Borderlands 5 (36 page)

Edward opened his eyes and the bottle continued to float in his vision for a few seconds before dissipating, droplets splashing across his ceiling, dripping onto his bed.

Like shadows.

“A
w, Grampa!” the boy wailed, “ya can’t stop there!”

The bottle between the boy and his grandfather shimmered in the flickering shadows thrown by the fireplace behind the old man. The boy slammed his little fist on the oak table in frustration. “Come on! Tell the rest! No fair!”

Grampa chuckled, jowls jiggling, bright red cheeks plumping with the motion, like a butterball onThanksgiving Day. “No more, my boy. You’re getting scared, and besides, it’s bedtime for wee little chumblies like you.”

Chumbly.

That’s what Gramps always called little Eddie. The old man had made up the story many years ago about a bear that wore fuzzy pants and had a wobbly oven and a farting toaster. Pretty bizarre, Eddie thought. He didn’t much care for the story of Chumbly Bear, but he liked the name for some reason. It had a nice ring when Grandpa said it.

“But you stopped at the best
paaart!”
Eddie whined, stretching out the last word like toffee.

Grampa chuckled again, shaking the table ever-so-slightly with his big belly as it rubbed up against the old oak. “There
is
no best part of a Chumbly story, Eddie.” He leaned forward slowly, chair creaking beneath his weight, eyes dancing. “It’s
all
the best part.”

Something in the wine bottle moved.

Eyes flying wide open, an electric bolt shot up Eddie’s spine. “What was
that!?”
The boy jumped out of his chair and stood behind it, staring, jaw agape, at the bottle.

Grampa sat back in his chair, and looked at the bottle. His eyes glazed over a little, scaring young Eddie. “Gramps? Gramps, are you okay?”

Grampa snapped out of it, his eyes lighting on Eddies’, dancing again. “Yes, boy, yes, just fine, just … fine,” he said, studying the bottle as though it were some curiosity he’d found at an antique shop. “It’s just that …” He trailed off again, this time grinning a little as if remembering the punch line of a favourite joke. Eddie came around the chair and sat back down, slowly, never taking his eyes off the bottle. “What, Grampa? What is it? What’s …” He raised an arm and pointed at the bottle. “… inside?”

Grampa’s grin widened. He cleared his throat. “Why, it’s the bear, son.”

A chill crept up Eddie’s spine. He mouthed the words along with Grampa as he spoke them:

“Chumbly Bear,” Gramps said, the smile failing to touch his eyes now, a haunted look replacing it as he remembered the events of over forty years past. “But I thought he was long gone, the old bugger.” He tried to laugh a little then, but the sound caught in his throat.

Eddie frowned. “But Chumbly’s just a dumb old story bear. How can …
that
be him?”

The thing in the bottle spun around slowly at the boy’s words, the glint from the firelight dancing into the crimson waves, washing vague drafts of fear through the boy, stabs of memory through the old man. The indiscernible shape bobbed in sync with the rise and fall of the tips of the flames from the fire hypnotically, mesmerizing.

“Don’t know, Eddie,” Gramps whispered, barely opening his mouth. “I hoped by telling stories about him, it’d keep him away for good.”

Gramps fell back into silence.

Eddie wanted to ask Gramps what he was talking about. When had he seen the bear before? It didn’t even
look
like a bear, so how did he know it was Chumbly? Why did he not want the bear to come back? What had happened?

The thing inside the bottle spun around a few more times, then disappeared in a glint of firelight and a ripple of wine.

E
dward brushed his teeth in the bathroom mirror and thought about his dream.

You can’t kill me, ’cause I’m already inside you.

Memories of Gramps and his childhood, listening to the old man tell his Chumbly Bear stories by the fireplace, flitted through his mind like a broken, too-bright strobe light, the images uneven, unnatural.

Wine and shadows,
he thought.
Something dancing in the bottle. Something I can’t kill. But I do not want to kill it. I don’t know how I know that, but I do.

