How should a Dead-Shell talk? “Maw maw maw,” it said, and then “Maw maw maw chaw chaw chaw.” And then, “Dam dam dam dam maw maw maw chaw chaw haw.”
But this was Dead-Shell throat-clearing and I could feel many eyes upon me from it, except that Dead-Shell’s eyes were not on its dead shell but instead flitting through the underbrush and overbrush on the rotting shores, through thickets of trees roving in their hundreds if not thousands. For Dead-Shell’s evolution made its sight independent of its self, and those eyes too had their own lifecycle, and were so numerous because of the predation upon them. Over Dead-Shell’s span, Dead-Shell would shed upwards of five hundred eyes, and only during the molting could it produce more that would ascend wing-ward to stare down from on-high.
Yet still this effect was unsettling to me, and this is why I took so long to adjust to Dead-Shell’s speech. When I turned my gaze to those eyes, I worried for them, for I knew them to be as like to his children, and every hour of every day one or more were eaten, and often I would see this on the far shore to the east or west—I would sense the shriek of the punctured eye from some felon of a predator and you would see the spurt of liquid and Dead-Shell was one eye closer to darkness.
All of these punctured and consumed eyes—even when they lay within the belly of the predator—could still see, for Dead-Shell told me that if swallowed whole his eyes would report back to him, from that enemy stronghold, sometimes for months, until expelled, which was usually enough to snuff out the remaining life. Dead-Shell’s brain, not fixed in the meat of him but in his shell, contained such a coiled complexity that I could not quite bring myself to imagine it.
“Maw maw maw maw maw may may my breather my bruther my brother,” Dead-Shell said, and I knew by this that at least one of his eyes had seen my story and knew of me.
This did not matter to me in the least now. It did not matter for Dead-Shell was of the new world not the old and my embarrassment and sorrow and guilt was all of the old world and made no difference in the new world, which had none of the culture I had known. I understood this at least. And so I forgave Dead-Shell not knowing that this opening might hurt me. Even as I sailed down the length of the lake on the inside of his shell and he spoke to me from the bow.
The words continued to sound like nonsense to my ears, but to my eyes, my nose, my tongue, my skin, Dead-Shell’s words resonated like the most powerful symphony undercut by the gentlest lullaby.
I was being put to sleep and roused to heroic acts, even as all I did was kneel on the dead shell of Dead-Shell. While out of my ears, as if the words must expel matter, poured my understanding, coating the sides of my body and falling away into the water like thick honeycomb in golden multitudes.
How Dead-Shell Changed Me
Soon I came to realize that Dead-Shell was a sort of scientist-creature on the order of the story-creature and school-creature before him. He communicated to me that the world had been remade against my image and that my form, even much reduced, was the rebellion of the old world against the new, and that this made no sense because the new world embraced the old; that my very presence made the old world manifest, no matter the form, so why was the form important? Why did I hold onto the form?
And why did I, holding my form, insist then on negating myself once we had reached the end of the lake? It would serve no purpose and was impossible because I would fail because I could not destroy my constituent molecules; they would still exist, and thus I would exist as well. As still the golden manna sang as it left my ears and streamed down my body, made of my body a clay that must be reformed and redistributed to make sense.
A sweet and bitter relief.
Better that I succumb to my purpose, Dead-Shell still maw-mawed into me. Better that I become what I must become for a new life and a new journey, for this was the only way to preserve any semblance of the old world … and here Dead-Shell brought to bear all of his thousand eyes all across the land—on the shore, in the trees, in the water, in the belly of myriad beasts and buried, buried deep in the ground, staring up through moss and lichen and rich, thick soil.
That I might see through his eyes, might see how underneath the new world lay my old world still. Like the foundation of my house, there it lay, and I saw it all in such a confusion and profusion that I could not hold it in my head and the golden honeycomb that was not honeycomb at all but the movement of my transformation spun out and pushed out from inside of me until there was more of it outside of me than inside of me, and that is how I knew that it had been growing inside of me for much, much longer than Dead-Shell had been talking to me.
For Dead-Shell’s words had encased me in honeycomb from the inside out and the fortress of my body lay behind a glistening wall, and that wall was attached forever and always to Dead-Shell, and his task was done, as even the space that had been my brain softened and spread out to coat the inside of that entire space I must call separate from the world.
