This World Is Full of Monsters

by Jeff VanderMeer

  But the memories remained separate from my own, would not mix. They just floated on the top and made me have to concentrate more to remember the old life, the time before the story-creature. They came in jumbled and not all fully formed at first. Instead, they huddled together and made sense slowly. So I was screaming and writhing and then was catatonic for a time, staring into the space where my brother slowly became deflated and desiccated and his face fell in on itself and one by one his eyes closed and rotted away, while his toes flinched and his one leg kicked, kicked, was still, and the tail writhed even after my brother was fully dead.

  I should have been sad seeing myself die, but instead I experienced a kind of joy and my eye clusters had all flickered open again at once. Perhaps when I was killing people in the backyard I had hoped one day someone would do the same for me. Perhaps I rejected this version of myself that did not resemble the me who had received the fateful story-creature on his doorstep. Or maybe I was just thankful that the memory transfer had ceased like a dam had been built to contain a flood. It is so difficult to know exactly why I felt this way, nor why there was such jubilance when the story-creature opened an impossibly wide set of jaws that it had not had moments before and swallowed my brother’s body whole. Even though I sat at the bottom of the basement pit, I experienced a sensation of flight and lift, as if I too had been borne up by that jagged black maw.

  Yet I was still catatonic, too, absorbing the memories and I lay there for a week becoming in part someone else, so that filaments and roots and vines grew over me and fed gently on my skin and even much later I would still have the faint scars of their affection as evidence of my time in that state.

  When it was done, my brother lay corpse-like and yet not corpse at the bottom of the pit and I stood at the lip, staring down at him while all around the sunrise of purple and amber made the seeing difficult. But I could not repudiate him for most of him now resided inside of me—and because of my brother my leg had recovered and I could walk through the new landscape like I had been born to it.

  I Was Taught Against My Will

  I headed west, and the story-creature did not follow. Perhaps I thought it would, but instead the story-creature swayed there, crooning soft to the not-corpse in the pit. The story-creature crooned so softly, and yet I heard that sound for so many miles on my journey. I heard it when I tried to sleep in a night that had blinding light hidden within it and the grunting passage of beasts for which I had no name.

  I heard it when I was trudging through what my mind interpreted as jungle but was an entirely different story, and one I could not remain sane within if I had really seen it, even with my brother’s memories.

  For I soon outstripped any place my fake plant brother had yet gone and the terrain became more floating than fixed, the ground covered with a thin stubble of vegetation while the clouds had come close above and turned sea-green and from them tumbled down a forest that hung wrong, the bird-things that were not birds stitching their way through that cover upside down. The smell came to me thick, in emerald mist, and often my forehead shoved up against the physical manifestation of the smell, which could be like mint or could be like a rotted, mossy animal body.

  The leaves and branches itched the top of my skull and brushed my cheek and I tried not to look up too often for fear of what I might see, but also because I grew to be terrified that if I took in that topsy-turvy land I would lose my grip on gravity and, slow and inexorable, take my place up there, my feet glued to the cloud cover and my head hanging toward the ground stubble.

  But also the ground stubble hid dangers, for some was not vegetable but more like animal, and less like irritant than like mouth. I would look for shadow on the stubble to know the difference and I would not take for granted either the boulder that might suddenly unroll itself into a beast like an enormous squat centipede, which did not want to eat me, but sent tiny versions of itself that lived in its skin to attach themselves to my skin while burbling like children.

  These children wanted to relive my memories. These children, for their own purposes, wanted to know about the last century, to extract it from my skull. This extraction hurt like machetes so sharp and keen that when they passed through my body I might be bisected and trisected without feeling it until I fell away into two or three symmetrical parts. That is how it manifested as pain. That is what it was every time.

  Yet I could not elude them, and they came in such regimented columns and also at such regular intervals did the living boulders open up to release their terrible bounty that over time I realized these were indeed schools of a kind and I had been set loose as a history lesson. The story-creature had not wanted me to understand the last century, but instead the rest of the world, which might not know everything. So I endured it better knowing this, that it was not random and they did not mean me harm, but inflicted it as a side effect of the learning. If I were to suffer, then at least let me suffer for a purpose. Although, of course, I would do best should I not suffer at all.

  Soon, though, came the final dislocation, for I had not understood the true nature of the school-creature in the same way that I had not understood the story-creature. For, one day, I came to the edge of the cloud cover forest above and the stubble ground below and the way the horizon ahead zeroed to a large dot revealed the truth.

  I had walked into the school-creature during one of the night hikes, when disoriented, and all of this time the sky-cloud above had been one edge of the creature and the ground another, a kind of gullet or intestine I had entered at one end—and I was about to jump out of the other. And by the mystery of how the world now worked, the entire entity had been itself moving along, so that when I climbed down the other end to the edge of a giant lake, I had the sense that I had traveled much farther than the distance demarked by the movement of my legs, the walking forward and forward still.