Slipknot hunkered down in Edward’s mind and listened. Just … listened. Being the bear had been fun, sure. But being Slipknot was
oh
so much better. In every way. It did not want to lose that. Not now. Not after all this time.

Edward leaned over, spit into the sink, rinsed, stood back up … and caught a flicker in the upper right-hand corner of the mirror. Something black. Churning. Twisting.
Mulching.

Dancing.

Slipknot could not resist a titter.

More memories surfaced—these ones like old, forgotten pictures in a photo album, like the dregs of a long-cold cup of coffee sliding down the throat.

Edward grimaced.

Gramps had shot himself in the face with a double-barrelled shotgun two months after that last Chumbly story when he’d been scared by the return of the bear … or whatever the hell it was … moving around in the wine bottle. Both parents gone before he was old enough to walk—father killed in a car accident, mother run off with another man—he’d been given over to his grandfather, so little Eddie had been the one to find poor Gramps, brains smeared all over the fireplace and oak table, blood splashes streaking across the wine bottle and ceiling, dripping. Dripping like the shadows sometimes dripped in his dreams.

A voice from the bottle, a swirling in the boy’s ears, weaving a tapestry of shadows across thought, whispered gently in his ear as he gazed down at Gramps’ cooling corpse:
You can’t kill me …

Edward had screamed then, and run out of the house shouting for help.

But that was over twenty years ago.

The flickering thing in the high corner of the mirror spread itself out and pulsed in time with Edward’s heartbeat. Edward stared, transfixed. The toothbrush dropped from his limp fingers. Then he heard the voice again, this time so close to his ear he imagined he could feel the slight rush of air as the sentence formed, each word like a crumbling tombstone half-in, half-out of the shadow of a tree, caught between this world and the next:
I’m inside you.

Then the walls dissolved in Edward’s vision, and he was no longer in his bathroom …

“Shoot the boy,” the man said.

Philip Curtis flinched. “I can’t, Smithy, he’s my only son.” The gun wavered, came down by the man’s side. “How do you expect me to—”

“Shoot him or I’ll shoot you both.” Cold fact. “But Smithy, there’s gotta be—”

“No, there ain’t nothin’ else you can do,” Smithy interrupted, raising both arms, gun in each hand, and pointed them at Philip and his son. “You got yourself into this, now you gotta do what you can to get out. And if you’re thinkin’ you can squeeze off a shot in my direction before I kill you both … well, if I was you, I’d stop thinkin’ like that, Phil. It ain’t gonna happen. You know it ain’t. Now FUCKING shoot him. I’m countin’ to five.

“One.”

Sweat popped out on Philip’s forehead. His son, James Curtis—just married, new father—shook his head back and forth, eyes glued to the guns in Smithy’s hands, one part of him praying Smithy would pull the triggers and just end it all, the other part praying his father would raise his own pistol and at least try to save their lives.

“Two.”

“Look, Smithy, I’m sorry, alright!? We gotta be able to work this out. Why are you doing this? Why do you have to—”

“Three.”

Philip Curtis started to cry. James’ insides clenched tight as a drum, heart lurching in his throat. Philip raised the gun to his son’s face.

“Dad, what are you DOING? Shoot HIM! At least TRY, for God’s sake!”

“Four.” Smithy smiled, waited a beat, took a breath, and moved the muscles in his face that would form the word “five.”

Edward, tears glistening in his eyes, fell over in his bathroom, bashing the side of his face against the tub and curling up into a ball. He cupped his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut, mouthed the word along with James.

“Five.”

Smithy only got half the word out before Philip’s bullet ripped through James’ skull, spraying thick clumps of brain and blood against the nearby trees.

James crumpled.

Philip dropped the gun, fell to his knees, head in hands, sobbing. Smithy turned around, silent, and made his way through the forest, back to his car.

