Weird Tales #358, page 7
“Am I?” Old Pete said, and returned to his work. “What a funny thing to do.”
My watch claimed our tasks done at twelve o’clock high, but from the color of the sky it could easily have been noon’s skulking sister midnight. A hard, unceasing wind pasted our clothes to our bodies. Sand swept off the dunes, tickled our noses, made it unpleasant to breathe.
Notching my initials into the foundation at my feet, I stepped back and let my sculptor’s pick fall into its bucket of tools. A drop of rain hit my open palm.
“Handsome George!” called Old Pete. “You ready?”
Handsome George’s castle was broad and flat, a kind of city state of small, compact buildings, no two alike, huddled together and radiating out from a central palace, surrounded on all sides by a great wall lined with ramparts and studded every few feet by a lookout tower. A market square spread itself across the northern border where sculpted vendors at their booths hocked every good worth purchasing: livestock, fruits and veg, crockery, clothes, and slaves by the dozen. Guards patrolled the streets that surrounded the main palace. Soothsayers, prognosticators and doomsayers stood atop soap boxes preaching their own brands of apocalypse. Women of ill repute stalked dark doorways; criminals of every persuasion prowled the alleys.
Handsome George huffed back his ginger hair, stepped into the broad, empty sporting arena on the west side of his city and placed both hands on the copper rod that jutted from the palace’s highest point.
He nodded to Old Pete, and Old Pete nodded back, then shifted his gaze to Slow Alfie.
Slow Alfie’s sandcastle was the smallest of the six. Not a castle at all, really, but a house. Two stories and a roof that rose to his waist. Windows and shutters. Picket fence and a mail box. An ankle-high sand man mowed the lawn in slacks and a tennis shirt. Two girls in pigtails purveyed a lemonade stand out front. Through a side window, a woman could be seen setting a pie to cool on the sill above her stove. A cat slept on the sofa. The TV was on. I didn’t have to ask if it was the house he was born in.
Slow Alfie gave Old Pete the thumbs up, spat into his small, mousey hands, rubbed them together, and slapped them tight around the copper rod that shot from the house’s chimney.
True to form, Felix and Helix and gone in aesthetically opposing directions. Being the traditionalist of the pair, Felix had constructed a fairytale castle with towers and ramparts, surrounded by a moat that swarmed with carnivorous reptiles of undreamt dimensions. Knights in plate armor lined the battlements, gathered themselves in rows in the central courtyard as though braced for siege. At the top of the highest tower, a young woman stood at a window, gazing out across the bristling crop of spear tips, arrowheads, and raised swords to a lone, armored figure situated outside the castle, beyond the moat, mounted on his warhorse as it galloped toward the heavily fortified compound.
But while Felix had struggled over the dunes with a wheelbarrow full of picks, trowels, buckets, brushes, levels and other instruments of measure, his twin had eschewed any such trappings of precision beyond his own hands. No two walls of his castle were the same height or length. Spires rose into the air in impossible s-curves, loop-de-loops, and figure eights. Found objects decorated the alien fortress. Muscle shells served as doors. Bottlecaps became window shades. A candybar wrapper waved from a toothpick flagpole. One window was cut in the shape of a hand. The one next to it, an eye. Few of the castle’s residents looked remotely human.
The twins took hold of their copper rods, and nodded to Old Pete, who then turned to me. Thunder rumbled overhead, a sleepwalking giant stumbling its way toward us. “You ready?”
I freely admit to having no imagination. Not in a visual sense. Since toddlerhood did I battle with my own dim wits; in mute dread did I labor for inspiration for how my castle could stand apart from the other Sons’. Nothing came. For years, nothing came. Until the night before we went to build. I was in the bathroom, staring into the mirror, trying and failing to count the grey hairs I’d developed (thirty-seven, already at the age of ten!) in pursuit of an original concept. Staring into the mirror, I imagined my head as a closet full of ideas that would all come tumbling out if I were to but open the door. If I could but find the door!
And then it hit me. . .
