Stupefying Stories: August 2014

by Alison Pentecost

  The fake VanHocht, the golem who had masqueraded as an old man for over a decade, looked. There was the teapot in the shape of a scorpion that could sting with deadly accuracy; there was the unfoldable map which refused to be seen from the correct orientation, resulting in a shifting mosaic of leather and enchanted ink. There was the mechanical rose bush that bloomed and died and bloomed again, the dead blossoms dropping into the pot at its base only to have the parts re-incorporated into the bush. All about him were things beautiful and incredible, odd and amazing. Each had meaning, each was more than a simple toy. They spoke to him, even though the heart that beat in his chest was an alchemical creation and the pains he had felt in his joints all those years had just been the natural wear and tear of springs and struts. He was like a father among children he had never thought to see alive. When he looked at the true VanHocht, his creator, he saw the same emotion painted on the old man’s wizened face. Tears streamed down his cheeks.

  The false VanHocht finally found his voice. “I am your masterpiece, aren’t I?”

  The true VanHocht shook his head and wiped away a tear. “No, you are more than that, more even than a brother. You are, in every sense, my own self.”

  Buttoning up his shirt, the false VanHocht shook his head in an exact mirror image of the original. “Alphod always said that, in art, one’s masterpiece cannot hope to be anything other than oneself.”

  Then the two men—one false and one true—embraced, in each man reflected his own great work.

  A great work that had at last been seen and judged good.

  Auston Habershaw lives and works in Boston, MA. His work has appeared in various anthologies and he blathers on about things in a blog at aahabershaw.wordpress.com. When not imagining fanciful worlds and writing about them, he teaches college students to write essays and read literature, though hopefully not in that precise order.

  RAINBOW SPORES

  By Jamie Lackey

  A RAINBOW SPREAD from the plummeting airplane’s burning wreckage. Another Cordyceps stromus sapien victim had managed to get up in the sky. Janice checked her mask, ear muffs, and safety goggles. It wasn’t safe without them. The parasitic fungal spores could be floating anywhere, waiting for a host to take control of. She couldn’t count on rainbows to warn her—the spores only bent the light when huge concentrations of them floated together.

  Janice trudged up the hill. Her walk to work took her straight through the cordy cemetery—most hosts couldn’t get airborne, so they congregated at the highest hilltop they could get to. Elevation helped the spores disperse.

  She reached the first of the bodies. Deep purple, four-foot long shafts of fungal growth speared out of quickly decomposing human skulls, and the air shimmered with beautiful rainbow light. The sight made Janice’s skin crawl.

  The corpses near the top of the hill were older and almost completely obscured by fungal spears. None of the secondary shafts grew as large as the first that cracked its way out of the skull like a chick struggling out of an egg, and the smallest were just longer than Janice’s hand.

  She stopped at the very top of the hill and knelt next to one of the bodies. She reached out and touched a white finger bone, just visible beneath the mushy purple mass. It crumbled. Her throat ached. “Hi, Mom.” She was still for a moment, blinking away tears. “I miss you.”

  It got harder and harder to walk past this spot. Janice stood up and started down the hill. It was going to be another long day.

  ¤

  No one at the lab met her eyes as she stepped into the decontamina-tion chamber, waited for it to do its job, then stepped out the other side. She removed her outdoor protective gear and held her breath as she hurried to her locker. Air scrubbers kept the cordy spores out of the building, but she couldn’t be too careful. She didn’t breathe again till she was protected by her hair bonnet, foot covering, double latex gloves, surgical mask, and goggles. She slipped into her white coat and hurried to her private lab. The room that her mother had worked in was still vacant, and Janice hated its empty windows even more than her remaining coworkers’ averted eyes.

  No one really blamed her for what her mother had done, but she was so much like her mother that it was hard for people who had known her to separate them. People had started accidentally calling her by her mother’s name when she was twelve. Janice had never thought that would become a source of shame.