Namely: me.
How I Left My Self Behind
I toppled into Dead-Shell’s embrace and the dead shell closed around me and bound me, while Dead-Shell’s mouth detached on tiny legs and jumped into the lake. For this was all that was left of Dead-Shell, who must now rejoin his own eyes, or some portion of them and continue on his anointed purpose, his path, which might mean repeating his conversation with yet another person who had slept a century and would reach the lake through the school-creature, but had lagged behind me in his timing.
But, meanwhile, Dead-Shell had brought his teachings up and through me and the golden honeycomb that was so much more bound me and I came out from the lake to a river that roared and gushed its way down to the premonition of a vast sea, and along with this roaring and gushing and thrushing came the bobbing and weaving and floating and gliding and all of the other motions of the Dead-Shell eyes, now watching me, turned on me, so that I still saw through them but they saw me. And the weight of that was a powerful thing such as I cannot describe. To be seen in that way.
While I could not move for I no longer had what might be called arms and legs but only the motion provided by cilia and by the thick stickiness of the honeycomb, which was both me and not me, was how I could move and how I could stay. Yet my eyes did not partake of the honeycomb. My cluster of half a dozen eyes was too busy transforming into one eye, one giant eye that was also a kind of helmet, as if an eye had been drawn on the glass of an astronaut’s helmet, except that drawn eye could see and the entire globe of glass was the eye. That while I had my hands I put my hands to my face to know that this one eye was enormous, like a world, and that already things swam there like motes but wriggling and alive. I saw so far and I saw so well, and as the many eyes of the Dead-Shell retreated and receded until I saw only through my own face.
Beneath, there came an itching and tickling. I had grown fins so I could steer myself fast down the river, now underwater because I had the gills and I had the encasing of golden sap, which I knew was stronger and yet lighter than any substance humankind had ever known, so that I was my own fish but also my own submarine, and I rushed and darted and frolicked through that water in such a sublime way I almost forgot the sense of me, forgot that I had but one eye now. I sought open water. I sought the ocean. And I blessed the thousand eyes of the Dead-Shell, and I blessed Dead-Shell himself for allowing me to be this way, to experience this, to be other than human.
I was so fluid in my shell that I could not at times distinguish the water from my self. I could not distinguish a wave from my thoughts. Extinguish me, become me. That is all the river meant to me: a long, thick muscle that would deliver me, and I was that muscle and I wanted the sea. I desired it so badly, more than anything I had ever wanted, and it pushed out all other concerns and I could taste nothing but the sea-to-come and hear nothing and feel nothing but that.
And still I was changing, well beyond the changes that had created my brother. Those innocent days, those hours of being planted by a story-creature on a hillside, a sapling sprin
ging from my head, were long distant. I could not return to them even if I had wished to.
The Ocean That Lay Beyond the River
At the ocean, however, my urgency faded. Having reached that place, I no longer worried about ending my life, for my life had spread and swelled and become something other than it had been. Nor did I worry about much else, and I floated in the glistening green water staring up at the sky, which sagged so close and was not yet full of stars but only the ghosts of stars or a haunting of everything that was not-star, so that by the lack I might think of the word “star.”
I received this vision through the taut thickness of the air, which had not yet dulled to dark.
Into that calm I was either allowed further knowledge of my wife and my daughter, or these slipped through like silvery minnows of memory darting out of me—still at a remove, but they were true, as if only by turning away so utterly now I could see them, glimpse them back on shore, staring out at me across a century. Who knew where they might be now, if they lived in the world at all?
My daughter had liked to stage plays in her room back in the house that was only a dirt foundation now, and she would make us pay to watch them and then she would do what she had planned to do anyway while we sat there with foolish grins, unsure if she was a genius or just sillier than us. My wife made jewelry in the shapes of all the natural things; spoons that were leaves and knives that were stalks of weeds and metal bowls like ponds full of fish. She made me a coiled snake as a band for my wrist, but I wasn’t wearing it when I went to the hillside and though my digging in the foundation may have been to find it, nothing was there. Nothing would ever be there.
Fierce as river rush came to me love, came to me many trips to the beach with them, and the laughing and the sunburn and the cold drinks and the sand between the toes, and how when that happened time was no longer there, that everything became one moment, the only moment, and it was as if we had not traveled to the beach or would be leaving soon but only that we had ever been there and ever would be there.
