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TIME AND THE ORPHEUS
by chiles samaniego

copyright © 2008 / May not be reproduced without permission

(from Weird Tales #351, Sep/Oct 2008)

[ Download this issue as an ebook ]

Playing trumpet at the Orpheus was practically the only life John Bastion ever knew.

Certainly it was little different from any other life he’d ever led. The Orpheus had no band, no singer, no piano; not even a turntable or jukebox. All it had was a small dais for John Bastion to stand on when he played, a mic stand with no microphone, and, of course, John Bastion and his trumpet.

“The reason you’re so essential to the Orpheus, Johnny boy, is you provide wossname, ambience. The Orpheus never used to have one before you came along, and these days, you’ve got to have it to keep what we management types call a competitive edge.”

That was Barney, a one-armed, one-legged ex-pirate with at least one glass eye, who was both bartender and owner of the Orpheus.

“All a them new spots on the strip, like, say, the Blue Oyster Wagon and the Sylvian Digs, they charge an arm and a leg off their customers for the dull wall-furnishings they laughably call their ambience; but you Johnny boy, you give our customers something special at no extra cost. We got our arrangement, and thas definitely somethin’ of itself worth a jawin’ or two, an’ it isn’t anything these folk have seen ‘afore.”

Barney had first come across John playing on a sidewalk corner, all the way across the City, a battered old hat lying with the wrong side up in front of him. Barney, being congenitally tone deaf, and therefore unable to tell good music from bad, had first noticed the remarkable number and variety of people that had gathered around him; positively magnetized by the gawky, dark, inexplicably odd young lad with the horn, they watched and listened with slack jaws and glazed eyes. The on-lookers would frequently reach into their pockets and flick their wrists with quick, sleight of hand motions, each time drawing a significant clinking sound from the depths of the battered old hat on the ground. This ritual was done, Barney assumed, each time John reached a particularly good bit in his playing.

That was the second thing Barney noticed: how John Bastion’s old hat managed to draw more coinage than any other street performers’ particular beat-up head gear. And that, more than the third and final thing Barney noticed watching John Bastion play for the first time in his life, was what made him decide that John Bastion was a gifted chap, and belonged inside the Orpheus.

“I haven’t got nothing to pay you, other than to let you ply your trade as you know it (at just the merest percentage out of your hat, so to speak, for overhead and some such); and if you fancy a good drink, an occasional free meal, and a good solid roof over your head to keep the rain off while you play, you’ll leave your spot on that corner there and come work for me at my place.”

John Bastion had given him a look that told Barney nothing, and Barney thought maybe this bloke was special in other ways as well.

“’S called the Orpheus,” he added helpfully.

John looked at him some more. Barney was starting to shift uncomfortably under his gaze, and was considering whether the addition of a bowl of nuts with each drink to his offer was worth the trouble, when John put his trumpet away, poured the change from his hat into an old brown sack, and shoved the hat onto his head, right side up this time. He sealed the sack with fray-ended drawstrings, and threw it over his shoulder, and stood there, trumpet case in one hand, sack in the other, coat on his back, hat on his head. There was something definitely odd about the lad, but when he nodded, Barney forgot all about it and led the way enthusiastically back to the Orpheus.

Barney was nothing if not true to his word, and he never paid John a single quid or tuppence, but gave him an occasional free meal, and kept a good solid roof over his head that kept the rain off while he played, although it turned out the only drink John would ever have out of the bar was chilled, undiluted tonic water (Barney insisted on this, in lieu of the rain water John initially asked for, with certain vividly portrayed admonitions concerning employee health regulations).

He even threw in a bowl of nuts.

John sat at the bar between sets and drank his tonic water, popping the occasional dry roasted peanut into his mouth. He only ate a little when he had to play. Bits would get stuck in his teeth, and, though it’s never happened before, he was afraid a particularly capricious crumb would choose a good bit in his playing to dislodge and fly into his mouthpiece. Although John was never someone anybody would have called temperamental, he suspected that any interruption to his playing would displease him immensely.

It was at those times, as John sat quiescent at the bar, when Barney would speak to him, giving him what Barney referred to as his ‘pep talk’.

“You take ‘em places they’ve never been, John, and could never be; you give ‘em a piece o’ the street they never woulda seen for themselves. The Artists’ Quarter, lovely neighborhood that it is, ’s no place for a Citizen Aristocrat to be seen gallivanting about.

“And your music, John, I’ve never had an ear for the like, you understand, but it doesn’t take half a glass eye to see it moves them. The customers never spend a mite less time than they intend to, and, more often than not, they spend more.”

He would remember the first time he saw John then, and the third and last thing he noticed about the lad and his audience, and he tried to put good words to what he thought was happening.

“Your music keeps them, toys with their imaginings of time, I reckon, and while you play, they stay and drink and flirt as though all the time in the world was theirs for the takin’.”

He would ruminate over those words, pausing to chew on his lip for a moment, but, apparently satisfied with what he’d said, would say no more and walk away and return to work, or to flirting with Constance, the Orpheus’ only waitress, and a pretty young thing herself.

John Bastion never thought about any of it. He just played when he was supposed to, collecting his hat and his coins at the end, usually long past time for the Orpheus to call it a night.

Then, he’d step out onto the sidewalk, standing beneath the sign of the Orpheus, put his hat in the customary position in front of him, and play some more.

One night, John ended a set the way he always did: hardly noticing the applause, the ovation, Barney called it, of the audience. He blinked the way he always does after having played an entire set, clearing his vision as though having just woken-up from a long, rather pleasant and restful sleep, then stepped-off the dais and moved to the bar.

He waited for Barney to come over with his tonic water. He didn’t usually have to wait too long, but tonight, it seemed Barney was held-up for some reason or another, talking to one of the customers down the other end of the bar. John did the John Bastion equivalent of shrugging his shoulders, which involved no movement at all, and decided to look around.

He’d never actually seen the Orpheus. Night after night he would come, a quarter of an hour before opening, and a quarter of an hour after closing, and the whole time he would stand on his dais and play, eyes turned inward, lids closed, just him and his trumpet and the music, dancing a slow waltz in a wild, ancient place John could neither remember nor describe when he stopped, but which never failed to fill him with a sense of inviolable peace. He stopped between sets for his glass of tonic water and Barney’s pep talk, the occasional peanut and nothing more.

Barney, as the ex-pirate himself liked to put it, could fill a hole to the center of the earth, through to the other side with talk.

At first John had trouble making out what he saw. It was like picking out stalking tigers in a dense jungle, if you’ve never heard of either tigers or jungles; when the tigers did jump at him he was filled not with dread, as you might expect from a surprise tiger attack, but with an inexplicable, indescribable, near-insufferable delight.

He saw the gentlemen in their suits and tuxedos, trench coats and jerseys and vests and leather jackets. The ladies were even more pleasing to watch, in their gowns and petticoats, their shawls and feather boas, their sweaters and cardigans. A few of them wore trench coats and leather jackets like the gentlemen (and there were some gentlemen in gowns and petticoats, as well), but he found it pleasing how different they all were, regardless of gender. He watched them gesture and gesticulate, hunching forward for a lewd whisper, or leaning back for a hearty laugh. There were little groups of silent people as well, and they sipped at their various beverages sulkily, but John found them no less pleasing to watch.

Most of all, he listened to them, all of them, their laughter, their weeping, their shouts, their whispers, their silence.

He was not playing, but somehow, he was back at that ancient place of wildness and peace.

And Constance! Watching Constance was best of all. John had always known Constance was pretty, the way a book might know a character in the story printed on its pages was pretty. But now, he actually saw it: she made her way through the tables like a dancer, dodging glances and lusty grabs with equal ease, never losing her poise or that joyful gleam in her eye, laughing at something unheard from a customer, returning gamely with a witty remark that could bring either laughs or blushes but never animosity or rancor (which, John realized with delight, were two very different words for the same sort of thing).

For the first time in his life, John Bastion was aware, and awareness, astonishingly, brought him joy and delight (two more words that were different, but were both very good at saying pretty much the same thing: which was, to be plain, what he felt at that particular moment).

There was something unusual about Barney, when he finally brought John his tonic water. Barney always hobbled over with the air of someone quite comfortable in the grotesquerie of himself, and would speak in a booming voice that belittled whatever the world could possibly think of a one-armed, one-legged ex-pirate with at least one glass eye.

It was not obvious to John, but it would have been to anyone else: Barney was shaken, and when he spoke, he spoke soberly, without the affected slur he imagined ex-pirates always spoke with, and, most of all, he spoke in a whisper.

“Drink up, John. Here, why don’t you let me add a little something to your drink, give it a little kick?” Barney gestured with the bottle of gin in his hand. John blinked back at him with that look that never told Barney anything.

“I like it fine the way it is, thank you.”

John never called anyone by their name, if he spoke at all, and tonight he was surprised by his own voice, as though he’d never heard himself before, and, quite possibly, never really knew he had the knack for it. He thought about it, and decided it wasn’t quite so bad, saying things, and decided to try saying some more.

“The place is jumping tonight.”

He didn’t know what that meant, but he’d heard it often, from customers who seemed more than passing familiar with Barney, and he thought it had a rather pleasing sound to it. Friendly, he thought, was just how the line sounded.

“I wouldn’t doubt it. Listen, John, there’s something you should know.” Barney again gestured with the bottle of gin, letting the open bottle hang poised over the lip of John’s glass.

“I like it fine,” John said again.

