Dead Astronauts

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Framed by tangled forest and a rusted dead car sunk in the dirt, vines erupting from the carriage, and, beyond, the plumes from smokestacks of the factory. Smoke that curls into the sky above the tree line is not half so white as this man. His clothes glint or sheen or move. Catch what dappled light comes through the branches. He stands still, but not still, face so gaunt you can read it from afar. An intent that reads like search or journey.

  He’s not real to you. He’s like a hallucination or a thought you had that’s still inside your mind. Still far away. Until another like him appears beside him. Then he’s real. Then, amplified, he frightens you.

  You’re hunched low and slunk. In the cool hollow of a berm overgrown with ferns. Wrens scold in the underbrush. Nothing else much moves or even seems to breathe. The two men are indistinct, wavering, through the bushes, as if they could move without moving. Or like you remain still but they’re disappearing and reappearing again, in not quite the same place. Yet: the same place.

  A sentinel quality, curled a bit like ferns as they survey the ground. Sense of a search. But they’re not looking for you. Except they are. Because you have the journal. Because you’ve seen the salamander. They just don’t know who you are yet. Or who you might become.

  When the third appears, bone-stark against forest greens, the pale man becomes unreal again. Suspended in the sunshine, in the glittering dust of his own stillness.

  This third, the way he holds himself, the flicker of light on his eyes. You recognize pain when you see it, once you’ve plunged past the strangeness. They are sick, in pain. Reluctant, for that reason. But still they search, as if someone makes them search.

  A smell of foul burning needles your nostrils, and you think they must be burning in the sun, melting, the mist or spray that reaches them. But then you realize it is just a new smell from the factory. The smell gains a weight and misdirection, like rusted iron soaked in honeysuckle. Devolves into a disgusting swill of hot asphalt and raw liver. With an aftertaste that is pungent. Makes it hard to tell the poison from the pain.

  When the three pale men are roving distant again, you head back to the tunnel.

  * * *

  Midday. The others are out foraging, reflexive. Scouring what’s empty or derelict. Names of the dead or those who moved on scrawled simple in black ballpoint on the opposite wall. A moment to assess yourself, to note new symptoms. The rasping cough won’t go away. But won’t kill you in the moment. Joint pain, headache, the same as always. Nothing beneath that. Not that you can detect. A collection of ills like pots and pans banging together in a jostling van. You fool yourself that the river water is safe, but it’s just safer than what comes out of the tap. Hunger pangs you ignore. Easy after years of it.

  The fire in the barrel’s gone out, cars hum and buzz across the bridge above. Sometimes drones take an interest, a different kind of buzz. The forest’s a wall of green on the north end of the tunnel and burnt-out concrete blocks of a strip-mall office complex, heavily tagged, to the south. Just beyond, the dull walls of the main street, the gutters glaring with dirty runoff, the severe shadows, the shuttered doors and windows.

  The journal’s hidden good. Beneath a brick beneath a bag of dirty, rotting clothes, amid a pile of soft limestone soggy with water dripping down the underside of the bridge. Lines of lichen and sour gray mold disguise it. You imagine the journal vibrating with the energy of what it contains. You imagine the lichen and moss murmuring to it. Telling the journal to settle, to rest, to sleep. Drawing the demons out of it, to dissipate harmless in the air. But under brick it’s cool and calm as if it’s always been that way. Except for the fox, image like a secret blue sun pulsing at you underneath.

  You’re alert for the pale men, for discovery. But there’s only an ancient porcupine noisy in the underbrush. Rustle of needles. No fruit to give him, but even polluted the forest must provide.

  The journal still looks abandoned, not stolen. Pages singed by fire, some by rips made in anger. Curling at the edges. Stained. While something gulps and chortles from the river nearby, and you try to ignore that. The sound could mean anything or nothing. Heard the river enough to know it changes, is never exactly one thing. Here, a toxic holding pond. There, a half-built muskrat lodge, home to some other critter.

