The Harvest Cycle (26 page)

    The Queen sat behind him. Only she and Caterpillar had chairs; the rest of the community, several dozen of them, sat on the floor. Also sitting on the floor, beside Caterpillar’s chair, was a frail-looking man who had been introduced as the public defender. West was forced to remain standing throughout the proceedings.

    
Maybe Nightmare hasn’t won yet,
West thought.
These people have a system of order, of logic, even if it is deranged, and Nightmare has entrusted them with my fate. I might actually be able to talk my way out of here.

    Caterpillar approached him, chewing another strip of fungus. His teeth glowed in the dark tunnel. “Your Highness, for your consideration: Michael West, a destitute wanderer who claims, among other things, to be a doctor. A doctor of what, exactly, we aren’t certain. What is certain is that this quack thinks he can kill the Jabberwock.”

    Gasps from the audience. Lizard, as court recorder, scribbled frantically on a sheet of fabric.

    “And how would he do this?” Asked the Queen. West hadn’t been allowed to look back at her, but she had a delicate, lilting voice.
Almost human
.

    “He refuses to say,” Caterpillar replied.

    “Michael West,” the Queen said, her voice no longer so delicate, “tell us now or you will be held in contempt.”

    “I never intended to kill the Jabberwock,” West said. “My only intention was to stop the Harvesters - the Pawns. The Pawns have been slaughtering people like you and me, topside, for decades. The Pawns belong to the Jabberwock. Now, your prosecutor tells me that you’ve never been attacked by them, but I believe that this is only because the Jabberwock has been using you - the way it’s using you now.”

    “Objection!” Caterpillar snapped. “Shut up.”

    “Sustained,” said the Queen. “The defendant will not speak again unless permitted by the court.”

    The public defender rose shakily and began to stammer. “I-i-i-if it puh-puh-pleases the court, I-I m-m-move to strike my c-c-client’s last s-s-s-statement.”

    Lizard looked to the Queen, then licked his thumb and began rubbing out scribbles.

    Why was it being stricken? It was the only argument West had! What kind of fucking public defender was this?

    
A mad one, just like everyone else in this so-called court!

    He fought to keep from letting any words slip as Caterpillar paced back and forth in front of him. “Why did you come here as part of your plan? Is there something here that would help you kill the Jabberwock?”

    “Answer the question,” demanded the Queen.

    “I tell you, I came to kill the Pawns!” West shouted. He couldn’t contain himself any longer in the presence of these lunatics. “If we kill them, the surface world is ours again! Man used to live up there without fear of these monsters tearing through the streets! We had enough food to eat that we weren’t forced to turn on each other! Yes, I know you’re cannibals - I can smell the stink of it on your breath,
Counselor
, no matter how many mushrooms you eat. Is this how you want to live? Clothed in rags, hunting for flesh? Praying to a character from a goddamned work of fiction?”

    The crowd roared. He was pelted with pebbles. The Caterpillar screamed and ran in circles around the court space.

    “Stop!” West bellowed. “
Stop it! STOP!
”

    “Heretic!” Shrieked the Caterpillar. “Devil!”

    “
Enough!
” Yelled the Queen.

    The mob’s roaring stopped abruptly.

    Turning toward her, head lowered, West spoke. “Please, your Highness, let me explain your god. Let me explain what’s happening up there. This isn’t the way life is supposed to be. This isn’t...it’s not right. Don’t tell me you’ve never wished for something better, something natural!”

    There was no response from the Queen. All eyes but West’s were upon her. She sat silent, hands having gone to her belly, tears in her eyes.

    Then, she stood.

    “
Off with his head!
”

    The audience burst into cheers. West screamed and ran. The Caterpillar threw his arms around the doctor and tackled him to the floor, hissing in his face. “I eat flesh! Oh yes I do! I’m going to eat
you!
”

    Rabbit stepped forward, hatchet in hand.

    The Caterpillar and the public defender hoisted West to his feet. West looked over his shoulder. The Queen was gone.

    The Rabbit pulled on his mask and raised the blade.

    The public defender bit into West’s forearm.

    The Harvesters began dropping into the tunnel.

    West realized that Nightmare had entrusted these mad fools with absolutely nothing.

    The horror began.

30.

Through The Looking glass

    Amanda was studying her reflection in a floor-length mirror. The glass, slightly smudged in its antique frame (what else could it be but antique?), showed her a haggard young woman with blood trickling down her face; soiled clothing worn thin at the joints; deep bruises beneath bloodshot eyes, misshapen fingernails chewed to the quick, grime between her fingers and at the corners of her mouth. She saw a woman she didn’t recognize. And yet, as she reached toward the glass, the woman reached for her.

    She touched the glass. It was ice-cold. There was a sort of POP! and a web of tiny cracks spread out from beneath her fingertips.

    Things emerged from the cracks: tiny white tendrils, waving gently in the air, then seeming to harden and bend, forming into tiny legs. Little white spiders pulled themselves from the cracks and scuttled across the web she’d made, crawling over one another, more and more of them emerging until they began to expand across the glass in all directions as an indiscernible white mass. She was horrified. She couldn’t pull her hand back. Her feet were rooted to the floor.

    Floor...she was in a room, a bedroom in a house. It was a house she’d seen as a child, when her father took her and her brother across the country in search of a new community.

    POP!

