ODD? (14 page)

I tried to tell him. I did. I can’t remember what I said. Josh’s eyes just kept getting bigger and bigger.

“We . . . We need to see about this,” was all he said. Then he started rolling a cigarette fast.

The fire smelled great. There were coyotes yipping somewhere between Alpine and the horizon. The cowboy moon was a bleached, peeled, pickled skull.

The darkness beyond the lights of the farm looked two-dimensional, flat and featureless as the edge of the Known World in some Arthur C. Clarke nightmare at The End.

Except Clarke had too much hope to imagine the noises I could hear out past the edge of that darkness, too much faith in Evolution over Propitiation . . .

I passed him the pipe. Josh stayed my hand. “Finish that. I’m going to . . . see about this. You’re fucked up, man, but . . . I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”

I waited five hours for Josh to come and reclaim his pipe. I counted the minutes.

I found I could do that, in the dark, huddled around my smoky peat fire and ancient transistor radio spilling out KUFO heavy-metal and gabble into the night.

I had a box of old newspapers, and some
Reader’s Digest
Condensed Books, scraps of notebook paper almost too used to use again. The fire kept going out, every couple of minutes.

I started burning old illusions of the soul, too. Some of them looked like my clothes. Some of them looked like my writings and drawings. Some of those were originals.

Then the lights were everywhere in the woods again. The lights, and the slouching shadows that you could
feel
staring at you, though they shuffled and brachiated on the other side of that black-gray 2-D void. Their laughter grew louder still, shaking the canopy. Vibrating the forest floor . . .

Overhead, the Western stars were a nightmarish acid trip too vast and inhuman to fathom. Out there on the perimeter, there were too many stars, too many things to be careful of wishing for that might fall on you and knock you flat . . .

In the clearing, the shadows come and go. The Ancestors tie down their wriggling sacrifice, and take their good old time. I see it again. Again. Again. Until the day I die. And then I see it again. It happens again. I dream it Again.

The way I saw them last. Over my shoulder. When I fired the gun empty, threw the machete and ran through the jungle, with a twisted ankle and irretrievable pride, running, running, running like a little bitch. Again. They all do it again.

In the heat of the night, I heard Pandora scream, once. Then there was silence. The kind I didn’t like . . .

And when I turned around again, that was the last time I drew breath as anything but a pillar of desiccated salt.

That was now for me, and this is then. There are gray streaks in my hair. I startle easily, and look so much like my Dad around the crow-tracked eyes that I forget I’m only 34.

I live on North Hollywood Boulevard now, in LA. It doesn’t rain much here, or storm and blow and whack. I have to smoke hash to get to sleep. Sometimes I have to take stronger measures.

But by gods, I have central heating. And no trees anywhere. No places to hide. No . . . got to say it, no loop-holes.

I write hard speculative Science Fiction about far-flung worlds millions of years in the future. My books are the size of cinderblocks. Many trees die for me. Hopefully, one of them had the critter in it, the one that was leering at me and Pandora outside my door on the night I lost my mind, and at least one other vital organ.

It growled and puffed up like a baboon when I spoke, swung down on its strong back legs from the tree and punched right through my front door. Pandora was still screaming when he punched out the back wall with her slung over his shoulder.

They picked me up on the street in downtown Portland four days later, babbling. By then, I’d hurt myself quite badly, they said, and would have died.

The Forest Service never found my heart.

AUNTS

Karin Tidbeck

Karin Tidbeck is a Swedish writer whose fiction has appeared in
Weird Tales
and
Shimmer Magazine
, among others. Her first English-language collection will appear from Cheeky Frawg in 2012.

In some places, time is a weak and occasional phenomenon. Unless someone claims time to pass, it might not, or does so only partly; events curl in on themselves to form spirals and circles.

The orangery is one such place. It is located in an apple orchard, which lies at the outskirts of a garden. The air is damp and laden with the yeasty sweetness of overripe fruit. Gnarled apple trees with bright yellow leaves flame against the cold and purpling sky. Red globes hang heavy on their branches. The orangery gets no visitors. The orchard belongs to a particular regent whose gardens are mostly populated by turgid nobles completely uninterested in the orchard. It has no servants, no entertainment. It requires walking, and the fruit is mealy.

But in the event someone did walk in among the trees, they would find them marching on for a very long time, every tree almost identical to the other. (Should that someone try to count the fruit, they would also find that each tree has the exact same number of apples.) If this visitor did not turn around and flee for the safety of the more cultivated parts of the gardens, they would eventually see the trees disperse and the silver and glass bubble of an orangery rise out of the ground. Drawing closer, they would have seen this:

The inside of the glass walls were covered by a thin brown film of fat vapour and breath. Inside, fifteen orange trees stood along the curve of the cupola; fifteen smaller, potted trees made a circle inside the first. Marble covered the centre, where three bolstered divans sat surrounded by low round tables. The divans sagged under the weight of three gigantic women.