Barney turned over a glass from behind the counter, and poured himself a straight. Double. Make that a triple. Hell, he filled the glass, would probably have filled two the way he held the bottle upturned like it was. This was something new as well; John had never seen Barney drink anything more than tap water when he was working.

He knocked it back, taking one large swallow to empty the glass.

“See that stiff over there? The cocky-looking one in the slick grey suit?” John looked but didn’t seem to get what Barney was saying. “Talking to the giddy young blonde in the red dress.”

John had to squint a bit for the tigers to come out. The blonde certainly did look “giddy.” He wasn’t quite sure he knew what the word meant, but he thought it was a good word for the way she looked and moved and laughed, like somehow she wasn’t quite herself; “beside herself” was the phrase that followed “giddy” in John’s mind.

The “stiff” was a bit harder to pick out of the jungle. Most of the gentlemen wore grey suits anyway, but it finally became clear only one of them was actually paying the blonde the kind of attention that could be called “talking to her,” though a lot of the other gentlemen, and quite a few ladies, were looking as well, albeit from a distance.

When he finally did notice the gentleman, he wondered why he hadn’t picked him out sooner. There was something about the fellow that certainly made him stand out quite conspicuously from the rest, even when he was just leaning over the blonde in the red dress, whispering in her ear as she giddied. Something about him made the word “confidence” pop into John’s head.

He continued to be delighted at his newfound awareness, but when he looked back at Barney, he felt something else he didn’t quite have the word for, though it was definitely less pleasant than anything he’d experienced before that night.

He thought about getting back to playing then, the sensation was making him so uncomfortable (he realized just then how much he didn’t like that―being uncomfortable), but something inside him insisted that he stay and listen to what Barney had to say, though he could think of no reason at all why he should. Perhaps it would give Barney pleasure, he thought, and make the discomfort go away.

Barney had poured himself another glassful (John wasn’t sure it was only the second since he’d looked away) and knocked it back with no less alacrity than the previous one.

“I’ve been ‘negotiating’ with that ‘gentleman’ for over a month now. District Attorney for the City Planning and Development Office.” Visions of Unstoppable Power swam in John’s head at the title, though he’d never heard it spoken before. “Seems there was a bit of an oversight when the deed to the Orpheus passed into my hands. Says it was never meant to be owned privately, that the Orpheus rightfully belongs to City Administration, and the public for which they stand.”

He knocked back yet another drink, saluting his own irony.

“Apparently, it’s been decided that a new public throughway is much more essential to the City than the Orpheus, and that shithead is telling us they’re tearing us down, and want us out of here by tomorrow.”

John recognized one of the words from Barney’s pep talk, and a bright smile played on John’s lips.

“Essential. That would be a good thing then.” But Barney’s response made him a little less certain of his statement, and he added, “To the City.”

Barney kept knocking back drinks. The bottle was almost empty.

“Suppose you could say that.” Something in his voice sounded very much like the word “grudging” was meant for it, and John felt another twinge of delight at the realization that he was getting quite good at that, the meaning of things, but was brought down by Barney’s next words: “And maybe you should go work for them then.”

John frowned at that. He took a gander at all the astonishing things he’d become aware of that night. Looked around at the Orpheus.

“I like it fine the way it is, thank you.”

Barney’s look was pitying, though the effect was lost on John, to whom it was just another “look,” a particular configuration of features that, while unique to other such configurations, remain the general size and shape, being inevitably made of the same composite parts, as Barney’s face.

“Listen, John, I know this is difficult, but the negotiations were just fluff while the Office waited for the plans to come through the pipeline. They were never gonna give us anything. Far as they’re concerned, the Orpheus is theirs, and they don’t owe us anything.

“Tonight, the Orpheus closes for the last time.”

John thought that over, looking around at the Orpheus one more time. The displeasure he had assumed was emanating from Barney alone had taken root somewhere inside of him, and he felt it filling him and shoving out all the delightful things he’d been feeling up to that point.

“Come back tomorrow, then.”

“The City’s made its decision, John, they aren’t giving us an extension. I didn’t tell you sooner because, well, there was never really a lot you could do about it, and I didn’t want it getting in the way of your work. We only have the rest of the night.”

John’s face fell with all the weight and sturdiness of a porcelain jug, filled to the brim with curdled milk, and hit the floor with the exact same effect, assuming porcelain jugs could shatter without actually breaking, without, in fact, exhibiting any formal change at all.

“Well, look, John, it can’t be so bad for you. I mean, you still work the street; you’ve practically never left it. You can always go back to your old corner, playin’ the crowds the way you always have. Sure, you’d have to do without the free meals, or the roof, or the tonic water. . .”

John looked at his glass, which he hadn’t yet touched, and was still full of tonic water, though slightly less chilled than it had been.

“Or me.” Barney knocked back one last drink, tried to pour himself another, but found the bottle, at last, empty.

“Constance,” John said, though he wasn’t quite sure why.

“She’ll have it worse than either of us, I expect. Me, I’m a wrinkled hand up the withered arse, if you know what I mean.” (Which John didn’t.) “I’ll find my way, old fart that I am. But Constance? Young as she is, she’s never known another life, and never wanted any other. I’ve always said: if there’s anything stands a good chance of outliving me, it will be the Orpheus, with Constance waiting at the tables.”

Barney shrugged his one remaining shoulder, shaking off the sobering effect the alcohol seemed to have on him. “But, I s’pose, ’s the way of the world, and I’ve been wrong afore.”

John didn’t want it to be “worse” for Constance. And he didn’t care if Barney’s been wrong before; he wasn’t even quite sure what Barney was wrong about then and what he could be wrong about now, but he knew he didn’t want to take any chances with Constance, or with the Orpheus. In one night, he’d fallen hard, harder than any human being has ever been known to fall (and human beings, well, they can fall pretty damned hard), and he knew he had to do something, would never be able to go on if he didn’t.

“John? Wake up boy, time for you to play.”

Yes. That was it. It was time for him to play.

* * *

John stood on the dais like he always did, trumpet in both hands, head bowed slightly. He closed his eyes, turning them inwards, and thought of all the things he’d seen, become aware of, that night. The feel of the tonic water sliding down his throat. Barney’s grotesque but endearingly familiar one-legged hobble. The gentlemen. The ladies. The giddy blonde and the District Attorney for the City Planning and Development Office. Constance waiting tables. The Orpheus and all its noise, its own sweet music; he’d never realized it before, but he knew it then; he never played alone: the Orpheus played with him.

All the delight and comfort and joy and sadness and numbness and drunkenness and sobriety: he thought them all in his head, balled them up tight and put them in the pit of his stomach.

He opened his eyes. Constance was standing at the back of the room, watching him.

When he seemed to hesitate, he saw her jaw tremble slightly, as though she’d said something. He imagined he heard her whisper one word: “Play,” she might have said.

“Play.”

He brought the trumpet to his lips, letting it linger there, as though savoring his first kiss; which, in the way of things that night, it may as well have been. Keeping his eyes on Constance, on all the ladies and all the gentlemen, on the giddy blonde and the District Attorney and the ex-pirate behind the bar, on everyone and everything that was the Orpheus that night, he played.

Your music keeps them, toys with their imaginings of time, I reckon, and while you play, they stay and drink and flirt as though all the time in the world was theirs for the takin’.

The first note started softly, and grew. It was long and mournful, and seemed to fill the Orpheus with its sorrow. Several hearts broke that night, but no one dared even breathe to interrupt that note.

You give our customers something special. You take ‘em places they’ve never been, and could never be; you give ‘em a piece o’ the street they never woulda seen for themselves.

The bar grew quieter with each passing second, and all at once became silent. All eyes were on John as he started his last set. How many were there? Fifty? A hundred? All of them were listening intently, as though incapable of anything else: jaws were slack; eyes glazed. Everyone stopped to hear the last mournful song to ever be heard from the trumpet of John Bastion.

The customers never spend a mite less time than they intend to, and, more often than not, they spend more.

John just kept right on playing, through the night, straight up through dawn; standing right there at the heart of the Orpheus, he just kept right on going like nothing in this world could ever stop him.

And everyone in the Orpheus, they just kept right on listening.

And City Administration, they went right on and built that throughway.

Now no one ever gets to go to the Orpheus; but that’s OK, John Bastion thinks as he plays, because now, no one ever has to leave.

* * *

If you ever find yourself happening across that particular throughway, take a moment to listen; it’s a quiet place for all the cars driving by, but if you listen, and listen hard, you just might hear John Bastion playing.

They say it’s lovely stuff. Me, well . . . I’ve never had an ear for the like, you understand.

When asked to write about himself, chiles samaniego enjoys using lowercase letters and the third person: “Easier to make things up that way,” he says. As a writer of fictions, he wonders if everything he writes might be true, and therefore not to be trusted. He is originally from the Philippines but is currently living in Singapore.

LANDSCAPE, WITH FISH
by Karen Heuler

copyright © 2008 / May not be reproduced without permission

(from Weird Tales #348, Jan/Feb 2008)

[ Read this story as a PDF ]

“You gotta control your fish better,” Willis said. “They’re scaring my dog.”

Tom nodded. “Didn’t know they could go so far. It’s interesting.”

“The first time, yes,” Willis agreed. “After that, it’s nasty. The dog ain’t the same.”

“Easy now, it’s just a fish.”

“I hear they eat things you wouldn’t think. I hear they slide right under doors.”

“That ain’t true, about the doors. You’re thinking of mice, not fish. These fish eat mice, so they’re more like cats. Only not so fast, I think. At least, I haven’t seen ’em move that fast.”