I had worked as a writer of obituaries; I had not buried the stories of the dead in the backyard. I had worked for a newspaper researching people’s lives. I had a father and a mother who were still alive when I began my long sleep, but they were more distant still, and I could not recapture them, not in any way that had meaning, and with that loss was snapped off the whole branch of relatives and perhaps I had never had close ties to them, but in the succor of the sea, surrounded by such seething life, I felt the lack of those connections and the new connections roared into my head in such a joyous profusion.
Touched by the want and need of all of that, I, turning to look back, tried to conquer the new shoreline with the old one. For that would bring more substantial something of old life, old growth. I could almost do it. I could almost revert, for the moment. But not quite.
What would this world have been if I had slept and had returned to find it human?
Would it have been terrible or beautiful?
Would I have recognized it any better, or would humankind have been as banished as if the story-creature had come along after all?
The Sky Beyond the Ocean
All of this I thought in long and short flashes and daggers and circles as I floated, waiting for the next thing. The sky was the sun and the sea was the sky both and only the thin line between told me of any difference, and the difference meant nothing. I could tell by how the skin of the water lifted below me that the ocean was not the ocean, but instead a great beast, a story-sea that was salt water and not salt water, and that the swells were rising that I might be lifted up into the heavens when finally the sky darkened and the stars came out, and then I might know my destination.
I sensed that while I had been shedding my last ancient skin to become pure, there had swum in quiet those who now bobbed and floated around me, others not unlike me—those who had slept on their separate hillsides and then taken a journey to arrive here, and would soon disperse again. All of us with our huge single opaque eye like a helmet and the compact bodies, from which the fins had fallen off, to drift to the bottom and be broken down and become nourishment for the beast that enclosed us in such a wide embrace.
There was no music, and yet there was such music as I had never heard before. Distant, so distant, and yet so close. Did we make that music or did the world make that music in celebration of our departure?
I did not think I would ever be human again, but I would see things no one of my species had ever seen, and with that thought I began to cry from some excess of emotion that could not go elsewhere.
I began to cry as if I meant to swell the sea and drown the earth … and yet even my tears were purposeful, and repurposed by the story-creature. For my tears encapsulated a chronicle of my story, of this story, and every tear that met the ocean’s surface contained all of this tale and every tear shed by every cocooned single-eye to all sides told their tales too, that they might not be forgotten, and might be sheltered and expressed indeed by the sea and the earth itself.
Nothing ever could be lost and all would be used, and that was the way of it and part of what Dead-Shell had tried to tell me to comfort me. And so I wept my story into the ocean and the ocean received it and if you know these words you have heard tell of them from the drops of water that fall from the sky and inhabit the lakes and the rivers and all creatures across the face of this world have heard tell of it, including the thousand eyes of Dead-Shell, for they too are self-aware and some of them must have watched us far out at sea, waiting for the next part of the story.
The clear substance over my head, the eye of me, had thinned and hardened and taken what it needed from the saltwater, and I was ready. The ocean that was itself a beast began to faster and faster curve upward like the eyes, like the helmets, and in slow-motion began to slingshot us up into the cosmos. But it was not slow motion for long, for the ocean bellowed and sped up and pushed up and its wishes were that we be gone—and at speed.
We like children heard and received and as if upon a mighty trampoline were flung up into the stratosphere and then achieved escape velocity in a holy roar and expulsion, through light and dark into dark and weightlessness … until we were all of us tumbling end over end through vacuum, and with each tumble my fellow travelers dispersed farther and farther from me, headed to other worlds than me, to become story-creatures.
For we were joyous. We were ecstatic as the stars came at us, no longer veiled, and we saw them in all of the glory that was both ours and theirs.
What was breath to us behind our helmets? What was time? What was speed?
We could tumble forever and never die, and every sighting of a star filled us like a tiny bliss, a flower opening up and opening up and never fading.
Now I would be a story-creature and have a world of my own.
About the Author
Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor. His fiction has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales and multiple year’s best anthologies. He writes nonfiction for The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian, among others. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife. Jeff is the author of Borne and The Southern Reach Trilogy. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Jeff VanderMeer
Art copyright © 2017 by Ar
mando Veve
This World Is Full of Monsters Page 3
