A Broken Darkness

by Premee Mohamed

  “What can we do about it?”

  “Truly, Joanna, I am very sorry. I don’t know. Your idea of a counter-prion… numerically, in terms of transmissivity, in terms of infectivity, reach, spread, I don’t know how it would work. I mean to say, I don’t know how this works either. And that is why I say I don’t know.”

  She slumped, but only a little. We had both been expecting it, I thought. She just wanted to hear it from someone not herself.

  Chan went on, softly, “You know, we are taught… everything in nature has its predator. We don’t say enemy, we say predator. Sometimes that’s not true, it’s just… a parasite, say. Or an unlucky mutation. It’s meant to soften the blow a little when we lose a patient. We say: predator. Even if we mean cancer, heart attack. If these things have a predator I know you will find one. I am sure of it. Or make one. Even the dark gods of the sea fear the gods of the inner earth, even the Ancient Ones once feared the Elder Gods.”

  “Why can’t they help us now?” I said. “These… these Elder Gods, I mean.”

  “They’re all dead,” Johnny said dully. “Or as close as you can get to dead. And even their bodies were sent out of reach. The last invasion. They were betrayed, it’s said. Double-crossed. Right there in the… in the Fertile Crescent. Right where we stood in Nineveh.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “It has happened so many times,” Chan said, pounding a fist suddenly into his thigh; his face contorted. “When the Ancient Ones come, They play, use us as... resort, playground, nasty place where sick kids torture animals. Take what They want and laugh and gamble and destroy till They’re kicked out. They don’t make... colonies. Look at the history of the world. The British Empire, the French, the Spanish. Look what happened here, even, in Prague—I mean, in Europe in general. Why don’t some people just stay where they are? Why do they overrun and conquer and exploit, and declare a place property, and the people in them property, instead of just staying at home?”

  Johnny stared at him. Just behind her, something slapped against the metal hull, making the entire structure ring. I resisted looking, with an effort.

  “Nothing you can justify, I’m not trying to. I’m just saying: why? We have to think of why. More than one reason. Not every country became an empire, and not every country wished to. Why?”

  I glanced bleakly out at the river. He had said what I had been thinking, or trying to think, unable to summon the words for it. But yes: the riverbank, rippling, changing as we watched. Look at it. I had seen photos in my parents’ photo albums of the cities back in Guyana, invaded and colonized by country after country that had not intended to come there, plunder, burn, kill, and leave, but to keep doing it while they stayed. They didn’t move in and build structures that looked like what was already there. They wanted it to look like where they had come from. All those buildings in Georgetown that you would swear came straight out of some English town. You sail to a new place, and you make it look like the old place. Because you haven’t come to the new land for it to be a new land. You want more of what you already have. And They finally figured out how to do it.

  Johnny said, “I keep thinking of Them as locusts. Just swarming whenever conditions are right. Because it’s less scary than thinking that They’ve been... scheming. Waiting. Planning.”

  “But They are. Aren’t They? We thought They were not. But, we thought a lot of things in the Cold War too. If you were going to make a war, you would find our existing wounds, press down, rip them open. I am sorry. Not what I meant to say.

  “You would find the... crack in the wall, and put in a crowbar, and lean on it. Yes? But supposing you know where is the crack on your side, but you’ve got people who will… Inside Beziers, say, inside Constantinople, who say: Spare me. I will show you more cracks. And here is the aqueduct, whose water you can take for your army. And here is where you can dig underneath our foundations. And...”

  No, I almost said. No. No.

  But I was thinking it. I’ve been thinking it for days. She’s been thinking it too.

  “Everything has a price,” Chan said. “Everything, everything, everything. Why do you think people say that so often? The old practice of indulgences, dispensations. Making bastards legitimate or buying the right to trade with an infidel. Marry your cousin. Purchase stolen goods. All legal if you pay up! Even if you were Jewish, a convert, and wished to visit your Christian parents.”

  “What does that mean to people who won’t pay the price?” Johnny said. “Or can’t?”

