Arcane II (9 page)

He began instructing people to lean their heads in to see the skeletal remains of the last tenant and then towards the mound of gray flesh in the other corner.

When he shut the door the people squealed for more, asked him question after question. “What is it? Where did it come from? Can it get out of there? What do you think it wants? This is fake, right? No way that was real.”

Roy answered all that he could before sending the people down the stairs and inviting the next group up to see for themselves. By the end of the first month he started getting upwards to thirty people showing up on Fridays and Saturdays to take a peak, almost all teenagers, many returning for a second view. The thing only replicated their face the first time, however, much to their disappointment.

Every so often someone would try to make a break for the room, hurry past the door before Roy could notice, but he always managed to get his fingers around their collar and throw them back out. “I’m not allowing a death on my watch,” he told them.

It didn’t take long before he began making more in a week off the apartment than he would have if he’d been renting out the place like normal. The word spread quickly, but only to those willing to fork over cash for a quick thrill. Roy never saw any higher authority bother to set foot on his complex, and he didn’t bother contacting any, not wanting to risk them trying to take it away from him. Who cares what it could do for science or humanity? he often thought to himself. He’d made the discovery, and he would be damned if they tried to ruin it for him.

***

Roy awoke at two in the morning, gasping for air, fingers groping at his neck in a poor attempt to dispel whatever choked him. He threw off the thin sheets and stumbled through discarded clothes and beer cans into the bathroom.

The bright light blinded him, hands groping for the sink rather than the toilet, thick sludge pouring from his mouth, down his chin. He heaved into the sink, and while he didn’t feel anything come up, his throat partially cleared and Roy gasped for air. He stared at his own reflection, eyes bloodshot, face red, and a thin stream of gray liquid dribbling down his chin.

He spit out a wad of it in the sink, felt his body numb at the sight. His eyes turned towards the open door and the apartment complex beyond it. He could still feel the sludge in his throat, threatening to come out again.

He pulled on a pair of pants and an over-shirt on his way out the front door, running barefoot across the parking lot towards the steps leading to C3, entire body bloating out more with each step. As he reached the top and fumbled with the key he had to pause, aware of a murmuring in the air, like static with a voice somewhere in the middle of it.

The door pushed open to show him the creature standing in the middle of the room in the darkness, its empty face aimed towards him, and though he couldn’t know it, he felt it somehow smiled at him.

“You did this,” Roy said, voice strained and watery. He coughed up another wad of thick, gray sludge.

“I wanted to thank you,” it said to him, voice streaming into Roy’s head, clear amidst the normal buzzing.

“You can talk?” Roy said.

“I could always talk. You just couldn’t understand me.”

It walked right up to the threshold but didn’t pass. “How did you do this to me? You’re trapped in there.”

The thing pointed towards the kitchen and the hardened mound of gray substance, then pointed towards the skeleton in the corner. “He summoned that one, thinking it could help him, but all it did was infect him. He killed it before it could do more, but the infection spread until it was too late. He managed to trap me in here before I emerged.”

“Emerged?” Roy asked, taking a step back, throat clogging more with each second.

“I was the infection,” it said.

From within the apartment behind him Roy heard a woman coughing, hacking loudly, and turned towards the door of the second individual to witness this creature. “The face,” Roy whispered, every second making his body worse, dropping him to his knees.

“When I mark them, the infection sets in—all of my future children free from this confinement, free to infect as many others as they can. Without the right tools we aren’t an easy infection to kill off.”

Roy fell forward; hands pressed against the wood, unable to breathe anymore, gray sludge pouring from his mouth, dripping from his ears, running like liquid from his eyes. He felt himself bulging from within, stomach tearing open. He saw the splits running up his arms, only the barest mark of red visible before the gray seeped out.

“I thank you,” the creature said. “After being confined here for as many months as I was I had given up hope. I can never thank you enough for all the wonderful hosts you brought me.”

Glad I could help, some part of Roy thought, snorted, a short, fierce laugh shaking his frame in those final seconds when his body tore apart, and he was privileged to the brief glimpse of the thing he’d given birth to standing upright in front of him. He stared into the void of its face, and the emptiness sucked him into its darkness.