  She took a deep breath and got to work. Constance Jones had created the cordy, and Janice Jones was going to destroy them.

  Somehow.

  ¤

  “Application of any variety of antifungal azole destroys the fungal shafts, but has no effect on the spores.” Janice poked at the puddle of purple goo with a glass rod. “Tea tree essential oil also has negative effects on the shafts.” The next shaft crumbled to dust when she poked it. “It’s possible that if enough tea tree is taken internally it could slow or stop the growth inside the body, but that runs the risk of severe side effects, including drowsiness, confusion, hallucinations, coma, unsteadiness, weakness, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach upset, blood cell abnormalities, severe rashes, and death.” She clicked off her tape recorder and sighed.

  The lab kept three cordy victims in clean rooms for Janice’s experiments. Each had his or her own room, because the fungus’s urge to propagate itself affected their interactions with other people—cordy victims didn’t just become hosts of the fungal plague. They also became sex fiends, or if they couldn’t find a willing partner, rapists.

  They were strapped down. They could hardly speak anymore, but their lecherous gazes made Janice sick to her stomach. She gave them each a large dose of tea tree oil and went home.

  ¤

  The next morning all of her subjects were dead, and their skulls were starting to buckle outward. The fungal shafts would emerge soon. Tea tree was another dead end. Janice clicked her recorder on. “I don’t know what to try next. Anything that might destroy the spores will kill the host.” She flipped it off again.

  “Janice?” Her mother’s lab assistant, Cindy, stood in the door to her lab, smiling hesitantly.

  Janice’s stomach fluttered. She stifled the feeling and sighed. “What’s up?” She and Cindy had been friends, before. Janice had hoped to be something more. But she didn’t have time for that now. She was working.

  “I wanted to apologize for the way we’ve been acting,” Cindy said, stepping into Janice’s lab. “It’s not fair to you.”

  Janice turned reluctantly from her desk and looked up at Cindy. It wasn’t fair that she was so pretty, even looking like she hadn’t slept in a week. “I understand. It’s been hard for all of us. And I look so much like her.”

  Cindy stepped into the room and stumbled. Janice lunged forward to catch her. The human contact felt good, even through their suits. Cindy was trembling.

  “Are you okay?” Janice asked.

  “I—I’m sorry,” Cindy whispered. Then she grabbed Janice’s mask and ripped it off in one smooth motion, pulled off her own, and kissed her, all faster than Janice could react.

  “You’re infected,” Janice whispered.

  Cindy nodded. “Now you are, too.”

  Janice dove for the contamination alarm. She couldn’t let Cindy infect the whole lab. Lights flashed and doors hissed closed. They were sealed in. Cindy stood in the middle of the room, shaking. Tears rolled down her bare cheeks.

  “How far along are you?” Janice demanded, pushing all of the emotions that were roiling inside her to the background.

  “About two weeks. I thought—I thought I could control the impulses. But—but I needed to—I couldn’t—” Cindy broke into shuddering sobs. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  Janice turned away from her and got back to work.

  ¤

  Janice put Cindy to bed on the cot in the corner of her office. Janice would have to find some way to restrain her, and soon. Cindy’s last vestiges of who she used to be would be gone in a few days.

  Janice
spent the night poring over her mother’s notes. The answer had to be in them. It had to. Her mother had been experimenting with using the Cordyceps fungus to treat brain tumors. When she’d been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer herself, she’d stepped up her research and used herself as a guinea pig.

  Janice stared at the final pages. The hand writing the notes hadn’t really belonged to her mother—not at the end. It had been a warped reflection of the woman that Janice loved and respected, twisted by her own science, controlled by the fungus growing in her brain—by the same fungus that had made Cindy kiss Janice and was starting to spread through her body right now. Janice shuddered and tried not to think about it.

  She’d been in Europe, visiting friends and accepting an award for her research on cloned corn, when the plague started. She wondered how things would be if she’d been home. Would she have noticed her mother’s madness? Would she have found a way to stop the plague before it started, or would she have just died sooner?

