The Empire of Ice Cream (15 page)

Still, the conscientious young man continued to search for over a year. His desire was to study the physiological form of this legend. Eventually, after months of exhaustive searching, he came upon a crate marked with grease pencil:
Gelreesh
. Upon prying open the box, he found inside a collection of bones wrapped in a tattered garment of maroon silk. There was also a handkerchief bearing the stitched symbol of a broken heart. When he uncovered the bones, he was shocked to find the skeleton of a very large bird instead of a mutant human. A professor of his from the university determined upon inspection that these were indeed the remains of a great horned owl.

The Beautiful Gelreesh

Story Notes

I don't remember what dark basement of my imagination this story crawled out of, but when it finally showed itself in the daylight I was enchanted by it. I can tell you that a good many editors were not. Who can blame them? There's a brutal irony to it that verges on cynicism, something that usually doesn't find a home in my fiction. I don't know what it was, but I felt that in this story's darkness it still pointed the way to some truth. What that truth might be, I couldn't tell you if you put a gun to my head. Jeff VanderMeer published it in his anthology
, Album Zutique,
where it was surrounded by other work that made it feel at home. A story needs the right residence. To my surprise, this piece made the 2003
Locus
Awards recommended reading list, which led me to wonder if there were not perhaps some readers out there with mutant entities lurking in the basements of their own imaginations
.

Boatman's Holiday

Beneath a blazing orange sun, he maneuvered his boat between the two petrified oaks that grew so high their tops were lost in violet clouds. Their vast trunks and complexity of branches were bone white, as if hidden just below the surface of the murky water was a stag's head the size of a mountain. Thousands of crows, like black leaves, perched amidst the pale tangle, staring silently down. Feathers fell, spiraling in their descent with the slow grace of certain dreams, and he wondered how many of these journeys he'd made or if they were all, always, the same journey.

Beyond the oaks, the current grew stronger, and he entered a constantly shifting maze of whirlpools, some spinning clockwise, some counter, as if to negate the passage of Time. Another boatman might have given in to panic and lost everything, but he was a master navigator and knew the river better than himself. Any other craft would have quickly succumbed to the seething waters, been ripped apart and its debris swallowed.

His boat was comprised of an inner structure of human bone lashed together with tendon and covered in flesh stitched by his own steady hand, employing a thorn needle and thread spun from sorrow. The lines of its contours lacked symmetry, meandered, and went off on tangents. Along each side, worked into the gunwales well above the waterline, was a row of eyeless, tongueless faces—the empty sockets, the gaping lips, portals through which the craft breathed. Below, in the hold, there reverberated a heartbeat that fluttered randomly and died every minute only to be revived the next.

On deck, there were two long rows of benches fashioned from skulls for his passengers, and at the back, his seat at the tiller. In the shallows, he'd stand and use his long pole to guide the boat along. There was no need of a sail as the vessel moved slowly forward of its own volition with a simple command. On the trip out, the benches empty, he'd whisper, “There!” and on the journey back, carrying a full load, “Home!” and no river current could dissuade its progress. Still, it took a sure and fearless hand to hold the craft on course.

Charon's tall, wiry frame was slightly but irreparably bent from centuries hunched beside the tiller. His beard and tangled nest of snow-white hair, his complexion the color of ash, made him appear ancient. Yet when in the throes of maneuvering around Felmian, the blue serpent, or in the heated rush along the shoals of the Island of Nothing, he'd toss one side of his scarlet cloak back over his shoulder, and the musculature of his chest, the coiled bulge of his bicep, the thick tendon in his forearm, gave evidence of the power hidden beneath his laconic facade. Woe to the passenger who mistook those outer signs of age for weakness and set some plan in motion, for then the boatman would wield his long shallows pole and with one mighty swing shatter every bone in their body.