Hurricane Drunk

Harry Markov

Tatyana’s first memory of Grandfather Grigory was when she was eight years old. The night she met Grandfather Grigory was also the night her heart learned to secrete hatred so fine that it pumped poison into her veins.

Tatyana heard the front door open. Then there were creaks and hissing scratches from the small room only Grandmother was allowed in, but instead of the huffs and puffs that Tatyana had grown up with, she heard laughter and hushed mirthful words. The door to Tatyana’s room opened as Grandmother and someone else entered.

“Tatyana, this is your grandfather, Grigory,” Grandmother said, but Tatyana did not want to believe her. She did not want a grandfather.

Grandmother’s words sounded wrong, exhaled, croaked out, grated as a saw’s blade on wood, but were sickly sweet and overripe with joy. Could she be a woman dressed like Grandmother? Tatyana wanted to believe that.

But the woman with the man was her grandmother. She carried her broom, dripping rain from its twigs. She wore her dark skirts, which passed through raindrops and never wrinkled. She walked in her red leather slippers, the ones—Grandmother had told her—that the house and the hurricane listened to.

Tatyana didn’t like it, but how could it be anything but the truth? That man, Grigory, was her grandfather, which she never knew she had.

Tatyana knew what a man was. She had seen pictures in the books, which the hut laid every day on her pillows, but the pictures now paled compared to seeing a man in the flesh. The pictures were only outlines of something so complex. He was old, a man made of bark that creaked even when he wasn’t moving.

“Don’t be shy, my dear,” Grandmother said and laughed and said through thick syrupy laughter, the words mirth themselves.

Grandmother kissed Grandfather Grigory, and Tatyana did not feel well when Grandmother’s thick lips sank in the quicksand of wrinkles that were Grandfather Grigory’s cheeks.

At that point Tatyana forgot everything: her belly that ballooned as if stolen from the throat of a frog, the fireplace that was an iron mouth with iron teeth, the tongues of light that licked the pages of her book, the words that spasmed when the light hit around the illustrations of snakes, snakes Tatyana loved to watch and run her fingers on.

All that seemed covered in dust in her mind, like the times she’d forgotten to wipe down the pantry. Even the hurricane that closed the house in the armpits of its winds, now hissing lightning and spitting rain, was beyond her attention.

There was only this crickity-crackity wooden doll of a man with sand as skin that moved around, pulled left and then right as if beneath its surface squirrels skittered, not that Tatyana had ever seen squirrels, for she had seen almost nothing outside Grandmother’s hut. He smelled of the sea, his clothes dripped water that was not of the sky.

His eyes, she could not see. But the smile... She remembered, for it was the twin to that of Grandmother’s, stretched over her cinnamon face.

“Don’t be rude, child. Stop staring,” Grandmother said through her smile without moving her lips, as if Grandmother were not there, in her body. “Look, your Grandfather has brought us eels for dinner.”

It was only then that Tatyana could see past Grandfather Grigory’s smile to his left hand, which held a bundle of long animals that looked like snakes, but had no scales. They were dark as if they were ribbons of the night, smelled like the sea, and they were covered in grease. Tatyana wanted to play with them. She loved snakes, even though these were not. Tatyana had only the house, the hurricane and Grandmother to play with, so she felt sad that she had to eat the eels.

“Silly girl,” Grandmother said and put a frown over her smile, the former never maturing, the latter never melting away. “Get these in the kitchen and get your grandfather a cup of my brew. Can’t you see he’s not well?” All the while she sounded happy.

Tatyana closed the book. The pages huffed in disappointment, or maybe that was Tatyana who wanted to stay a bit longer.

“Finish yours first, or else you won’t sleep,” Grandmother said and patted her shoulder the same way she fluffed her favorite pillows.

The bracelets chirped a metallic song as Grandmother brought the half-empty cup to Tatyana’s lips. Tatyana opened her mouth and gulped it all in one breath. The brew was so thick and warm that it made her sleepy immediately, even though she tasted salt on her lips and bitterness between her teeth.