  From the outside the school-creature resembled a giant, horizon-consuming fuzzy worm, for while its belly was flat and padded, all along its flanks and atop its blind head, moss and creepers entangled it and disguised it so that the education within could be clandestine and immersive and conducted by light and dark provided by the school creature and the school-creature alone.

  I ran for my life then, for the school-creature picked up speed as if it had known I was disembarking but now had its route to follow. With a plunging relentlessness it dove into the giant lake, the whole amazing length and width of it, while I had sprinted as fast as I could for the side, barely leaping clear of being crushed, and then, after it had passed me, of being drowned, for the splash into the lake had sent a vast wave in my general direction and I sprinted as far inland as I could, and still I was buffeted by the water and washed this way and that, one arm trapped by a single-celled creature that kept calling out my name as if I had already told it my name, but … I had not.

  Then I was drowning, pulled under the waves, and I held on to the single-celled creature like a life-preserver, even as I rebuffed its attack and screamed only in my mind for I was holding my breath and thrashing and yet somehow knew I would not drown if I only leaned on new skills, except that it was too unnatural and I would have drowned not for lack of air, but for lack of practice and because I could not understand what I had become or was becoming.

  But there came a sigh and a surge and I dashed up on moss-covered rocks, battered, gulping air, still clinging to the single-cell that clung to me. It meant to end me. It meant to do that whether we were drowning or whether we sucked air, together.

  There are some beasts that do not care where you are, or if things have changed, still they will attack. Even if that progress came slow, inexorable, for I could feel the cell of it merging with the cells of me, and I knew I could not give it the time.

  I Acclimated Despite What I Had Lost

  When the water receded, I could only extricate myself by causing harm, and while I did not want to do this, and indeed looked about me to make sure nothing and no person was watching—at least, as f
ar as I could be sure—I battered the single-cell against a rock that was no doubt some other animal lying there dormant, until the single-cell bleated and let loose of me and, bleeding an ichor lighter than the air, floated off into the sky in tendrils and green blood slicks that gripped the sky with a kind of phantom intent.

  The blood was beautiful escaping into the heavens; I could barely stand the beauty of it, and what that meant about me.

  The single-cell, subdued by my attack and with nothing to tether it to the ground, soon followed its own blood up into the sky, leaving me to contemplate a harsh truth: I had become so acclimated to this new environment that until seeing blood drift away into the sky I had not realized the thickness of the atmosphere of this new Earth. It was viscous, it rippled, and it could not, in a sense, be called air, although as I observed the edge of the giant lake, having returned now that the wave had passed, I could tell that water still was heavier than air, even if the composition of both had changed.

  From that point on, I became aware of my breathing and how, although I had no visible gills, my lungs must in some way work different than before. That my weight or my walking must anchor me different. This awareness, creating a confusion like unwanted stereo in my head, made it hard to walk and to breathe without recognizing the effort. It was as if I had all of a sudden become a passenger in a machine body that I was expected to pilot without the seamlessness of before. It was like being transformed from a dolphin to a human upon reaching the midpoint of a swim across a dark and endless ocean.

  As painful as it had been before—my brother’s memories, the trisection extracted from me for the school-creature—this loss of lack of thought about basic motor functions depressed me. I resolved I would build a boat and float down the lake and when I reached the other side of the lake, I would end myself. For it was clear to me I did not belong in this world.

  The memories had become a burden I did not want to suffer, for new memories, like thought bubbles, burst inside my head every night and I would dream and nightmare so vivid that I could barely call what I did sleep, in my thrashing and muttering and shaking. So that even though it seemed my skin absorbed some sort of nutrition from the heavy air or the weird sun, still I felt weary forever and horizons became a kind of torture, whether near or far.

  From these memory bubbles, which were like my forced re-education by some ghost of a school creature living inside me, I came to learn the truth of what had happened immediately after my planting one hundred years before.

  My Brother Had Been a Traitor

  I watched my “brother” being born from a patch of weeds beside my body where I slept, my head dissected and held in place by the story-creature. I watched my brother rise and walk back to my neighborhood and into the house I had lived in and make it his own. He drank the milk and the water. He put out the birdseed. He ate the steaks and the fish and the vegetables. He ranted at the television about the news.

  It was my brother, not me, who put my daughter to bed at night and kissed her on the forehead and read her stories until she slept. It was my brother, not me, who slept with my wife and who laughed at her tales from her work and who took her to the movies and paid the babysitter and, again, drank the milk and drank the water. With my wife. Taking care of my daughter.

  But I did not remember having a wife or a daughter, and even now saw them at a remove similar to experiencing senses I did not know I had. My gills filled with air. My lungs filled with water. Nothing lived in the right direction; everything died the wrong way up. Memory must be corrupted, gone bad. I made my hands into claws and I ripped at the ground like it was the flesh of the story-creature. How could I have had a family? What did it mean that I saw my brother had a family?

