by Cat Rambo
He took three small prisms, the most valuable objects there, and that evening dropped off two bushels of smoked trout. He must have said something to Lafitte as well, for one of the wives brought a sack of flour and another of dried meat. I distributed it among the pregnant women, despite the grumbling of the others, but saved a handful of each for myself.
March 7, Duke Theo’s reign, 12th Year, Fort Plentitude
Last night I stayed awake, resolved to see the fox women. I sat in the tower with the sentry, watching the wood’s edge. When I saw a blur of silver and blue fog, I looked with my spyglass.
She had Melissa’s face and she looked straight at me.
It was only the bowl in her hand, steaming beef stew with dumplings, I knew, that kept me from running to her. The smiling lure was too broadly painted and I realized it must be reading my thoughts somehow. No wonder men have run out to them.
In the morning, I told the Captain what I had discovered, that the fox women were trying to lure us out, but he would not listen. He had maps spread out across his desk. Come spring, he would take a patrol gold-panning, he said cheerfully to me. Wouldn’t that be an adventure? His fingers trembled as he traced a line across the mountain, translucent blue as frost.
The cold has driven him mad. I broke my second demon gem and sent a letter to Tabat, to the Army Corps Headquarters. I explained our circumstances and the dangers. I explained that the Captain was unresponsive. I said ‘Send food and more demon gems, and word of hope, or we will perish.’ The demon took the scroll away. This one was feathered like a peacock, and had an odd snout that lolled loosely when it sniffed at me. I wait for the reply.
March 8, Duke Theo’s reign, 12th Year, Fort Plentitude
I have been advised that the winter has affected all frontier forts adversely and that food has been dispatched overland. Due to the frozen river, it will not reach here for at least six weeks. They sent no gems or other devices of aid. I have been officially demoted for using the gem, and reminded of their cost and scarcity.
In six weeks we will be licking the bones of the three horses left to us.
I sent to Big White to ask for more food, but he did not come. At length I donned snowshoes and walked over to the Shoshal camp.
Winter has not hit them as hard as it has us. There are fewer of them, and they spent the summer gathering food while we were building the fort walls. He gave me handfuls of smoked meat and a kind of thick biscuit baked with dried berries. I ate greedily until my stomach hurt and washed it down with gulps of hot bark-scented tea.
He said danger to the fort, babies, babies.
There is danger to the children, I asked.
He shook his head and drew a figure in the snow, a woman amid pine trees. You say fox women, he said, because hair red like fox. But not fox, not women. Babies that die go into the winter and make more. They want.
I was not sure what he was saying. That babies died and became fox women?
He tapped the figure with a gnarled finger. Baby want, he said. Just want want want. No more.
Was there no way to ward them off?
He shook his head. No.
March 9, Duke Theo’s reign, 12th Year, Fort Plentitude
Yielding to my entreaties, the Captain sent several soldiers out hunting again, but they came back with only a bony elk, barely a mouthful or two of meat apiece. The cook stewed the heart for the officer’s mess, but there was nothing but meat and water. The vegetables had gone long ago.
I found tracks all along the walls. Light tracks. Barefoot tracks, each foot tiny and arched, like that of a child. Snow sprites clustered motionless along the runes like a fuzz of white velvet.
I brought the Captain out to look at them, but he only smiled and patted my arm. This is a land of plenty, he said. In the summer, the bees will sing in the sour gum trees and drip honey into our mouths.
Another seven soldiers have died of dysentery so far this week, bringing our numbers to forty-two. We cannot make it till spring.
I lie awake trying to figure out a plan. Should I use my last demon gem and summon a final messenger to plead our case? Did they not understand that we will die without immediate surcease?
There are eight babies here now, aged between two and six months. They are thin and sickly, and they cry from the cold. I imagine the fox women taking them away, making them into new monsters. I imagine them walking across the snow slopes, clothed in glittering snow sprites, legs lengthening with each stride, faces elongating, hair falling into blazes of crimson longing.
