Selected Short Stories Featuring New Corpse Smell

by Nicolas Wilson

paper. And my disapproval must have shown on my face, because he looked to me, stared into me, and then he shrugged.

  And for an instant, I became afraid I had idealized Ed, that he might not be everything I believed him to be, and in truth he most likely isn’t. But it does not make any difference, because if he isn’t, he could be, and that’s enough, and it is likely mere jealousy. And do I deserve even to be jealous, or more importantly, do I deserve to have Edward only for myself?

  She came and went over the better part of the summer, and in that same span his interest in me began to wane, until one afternoon, after she’d left for her home, I asked him, “Why did you kill Marion Parker?”

  He paused to think a moment. “It was a dual force, I think, the impulse to harm anyone I care for, and a desire to execute a master crime.” He had, he explained, labored for the majority of his life in petty crimes, but he had decided to strike out at the plain mediocrity of this very average society. Initially, he had envisioned a grand scheme, with the ransom money as seed for a larger, wider plot; but he admitted underestimating the police, and the abhorrence of a public unused to having its laws flouted- outraged at the audacity of one man to live as he pleased. I wondered aloud when his crimes would return to their former extravagance, and he became wounded; I had not guessed that his “death” had chastened him, but his reaction was transparent.

  A few days passed, and I rarely saw him save when we shared our bed, until I came home to find him there, with that girl again. By that point he had already cut away her limbs, and was tearing the entrails out of her chest. Calmly, I asked the girl’s name- I thought it only proper- but he would only call her Marion, though I thought it preposterously unlikely that was actually the case.

  I should have been disgusted, and perhaps somewhere I was; but I was thrilled, because his interests in her had been different- no more a competitor of me than the air he also needed.

  But for several days her body remained in the apartment, where I’d first found him and it in our bed, and when finally I asked the purpose it served he claimed he had been waiting for the proper mood. He kissed me, and at the beginning I did not question his meaning, but then he began to choke me with one hand, and in the other, choke the lifeless body of his second Marion.

  I continued to kiss him, but unlike at other times his grip did not slacken, but tightened. My lungs burned for lack of air. “Please” I managed to squeeze out. I tried to open my eyes, and realized I had never shut them, that I was blacking out. I fumbled at the nightstand, for the lamp, since repaired, that had brought him to me, and I smashed it into his skull.

  He lay on the bed, as he had when I’d first finished sewing him back together; the only signal of his life poured liberally from his temple, and my heart bled in kind. This brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy turned into a purposeless monster. But by whom? By what? Yes, he is a monster now. But the worse must be the cause that drove him to this. Isn’t it significant that society was not able to fill the life of an exceptional, intelligent boy, to give him anything to outbalance degeneracy in his eyes? I felt disgust well in me as I raised the lamp one final time to right society’s wrong, and put my Atlas back in the ground.

  Table of Contents

  Blood Falls

  The following was found written in pencil in a small snow cave 70 yards from the Blood Falls base camp in Antarctica.

  My name is Henry Bentham, and I’ve been a biologist for fifteen years. I’ve known Charlie Astrid most of my adult life. So his text message of a few weeks ago had all the immediacy of a telegram: “Taylor Glacier cave-in, Blood Lake exposed. Expedition!”

  Charlie was an extremophile-phile, the weirder and more resistant the organism the more excitable he became. I tried to convince him, back when it still mattered, to get into marine biology- under the sea there are creatures that survive in and near volcanic vents, who survive extreme cold and extreme pressure. At the time I thought he wanted to share classes with me, but he later explained that it was the fast evolutionary turnover that turned Charlie into an extremophile microbiologist.

  We’d talked about Blood Falls, a constantly running spigot from an underground lake sealed tight by a glacier from outside influence for nearly 2 million years. There were microorganisms living in that lake, thought to be responsible for the blood-red color of the water in the falls, evolving independently, sealed off from the rest of the world in one of the most inhospitable corners of the world. This was his Valhalla, which was sort of funny, since the falls were very near to the Asgard mountain range. Charlie wanted desperately to study the falls, but had never gotten his chance, because they’d been explored time and again, samples taken time and again.

