The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (40 page)

“The church teaches the subjugation of memory,” I say. “Grief is a weakness.”

“I know,” says Mr. Wormcake.

“Your marriage. Your love for your wife and your friends. They're stones in your pockets. They weigh you to the earth.”

“I know.”

“Empty them,” I say.

And so he does. “I miss her,” he says. He looks at me with those hollow sockets, speaks to me with that borrowed mouth, and for the first time that night I swear I can see some flicker of emotion, like a candle flame glimpsed at the bottom of the world. “I miss her so much. I'm not supposed to miss her. It's blasphemy. But I can't stop thinking about her. I don't want to hear the lies anymore. I don't want to hear the stories. I want to remember what really happened. We didn't recognize anything about each other at the fair that night. We were little kids and we were scared of what was going to happen to us. We stood on the edge of everything and we were too afraid to move. We didn't say a single word to each other the whole time. We didn't learn how to love each other until much later, after we were trapped in this house. And now she's gone and I don't know where she went and I'm scared all over again. I'm about to change, and I don't know how or into what because I left home when I was little. No one taught me anything. I'm afraid of what's going to happen to me. I miss my wife.”

I'm stunned by the magnitude of this confession. I'd been fooled by the glamour of his name and his history; I'd thought he would greet this moment with all the dignity of his station. I stand over him, this diminished patriarch, mewling like some abandoned infant, and I'm overwhelmed by disgust. I don't know where it comes from, and the force of it terrifies me.

“Well, you can't,” I say, my anger a chained dog. “You don't get to. You don't get to miss her.”

He stares at me. His mouth opens, but I cut him off. I grab the mound of ripe flesh from the altar and thrust it into his face. Cold fluids run between my fingers and down my wrist. Flies go berserk, bouncing off my face, crawling into my nose. “This is the world you made! These are the rules. You don't get to change your mind!”

Fifty years ago, when Uncle Digby finished his story and finally opened the gate at the very first Skullpocket Fair, we all ran out onto the brand-new midway, the lights swirling around us, the smells of sweets and fried foods filling our noses. We were driven by fear and hope. We knew death opened its mouth behind us, and we felt every living second pass through our bodies like tongues of fire, exalting us, carving us down to our very spirits. We heard the second gate swing open and we screamed as the monsters bounded onto the midway in furious pursuit: cannibal children, dogs bred to run on beams of moonlight, corpse flowers with human bodies, loping atrocities of the laboratory. The air stank of fear. Little Eddie Brach was in front of me and without thought I grabbed his shirt collar and yanked him down, leaping over his sprawled form in the very next instant. He bleated in cartoonlike surprise. I felt his blood splash against the back of my shirt in a hot torrent as the monsters took him, and I laughed with joy and relief. I saw Christina leap onto a rising gondola car and I followed. We slammed the door shut and watched the world bleed out beneath us. Our hearts were incandescent, and we clutched each other close. Somewhere below us a thing was chanting, “Empty your pockets, empty your pockets,” followed by the hollow
pok!
of skulls being cracked open. We laughed together. I felt the inferno of life. I knew that every promise would be fulfilled.

Six of us survived that night. Of those, four of us—exalted by the experience—took the orders. We lived a life dedicated to the Maggot, living in quiet seclusion, preparing our bodies and our minds for the time of decay. We proselytized, grew our numbers. Every year some of the survivors of the fair would join us in our work. Together, we brought Hob's Landing to the worm.

But standing over this whimpering creature, I find myself thinking only of Christina Laudener, her eyes a pale North Atlantic gray, her blond hair flowing like a stilled wave over her shoulders. We were children. We didn't know anything about love. Or at least I didn't. I didn't understand what it was that had taken root in me until years later, when her life took her to a different place, and I sat in the underground church and contemplated the deliquescence of flesh until the hope for warmth, or for the touch of a kind hand, turned cold inside me.

I never learned what she did with her life. But she never took the orders. She lived that incandescent moment with the rest of us, but she drew an entirely different lesson from it.

“You tell me those were all lies?” I say. “I believed them. I believed everything.”