  Your sense of time has faded over the years, but probably you have thirty minutes, maybe an hour before the others return. Don’t want them to think you have anything valuable. A long, hard lesson, that. Need and want were forces like demons.

  Maybe it is an illusion of the charred pages, but the journal feels warm. Like it is really something else. Inside the journal, no name, no address. Unreturnable. Two marks that might be the letter C and the letter X or might not be.

  Instead: Constellations or what you take to be constellations. Points of light with lines between them. Just a page or two. Each of the constellations is roughly circular. Notations in numbers beside each point. Smaller circles mapped to larger, as if the larger are replications that should show more details. But don’t.

  The first pages disturb you. Can’t say why. There’s something familiar about them. Maybe in the colors. Maybe in the shape of the door that pops up on page three. The door worries you. It makes you think of something opening that needed to stay shut. You imagine a vast darkness behind that door. Darkness you never want to know.

  Then come diagrams of creatures that look like autopsies or recipes. Some almost whimsical: A plant that becomes a sea anemone that becomes a squid. Others like levels of hell. Bear-men and men like bears. Scenes of slaughter you pass quickly. More “instructions,” in sentences and paragraphs written in a language you don’t understand. Spanish in high school and some knowledge of Russian, so you know other alphabets. But this matches nothing you’ve ever seen.

  Page after page of this, until a few phrases in English. In a wild, uncontrolled handwriting, an alien language all its own. The English doesn’t lead to anything useful, as if a trail of bread crumbs petered out into a sprawl of mushrooms or tiny black monoliths.

  “The fox is reluctant, must be forced.”

  “Words coming to me remote from beyond the globes.”

  “No more Company.”

  Fair unfair: Most people living under the bridge over the years have been institutionalized, then released. Left to wander. True even in your childhood, or was what your parents told you to make you stay away from there. They share their writings sometimes, point at words and you nod and take them seriously, because it was serious, to them. Maybe the journal was a story of someone’s life. Written in invented languages.

  The journal mutters on most pages. Like someone muttering to himself, not writing to another person. Working out issues or equations or formulas. You don’t know why you think the journal was written by a man, but you do.

  The most disturbing images show mice being bred and re-bred to become smaller and smaller. In the last diagram, these new mice are being placed inside a person’s throat, in an operation that cuts a hole in the throat. The human figure like the sexless figure in CPR instructions.

  Some of the images in the journal remind you of the real world. A page has a thin figure on it like a druggie named Hal whose face had been cut up by a bottle in a fight. He weighed all of ninety pounds. Probably didn’t last the winter. Talked for hours about his former life. Husband. Homeowner. Programmer at a software firm. All that done now. But he kept reciting every detail for the three months you knew him.

  You never talk about your past with anyone. Talking just releases memories into the air, and they aren’t really yours anymore, or they become changed or other people capture them and hold them prisoner. You want to keep them. The bad ones might infect someone.

  Scribbled in the margin, almost a plea or an order: “You have to open your heart to as much as you can. As much as you can stand. No matter the cost.”

  Such treacle. The sentiment is more surprising than finding sentences you can read. A few more like that, almost like greeti
ng cards, until you wonder if it means something different. Wonder if this was some strategy for combating horror. But who created the horror? If you’re reading this right.

  “Everyone should have a magical garden. Everyone should know how that feels.”

  You skip and skim, unsettled, glance back at the fox from time to time. But he’s no help.

  Toward the end of the journal, you find sketches of a creature like what you glimpsed in the river. In a globe of light, like the fox on the cover. In a more scientific sense, carefully labeled, splayed, with eyes x’d out. A diagram. Resembles a salamander. A large salamander. Almost but not quite.

  Like the languages you can’t understand, the creature doesn’t map to anything you’ve seen or read about. More English, but only to support a delusion. A made-up language again. A salamander language?