  The last page of her mother’s notes was completely filled. She’d written the words must propagate over and over again.

  Janice wiped away pointless tears.

  She duct-taped Cindy’s wrists and ankles to the metal bed frame. She wasn’t sure how well it would hold, but it was better than nothing. She curled up on the floor next to the cot and tried to sleep.

  ¤

  Janice dreamed that she was outside, standing with the sun warm on her bare skin. The cordy cemetery loomed above her. She ran to the top of the hill, to the spot where she paused every day. “How could you do this?” she screamed. She kicked the purple mass that covered what used to be her mother. “How could you?” She kicked it again, then ripped into it with her fingernails. She tore the smaller shafts off and hurled them away from her until only the primary shaft jutted out of the skeletal body.

  “It isn’t fair! I don’t want to die! I don’t want to spread this damn fungus that you made!” She stomped on her mother’s bones, and they crumbled beneath her feet. “I’d kill myself first, but all that does is spread your goddamn fungus over a smaller area!” She pulverized the rest of the skeleton. Chalky bone crunched into powder under her heels, and an idea bubbled to the surface of Janice’s mind.

  She scooped up a handful of the bone dust and let it run through her fingers. It wasn’t just chalky—it was chalk.

  She jolted awake and ran to her desk. Her mother’s bone had crumbled the other day when she touched it. Could that mean something? There was an analysis of a victim’s bones here, somewhere.

  “What’s going on?” Janice jumped at the sound of Cindy’s voice.

  “I had an idea.” Janice frantically pawed through the mess on her desk.

  “Let me up. I can help.” Cindy’s voice was soft and pleading.

  “No,” Janice said. She finally found the page she was looking for, and started skimming it. All of the collagen and hydroxylapatite had been leached out of the bones. The fungus fed on everything else in the body, but it left the calcium. What if calcium wasn’t just something it avoided—what if she could use calcium to hurt it? A huge dose of calcium could disrupt her nervous system. The fungus was in her nervous system. It might kill her, but at least she’d be doing something. She glanced at the empty clean rooms. All of her test subjects were dead.

  “Please, Janice, let me help.”

  She could test it on Cindy, first.

  ¤

  Four days later, while she was working on getting the formula right, she caught herself staring out the tiny window high in the wall. She wondered if she’d be able to get out through it. She longed to get someplace high. A mountaintop, or a tree. She wanted to be able to see as far as possible.

  The alien thoughts felt completely normal. It turned her stomach.

  “Janice?” Cindy whispered. “Do you hate me?”

  “No.”

  “Come here. I’m lonely, Janice. So lonely. And cold. Won’t you warm me up?”

  Janice wanted her more than she’d ever wanted anything. She longed for intimacy with her entire body. She shook her head.

  “I always loved you, you know,” Cindy said.

  Janice wished she knew if it was really Cindy speaking, and not the fungus.

  She blinked hard and swallowed the ache in her throat. “I always loved you, too.” She had to work faster.

  ¤

  It was getting hard to concentrate. Thoughts of propagating kept edging in on her experiments. She kept glancing over at Cindy, who was by now raving and hardly conscious. She was still beautiful, though.

  Janice shook herself. She finally thought that she had something, based on her calcium theory. But she was out of time. She’d almost torn the papers up, earlier. It kept getting harder to control herself.

  It would either work, or they would die. Janice filled two I.V.s with the milky experimental liquid. Looking at it made her tremble, but she couldn’t be sure if the fear belonged to her or to the monster in her brain. She stabbed the first needle into Cindy’s arm.

  Cindy screamed and thrashed for a few moments. Then she was still. Janice couldn’t tell if she was dead, or just unconscious.

  Fear made Janice’s knees weak, but she picked up the second dose and injected herself.

  It burned. Pain spread down her arm, then across her chest. She passed out before it spread to her legs.

