by Neil Gaiman
∇
A bit later still:
Dexter came home from the hardware store, unlocked both deadbolts— it paid to be safe, since thieves weren’t above stripping the copper from any property, inhabited or not—and stepped inside to find unmistakable evidence of intrusion. There were scraps of paper scattered on the floor, covered with peculiar geometric diagrams, and muddy footprints, and in the middle of his living room floor: a straw hat with a crushed crown. The back door stood open, and there were marks on the ground, as if something heavy had been dragged toward the vine-covered back fence, but the trail vanished there.
He went to the neighbor’s house and pounded on the door, but no one answered, and when he peered through the windows he saw only empty rooms full of dust. He called the police to tell them he’d had an intruder, but when he gave his name, the dispatcher paused, said, “Dexter West? The guy who sued the city? The reason, my bosses tell me, I didn’t get a raise this year?”
“Ah—no?” he said.
The dispatcher laughed. “We’ll send someone right over. You just sit and wait. Be sure to call us if your house catches fire, too—lots of my friends are firemen, and you know as well as anyone there are arsonists around.” The dispatcher hung up.
No one ever came. Dexter was astounded to realize he’d managed to personally anger and alienate the bureaucracy of a city—an institution normally so vast and impersonal that it was wholly unconcerned with individuals. In a way, it was quite an accomplishment.
∇
Very near the end:
The scuttling in the ducts continued all summer, increasing until even pounding on the metal failed to make any difference. Dexter spent the deep darkness of the nights awake and listening, and slept through the heat of the days. Work on the house ceased. He only went to the hardware store to acquire rat poison—hadn’t he read somewhere that heart medication and rat poison worked on the same principle, by thinning the blood?—and scattered the poison throughout all the secret places in the house: the odd-sized storage rooms, some inexplicably painted red; the little cubbyholes filled with dusty blue glass bottles; the low cabinets with their strangely-angled, cramped interiors. He never saw rat droppings or nibbled wires, but the noises every night told a different tale.
Dexter got a cat, a sleek black one from a shelter that came already equipped with the peculiar name “Ninja-Man,” but the animal was dead within days. He was never sure why—maybe it had gotten into the poison, but he preferred to think it had possessed some undiagnosed heart defect or other hidden flaw.
Dexter buried the animal in the yard, deep, though not as deep as he’d intended—about two feet down he began to find things that looked suspiciously like knife blades made of flaked stone, and then fragments of bones that suggested his cat wasn’t the first thing to be buried here in the cinderlands. He chose to dig no deeper.
∇
Just before the end:
When the scuttling crescendoed just after three am, he decided to smash the ducts. They weren’t even connected to anything— just remnants of a past tenant’s attempt to modernize the place with central heat and air. He’d left them in this long because he thought he might install such amenities himself someday, but the noise was overwhelming, worse tonight than ever. He hadn’t slept well for weeks, convinced he heard not just rats but also human footsteps and voices, either in the next room, or in the back yard, or in the upstairs apartment which he intermittently forgot didn’t actually exist.
He picked up his wrecking bar and began smashing at the ducts, leaving dents and little else, until he finally struck a seam in the metal and caused a plate to pop loose and gape open downward like a sprung trap door.
Dark shapes spilled forth from the duct like a greasy black flood, fur and wriggling noses and tails, and he fell back against the wall, clutching his steel bar, terrified the rats—dozens! scores! hundreds!—would attack him. But they kept running, through his open bedroom door, into the hallway, toward the kitchen and the back door. He imagined his house filled, infested, overrun by rats—
But they weren’t rats. Or they weren’t entirely rats.
He’d seen a program on television once about parasitic wasps. They attacked cockroaches, injected venom into their tiny roach brains, and took control of the insects, driving them like six-legged golf carts into their nests, where the roaches became paralyzed incubators for wasp eggs.
Something similar had been done to these rats. There were glistening greenish-black growths on their necks and heads, foreign tissue sometimes obscuring their eyes, sometimes extending down their backs to their tails. The growths looked wet, and they pulsed, and they might have been a sort of fungus or horrible external tumor…
Except for the eyes. Every growth had a single, marble-sized blue eye somewhere on its mass, gazing backward. The eyes blinked and moved in unison, as if they were parts of the same organism, temporarily separated.