Why do they only prey on the men? Are we weaker in our hearts?
March 10th, Duke Theo’s reign, 12th Year, Fort Plentitude
For dinner we had watery gruel, a scant cupful per person, measured most strictly. More hunting parties dispatched.
March 12th, Duke Theo’s reign, 12th Year, Fort Plentitude
Lafitte and his wives are dead. They found them frozen in their building. The children were all taken. We brought the last of their food to the fort, but it is sufficient for only a few more days.
Hunting parties still unsuccessful. We ate the last horse today.
March 13th, Duke Theo’s reign, 12th Year, Fort Plentitude
There are definitely more of them now.
March 18th, Duke Theo’s reign, 12th Year, Fort Plentitude
Finally I take up the last demon gem. I walk across the fort, pass by the dead and dying. The cook is dead now, died of bloody flux, and the Captain has holed himself up in his office, crouched over his maps.
Faithful Caruso helps me. We sew an immense bag of buffalo hide, lined with the softest, warmest furs we can find among Lafitte’s bales. We make it open at the top. We put the babies in it, one by one. The mothers that are still alive help us. I shatter my last gem and give the directions to the demon.
We can only hope a few will survive. The ones towards the outside of the bag will succumb to the cold first. They say freezing is not an unpleasant death. And when the demon arrives, perhaps it will only be delivering a package of frozen or drowned corpses. Demons are unreliable, to say the least.
But perhaps one or two will survive.
We watch the bag float up towards the sky. The demon is a kind I’ve never seen before, with rounded ivory horns and glittering silvery skin, immense wings that claw upward at the chilly air. It is quite splendid in its own way.
When night comes, I can hear the runes working on the outside of the walls, cracking them with icy pressures. Caruso and I wait in the watch tower, near the swivel mounted cannon, snow sprites swirling around its barrel.
I can hear them coming, whimpering with want as they walk forward through the snow. Perhaps one will look like Melissa again.
One of the things that intrigue me when reading American history is the idea of the frontier, of humans trying to carve out an empire from a land that doesn’t share their sense of superiority. “Events at Fort Plentitude” draws from the history of American frontier forts and superimposes a supernatural menace.
I particularly like the line about the frogs.
This story originally appeared in Weird Tales in 2008.
Dew Drop Coffee Lounge
The minute the woman walked in, Sasha sensed it. Her head went up, that characteristic Sasha motion, like a blind bear sniffing the breeze. The well-dressed suburbanite glanced over the surroundings as she entered the coffee shop. Her hair glimmered with red dye and was cut in a Veronica Lake bang that obscured one eye. I couldn’t see more from where I sat.
Sliding her notebook back into her bag, Sasha leaned forward, her gaze intent on the arrival, who looked back, first sidelong, then openly. As though pulled by that stare, she moved through a clutter of tables towards Sasha.
Her interrogatory murmur was inaudible except for its tone. Sasha nodded, gesturing to the seat across from her.
First there was coffee to be ordered, and the obligatory would-you-like-something, no-nothing-thank-you while Sasha cleared an old mug and several napki
ns away from the shared surface.
Then just as the redhead was pulling her chair back, Sasha’s voice sounded, pitched loud and clear. “I only agreed to meet with you to say I can’t do this anymore. My husband is in Iraq, stationed in Basra.”
The other woman stopped, looking as though she had been socked in the gut, halfway between heart torn out and tight-lipped anger. Sasha studied the table, tracing a finger across the constellations of blue stars. She looked as though she were worrying over a grocery list rather than declaring an end to a romance.
In the other woman’s blank face, her eyes were a shuttered, washed-out blue. The Universe watched as the painful moment played itself out, watched with a grim and inexorable regard that I was glad was fixed on Sasha and the stranger rather than on me.
When the redhead had vanished onto the street without a backwards glance and the door had jangled shut behind her, Sasha claimed the untouched latte and croissant.
