Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (49 page)

Dank coldness seeped up through his shoes and his feet dragged splashing wakes along the floor. He slipped and stretched out an arm to steady himself, leaning his knuckles on the plaster. The walls were wet, too. He wiped the back of his hand on his pants. It left a trail of slime.

The clank of machines pounded harder, and with it the accompanying smell insinuated itself into every pore of Baku’s body, into every fold of his clothing.

But into the heart of the warehouse he walked—one knife in each hand—until he reached the end of the corridor that opened into a larger space—one filled with sharp-angled machines reaching from the floor to the ceiling. Rows of belts on rollers shifted frosty boxes back and forth across the room from trucks to chilled storage. Along the wall were eight loading points with trucks docked and open, ready to receive shipments and disperse them. He searched for a point of commonality, or for some easy spot where all these things must come together for power. Nothing looked immediately promising, so he followed the cables on the ceiling with his eyes, and he likewise traced the cords along the floor. Both sets of lines followed the same path, into a secondary hallway.

Baku shuffled sideways and slithered with caution along the wall and toward the portal where the electric lines all pointed. Once through the portal, Baku found himself at the top of a flight of stairs. Low-power emergency lights illuminated the corridor in murky yellow patches.

It would have to be enough.

When he strained to listen, Baku thought he detected footsteps, or maybe even voices below. He tiptoed towards them, keeping his back snugly against the stair rail, holding his precious knives at the ready.

He hesitated on the bottom stair, hidden in the shadows, reluctant to take the final step that would put him firmly in the downstairs room. There in the basement the sad little emergency lights were too few and far-between to give any real illumination. The humidity, the chill, and the spotty darkness made the entire downstairs feel like night at the bottom of a swimming pool.

A creature with a blank, white face and midnight-black, lidless eyes emerged from inside an open freezer. It was Sonada’s manager, or what was left of him.

“You,” the thing accused.

Baku did not recoil or retreat. He flexed his fingers around the knife handles and took the last step down into the basement.

“You would not eat the sushi with us. Why?” The store manager was terribly changed without and within; even his voice was barely recognizable. He spoke as if he were talking around a mouthful of seaweed.

Baku circled around the manager, not crossing the floor directly but staying with his back to the wall. The closer he came, the slower he crept until he halted altogether. The space between them was perhaps two yards.

“Have you come now for the feast?” the manager slurred.

Baku was not listening. It took too much effort to determine where one word ended and the next began, and the message didn’t matter anyway. There was nothing the manager could say to change Baku’s mind or mission.

Beside the freezer with its billowing clouds of icy mist there was a fuse box. The box was old-fashioned; there were big glass knobs the size of biscuits and connected to wiring that was as frayed and thick as shoelaces. It might or might not be the heart of the building’s electrical system, but at least it might be
connected
to the rest. Perhaps, if Baku wrenched or broke the fuses, there was a chance that he could short out the whole building and bring the operation to a halt. He’d seen it in a movie he’d watched once, late at night when he couldn’t sleep.

If he could stop the electricity for even an hour—he could throw open the refrigerators and freezers and let the seafood thaw. Let it rot. Let it spoil here, at the source.

The manager kept talking. “This is the new way of things. He is coming, for the whole world.”

“So this is where it starts?” Baku spoke to distract the manager. He took a sideways shuffle and brought himself closer to the manager, to the freezer, to the fuse box.

“No. We are not the first.”

Baku came closer. A few feet. A hobbled scuffing of his toes. He did not lower the knives, but the manager did not seem to notice.

“Tell me about this. Explain this to me. I don’t understand it.”

“Yes,” the manager gurgled. “Like this.” And he turned as if to gesture into the freezer, as if what was inside could explain it all.

Baku jumped then, closing the gap between them. He pushed with the back of his arm and the weight of his shoulder, and he shoved the manager inside the freezer.

The door was a foot thick; it closed with a hiss and a click. Only if he listened very hard could Baku hear the angry protests from within. He pressed his head against the cool metal door and felt a fury of muted pounding on the other side.

