The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Close to death, was Arce’s thought, but it was not his place to argue, and he only shrugged.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Akashini, as if answering a question inaudible to Arce. He ran a palsied hand along the linen tablecloth, which—like its owner—displayed the effects of ill usage: stains, rips, embroideries of mildew. Even the candelabrum seemed afflicted, its surface tarnished. On a chipped plate were the remains of a meal: philosopher beetles thrashing in a stew of weeds and wild dog. “I … uh.…” Mr. Akashini’s eyelids fluttered down and he gestured feebly at the plate. “Stay with me while I finish, will you?”

  Astonished at this breach of custom, for Mr. Akashini had never before permitted him to remain with him while he ate, Arce took a seat on the futon and watched in silence as his employer laboriously swallowed down the stew. At last, he fell back in his chair, the muscles bunching in his jaw … or so Arce thought at first, his vision limited by the flickering candlelight. But then, to his horror, he realized that this was no simple muscular action. It appeared that a lump was moving beneath Mr. Akashini’s skin, crawling crabwise across the cheek, along the cheekbone, then down along the hinge of the jaw and onto the neck, where it vanished as if submerging into the flesh. However, the truly horrifying aspect of this passage was that in its wake, the skin was suffused with blood, darkened, and the lump of muscle left—as a receding tide might reveal the configuration of the sand beneath—an expression such as Arce had never seen on any human face, one that seemed a rendering in human musculature of an emotion too poignant for such a canvas, embodying something of lust and fear but mostly a kind of feral longing. The expression faded, and Mr. Akashini, who had not moved for several minutes, his mouth wide open, let out a gurgling breath.

  Certain that he was dead, Arce leaned over him and was further horrified to notice that the man’s arms were freckled with vaguely phosphorescent patches of gray fungus. Closer inspection revealed other anomalies: three fingernails blackened and thick like chitin; strange whitish growths, like tiny outcroppings of crystal, inside the mouth; a cobweb of almost infinitesimally fine strands spanning the right eye. Arce’s thoughts alternated between guilt and fear of implication in the death, but before he could decide how to proceed, Mr. Akashini stirred, giving him a start.

  “I really believe that I am making progress,” Mr. Akashini said with surprising vigor, and gave an approving growl.

  Arce was inclined to let Mr. Akashini have his illusion, but a reflex of morality inspired him to say, “I think you’re dying.”

  Mr. Akashini was silent for a long time. Finally, he said, “That is not important. I am making progress, nonetheless.”

  This confused Arce, causing him to wonder whether or not he had misjudged Mr. Akashini by labeling him a fool. But then he thought that his original judgment may have been correct, and that Mr. Akashini’s judgment concerning his own enthusiasm must have been in error. Arce felt sympathy for him, and yet, contrasting Mr. Akashini’s attitude with his own detachment, he envied him the rigor of his commitment.

  “Will you continue to help me?” Mr. Akashini asked, and Arce, suddenly infected with a desire to know his employer, to comprehend the obscure drives that motivated him, could only say yes.

  Mr. Akashini nodded toward his suitcase, which lay closed on the futon. “There … look beneath the clothing.”

  In the suitcase was a fat sheaf of traveler’s checks. Arce handed them to Mr. Akashini, who—barely able to hold the pen—began endorsing them, saying, “You must keep them away from me … the people who would report my condition. Someone tries the door when you are away. I want nothing to interfere with … with what is happening.”

  Considering Nacho’s suspicious questions and avaricious nature, Arce knew that Mr. Akashini’s worries were well founded, yet he could not understand why his employer trusted him with such a vast sum of money. When he asked why, Mr. Akashini replied that he had no choice.

  “Besides,” he said, “you will not betray me. You have changed as much as I these past months, but one thing has not changed—you’re an honest man, though you may not want to admit it.”

  Arce, convinced that because of his proximity to death, Mr. Akashini might have clearer sight than ordinary folk, asked how he had changed, but his employer had fallen asleep. Watching him, Arce thought it might be possible for him to know Mr. Akashini, and that they might have been friends, though only for a brief period. If they were both changing—and he believed they were, for he sensed change in himself the way he sometimes sensed the presence of a lurking animal in a shadowy thicket—then they were changing in different directions, and in passing, they were likely to experience a momentary compatibility at best.