    The sea of wriggling white shapes was outside now, visible through two windows looking out on an enormous rolling lawn. The mass spread, and then the squirming within in stopped and things seemed to freeze, to crystallize. She was looking out on a lawn covered in new-fallen snow. Yes, it had been winter when they’d spent the night in the old house. She remembered being ten years old, snuggling next to her father and little Aidan in a musty-smelling swath of bedsheets. They’d hidden themselves underneath the bed and slept there until the following evening. They always moved at night. She remembered asking Dad why it mattered in winter, when even the midnight sky was stained gray and there seemed an unnatural light cast over the world. “It’s a habit,” he’d replied, “and one you’d do well to have. Someday...someday I might not be there, and you’ll have to pick up and move again.”

    “Why wouldn’t you be there?”

    “Mandy, I’m not going to live forever.”

    That was the first time she ever considered a life, a world without her father. In that terrible, clinging fear, she’d begun to find the strength that would preserve her long after his death.

    The mirror was clear now, save for the cracks, and Amanda turned from it to examine the bed. The rumpled bedsheets were still shoved underneath, and she thought she detected movement within the folds.

    “Daddy...? Aidan?”

    No. This wasn’t real, none of it. She was unconscious. She was dreaming.

    
Nightmare
.

    Why wasn’t Bruce protecting her?

    Amanda whirled around. She saw only her reflection in the mirror, eyes now wide in panic.

    Her shirt had come open, and the slopes of her breasts were heaving with each terrified breath. She felt something within the flesh of her bosom. Touching her fingertips to her skin, Amanda sensed a hardness there, and then...it moved.

    She doubled over, screaming. Holes like tiny toothless mouths opened in her skin. Her breasts fell free of the shirt, and she saw in the mirror that they were riddled with holes, like some awful rot, and then the spiders’ legs emerged!

    Amanda shrieked and clawed at herself. The spiders swarmed from her chest, spilled onto the floor in wet squirming piles. Others crawled from one hole to another and burrowed back inside of her. She felt each and every one, and there was no pain, which only made it worse - there was only the sickening sensation of dozens of frenzied parasites scrabbling through tissue. A tiny leg snaked out from her left nipple and her mind broke.

    “
STOP IIIIIIIIIIIT!
” The scream dragged razors through her throat and left it raw. It reverberated off the walls. The mirror trembled, her reflection blurring. She could only sob helplessly as the strength left her legs and she fell to the floor, onto her breasts, squeezing out more of the hideous spiders. They brushed against her eyelid as they fled across the floor. She smashed them with her fists and they kept running, nothing but little sacs of fluid with legs. They disappeared into the floorboards, into holes in the walls.

    They were gone. She rolled over and, seeing that the holes had healed - or had never been there at all - she let out a long, defeated wail.

    She had to get out of here. She had to wake up - but she wasn’t asleep, she’d been knocked out by the rabbit-man. Rabbit-man? Had that been a dream too?

    Amanda sat up and massaged feeling into her legs. She had to get out of the house, then. Even if the snow on the lawn was...no, she couldn’t risk that. She wouldn’t endure them again. She was trapped inside.

    Something scratched at the door.

    Amanda backpedaled into the corner and buried her face in her hands. “
Please! I don’t want to see!
”

    The clump of bedsheets moved out from under the bed, toward her.

    She saw it through her fingers and cried miserably. Whatever it was, it would be worse than the spiders...

    A wolf cub poked its head out from the sheets and looked at her with smiling eyes, tongue lolling.

    
Oh my God! The wolf!
They’d found the cub while trekking through the a mountain forest. It had followed them for a few days before she and Aidan begged Dad to let them feed it. Though rations were few, he agreed, if only to see the joy in their faces.

    The cub had stayed behind when they left the woods. She remembered the way it watched them as they walked away, the way its expression seemed to say,
I am young, but I know - I have seen them out there. I smell them now. They don’t belong.

    Padding across the floor toward her now, the cub only looked curious. She held out a shaking hand, and a warmth filled her belly as she remembered the comfort the little creature had brought her as a child, sleeping with its head in her lap, making soft sounds as it dreamed.

    The cub stopped and pawed at its mouth. It made an anxious-sounding sort of mewl. Then it retched. It pushed its snout into the floor, and a milky bile spewed from the sides of its jaws.

    Maggots! Hundreds of maggots, pounds of them, teeming, pouring from the cub’s throat in an endless stream!

    Amanda thrust both feet out. The cub sailed into the opposite wall, deflating as the last of the larvae spilled from its slack mouth.

    She streaked across the room with no regard for the scratching on the door and flew into the hallway, down a rickety flight of stairs, across creaking floorboards and out the front door.

    No lawn. No snow. Only an expanse of fog-draped moors.

    She turned, and the house was gone.

    “
NIGHTMARE!
” Amanda screamed. “
WHYYYY?!
”

    She ran into the fog, full aware that at any moment it could coalesce into something far more horrible than anything she’d seen so far.

    A fog had descended on that place where they had been walking when it happened, the place where the cub had refused to go any further. She had been twelve, Aidan ten. It was the dead of night, and they’d had no way of getting their bearings. Dad said they would have to stop until the fog cleared and they could at least see the stars in the sky. Earlier just that autumn he’d taught Mandy and Aidan how to orient themselves by the North Star.

    They found a hollow log at the edge of a wooded area (perhaps the one they’d just left) and the children crawled inside, lining the bottom of it with their coats and shooing the fog away.

    Dad knelt to crawl inside.

    The Harvester drove all five claws through his throat and face and took him away forever. The last thing they saw of their father was his right eye bursting as one of the monster’s knives lanced it.

    Amanda froze in the dream-fog. She’d heard something.

    “Mandy?”

    It was Michael.

    She knew it couldn’t really be him, that it was, if anything genuine, a mere amalgam of her memories of him; but she ran as hard as she could anyway until she reached a stone wall that towered over her head.