Weird Tales, Volume 51 (9 page)

“Eat words for us,” they whispered.

When he came up to bed, she lay still. She waited for the sound of his breathing, listened for his snores rising and falling in the quietness of the room.

“Eat words,” they commanded.

She sat up and dragged on her housecoat. Shivering in the dark, she made her way down the crooked stairs to the living room where he'd sat all night, drinking beer and chewing peanuts, cursing as he watched the telly.

She found the words jotted down on a white napkin folded up to a fourth of its size.

In the morning, he walked through the house dressed in his bathrobe. His eyes were bleary and red, and she felt guilty thinking of the words she'd consumed the night before.

“Can't think straight,” he said. He headed for the fridge and pulled out a bottle of beer.

She smelled the despair on his breath when he shuffled away from her.

“I'll be writing today.” His words bounced off the walls and she caught them on the edge of her tongue. They tasted like dried up gum, but she swallowed them nevertheless.

Days passed and she watched him sink deeper into despair. At night, she ate the words that tasted like burnt Brussels sprouts and sour milk.

“Please.” She whispered to the darkness as she swallowed the words. “Please make him look beyond the words and see me.”

One morning he looked at her and she knew what he wanted even before he spoke.

He stopped writing and got a job at the local factory.

And her belly began to grow.

Inside her head, the Wordeaters grew more insistent. She developed a habit of going to the library. Wandering through the rows of books she became a connoisseur in identifying authors whose works were pleasing to the tongue.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez tasted like red wine and chocolate. Michael Moorcock was a feast of secret flavors with hints of exotic spices and expensive vodka. Virginia Woolf went down like a slice of paprika and lemon. Ernest Hemingway was tart, stinging her tongue like red chili pepper. Visions of luxurious banquets appeared before her eyes as she took in the words of ancient writers. Pliny and Plato, Aristotle and Dante. She wept as she savored their words on the back of her tongue.

She consumed a thousand literary works. Nobel Prize winners, the classics, current history, everything written with soul in it, she ate. They left behind a satisfying, nourishing taste that made the Wordeaters inside her head burp and sigh.

And her belly kept on growing.

They painted the baby's room blue with clouds floating on the ceiling and birds flying through the walls.

“There are words on the wall,” she said.

“Where?” he asked. His eyes searched the cloud covered ceilings and the bird dotted walls.

“There,” she said.

But no matter how he looked, he could not see them.

“I'm off to work,” he said.

He kissed her and walked out the door.

She smiled as she danced around the bedroom. Inside her, the Wordeaters were singing.

She opened her mouth and they floated out, they populated the walls, and filled the baby bassinet with their smell of warm earth, ripening rice, wild lilies and giant tuberoses.

“Time,” they said to her. “Time for the baby to be born.”

She gazed into their dark eyes and felt no fear.

She called him Ariel.

“Look, look how he turns to follow my voice?” her husband said. “I bet he's a genius.”

He leaned in close and, cradling them both in his arms, he sang a lullaby with nonsensical words that made her laugh.

In Ariel's bedroom, the Wordeaters were waiting. She smiled when she saw their stomachs distended with all the words she had swallowed for them.

“Feed him,” she whispered.

They floated around the baby, their stick limbs touching his head, caressing him.

“Pretty baby,” they purred.

One by one they crooned words to her baby. They gathered him up in their arms and comforted his sobs with weird songs, and jibber-jabber words.

“Beautiful child,” they sang.

The walls reflected the colors of their songs. They sang into him, blood-red sunsets, purple mountains, hazy green meadows, and the black of night.

“Ariel,” they said. It was as if they tasted the sound of his name.

They looked at her and smiled.

“No need for fear,” they whispered.

In the morning the Wordeaters were gone.

She did not see the Wordeaters again and she stopped consuming books.

Ariel grew fast. At three his vocabulary was extraordinary.

“Constellations,” he would say. “Cosmos, curtail, constellations.”

He smiled, rolling the words on his tongue as if tasting them before releasing them with a sigh.