Each treacherous obstacle, the clutch of shifting boulders, the rapids, the waterfall that dropped into a bottomless star-filled space, was expertly avoided with a skill born of intuition. Eventually a vague but steady tone like the uninterrupted buzz of a mosquito came to him over the water; a sign that he drew close to his destination. He shaded his eyes against the brightness of the flaming sun and spotted the dark, thin edge of shoreline in the distance. As he advanced, that distant, whispered note grew steadily into a high keening, and then fractured to reveal itself a chorus of agony. A few more leagues and he could make out the legion of forms crowding the bank. When close enough to land, he left the tiller, stood, and used the pole to turn the boat so it came to rest sideways on the black sand. Laying down the pole, he stepped to his spot at the prow.

Two winged, toad-faced demons with talons for hands and hands for feet, Gesnil and Trinkthil, saw to the orderliness of the line of passengers that ran from the shore back a hundred yards into the writhing human continent of dead. Every day there were more travelers, and no matter how many trips Charon made, there was no hope of ever emptying the endless beach.

Brandishing cat-o'-nine-tails with barbed tips fashioned from incisors, the demons lashed the “tourists,” as they called them, subduing those unwilling to go.

“Another load of the falsely accused, Charon,” said Gesnil, puffing on a lit human finger jutting from the corner of his mouth.

“Watch this woman, third back, in the blue dress,” said Trinkthil, “her blithering lamentations will bore you to sleep. You know, she never
really
meant to add belladonna to the recipe for her husband's gruel.”

Charon shook his head.

“We've gotten word that there will be no voyages for a time,” said Gesnil.

“Yes,” said Charon, “I've been granted a respite by the Master. A holiday.”

“A century's passed already?” said Gesnil. “My, my, it seemed no more than three. Time flies …”

“Traveling?” asked Trinkthil. “Or staying home?”

“There's an island I believe I'll visit,” he said.

“Where's it located?” asked Gesnil.

Charon ignored the question and said, “Send them along.”

The demons knew to obey, and they directed the first in line to move forward. A bald, overweight man in a cassock, some member of the clergy, stepped up. He was trembling so that his jowls shook. He'd waited on the shore in dire fear and anguish for centuries, milling about, fretting as to the ultimate nature of his fate.

“Payment,” said Charon.

The man leaned his head back and opened his mouth. A round shiny object lay beneath his tongue. The boatman reached out and took the gold coin, putting it in the pocket of his cloak. “Next,” called Charon as the man moved past him and took a seat on the bench of skulls.

Hell's orange sun screamed in its death throes every evening, a pandemonium sweeping down from above that made even the demons sweat and set the Master's three-headed dog to cowering. That horrendous din worked its way into the rocks, the river, the petrified trees, and everything brimmed with misery. Slowly it diminished as the starless, moonless dark came on, devouring every last shred of light. With that infernal night came a cool breeze whose initial tantalizing relief never failed to deceive the damned, though they be residents for a thousand years, with a false promise of Hope. That growing wind carried in it a catalyst for memory, and set all who it caressed to recalling in vivid detail their lost lives—a torture individually tailored, more effective than fire.

Charon sat in his home, the skull of a fallen god, on the crest of a high flint hill overlooking the river. Through the skull's left eye socket, glazed with transparent lies, he could be seen sitting at a table, a glutton's fat tallow burning, its flame guttering in the night breeze let in through the gap of a missing tooth. Laid out before him was a curling width of tattooed flesh skinned from the back of an ancient explorer who'd no doubt sold his soul for a sip from the Fountain of Youth. In the boatman's right hand was a compass and in his left a writing quill. His gaze traced along the strange parchment the course of his own river, Acheron, the River of Pain, to where it crossed paths with Pyriphlegethon, the River of Fire. That burning course was eventually quelled in cataracts of steam where it emptied into and became the Lethe, River of Forgetting.

He traced his next day's journey with the quill tip, gliding it an inch above the meandering line of vein blue. There, in the meager width of that last river's depiction, almost directly halfway between its origin and end in the mournful Cocytus, was a freckle. Anyone else would have thought it no more than a bodily blemish inked over by chance in the production of the map, but Charon was certain after centuries of overhearing whispered snatches of conversation from his unlucky passengers that it represented the legendary island of Oondeshai.

