The Best of Lucius Shepard (42 page)

Her
head flung back, she lifted and lowered herself. The leaves and stalks churned
and intertwined around us as if they, too, were copulating. For a few moments
my hunger was assuaged, but soon I noticed that the harder I thrust, the more
fiercely she plunged, the less intense the sensations became. Though she
gripped me tightly, the friction seemed to have been reduced. Frustrated, I dug
my fingers into her plump hips and battered at her, trying to drive myself
deeper. Then I squeezed one of her breasts and felt a searing pain to my palm.
I snatched back my hand and saw that her nipple, both nipples, were twisting,
elongating; I realized that they had been transformed into the heads of two
black centipedes, and the artful movements of her internal muscles...they were
too artful, too disconnectedly in motion. An instant later I felt that same
searing pain in my cock and knew I was screwing myself into a nest of creatures
like those protruding from her breasts. All her skin was rippling, reflecting
the humping of thousands of centipedes beneath.

The
pain was enormous, so much so that I thought my entire body must be glowing
with it. But I did not dare fail this test, and I continued pumping into her,
thrusting harder than ever. The leaves thrashed, the stalks thrashed as in a
gale, and the green light grew livid. Tuyet began to scream—God knows what
manner of pain I was causing her—and her screams completed a perverse circuit
within me. I found I could channel my own pain into those shrill sounds. Still
joined to her, I rolled atop her, clamped her wrists together, and pinned them
above her head. Her screams rang louder, inspiring me to greater efforts yet.
Despite the centipedes tipping her breasts, or perhaps because of them, because
of the grotesque juxtaposition of the sensual and the horrid, her beauty seemed
to have been enhanced, and my mastery over her actually provided me a modicum
of pleasure.

The
light began to whiten, and looking off, I saw that we were being borne by an
invisible current through—as I had imagined—an infinite depth of stalks and
leaves. The stalks that lashed around us thickened far below into huge pale
trunks with circular ribbing. I could not make out where they met the earth—if,
indeed, they did—and they appeared to rise an equal height above. The light
brightened further, casting the distant stalks in silhouette, and I realized we
were drifting toward the source of the whiteness, beyond which would lie
another test, another confrontation. I glanced at Tuyet. Her skin no longer
displayed that obscene rippling, her nipples had reverted to normal. Pain was
evolving into pleasure, but I knew it would be shortlived, and I tried to
resist the current, to hold on to pain, because even pain was preferable to the
hunger I would soon experience. Tuyet clawed my back, and I felt the first
dissolute rush of my orgasm. The current was irresistible. It flowed through my
blood, my cells. It was part of me, or rather I was part of it. I let it move
me, bringing me to completion.

Gradually
the whipping of the stalks subsided to a pliant swaying motion. They parted for
us, and we drifted through their interstices as serenely as a barge carved to
resemble a coupling of two naked figures. I found I could not disengage from
Tuyet, that the current enforced our union, and resigned to this, I gazed
around, marveling at the vastness of this vegetable labyrinth and the
strangeness of our fates. Beams of white light shined through the stalks, the
brightness growing so profound that I thought I heard in it a roaring; and as
my consciousness frayed, I saw myself reflected in Tuyet’s eyes—a ragged dark
creature wholly unlike my own self-image—and wondered for the thousandth time
who had placed us in this world, who had placed these worlds in us.

*
* * *

Other dreams followed, but they
were ordinary, the dreams of an ordinarily anxious, ordinarily drunken man, and
it was the memory of this first dream that dominated my waking moments. I
didn’t want to wake because—along with a headache and other symptoms of
hangover—I felt incredibly weak, incapable of standing and facing the world.
Muzzy-headed, I ignored the reddish light prying under my eyelids and tried to
remember more of the dream. Despite Stoner’s attempts to appear streetwise,
despite the changes I had observed in him, he had been at heart an innocent and
it was difficult to accept that the oddly formal, brutally sexual protagonist
of the dream had been in any way akin to him. Maybe, I thought, recalling Tuu’s
theory of ghosts, maybe that was the quality that had died in Stoner: his
innocence. I began once again to suffer guilt feelings over my hatred of him,
and, preferring a hangover to that, I propped myself on one elbow and opened my
eyes.