At four he told her a story about a world where dragons and unicorns lived together in harmony. Where fairies convened with naughty imps who jumped from moonbeam to moonbeam and answered the wishes of mortals on a whim.

“Imps?” she asked. “What do you know of them?”

He looked at her with wise eyes and smiled a slow smile.

“Listen,” he said. “There are stories on the wind.”

She strained her ears, but all she heard was the sound of the nightbird singing and the tall grass blowing.

“What did they do to you?” She wanted to ask him.

“Write it down,” he said. “Write down my words.

And he told her a story of dragons at sunset, of winds that brought news of secret wars. His words were filled with the dreams of a thousand warriors; they were heavy with the pathos of years, and dripping with the anguish of fallen nations.

“Write faster,” he said. But her fingers were too slow and she lost some of his words and his stories when she read them were only a pale shadow of what he had said.

“I'm sorry,” she said, when she read them back to him.

He smiled and looked at her with his eyes that were so dark she could barely see her reflection in them.

“Tell me a story,” he said.

And she told him the story of a woman who sat alone in her chair, waiting for the moon to come out. She told him of the silver sickle moon, of Wordeaters sliding down the moonbeam onto her bed, of the words she had eaten and the way they tasted.

When she was done with telling, he was fast asleep.

She held him in her arms and sang the songs that her own mother sang when she was a child, and she cried a little because she didn't know how to sooth the ache inside her heart.

“If only we could stay like this forever,” she whispered. “There would be no need to say goodbye.”

It was dark in the house when her husband came home. In the bedroom, the sheets of white paper were scattered around the bed like fallen leaves.

“Ariel,” he whispered.

He ran his fingers over the words.

A breathe of wind fluttered the pages in his hands and from outside the window, a flame of light illuminated the dragons rising up from the page. He watched them tumble in graceful flight. Green-gold fire licked at the pages, curling the edges, turning them to ash.

He watched as miniature cities rose and crumbled; stars stumbled and collided, warriors clashed in battle, the world fell from its axis, and righted itself again, and at the end of it, Ariel was there, staring at him, his eyes piercing beyond the shell of skin to the pain beneath.

“Now, you must give birth to life,” Ariel said.

Outside, the moon was a sliver of silver fire, and he saw the Wordeaters dancing on the pillows.

“No need for fear,” Ariel said.

He looked up at his son.

And the Wordeaters were around him. They surrounded him with their smell of lilies and wild roses. They filled him with the scent of rich loam, the wild growing of trees and the harvesting of rice.

Images burst to life on the back of his eyelids. Warriors sprouted wings and flew away like eagles, the earth split apart into a thousand splintered reflections of itself, and the stars floated down to earth to speak with the remnants of a lost generation.

He lay there for a long time and when he opened his eyes he saw Ariel floating upward on the beams of the moon.

“No,” he cried. He stood up, and tried to catch hold of his son. “Stay,” he pleaded.

And he wept because his arms were not strong enough, and he felt his son slip away from his grasp until there was nothing left but a ray of moonlight across the cover of their bed.

“He was never ours to keep,” his wife said.

In the darkness, her pale skin shone like ivory, and her body was soft and yielding under the bedcovers.

She turned her face away and he saw the glimmer of tears on her cheeks, and when he reached out his hand to touch her shoulder, he felt her shudder with grief.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

And he thought of how he had shut her out, of the days turned into weeks and months of not speaking.

He looked at her and saw how sorrow had hollowed out her cheeks, and etched lines upon her face, and for the first time in a long time, he reached out his arms to her. “We could have another child.”

They were walking together on the beach, squinting against the glare of sun shining on white- topped waves.

“No,” she whispered.

She looked out and thought of her son whom she had lost to the waves and to the moonlight, and of her husband who stood beside her.

“There are so many stories in the world,” she said. “So many stories packed into books. So many words packed into libraries waiting to be tasted, and swallowed up by people like me.”

“We'll make another child, if you want.”

She looked at him and saw the sadness and the longing and the aching shyness that transformed him from the boy she'd fell in love with into this man with whom she had chosen to share her life.