Dexter dropped his wrecking bar and fled, and since he could only flee through the door— the same door the rats were pouring through, endlessly, how could there be so many?—he tried to leap through the door over the flood. He leapt well, but the leap had to end, and he came down in his bare feet among the rats. They squealed and twisted and rushed away from him. He lost his footing and stumbled through the dark hall, toward the kitchen—
—where his back door stood open, the rats and their passengers racing through the opening and away. Dexter stared through the door, into the yard, unable to comprehend what he was seeing.
The human eye and brain have ways of coping with size and distance. Objects seen up close appear larger, and as those objects move farther away, they appear to shrink, growing ever smaller as they recede into the distance. So the great ship that looms large as a building while you’re standing on the dock becomes a tiny speck of blackness as it vanishes over the distant horizon.
The rats were exactly the opposite. They looked normal-sized up close, but as they streamed into his yard, getting farther away, they seemed to become larger, until—in violation of all laws of nature and perspective—they were easily the size of cars by the time they reached the back fence, the eyes on their backs as big as tires, all staring not at him, but past him. Just before they should have crashed into the fence, the enormous rats vanished, as if they’d turned a corner that didn’t exist… or fallen into a deep, hidden hole.
Dexter stood aside, staring down at the rats as they fled, afraid to lift his gaze again to witness their impossible growth. After a long time—it seemed like hours, though it couldn’t have been so long, surely?—the scuttling in the ducts ended, and the final few rats disappeared into the back yard. He watched the last ones go, growing from rat-sized when they left the house, to dog-sized when they were halfway across the yard, to pony-sized and bigger still as they reached the fence… until, finally, the last one vanished.
He released a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. He shut his door, engaged the locks, and only then asked himself—how had the door opened? Had the press of the rats somehow shoved it wide? Maybe the old man who didn’t actually live next door had been there to open the door for the creatures. Or maybe—
Something in his bedroom thumped, like a great weight hitting the floor.
Frozen by the back door, listening, Dexter suddenly wondered: what were the rats running from? He had no doubt the creatures were fleeing, either in terror or under orders from the staring growths on their backs. Dexter couldn’t imagine where they’d originally come from; certainly not within his walls. Nor could he tell where they were going. They were simply… passing through. Whether his house was along some mysterious right-of-way or merely a hastily-chosen detour, he couldn’t know, but he was sure of one thing: this was an escape route.
So what, exactly, were the creatures escaping from?
Another thump, this one louder, and Dexter began to open the locks, his fingers clumsy, his hands slick with sweat, the thought scuttling and skittering in his mind a
s insistently as the claws of a thousand fleeing rats: run, run, run.
The last locked turned. The door yawned open. The trees in the back yard rustled in the wind, and the old man from next door—now hatless—leaned on his walkingstick by the back fence, face lost in shadow, and shook his head.
Dexter sprinted from the house, but the back fence seemed to get smaller as he ran, and the old man seemed farther away with every step, and Dexter realized, before he fell—before something fell upon him, radiating ancient, indifferent heat—that he’d never reach the corner or hole or exit in time. That he was too small, and the world, and all the things in it, were just too big.
∇
Lord of the Land
Gene Wolfe
The Nebraskan smiled warmly, leaned forward, and made a sweeping gesture with his right hand, saying, “Yes indeed, that’s exactly the sort of thing I’m most interested in. Tell me about it, Mr. Thacker, please.”
All this was intended to keep old Hop Thacker’s attention away from the Nebraskan’s left hand, which had slipped into his left jacket pocket to turn on the miniature recorder there. Its microphone was pinned to the back of the Nebraskan’s lapel, the fine brown wire almost invisible.
Perhaps old Hop would not have cared in any case; old Hop was hardly the shy type. “Waul,” he began, “this was years an’ years back, the way I hear’d it. Guess it’d have been in my great granpaw’s time, Mr. Cooper, or mebbe before.”
The Nebraskan nodded encouragingly.
“There’s these three boys, an’ they had an old mule, wasn’t good fer nothin’ ’cept crowbait. One was Colonel Lightfoot—course didn’t nobody call him colonel then. One was Creech an’ t’other ’un…” The old man paused, fingering his scant beard. “Guess I don’t rightly know. I did know. It’ll come to me when don’t nobody want to hear it. He’s the one had the mule.”