Edward opened his eyes, the fluorescent light of the bathroom too bright, blinding. He said one word, the sound dropping like stone from between his dry, cracked lips: “Dad.”

Slipknot waited until Edward had gone to bed before slipping out again from behind the bathroom mirror.

It would rend this one like it had the last, and the one before that, and on down through history. Sometimes it wished it wasn’t restricted to just one family, that it could fuck with others, turn their lives inside out, torment them in whatever ways caught its fancy that generation. But rules were rules, and these were rules of the universe, so there was no one to appeal to.

Smithy had been a longtime friend of the Curtis’, and was Slipknot’s first and only human host. In its true form—the form it was in now, that of shadow—it was not as limited as when it was the bear or the human. It had forgotten the other forms it’d assumed/created over the many, many years with the Curtis’, but it knew, and never allowed itself to lose sight of the fact that they were all, essentially, human creations.

Guilt took all forms, and Slipknot’s was only to portray them. Though, in its boredom of late, Slipknot had deigned to help things along their way a little. After all, as there was no one to appeal to about the rules, it stood to reason that there was no one to answer to, either. Edward often dreamed about his guilt, and Slipknot fed off it, intertwined it with the rest of the family’s, splashed it across the ceiling and let it drip down. Slipknot increased the tentative connection with Edward as he slept, and listened hard … Edward was dreaming of it again.

And Slipknot was hungry.

I
n the dream, Edward was taking his twelve-year-old son, Stephen, to a hockey game for his twelfth birthday.

“Woo-hoo! Go Canucks!” Stephen shouted, his little boy’s voice lost in the roar of the crowd.

The noise was driving spikes into Edward’s brain. The pounding headache/near-migraine was threading through his skull, chipping bits off, and by Christ he wished Stephen would just watch the game and shut the fuck up.

“Dad, did you see Ohlund rip that shot through Hasek!? Holy cats!

What a blast he’s got! Incredible! Dad, did ya see it!? Dad?”

Edward gritted his teeth, more cracks in his head. The Canucks had scored on the Buffalo Sabres and this Vancouver crowd was going nuts—a jackhammer at the base of his skull. He’d never had a headache this bad in his life. He’d taken aspirin for it before they’d left for the game, but—

“Ha-HO!” Stephen leaped out of his seat with the rest of the capacity crowd and started clapping and hollering. The Canucks had popped another one in. “Dad, Bertuzzi roofed one! Did ya see it!? Wow!”

Shut the fuck up,
he thought.
Just SHUT UP. Yes, I fucking saw it.
Edward leaned forward in his seat with his head in his hands, rubbing his temples.

“You okay, Dad?”

“Leave me alone, Stephen,” Edward said, eyes shut, a tear slipping down his cheek from the pain. “Just … watch the game and let me be for a bit, okay?”

“But what’s wrong?” Stephen shouted over the noise of the crowd.
I knew the little shit wouldn’t shut his trap. He can’t just fucking leave me alone, can he? He has to know what’s wrong. He has to shout
t
he question right in my goddamned ear. Has to—

“Dad, can you hear me!? Are you alright!?”

Edward knew he was close to snapping. Teetering on the brink.

One more word and he knew—“Dad, is it your head? Is it—”

Slipknot pushed just then … only a little bit, but he pushed. Just enough.

Edward swung around in his seat, lifted his son up to his face by the arms. Stephen dangled like a broken puppet, eyes wide, suddenly terrified. “Yes, Stephen, my FUCKING head is killing me, you little bastard!” The words came from his mouth, but he had no idea where the thoughts that had formed them came from. “My head is pounding like hell, and your constant shouting and bellowing in my fucking ear isn’t exactly helping, ALRIGHT!?”

“B-B-But … Dad, I—”

Slipknot shoved a bit more and grinned as the words tumbled from Edward’s mouth. “You were an accident, anyway, Stephen,” Edward said, and dropped his son back into his seat, utter disdain on his face.