  He shrugged. “Siena, Florence. The old days. Some bankers offered loans with so many strings attached you could face eternal damnation if you defaulted.”

  “Harsh,” Johnny said.

  “All is lost,” Chan said. “If They want war now, then They want no resistance in the future. Humiliation but also pacification: that would be the goal. The Anomaly would be the absolutely last time humans could be allowed to fight back. Anyone who can do magic should make out a good will, and have it witnessed. Things that were hidden are moving now. Who else have you spoken to?”

  Johnny pressed her lips together. “No one.” In fact we had spent days tracking people down, being told no again and again. No, but not for lack of trying.

  “You should go, Joanna, you should go home, and be with your family. Forget this… this cure. Nothing can be done against such foes. Maybe in the early days, but not now.”

  “It’s not too late,” she said stubbornly. “I’ll figure something out.”

  “And I know. If anyone can, it would be you. But…”

  Another ringing slap. At last I looked over at the river, reluctantly, where the long rays of late afternoon cut into the slow clear water, highlighting swans as if they burned from within, and lighting also the thick writhing glassy forms inches below the surface, eyes staring unseeing at the sky, limbs undulating, reaching for us, drawing back, lifting into the air for moments, sizzling and trembling, then falling back, all around us, below us, a nest of the things, staring eyes and teeth and open mouths. I had argued against this, raising my voice a little too much: what the hell kind of protection, I had said, is a boat? You’re asking us to practically rub our faces into these things. Stick our hand into the wasp nest.

  “Let’s go back,” Chan said, voice trembling. “There’s nothing we can do.”

  The swans screamed and flapped, one briefly getting jerked under, biting and thrashing, bobbing back to the surface. They ran along the water past us, took to the air, so close to the boat that I caught the water-and-weed odour of their feathers as they passed.

  Small red lights appeared on the riverbank on either side of us: drones, I thought at first glance, but no—stags, boars, blue-black as magpies, their antlers and tusks burning white-hot, moving delicately on invisible roads past churches and houses, apartments and castles, the crosses and statues behind them wobbling in the flame of the heat.

  I moved between them back to the boat’s controls, which seemed simple enough, though vibrating in the multicoloured glow of adrenaline. Something bumped the boat heavily, sending it crosswise in the current. I sat in the padded leather chair and hit the button for the electric motor, flinching as it started up, the loudest sound we’d heard in hours, like gunfire. Pedals? No pedals. A chrome lever, at the bottom of its slot. God fucking dammit, we had spent all this time eluding the things, and now we walked right into their place, with nothing between us but a few inches of water.

  “You don’t even have a license for this thing,” Johnny said, her chuckle a little hysterical.

  “Well you don’t have a license for anything, so shut it.”

  I inched up the lever, one hand on the faux-wood steering wheel, and we began to whir downstream, the burning animals following our progress, hooves dancing through and over rooftops, domes, the tumbled stones of ancient walls. Surreptitiously I held up my left hand, so they could see the mark of the watcher, in case it helped, but they simply paused a moment, letting us get perhaps ten
or fifteen feet down the water, and then continued to pace us, darting forward, back. Where their hooves touched the river it began to boil on contact. Crows soared in a panic from the trees, spattering the river with fresh green leaves.

  A jolt sent me crashing into the dashboard, Johnny and Chan sprawling to the floor. Had we hit something? No: something behind us, Johnny whispering and pointing, something clawed that had seized our trailing mooring rope. It oozed up out of the river like a liquid made solid, even staining the water around it with an oily slick, studded with translucent lumps. The stench of magic hung heavy around us, sour and overwhelming. The rope was wrapped around the toothed tentacle, snagged on its edges. Something beneath it, huge, domed: a head, watching us, the dozens of eyes darting back and forth.

  I felt my pupils dilate in terror and couldn’t help but think: Reading. Not seeing us, really. Checking to see if we’re something it’s been told to want. Can’t want anything unless you’re instructed to want it.

  Remember: us. They’re after us, as well as everybody else. But someone, somewhere, said: Get them alive.