  I was cut into pieces by the school-creature. I was flailing close with the single-cell. But in the blur and the smudge, with the rot coming to close, creeping up my leg, there by the edge of the lake, it came to me, bathing in the memories, that, yes, I had had a family. Except that the story-creature had taken away those memories from me and given them to my brother. That he might benefit and that I might not suffer. Yet still I suffered with the weight of this—that as I slept for a hundred years, my brother had taken my place in my family and done all of the family things indistinguishable from me. But it was true this made me feel worse, and that if I had woken to knowing I had left a family one hundred years behind me, I might have gone mad or become comatose.

  Were they buried beneath the dirt floor of the foundation? Had I slept atop them like a faithful dog? I would never know, and nothing in my memories told me. I just knew that I, through the person of my brother, had become a true murderer, for I had helped to end the human species in the form in which we had known it.

  Every time that my brother visited a neighbor’s house, my brother left a residue that was an anti-story to the one we all knew, and this residue would grow and accumulate in the mind until it was too late to do anything but turn to the left and change and change again.

  Everywhere across my neighborhood, my country, and the world, this residue accumulated, extended silvery filaments across the bottom of people’s shoes, across their palms and foreheads and elbows and the backs of their knees while asleep or awake, and over time everyone must turn to their left and in the turning transform in either mind or body or both. For this was the form the change took: a shudder, a turn, a cringe, a shrug. Every time, I saw in memory, my brother took to walking through the streets at dusk so he could peer in windows and see the anti-story take hold as he spread it farther. And with each new filament extended, more people spread the anti-story until eventually it was just the story not the anti-story and there had never been an anti-story at all, or any other story to rule the Earth.

  It did not care about your belief system, your grasp on reality, the excellence of your analysis or your senses, for the anti-story of the story-creature became story by retelling effortlessly what lived at the core of you. So my brother went out walking and thrulled to the thrill of it, made the sounds deep in his throat that sounded like an odd nocturnal bird but were instead the end stages of the anti-story, triumphant.

  Now when my brother met my neighbors, all knew all and that all was one. My brother’s neighbor was my brother and he was his neighbor. While those they thought might be troublesome head-planted in remote places, as I had, and slept it off—that they might acclimate and hear the song of the one true story in due time. As I was hearing it now, buffeted by it, and yet even though I heard it I was inured to it. But this did not make me hopeful, for it just meant I no longer mattered to the spread of any story or to the plans of the story-creature.

  I could roam this world as rebel or spy my entire life but the colonization was complete. All I could do is choose when I ended my experience of the world.

  What I Stumbled Upon That I Was Meant to Find

  I began my journey across the lake, that I might find the end of my story, which was now the anti-story much as I was the anti-brother. I felt like the captain of my own fate, that I might at least control my own body and how long it drew breath—and I wish I could tell you what I discovered I created by my own roving, my own actions, but chance does not reside on the new Earth as it did in the old.

  This is both a terrible and miraculous thing.

  I found the dead leathery shell of a creature that might have been like a turtle except a hundred scrawny necks attached to tiny bulbous heads with gaping mouths hung from the inside of the shell, as if these inner heads had eaten the larger creature from the inside out as part of some plan, and I had to cut them all off. They welcomed this art with an eagerness that suggested some maker’s plan remained for the rest of their life-cycle, and indeed I watched those I had severed burrow into the ground with squeals of delight and soon they were gone and I never saw them again and I am glad of that. Then I had to sand down the neck stumps to make the shell float and not be disgusting. Although by then not much was disgusting because the word familiar had changed so much
since I had woken.

  I floated on the black-and-green surface of the lake, with pools of clearest blue embedded in that thickness, and I reflected on my situation. I reflected and refracted my situation, my memories continuing to be absorbed through the epidermis and then into my brain, as if the entire world but me already knew my past. There was nothing else to do, nothing to occupy me, for the lake was slow to travel across, the current glacial.

  But then the dead shell that was my boat grew a mouth and began to talk to me, for it too still had a role to fulfill in my life in this world.

  The Wonder That Was the Dead-Shell

  I was made to understand by the talking dead-shell mouth that whoever should cut the hundred bulbous heads from its undercarriage shall be the feeder that the remaining dead-shell shall converse with, and that by this ritual shall both the feeder and the fed know that learning has taken place. I did not understand the importance of this at first, and considered that it might be a trick by the story-creature, except the story-creature had no part in this.

  Dead-Shell grew a mouth at the bow, and it was salty and chalky with unshaven teeth that sprouted up crooked, so that the mouth must speak through a thicket of its own slashing surgery. Although it took time, of which we had plenty in that becalmed fish bowl, I came to understand Dead-Shell very well, even if I never discovered if we spoke in Dead-Shell’s language or my own. I suppose after my encounter with the school-creature, I had absorbed a capacity to understand beyond my actual ability to understand.

  The weather was deep and porous and full of needles and it pressed around us in a way that invigorated even as it pricked, and even if the lake looked like no body of water I had ever seen, I found it melancholy, reassuring, and calm, and thus although Dead-Shell disturbed me, I had been disturbed worse since I had woken.