The Nebraskan nodded again. “Three young men, you say, Mr. Thacker?”
“That’s right, an’ Colonel Lightfoot, he had him a new gun. An’ this other ’un-he was a friend of my grandpaw’s or somebody—he had him one everybody said was jest about the best shooter in the county. So this here Laban Creech, he said he wasn’t no bad shot hisself, an’ he went an’ fetched his’un. He was the ’un had that mule. I recollect now.
“So they led the ol’ mule out into the medder, mebbe fifty straddles from the brake. You know how you do. Creech, he shot it smack in the ear, an’ it jest laid down an’ died, it was old, an’ sick, too, didn’t kick or nothin’. So Colonel Lightfoot, he fetched out his knife an’ cut it up the belly, an’ they went on back to the brake fer to wait out the crows.”
“I see,” the Nebraskan said.
“One’d shoot, an’ then another, an’ they’d keep score. An’ it got to be near to dark, you know, an’ Colonel Lightfoot with his new gun an’ this other man that had the good ’un, they was even up, an’ this Laban Creech was only one behind ’em. Reckon there was near to a hundred crows back behind in the gully. You can’t jest shoot a crow an’ leave him, you know, an’ ’spect the rest to come. They look an’ see that dead ’un, an’ they say, Waul, jest look what become of him. I don’t calc’late to come anywheres near there.”
The Nebraskan smiled. “Wise birds.”
“Oh, there’s all kinds of stories ’bout ’em,” the old man said.
“Thankee, Sarah.”
His granddaughter had brought two tall glasses of lemonade; she paused in the doorway to dry her hands on her red-and-white checkered apron, glancing at the Nebraskan with shy alarm before retreating into the house.
“Didn’t have a lick, back then.” The old man poked an ice cube with one bony, somewhat soiled finger. “Didn’t have none when I was a little ’un, neither, till the TVA come. Nowadays you talk ’bout the TVA an’ they think you mean them programs, you know.” He waved his glass. “I watch ’em sometimes.”
“Television,” the Nebraskan supplied.
“That’s it. Like, you take when Bud Bloodhat went to his reward, Mr. Cooper. Hot? You never seen the like. The birds all had their mouths open, wouldn’t fly fer anything. Lot two hogs, I recollect, that same day. My paw, he wanted to save the meat, but ’twasn’t a bit of good. He says he thought them hogs was rotten ’fore ever they dropped, an’ he was ’fraid to give it to the dogs, it was that hot. They was all asleepin’ under the porch anyhow. Wouldn’t come out fer nothin’.”
The Nebraskan was tempted to reintroduce the subject of the crow shoot, but an instinct born of thousands of hours of such listening prompted him to nod and smile instead.
“Waul, they knowed they had to git him under quick, didn’t they? So they got him fixed, cleaned up an’ his best clothes on an’ all like that, an’ they was all in there listenin’, but it was terrible hot in there an’ you could smell him pretty strong, so by an’ by I jest snuck out. Wasn’t nobody payin’ attention to me, do you see? The women’s all bawlin’ an’ carryin’ on, an’ the men thinkin’ it was time to put him under an’ have another.”
The old man’s cane fell with a sudden, dry rattle. For a moment as he picked it up, the Nebraskan glimpsed Sarah’s pale face on the other side of the doorway.
“So I snuck out on the stoop. I bet it was a hundred easy, but it felt good to me after bein’ inside there. That was when I seen it comin’ down the hill t’other side of the road. Stayed in the shadow much as it could, an’ looked like a shadow itself, only you could see it move, an’ it was always blacker than what they was. I knowed it was the soul-sucker an’ was afeered it’d git my ma. I took to cryin’, an’ she come outside an’ fetched me down the spring fer a drink, an’ that’s the last time anybody ever did see it, far’s I know.”
“Why do you call it the soul-sucker?” the Nebraskan asked.
