The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (78 page)

Some people might lay down cement to build a barbeque area next to their wooded cabin. But Sibley, he built himself a miniature amphitheatre. From the looks of it, the model was old—showing some chipped decay, to echo the modern-day ruins of the real theatres in Greece. Leonard guessed it dated back to the fifties, from when Sibley was writing his one and only book.

He wondered if Sibley’s wife ever accompanied him to the cabin. She might have sat there and watched him, knitting while her husband envisioned a miniature Oedipus or Creon or Iocaste pacing the puppet-sized stage; or pictured the
deus ex machina
contraption lowered from the top of the
skene
replica, like a tiny God from a tiny heaven.

Nothing currently perched on the roof of this
skene
—no serpent-drawn chariot for Medea to ride, no cut-outs of the sun for Apollo, the lightning bolt for Zeus. But the detail on the small building was remarkable. Faded paint over the rough concrete simulated the brick-pattern of a royal palace. Thin rectangular panels along the top border glowed with faint gold inlays. The three doors along the front of the
skene
looked like weather-worn wood, rather than concrete. They each had a small hook-latch on the front, as if they were actually functional doors.

Were they? Leonard bent toward the left-most door and tapped it with a knuckle. The answering sound was a wooden thunk.

He tried the latch. The rusty hook was stuck in the eyelet, and needed to be forced before it would lift. The door itself, in contrast, swung outward with little protest. Inside, the model
skene
was hollow and mostly dark.

Leonard put his mouth near the opening, shouted “Hello” to amuse himself.

No answer, which was just as well. He remembered the shrill cry he’d tried to follow, and cautioned himself not to upset some animal’s nest.

Even the day’s dim light was enough to reveal, luckily, that the inside of this tiny bunker was uninhabited. The building’s floor was a continuation of the cement base, with a faint layer of undisturbed dirt overtop.

Maybe it was okay to try another door. Number two, in the center. He placed one foot inside the model, planting it on the flat circle of the orchestra stage. He rested his elbow on his knee while he reached toward the second hinge. This latch flipped up easily, and he pulled the door open.

A shape of lumped fabric lay inside the middle doorway. A dark-blue, flannel rag. It didn’t seem like an article of clothing—there was no pattern to the cloth, no seams or pockets or buttons. Leonard brought his other leg into the dipped center of the amphitheatre, then lowered his Gulliver-giant rear onto the jagged slope of the theatron seats. Holding his hands to each side for leverage, he eased the tip of his right shoe into the doorway, giving the cloth lump a gentle nudge.

No animal growl or hiss, thank goodness. Only a slight clacking sound. It seemed safe enough to investigate further.

It turned out to be a small cloth sack, cinched at the top with a threaded rope of yellow yarn. In earlier days, the yarn might have appeared golden.

He lifted it from underneath with one hand. The sack rattled, as if it were filled with tiny bones. He tugged at the yarn, and the soft flannel opened at the mouth of the sack. Again, a clacking rattle as the contents shifted over his supporting hand.

Leonard was disappointed by the contents. Empty walnut shells. Roughly two dozen, at first glance.

Then he looked more closely. The split shells had tiny markings on the surface. Colors. Carved furrows. Threads and faded tinsel.

They were masks. Half-masks for the chorus, full-face ovals for the main characters. Leonard picked up one of them: a miniature comic mask, the smile painted in a delicate red curl, pin-hole eyes drilled in careful symmetry above a natural nose-like ridge in the shell. The craftsmanship was amazing.

He lifted another from the sack. This one was clearly a tragic mask, mouth twisted in an agonized black line, a spiked tin-foil crown attached askew atop the head. Wisps of red thread were glued beneath blinded eye sockets, simulating blood. The shell had a thin elastic band looped around the back, as if to hold the mask on a tiny head.

On a whim, Leonard set down the bag and slid the Oedipus mask over his right thumb. He wiggled the thumb, and the small face shook on its new perch; from the motion, red threads waved faintly in the air, fresh blood streaming from the doomed king’s empty eyes.