I built myself. A sand sculpture self-portrait. Only, instead of eyes, I’d installed windows shaded by a shingled brow. Where the mouth should have been, I placed a door, and so on. My hair, always a mass of unruly curls, served as the support structure for a grand tree house that sprouted from my skull, complete with tire swing and owl’s den.
“Nice one,” said Old Pete. “But where are the people? Who lives there?”
“Nobody,” I answered. Standing atop the red plastic bucket I’d brought with me, I took hold of the copper rod that poked out through the topmost part of Mr. Sandman’s head. “It’s a haunted house.”
Old Pete nodded, and turned to his own castle. There was no question— his was the finest of the day. Perfectly conical in shape, Old Pete’s tower boasted an unremarkable exterior save a winding shelf that wound around it to prevent erosion. Bullet-shaped windows ran up in a spiral, allowing for a view of the labyrinths which spanned the breadth of each of its thirteen interior levels. Skeletons littered the floors, impaled on spikes or crushed by sprung booby traps. Half-decayed bodies slumped against corners, anchored by fingers dug into the walls as they starved to death, lost in the maze while their bodies wasted away. A beast haunted each level of the tower. Giant spiders, snakes and rats stalked the interlocking corridors. A minotaur kept watch over the penthouse. And at the very top, where the endless road of pitfalls and illusion lead to a single trap door in the tower’s roof, lay a mountain of treasure. It was the only part that looked fake, that horded swag. No more than a clump of half-sculpted sand, a kind of fool’s gold, as was Old Pete’s intention, I now believe.
I’d lost. The other boys’ dejection was also painted on their faces in bright shades of crimson as well. But it was square. We’d been tested and bested and that was that.
Old Pete’s copper rod ran the length of the tower and emerged from the top at shoulder-height. He grabbed hold of it, and gave me a nod. Wind whipped his dirty blonde shag around his head, sent a constant spray of brine to sting our sight.
As I examined the tower, and the other boys’ work as well, Old Pete’s strange song came into my head, repeated itself as we waited for the storm to hit.
London Bridges. . .had a great fall. . .along came a spider. . .who lost her sheep. . .and cried wee-wee-wee all the way home.
Only the bad parts, all stitched together with a minor note melody. I wasn’t aware that I was singing it aloud until I caught the expression on Old Pete’s face. He gave me a funny smile then, like we’d bumped into each other in the woods after dark, on separate errands to bury something.
He joined in the song as we turned to meet the storm.
Even with practice, it was hard to stand firm when the lightning came. After all we’d been taught at St. Ahab’s, forgoing literacy, maths, history and science, save how they related to the more arcane studies of meteorology, metallurgy, and the like; after the films we’d been shown and the practice drills we’d run, it still took nerve to stand in your threadbare trousers and wait for Zeus to cut you down.
“Here it comes, boys!” said Old Pete. “Belts!”
At Old Pete’s cue, every boy down the line freed a hand and whipped the belt from the loops in his shorts, folded it over twice or three times, and shoved it between his teeth.
George was the first to be hit. The bolt came down over the water, a dozen feet out. At the last moment, it hooked in toward land to blast the boy right out of his shoes. I never saw them come down.
I turned to Old Pete, eyes wide. He looked calm, happy even. I don’t know why he waited till I was watching to do what he did. You couldn’t call us enemies, but we weren’t exactly friends. Whatever the reason, he chose that moment to let go of his rod.
When the lightning came for him, it hit Old Pete so hard I thought he’d disintegrated, smote by the gods for his impudence. The boy had completely disappeared. As had his castle. The lightning struck the rod, uneasy now in its moorings without hands to steady it, and destroyed Old Pete’s life’s work as it had surely destroyed Old Pete himself.
Helix and Felix were next, struck by prongs of light split down the center from the same bolt as it lifted them into the air, then discarded them with a violent caprice. Helix flew back to the dunes. Felix skidded down to the water. That’s when I spotted Old Pete. He was laying face-down in the sea.
I didn’t think twice. Or once, for that matter. If I had, I’d have no doubt seen sense and stayed where I was and waited for the storm to hoist my bones into the sky and twist them like a wire hanger bent in a wet shirt.