When he was comfortable believing that the manager would not be able to interfere, he removed his ear from the door. He turned his attention again to the fuse box, regarding it thoughtfully.

Then, one after the other, the fuzzy white pods of light were extinguished.

Darkness swallowed the stray slivers of light which were left.

The basement fell into perfect blackness.

And the heavy thing that struck Baku in the chest came unseen, unheard, but with all the weight of a sack of bricks.

The shock sent him reeling against the freezer door. He slammed against it and caught himself by jabbing his knives into the concrete floor, the door, and anything else they could snag.

Somewhere nearby the thing regrouped with a sound like slithering sandbags. Baku’s ear told him that it must be huge—but was this an illusion of the darkness, of the echoing acoustics? He did not know if the thing could see him, and he did not know what it was, only that it was powerful and deadly.

On the other side of the room Baku’s assailant was stretching, lashing, and reaching. Baku flattened his chest against the wall and leaned against it as he tried to rise, climbing with the knives, scraping them against the cement blocks, cutting off flecks and strips of paint that fluttered down into his hair and settled on his eyelashes.

A loud clank and a grating thunk told Baku that his knives had hit something besides concrete. He reached and thrust the knife again. He must be close to the fuse box; he’d only been a few feet away when the lights went out.

The thudding flump that accompanied his opponent’s movement sounded louder behind Baku as he struggled to stand, to stab. Something jagged and rough caught at his right hand.

A warm gush soaked his wrist and he dropped that knife. With slippery fingers he felt knobs, and what might have been the edge of a slim steel door panel. He reached for it, using this door to haul himself up, but the little hinges popped under his weight and he fell back down to his knees.

The monstrous unseen thing snapped out. One fat, foul-smelling limb crashed forward, smacking Baku’s thighs, sweeping his legs out from underneath him.

His bleeding right hand grazed the dropped knife, but he couldn’t grasp it. Holding the remaining blade horizontally in his left hand, Baku locked his wrist. When the creature attacked again, Baku sliced sideways.

A splash of something more gruesome than blood or tar splashed against the side of the face.

He used his shoulder to wipe away what he could. The rest he ignored. The wet and bloody fingers of his right hand curled and fastened themselves on a small shelf above his head.

The thing whipped its bulk back and forth but it was not badly hurt. It gathered itself together again, somewhere off in the corner. If Baku could trust his ears, it was shifting its attack, preparing to come from the side. He rotated his left wrist, moving the knife into a vertical position within his grip. He opened and closed his fingers around it. To his left, he heard the thing coming again.

Baku peered up into the darkness over his head where he knew the fuse box now hung open.

The creature scooted forward.

Baku hauled himself up and swung the fine German steel hard at the box, not the monster—with all the weight he could put behind it. It landed once, twice, and there came a splintering and sparking. Plastic shattered, or maybe it was glass. Shards of debris rained down.

One great limb crushed against Baku and wrapped itself around his torso, ready to crush, ready to break what it found. The man could not breath; there in the monster’s grip he felt the thing coil itself, slow but wickedly dense, as if it were filled with wet pebbles.

In the center of the room the beast’s bulk shuddered unhappily as it shifted, and shuffled, and skidded. The appendage that squeezed Baku was only one part of a terrible whole.

Before his breath ran out, before his hands grew weak from lost blood and mounting fear, Baku took one more stab. The heavy butcher’s blade did not bear downward, but upward and back.

The fuse box detonated with a splattering torrent of fire and light.

For two or three seconds Baku’s eyes remained open. And in those seconds he marveled at what he saw, but could have never described. Above and beyond the thunderous explosion of light in his head, the rumbling machines ceased their toil.

The current from the box was such that the old man could not release the knife, and the creature could not release its hold on the old man.

As the energy coursed between them, Baku’s heart lay suddenly quiet in his chest, too stunned to continue beating. He marveled briefly, before he died, how electricity follows the quickest path from heaven to earth, and how it passes with pleasure through those things that stand in water.

