Unidentified Funny Objects 7, page 14
“I want to see the cat.”
“No, stay here and eat your I of Newt.”
Bill crept through the doorway and swung the barrel of the gun over the banister. His head darted from side to side, scanning the living room for gremlins. It was some time before it registered that indeed the Wilkes’s cat had gotten into the house again and knocked a picture of Mason off the coffee table.
“Daddy, this is the best candy ever!” said Mason from the other room.
“Yeah?” asked Bill, turning back to the bedroom and stepping in. “What does it . . . taste . . . ?”
He froze.
“Mason?”
Mason’s eyes had gone wide and they took on a red glow. His hands seemed too thin and his jaw grew wider.
“Treat,” he whispered.
“Mason . . .”
“Treat!”
“There’s treats in front of you.”
Mason pounced on the pile of Halloween candy in front of him, tearing off wrappers with his teeth and shoving chocolate and artificial fruit flavor into his mouth. He ate it by the fistful, seeming to gasp for breath as he did, almost choking himself with each helping of sugar.
“Mason . . .” said Bill, taking a cautious step forward. His son’s head turned and an animal hiss came out of him. Bill stepped back. He froze for a moment then stepped back again.
When he’d moved back far enough that his gremlin son felt the candy stash was unthreatened, Mason went back to shoveling it into his face. Bill backed out of the room, down the stairs, and all the way to the garage, never taking the gun off the chest of his own son.
The call went out to everyone. Emergency PTA meeting in the bunker under Fred’s house. Arm yourselves. Stock up on treats. If you’re near a convenience store, grab all you can—garbage bags full if possible. Go for jaw breakers, toffee, caramels. The longer it takes them to eat, the longer you’ll have to run.
“I of Newt,” said Bill to the crowd. “It was a black wrapper with a cartoon lizard.”
“That’s it then,” said Fred. “Chemical warfare. Russians, right? Gotta be. It was only a matter of time.”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” said a woman in the crowd.
“Who’s jumping to conclusions? Weird candy is turning kids into monsters. Sounds like chemical warfare to me. Who would do something like that other than Russia?”
“All right, can we calm down?” asked a youngish man with blonde hair and the kind of coke-bottle glasses that function as involuntary birth control. “Can we even say for certain it was the candy?”
“He just said, as soon as the kid ate the candy. Has anyone heard of that brand?”
The crowd collectively agreed that no, they hadn’t heard of I of Newt.
“Well that sounds pretty airtight to me,” said Fred. “Weird candy, weird monsters.”
“Post hoc ergo propter hoc,” said the nerd.
“Do not talk to me in Russian!” shouted Fred.
“He ate a candy right before it happened! He could have just as easily picked his nose or petted the dog. It doesn’t necessarily mean that was what made him a monster.”
Whispers went through the crowd. The certainty that seemed to be there a moment ago was gone.
“No,” said a woman who had introduced herself as Rebecca. “It was the candy. The same thing happened to my Emily.” She held up a black wrapper with a picture of a newt on it.
“Well . . .” said the nerd. “Okay, we should acknowledge the possibility.”
“I can’t even find a manufacturer!” shouted a frantic man from the back of the room who had been staring at his smartphone for the last seven seconds. “No Wikipedia, no Facebook . . . it’s like it doesn’t exist!”
“No Twitter!” shouted somebody else, and the crowd gasped and murmured among themselves.
“You want to tell me, Mister Host Pock Copter Prop, how a candy without even a Twitter ended up in all our kids’ bags and there’s no chemical warfare?”
“Post hoc ergo propter hoc, is what I said, but—”
“One more word of Russian from this guy, I say we tie him up,” said Fred. Much of the crowd roared with support.
“Or . . . !” shouted Bill. “Or . . . instead of killing each other, we could try to come up with something useful to do. Let’s think about this. We’ve established that maybe it’s the candy. Do any of you remember where your kid might have gotten an I of Newt?”
“I remember,” said Rebecca. “It was that mansion, that really old one by Sunset Village. I didn’t think anybody lived there, but it was decorated, so we knocked. I commented on the candy when she held it out, that I’d never seen it before.”
“Hm . . .” said Copter Prop. “I took my kids there, too.”