After the strange discovery, Leonard accomplished little else that day. He’d spent some time admiring the skill that produced those small masks, many with painstaking details that helped him easily identify the characters: Antigone, her expression firm in quiet defiance of the king’s law; Creon, face ablaze with self-righteous anger. Although the masks obviously had been designed to fit dolls or marionettes, Leonard found no such puppets in the hollow
skene
replica; a cursory search of the cabin also turned up nothing.

As much as he appreciated the meticulous artistry of those masks, the oddness of the project unsettled him. Similarly skilled fingers assembled ridiculous “ship in a bottle” models, popular with old men in a previous generation. Those ship models eventually became so common that they lost much of their charm. Something dusty and pointless, earning a curious glance then low bids (if any) at an estate auction. The people who built these ships were eccentric retired men with too much time on their hands.

Sibley had invented his own peculiar pastime, without the calming association of shared practitioners. A twisted version of an old man’s hobby—but Sibley, obsessed with classical texts, would have been an old soul before his time. This state of mind surely explained his life-long resistance to new ideas.

The man’s headstrong resistance had seemed annoying to Leonard, maybe slightly affected or quaint. But now he wondered if his former teacher hadn’t long ago left quaint behind, and crossed into more disturbing territory. Mrs. Sibley had passed on in the early nineties, yet the doctor still spent summer months in his isolated cabin. Supposedly he was working on his second book, but that was decades overdue; when asked, he declined to state a title or clarify the topic. Looking for the marionettes earlier, Leonard had uncovered no evidence of scholarly work: no textbooks or journals or scribbled notes.

What did he do all summer: act out the plays with his walnut-shell masks, recreating his own festival of Dionysus at his miniature amphitheatre? Leonard considered the building where he’d found the masks, the roof of the
skene
from which a god could descend to resolve the play. In
Herakles,
the spirit of madness scratches at the roof, breaks through and forces its way into the hero’s mind. Perhaps something similar had happened to Sibley.

Phrases from Sibley’s book gained new meaning. (But were they from his book? Or simply those expressions he repeated in class, in the faculty room? The sources tended to blur.)
Greek theater is like magic. The unities cast a kind of spell.

And all that emphasis on masks.
The actors wore masks. They conveyed no emotion through their faces—it was all in the words themselves.
Sibley’s face was expressionless whenever he said this.

Leonard tried to push these troubling thoughts away and work on his book, but ended up doing little more than pushing his notepads in new arrangements across the card table. Doubts overshadowed the productivity of his first day at the cabin: doubts about his own project, and doubts about the sanity of Bennet Sibley.

Which affected his sleep again that night. How frustrating to waste the day, then lie awake knowing that, without rest, the next day could follow the same frustrated pattern. A mechanical screech from the generator closet compounded the problem. Leonard was too exhausted to investigate, and the worrisome machine seemed to wail loudest when he teetered on the edge of sleep, startling him awake.

Sometime in the night, he must have gotten up to turn off the generator. The wailing mostly stopped, but the room grew cold. Leonard huddled under borrowed blankets, and another sound circled the dry dirt outside the cabin—a sound the generator’s hum must have obscured the other two nights. It was something like footsteps.
Two small feet have a predictable rhythm,
he thought.
Three is two with an extra sound. Click click thump. Click click thump.

He’d kicked the blankets away during the night, and the sweatshirt and sweatpants weren’t enough to keep him warm. He lay in the fetal position, his arms hugged tight to his chest. Leonard wasn’t sure he’d gotten any sleep. Certainly, he was awake earlier than he should be: only a faint morning light, and his battery clock indicating twenty minutes after six.

And that howl. That howl that was
not
the generator. A gargling, choking sound, like a human infant needing to vomit, but too young to know how.

Outside the cabin.

Leonard unfolded himself from the bed, stumbled in stocking feet to the door, then opened it in a quick motion to catch whatever was making that awful sound.

When he saw it, Leonard was unable to step closer. He held onto the door frame for support, clenched the wood for a reminder of something solid and familiar.

