The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (35 page)

His mother and father were back, and
she
was coming for him, hoping that his grandmother would be asleep by now, that he would be alone in his bedroom—awake or asleep, it didn’t matter—and that what lived in her eyes would be free at last to do what it had wanted to do since he was born. 

To have him—and if she couldn’t, to make sure no one else could
. 

His grandmother—blue eyes blinking as she listened, as she saw things he could not see—looked at him quickly and said, “Do what we’ve done before, John.” 

And they did, quickly. They put the largest shells—the big conchs, long trumpets, heavy “helmet shells,” and “ton shells”—in a big circle on the rug. Inside that circle they put another circle—of bright scallops,
pectens,
from all over the world, and angel wings, and fragile
tellinas
(the prettiest of the clams); and inside that circle another circle of the most beautiful cowries (like living pearls), cone shells, and volutes; and inside that, a circle of the sturdiest, bravest murexes; and then a circle of the most fragile ones, the “Venus combs” and the black-spined
nigrispini
—until the floor was covered except for a circle just large enough for a boy in the middle of it. In that space his grandmother made a five-pointed star with
olivas,
slipper shells, keyhole limpets, rare tegulas, scorpion conchs, and
spondyli,
and made him lie down on it quickly, though the spines of the
spondyli
hurt. 

There was a knock on the door, and neither of them said a thing. He looked up at his grandmother and waited. “Do not look at the walls,” she whispered, but he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to know what the figure at the door was doing to the room this time. The walls had darkened, were darkening even more as the knock came again and louder. The walls were beginning to glisten. They were glistening with scales. They were
covered
with scales, and something—something like spit or venom or seawater—began to drip from the flowery wallpaper, from those scales, eating at the paper’s pattern of birds and flowers, making it curl to reveal beneath it the flesh of something huge—a great skinned frog, an immense turtle with its fiery-red shell crushed, something he’d once loved. 

The knocking grew more frantic as if it were not just angry, but afraid, too. The door began to bleed, and as he and his grandmother watched it they heard what sounded like crying—which was impossible—a trick, a lie, since what was pounding wanted to kill him. 

Do not move,
his grandmother said.
Be the star on the floor.
 

The door buckled in at the pounding and the voice on the other side, as it wept and screamed in rage and grief, said,
Are you all right?
and
He’s not in his bedroom,
but as always it was a trick. If he moved, she would take him and he would be
nothing
. 

When the knocking stopped at last, the voice stopped, too, and with it the crying. 

“If you surround yourself with what you love, evil cannot hurt you,” his grandmother said as they picked up her seashells, put them back on the table, and she made the walls look right again. “It can only be jealous of what you have.” 

Two months after his grandmother died, as he lay in his bed in the dark, he heard it coming for him on heavy footsteps. His grandmother’s room was too far away for him to hide in. Her shells were too far away and he wasn’t sure he could make the star correctly anyway. 

When the figure entered his room, it did not turn on the light. 

“John?” 

He could barely hear the word above the knocking of his heart. 

“Yes,” he said. 

“I wanted to tell you good night.” It stepped toward him in the darkness. He couldn’t see its face. He wanted to look at it, yes—so that he might understand why it wanted to kill him—but he also didn’t—didn’t want to see the face he had tried so long to love, but could not. 

“I wanted to tell you good night,” the figure said again. It had come to do what it couldn’t do before—what, now that his grandmother was dead, it could. Why was it waiting? 

“I also wanted to tell you—” 

His heart stopped. The figure had sat down on the side of his bed, where pale light from the porch fell through the bedroom blinds to its broad face. He could see its eyes now. He could see its hands, perfectly still in its lap—hands that never made patterns in the air, that hated and always would the idea of such things. He looked in its eyes for the cobra, the towering wave, the girl with the board, the bleeding door, but he saw none of these things. 

What he saw instead was impossible. 

“—how sorry I am your grandmother is gone. . . . She was my mother, too . . . and I miss her, John.” There were tears in the words. It had to be a trick, a lie, but it wasn’t. 

The figure fell silent then, unable to speak. 

In the silence of the room he heard his grandmother—who was gone, but somehow there, as she would always be—say: 

This is what she wanted all along, John—to have you for herself, that is all. And now that she does, what wanted to kill no longer needs to kill. It can sleep, and I will be watching. There are more witches, John, and spells than the world can imagine, and a witch who doesn’t know she is one is a sad and terrible thing. 

Grandma?
he asked. 

Do not be afraid
. 

I can’t
. . . . 

Yes, you can. You now know who you are
. 

The boy waited, and when the figure sitting on the side of his bed still did not speak, he reached out, and, though he was shaking, touched it, saw his hand begin to glow like a little sun, and in a moment the figure touched him back, uncoiling in the warmth of his light. 