  I turned back to the dash, tasting blood in my mouth where I’d cut the inside of my lip, and shoved the lever, the rope drawing up its slack and going taut. A moment’s freedom, the boat surging forward fast enough that I had to hang onto the wheel to stay upright, and the sunset becoming golden, brazen, and then another jolt as it seized the rope again.

  “Somebody cut that! For fuck sake!”

  Johnny nudged Chan aside, began to scrabble through the compartments marked EMERGENCY and FIRST AID, and after a second Chan joined her, but a shadow burgeoned under us, black in the water, and the creatures were still coming on the riverbank, their mouths dripping with flame like napalm, and very calmly, because sure, yes, absolutely, why not, I brought the boat around in a wide circle at the end of its tether, thinking of compasses, astrolabes, the way you pivot around the known to see where you are in the unknown, Johnny crying out, but if you can’t run you gotta turn and fight, sending the boat straight back towards the thing in the river, too slow to avoid us.

  “Grab something, if you can,” a strange voice said, maybe mine, and keeping my eyes resolutely open, meeting the eyes of the creature as it breached, water and ooze sliding off its sides, closer, closer, till I could see the white-yellow galaxies that flared under the slimy surface of the membranes, see the skin around it flinch, brace for impact, we hit it, full-speed, not very fast (I thought) but hard enough that the skin ruptured and sprayed gouts of its acid-stinking blood into the air, spattering the boat and the windshield, a crash and confusion, a moment’s loss of gravity as we tilted, then righted.

  Tentacles sprang from the water, so thick and dark that for a second I almost thought we had somehow unearthed a submerged tree. They splattered around us on all sides, the creature not dead, bleeding, screaming, the boat tilting again. Metal screeched too near my ear: Jesus, they were tipped not even with claws but something like knives, silvery and serrated.

  Those people at the party. Stabbed in the back. Hanging, puppets. Chan screamed as one of the flailing limbs sank into his shoulder, Johnny quickly yanking it out. The plastic box of files banged against one of the compartments, wobbled for a moment, and fetched up against the railing. I watched Johnny’s eyes go wide and golden as coins. For a second she hung poised between the files and her grip on Chan’s shoulder.

  But it was only a second. I slammed on the throttle again, hitting the monster in the same place, sending the box toppling into the nest of tentacles to sink without a trace.

  Johnny had the good grace at least to not speak as we raced back up the river.

  THE MOTOR ROARING, chugging, choking as it encountered patches of blood or ooze, passing first one pier, then another, or were they docks, then a third, and twenty minutes later Johnny finally tugged on my sleeve and pointed. We slowed down enough to run into it not very hard, so that she and Chan could quickly pull each other out and run up the steps, and I cut the engine and followed them, already wobbling on dry land. Lost my land-legs.

  The front of the little boat was splattered with a thick indigo substance, streaked with white and yellow like pus, and the sides bore a hundred thin but deep scratches, revealing the steel beneath the paint. We stared at it for a long time, our panting breath loud in the sudden silence of the killed engine. Only the river made a sound now: low, wet, gloating, as if trying to tell us a dirty joke. Good one, I thought. Yes. Stole our stuff.

  “Let us go,” Chan said, tugging on Johnny’s bag; he was wincing, but not bleeding any more, it seemed. A dark patch had spread on his coat and stopped. “Quick. Find a church.”

  “Sacred ground?” I said, interested.

  “Well. They have public washrooms.”

  I looked down at my new coat, then over at him and Johnny. “Oh. Good call.”

  CHAN LEFT US at the church, which I thought was pretty reasonable. I wondered if he would do what he said: finalize his will, pack a bag, flee. Not that you would necessarily get somewhere that They wouldn’t find you; but that, as he quietly reminded us, ‘Ssarati’ meant ‘watcher’ or ‘witness,’ and there was a reason they had named themselves such. There was power in those who watched together. And if they fixed their gaze upon you, you could not escape by fighting or fleeing or playing dead. “You don’t have long,” he’d said quietly. “Whatever you do. And don’t tell me what that is. They will only make me tell them. Good luck.”

