The Best of Galaxy’s Edge 2013-2014 (4 page)

But I had to do the goddamn duck tape.

I turned away just as the tips of Sven’s Nike Air Jordans disappeared down the Wendy’s throat.

One strip, covering the space between the door and the carpet. A strip above it, a strip below it, sealing and securing.

* * *

Poor Sven. He’d had to play out that
other
story that the outside world didn’t realize was based on Roanoke Society activities.

The Stranger in the Bar story.

You know the one: it’s become such a stale old wheezer that it can’t be published in magazines anymore, only broadcast. It goes like this:

Niles Cadbury hoisted his Tom Collins as he scanned the crowd. Some beautiful women were here tonight. Niles loved beauty. He took beauty. Even if it didn’t want to be taken.

At the end of the bar was a good-looking blonde who was getting very unsteady and was laughing way too loud. If he could just separate her from her friends and get her into a cab, he could do what he wanted. And Niles Cadbury liked to play rough.

“Hey stranger, buy me a drink?”

Niles looked over in surprise. How had this sexy redhead come to sit down beside him without him seeing her? Her swept-up hair was even redder than her lipstick.

Almost the color of blood.

(They get back to some hotel room, where inevitably, the misogynist gets his comeuppance.)

He sat back on the bed, watching as she shrugged off her dress. It hit the floor, and she kicked it aside.

“Tell me what you want,” she breathed, as she stepped out of her high heels.

Niles Cadbury didn’t like to put on the romantic crap any longer than he had to. He would tell her, in the crudest terms, what he wanted. If she didn’t do it, he would grab her and beat her until she did.

He was an expert at it.

“I want you to suck me dry,” he growled.

Her smile widened into a strangely oversized grin. With a shock, he saw that two of her teeth ended in long, sharp points.

And her eyes … Her eyes were red, glowing coals!

“Gladly
!
” she snarled. She jumped on him before he could scream.

The Wendys were the basis for the mythical vampires, of course.

* * *

Our screams would lead to no assistance. This was the
Fleabag du Fleabag
. No one cared. Loud rap blared from a room down the hall; there were shouts of argument from the floor above, unrelated to us.

The Wendy’s mouth was as wide as an
HDTV
now. It was barely keeping its human form. It chewed Jamal
and
Dana at once. Half a dozen knives and hatchets stuck out of her, but she still kept going. If we’d been able to surprise her and bag her head before she opened her mouth, none of this would have happened. It’s almost like they’ve got to get a running jump to leave their human form.

Three of my friends had disappeared inside its mouth, and it was still hungry. But the blows they’d struck were beginning to have their effect. From the knife sticking out of its back, a white mist began to waft. From the hatchet handle poking out from under an armpit, another little tendril of mist.

Three members in good standing of the Roanoke Society, local chapter 8601, were dead and consumed. The Wendy grabbed Manny, our old hand who’d been doing this since the 1970s. With a roar, it lifted him up and scooped its lower jaw (which was stretched like a pelican’s lower beak by now) and tossed him in. John “Lumberjack” Tolliver, who stood 6'6", swung a machete low to the ground, biting into its knee. But that barely fazed it.

I unrolled the duck tape and extended it in front of me.

The machete had done less than one of the daggers had, don’t ask me why. We can never tell.

* * *

Some wendigos seem to fear the crucifix, and will stop resisting entirely; we don’t know if it’s because some of them have adopted cultural taboos, or if we’re dealing with different subspecies.

Some of the creatures are easily bound up in rope, while others simply break it into shreds.

Chains were tried in the early 20th century, and always ended up being used against the Roanokans; somehow, the Wendys could heat the links and burn the hands of the people trying to wrap them up.

Guns never did any good, because the fast projectiles did little but perforate them, and in closed spaces we could shoot each other by accident.

Any sharp object did some good, because it started them bleeding out their mist. Some mythical vampires (depending on the author) are able to turn themselves into mist; that was surely based on wendigos bleeding out that white vapor; but it’s not some shape-shifting thing—it’s their death throes. If they’re able to drift out of the room, they can
sometimes
re-coalesce and survive to prey another day; hence, we have to seal the room fairly tight, always.
We have to lock the room
. Their body evaporates into mist, the mist becomes just water stains on the walls, and the bitch is dead.

