Finch by Jeff VanderMeer (9 page)

Returned whining. Keening. A low, animal sound from deep in his
throat. Lay curled up on the chair. Sweating. Things crawled around
inside his skull. Didn't know how much time had passed.

An enormous grub drowning in a sack of its own liquid skin.

Coughed. Sat up.

A rotting tank with the insignia of the Houses on its side, asleep under
the fruiting bodies.

Feral rubbed up against his extended arm. Finch got up, made it
to the phone, dialed Rathven, said "One done, one to go" when she
answered, and hung up. Grabbed the second memory bulb. Collapsed
back to the chair.

A monstrous City, balanced atop a single building.

Started laughing. Didn't know what was so funny or why he couldn't
stop.

Falling through cold air and couldn't feel his legs.

Wondered how much this would mess him up.

he night half over. Something important slipping away?

Drank more whisky, and let it swirl around his mouth. Held
the burn in the back of his throat. Followed by numbness.

The sounds out in the dark beyond the window hadn't made him
shudder or start for a long time. Skitterings. Moanings. A cut-off
shout of alarm.

A spotlight of lavender and crimson painted itself across the far wall
of his apartment, then leapt away. Once, Finch had seen a shoal of
spores take the form of a huge, bloated green monster. Spiraling red
eyes. It had bellowed and dived into a neighborhood to the north.
Smashed itself into motes against the ground.

A child might see that and cry out in delight.

Sidle, quick-shadow, scuttled up the side of the wall near the
window. Pursuing moths that had flown into the apartment. Sidle
was a happy little predator with bright black eyes. Didn't care about
anything but his next meal. Finch could put him in a cage with a
branch and water, and Sidle would be content his entire life. So
long as he got fed.

"I guess we'll soon find out what kind of bastard he was," Finch said
to an oblivious Feral. Feral was looking up at the wall. Mesmerized
by Sidle's stalking of the spiraling moth. Finch wondered how many
Sidles Feral had caught over the years.

Finch forced the second bulb into his mouth. Chewed it into
a dull paste as he moved from the chair to the couch. Lay down.
Swallowed.

The room spun a little. Righted itself.

The ceiling had a few odd discolorations but nothing to suggest
infiltration. Invisible spies. Who lived upstairs, anyway? Sometimes lately he had heard a person pacing across the floorboards in the
middle of the night.

After a minute or two, Finch sat up. Nothing seemed to be happening.
Nothing at all.

The dead man sat in the chair next to him, smiling.

"Uhhh!" Finch leapt to his feet.

The man was flanked by a Feral grown large as a pony. A Sidle grown
as large as a Feral. They both looked at him the way Sidle had been
looking at the moths.

"Sit down," the man said. An order, not a suggestion. In a strange
accent. The man looked much younger than he had on the floor of
the apartment. Had lost the fungal beard.

Finch sat down slowly. Didn't take his eyes off the man. Left hand
groping across the cushions. Where was his gun?

"I've been waiting for someone like you," the man said. "You won't
understand it, but I'm going to give you what I know. Just in case."

The window behind the man no longer showed the city. What it
did show was so impossible and disturbing Finch had to look away.
And yet the image entered into him.

The man said Finch's name. Except he didn't say "John Finch." He
used Finch's real name. The one buried for eight long years.

Finch tried to slow his breathing. Failed. Chest felt like something
was going to explode.

He must be inside the man's memories.

Then why is the man sitting across from you?

"Who are you?" An obvious question. But it kept pounding against
the inside of his skull. So he had to let it out.

The man laughed.

"I didn't say anything funny."

"More to the point," the man said, "who are you? And who are
you with?"

"Shut up. This is just one of your memories. Manifesting in me. It
isn't real."

Blindingly, unbelievably bright, a light like the sun shot through the
window. The night sky torn apart by it. Through the tear: a turquoise
sea roiling with ever-changing patterns.

"You don't have to understand it. Not now," the man said.

Didn't know if he was inside a mushroom or outside the universe.
Glimpses of the city from on high: each street, each canal, an artery
filled with blood. Hadn't known there could be so many shades of
red. Spiking into his eyes.

"Be careful," the man said, echoing Rathven, and took Finch's hand.
The man's hand was warm. Calloused. Real. "Don't lose your self, no
matter what happens."

The man and Feral and Sidle disappeared. The window became a
huge mouth, and they were all nothing more or less than memory
bulbs within it. Finch fell through the same skein of stars he had seen
in the gray cap's memory.

Woke up:

Teetering on the battlements of an ancient fortress, looking out
over a desert, the sand flaring out for miles under the seethe of dusk.
Moments from someone else's childhood. A parent's death. Sitting in
a blind. Crawling through tunnels.

Woke up:

A cavern glittering with veins of some blue metal, huge mushrooms
slowly breathing in and out. Seen in a flash of light that faded and
kept fading but never went out: more caverns, an old woman's face,
framed by white hair; another woman, in her twenties, her thirties,
her forties. A shadowy figure hobbling down a street.