The Aunts had one single holy task: to expand. They infinitely, slowly accumulated layers of fat. A thigh bisected would reveal a pattern of concentric rings, the fat coloured different hues. On the middle couch reclined Great-Aunt, who was the largest of the three. Her body flowed down from her head like waves of whipped cream, arms and legs mere nubs protruding from her magnificent mass.

Great-Aunt’s sisters lay on either side. Middle Sister, her stomach cascading over her knees like a blanket, was eating little link sausages one by one, like a string of pearls. Little Sister, not noticeably smaller than the others, peeled the lid off a meat pie. Great-Aunt extended an arm, letting her fingers slowly sink into the pie’s naked interior. She scooped up a fistful of dark filling and buried her face in it with a sigh. Little Sister licked the inside clean of the rest of the filling, then carefully folded it four times and slowly pushed it into her mouth. She snatched up a new link of sausages. She opened and scraped the filling from the skin with her teeth, then threw the empty skins aside. Great-Aunt sucked at the mouthpiece of a thin tube snaking up from a samovar on the table. The salty mist of melted butter rose up from the lid on the pot. She occasionally paused to twist her head and accept small marrow biscuits from one of the three girls hovering near the couches.

The grey-clad girls quietly moving through the orangery were Nieces. In the kitchens under the orangery, they baked sumptuous pastries and cakes; they fed and cleaned their Aunts. They had no individual names and were indistinguishable from each other, often even to themselves. The Nieces lived on leftovers from the Aunts: licking up crumbs mopped from Great-Aunt’s chin, drinking the dregs of the butter samovar. The Aunts did not leave much, but the Nieces did not need much either.

Great-Aunt could no longer expand, which was as it should be. Her skin, which had previously lain in soft folds around her, was stretched taut over the fat pushing outward from inside. Great-Aunt raised her eyes from her vast body and looked at her sisters who each nodded in turn. The Nieces stepped forward, removing the pillows that held the Aunts upright. As she lay back, Great-Aunt began to shudder. She closed her eyes and her mouth became slack. A dark line appeared along her abdomen. As it reached her groin, she became still. With a soft sigh, the skin split along the line. Layer after layer of skin, fat, muscle and membrane broke open until the breastbone was exposed and fell open with a wet crack. Golden blood washed out of the wound, splashing onto the couch and onto the floor, where it was caught in a shallow trough. The Nieces went to work, carefully scooping out organs and entrails. Deep in the cradle of her ribs lay a wrinkled pink shape, arms and legs wrapped around Great-Aunt’s heart. It opened its eyes and squealed as the Nieces lifted away the last of the surrounding tissue. They cut away the heart with the new Aunt still clinging to it, and put her down on a small pillow where she settled down and began to chew on the heart with tiny teeth.

The Nieces sorted intestines, liver, lungs, kidneys, bladder, uterus and stomach; they were each put in separate bowls. Next they removed Aunt’s skin. It came off easily in great sheets, ready to be cured and tanned and made into one of three new dresses. Then it was time for removing the fat: first the wealth of Aunt’s enormous breasts, then her voluminous belly, her thighs; last, her flattened buttocks. The Nieces teased muscle loose from the bones; it needed not much force, but almost fell into their hands. Finally, the bones themselves, soft and translucent, were chopped up into manageable bits. When all this was done, the Nieces turned to Middle and Little Sister who were waiting on their couches, still and wide open. Everything neatly divided into pots and tubs, the Nieces scrubbed the couches and on them laid the new Aunts, each still busy chewing on the remains of a heart.

The Nieces retreated to the kitchens under the orangery. They melted and clarified the fat, ground the bones into fine flour, chopped and baked the organ meats, soaked the sweetbreads in vinegar, simmered the muscle until the meat fell apart in flakes, cleaned out and hung the intestines to dry. Nothing was wasted. The Aunts were baked into cake and paté and pastries and little savoury sausages and dumplings and crackling. The new Aunts would be very hungry and very pleased.

Neither the Nieces nor the Aunts saw it happen, but someone made their way through the apple trees and reached the orangery. The Aunts were getting a bath. The Nieces sponged the expanses of skin with lukewarm rose water. The quiet of the orangery was replaced by the drip and splash of water, the clunk of copper buckets, the grunts of Nieces straining to move flesh out of the way. They didn’t see the curious face pressed against the glass, greasy corkscrew locks drawing filigree traces; a hand landing next to the staring face, cradling a round metal object. Nor did they at first hear the quiet, irregular ticking noise the object made. It wasn’t until the ticking noise, first slow, then faster, amplified and filled the air, that an Aunt opened her eyes and listened. The Nieces turned toward the orangery wall. There was nothing there, save for a handprint and a smudge of white.

Great-Aunt could no longer expand. Her skin was stretched taut over the fat pushing outward from inside. Great-Aunt raised her eyes from her vast body and looked at her sisters, who each nodded in turn. The Nieces stepped forward, removing the pillows that held the Aunts upright.