  * * *

  Unable to care for Mr. Akashini every hour of the day, Arce recruited Expectacion to assist him, bestowing trust upon her with the same hopeful conviction with which Mr. Akashini had bestowed it upon him. Yet he was not so thoroughly trusting as his employer. When forced to be away from the room, he would leave valuables tucked into places where a cursory search would reveal them. Not once did he discover anything missing, and he took this for an emblem not of trustworthiness—he believed Expectacion had made a search—but of wisdom. He understood that she was interested less in making a minor profit than in changing her life, and since wisdom was an ultimately more reliable virtue than trustworthiness, he came to value her more and more, to dote upon the sweetness of her body and the bright particularity of her soul.

  Yet as they watched Mr. Akashini being transformed into the artifact of his understanding, a strong bond developed between them, one that stopped short of untrustworthy passion and yet had many of the dependable consolations of love. It would have been unnatural had they not developed such a bond, because the event to which they were bearing witness was so monstrous it enforced union. Within the space of a few weeks, fungi of various sorts grew to cover much of Mr. Akashini’s body, creating whorls of multicolored fur—saffron, lavender and gray. His visible skin became pale and puffy, prone to odd shiftings and spasms, and his right eye was totally obscured by glowing silver webs and green spiders scarcely bigger than pinheads, and more cobwebs spanned between his shoulders and neck and the walls, and a bubbled milky film coated his tongue, until finally, he had undergone a metamorphosis into a fearsome creature whose eyes glowed silver with greeny speckles in the darkened room, burning out from a head shaped like a tuber, his body sheathed in a mummy wrapping of cobwebs and moss, with stalks of mustard-colored fungi clumped like tiny cities here and there, a thing capable only of emitting croaked entreaties for food or asking that a photograph be taken. On one occasion, however, he appeared to regain something of his old spirit and strength and engaged Arce and Expectacion in conversation.

  “You must not be concerned, my friends,” he said. “This is glorious.”

  The effect of his lips, almost sealed with clots of fungus, splitting and the effortfully spoken words oozing forth, struck Arce as being more ghastly than glorious, but he refrained from saying as much.

  “Why does it seem glorious?” he asked.

  Mr. Akashini made a noise that approximated laughter, the heaving of his chest and diaphragm causing puffs of dusty spores to spurt into the air. The candle flames flickered; a faint tide of shadow lapped up his legs, then receded. “I…” he said. “I am … becoming.”

  Expectacion asked in a tremulous voice if he wanted water, and he turned his head toward her—the laborious motion of a statue coming to life after a centuries-long enchantment.

  “Sitting here,” he said, ignoring her question, “I am arrowing toward completion. Toward … everything I wanted to believe but never could. I understand.…”

  “The Malsueno?” Arce asked. “You understand the Malsueno?”

  “Not yet” was the answer. “I understand … not everything. But I had no understanding of anything before.”

  He appeared to drift off for a moment.

  “What’s happening to you?” Expectacion
asked him.

  “When I was young,” he said, “I dreamed of becoming a samurai.…”

  He gave another horrid laugh.

  Expectacion looked perplexed, and Arce wondered if his employer were rambling as men would in the grip of fever; yet he could not quite believe that. He sensed a new rectitude in Mr. Akashini, one that accorded with the ideas about Japan he had gleaned from his reading. But neither could he accept that what he sensed was wholly accurate, because Mr. Akashini’s horrifying appearance seemed to put the lie to the notion of beneficent change.

  In that stomach where once he had envisioned cars and paintings and other oddments of culture, he now pictured a miniature jungle, and sometimes, on entering the room from the bright corridor, he would think that a demon with eyes of unreal fire had materialized in Mr. Akashini’s chair. He and Expectacion spent hours on end sitting side by side, listening to the creaky whisperings of new growth emanating from the man’s flesh, gazing at the awful pulsings of his chest and belly. Mr. Akashini was so self-involved that they were not embarrassed about making love in the room. Sex acted to diminish the miserable miracle before them and to make their vigil more tolerable, and if it had not been for Nacho’s questions, knockings on the door and general harassment, they might have been happy.