I
doubt more than a second or two passed before I sprang to my feet, hangover
forgotten, electrified with fear; but in that brief span the reason for my
weakness was made plain. Stoner was sitting close to where I had been lying,
his hand outstretched to touch me, head down...exactly as he had sat the
previous day. Aside from his pose, however, very little about him was the same.

The
scene was of such complexity that now, thinking back on it, it strikes me as
implausible that I could have noticed its every detail; yet I suppose that its
power was equal to its complexity and thus I did not so much see it as it was
imprinted on my eyes. Dawn was a crimson smear fanning across the lower sky,
and the palms stood out blackly against it, their fronds twitching in the
breeze like spiders impaled on pins. The ruddy light gave the rutted dirt of
the street the look of a trough full of congealed blood. Stoner was
motionless—that is to say, he didn’t move his limbs, his head, or shift his
position; but his image was pulsing, swelling to half again its normal size and
then deflating, all with the rhythm of steady breathing. As he expanded, the
cold white fire blazing from his eyes would spread in cracks that veined his
entire form; as he contracted, the cracks would disappear and for a moment he
would be—except for his eyes—the familiar figure I had known. It seemed that
his outward appearance—his fatigues and helmet, his skin—was a shell from which
some glowing inner man was attempting to break free. Grains of dust were
whirling up from the ground beside him, more and more all the time: a miniature
cyclone wherein he sat calm and ultimately distracted, the likeness of a
warrior monk whose meditations had borne fruit.

Shouts
behind me. I turned and saw Fierman, Tuu, Witcover, and various of the gooks
standing at the edge of the village. Tuu beckoned to me, and I wanted to
comply, to run, but I wasn’t sure I had the strength. And, too, I didn’t think
Stoner would let me. His power surged around me, a cold windy voltage that
whipped my clothes and set static charges crackling in my hair. “Turn it off!”
I shouted, pointing at the tin-roofed building. They shook their heads,
shouting in return, “...can’t,” I heard, and something about “...feedback.”

Then
Stoner spoke. “Puleo,” he said. His voice wasn’t loud, but it was
all-encompassing. I seemed to be inside it, balanced on a tongue of red dirt,
within a throat of sky and jungle and yellow stone. I turned back to him.
Looked into his eyes...fell into them, into a world of cold brilliance where a
thousand fiery forms were materialized and dispersed every second, forms both
of such beauty and hideousness that their effect on me, their beholder, was
identical, a confusion of terror and exaltation. Whatever they were, the forms
of Stoner’s spirit, his potentials, or even of his thoughts, they were in their
momentary life more vital and consequential than I could ever hope to be.
Compelled by them, I walked over to him. I must have been afraid—I could feel
wetness on my thighs and realized that my bladder had emptied—but he so
dominated me that I knew only the need to obey. He did not stand, yet with each
expansion his image would loom up before my eyes and I would stare into that
dead face seamed by rivulets of molten diamond, its expression losing
coherence, features splitting apart. Then he would shrink, leaving me gazing
dumbly down at the top of his helmet. Dust stung my eyelids, my cheeks.

“What—”
I began, intending to ask what he wanted; but before I could finish, he seized
my wrist. Ice flowed up my arm, shocking my heart, and I heard myself...not
screaming. No, this was the sound life makes leaving the body, like the
squealing of gas released from a balloon that’s half pinched shut.