“I hear,” Willis said slowly, “I hear they can get in the pipes. You know, you’re sitting on the john…”

“Now that’s damn foolish,” Tom said. “That’s maligning my fish.”

“Keep ’em on a leash,” Willis said flatly. “And put up some kind of fence.”

“It’s a good thing we’re friendly,” Tom said shortly. “Or I’d be annoyed.” With that, Tom lowered his head and left. He came across one of those special-order fish of his on the well-worn path back to his own house, and he kicked it a little. It made a kind of hissing sound.

“You watch it,” he said to the fish. “You were meant to be eaten, you know.” He looked at the fish, its big toothy mouth, its snaky head. “Though I wouldn’t want to see you on my plate. Not without gravy anyway.”

He poked the fish back to the pond and set to putting up a fence around it. “Fencing a pond,” he grumbled. “Damn foreign fish.”

He pounded in the posts and put up the mesh. The fish sort of hopped along the ground so it didn’t have to be high. The job went easily.

He thought it was his imagination when he heard the pops against his window in the morning. He sat at the kitchen table and had his coffee first, that was his rule. He saw movements, like big flies, out of the side of his eyes, but he waited to catch them dead-on.

He saw one, finished his coffee, saw another, and got up.

They were leaving oval slimy smears on the windows and falling in the bushes around the house. A little stunned they were, obviously shook up till they got their wits about them again. It annoyed Tom when he saw them, because it meant there’d be trouble. He didn’t have the kind of neighbors that would let a thing like this go by without comment.

He never actually saw them take off — he always caught them flying, instead — but he had to assume they did a kind of leap first, so he put up a higher fence.

That didn’t stop them, and his windows were getting all smeared. Well, then, some kind of tent would do it. He stared at his little pond, which, when you started thinking about covering it, got a whole lot bigger. He sighed. It might be best if he got Willis to help him. It was hardly a secret he could keep.

Kind of strange he hadn’t heard from Willis anyway, he thought, as he walked the old path to his neighbor’s house. There were fish in the trees and they sometimes dropped on top of him with a wet thwack and an unpleasant snapping of teeth. They hadn’t quite got the hang of it yet; they landed upside down and their teeth went nowhere.

Willis’ place was looking a little off. The grass must have gone to seed because there was a whole flock of grackles standing off to the side making grackly cackles.

“Psst,” Willis said, tapping on his window from inside. “Get in here.”

Tom stepped inside.

“No problems getting through?” Willis whispered. “You didn’t hear anything?”

Tom frowned. “Well, there’s birds outside. I did hear that.”

Willis drew in a long breath. “What were they saying?”

With that, Tom started to actually listen to the murmur outside, which wasn’t exactly the regular kind of bird talk. He stepped to the window. The birds were walking around, meeting in groups. He listened hard.

The birds were saying, “WILLIS Willis Willis. WILLIS Willis Willis.”

He stepped away from the window. “Now, that’s creepy,” he said.

Willis nodded. “Did they say anything about you?”

Tom listened again, but there was nothing but Willis in the air. “No,” he said. “It’s just you.”

“What if they start lying?” Willis asked. “Won’t nobody believe me over birds.” His eyes got filmy. “How much do you think they know?”

Tom went out down the path and picked up a few of his fish. It seemed like they’d followed him part way. Some fish hopped along behind him back to Willis’ place, and when he got to the grackles one fish reared up and grabbed a bird by the wing. Tom kicked it free, watching that bird rise up and join the others scattering overhead. As long as they were talking, they could talk about that.

Willis peeked from his window until the yard was clear and then he came out. “Those fish of yours,” he said. “Mighty evil looking. They got a temper?”

“Sweet as can be,” Tom said. “They get attached, too, just like a dog.”

“I think my dog ran out on me. Kind of miss him.”

They stood for a while in silence, watching the fish. They were flapping on the ground, wiggling their tails back and forth till they started making a bunch of holes around the yard. Then they each settled into a hole and turned their heads towards the two men by the house.

“Well,” Tom said. “Looks like they’re planning on staying. You want ’em?”

Willis nodded. “I can see their attraction now. They’ll keep the yard free anyway. And they’re quiet — I like that.”

Tom nodded. “Real quiet,” he said. “You never hear them coming. You never know they’re there.”

Satisfied, the two men looked at the fish, and the fish in their trenches looked back at them.

Karen Heuler’s stories have appeared in anthologies and in many literary and commercial magazines. She has published two novels and a short story collection, and has won an O. Henry award. Her latest novel, Journey to Bom Goody, concerns strange doings in the Amazon. She lives, writes, and teaches in New York, which has its own share of strange doings.

FIRST PHOTOGRAPH
by Zoran Živković

copyright © 2008 / May not be reproduced without permission

(from Weird Tales #351, Sep/Oct 2008)

[ Download this issue as an ebook ]

Appearances can be deceiving.

You look at a picture and think you see everything. Young mother with babe in arms. Indeed, what else is there to see? You’ve seen thousands of such photographs. Even on postcards. It’s a cliché, you think.

And yet it isn’t. Take a closer look. The two-month-old child (me, although, of course, you can’t recognize me on my first photograph) seems intent on holding its head where it’s not supposed to be, under its mother’s bosom, closer to her stomach.

There’s something unnatural about that position. One would expect the baby to long to hear its mother’s heartbeat. That’s why mothers instinctively hold babies with their head cradled in their left arm.

I suppose I too (although, to tell the truth, I don’t remember) loved to hear my mother’s throbbing heart. How could it be otherwise? I was a normal baby.

Or perhaps not quite normal. I knew something that, even if I could, I wouldn’t have told anyone. Because it wasn’t normal. At least not according to the standards of the time. Today people would probably have a different take on it all. Be more indulgent. At least I hope so.

Here, let’s check it out. I’ll tell you the secret why I, this weak little baby, was trying with might and main to listen beneath my mother’s bosom. I wanted so terribly to hear the beating of another heart that was down there a bit lower.

No, my mother didn’t have two hearts. Not at all. Anatomically and in all other respects, everything about her was in perfect order. She certainly would have been horrified to learn about that other heart, particularly since it wasn’t hers and yet was located inside her.

Well, all right, whose other heart could that be, you wonder with a certain understandable surprise, in the normal mother of a two-month-old baby?

Here’s the answer. The other heart beating in my mother’s body belonged to my twin brother. I would like to call him by name, but he was never given one. Not only because he was never born. Had my parents known that he was conceived when I was, they would certainly have had a name waiting for him. As they did for me. But there was no ultrasound at the time.

Wait, wait, I can already hear your interruptions, what do mean to say ― he wasn’t born? How could he still not be born two months after your birth? All-embracing medicine has yet to record such an event. Without mentioning the fact that your mother, even after bringing you into the world would have been ― and looked, which is more important ― pregnant.

It truly would have been like that, and your amazement quite fitting, had things taken their natural course. But they didn’t. Exactly two months and eleven days after my twin brother and I were conceived, he decided not to be born. It’s true we were only fetuses at the time, but you are terribly mistaken if you think such far-reaching decisions can’t be made so early on.

All right, not all fetuses are equally mature. Take me, for example. Something like that would never have crossed my mind. I was much more ingenuous. Nothing more far-reaching than enjoying the warm, safe surroundings of my mother’s womb interested me. But even then my brother was characterized by a seriousness and responsibility of which few can be proud, among newborns and adults alike.

His decision astonished me, of course. How else could it be? I had counted on us being born together as befits identical twins. How could I enter the world by myself, deprived of the closest relative imaginable? It’s not certain I could even consider myself a twin in that case.

Completely distraught, I asked for an explanation. But I didn’t get one. All I was told, in the special nonverbal way that fetuses communicate, is that that’s the way it had to be. As though Fate itself were talking. It was not until much later that I realized it actually could not have been otherwise. The explanation went far beyond my capacity to understand at that age. It’s questionable that I could even today. I sincerely doubt that I will ever reach an understanding of the world to match that of my brother when he was just a fetus.

While I was unable to grasp his reasons for not being born, I wanted to know how he intended to pull it off. This was a technical, not metaphysical question, so I hoped that I would be able to understand it. Was he intending to keep growing and developing in Mother’s stomach until he came of age, and even afterward? I was horrified at the thought of what our mother would look like with a grown man in her stomach.

He took me soundly to task for such a vicious thought. Of course he wouldn’t keep on growing. How could he spoil his own mother’s appearance? He wouldn’t even stay in his current tiny proportions that would certainly cause her no inconvenience. He would go to the opposite extreme. Become smaller.

I must have given him a dumbfounded look with my large fetus eyes, because he hastened to dispel my doubts. Why was I so surprised? We live in an age of miniaturization, don’t we? Everything’s getting smaller and smaller. We’re coming closer to a quantum world in all respects. It turns out that even the cosmos itself isn’t quite as enormous as was once thought. So why should fetuses be any exception?

What else could I do but accept this rational explanation. But this did nothing to lessen my concern. When do you intend to start shrinking, I asked him. Sensing fear in my inaudible voice at the possibility of being all alone, he firmly promised that nothing would happen before I was born. He would maintain his current size until then.

And indeed, while I continued to grow, he didn’t change. Over time I became so large compared to him that I had to be very careful not to accidentally harm him. Moving about like every lively baby at the end of its term in the womb, I could have smothered him, pressed him or even smashed him.

My anxiety grew as the delivery date approached. It’s a tumultuous event, something could go wrong. What if he didn’t manage to stay inside? If he came out with me, he wouldn’t even be a premature baby. The obstetrician and midwife might not even notice him.