  * * *

  Early one morning, before dawn, Arce went to buy breakfast for himself and Expectacion—they had slept poorly, disturbed by the noises of Mr. Akashini’s body and his constant troubled movement. On returning, he heard angry voices issuing from room 23. The bulbous form of Nacho Perez was blocking the door. He was haranguing Expectacion, while two men—marañeros, judging by their tattoos—searched the suitcases, doing their utmost to avoid contact with Mr. Akashini, who sat motionless, emitting a faint buzzing, shifting now and again amid the fetters of his cobwebs, the shifts redolent not so much of muscular contractions as of vegetable reflex. In the dimness, due to the activity of microscopic spores, his glowing eyes appeared to be revolving slowly.

  Arce drew his knife, but Nacho caught sight of him, seized Expectacion and barred an arm beneath her chin.

  “I’ll break her neck!” he said.

  Expectacion threw herself about, trying to kick him, but when Nacho tightened his grip, she gave up struggling, other than to pluck feebly at his arm. Behind him, the two marañeros had drawn their knives. Arce recognized one of them—Gilberto Viera, a thin, sallow man with pocked skin and a pencil-line mustache.

  “Gilberto,” said Arce, “you remember the time on the Blanco Ojo? I helped you then. Help me now.”

  Gilberto looked ashamed but only lowered his eyes. The other man—taller, darker, with the nappy hair of a man born in the eastern mountains—asked Nacho, “What should we do?”

  “Well,” said Nacho, beaming at Arce, “that depends on our friend here.”

  “What do you want?” Arce had to exert tremendous restraint to resist aiming a slash at Nacho’s double chin.

  “There must be something,” said Nacho archly, paying no attention to an intensification of Mr. Akashini’s buzzing. “Isn’t there, Arce?”

  When Arce remained silent, he tightened his grip—Expectacion’s feet were lifted off the ground and her face grew dark with blood. She dug her nails into Nacho’s arm but with no effect.

  “There’s some money hidden behind one of the bricks,” Arce said grudgingly. “Let her go.”

  Another flurry of buzzing from Mr. Akashini, accompanied by a series of throaty clicks, as if he were trying to speak. The two marañeros edged away from his chair, bumping against Nacho.

  “Which brick is it?” Nacho asked, and Arce, thinking furiously of how he might extricate Expectacion from the fat man’s grasp, was about to tell him, when—with the ponderous motion of a bloom bursting from its husk—Mr. Akashini came to his feet. With his glowing eyes and dark, deformed body, puffy strips of pallid skin showing through the fungus and moss like bandages, he was a gruesome sight. Gilberto tried to shove Nacho aside in an attempt to escape from the room. However, the other man spun about and slashed Mr. Akashini with his knife.

  The knife passed through Mr. Akashini’s side, its arc slowing as if encountering resistance of the sort that might be offered by sludge or mud; the dark fluid that leaked forth flowed with the sluggishness of syrup. Mr. Akashini staggered against the wall; his buzzing and clicking reached furious proportions, sounding like a nest of bees and crabs together. A tiny spider scuttled out from his right eye, diminishing its glow by a speck of green. His cheek bulged. One arm began to vibrate, his skin bubbled up in places, his chest puffed and deflated as if responding to the workings of an enormous flabby heart. Arce was repelled and retreated along the corridor, but when Mr. Akashini gave out a growly hum—of satisfaction, Arce thought—he realized that some fraction of his employer’s personality was yet embedded within this vegetable demon. The man who had wielded the knife shrieked, and Nacho half-turned to see what had gone wrong, blocking the doorway entirely. Arce seized the opportunity to leap forward and stab him low in the back. The hotel owner squealed, clutching at the wound, and released Expectacion, who slumped to the floor and crawled away. Arce prepared to strike a second time, but the hotel owner lurched to the side, permitting him an unimpeded view into the room, and what he saw caused him to hesitate, allowing Nacho to stumble out of range.