It’s slow though, damn it.

I jumped at the Wendy just as it had pushed Manny’s Doc Martens down its hellish gullet. The gray tape stuck in a diagonal slash across its face (it looked like a Silly Putty-stretched comic strip had come to life—not a trace of its human guise as a beautiful woman remained) but I dropped the roll and it simply hung on the other side of “her.”

Thank God for Jane. She’s a jogger and a health nut, and at most of our chapter meetings she can be depended upon to rant about overweight America and diabetes and government-subsidized corn syrup—you almost want her to choke on her carob and soy-substitute milkshakes. But she’s in great shape. In a blur of motion, she wrapped it around the creature’s head three times.

Fitting that a weight-loss scold would bind up a wendigo’s mouth. No more meals for you, Wendy.

We bagged its head, wrestled it down to the floor, and sat on it; soon its life would bleed out. It took a while. We’d made a ruckus, but no one called the cops in this neighborhood. As the three of us survivors sat quietly, waiting for the wendigo to evaporate into dead mist, a shouting match (in Spanish) broke out between a male and female voice.

We would sneak out of here soon, and go back to our normal lives. The management would find a trashed hotel room, but no bodies.

Finally, the Wendy was gone. A few scraps of clothes, bunched up duck tape, and an empty burlap sack were all that remained of it—and our departed friends.

We cleaned up and left.

If it had happened differently, there would have been a locked-room mystery.

It could have gone like this: If everyone was eaten except me, and I succeeded in killing the Wendy, and died of wounds after killing it, they would have found my single dead body, evidence of a struggle, but a room sealed from the inside, with no possibility of escape.

Every locked-room mystery that ever really happened, happened like that.

The stories had to make up some convoluted tale of icicle daggers and false compartments or hidden rooms and odorless poisons. They also had to provide characterization. Sorry I wasn’t able to give you a sense of mine. But goddamn it, if I twist my ankle stepping off a curb, I’ll have to limp into the office the next morning, because I’ve run out of sick days taking care of these creatures. For you. And if you don’t have enough of a sense of me as a heroic, sympathetic character, then fuck y’all. Will
you
volunteer to kill Wendy?

Published in Galaxy’s Edge Issue 5
Copyright
©
2013 by Eric Cline. All rights reserved.

E
ver since Mads carved me, he has spoken of the day when he will make me his. Today is no exception.

“Your skin will part like apple-flesh,” he tells me, “and the meat beneath is white. Did you know that, Pluto? That inside, you are as white as I?” His fingers trace the slope of my cheek up to my scalp and into the stalks of my hair. He tugs—I am sure he thinks he is being gentle, but Mads is never gentle—and it takes everything I have not to react.

Like most humans, Mads does not believe we can feel pain, and I have never set him straight. If he does not know that he can hurt me, he will not bother to try. So I keep my face blank as I polish his second-best pair of shoes and say only, “So you have told me, Gartner Poulson.” When he caresses me, I dare not use his given name.

“You’re a good neep,” he tells me.

But that is the problem—I am no longer a neep. I am nearly full-grown, and when I begin to flower I will be diced and shaved and julienned in the name of Mads Poulson’s hunger.

His hand, where it rests against my skin, is smooth and soft. Beneath a stranger’s touch, I would seem to be the rough one. But skin deceives.

* * *

It pleases Mads to think of me as a woman—though of course I am no such thing—because his hunger for me has the same shape as all other human hungers.

When the light finally begins to fade from the sky, I am permitted to sit behind the old house, on the weathered steps half worn-through with rot, and speak with Sissel Peals, so long as it does not disrupt her work. Sissel considers herself a
her
, most likely because she has seeded several neeps of her own.

“You’re not well,” says Sissel, laundering Mads’ shirts. Her hands are leathery and polyped from so much time spent in the water.

“Well enough,” I say. From the folds of my tunic, I withdraw my secret stash of cigarettes. I must be very careful where and when I smoke, in case Mads should smell it and catch me out, but he never intrudes on the laundry washing. It disgusts him to think that he needs washing-after. When Sissel sees the carton, her lips become pruney, but she does not scold.

“There is news in town today,” she says instead. “We have a visitor.”