“’Cause that’s what it does, Mr. Cooper. Guess you know it ain’t only folks that has ghosts. A man can see the ghost of another man, all right, but he can see the ghost of a dog or a mule or anythin’ like that, too. Waul, you take a man’s, ’cause that don’t make so much argyment. It’s his soul, ain’t it? Why ain’t it in Heaven or down in the bad place like it’s s’possed to be? What’s it doin’ in the haint house, or walkin’ down the road, or wherever ’twas you seen it? I had a dog that seen a ghost one time, an’ that’n was another dog’s, do you see? I never did see it, but he did, an’ I knowed he did by how he acted. What was it doin’ there?”
The Nebraskan shook his head. “I’ve no idea, Mr. Thacker.” “Waul, I’ll tell you. When a man passes on, or a horse or a dog or whatever, it’s s’pposed to git out an’ git over to the Judgment. The Lord Jesus Christ’s our judge, Mr. Cooper. Only sometimes it won’t do it. Mebbe it’s afeared to be judged, or mebbe it has this or that to tend to down here yet, or anyhow reckons it does, like showin’ somebody some money what it knowed about. Some does that pretty often, an’ I might tell you ’bout some of them times. But if it don’t have business an’ is jest feared to go, it’ll stay where ’tis—that’s the kind that haints their graves. They b’long to the soul sucker, do you see, if it can git ’em. Only if it’s hungered it’ll suck on a live person, an’ he’s bound to fight or die.” The old man paused to wet his lips with lemonade, staring across his family’s little burial plot and fields of dry cornstalks to purple hills where he would never hunt again. “Don’t win, not particular often. Guess the first ’un was a Indian, mebbe. Somethin’ like that. I tell you how Creech shot it?”
“No you didn’t, Mr. Thacker.” The Nebraskan took a swallow of his own lemonade, which was refreshingly tart. “I’d like very much to hear it.”
The old man rocked in silence for what seemed a long while. “Waul,” he said at last, “they’d been shootin’ all day. Reckon I said that. Fer a good long time anyhow. An’ they was tied, Colonel Lightfoot an’ this here Cooper was, an’ Creech jest one behind ’em. ’Twas Creech’s time next, an’ he kept on sayin’ to stay fer jest one more, then he’d go an’ they’d all go, hit or mi
ss. So they stayed, but wasn’t no more crows ‘cause they’d ‘bout kilt every crow in many a mile. Started gittin’ dark fer sure, an’ this Cooper, he says, Come on, Lab, couldn’t nobody hit nothin’ now. You lost an’ you got to face up.
“Creech, he says, waul, ’twas my mule. An’ jest ’bout then here comes somethin’ bigger’n any crow, an’ black, hoppin’ ’long the ground like a crow will sometimes, do you see? Over towards that dead mule. So Creech ups with his gun. Colonel Lightfoot, he allowed afterwards he couldn’t have seed his sights in that dark. Reckon he jest sighted ’longside the barrel. ’Tis the ol’ mountain way, do you see, an’ there’s lots what swore by it.
“Waul, he let go an’ it fell over. You won, says Colonel Lightfoot, an’ he claps Creech on his back, an’ let’s go. Only this Cooper, he knowed it wasn’t no crow, bein’ too big, an’ he goes over to see what ’twas. Waul, sir, ’twas like to a man, only crooked legged an’ wry neck. ‘Twasn’t no man, but like to it, do you see? Who shot me? it says, an’ the mouth was full of worms. Grave worms, do you see?
“Who shot me? An’ Cooper, he said Creech, then he hollered fer Creech an’ Colonel Lightfoot. Colonel Lightfoot says, boys, we got to bury this. An’ Creech goes back to his home place an’ fetches a spade an’ a ol’ shovel, them bein’ all he’s got. He’s shakin’ so bad they jest rattled together, do you see? Colonel Lightfoot an’ this Cooper, they seed he couldn’t dig, so they goes hard at it. Pretty soon they looked around, an’ Creech was gone, an’ the soul-sucker, too.”
The old man paused dramatically. “Next time anybody seed the soul-sucker, ’twas Creech. So he’s the one I seed, or one of his kin anyhow. Don’t never shoot anythin’ without you’re dead sure what ’tis, young feller.”
Cued by his closing words, Sarah appeared in the doorway. “Supper’s ready. I set a place for you, Mr. Cooper. Pa said. You sure you want to stay? Won’t be fancy.”