He just waved his bud of a hand dismissively at my anxious questions. I was not to worry, everything was taken care of. He was always to the point when important matters were involved.

He was able to console me in that regard, but not about our parting. It was clear to me that Fate was behind the whole thing, but this didn’t make it any easier for me. Is there anything harder than taking leave of your twin brother? It’s like parting with your own self. But we’re not parting, he assured me. I won’t die, I’ll just get smaller. And I won’t go anywhere. You’ll be able to hear my heart whenever you put your ear to Mother’s stomach.

Just as he promised, the delivery went smoothly. For both of us. And for Mother too. In spite of her exhaustion, she was cheerful, and everyone misunderstood my cries. They shouldn’t be criticized for this, though. Every

baby cries at birth. How could they suppose that my tears were from parting with a brother no one knew about?

Although quite weak, ever since Mother first drew me to her breast I made every effort to put my little head on her stomach. At first she found it unusual and brought my head back up, but she got used to it over time. Particularly since I fell asleep the fastest in that position. And what mother wants to have trouble putting her baby to sleep?

My brother’s heartbeats, although barely audible, had a calming effect on me. We were no longer touching like before, but we were separated by the very small partition of Mother’s skin and a thin layer of fat. You could even say that we were still connected. Just like when we were happily inhabiting the same body.

Well, no idyll is ever of long duration. This one ended when I was four and a half months old. Not all at once, but over three days. At first I thought there was something wrong with my hearing. I had to press my head harder and harder into Mother’s soft abdomen to make out the sound of the tiny heart inside.

And then with horror I realized the truth. My brother had set out on the final minimization. At the end of the third day I could no longer hear him regardless of my efforts. And I couldn’t try any harder because Mother’s stomach had started to hurt from all my pressing, so she held me away from it.

Inevitably I fell ill. Many adults, let alone a baby, would have been crushed by such a trauma. My illness caused the doctors great concern. No one could discover its cause. They examined me thoroughly and tried various therapies, but nothing helped improve my blood count and bring back my appetite. And pull me out of my apathy.

I got better at the beginning of my sixth month. They thought it happened all by itself. The doctors couldn’t find the reason for this spontaneous recovery either. But it caused them no concern. Who cares why things are going fine, while they are? They didn’t miss a chance, however, to give themselves credit for this favorable turn of events.

And the credit was all mine. I simply started to look at things rationally. At that age a lot of maturing happens in a month and a half, even when you’re sick. Or rather, particularly then.

All right, I can’t hear my brother’s heart anymore, but that doesn’t mean, as he himself said, that he died. He’s still alive in Mother’s womb, he just got smaller. To the quantum level. Maybe even below it. Indeed, miniaturization truly knows not boundaries. And there, as we all know, it’s completely immaterial to talk about sound, so there isn’t any beating.

This silence from the womb actually came at just the right time. I couldn’t keep my head on Mother’s stomach forever. What would that look like? Babies have to be weaned sooner or later. It’s a bit hard in the beginning, but then they get used to solid food. And start enjoying it.

I rarely think of my brother today. You know how it is: out of sight, out of mind. I only remember him when I look at this photograph, and I don’t do that very often. You can’t see him, but I know he’s there. And I hope he’s well wherever he is now. In any case, it was his own choice.

I don’t know whether I’ve convinced you, though. I’d say I haven’t. Congratulations on the quantum world, I can almost hear you thinking, but if a person doesn’t believe their own eyes, whom will they believe and why? Appearances can be deceiving, but not that much. The picture only shows an ordinary young mother with babe in arms. And since the baby truly doesn’t look like me now at this advanced age, how can you believe me when I say it’s me? Particularly since my penchant for wild ideas earned me a bad reputation long ago. I’m even trying to make a living out of it.

Zoran Živković is a writer, essayist, researcher, editor, publisher and translator from Belgrade, Serbia, where he still resides. He is the author of seventeen works of fiction including The Fourth Circle (1993), Time Gifts (1997), The Last Book (2007) and Escher’s Loops (2008). Živković has been nominated for several awards and received the Miloš Crnjanski Award, World Fantasy Award, the Isidora Sekulić Award, and the Stefan Mitrov Ljubiša Award for Life Achievement in Literature. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

THE LAST GREAT CLOWN HUNT
by Chris Furst

copyright © 2008 / May not be reproduced without permission

(from Weird Tales #352, Nov/Dec 2008)

[ Download this issue as an ebook ]

It was clown-hunting weather. The leaves of the box elders were beginning to turn in the draws that cross-stitched the Musselshell River country. Frost fastened on the dry summer grass. I rose early one morning and marked a pair of trumpeter swans forging south under a bank of fast-moving clouds, their calls torn away in the ragged wind that smelled of burnt sugar. It was time to gather the musty costumes, clean the slide whistles, bag up the guns, and spin the lures of cotton candy.

My name is Jack Wilson. Ever since back in ‘22 I’ve worked as a guide, leading wealthy hunters who hope to bag the coveted Three Ring Slam: a trophy clown from every major tribe. Along with my tracker, stone-faced Keaton, I’ve hunted renegades from the Montana reservations every fall and smeared the faces of fat city men with the ritual blood and greasepaint from their kills. But fifteen years is a long time in this game, and the prey dwindles every year.

It wasn’t always that way. My father was the first clown agent for the Emmett Kelly Reservation. I remembered how he would take me and my brother, Billy Boy, along on his visits to the clowns, and how we watched that day when the tribes first arrived. Wave upon wave they came, the Kellys and their subsidiary tribes, the Chuckos with their whirling carousel hats, the yipping Zipps, and a small band of JoJos, spreading through the valley on their wagons and elephants. It seemed there was no end to them. Hundred-year-old flivvers flopped in on limping tires, disgorging scores of clowns. Bedraggled jugglers held dirty ninepins limp by their sides; their faces brightened a little when they saw us rubes. Two weary elephants, Dinky and Snaggletusk, dragged the steam calliope into the shade of a solitary cottonwood.

Billy Boy gaped at the straggling procession and toddled after the shaman, a gaunt giant sporting a battered top hat.

Chief Hairy Eyeball jolted up in his square-tired Pierce Arrow to parley with my father. Hairy Eyeball stood proud in his baggy brown pants, greasy shirt and filthy waistcoat, his wig and tie askew, his shabby derby hat set at a careless angle, and three days’ stubble shading through his makeup. He tripped on his floppy brogans and somersaulted to attention.

“What the hey,” he said. “Put ‘er there.”

Father reached out to shake hands and received a jolt from the ceremonial hand buzzer that sent him sprawling in the dirt.

“Allow me,” said Hairy Eyeball. Bowing to dust off Father’s suit, he squirted him with a lapel flower, then spent a long minute pulling a knotted rainbow-print kerchief from his coat pocket. He wiped Father’s face, and stuffed the kerchief into his sleeve.

The chief signaled that the preliminaries were over with a mighty blast on the klaxon.

“Well met, John Wilson.”

“Well met, Hairy Eyeball.” Father turned to the throng and welcomed all of the clowns to the reservation.

The Chief chuckled and, speaking through a megaphone, launched into his patter.

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this here’s gonna be our headquarters―for the duration.” A chorus of slide whistles drew out a mournful, minor tune. Hairy Eyeball raised his arms and gestured for silence.

“I know we’ve given up a lot,” he said, “but from what I can see, this looks like our last best place. Come on, let’s get to work. We have a circus to run! And for Zoot’s sake, water those elephants!”

The calliope hissed to life, and the clowns passed the cigar butt before they erected the big top and the sideshow tents. Even in defeat they were magnificent.

* * *

My wife, Lucy, was caught up in the Portland Massacre. She was working as a mime when a berserker clown cadre grabbed her off the street to use as a human shield. I never knew if it was the police or the clowns who’d shot her, but after Lucy’s death, something changed in me and I moved back to Montana.

There were some guides who used laugh tracks, bicycle horns, amplified kazoos, and calliope detectors, but I was determined that my clients earn their kill in the old way. Classic guns, nothing automatic, nothing high-tech. A minimum of sound effects.

One had to be careful to make a clean kill, too, for a wounded clown could turn on the hunter or, worse yet, maul a client. I carried a rifle and a revolver for just such instances.

And I brought down renegades for the government, but I was developing less and less taste for the work. Entire tribes of clowns had been wiped out: the Bartys, the Kokos, the Rootie-Kazooties. Now even the proud Karamazovs and the once-numerous Bozos were reduced to bands of pitiful remnants that eked out a living as exhibits in Ripley’s museums across the country.

* * *

I was throwing bundles of bottle rockets into the back of the pickup when Crosswhite, the new regional clown agent, called from Bozeman.

“Wilson,” he shouted, “there’s been a breakout!”

“Don’t see how it’s any of my business, Crosswhite.” There was no love lost between us. Crosswhite was CEO of the Nimrod Channel and an ambitious, mean lickspittle, fresh into a D.C. political appointment and sent by the Interior Department to deliver the clowns an ultimatum: Hand over the renegades or see their winter supplies cut off.

“I can make it your business,” he said. I heard the smile in his voice. “Billy Boy’s gone greasepaint and is leading the renegades. I want you to bring him in.”

“What’s my brother got to do with it?” I said. “He’s a performance artist in Santa Barbara. Bullshit. Let somebody else clean up your mess.”