“A visitor.” I light a match, one of only four I have left, just as dangerous and just as secret as the cigarettes themselves. “That does not pass for news.”

“Ah, but she is special.” Sissel wrings a shirt dry and hangs it on the line. “Her performances are spectacular. And she is very pretty; they all say so.”

Who cares about pretty women? I hope she starves to death. I hope they all starve to death, and then sink rot-deep within the soil, that we may feed on them.

I take a deep drag on the cigarette and hold the smoke within my fibers for as long as I can, so that the tar and nicotine have every opportunity to render me carcinogenic. So that when he cuts me open, Mads’ stomach will roil at what his knife reveals: my flesh, not opaline, but yellow-black.

“Tell Gartner Poulson,” Sissel insists. “Maybe he’ll bring you to town, to meet her, before she leaves.” She hangs the last shirt and shakes her hands dry.

“What fun that would be,” I tell her, in just the tone of voice that should make clear my feelings on the subject.

“Tuber of Many Roots,” Sissel mutters, “such a sour neep I never met. Gartner Poulson will make himself sick on you.”

Very good. Let him.

* * *

When the sky has lost its blueness and is freckled with silver stars, I rub out the last ashes of my secret cigarette and head back into the house.

As much as it would please me to snub Mads, I do not dare. I find him in in his study, writing a lengthy letter to the head office in Copenhagen, telling them that the salt mine is nearly used up. They will tell him the same thing that they always tell him—keep trying, send what you find, write again next month—and things will go on as they always have. The mine has always been falling apart, and the head office has always sent him dry form letters with no useful advice or meaningful dispatches.

“Good night, Mads,” I say, letting my fingertips trail across his shoulders. He likes being called Mads when he is working, because it makes him feel at home. I know all his likes and dislikes; after all, he carved me.

He nods, but does not look up at me, does not even pause in the writing of his letter. So I am left in peace to head to the root cellar.

Only twelve steps separate the cellar from the rest of the house, but they lead to another world. Even out in the open air, I am never really myself. My people, from neep to turnip, are a people made for dwelling underground.

I step past cook’s plot to mine. The field workers do not sleep inside, and cook both retires and rises earlier than I. My plot is against the wall, where I can hear the occasional blast of dynamite more clearly than the Gartner’s movements about the house. I take off my tunic and hang it on its nail, to keep it out of the soil. The Gartner, like all his people, believes that dirt is shameful. I hide my cigarettes and my matches behind a loose board; if they are tainted with insulation or asbestos, so much the better. At last, naked, I slip into my plot.

It is so peaceful underground. I stretch out all my fingers and toes into the soil—even though it is flavored with punctured veins of salt—and relax. I let the damp earth feed me. I try to remember what it was like, before Mads Poulson dragged me up into the air and carved me a face.

He didn’t create me, no matter what he likes to think. He only changed me, and that’s poor magic.

I am drifting, my thoughts freed from my body, when it strikes me: if people pay their money to see this actress, the woman Sissel spoke of, then she must indeed be beautiful. And if they think she is beautiful, maybe Mads will think she is beautiful. And if Mads thinks she is beautiful, maybe he will hunger for her and not for me.

And he will forget about me.

And I will escape.

And so, I must cause him to meet this woman. It must happen soon, before I begin to flower.

* * *

For the hot meal, cook serves Mads liver paste and smoked cod alongside two thick slices of rye bread and a pile of roast baby potatoes.

I sit at table with him, but only to watch. I do not eat the same way he does. Still, he prefers my company. He likes my eyes on him; he likes to see my expression when his white teeth cut into those golden baby tubers, their brown skin crackling. Their butter smell seeps into my leaves. I don’t mind the suffering of the cow, or even of the fish—but each time he spears a potato, I feel as though my own flesh is speared, as if my own fibers are being ground to pulp between his molars.

He swallows, and I see his Adam’s apple bob as the potato slides down his throat and is lost. “You are quiet today, Pluto.”

“Sissel says there is a woman in town.” The words bubble out of me like a spring flood. “Everybody is talking about her.”

Mads raises his eyebrows and takes a bite of liver paste on rye bread.

“She is an actress,” I tell him.

“In plays? Or pictures?”

“I do not know, Gartner,” I admit. “But they say she is very beautiful.”

“Beautiful,” he says. “Well.”