The Aunts gasped and wheezed. Their abdomens were a smooth, unbroken expanse: there was no trace of the tell-tale dark line. Great-Aunt’s face turned a reddish blue as her own weight pressed down on her throat. Her shivers turned into convulsions. Then, suddenly, her breathing ceased altogether and her eyes stilled. On either side, her sisters rattled out their final breaths in concert.

The Nieces stared at the quiet bodies. They stared at each other. One of them raised her knife.

As the Nieces worked, the more they removed from Great-Aunt, the more clear it became that something was wrong. The flesh wouldn’t give willingly, but had to be forced apart. They resorted to using shears to open the ribcage. Finally, as they were scraping the last of the tissue from Great-Aunts thigh bones, one of them said:

“I do not see a little Aunt.”

“She should be here,” said another.

They looked at each other. The third burst into tears. One of the others slapped the crying girl’s head.

“We should look further,” said the one who had slapped her sister. “She could be behind the eyes.”

The Nieces dug further into Great-Aunt; they peered into her skull, but found nothing. They dug into the depths of her pelvis, but there was no new Aunt. Not knowing what else to do, they finished the division of the body, then moved on to the other Aunts. When the last of the three had been opened, dressed, quartered and scraped, no new Aunt had yet been found. By now, the orangery’s floor was filled with tubs of neatly ordered meat and offal. Some of the younger orange trees had fallen over and were soaking in golden blood. One of the Nieces, possibly the one who had slapped her sister, took a bowl and looked at the others.

“We have work to do,” she said.

The Nieces scrubbed the orangery floor and cleaned the couches. They turned every last bit of the Aunts into a feast. They carried platters of food from the kitchens and laid it out on the surrounding tables. The couches were still empty. One of the Nieces sat down in the middle couch. She took a meat pastry and nibbled at it. The rich flavour of Great-Aunt’s baked liver burst into her mouth; the pastry shell melted on her tongue. She crammed the rest of the pastry into her mouth and swallowed. When she opened her eyes, the other Nieces stood frozen in place, watching her.

“We must be the new Aunts now,” the first Niece said.

One of the others considered this. “Mustn’t waste it,” she said, eventually.

The new Aunts sat down on Middle Sister’s and Little Sister’s couches and tentatively reached for the food on the tables. Like their sister, they took first little bites, then bigger and bigger as the taste of the old Aunts filled them. Never before had they been allowed to eat from the tables. They ate until they couldn’t down another bite. They slept. When they woke up, they fetched more food from the kitchen. The orangery was quiet save for the noise of chewing and swallowing. One Niece took an entire cake and buried her face in it, eating it from the inside out. Another rubbed marinated brain onto herself, as if to absorb it. Sausages, slices of tongue topped with jellied marrow, candied eyes that crunched and then melted. The girls ate and ate until the kitchen was empty and the floor covered in a layer of crumbs and drippings. They lay back on the couches and looked at each others’ bodies, measuring bellies and legs. None of them were noticeably fatter.

“It’s not working,” said the girl on the leftmost couch. “We ate them all up and it’s not working!” She burst into tears.

The middle girl pondered this. “Aunts can’t be Aunts without Nieces,” she said.

“But where do we find Nieces?” said the rightmost. “Where did we come from?” The other two were silent.

“We could make them,” said the middle girl. “We are good at baking, after all.”

And so the prospective Aunts swept up the crumbs from floor and plates, mopped up juices and bits of jelly, and returned with the last remains of the old Aunts to the kitchens. They made a dough and fashioned it into three girl-shaped cakes, baked them and glazed them. When the cakes were done, they were a crisp light brown and the size of a hand. The would-be Aunts took the cakes up to the orangery and set them down on the floor, one beside each couch. They wrapped themselves in the Aunt-skins, and lay down on their couches to wait.

Outside, the apple trees rattled their leaves in a faint breeze. On the other side of the apple orchard was a loud party, where a gathering of nobles played croquet with human heads, and their changeling servants hid under the tables, telling each other stories to keep the fear away. No sound of this reached the orangery, quiet in the steady gloom. No smell of apples snuck in between the panes. The Aunt-skins settled in soft folds around the sleeping girls.

Eventually one of them woke. The girl-shaped cakes lay on the floor, like before.

The middle girl crawled out of the folds of the skin dress and set her feet down on the floor. She picked up the cake sitting on the floor next to her.

“Perhaps we should eat them,” she said. “And the Nieces will grow inside us.” But her voice was faint.

“Or wait,” said the leftmost girl. “They may yet move.”

“They may,” the middle girl says.

The girls sat on their couches, cradled in the skin dresses, and waited. They fell asleep and woke up again, and waited.

In some places, time is a weak and occasional phenomenon. Unless someone claims time to pass, it might not, or does so only partly; events curl in on themselves to form spirals and circles.

The Nieces wake and wait, wake and wait, for Aunts to arrive.