Billy Boy had always identified with the clowns more than I had. I admired clowns for their anarchy, for their free lives on the prairie and under the big top, but for Billy Boy it was love. From the first day he met them, when he rode with the shaman atop Snaggletusk, he knew that he belonged with the clowns. At sixteen he underwent the secret initiation rites and became a member of the Emmett Kellys.

How far had he gone this time?

“Come on, Crosswhite, I doubt Billy Boy would even show up in Montana, let alone lead some breakout.”

Crosswhite laughed. “Wilson, are you listening? They’re grabbing hostages. Your brother’s in trouble up to his big red wig. The Kellys made him their new chief.”

That stopped me for a moment. “Wait, that’s impossible,” I said.

“Wilson, Hairy Eyeball is dead.”

The cold wind cut through my parka.

“Billy Boy and that crazy old shaman, Runs With Scissors, they’re going around like the Messiah and John the Baptist, talking to the other tribes, preaching the stilt dance. They think the clowns can recover their old power.”

I had glimpsed the stilt dancers only once. Billy Boy and I were watching them through a gap in the big top when the shaman caught us. He ran me off; he allowed Billy Boy to stay. I still had a hard time picturing Billy Boy as one of them. To me he’d always seemed like a clown wannabe.

“And he has Catlin,” said Crosswhite.

A year ago, Keaton and I had accompanied the artist Fitzhugh Catlin on a last-ditch expedition to capture the major clown chiefs in paint before they died out. Each day for three months Catlin set up the blocks of velvet on his easel and painted the clown chiefs, barnums, and ringmasters I’d forced to stand before him. We lived in tents and wagons, shared the clowns’ simple but hearty fare ― the corn dogs and the cotton candy, the Cracker Jacks and sno-cones, the buffalo wings and deep-fried candy bars. We drank deep from barrels of pink lemonade or tipped back gulps of Mickey’s Big Mouth. I grew strong and content on the food and the outdoor air, but I knew, as we followed the clowns on their way to winter quarters, that they suffered my presence only because my brother had taken the initiation.

“Can’t the feds handle this?” I asked.

“Abetting a breakout, hmm, that’s good for about ten years,” he said. “Of course, we could also sell the ranch pour encourager les autres.” I heard him shuffling some papers. “And there is the tiny problem of your contract. Pinchot was far too lax with you, Wilson. You still owe us a year out of your life.”

I looked south. A figure was running at a steady pace along the river road, kicking up dust. It had to be Keaton. I recognized his skinny frame even at a distance.

“All right. What do you want?” I sighed.

“Bring in Billy Boy. Minimum violence, minimum fuss. And I get to film.”

* * *

Let me tell you about Keaton. The first thing you noticed was his dour, impassive expression that never changed, even in battle. Keaton ― he had no first name as far as anyone knew ― was the best tracker in the business, able to sniff out circus smells from miles off: roasted peanuts, cheese popcorn, cotton candy, stale beer, moldy canvas, elephant dung, and the blood trail of killer clowns. If a clown put on a polka dot, Keaton knew about it. If a motorcycle clown gelled his liberty spikes, Keaton caught it on the wind. The clowns considered him a traitor for helping the hunters, and made no secret of marking him for special torture if he were to be caught.

He was also remarkably brave. During the brief Clown War he distinguished himself when he carried Major Vegas from the field at the Battle of the Little Big Top. I’m told that the savage Kokos counted coup on Keaton more than sixty times, yet he never faltered.

I trusted him with my life, in a bar fight as much as in the hunt. Once, we went to San Francisco for some R&R, and one night we took in a show at a comedy club. Maybe we were making a mistake. At his lowest point, Keaton had worked as a rodeo clown in Sawdust Pete’s Wild Clown Show, but had quit in disgust. Maybe I should have paid attention to the twitch at the corner of his mouth. Both of us had been drinking, enjoying a tour through the beers of the world, when the first performer took the stage. I don’t know what was so disappointing about the show, other than the fact that it was a collection of rimshot jokes and jousts with hecklers. I so wanted the comedian to wear greasepaint, a whirligig hat, a bulbous nose, and floppy shoes. Our mood grew ugly, and I had to hold back Keaton from assaulting the headliner, an overpaid, over-curled, over-dyed, red-haired young man in a horizontal-striped shirt. The club’s bouncer punched Keaton, but my tracker merely licked away the trickle of blood from his lower lip.

Keaton shielded his eyes with his left hand and peered intently toward the back of the club. He pivoted to face in the opposite direction and shielded his eyes with his right hand, staring out into the street. He removed a large title card from inside his shirt. In elaborate woodcut lettering it read, GIVE UP YET? The bouncer was infuriated and swung at Keaton again, but Keaton feinted right and the bouncer punched the bricks instead. We made our exit.

* * *

Keaton and I prepared to bring in Billy Boy and rescue Catlin and the hostages. I put on a belt of false noses and a polka-dot camo shirt. I wore a new orange wig so I could approach clowns without spooking them. Keaton removed his porkpie hat, dipped his index finger into a jar of molasses, drew an oval on the top of his scalp, and clamped a crumpled, bloodstained war boater on his head. We were ready.

* * *

We set out before dawn for the camp of the Emmett Kellys. As we came over a rise I saw the big top, a disheveled memory of the magic I remembered from childhood, its canvas torn and stained with mildew. Greasy smoke curled from under the tent flap. Dinky the elephant, emaciated, held his trunk in his mouth and shook his head from side to side while doing a mad little shuffle at the end of his chain. He had worn a circle three feet deep and had rubbed the skin raw on his trunk. Snaggletusk’s skull and twisted ivories stood guard above the entrance to the funhouse. Faded wigs hung from the eaves.

“Are you getting this?” Crosswhite asked the cameraman.

I warned them all to say nothing until Catlin and the other hostages were well away. I cared little what happened to Crosswhite, but I felt uneasy about endangering the camera crew.

A hostile reception party met us in the center of camp. Kelly Two-Step blew a blast on the air horn.

Billy Boy came out of his tent to parley. I hadn’t seen my brother in seven years and was unprepared for the changes in him. In addition to the Kellys’ sad clown makeup, he had pasted decals of the decimated tribes on his forehead.

“What the hey, Billy Boy.”

“What the hey, Jack. Long time.” Billy Boy crossed his puffy sleeves over his chest and examined us. “You bring guns and cameras. Which one will you shoot first?”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” I said. “Let the hostages go, stop the stilt dance, and we’ll give you safe conduct back to the reservation.”

“A lot of conditions,” he said. “We’ll see. Let us parley.”

As he motioned me toward his tent, Billy Boy caught sight of Keaton and stopped.

“It’s bad enough that my own brother deals in death,” said Billy Boy. “But you dare to bring the traitor Stoneface Keaton to my camp.” He spat at the tracker’s feet.

Brazen young clowns approached Keaton and honked their klaxons in his ears and threw confetti in his eyes, but he stood imperturbable as ever. Others surrounded the cameraman and the soundman and somersaulted over their equipment bags.

The tallest of the Kellys, the old shaman Runs With Scissors, strode from the funhouse and wrenched away Crosswhite’s leather bag. Velvet sketches for Catlin’s series on the extinct tribes spilled to the ground.

“Ho ho ho!” said Runs With Scissors. “Lookee what we have here, boys and girls.”

An excited honking arose and just as quickly died. The Kellys silently passed the velvet boards among themselves. Real tears rolled down the painted cheeks they dabbed with giant handkerchiefs.

Billy Boy held the sketch of Hairy Eyeball at arm’s length. He gazed at the old chief’s picture so intensely, I thought he was trying to x-ray it.

“Come with me,” said Billy Boy. “I want you to see something. The camera crew stays outside.”

We entered the big top, followed by Runs With Scissors. Inside, light slanted into the tent through a rent in the roof. Catlin was lashed to the center pole, encased in a thick layer of pink cotton candy. He looked like a giant cocoon with a man’s head sticking out. Stilt dancers whirled around him in the center ring and squirted him with water rifles. I don’t know how he’d managed to withstand such torture, but he was alive.

Under the disapproving eye of Runs With Scissors, we sat down in the ringside seats.

“Good God, Wilson,” whispered Crosswhite. “You’ve got to stop this.”

Keaton flashed a title card at Crosswhite: SILENCE!

“Let Catlin go, Billy Boy,” I said.

Billy Boy ignored me and selected a pair of red and white stilts from a bundle near the seats. He tied on the stilts and waited to enter the dancers’ circle. At a signal from the shaman, the dancers parted.

Billy Boy was transformed the moment he stepped into the ring. He led the intricate steps of the stilt dance, shuffling clockwise then counter-clockwise around the center pole, circling closer to Catlin in ever tighter rings, faster and faster, all the while sustaining a tremolo on the slide whistle.

Billy Boy danced for maybe an hour before corkscrewing out of the circle. The dancers followed him and rested against poles and guy wires.

“I had a vision as I danced,” said Billy Boy, untying the straps and removing his stilts. “This artist’s death would serve no purpose. We cannot win this way. Let him go.”

Angry shouts rose from the stilt dancers.

“Power demands a sacrifice,” said Shot From Cannon.

“Catlin steals souls,” said Reedy Pagliaccio. “He must pay with his life.”

Runs With Scissors, clearly upset by Billy Boy’s decision, but deferring to the chief’s authority, was trying to hold back the more volatile stilt dancers.

“Cut him down,” said Billy Boy. “I have spoken.”

Keaton and I broke the hard casing of cotton candy and cut Catlin down. He sagged between us.

Billy Boy led us from the tent. The crowd of clowns murmured angrily when they saw that we had Catlin.