Within
seconds, drained of strength, I slumped to the ground, my vision reduced to a
darkening fog. If he had maintained his hold much longer, I’m sure I would have
died...and I was resigned to the idea. I had no weapon with which to fight him.
But then I realized that the cold had receded from my limbs. Dazed, I looked
around, and when I spotted him, I tried to stand, to run. Neither my arms nor
legs would support me, and—desperate—I flopped on the red dirt, trying to crawl
to safety; but after that initial burst of panic, the gland that governed my
reactions must have overloaded, because I stopped crawling, rolled onto my back
and stayed put, feeling stunned, weak, transfixed by what I saw. Yet not in the
least afraid.

Stoner’s
inner man, now twice human-size, had broken free and was standing at the center
of the village, some twenty feet off a bipedal silhouette through which it
seemed you could look forever into a dimension of fire and crystal, like a hole
burned in the fabric of the world. His movements were slow, tentative, as if he
hadn’t quite adapted to his new form, and penetrating him, arcing through the
air from the tin-roofed building, their substance flowing toward him, were what
appeared to be thousands of translucent wires, the structures of the fields. As
I watched, they began to glow with Stoner’s blue-white-diamond color, their
substance to reverse its flow and pour back toward the building, and to emit a
bass hum. Dents popped in the tin roof, the walls bulged inward, and with a
grinding noise, a narrow fissure forked open in the earth beside it. The
glowing wires grew brighter and brighter, and the building started to crumple,
never collapsing, but—as if giant hands were pushing at it from every
direction—compacting with terrible slowness until it had been squashed to
perhaps a quarter of its original height. The hum died away. A fire broke out
in the wreckage, pale flames leaping high and winnowing into black smoke.

Somebody
clutched my shoulder, hands hauled me to my feet. It was Tuu and one of his
soldiers. Their faces were knitted by lines of concern, and that concern
rekindled my fear. I clawed at them, full of gratitude, and let them hustle me
away. We took our places among the other observers, the smoking building at our
backs, all gazing at the yellow houses and the burning giant in their midst.

The
air around Stoner had become murky, turbulent, and this turbulence spread to
obscure the center of the village. He stood unmoving, while small dust devils
kicked up at his heels and went zipping about like a god’s zany pets. One of
the houses caved in with a
whump,
and pieces of yellow concrete began to
lift from the ruins, to float toward Stoner; drawing near him, they acquired
some of his brightness, glowing in their own right, and then vanished into the
turbulence. Another house imploded, and the same process was initiated. The
fact that all this was happening in dead silence—except for the caving in of
the houses—made it seem even more eerie and menacing than if there had been
sound.

The
turbulence eddied faster and faster, thickening, and at last a strange vista
faded in from the dark air, taking its place the way the picture melts up from
the screen of an old television set. Four or five minutes must have passed
before it became completely clear, and then it seemed sharper and more in focus
than did the jungle and the houses, more even than the blazing figure who had
summoned it: an acre-sized patch of hell or heaven or something in between,
shining through the dilapidated structures and shabby colors of the ordinary,
paling them. Beyond Stoner lay a vast forested plain dotted with fires...or
maybe they weren’t fires but some less chaotic form of energy, for though they
gave off smoke, the flames maintained rigorous stylized shapes, showing like
red fountains and poinsettias and other shapes yet against the poisonous green
of the trees. Smoke hung like a gray pall over the plain and now and again
beams of radiance—all so complexly figured, they appeared to be pillars of
crystal—would shoot up from the forest into the grayness and resolve into a
burst of light; and at the far limit of the plain, beyond a string of ragged
hills, the dark sky would intermittently flash reddish orange as if great
batteries of artillery were homing in upon some target there.

I
had thought that Stoner would set forth at once into this other world, but
instead he backed a step away and I felt despair for him, fear that he wouldn’t
seize his opportunity to escape. It may seem odd that I still thought of him as
Stoner, and it may be that prior to that moment I had forgotten his human past;
but now, sensing his trepidation, I understood that what enlivened this awesome
figure was some scrap of soul belonging to the man-child I once had known.
Silently, I urged him on. Yet he continued to hesitate.