The creature stood near the far edge of the dirt porch. It was about a foot tall, covered with scales like a lizard, but with a hard insect back. Its head was the size of a walnut; wire-like bristles sprouted out the top, approximating the appearance of human hair. Impossibly, the creature stood upright. A third leg, thicker than the other two, looked as if it had burst through the creature’s neck, distorting its guttural growls. Flaps of skin, like the suckers of a lamprey, twisted and agitated against the throat-end of the leg. The howling sound whistled over these flaps, a wet and frantic wail.

As Leonard watched in horror, the third leg began to swing back and forth. The lamprey-flaps pushed and scraped until the skin of this thick digit began to slough off. The leg bent and wiggled, and the casing of skin slipped to the ground. The creature howled again through the opening in its throat, a faint hiss from its mouth joining the awful cry. As it screamed, the raw limb began to tear itself down the middle. Two newly formed legs stretched in opposite directions, then the creature’s body shifted, and the new legs lowered to the ground. It walked on four legs in the morning.

What was it?

Bumble-glumph,
Leonard thought.
Hurgle-whynn.

No.

The creature studied him, its eyes black in a pruned and scaled face that expressed a terrible malice.

Leonard backed into the cabin and slammed the door. He flicked the latch to hold it closed, noticing now that it was a similar hook-and-eyelet contraption to the three doors at Sibley’s miniature amphitheatre. Next he heard a gallop of four legs, two of them untested and shuffling in the dirt. A hard crack hit the bottom of the door, as if a golf ball had been rolled into it. The wood shook beneath his hand. He heard a quick chittering sound, then the creature scrambled away.

Thank God. The thing was some weird hybrid, a chimera. Leonard’s late-night musings seemed less preposterous after such evidence. Perhaps Sibley was some kind of magician after all, his studies of ancient texts uncovering dark secrets other scholars overlooked or avoided out of fear. Sibley had summoned this creature somehow—or he’d had some hand in its making, as surely as he’d crafted those bizarre, tiny masks that would fit perfectly over the creature’s head. Leonard imagined this had been Sibley’s real project all these years: not a second book, but a quest for new, literal truth in the Riddle of the Sphinx. A creature that transformed each day, its two front legs withering away to an upright noon, then a new thick leg tearing through the throat as evening fell. At night the throat would swell around a leg that choked each awkward step. By early morning this leg would itch and wriggle itself into agony: Leonard thought of his own hand, if the webbing between the middle and ring fingers were stretched until it split, then the palm ripped raw, the whole arm torn up the middle. And cursed to suffer this same metamorphosis each day? No wonder the creature howled. No wonder it looked so angry.

As if it blamed Leonard for its pain.

He heard the howl again: the throat gurgle and the hiss combined. A similar cry answered from the right side of the cabin. Then two distinct calls from the left.

Leonard slid to a seated position, his back supporting the door. Tiny feet scuffed in the dirt, the leader’s gallop more steady. A patter joined from the sides, like rain, then a series of hail-stone cracks battered against the bottom of the door. Leonard’s lower back jolted with each strike.

He couldn’t hold this door forever. He wondered about other entrances. In the kitchen, the window was up high, over the sink; but in the main room of the cabin, the sill was a scant two feet above the floor. Those legs—the two back legs, constant through all the transformations, their muscles strengthened over time . . . How high might these creatures be able to jump?

A weapon would help ease his mind, and Leonard recalled the steak knife he’d used for yesterday’s meals. He saw the wooden handle along the edge of the kitchen counter, knew he could retrieve the weapon in a few quick seconds. But he was too afraid to leave the front door unguarded.

The chittering noise grew louder, then the scuffle of retreat before a renewed assault. In that instant, Leonard realized he’d neglected the early part of Oedipus’s story. King Laius learns that his son will grow up to murder him. To circumvent the prophesy, he instructs a servant to abandon the infant in an isolated place, where he would surely die.

In this formulation, Sibley hadn’t loaned the cabin to Leonard out of kindness, but to remove a threat from the new generation of scholars. He struggled to remember Sibley’s exact phrasing.
You’re welcome to use my cabin. But I’m afraid no one will ever read that book.

More patter of small feet in distant dirt, getting louder.