My brother tried to calm the Emmett Kellys, but slapsticks and slide whistles began to rain down upon us.

“What about the other captives?” demanded Crosswhite.

Keaton turned to slip Catlin away from the camp, but a small knot of clowns in unfamiliar dress blocked them and began launching themselves off the teeter-totter, all the while keeping a flight of ninepins in the air.

Crosswhite aimed at Billy Boy and fired. The bullet grazed the chief’s scalp. The clowns surrounded their leader for a moment, then turned as one, whooping and honking, and attacked us. We ran downhill toward the cover of the trees.

I looked back and saw Runs With Scissors tear off his ringmaster trousers. The shaman was strapped into a giant pair of red scissors. He stalked to the funhouse and pulled on a tasseled cord. The false front of the funhouse fell forward, revealing the hostages in cramped cages behind a display of fireworks. Clowns stuffed them twenty to a Volkswagen Beetle and sent them hurtling towards us.

Keaton held up two title cards: WATCH OUT. PINCER MOVEMENT. But it was too late. Swooping down the brow of the hill, a unit of berserker clowns snapped giant clacking pincers. They pierced the unfortunate camera crew again and again.

Only Keaton’s quick shooting kept us alive.

I don’t know how we did it, but we began to get the better of them. Dead and wounded clowns littered the earth. Runs With Scissors was gravely wounded and his scissors shattered. A handful of stilt dancers and berserkers gathered around him, chanting the death dirge.

The old shaman pulled a Zippo lighter out of his hat, flicked it open, and tossed it into the fireworks. “Under the big top, brothers! Under the big top!”

Keaton and I looked at each other. For the first time I could recall, he raised his right eyebrow. In his hand was a title card: DUCK!

The funhouse burst asunder in a shower of jagged shards and shrieking rockets and fiery wigs. Shot From Cannon rode the back of a Red Molotov before he, too, blew up in the afternoon sky. Snaggletusk’s skull landed five feet from our hiding place. The big top caught fire, its flaming canvas moaning like a dying animal. Random bottle rockets ignited the sideshows, and the entire circus burned to the ground. Dinky, unchained, fled past us into the badlands.

We limped back to our field camp, a clearing in a glade of aspens. We fell exhausted, and lay in grim repose.

* * *

“Jack!” Billy Boy shouted from the aspens. “See how many fine clowns have died today. Why do we do this?”

“You’re not going to negotiate with him, are you?” said Crosswhite.

“Come into the clearing and we’ll talk a while,” I shouted back. I walked out toward the edge of the trees and waited for Billy Boy. He was dressed in his full regalia as chief of the Emmett Kellys. A shot fired behind me. Billy Boy was wounded in the shoulder, and he ran into the cover of the trees.

I turned.

“Crosswhite, you damn fool!”

We stood glaring at each other, our guns raised, until Keaton intervened.

He withdrew a thick stack of title cards from his shirt, fumbling with them before he found the ones he wanted.

WAIT, read the first card. I’LL GO AFTER HIM, read the second. Both cards had bullet holes in the top left corner.

Ten minutes later, Keaton came out of the aspen grove dragging Billy Boy on an orange sleeping bag and stopped beside our camp in the middle of the clearing. Blood seeped from an ugly wound on Billy Boy’s left shoulder. A shallow groove ran red where a bullet had grazed his skull, and his blood-damp hair hung down over his right eye. Kapok leaked out of rents in his sleeves. Keaton leaned Billy Boy against some duffle bags piled next to the lean-to.

Crosswhite came forward, his rifle pointed at my chest. “He’s mine, dammit! Get out of the way, I’m taking the last shot.” He raised the old Winchester and motioned Keaton to step aside.

Keaton placed himself between Billy Boy and Crosswhite.

“Wilson,” barked Crosswhite, “control your man!”

I stepped closer to Crosswhite and nodded to Keaton.

“Why don’t you shoot me, too, Crosswhite? Because you’ll have to, you know. There aren’t any cameras now to catch your heroics, so why don’t you just go ahead?”

“I don’t care if he is your brother. He’s vermin.”

I caught Crosswhite on the bridge of his nose with the butt of my rifle and sent him sprawling in the greasy grass. Then I picked up the antique Winchester and fired a shot into the ground by his head. Crosswhite, groaning and holding his shattered nose, screamed and tried to roll away.

“Bastid,” he sputtered, spitting blood and broken teeth.

I levered out the rest of the bullets, gripped the barrel, and brought the stock down again and again on a granite boulder until the wood crazed and flew off in long splinters. I jammed the muzzle into a crevice in the rock and jumped on the barrel, bent it out of true, and tossed it into the woods.

Keaton motioned me toward Billy Boy, who sat propped against Crosswhite’s gear.

“Hey, Billy Boy.”

He popped open one puffy eye and stared upward. He chuckled for a moment, then a spasm went through his body and he coughed up bright arterial blood.

“Jack, it’s you,” he whispered when the coughing stopped.

“It’s all right, Billy Boy.” I sat down and cradled him in my arms. “Try not to speak.”

He smiled weakly under the greasepaint frown. With his wounded right hand he fumbled in his pants pocket and pulled out a two-foot comb, a rubber chicken covered in blood, a leaky can of silly string, a strand of knotted scarves, another strand of scarves, a rusted slinky, a ball of purple Play-Doh, yet another strand of scarves, and finally the dented klaxon that was his badge of office. “Here, I want you to have it,” he said.

I took the klaxon from him bulb end first and squeezed out a loud Ah-oo-gah that echoed through the clearing.

Billy Boy was breathing like a wheezy concertina.

“You’ll take me to the big top, won’t you, Jack? They have clowns at the big top.” He sighed for a long count, and I knew he was dead.

I pressed his head against my own, smearing my face with blood and greasepaint.

Chris Furst is a California nomad who lives in upstate New York. He is a graduate of Clarion West. His work has appeared in Talking Back: Epistolary Fantasies and Captain Kidd Monthly. He once tried to join the circus, but they wouldn’t have him.

SEVEN SHADES
by Karen Best

copyright © 2008 / May not be reproduced without permission

(Weird Tales Spam Fiction Contest
Honorable Mention, inspired
by the spam email headline
“Get your Teeth 7 shades Whiter!”)

Helena used to love tea. But that was before the whitener and this government facility where Scott watches her sip water through a straw attached to her mouth appliance. They both know it’s there to protect them, but still, he tries to remember what her lips looked like and can barely recall a plump lower curve.

The building has black plastic on all the windows. Helena detaches the straw from the appliance and picks up her tablet. She taps out a message and shows Scott the screen. This is what they call a conversation. She wants to know if they’ve found a cure yet. This appliance thing sucks. She just wants to eat an apple for once, instead of applesauce.

Scott is still picturing her incandescent teeth shining like headlights as she buries them in an imaginary fruit when he realizes he has no idea how she brushes her teeth now. It’s only been two months since the doctors came to bring Helena here, and already he’s forgotten what her smile looks like. There is a thin line of light leaking from the appliance that now blocks the glow emanating from her mouth. The doctors here have warned him that her teeth are not to be looked upon unless he wants his eyes to boil.

Helena used to be self-conscious about her smile. Years of strong black tea had dyed her teeth an antique white. Now they shone brighter than flaming magnesium. The whitener had promised teeth seven shades whiter. No one bothered to ask: “Whiter than what?”

Nurses in black goggles walk past the open door. A guard in what looks like a welding mask paces in the hallway. Scott waves one of the nurses over and asks if they’re making any progress. She shakes her head. Helena makes a sound that could be a sigh, deeply muffled. The nurse tells them they’re doing everything they can. His distorted reflection in her black goggles stares back as she says this.

A cry echoes down the hall, and the nurse goes running in its direction. The guard says something about the third one this week. In the next room, another patient has pulled off his light-absorbing appliance and looked in the mirror. The nurses have the guy on a gurney, but Scott knows that his retinas have already been burned away. A shiver pours down Scott’s back as he looks at Helena. The goggles he was issued by the nurses lie next to her cup of applesauce. How easy it would be to slip off the appliance and see her smile again, and for the last time.

He reaches for her, and she must think it’s to comfort her, because she leans in. Once his arm is around her he lets his hand rest on the appliance’s latch, the tension in his fingers anticipating the moment it will drop away and annihilating brilliance will stream from her mouth.

TOM EDISON AND HIS TELEGRAPHIC HARPOON
by Jay Lake

copyright © 2007 / May not be reproduced without permission

(from Weird Tales #345, June/July 2007)

[ Download this story in PDF ]

Tom Edison stared out the viewport at the rolling hills of the Iowa territory, just within Missouri country. The horizon moved with a lurch-and-swoop not unlike the boats on the Great Lakes in choppy weather, though today’s brilliant sun and flawless sky belied the comparison.

The steam ram City of Hoboken moved like a drunken bear in all weathers, pistons groaning with the pain of metal as the great machine walked the prairies.

Behind him, his printing press chunked through another impression, Salmon Greenberry grunting with the effort. Salmon, Tom’s freedman friend and colleague in experimentation and business alike, though they were both barely sprouting beards yet.

Boys in arms, adventuring together across the West. He resolved that he would someday write a book. If one could ever send communications across this benighted country.

“The problem with the telegraph,” Tom said slowly, the idea unfolding even as he spoke, “is that one cannot run the lines west of the Mississippi. Those damnable Indians, or worse, Clark’s Army, just pull the copper down again.”