∇

The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife

John Hornor Jacobs

I
n the afternoon, when the café and the cobbled lane beside the quay empties until the ships come back in, she stands in her apron among the tables and stares out past the seawall, beyond the rocky shore tangled with bladderwrack and snarls of trawler’s nylon nets, to the sea.

Flights of gulls wheel and bank in a grey sky while a trio of boys yell good-natured profanity at each other as they roust an upturned skiff from the shore, flip it, and push it into the foam.

“Maebe, here comes Lancelot from the visitor’s bureau,” Laura says through the open window, hands full of dishes but standing in the interior dining area. Laura’s wide face gleams in the low half-light of the afternoon, and she gives a grin to Maebe that is as playful as it is lurid.

“Now’s the time. And he is handsome.”

Maebe follows Laura’s gaze down the lane, past the bright confections of trinket and t-shirt shops, past the tourists wearing garish shirts adorned with flowers that only bloom under the brighter sun of latitudes thousands of miles away.

The man from the visitor’s bureau grins at Maebe and waves. When he gets close enough, he calls her name.

She waits.

He orders a Diet Coke and a salad with grilled chicken and sits with his back to the quay, so he can watch her, watch the way her body moves under her clothes, the heaviness of her hips, the sway of her breasts.

“Sit with me.”

“That’s not a good idea.”

He’s blond and lean and has the light, translucent fluff that shows where the razor didn’t touch, high on his cheek. He wears white tennis shoes with no socks, khakis, and his collar up in a way that makes her want to cry for his desperation. He’s a creature of sun and surf and boarding schools. He loves to sail.

“Sit with me.”

Laura grins from inside and shuffles off to dump dishes in the sink. Maebe sits with the man, looking beyond him to the boys and their skiff. They have moved out past the breakers and now the skiff bobs on the great face of sea.

“I love this weather. Gusty. You’ll be at the regatta this weekend?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Not really interested in sailing.”

He smiles as if this is the most amusing thing he’s ever heard. He looks at her hand. The one with the wedding-band.

“You’ve worn that as long as I’ve known you.”

“I was married. It’s hard to forget.”

He sits, silent, sipping his drink. But he doesn’t look upset by her statement, just curious and wanting to let the matter pass, like a cloud scuttling across the face of sun.

But she looks at him and says, “He went down to the sea.”

The man smiles, again, at her antiquated way of saying death by drowning.

“Will you meet me tonight?”

Maebe stands and goes into the dim interior of the café and gets his salad. He’s still smiling when she places it in front of him and smoothes her apron. She sits again and turns her face back toward the lane, the seawall.

He eats with the exuberance of the young. When he’s done, he wipes the corners of his mouth with a napkin and says, “You won’t meet me?”

He’s asked every day for the last two weeks and Maebe has always replied the same way. “No, thank you. But you’re very kind to ask.”

The boys in their skiff have disappeared, out beyond everything she knows. The gunmetal clouds shift, and a pillar of sunlight breaks on the surface of the sea, shattering into a million bits. And then it is gone.

It has been too long.

Laura leers at her from inside the café.

“Yes,” Maebe says, and takes his hand. “I’d love to see you. Let me give you my address.”

∇

He takes her to a restaurant down the coast and pushes the escargot and coq au vin possibly because he likes it and possibly because he thinks he should. She dips the restaurant’s crusty bread into the escargot’s garlic butter and it tastes like grease and ashes on her tongue. She shoves the food around on her plate with a fork and drinks expensive wine from an oversized glass.

“Most sailors love the Melges 24 class because of its speed and performance but weekenders love the simplicity. It’s so easy to sail.” Despite the pomp and ceremony of the French restaurant, he had ordered a beer and drank it from the bottle. He winked at her when the waiter scowled and said, “Hey, it’s good beer! Microbrewery.”

“So, you go every weekend?” she asks.

“Yah, pair runs. Me and Walter. Have you met him? We’ve just been sponsored by Trident Sails—I pulled a few strings through the ICVB—so this weekend’s regatta means a lot to both of us.”