“Pig,” I said from my seat.
“Don’t you have some gathering of finger-snapping beatniks to get to?”
“I’m writing a poem about you right now. I’m calling it ‘Sweet Goddess of the Dew Drop Coffee Lounge’.”
The name of the shop was originally the Dew Drop Inn, back when it was a bar. As it had passed through the successive hands of owners who had not understood the original name’s charm, it had become The Dew Drop Restaurant, The Dew Drop Donut Shop, The Dew Drop Take and Bake Pizza and most recently, the Dew Drop Coffee Lounge.
In this incarnation, the owner, Mike, had decorated the walls in neo-mystic. Posters showed translucent, anatomically-correct figures with chakra points set like jewels along their forms, backed by Tibetan mandalas. Sunlight slanted in through the crystals dangling from monofilament line in front of the French doors, and sent wavering rainbows across the glass cases by the counter, trembling on the scones and dry-edged doughnuts. Painted stars and moons covered the Frisbee-sized tables.
At first I hadn’t liked the hearts of space music Mike insisted on, but after hours, days, weeks, now months of it, the aural paint of synthesizers and whale song had crept into my thoughts until mall Muzak now seemed strange and outré to me.
Sasha went back to her reading. I got up and started opening the doors to take advantage of the spring weather. The breeze ruffled the foam heart atop Sasha’s latte and tugged at her newspaper. A skinny man in a red baseball cap came in, looking around, and she caught his eye, gestured him over, preparing her next brush-off.
“Everything’s alchemical,” Mike had told me the week before. We were cleaning out the coffee machines with boiling vinegar and hot water. Wraiths of steam rose up around his form, listening as he spoke.
Whenever we were working together at night, he would deliver soliloquies that explained the secret inner workings of the world. While much of it was dubious and involved the magnetic poles, UFOs, and a mysterious underground post office, it was a world that I found more appealing than my own. More interesting, at any rate.
It was a decent job, all in all, and it paid fair money in an economy that was so tanked that my already useless English degree was worth even less. So I tidied up the coffee shop, carryied ten gallon bottles of water in, swept, and refoldednewspapers after customers had scattered them like ink-smeared autumn leaves. It did mean the occasional late night labor, but Mike was a good sort and helped with the scutwork.
“Yes,” I said noncommittally. I had learned that the best thing to do with Mike was not to stand in the way of the current rant.
“The thing is this. You know Tarot cards?”
“Like fortune tellers use?”
“Yeah, sorta kinda. See, Tarot cards have pentacles and swords and cups and rods, and that’s diamonds and spades and hearts and clubs. With me so far, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s twenty two cards beyond that. The Major Arcana, they call them.”
“Aren’t there Minor Arcana too?”
“Yeah, those are the pentacles and stuff. Anyhow, each Major Arcana shows a step in our life journeys.”
“Which is how you use them for fortunetelling,” I said.
“No, well, kinda sorta. But they’re steps that everyone goes through, the stages of life.”
“All right,” I said. I tipped the jug into a tank and drained it, frothing with heat. I sniffed the steam. Was that a last trace of vinegar?
“You should write about it,” Mike said. “A lot of great literature is based on alchemy.”
“Yeah, that’s certainly a thought,” I said. “Is that one done?”
He sniffed at the tap. “Another pass, maybe. Then let’s mop the floor, as long as we have the hot water. Call it a night after that.”
“The thing is this,” he said after a long and reflective silence in which I’d forgotten what we were discussing. “There’s these Avatars that walk around. They’re foci for the Universe’s attention, moments that get repeated over and over again, like in the Tarot cards. Sasha’s one, for example.”
“Sasha?”
“That skinny blonde who comes in around ten, reads and drinks coffee for a couple of hours, turns up in the late afternoons sometimes.”
“She’s a what?”
“An Avatar. It’s the shop. It’s a Locus.”
“I thought you said it was a foci.”