Of course Grandfather Grigory would feel sick. He had drunk no brew to begin with. It was more than important to have three cups a day to be able to stay inside the house, which always shook and spun in the hurricane’s arms. While Grandmother and the house had agreed that no furniture should dance to the hurricane’s spins and twirls, the people inside felt the spinning. This was why Grandfather Grigory’s arms and legs crittered on the chair like wild beasts.

Tatyana took the eels from Grandfather Grigory’s hand, which reminded her of raw wood, and hopped to the kitchen, where she flopped the eels with a loud, greasy slap on the table and picked a cup for her grandfather. It was old and wooden, the surface slippery from the moisture of all the drinks it had been filled with. She filled the cup with the brew, turning the ladle like Grandmother did, three times clock-wise and then three times backwards.

Back at the fire place, Grandmother danced for Grandfather Grigory. She danced like the spider danced on its web, like the shadows did on the wall in front of the fireplace, like the bits and pieces in the cauldron did when Grandmother made borsch, like her crow did when Grandmother let it fly inside the house.

“Good girl, Tatyana,” Grandmother said and took the cup. Grandmother looked like a crow. A cinnamon hand with skin polished to a metal sheen extended from the darkness that was her skirts and her sleeves.

“Now, go to bed.”

It was an order and Tatyana had to obey.

She closed the door and the wood laughed with the voices of her grandparents. The stairs tried to laugh with small, sharp creeks to cheer Tatyana, for she felt as if she was locked in the pantry with no candle light. Isolated and abandoned.

Grandfather Grigory changed everything. Grandmother had never sent her to bed so early. She did not dance and she did not laugh. At least not with her. For that, she did not like Grandfather Grigory. She decided that she would never like him at all.

In her room, the house had left a new book. It was thick and old, the size of a brick from the fireplace, wearing a skin of dust. She opened the pages, but there were no pictures. Grigory had changed everything indeed. Tatyana huffed, not sure whether she would like it here anymore.

Now she only had the hurricane.

Tatyana sat on the bed and tapped on the window three times, just like Grandmother did on everything so that things would go her way. The glass shivered in what Tatyana could understand was a scold.

The hurricane never stopped. Now it spun darkness and clouds like threads on a spindle, black as the night, and silver as the lightning that criss-crossed the sky. She waited, not sure what she wanted to happen. No, she knew she was bored and restless. She wanted something to play with. Something new, something secret. Something that even Grandmother, the witch in the hut with four chicken legs that was the heart of the hurricane, did not know.

Then the secret happened. The glass tapped three times at her again. It could not have been normal. Hurricanes didn’t tap on windows. No, they could tap, but Tatyana knew that never did unless it was for someone special. What else could it be? So Tatyana slept with a smile on her face that night.

In the morning, Tatyana was happier. Grandfather Grigory had gone and Grandmother was bent over her cauldron, making borsch of eels, red meat and shriveled pig skins that smelled like the sea to Tatyana.

***

In the years that followed, Tatyana met Grandfather Grigory over and over again. And every time he was different. Every visit a new test to her patience, a new hour stolen of Grandmother’s attention, a new challenge to hold her breath and appear as the good girl Grandmother loved, but no matter how quiet Tatyana was, Grandmother loved Grandfather Grigory more.

Tatyana met a Grandfather Grigory who was so small that the chair seemed to wear him as a brooch. She met a Grandfather Grigory who was as big as an ox, a Grandfather Grigory who was as slim as a willow. One Grandfather Grigory had hair red as fire. Another had skin as black as iron. One with eyes as blue as the dye on her favorite dress. Another with thick black hair on his face, but with not a single hair on his head. There was a Grandfather Grigory with rings. One who would dance with her and Grandmother. One whose laughter was the grit of two stones grinding.

Tatyana dreaded when her grandmother would go out with her broom, come back and greet her with, “Tatyana, this is your grandfather, Grigory.” Tatyana felt as if she had swallowed river pebbles, which glid inside her innards. Each night would be the same. Tatyana would bring Grandfather Grigory a cup of Grandmother’s brew and then be sent to her bed, up the same stairs which exhaled the same creaks. She hated that she remained the same.