  But when I called back, he explained how this was different: “The collapse has sectioned off about a third of the underground lake, and exposed it to the air. We have a unique experience to not just look at the piss seeping out of this lake’s urethra, but we can stick our fingers in its guts and see what squirms out of the primordial ooze.” Charlie already had funding lined up- he’d always had funding waiting for anything to justify a trip to the falls- but this was big- huge- this was a once in a species type of scientific event. I couldn’t have said no if I’d wanted to.

  As our expedition ramped up, more and more donor money flowed in, and with more money came further expediting, until after what seemed like an impossibly short amount of time we were standing on the edge of the Antarctic ice shelf. I’d been to Antarctica once, spent a season in McMurdo. Charlie’d been here three times before, only once in an American base- he spent a summer at a Japanese station even though he speaks none of the language (80% of their staff spoke English- but still). Anne Ashworth was a geologist from the University of North Dakota, and our meteorologist was named Sam (he had enough of a speech impediment that I never could quite catch his last name). I never saw our guide outside his winter gear, but his name was Alex (though I can’t honestly be sure Alex was a he- if he was, he had a slight frame, and one of those androgynous faces that, especially when covered by a parka and goggles made it impossible to know for sure).

  We’d brought along Yamaha Vikings (I’d nearly fallen over laughing when one of the Finns who’d come along on the supply ship referred to the snowmobiles as “scooters”- though she didn’t seem to understand what was so funny). I felt poorly for Scott and Amundsen and the rest, making the slog on foot, and we weren’t going anywhere too near the pole. We made good enough time that we reached the site of the cave-in with time to set up our camp for the night. After we’d pitched our tents and secured our gear, my heart raced as we all started undressing, and I thought I’d definitively learn Alex’s gender, but as he slid out of her parka and goggles he turned away. (S)he kept on enough layers that neither a masculine nor feminine frame became apparent.

  The next morning we set out onto the ice. Alex was an experienced ice climber, and he (or possibly she) reminded us that we were practically walking on ice now, and to be accordingly cautious. That reminded me of my childhood, when my father had pulled my arm from the socket yanking me off a frozen lake we were playing on, for fear that we’d fall through. I asked Alex just how dangerous it was walking around on top of an already partially collapsed glacier. “Ridiculously,” he said, with a laugh that truly terrified me.

  Alex walked us through the basics of climbing, and we were beginning our approach of the cracked lip leading down to the lake when there was a loud crackling sound. “Shit,” he said, “I’d hoped this wouldn’t happen.” We saw a crooked line of lightning flash through the ice beneath our feet, and then the world tilted. I was the farthest back towards the edge of the glacier as our section sheered off, and dug in my heels and flung myself at what was to be the new ledge. I swung my ice ax, and it caught, and for a long moment there was stillness, until the ice we’d been standing on smashed onto the icy floor some 400 meters below.

  I took a moment to breathe, but knew I wouldn’t be able to hold too long (or wors
e, have the strength to pull myself up). I couldn’t gain traction with my boots. I smiled through a beard that always made me look older than I was, but thankfully protected from some of the cold, and told myself it was time to stop acting like a doddering old bastard and pull like a man, damnit (I was certainly nowhere near old enough to die for want of a pull-up). I gave one last good yank, and the ax shifted as I rolled over the edge and to relative safety.

  I used the radio to call the ship, but they said the weather wouldn’t allow for help just yet, and I looked at the sky and understood completely. Yesterday, Sam had told us the weather looked fine for the week; this morning he told us he’d been wrong, but that we should be able to batten down at base camp come nightfall and be fine. I was beginning to suspect Sam was an asshole, because the sky was already a dark gray, and I could tell that not a mile away, a harsh snow was falling, and getting closer.

  But I knew that if anyone survived the fall down there, they wouldn’t survive the snow- I had little choice but to climb down. Alex had been a good guide, and we had more than enough rope, even though our first anchor had slid down with the rest of our team.