There was a freshet of ink-odor in his nostrils, and barely audible, the damp tear of a sheet from the stone. Tom’s ears were never the best.

Salmon said something unintelligible, grunting with his labor, then the words segued into meaning. “…help what they are. It’s the West, Tom.” There was a familiar warmth in his friend’s voice, in which Tom sometimes to his secret shame found comfort in the clanking, heaving darkness of the steam ram during prairie nights.

Tom snorted away the reverie and Salmon’s suggestion together. “People have been using that excuse since Jefferson’s day. Apologists for spiritualist madness, with no understanding of or interest in Progress. This is a better world than that, amenable to logic and sweet reason.”

Another thunk of the press. Another grunt from Salmon. “As you’ll have it, Tom.”

Though he still had not turned to face his friend, even with his failing ears Tom could hear the grin. He smiled back. Another secret shared.

A shot echoed from above, in the watchman’s post, followed by the clang of valves as the captain shunted power to the turrets.

“Attack,” shouted Salmon.

Tom whirled to help his friend latch down the printing press, then they both grabbed the repeating rifles racked by the hatch of their little work-cabin, heading for battle stations. Tom thought he heard the crackle of distant gunfire, but it might have been his own pulse.

* * *

The weather deck of the City of Hoboken was a good forty feet above the solid Iowa earth. “Deck” was perhaps too kind a word for what was really just the plank ceiling of the bridge deck below, surrounded by a low railing with built-up firing points for prone riflemen. It was perhaps nine feet wide and twenty feet long, and featured only the watchman’s post, like a preacher’s lectern set amidships with no congregation but the distant horizon and the wheeling sky.

Tom and Salmon took up their firing points on the starboard rail, up top with the other useless supercargo and oddlot apprentices. Those with real worth in a battle manned the boilers, or the turrets, or worked the bridge deck. The City of Hoboken’s eight dragoons, eternally dissolute masters of pasteboard wagering, were certainly down in their lower balcony, ready to leap, shoot, or toss grenadoes as circumstances dictated.

The weather watch was for anyone with hands to shoot and nothing else to offer in defense.

“Where?” shouted Salmon. Tom watched his friend, waiting for the other boy’s eyes or rifle barrel to move in response to whatever the deck watch advised.

Then Salmon rolled onto his back, snappy as a scalded cat, and stared skyward.

Oh, no, thought Tom, but he did the same.

Something very big was silhouetted against that perfect prairie sky. It was shaped like a man, without the wings of one of the angels of the mountain West, and appeared to be carrying a cannon.

“What…?” he whispered aloud. Tom had read the dispatches, those that were made available in Port Huron, and Chicago, to a fast-talking young man like himself. Not much was published about angels, but he’d even seen the Brady daguerreotypes from the Battle of St. Louis the previous year.

Angels had wings. Everything that flew had wings. Save one rumored monster out of the deepest Western mountains.

Tom brought his rifle up to point skyward, stepping it against his body like a boat’s mast. He pulled the trigger, thinking, Nephilim. The great avengers. Nothing can kill a Nephil. And he’s above the elevation of any of our big guns. It was an offense against man and nature, this flying thing, and Tom swore out the measure of his fear. He had not come West to die at the hands of an impossibility.

His shot was the harbinger of a hailstorm of firing, the weather watch loosing its useless bullets at a thing above which laughed in a voice made of thunder, earthquakes and simple, gut-jellying terror.

* * *

The captain made a quick, hard turn, taking the City of Hoboken toward the dubious shelter of a tree-lined watercourse. After their initial orgy of firing, the weather watch calmed down a little as the Nephil banked above them.

It was definitely carrying a cannon, Tom realized. Something long and sleek, perhaps one of the new Parrott rifles. He couldn’t imagine what need a supernatural being would have for such a thing. Supposedly the Nephilim could call lightning from the summer sky and break the backs of angels.

Did he have anything below that would entice it, entrap it, somehow save this day from the bloodbath which was surely coming?

In addition to hosting his half-penny newspaper, The Trans-Mississippi Monitor, the City of Hoboken was also home to something of a laboratory which Tom had accumulated. The captain tolerated Tom and his equipment in exchange for mechanical services rendered and the cachet of having his own newspaper on board. The prestige of a working press allowed him to charge higher fares for passengers heading for Des Moines, Council Bluffs and other points on the City of Hoboken’s usual routes Westward toward the distant riches of the Front Range in the Colorado country.

As part of his laboratory, Tom had on board a store of chemicals, machine tools, and curious items of his own devising. But what could dispatch one of the Nephilim? Legendary as they were, there were no whispered tales of the mighty monsters’ defeat in battle.

The attacker circled lower, lazy and slow, following the City of Hoboken through the great steam ram’s course changes. At least it had not set to killing them yet.

What could he do? Tom ran through a rapid mental inventory of acids, caustic chemicals, electrical jars, sharp tools, mechanisms.

There was the harpoon, he realized. The watchman’s post had a pintle mount and a steam valve for that implement — designed originally for fighting off the mastodons, which sometimes crossed the Missouri River to range the Iowa prairies.

He could surely devise a suitable load to burst on impact with the attacker.

Tom handed Salmon his rifle and jumped to his feet. “Bannock,” he shouted to the day watch. “We need to unship the harpoon rig. I can fight this thing!”

“You’re buggered as a limehouse rat,” said the watchman, peering at the Nephilim through a telescope. But as Tom scrambled down the hatch, he saw Bannock whispering into the speaking tube.

* * *

Tom was trying to quickly, very quickly, assemble a caustic load fit to drive off something as great and terrible as a Nephil. Tom didn’t believe for a moment that God had sent the terrible creatures to the Mormons, but nonetheless they were here in the world. Even Nephilim had eyes. And he had a number of nasty acids fit to burn even the most resistant membrane. His science would defeat this treacherous superstition.

Then his gaze lit on the Planté-Fauré battery cell. It was a new device, recently shipped out at great cost from New Jersey. Tom had made some modifications to it by way of accumulating ever more electrical potential, hoping to produce a fearsome spark from the thing as part of his ongoing investigations into the practical applications of such energies.

What would a great electrical discharge do to the flying menace? It might be as good as a strike by lightning.

Tom abandoned his acids and grabbed the loose cable end off a spool of telegraph wire. It was four-stranded copper, coated in gutta-percha then wrapped in sealed hemp yard — the best his limited money could buy, all the way from Buffalo. He dragged the end into the passage, letting the cable unspool, and shouting for Bannock or Salmon to come help as he worked to pass the copper cable up top.

Once the weather watch had hold of the cable, shouting and excited, Tom grabbed a ball-peen hammer and a set of staples, along with his tool bag. He nailed down the loose end off the spool center, allowing himself some slack, then scrambled up the ladder, past the writhing snake that was his cable.

On the weather deck the breeze was stiffer. Cottonwoods swayed around the steam ram as the captain took them further down into the creekbed. Tom knew their search for cover was in vain — the City of Hoboken was over four stories tall. Nothing could hide such a magnificent machine, such a stout work of Dame Progress. And certainly not out here on the Iowa prairie, where their pursuer circled high above, a vulture waiting to descend.

He set about lashing the free end of the cable to Bannock’s harpoon, again leaving himself slack. A copper point on the head would be perfect, but Tom figured he could make do with the steel.

When the line came up short and the nervous weather watch huddled around him, Tom pulled himself away from his work on the harpoon shaft.

“It’s like this, men,” he shouted. He hated speaking, hated rousing men like this — that was the job of officers and shop foremen, not a thinker like himself. Especially when he was the youngest man on the deck.

Salmon gave Tom a big wink.

“That up there’s one of the Nephilim!” Tom pointed at the sky. “Some folks say the Mormons raised ‘em from a Bible. Some folks say they’re Chinee magic, brought across the sea by the Russians. Well, I don’t care!” His voice was a bellow now. “It’s here a-hunting us, and we’re fixing to drive it away. But you each have a part.”

Eight frightened men loomed in closer. A voice squawked from the cupola’s speaking tube, but even Bannock, the day watch, ignored the captain in favor whatever spectacle Tom was about to put on in the face of life and death.

“Very shortly I’m going below,” Tom said in a normal voice. “I’m going to hook this harpoon up to a cell battery. Once I done that, don’t nobody but me or Bannock touch nothing here. When I give the word, you all each start shooting again for all you’re worth. We must draw that thing down close, so’s Bannock can shoot it with my wires. Then…” His hands slammed together. “Boom.”

There was a ragged cheer. Tom took a simple knife switch from his toolbag and hammered it into the deck next to the hatch coaming. He cut his cable at the taut end, and wired it into the switch, careful to leave the switch open.

“Don’t touch nothing,” he said, wagging his finger with a significant look at Bannock, then ducked below again.

* * *

The City of Hoboken continued to lurch over rougher terrain, swinging back and forth to avoid the Nephil. Tom’s footing was challenged in the little cabin, his glassware threatened even stowed within various leather-padded racks. He drew on his heaviest insulated gloves, and then with great care proceeded to wire the free end of the cable to the copper terminals of the Planté-Fauré cell.

He was just tightening down the second connection when the great steam ram shook with a noise that Tom felt within his bones. There was a grinding, and the deck canted off true five degrees, then ten.

Somehow the captain got the vessel back on balance, but the stride had changed — Tom could feel the difference. Where had the shot hit?

Only one shot in that Parrott rifle, he thought. Blast and damn that featherless bird, this wasn’t how men were meant to live!

He raced back up the ladder, afraid he might already be too late. Had the shot signaled the beginning of the Nephil’s attack?