Even now, I can’t say why I did it. All I remember is that Old Pete’s strange little patchwork song was still rhyming its way through my head when I spat out my belt, loosed my hands from the copper rod and ran into the surf. Couldn’t help but notice the scorched thumbprint of sand where the boy’s castle had once stood— the castle he’d left home to build, had been chosen to build, and which surely would have won had he not abandoned it.
He was still breathing when I dragged him from the water. I was almost disappointed. I wanted to thump him on the chest like they do. Not the mouth-to-mouth bit, just the thumping. Didn’t get to do the latter, but the former wasn’t called for, either. So that was a trade, I guess.
I thought I could make it back. My castle was still standing. I leapt to my feet, took a step inland, and watched my dream explode. Electricity coursed down through the copper rod and, with no one to steady it, destroyed my sandy doppelganger. As if to scold me, a splinter of light peeled off from the main bolt and slapped my outstretched hand.
Couldn’t say how long I was out, only that I was last to wake.
“Come on, lad.” Old Pete was on top of me. Shaking my shoulders. Whispering. “They come.”
Those words alone would have been enough to get me on my feet had I been dead and buried in a concrete coffin.
Handsome George, Slow Alfie, Helix and Felix stood in a line before their castles, each earthy construct now turned to glass from their respective doses of lightning. No longer resembling the work of master adolescent artisans, the surviving castles had become dirty, alien things, hard and smoke-colored, marbled with veins of muddy shadow, looking not so much built as grown, a kind of crystal pox that bubbled up from a syphilitic earth. Yet they caught the light. Lured it and trapped it and held it captive behind their walls and parapets with a raw, scarred beauty. A piece of my own castle lay at my feet, an open eye turned to glass, warped in its final moments. Staring up at me with mute accusation.
A dozen dark shapes loomed in the deeper water less than a league off shore, illuminated by rays of sunlight only just breaking through the clouds. A passerby would have mistaken them for bunches of kelp gathered by the tide had it not been for their slow, deliberate progress toward the shore. The Mermaid Queen and her court had come to choose her new concubine.
A wasp’s stinger pricked my heart at the sight of my demolished sandcastle. I would never go under the waves. Never know the weightless, shimmering paradise that awaited one of the four boys from St. Ahab’s who stood tall as the royal saltwater court emerged onto the border of our two kingdoms.
Old Pete seized my arm. We both did our best not to scream.
Her eyes came first. Glossy black marbles rose from the tide on red-veined stalks above a face of grey rubber. A lipless mouth parted to reveal three rows of dainty razorblade teeth. Densely matted tendrils of a man-o-war served her as hair, trailing back over her shoulders, their tips aglow like the lure of an angler fish.
She had a woman’s breasts. Six of them, hard and milk-less carbuncles that pocked her chest at random. Gill flaps filled the spaces between ribs. Jagged, horny plates ran down her neck, arms, and back. Her hands, if they could be called hands, looked more like a lobster turned on its back, a mass of frantic spines and feelers.
The lower half of her body was but speculation, hidden by a great, spiraling conch supported by a retinue of crabs the size of tortoises. From the way she moved, her tail appeared to be utterly boneless and devoid of scales. A single, tongue-like appendage incapable of supporting her body on land.
She paid no attention to Pete and myself, and for that I have thanked God every day of my life. Her attention was entirely focused on the four boys’ glass castles.
Three times she circled them, hoisted by her scuttling courtiers, examining each in turn, eye stalks probing the air.
Slow Alfie began to shake when the Deep Widow held up a handful of thorny fingers, and bayed the boy draw near. When he turned to look back at us I swear my heart stopped. Like I’d peered into a coffin at a funeral and found my own corpse in repose.
A bed awaited him, chauffeured through the listless tide by two manatees with dumb, bulging eyes. It was a muscle shell, as long as a man is tall. A salted slime membrane glittered over the obsidian gloss of its shell as it yawned open. The Empress of Brine made a slow sweeping gesture toward it.