Woke up:

The insane jungle of the HFZ, almost floating above it, through
it, coming out into a clearing ringed by twelve green men planted
in the ground, arms at their sides, their mouths opening and closing
soundlessly. And the jungle was made of fungus, not trees, poured
over trucks and tanks and other heavy machinery junked and rusted
out and infested with mushrooms, some of it still slowly, slowly
moving. And back to the fortress, at the edge of a man made cliff,
many hundreds of feet above the desert floor, and out in the desert
a thousand green lights held by a thousand shadows motionless, watching. A sound of metal locking into place. A kind of mirror.
An eye. Pulling back to see a figure that seemed oddly familiar, and
then a name: Ethan Bliss. Then a circle of stone, a door, covered
with gray cap symbols. And, finally, jumping out into the desert air,
toward a door hovering in the middle of the sky, pursued by the gray
cap, before the world went dark.

Wake up ... Came out of it seconds, centuries, later. To find Feral and
Sidle watching him. Feral on the floor near the couch. Sidle on the
windowsill, a large black moth trapped between his clockwork jaws.

The phone was ringing and ringing. Reached out for it. Put it to
his ear.

"Are you okay?" Rath's voice.

"I'm going to be fine. I think."

Hung up.

Closed his eyes.

I: The fanaarcensitii. You said he had fallen from a great height. Did
anything you saw in the memory bulbs support that idea?

F: Instinct. I didn't trust what I saw.

I: Why not?

F: Because I haven't felt the same since I ate them. Because they were
scenes out of a nightmare. I don't know.

I: There's one strange thing in all of this.

F: Just one?

I: A mention of a fortress. In a desert. Do you know the name of this
place?

F: No.

I: I think you do.

F: I don't even know if it was real or not.

I: Is this real?

[screams]

oke to a weight on the bed next to him. Went rigid. Sucked in
his breath. Reached for his gun. Then relaxed. Recognized the
smell of her sweat, some subtle perfume behind it. Sintra Caraval.
The woman who had been part of his life for the last two years. She
smelled good.

He could feel her staring at the back of his head. Her breath on his
back. He smiled. Didn't open his eyes. She kissed his neck.

She was naked. Smooth, soft feel of her breasts against his
shoulders. He was instantly hard. Opened his eyes. Turned over on
his back. Sintra turned with him so she was nestled under his left
arm. A surge of happiness startled him. Through the window: dim
light creating shadows out of the darkness. Her brown skin somehow
luminous against it. She'd told him she was half nimblytod, half
dogghe. Tribes that had lived in Ambergris since before settlement.
Before the gray caps.

Even in the darkness, Finch knew her face. Thick, expressive
eyebrows. Green eyes. Full lips. A thin scar across the left cheek he'd
never gotten her to talk about. A nose a little too long for her face,
which gave her a questioning look.

An exotic lilt to the ends of her sentences as she whispered in his
ear: "I let myself in. I wasn't trying to startle you."

He started to get up, to lock the door. She pushed him back down.

"I locked the door behind me. No one else can get in."

Finch stopped resisting her. The key was the greatest act of trust
between them. Was that good or bad?

"Sintra," he said sleepily, bringing his right arm around to cup
one warm breast. "I could get used to you. I really could." Not really
listening to what he was saying. Still waking up. Reduced to the kind of meaningless words he'd mouthed at fifteen. Having sex in his room
with the neighbor's daughter while his father was out.

"You could get used to me?" she said.

When mock-angry with him, she raised her eyebrows in a way
he loved.

"A bad joke," he said. Hugged her closer. "I'm already used to you."
Kissed the top of her head. Relaxed against her, the shudder that had
been building up overtaking him. Then gone.

Then, more awake: "Let's escape. Tonight."

He'd worked it out in his head hundreds of times. Along the shore
of the HFZ at dusk. A rowboat. Not a motorboat. To the end of the
bay. Then either west to the Kalif's empire or south to Stockton. West
because it was easier to get through the security zones in the desert.
He knew places there. Places his father had shown him on maps.

Escape. Now.

Imagined she was grimacing, there, in the dark. The way she always
did when he mentioned it.

"Bad night?" she asked.

"Just don't betray me," the man said, and took Finch's hand.

"Confusing night."

"Tell me later."

Then she was kissing him and he was kissing her. Tongue curled
against tongue. The salt of her in his mouth. A hunger. A need. His
hand between her muscular thighs. His cock in her hand. A pulse.
A current that made him want to touch, to kiss, every part of her.
Warmth and softness at his fingertips. Burning in her hand. An intake
of breath. A little sighing cry. He turned and turned until he was
above her, his forearms brushing her shoulders. Moaned as he slid
into her and kept kissing her. Dissolving his poisoned thoughts. Not
thinking at all. Becoming someone else.

She felt so good that he had to stop for a moment. Locked his
elbows to hold himself up over her, looked into her eyes, her hands
on his chest.

"I love your neck," he said, and kissed it. "And your eyes." Kissed
her eyelids. He could see her better now, light colonizing shadows.

She wasn't smiling back. Wasn't responding.

"John," she said, looking worried. "John, you're crying blood."

She wiped a too-dark tear away with her finger.

"Am I?" he said, trying to smile, and came with a long shuddering
groan before the thought could hit him.

Occupational hazard.

Later. Lying in bed together. Feral pushing his head against a bedpost,
already wanting breakfast. The blood tears had stopped almost as
soon as they'd started. Remembered Wyte had told him it could be
an after-effect of eating memory bulbs. It hadn't hurt. It had just
surprised him. He'd daubed his eyes clean with a bathroom towel.
Had stared for a moment at the worn face of the stranger trapped in
the cracked mirror.