Spell 

Story Notes 

As should be obvious from at least some of these stories and story notes, I was a strange child—much stranger than my brother Jack, who remains to this day, despite his artistic and musical talents and encyclopedic memory, enviably normal. I was kind and pleasant to be around, I’m told, but I was, as one friend put it years later, “a young eccentric,” and, as another friend put it, “a Nineteenth Century naturalist born
waaaay
too late.” By the age of ten I had, among things, a seashell collection (“univalves and bivalves,” please) of 1,000 specimens all neatly labeled with their genus and species and subspecies names, location, temperature of the location, etc. Did that make me a scientist? Of course not. I had that collection because my father loved the sea and my mother and grandmother loved its treasures, and I was, like most human beings, choosing a life of “love.” I’d go on in later years to discover three unreported species of animals (one mollusk, two insects), but that didn’t make me a scientist either. That friend’s words were accurate: “a Nineteenth Century naturalist.” I loved nature, the sense of wonder it provided, the way it pointed, like science fiction itself, to mysteries the human mind could barely fathom. That made me a mystic more than a scientist, I knew—and much of my writing shows that mysticism as well—and using Mind and Reason to reduce the wonders of nature to something cognitively manageable was of no interest to me. The human mind could serve to appreciate, but it could not understand it all. And at ten, of course, no matter how much conchological and malacological information might be in my brain, I was still a kid, and I played with those seashells the way other boys played with toy soldiers. The Queen Conch (
Strombus gigas
) needed protection, and so her forty Fighting Conchs (
Strombus alatus
) protected her. The shells had been collected during the year of my brother’s birth in Key West, Florida, and were “family,” too. Four years later, in San Diego, I was looking a little more like the oceanographer I thought I might become thanks to my father’s world: a world of seaside assignments, Navy research divers, research vessels—the wonders of the sea. Three of those Navy divers—whose offices were in barracks across the street from our quarters on San Diego Bay and who would the next year take their historic dive in the bathyscaphe
Trieste
(which sat in our backyard for my brother and me to play around, wondering at its alien-spacecraft look) to the bottom of the Marianas Trench—gave me a little desk in their office. There, at age twelve, I had my research notebooks and big formaldehyde jars full of skates, rays, sharks, and other creatures from the bay; but I was still no scientist. It was still about wonder and mystery, and the story in this collection that speaks to that secret most loudly is “Spell.” It is the only fantasy story in this book; and though it was written as a thank you to a boy’s grandmother for a love that kept him from darkness as he grew up, it is also about the “magical” ways we use the natural world even in rational, civilized, hi-tech times—how even scientists, in their deepest psyches and despite their protests to the contrary, use them to make meaning of the world.
 

Postscript: These days the first people I share my fiction with are my wife Amelie and my youngest daughter Liz. I know that if the stories touch their hearts with mystery and magic, the stories are working. Their hearts are never wrong; and as any writer at any age knows, having hearts like this around before one sends one’s vulnerable fictive works out into the world is a godsend. 

This story appeared in 2005 in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
and is one in a series of fablelike fantasies called “the American boy stories.”
 

The Faces Outside 

I wanted to call her Soft Breast, because she is soft when I hold her to me. But the Voice told me to call her Diane. When I call her Diane, I have a pleasant feeling, and she seems closer to me. She likes the name “Diane.” The Voice knew what was best, of course, as it always does. 

I must mate with her every day, when the water is brightest. The Voice says so. It also says that I am in a “tank,” and that the water is brightest when the “sun” is over the “tank.” I do not understand the meaning of “sun,” but the Voice says that “noon” is when the “sun” is over the “tank.” I must mate with Diane every “noon.” 

I
do
know what the “tank” is. It is a very large thing filled with water, and having four “corners,” one of which is the Cave where Diane and I sleep when the water is black like the ink of the squid and cold like dead fish. But we stay warm. There is the “floor” of the “tank,” the “floor” being where all the rock and seaweed is, with all the crawling fish and crabs, where Diane and I walk and sleep. There are four “sides.” “Sides” are smooth and blue walls, and have “view-ports”—round, transparent areas—on them. The Voice says that the things in the “view-ports” are Faces. I have a face, as does Diane. But the cracked, flat things with small lights circling about them are not pretty like Diane’s face. The Voice says that the Faces have bodies, like myself, and Diane. No body could be like Diane’s. I think I should be quite sick if I saw the bodies of the Faces. 

The Voice then says that the Faces are watching us, as we sometimes watch the porpoises. It took a very long time to grow used to having the Faces watch us, as Diane and I came together, but we learned to do it as simply as we swim and sleep. 

But Diane does not have babies. I am very sad when I see the porpoises and whales with their young. Diane and I sleep together in the Cave; Diane is very warm and soft. We sleep in happiness, but when we are awake, we are lonely. I question the Voice about a baby for Diane, but the Voice is always silent. 

I grow to hate the Faces in the “view-ports.” They are always watching, watching. The Voice says that they are enemies, and bad. The Faces have not tried to hurt me; but I must think of them as enemies because the Voice says so. I ask, bad, like the shark? The Voice says, no, worse than the sharks and eels. It says that the Faces are evil. 

The “tank” must be high, because the water is high. I have gone once to the surface, and, although I could get used to it, the light was too much for my eyes. It took me two hundred and seventy kicks to the surface; it took me three thousand steps from our Cave to the opposite “side.” The “tank” is very large, otherwise the whales would not be happy. 

The fish are many, but the dangers are few. I have seen the sharks kill. But the shark does not come near me if I see it and am afraid. Sometimes I have caught it sneaking up behind me, but when I turn it leaves quickly. I have questioned the Voice about why the sharks leave. It does not know. It has no one to ask. 

Today the “sun” must be very large, or powerful, or bright, because the water is brighter than most days. 

When I awoke, Diane was not beside me. The rock of the Cave is jagged, so as I make my way from our bed of cool and slick seaweed, toward the entrance, I scrape my leg on the fifth kick. Not much blood comes from the cut. That is fortunate, because when there is blood the sharks come. 

Diane has grabbed the tail of a porpoise, and both are playing. Diane and I love the porpoises. Sometimes we can even hear their thoughts. They are different from the other fish; they are more like us. But they have babies and we do not.