“No, people are the foci. The Avatars. The shop now, it’s a Locus, a place where foci converge. Like Stonehenge, where all the ley lines meet.”
“The Dew Drop is like Stonehenge?”
He laughed. “Yeah, crazy, isn’t it? I don’t understand why, either.” He pulled a bottle of whiskey out from behind a blocky pyramid of stacked coffee bags. “But we’ll drink to it all the same.”
The next day, I watched Sasha.
It was a little before ten, a slack hour with only a couple of customers. I appreciated the lull, since I was hung-over and queasy from last night’s drinking.
A kid came in, maybe fourteen or fifteen. He had long brown hair tied back with a red bandana, bell bottoms, the kind of teenage body that looks like one long stick. He slouched in the doorway until she gestured him over and said something.
His jaw dropped.
I’d always thought that was a figure of speech until I saw him go literally slack-jawed with surprise at her words. And I would have said something, done something, but I felt it. The weight of the Universe’s attention, just for a moment, not on me, but so close that you’d think space and time had collapsed at the point where Sasha sat, looking up at the kid.
He turned and pushed past me to the door. The back of his jacket had a picture of a chimpanzee with the legend “Got Monkey?” under it.
I gave her a little wtf? look and she shrugged at me and went back to the paperback she was reading, The Biggest Secret. But fifteen minutes later, another person came in, an elderly woman carrying a yellow flower in her hand.
She was taken aback by Sasha’s wave, and made her way over to the table like someone advancing to feed a stray dog that they don’t trust. Sasha stood and held the chair out for her, but the woman shook her head, laying her daffodil down.
“He’s not coming,” Sasha said. “He’s happily married, and he asked me to break it to you. He gave me a little money to buy you a coffee, a pastry perhaps.” She fumbled with her wallet.
“No,” the woman said. She wore a lavender pants suit and was carefully made up, her colorless hair freshly combed and set. “No, that will be all right.”
With chilly dignity, she left.
“That was awful!” I let Mike take the register and sat down across from Sasha, indignation pulling at my vocal cords. “What the hell was that all about?”
“It’s my role in life, sunshine,” she said.
“You pretended to be someone else! You’re interfering in those people’s lives!”
“It’s not as evil as all that, Clay.” She pointed at the front entrance. “It’s something about this place. Maybe it’s the du
mping ground of the Universe but I noticed it when I first started coming here to get coffee and read. People come here to meet blind dates that never show up all the time. I’ve never seen anyone actually meet here, but I’ve seen plenty lingering in the doorway, looking around, trying to catch your eye to see if you, you’re the one.”
She leaned forward. “So I started leaping into the breach. I give them a reason to run, to have a story they can tell at dinner parties for the next few years, the Blind Date from Hell, who seemed so nice in e-mail, then turned out to be…” She twisted her hand. “…a little cuckoo.”
“You’re not just a little cuckoo, you’re insane,” I said. “There ought to be a law about people pulling crap like that. How many dates have you thwarted?”
“You’re not listening. I don’t thwart them. They only show up here if the other person isn’t arriving.”
“Bullshit.”
“Watch.” She pointed at a small ginger-haired man as he stepped in. “I can spot them a mile off. I can hear it in the cadence of their steps coming along the sidewalk and read it in their faces when they open the door. But I won’t catch this one, and you’ll see what I mean. He’ll linger and wait.”
I rose and took his order, a double espresso. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and a robin’s egg blue cashmere sweater. He looked around as I prepared the coffee, glance falling on Sasha. She didn’t look up, just kept on reading.
He took the drink with a thanks and sat down by the door, checking his watch. Each time someone came in, he looked them over. After forty minutes and a dozen people, he drained the coffee and exited, shoulders a tight line of anger.
I went back over to Sasha, not sure what to think.
“See?” she said.
“How can you field all of them?”
She gestured at herself. “Online I could be anyone.”
“So you stand in for the men too?”