  ¤

  Her whole body ached, and her eyes felt like they’d been sandblasted. Everything was blurry. But she was alive. And free from thoughts of propagation. Cindy was quiet, up on the bed. Janice pulled herself to her knees and reached for Cindy’s wrist. It was cool to the touch, and there wasn’t a pulse. But there wasn’t a fungal spike growing out of her skull, either. She brought Cindy’s palm to her lips and cried for a long time. Then she pulled herself up onto the bed and curled up next to Cindy’s body and stared out the lab’s tiny window.

  She’d done it. She’d defeated the cordy. In a minute, she’d get up and make a phone call. She’d spread the word, share her formula. Save the world.

  But for now, she looked up through her window at a rainbow that was arching overhead, and felt no fear.

  Jamie Lackey grew up in Stoneboro, Pennsylvania, and currently lives in Pittsburgh with her husband, Paul, and cat, Zuko. She writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror short stories, is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and read submissions for Clarkesworld Magazine from 2008 through 2013. She was an assistant editor for the Triangulation Annual Anthology Series from 2008-2010, one of the magazine’s two coeditors in 2011, and is currently an assistant editor at Electric Velocipede. Her first appearance in STUPEFYING STORIES was “Music From The Air” in the January 2012 issue, but for a complete list of her publication credits, visit www.jamielackey.com.

  END TIMES

  By S. R. Algernon

  SEEK CAPTAIN GERALDINE SCHMIDT held a hand to her forehead, to shield her eyes from the Lithian sun as she scanned the horizon for Matthew Ritter’s blink shuttle. Ritter, a crisis consultant for the Space Exploration and Emergency Corps—SEEK—had a reputation throughout the frontier. Schmidt thought back to her cargo-hauling days, when Ritter’s nano-crops had turned a temporary food shortage into ecological collapse.

  “Whom the gods would destroy,” one of the locals once told her, as he unloaded sacks of emergency grain from the cargo hold, “they first send Matt Ritter.”

  The blink drive, thought Schmidt, as she brushed sand from her dress uniform, was a mixed blessing. Without it, SEEK could never have sent evacuation ships out ahead of the supernova. The news of the Lithian High Council’s refusal to evacuate had reached Earth with the same dizzying speed, and the SEEK Board was not about to let a million Lithians fry in full view of the news cameras. Schmidt felt sure that she could sort the matter out if she had more time, but the orders were clear. It was Ritter’s show now. Bureaucracy had replaced light as the fastest thing in the universe.

  As she waited, Schmidt looked pa
st rows of Lithian dwellings—caves dug into the rock with domed entrances like oversized igloos. Beneath them, a muddy river wound its way through the sand like a vein on a dried-up leaf and emptied into a shimmering lake. Multi-colored shrubs and grasses covered the shore. A few Lithian priests clambered down to the river bank, braving the sun to deliver their midday prayer to the worldly manifestation of their Great Streams. From a distance, the priests looked like gray rabbits, but up close Schmidt knew they were three meters tall and built like anvils.

  Pop.

  With a sound halfway between a sonic boom and a magician’s puff of smoke, a two-seater blink craft appeared overhead and touched down ten meters in front of Schmidt.

  “Welcome to Lithos,” said Schmidt, as she forced a smile and extended her hand.

  Ritter looked past Schmidt, eyeing her weather-beaten antigrav shuttle as if he had stepped onto a used car lot.

  “Right,” said Ritter in a world-weary tone. As he stepped forward to shake Schmidt’s hand, he glanced down at her uniform.

  “Saint Jude, eh?” said Ritter. “Patron saint of lost causes?”

  Schmidt remembered the pewter medallion hanging from her neck.

  “Out here,” said Schmidt, “you never know when you’ll need it.”

  “I’d rather not lose in the first place,” said Ritter. “These Lithians need a good kick in the pants, and I know people who can arrange it. Help me get my equipment up to the Council Chamber. I’ll show you how it’s done.”