“Gretchen wasn't a lie. Our life here wasn't a lie. It was glorious. It doesn't need to be dressed up with exaggerations.”

I think of my own life, long for a human being, spent in cold subterranean chambers. “The Maggot isn't a lie,” I say.

“No. He certainly is not.”

“I shouldn't have survived. I should have died. I pushed Eddie down. Eddie should have lived.” I feel tears try to gather, but they won't fall. I want them to. I think, somehow, I would feel better about things if they did. But I've been a good boy: I've worked too hard at killing my own grief. Now that I finally need it, there just isn't enough anymore. The Maggot has taken too much.

“Maybe so,” Wormcake says. “But it doesn't matter anymore.”

He gets up, approaches the windows. He pulls a cord behind the curtains and they slide open. A beautiful, kaleidoscopic light fills the room. The Seventieth Annual Skullpocket Fair is laid out on the mansion's grounds beyond the window, carousels spinning, roller coaster ticking up an incline, bumper cars spitting arcs of electricity. The Ferris wheel turns over it all, throwing sparking yellow and green and red light into the sky.

I join him at the window. “I want to go down there,” I say, putting my fingers against the glass. “I want another chance.”

“It's not for you anymore,” Wormcake says. “It's not for me, either. It's for them.”

He tugs at the false mouth on his skull, snapping the tethers, and tosses it to the floor. The tongue lolls like some yanked organ, and the flies cover it greedily. Maybe he believes that if he can no longer articulate his grief, he won't feel it anymore.

And maybe he's right.

He removes the fly-spangled meat from my hands and takes a deep bite. He offers it to me: a benediction. I recognize the kindness in it. I accept, and take a bite of my own. This is the world we've made. Tears flood my eyes, and he touches my cheek with his bony hand.

Then he replaces the meat on the altar and resumes his place on his knees beside it. He lays his head by the buzzing meat. I take the pickax and place the hard point of it against the skull, where all the poisons of the world have gathered, have slowed him, have weighed him to the earth. I hold the point there to fix it in my mind, and then I lift the ax over my head.

“Empty your pockets,” I say.

Below us, a gate opens, and the children pour out at a dead run. There goes the angry girl. There goes the weepy, buzz-cut kid. Arms and legs pumping, clothes flapping like banners in the wind. They're in the middle of the pack when the monsters are released. They have a chance.

They just barely have a chance.

KELLY LINK

FROM
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern

W
HEN THE SEX
tape happened and things went south with Fawn, the demon lover did what he always did. He went to cry on Meggie's shoulder. Girls like Fawn came and went, but Meggie would always be there. Him and Meggie. It was the talisman you kept in your pocket. The one you couldn't lose.

Two monsters can kiss in a movie. One old friend can go to see another old friend and be sure of his welcome: so here is the demon lover in a rental car. An hour into the drive, he opens the window of the rental car, tosses out his cell phone. There is no one he wants to talk to except for Meggie.

(1991) This is after the movie and after they are together and after they begin to understand the bargain that they have made. They are both, suddenly, very famous.

Film can be put together in any order. Scenes shot in any order of sequence. Take as many takes as you like. Continuity is independent of linear time. Sometimes you aren't even in the scene together. Meggie says her lines to your stand-in. They'll splice you together later on. Shuffle off to Buffalo, gals. Come out tonight.

(This is long before any of that. This was a very long time ago.)

Meggie tells the demon lover a story:

Two girls and, look, they've found a Ouija board. They make a list of questions. One girl is pretty. One girl is not really a part of this story. She's lost her favorite sweater. Her fingertips on the planchette. Two girls, each touching, lightly, the planchette. Is anyone here? Where did I put my blue sweater? Will anyone ever love me? Things like that.

They ask their questions. The planchette drifts. Gives up nonsense. They start the list over again. Is anyone here? Will I be famous? Where is my blue sweater?

The planchette jerks under their fingers.

M-E

Meggie says, “Did you do that?”

The other girl says she didn't. The planchette moves again, a fidget. A stutter, a nudge, a sequence of swoops and stops.

M-E-G-G-I-E

“It's talking to you,” the other girl says.

M-E-G-G-I-E H-E-L-L-O

Meggie says, “Hello?”