  Maybe you study that page for days, for months, for years. Maybe seconds. The page splits your brain into before and after. Becomes meaningless to gather meaning to it.

  This page of a liquid language reminds you of pages from a book you were given, about the coast. In the surge of watery lines. The withdrawal at low tide, leaving spirals of tiny creatures behind. Husks and shadows and evidence of something hidden by the water, revealed.

  Nothing like a eureka moment. Nothing except you know the others are coming back soon. So you memorize a simple phrase. What you think is a simple phrase, in salamander language. Put the journal back in its hiding place.

  You go down to the riverbank, write in ephemeral, rich mud. Words, you think, or symbols. Of greeting. Of friendship. Of solidarity.

  What if it is nonsense? Most days, all you have is reality, which is nonsense, too. The mud feels good against your hand. Soft and cool and forgiving.

  Crouched there still when the drone appears on the opposite shore. Pain soars in your back, your arm. You squat lower, pivot to cover your message in the shadow of your body. A drone is common, but perhaps not this drone.

  A beautiful thing with three glowing eyes, effortless as it comes close. Hovers there. You pretending to be a scrap of dead flesh propped up by bones stuck in the mud.

  Who knows who sent the drone. Anyone could have sent it. Anyone could want anyone else gone. Evaporated in a millisecond. Never there. No scrap left to mark the human.

  The drone sings to you for a while, querulous. A new thing you haven’t seen before. It is half flesh, has wings like a hummingbird, a voice like a thrush or a wren, the carapace lithe plastic metal. Sings to you like an old friend. Craves a response. You know better.

  But in the end, it doesn’t want you. Or doesn’t want you now. No demon sent it. Perhaps it’s a surveyor. Perhaps there’s no intent behind it at all. Anymore.

  When the drone is gone, you shudder, relax, forage for food. Just another, ordinary day. Except you’re convinced the factory is pretending now. Smoke is just to pretend it is still a factory, not something else. The drone came from that direction, you realize. Not the town. The three pale men, they emerged from the side of the forest nearest the factory. Did they come from the factory? The smoke used to be invisible to you. Now it feels ominous, like portent.

  You forage because your stomach is tight and small and aches. Berries will do. Orange mushrooms you know are safe, even if the forest stinks of gasoline half the time. As you search, the crisp blank pages beckon from the back of the journal like a kind of sustenance. Think on that as you bite down on sour berries to feel the seeds on your tongue. Your stomach hurts less. Mind becomes clear.

  You decide to write on those pages. Things you cannot say aloud, that frighten you. Things you don’t understand.

  Now a door is opening. Now a world is coming in. Through the pages.

  You know that already, but you don’t know it yet.

  * * *

  <
  Her mother thought the demons weren’t just demons but retribution from God. Purposeful. Punishment. The girl, as she became a teenager, knew her mother was wrong, as she was wrong about so many things. Yet sometimes it helped to think of them the way her mother talked about religion.

  Whenever the girl wrote the word demon in those days, as in these, she felt compelled to use her own blood. As protection. As penance. Circles in her room. Shapes she found in books.

  But what if the whole world was becoming a demon?>>

  - 5 -

  Some of the others ask too many questions once they spy the journal. Especially Eric, a gangly wreck who’s newly arrived. Shock of the new. Thinks of homeless people as the kind of community they might be but aren’t always. As separate from where he came from. And your eyes hurt from squinting in the poor light. You rebuff the questions even as you hide the journal deeper in your ragged blankets, your sleeping bag.

  Huddled up against the side of the tunnel, in some dirt that is out of the wind. When Eric has become silent. When Eric is defeated. When Eric is staring out of the tunnel toward the river. Then you try to sleep again. One hand on the baseball bat. The sound of snow falling is from the journal, not from the world, but it’s in your head regardless.