The weather watch were already blazing away, their rifles and muskets wreathing the open deck with smoke as fast the breeze could carry it off. The top of the steam ram already reeked of death, and there had not yet been blood spilled.

“Not yet!” Tom shouted, but his voice was lost in the violent noise. He looked up, around, scanning for the attacker, but between the gunpowder smoke and whatever evolutions it had made through the sky, he could not find the Nephil.

Tom slapped Bannock on the shoulder. The day watch had his harpoon loaded and tracking, swinging the gun on its pintle.

“Have sight of it?” Tom asked.

Bannock shook his head.

Then the Nephil rose above the City of Hoboken’s starboard flank. The muzzle of the Parrott rifle was huge in its arms, a vast, gaping pit of death sweeping the deck as the Nephil grinned. Despite his resolve, Tom screamed, as terrified as any child.

* * *

Imagine a man tall as a telegraph pole. His eyes glitter the same bottle-green as the insulators that carry the copper-cored cables with their burden of living thought and speech. His skin is fair as an Irishwoman’s, his hair black as the heart of a Georgia cracker. He is handsome in a way that would make a statue weep, and bring any blooded solider to his knees. If this man was not terror incarnate, if he did not tower over everyone and everything in his path, he would be worthy of worship.

Instead, he is merely — and utterly — feared.

The Nephil’s smile drove the weather watch toward the hatch. Oakey Bill jumped off the port flank, arms flailing, screaming his way into the long, fatal fall in preference to being trapped amid the scrum on deck in view of the leering monster.

Tom shoved Bannock back into the scout’s cupola. “Fire it on my call!” he yelled. “Into the chest!”

“I…” Bannock was screaming, too.

Facing the Nephil was like facing a city on fire. The force of its will blazed across Tom, Bannock and the rest of the panicked weather watch. Though it was pale as any white man, the Nephil’s skin gleamed like moonlight in a graveyard. Tom felt as if he were falling forward into a city, a necropolis, a land peopled by the dying and the dead, an eternal, pallid landscape of lost memory and —

“No!” he shouted. “This is the Age of Reason.” Tom grabbed Barley by the shoulders and pulled him from the scout’s cupola. He would be damned before he would bow before the evil thing’s fearsome aspect. The harpoon could not be so difficult to fire!

“Me,” shouted Salmon in his ear.

Tom looked up to see his great, good friend shaking his head and pointing at the harpoon. “No time,” he said, then swung the shoulder brace toward the Nephil, which was already rising above the weather deck, cocking its arm to throw the Parrott rifle down upon the steam ram.

The lines were clipped into place, the pressure gauge showed a full head of steam. Tom flipped over the locking pin, aimed the steel head toward the Nephil’s vast chest, and pulled the trigger.

There was a horrendous shriek as the steam pressure discharged. The shoulder brace of the harpoon slammed into Tom harder than any punch he’d ever taken while a burst of scalding steam enveloped him from the line which sprang free with the shock of the firing.

The Nephil took the harpoon point in its gut. Even through the swirl of steam, smoke and pain, Tom registered the expression of surprise on the monster’s face as it dropped the Parrott rifle and grabbed at the shaft which stuck. Somehow the electrical cable held.

But nothing happened.

The Nephil began to laugh, an enormous barking roar like a Missouri cyclone, dark vapors gusting from a mouth that seemed to open wide enough to swallow them all whole.

What had gone wrong? Even within the agony of his steam-scaled face and hands, Tom felt a cold stab of pain and fear in his heart.

Then he realized that he had not arranged to complete the circuit.

Salmon slapped his shoulder again and pointed down. Tom leaned over, blinking away the agony of the steam burns on his face and hands, to see his friend standing over the knife switch stapled to the weather deck.

Tom nodded.

Salmon leaned down, closed the copper blade, and held on even as sparks played through his hair.

The Nephil’s laughter changed to an eerie howl. Tom looked up again, his vision growing red — why? he wondered even in that moment — to see sparks pouring from the monster’s mouth, its hands, its hair. Far more electricity than could have come from Tom’s Planté-Fauré battery cell. The Nephil raged amid a storm of blue, yellow, and green sparks, lightning snakes that writhed along its arms and legs, seared its eyes, set fire to its skin.

I have opened a circuit to Heaven, Tom thought. He collapsed against the edge of the scout’s cupola, wracked with pain of his own, wishing he could pass out. That mercy was not offered him, though his sight dimmed to red mist. Even the arrival on the weather deck of the dragoons with their grenadoes and their clattering weapons was not enough to distract him from the pain.

* * *

Tom woke to a hand upon his shoulder. The steam ram was under way once more, he could tell by the gentle swaying in his body. He tried to blink, but his eyes were gummed tight.

A bandage, he prayed.

“Can you hear me, son?” It was the rumbling, patriarchal voice of Captain Brown, the City of Hoboken’s master.

“Yes, sir.” Tom paused, gathering his fears. “But I cannot see you, sir.”

The grip tightened. Brown smelled of whiskey and old leather — the cover of a Bible, Tom thought. “We’ll find you a doctor at

Council Bluffs, Mr. Edison. Cletis reckons you’ll have your sight back. As for the scars…”

Scars? “What?”

“You cannot feel them, son? Your face and hands is burned fierce by the steam.”

Tom felt very little other than the captain’s hand on his shoulder, and that scared him.

“Where’s Salmon?”

“Your Negro friend is dead. Kilt by your telegraph gun.”

Salmon had been holding the knife switch closed when the Nephil… exploded. The copper wire must have carried some of that extraordinary energy back onto the deck and into his friend. Tom felt his eyes finally, as they filled with tears so warm he must be weeping blood.

“But you kilt one of them monsters, son. You’re a hero.”

Hero. Tom wanted to turn his face to the bulkhead and cry for Salmon. He would never hear that belovéd voice again.

But he could not. This was the century of science, and he would be damned and damned again before he would let some Biblical monsters drive America from her West. No other man would ever lose his particular friend this way again. “I will bind the West in chains of copper,” he whispered, “and make her monsters bow to Progress. I swear this.”

“That’s the spirit, son.”

Brown’s hand left Tom’s shoulder, then the captain stepped out through a hatch which clanged shut, already shouting orders.

He could not think on Salmon any further, so Tom set his mind instead to wondering how the so-called telegraph gun had been so deadly to one of the Nephilim. Could he arrange for bigger Planté-Fauré cells, perhaps mounted on aerostats, to bring the battle to the enemy? The West needed railroads and telegraph and civilization, not the wild anarchy of steam rams and Clark’s Army and avenging angels.

He would pluck the last of the Nephilim from the sky himself, and ground their cousin angels as well.

Jay Lake lives and works in Portland, Oregon, within sight of an 11,000-foot volcano. He is the author of over two hundred short stories, four collections, and a chapbook, along with novels from Tor Books, Night Shade Books and Fairwood Press. His most recent novel is Escapement, the sequel to Mainspring. Jay is also the co-editor with Deborah Layne of the critically-acclaimed Polyphony anthology series from Wheatland Press, and the 2004 winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

• The Alchemy of Stone, Ekaterina Sedia’s novel of alchemical lust & automated anarchy
• Clockwork Heart, Dru Pagliassotti’s icarus-winged steampunk adventure-romance
• “Five Thoughts on the Popularity of Steampunk,” by Stephen H. Segal

The third place winner in the Weird Tales Spam Fiction Contest!

* * *

MEXICO DELIVERED AT YOUR DOOR
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copyright © 2008 / May not be reproduced without permission

I love Mexican food. Tacos, enchiladas, and guacamole are my favorites. So, the email offered to deliver Mexico to my door, and I was hooked. I should have read the fine print. I know better than to jump at something like this — but it was so cheap, and since the accident, I don’t get out very often. Actually, never. It’s amazing the things you can have delivered to your home. Groceries, clothes, books, and just about anything else you can imagine. The email said to allow four to six weeks for delivery. A week or so in, I actually forgot about my order. I felt depressed and had to stay in bed for two weeks. That order was the last thing on my mind. (more…)

The second place winner in the Weird Tales Spam Fiction Contest!

* * *

BOY EATS FRIED RAT, PICTURES
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copyright © 2008 / May not be reproduced without permission

Almost everyone has seen the pictures, and the unfortunate few at the Coma Farm who haven’t will be getting the audio version with their next round of Oxygen Blast®.

I ate a fried rat.

It all started this morning. I got up and immediately updated my “life^feed®.” As I’m sure you’re aware, last night’s dream was a big disappointment and I made sure that everyone knew. See the thing is, I’m kind of like a big deal on “life^feed®.” I got like 30 thousand people following me, so it’s kind of expected that I weigh in, you know, on everything. So yeah, the dream was stupid gay. “I want my 8 hours back,” I totally posted that. I mean seriously, this season’s dreams are completely lame and there are times when, I swear, I think about opting out. (more…)

Finally! It took a few extra days for us to contact all the winners, but Weird Tales is now proud to present: the first place winner in the Weird Tales Spam Fiction Contest!

* * *

LET YOURSELF LOOK SPINY
by Richard Howard

copyright © 2008 / May not be reproduced without permission

“Bone Exposure is sort of like paleontology,” said Connie, pulling her jumper down and turning around. “Your bones are fossils waiting to be revealed. The process takes about eight hours and involves picking away the flesh covering the desired bones with scalpels and chemicals. So far we’ve been one hundred percent successful. Not one single person has come back to complain about re-growth.”

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