“I would very much like to see her,” I say.

The bread stops before it reaches his mouth, which hangs open, forgotten.

This is a bold thing to say; I have never said I would like anything before—we are not supposed to want things besides what they tell us to want, or what they shape us to want.

He will think that if I want to meet her, he must also want to meet her. Oh, there are so many truths that humans do not know about the things they make.

He returns the bread to his plate. “How long will she be here?”

I say, “Not very.”

“Well, if it will please you”—his eyes roam over my leafy head—“then we will go.” His meaning is clear: yes, we will go, because I might as well be happy in the time I have left. He is still the Gartner, and I the neep. To drive this home, he spears the largest potato and bites it in two.

I flinch away. He tells me that other roots, so long as they have not been carved, do not feel pain. But how would he know?

* * *

“How much longer will the actress be here?” I ask Sissel.

“Tomorrow is her last performance,” she says. “All the finest Gartners will turn out for it. You are interested in her now?”

I nod, flicking the ash away from the end of my cigarette. “Gartner Poulson has promised to take me. What kind of actress is she?”

Sissel flaps her hand before her face. “What a question, Pluto!” She tucks her apron across her grinning mouth, and the purple-red of her cheeks is just close enough to the color of a scandalized human’s that I cannot help but grin too. “She is, of course, a
lady
!” But after a moment her merriment fades, and she pats her apron back into place. “They say she is not like other women. They say her skin is as dark as soil beneath the earth.”

“Impossible,” I say. I puff. And I think of Mads telling me that my skin, in secret, is as white as his. “Have you ever seen a woman like that?”

Sissel frowns. “No—not a beautiful one. The Gartners do not care for soil.”

I do not want a woman whom the master will not find beautiful. That will do me no good at all. “Let’s hope it isn’t true, then,” I say. “I would not want to go into town only to find an ugly woman.”

“Nor would anyone,” Sissel agrees.

* * *

When Sissel is gone, and my second-from-final cigarette is burning low, I feel a tingle on my scalp so sharp that I reach for it before I even register what I’m doing. At first my fingers find only the ordinary wrinkles and the thick squarish stems of hair that I am accustomed to. But then, in between them, I feel a little knot, a tightly curled lump.

Ugh
, I think,
a beetle
. I tear it loose.

The pain is instant and excruciating. To keep from crying out, I must stuff my fist into my mouth and bite down, and for all that my teeth are no more than square crenelations, even that is painful.

The knot, no beetle but instead a tight-wound bulb of leafy green, glistens wetly in my hand. It shows no yellow yet, but I know what lies within. It is a flower. A turnip flower. Part of me.

I throw it with all the strength I can muster, and it arcs through the air and falls into an unremarkable patch of brittle, salinated grass.

When I bid Mads good-night, I pray that he does not notice the sappy fluid leaking from between my leaves. For once the Tuber of Many Roots answers my prayers, and I am permitted to retire to the cellar in peace.

* * *

Even a full night beneath the ground does not revive me, and when I rise from my plot groggy and tender, I feel a sour ache all through my body. I know what Sissel would say—that my attitude has seeped into my flesh—but Sissel is not the one who fears my death. She would hardly be put out if the Gartner found my unripe bud abandoned in the withered grass, but I …

Mads finds me mending the lining of his best jacket; not his second best, the blue one which he wears to church, but the black one that he prefers for business.

“You want to see me looking fine?” he asks, following the curve of my broad leaves with his fat maggot fingers.

“If the actress is so fine to look at,” I say, “won’t you want to look even finer?”

He pats my shoulder. “Pluto, you clever girl. You know me better than I know myself.”

I, of course, will wear my tunic. It is the only article of clothing that I own.

* * *

All day, Mads laughs at my preparations—but all that means to me is that my Gartner is in a good mood, and that when the time comes for me to button him into his jacket, he lets me do so with hardly a word of protest.

“You look so handsome,” I tell him. He checks his reflection in the hall mirror to make sure that I am right.

The only thing Mads must do for himself is hitch the horse to the open buggy. We could perhaps be trusted with a horse, but horses cannot be trusted with us; it is as though they do not believe we are alive, and many turnips have been killed by horses, who bite at us indiscriminately, or tear into our greens and cause us to die of shock.