Stricken eyes still held on us, Slow Alfie waded into the surf.
The moment the boy’s skin touched the pink jelly inside the great muscle it began to crawl over him, cocooning him from the airless depths to come. No doubt a smaller version of the connubial bed he would soon share with his bride.
And then we were walking away, with spines of stone and legs of wood that refused to bend at the knee but moving none-the-less, me and Old Pete in the lead, Helix and Felix and Handsome George catching us up quick. By the time we were over the first dune, we were running.
I’ve never been back to the beach. I don’t swim in swimming pools. I’ve never taken a bath and don’t care for showers. I take sponge baths in the sink.
I went back to my own house that night, back to my mum and pup as did we all, never to step foot in the Home again, our limited but highly developed skills now as useless to our new urban setting as Olympic gymnasts past their prime.
Never saw the boys again. I became a weatherman. Got married. Had two sons who have never been to the beach, though they’re asking most days now. I wonder, sometimes, if they suspect.
I burned their letters the day they came. Smart lads, they will find me out, eventually. How then to confess? How do we explain about life’s bad parts to ears not yet grown large enough to admit such ponderous and unwieldy truths? Old Pete figured it out, as did our fathers before us.
As must we all, in time.
We grease the truth with rhyme.
* * * *
Nik Houser’s work has appeared in Best American Fantasy, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and a variety of print and online publications. He lives in Silicon Valley, where he is at work both on a novel and an escape plan. For a comprehensive bibliography, as well as free weird fiction, please visit www.nikhouser.com
LOOK AT THE JAM I’M IN, by Richard Holinger
Her coat bled orange. She tried to cover the oozing, but her hand gave up when gloved with goo. We riders sitting and standing around her tried not to stare.
“I’m Seri Boden from the planet Azeena,” she said in a nasally voice. “We’re infiltrating your social and business networks disguised as normal human beings. Trite, but true. And now that I’ve been discovered, the High Regime will disperse me.”
She crossed her legs, comfortable after her confession, as if she had nothing to lose. After a moment, we got over our initial shock and gave her our attention. After all, subway rides tend to be long and boring with no distractions.
“This is how we menstruate,” Seri told her captured audience. “I forgot to drink my Metacausal this morning, the Azeenan female’s only prophylactic.”
As plasma dripped gob-like onto the rubber mat floor, riders snuggled together to escape its spread.
“If you feel any compassion for life other than your own, you won’t breathe a word of this to anyone, not even your dentist or handyman (even though our research shows these occupations have little or no interest in their clients’ chitchat). If word spreads about my blown cover, not only will I be dispersed, but my outing will create fear and distrust among humans.”
“Why don’t you Azeenans just come clean?” I couldn’t help asking in my role as part-time blogger.
“Easy for you to say,” the alien answered. She looked middle-aged, and wore short hair, sandals and miniskirt. “You take normal for granted. You fit in. You yawn at seamless sameness. I live in dread of revelation. Now look at the jam I’m in.”
“No pun intended,” I joked, but instead of laughing, people glared at me.
The train began to slow. I stared back at my fellow travelers, then drew in a deep breath, exhaled and gave in to my gut feelings. Lifting one leg, I removed the Rockport loafer, stripped off the brown cotton sock and extended my antenna.
“My name is Plucosal, and I’m from the planet Ellis-over,” I declared, prepared to die in the stampede to kill me.
The faces around me looked appalled, many commuters actually stepping back. Then an old man sitting next to Seri Boden opened his mouth and out snaked a yard-long burr-covered green tongue. “Talgis from Overstod.”
A young woman dressed in hospital scrubs standing above me clapped her hands hard and slowly her fingers grew into what looked and smelled like grilled bratwurst. “Matenby from Githra.”
Other shocked expressions, one after another, turned from frown to smile, followed by an extraterrestrial disclosure. By the time the train stopped and the doors opened, Galconis from Glissing had wrapped Seri in his London Fog, and the rest of us made a path to offer her untrammeled passage onto the platform.
Then, once seeing her safely out the door, we crowded in behind her, the usual rush hour mélange.