  Cabs weren’t supposed to be running, but Johnny got us one from the church phone booth anyway, a long whispered negotiation in, I thought, a couple of languages; if we had been doing it in person, wads of cash would have changed hands. A few people stared at us as we left; I waited for them to cross themselves, maybe spit on the ground, make some reference to Satan (who would that be, I wondered, out of the two of us), but no one did.

  It was a wonder, she agreed, that the driver had agreed to pick us up at all. The cabby’s eyes, a bright reddish brown, like the roof tiles, flicked up constantly to meet mine in the rearview mirror, like coins being flipped, head, tails, head, tails.

  “I fell in the river,” Johnny said, perkily.

  He made a face of extraordinary disgust, and sucked his nicotine-stained teeth in distress. “Fell!” He shook his head. “Go to hospital.”

  “I’m fine. Take us where we agreed. “

  “Achhh.” He glanced at me in the mirror again, up then down, seeing our bags sitting between us, the canvas on Johnny’s moving slightly as both beetles bumbled around under it.

  “Some river you got there,” I said, maybe too fast for him to catch; he grumbled again, under his breath, and kept driving.

  “Where you going, you going to work? Good. The city, you know, these... office people. Pencil-eaters, they shit paper,” the driver muttered. “They don’t have real jobs, they tell everybody with a real job, Oh, stay home! Is monsters!” he said, in a simpering falsetto. “Haven’t seen anything. Just the... what do you call. Police bees.”

  “Drones.”

  “They got lights on them now,” he grumbled. “Like headlamp. Shine right into your bedroom at night, make a man go crazy. You go crazy if you can’t sleep. Fact, scientific fact.” He scratched his moustache, and glanced up at me in the mirror again. “Where you from? Americans?”

  Johnny answered him in, I assumed, Czech, and he burst into laughter. They chatted amiably as we left the city limits, moving into the stillness and green of the countryside, heavily marked here and there with fresh craters, perfectly round, or strange clipped cut-outs in hills or forests, the angles so sharp they seemed to shimmer above the cuts, as if some molecules still remained, stunned and bisected.

  Anything you touch, you change, I thought. How can we beat that?

  When we finally slowed, after twenty bumpy minutes on a gravel road, I got out and stretched, enjoying the clean, damp air, away from the smell of stale smoke ground into the upholstered seats, while Johnny paid. The driver beckoned
me closer, rolling down his window. “Hey,” he said quietly, his jaw jutting as he put a forearm on the door. “Hey. Fuckin’ don’t hit girls. Okay? I know you know this. And, specially, not the face. Don’t hit girls in the face. Okay? Am I clear to you?”

  I stared at him, horrified. “I—”

  “Okay good. Nice talk.”

  He pulled carefully out of the gravel circle and in moments was gone, leaving me staring after him and clutching my gut as if I’d been shot. Johnny, who had wandered off to cough, came back, wiping her mouth gingerly on her scarf. “You okay?”

  “When we get back to town,” I said, “we are buying you some concealer.”

  “How do you know about concealer?”

  “What? It’s not a state secret or whatever. It’s not like a... girl conspiracy.” I gazed suspiciously around us, the scraggly forest beginning to green up, fill in, hotly vivid in the spring sunshine. “These don’t look too bad. Did you get stabbed back there?”

  “No, I don’t think so. It’s a…” She stopped herself before saying shame about the files, and shrugged. “We’ll do what we can.”

  “I got these little... hang on.” She unzipped her bag, and 1779 roared out and bonked into my shoulder, scrabbling on the fabric for a moment till it got a grip, then climbing up to my collar and sliding down the far side. Johnny, ignoring my muffled yelling, got out two small round discs and clipped one, in a businesslike fashion, to the zipper pull on my coat, then the other to the edge of her own lapel. “Ta-da.”

  We moved down the gravel trail leading away from the road turnout; already the sun was just a sliver on the horizon, a hot crimson glow beneath a long ribbon of clouds. I shivered. Was that a flock of birds in the distance, or something else? Could you trust anything now? Clouds? Light? Feathers?