“Tell your stories,” she whispered. “Write your words and give them life. Let them be the child Ariel once was. Fill your tales with his laughter, with the color of his eyes, with the scent of his breath and the feel of his hand in my hair. Write your words. Bring him back to me.”

She saw the look he gave her. Saw wonder wake up in his eyes, heard the catch of his breath, and felt the trill of his hand reaching out to touch hers.

“Let it be our memorial,” she said.

A breeze blew in from the sea, wrapping them in the warmth of its caress.

“The breeze comes from far away India,” he said. “Where a little boy plays on a beach of black sand and the sun is a ball of red fire.”

They walked on, and his words floated away on the breeze to where a little boy with silver hair sat singing a tuneless melody under the light of the setting sun.

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz is a Filipina writer-mom living in The Netherlands. An incorrigible bookworm, she constantly seeks new ways to share her love for books and stories with those around her. She edits poetry for the online publication Haruah: Breath of Heaven, writes reviews and interviews for Munting Nayon (a Filipino-Dutch publication), and writes columns for Double-Edged Publishing. This story is dedicated to her eldest son who never fails to surprise her with his extensive vocabulary, his free-flying imagination, and his insatiable hunger for stories. You could say that he is responsible for the birth of “The Wordeaters.” Feel free to visit Rochita at
http://rcloenen-ruiz.livejournal.com
.

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OUT OF SACRED WATER

by Juraj Cervenák

(translated from the Slovak by Daren Bakker)

In Which the New Empire Will Face All the Wrath of the Old Magic

“We found Urosh! We found him!”

Prokuy nearly choked. He pushed aside his bowl of mushroom soup so abruptly that half of it spilled onto the compacted dirt floor. He carelessly wiped his mouth, leaving that part of the soup that was in his beard now on his hairy forearm. He snatched up his axe and quickly climbed up the short ladder rising from the zemlyanka.

“Urosh has been found in the woods!”

The sound of axe blows, reverberating throughout the vast hilly countryside despite the falling twilight, gradually began to lose its rhythm and faded away. The men laid their saws aside, sank their axes into the fallen timbers, let loose the reins of the draught horses and scurried back to camp. Prokuy looked up. A boy barely seventeen years old was dashing madly down the slope into the clearing full of smoldering piles of branches. Prokuy knew him well. Bushek was among the few brave souls who would dare enter the woods on the other side of the mountain in search of a lost companion.

“Urosh has been found!” he bellowed from the top of his lungs.

“Stop that shouting!” Prokuy cried out to him. “They can hear you all the way to the prince's fortress! You'll wake everybody!”

Only it was already too late. Work was done for the day and the men were hurrying back to camp. Prokuy swore to himself. Another useless delay. Felling trees and floating them fifty leagues down the River Morava to the main fortress was going terribly slowly. Moymir, the newly-installed Moravian sovereign, was starting to get impatient. Immediately after ascending the throne, he decided to build a new, grand court with enlarged, stronger fortifications. He wanted it finished by winter, but here it was already autumn and the wood needed for constructing it was falling short. And Prokuy knew all too well who they were blaming for it.

Bushek came to a wobbly stop and bent forward, his hands resting on his knees. He tried to catch his breath.

“Speak,” Prokuy growled at him. He wanted to get the bad news out before it reached the ears of the woodcutters on their way.

“Urosh . . .” the boy managed to get out. “In the woods . . .”

“I already heard. What about him? Is he alive?”

Bushek straightened up and looked into the foreman's eyes. He didn't have to say anything.

“Just like before?” Prokuy asked, gnashing his teeth.

The boy shook his head. “Much worse . . .”

Prokuy instantly forgot his anger and started to be frightened. Without thinking he lifted his hand to his chest and touched the talisman he wore for protection, the figure of a dog carved out of lime wood. “Perun and Radhost, don't forsake us now . . .”

The quickly gathering crowd of woodcutters started asking, “What's happened? Where is Urosh? Is he dead?” Prokuy could actually feel the fear that was engulfing one man after the other as if one giant, dark cloud were forming.