The planchette moves again and again. There is something animal about it.

H-E-L-L-O I A-M W-I-T-H Y-O-U I A-M W-I-T-H Y-O-U A-L-W-A-Y-S

They write it all down.

M-E-G-G-I-E O I W-I-L-L L-O-V-E Y-O-U A-L-W-A-Y-S

“Who is this?” she says. “Who are you? Do I know you?”

I S-E-E Y-O-U I K-N-O-W Y-O-U W-A-I-T A-N-D I W-I-L-L C-O-M-E

A pause. Then:

I W-I-L-L M-E-G-G-I-E O I W-I-L-L B-E W-I-T-H Y-O-U A-L-W-A-Y-S

“Are you doing this?” Meggie says to the other girl. She shakes her head.

M-E-G-G-I-E W-A-I-T

The other girl says, “Can whoever this is at least tell me where I left my sweater?”

Meggie says, “Okay, whoever you are. I'll wait, I guess I can wait for a while. I'm not good at waiting. But I'll wait.”

O W-A-I-T A-N-D I W-I-L-L C-O-M-E

They wait. Will there be a knock at the bedroom door? But no one comes. No one is coming.

I A-M W-I-T-H Y-O-U A-L-W-A-Y-S

No one is here with them. The sweater will never be found. The other girl grows up, lives a long and happy life. Meggie goes out to L.A. and meets the demon lover.

W-A-I-T

After that, the only thing the planchette says, over and over, is Meggie's name. It's all very romantic.

(1974) Twenty-two people disappear from a nudist colony in Lake Apopka. People disappear all the time. Let's be honest: the only thing interesting here is that these people were naked. And that no one ever saw them again. Funny, right?

(1990) It's one of the ten most iconic movie kisses of all time. In the top five, surely. You and Meggie, the demon lover and his monster girl; vampires sharing a kiss as the sun comes up. Both of you wearing so much makeup it still astonishes you that anyone would ever recognize you on the street.

It's hard for the demon lover to grow old.

Florida is California on a Troma budget. That's what the demon lover thinks, anyway. Special effects blew the budget on bugs and bad weather.

He parks in a meadowy space, recently mowed, alongside other rental cars, the usual catering and equipment vans. There are two gateposts with a chain between them. No fence. Eternal I endure.

There is an evil smell. Does it belong to the place or to him? The demon lover sniffs under his arm.

It's an end-of-the-world sky, a snakes-and-ladders landscape: low emerald trees pulled lower by vines; chalk and apricot anthills (the demon lover imagines the bones of a nudist under every one); shallow water-filled declivities scummed with algae, lime and gold and black.

The blot of the lake. That's another theory: the lake.

A storm is coming.

He doesn't get out of his car. He rolls the window down and watches the storm come in. Let's look at him looking at it. A pretty thing admiring a pretty thing. Abandoned site of a mass disappearance, muddy violet clouds, silver veils of rain driving down the lake, the tabloid prince of darkness, Meggie's demon lover arriving in all his splendor. The only thing to spoil it is the bugs. And the sex tape.

(2012) You have been famous for more than half of your life. Both of you. You only made the one movie together, but people still stop you on the street to ask about Meggie. Is she happy? Which one? you want to ask them. The one who kissed me in a movie when we were just kids, the one who wasn't real? The one who likes to smoke a bit of weed and text me about her neighbor's pet goat? The Meggie in the tabloids who drinks fucks gets fat pregnant too skinny slaps a maître d' talks to Elvis's ghost ghost of a missing three-year-old boy ghost of JFK? Sometimes they don't ask about Meggie. Instead they ask if you will bite them.

Happiness! Misery! If you were one, bet on it the other was on the way. That was what everyone liked to see. It was what the whole thing was about. The demon lover has a pair of gold cuff links, those faces. Meggie gave them to him. You know the ones I mean.

(2010) Meggie and the demon lover throw a Halloween party for everyone they know. They do this every Halloween. They're famous for it.

“Year after year, the monkey puts on a monkey's face,” Meggie says.

She's King Kong. The year before? Half a pantomime horse. He's the demon lover. Who else? Year after year.