  There is that cocoon of comfort in the journal. Some pages have the feel of summer. But others seem pulled out of the winter. The one that catches your eye cascades over two pages and captures the descent of a shooting star. Below, a creature made of darkness stares across a snowy plain at what may be the advancing claws and arms of some other monster entirely. All while splotches of snow fall, mixed with the stars. Scrawled in the margin, another sketch of the fox head in a deep-sea-diver’s helmet and words you can’t understand.

  At some point, or on another day, Eric’s gone. People are gone. The tunnel lies abandoned. Except for the flotsam that is you. Losing track of time. Losing track of self. Do something practical to keep hold. Drive a stake into the ground. Not drift away into a dark pool. Resist a dive deep into the water. Commit to the now.

  What’ve you got besides a mysterious journal? You take stock every morning, as if it might change. Because it might. You might have less. You can’t afford less. A depressing inventory. A backpack, and inside a Walkman with a mixtape in it that skipped. From an old boyfriend, before you roamed so much. A sawed-off baseball bat. An antique lipstick case that was your mom’s. Old bread you stole from a dumpster behind a grocery store. A can of tuna, but no can opener. A knife in your pants pocket for emergencies. A candy bar, also for emergencies. A gallon jug labeled “milk” filled with stream water.

  A salamander, which hangs around, even as the weather cools. Message received, or not received. When you check the mud bank, there’s just a swipe or swirl in response, the message gone.

  A broken, polluted body.

  Pale, unnatural men still creeping through the forest.

  The salamander grows larger. Almost as you watch. Because you watch a lot. From underbrush. Behind trees. Peering around an empty barrel. You spy. You surveil. Waiting. For what? Drifting, receding, coming back into focus. The salamander’s shifting skin changed from green to red hot, the hazy sheen of a burning shed. The way of it, the weight of it, the patterns in the water. The feeling of being engulfed by a monster, yet not monstrous. Is there a map to lead you out of this? Or are you stuck?

  You call it a salamander because that’s all you know. From days as a kid getting lost in the woods and following the stream to get back. Always thought of them as slow, small, fragile.

  But this creature in the river, this salamander, is so large now and churns the water, the swirls a teasing hint of its form.

  But the eyes are perched on its head in a way unlike a
salamander.

  But it has serrated teeth.

  But it has a tail with notches and fins to help stabilize it.

  Can swim so fast it’s here and then gone again. You watch it cut through the river, go deep then shallow, more like a shark might. The humid, close smell of the river fresh as the water parts. Fresher. Like it did once. Before there was a town.

  It gets dark that day, but you can’t stop watching. Belly full of thick dumplings made of cheap bread and a fifth of vodka someone left in an alley off of the main street. A test you either passed or failed. Let the demons in because the demons are already here. As some insect blinks and glows across the water and the salamander slides through, snuffs the light, brings it back again. A holy gloaming. Swiftness, the sharp intent … you don’t have that. Maybe because you are not as new as this thing, or because you are not as new to this place.

  Does it perform for you? Or is this just how it behaves? The salamander has no fear of you anymore. Has seen you run from the pale men. Seen you hide. Heard your low barked warning that one time, submerged before the pale men saw it. Warning that said, We’re on the same side of things.

  You tried speaking words to bring the salamander, in a rash moment. And then other words, with your finger in the water to form the words. Only to make it mad, smash its tail against the water and retreat. Then from the safety of the opposite bank reconsider you with those large, luminous eyes. Seemed to forgive you. I know not what I say. I know not what to say.

  The salamander from safety opened its mouth and out came fluid singsong speech that covered and coated you. Soothed and lit a fire inside. Enraptured. The most beautiful, indescribable words ever heard.

  Caught by that. Frightened by it.

  Full retreat, quick strides back to the tunnel. Back to the wall, clutching a blanket like an old half-remembered stuffed toy. Heart pounding. Still feeling the embrace of that secret language. Feeling like the river runs into and through you. Out of your eyes your mouth. The salamander’s message pouring out of you. So much information incoming to a receiver inadequate to receive it.