He put down his quill and compass and sat back in the chair, closing his eyes. Hanging from the center of the cathedral cranium above, the wind chime made of dangling bat bones clacked as the mischievous breeze that invaded his home lifted one corner of the map. He sighed at the touch of cool wind as its insidious effect reeled his memory into the past.

One night, he couldn't recall how many centuries before, he was lying in bed on the verge of sleep, when there came a pounding at the hinged door carved in the left side of the skull. “Who's there?” he called in the fearsome voice he used to silence passengers. There was no verbal answer, but another barrage of banging ensued. He rolled out of bed, put on his cloak, and lit a tallow. Taking the candle with him, he went to the door and flung it open. A startled figure stepped back into the darkness. Charon thrust the light forward and beheld a cowed, trembling man, his naked flesh covered in oozing sores and wounds.

“Who are you?” asked the boatman.

The man stared up at him, holding out a hand.

“You've escaped from the pit, haven't you?”

The backside of the flint hill that his home sat atop overlooked the enormous pit, its circumference at the top, a hundred miles across. Spiraling along its inner wall was a path that led down and down in ever decreasing arcs through the various levels of Hell to end at a pinpoint in the very mind of the Master. Even at night, if Charon were to go behind the skull and peer out over the rim, he could see a faint reddish glow and hear the distant echo of plaintive wails.

The man finally nodded.

“Come in,” said Charon, and held the door as the stranger shuffled past him.

Later, after he'd offered a chair, a spare cloak, and a cup of nettle tea, his broken visitor began to come around.

“You know,” said Charon, “there's no escape from Hell.”

“This I know,” mumbled the man, making a great effort to speak as if he'd forgotten the skill. “But there is an escape
in
Hell.”

“What are you talking about? The dog will be here within the hour to fetch you back. He's less than gentle.”

“I need to make the river,” said the man.

“What's your name?” asked Charon.

“Wieroot,” said the man with a grimace.

The boatman nodded. “This escape in Hell, where is it, what is it?”

“Oondeshai,” said Wieroot, “an island in the River Lethe.”

“Where did you hear of it?”

“I created it,” he said, holding his head with both hands as if to remember. “Centuries ago, I wrote it into the fabric of the mythology of Hell.”

“Mythology?” asked Charon. “I suppose those wounds on your body are merely a myth?”

“The suffering's real here, don't I know it, but the entire construction of Hell is, of course, man's own invention. The pit, the three-headed dog, the rivers, you, if I may say so, all sprung from the mind of humanity, confabulated to punish itself.”

“Hell has been here from the beginning,” said Charon.

“Yes,” said Wieroot, “in one form or another. But when, in the living world, something is added to the legend, some detail to better convince believers or convert new ones, here it leaps into existence with a ready-made history that instantly spreads back to the start and a guaranteed future that creeps inexorably forward.” The escapee fell into a fit of coughing, smoke from the fires of the pit issuing in small clouds from his lungs.

“The heat's made you mad,” said Charon. “You've had too much time to think.”

“Both may be true,” croaked Wieroot, wincing in pain, “but listen for a moment more. You appear to be a man, yet I'll wager you don't remember your youth. Where were you born? How did you become the boatman?”

Charon strained his memory, searching for an image of his past in the world of the living. All he saw was rows and rows of heads, tilting back, proffering the coin beneath the tongue. An image of him setting out across the river, passing between the giant oaks, repeated behind his eyes three dozen times in rapid succession.

“Nothing there, am I correct?”

Charon stared hard at his guest.

“I was a cleric, and in copying a sacred text describing the environs of Hell, I deviated from the disintegrating original and added the existence of Oondeshai. Over the course of years, decades, centuries, other scholars found my creation and added it to their own works and so, now, Oondeshai, though not as well known as yourself or your river, is an actuality in this desperate land.”