  Clouds of spores were pouring up from Mr. Akashini, filling the air with a whirling gray powder that reduced the flames of the candelabrum to pale yellow gleams, like golden tears hanging in the murk, and reduced the figures of the two marañeros to dimly perceived bulks that kicked and shuddered. One—Arce could not tell which—collapsed on the futon and the other crumpled beneath the dining table, both holding their throats and choking. Looming above them was Mr. Akashini, his luminous eyes the brightest objects in the room, the outline of his body nearly indistinguishable from the agitated gray motes around him, looking as ominous and eerie as a Fate. There was a flurrying at the edges of the body, along with a rustling sound—a horde of winged things were developing from the frays of skin, fluttering up to add a new density to the whirling spores, darkening the air further. Several danced out through the door: big carrion moths with charcoal wings. He must have inadvertently fed Mr. Akashini some of their eggs, Arce thought, and now they were hatching. And more than spores and moths were being born. Spiders, centipedes, insects of 100 varieties were burrowing up through his skin, pustules opening to reveal the heads of infant snakes and baby beetles, bulges erupting into larval flows, as the process of Mr. Akashini’s understanding, a process of adaptation and fertilization and fecundity, at last reached fruition.

  Within a minute or two, the room grew as dark as night, and yet still those strange silver eyes burned forth. It seemed to Arce that the body must have dissolved, that the eyes, thickly woven cobwebs, were suspended by a clever arrangement of strands. But then the eyes moved closer and he realized that Mr. Akashini was taking one unsteady step after another toward the door.

  Expectacion caught Arce’s arm. “Hurry!” she cried. “Nacho has gone for help!”

  Turning, Arce saw that, indeed, the hotel owner was nowhere to be found, a snail’s track of blood along the wall giving evidence of his passage toward the stairs.

  “For Christ’s sake, Papá!” Expectacion gave him a push. “Don’t just stand there gawking.”

  “No, wait!”

  Arce shook her off, ripped off his shirt and wrapped it about his face. Then he dashed into room 23, dived onto the floor and groped for the brick behind which he had hidden the money, trying not to breathe. Once he had secured the packet of checks, he scrambled to his feet and came face to face with Mr. Akashini—with a gray deformity, with newborn moths breaking free from a glutinous grain of skin and mold, with a shadow of a mouth, with tepid slow breath, with two eyes of green and cold silver. The webs of the eyes were a marvelous texture admitting to an infinite depth of interwoven strands, and Arce saw within them a tropic of green and silver, a loom
of event and circumstance, and felt that if he were to continue staring, he would see not only the truth as Mr. Akashini had come to know it but also his truth and Expectacion’s. Then he became afraid, and the eyes were again only webs, and the face before him, with its hideous growths, appeared a thing of incalculable menace. Yet the spores and the insects and the moths that had transformed the marañeros into anonymous heaps were keeping clear of him, and he realized even then that some relic of Mr. Akashini’s soul was employing restraint.

  Arce wanted to say something, to convey some good wish, but he could think of nothing that would not seem foolish. With mixed emotions, not sure what he should feel for Mr. Akashini, he retreated into the corridor, grabbed Expectacion by the arm and sprinted for the stairs.

  A line of pink showed above the black wall of the jungle, and only a few stars pricked the indigo sky directly overhead; the neon signs over the bars were pale in the brightening air, and shadows were beginning to fill in the ruts in the muddy streets. The coolness of the night was already being dispelled. There were only a handful of people out—two drunks staggering along arm in arm; an old Indian man in rags hunkered down beside a door, smoking a pipe; farther along, a whore was yelling at a shirtless youth. Arce led Expectacion out of the hotel and started toward the jungle, but after about 20 yards, she balked.

  “Where are you going?” she asked, pulling free of him.

  “The Malsueno. We’ll be safe there. I know places.…”

  “The hell with you! I’m not going in there!”

  He made to grab her, but she danced away.

  “You’re nuts, Papá! Nacho’ll have everybody looking for us! We have to get far away! The capital! That’s the only place we’ll be safe.”

  He stood gazing uncomprehendingly at her, seeing faces from another time, stung by old pains, experiencing a harrowing fear of displacement like that he had felt on being forced to flee the capital.

  “Come on!” she shouted. “Nacho’ll be here any second. We can take one of the cars parked back of the market.”