“Me, too,” said Bill. “The woman at the door was dressed as a witch. She said if she had her way, every night would be Halloween.”
The murmurs and gasps started again.
“Did anybody here not go to the old mansion in Sunset Village?” asked Copter Prop.
Silence.
“I think now we might have an answer,” he said.
“Thank you!” said Fred, rolling his eyes. “Let’s move, everybody. We’ve got a radical to interrogate. We’re walking into a real hot zone. Everybody grab a gun and a bag of Tootsie Rolls.”
Copter Prop stopped everybody at the entrance to the courtyard. Most of them were carrying bags of candy and guns or machetes and all of them had stuffed their pockets with candy and chocolate. Night had fallen and a fog had flooded the valley, seeming to set in from all directions at once. There was an eerie absence of goblin children. The walk from Fred’s house was over a mile and not one shriek, not one cry of “Treat!”
“I think only a couple of us should go to the door,” said Copter Prop.
“No,” said Rebecca. “No, no. It’s safer if we stick together.”
“Normally I would agree, but that courtyard is fenced in and if this is some sort of terrorist attack or curse and we all walk in there together, it could be a trap.”
The crowd nodded and murmured, always easily frightened and more easily led.
“It’s a solid point,” said Fred. “Everything has been awful quiet. They could be waiting for us to walk in there so they can shut the gates and take us out.”
“How many is ‘a few of us’?” asked Bill. “Five? Ten? If there’s something on the other side of that fence, all together, we might be able to handle it. ‘A few of us,’ not so much.”
“I agree,” said Rebecca. “It should at least be most of us.”
“You’re saying we should all go because it might be a trap?” asked Copter Prop. “Am I the only one here who took Logic 101? If someone planned for all of us to go in there, our best odds as a group are in not all of us going in.”
“I’ll go,” said Fred. “You guys all stay here. I’ll go myself.”
“It’s not safe,” said Rebecca.
“It’ll be fine. I’ll talk to her.”
They all waited at the gate as Fred made the walk through the long courtyard and rang the bell to the mansion. He banged the knocker on the door and shouted up to the window, “Hey lady! I gotta talk to you about your bullshit Russian candy! I’m onto you, comrade!”
“Kick the door down, Fred!” shouted Copter Prop from the gate.
“No!” cried Rebecca. Copter Prop turned to her and she stiffened and avoided his look.
“Why not?” he asked.
At the door, Fred kicked as hard as he could. It creaked, but didn’t break.
“What if . . . what if the inside is where . . . ?” Rebecca stammered. Copter Prop advanced on her and she slinked back into the bars of the fence.
Fred kicked again. The door gave an inch, but didn’t swing open.
“You know what I think . . .” said Copter Prop. “I think the witch is right here in our group.” He drew a small knife from a sheath at his waist.
“The . . . the witch?” said Rebecca.
Fred kicked the door once more and it swung open. The crowd didn’t know which threat to watch. As fast as the door was open, a dozen gremlins leapt from the darkness and wrestled Fred to the ground. They tore at his clothes and his skin. They bit into his pockets where his candy was kept and they bit into the flesh beneath it. Some of them sprinted across the courtyard toward the crowd of parents.
“Shut the gates!” Copter Prop shouted to the others, and after a moment of hesitation they obeyed.
Copter Prop drove his knife into Rebecca’s chest. She gasped and the crowd gasped with her. Bill and the others grabbed Copter Prop’s arms and pulled him back from Rebecca, taking the knife with him.
“Silver . . .” said Rebecca, looking down in shock at the small opening in her chest. Around the wound, her body was decomposing rapidly.
The gremlins reached the fence and stuck their arms through, clawing at the crowd. They tried to climb it, but their greasy, chocolaty hands only slid on the metal bars. They screamed and hissed at their parents through the gaps.
“I knew it was either you or Fred,” Copter Prop shouted to Rebecca as the crowd continued to restrain him. “I just wasn’t sure which until those things attacked him.”
“What’s going on?” screamed Bill.
“I can explain,” said Copter Prop. “Let me go.”
As Rebecca fell on her knees and the dry, black decomposition around her wound spread wider, the crowd let go of Copter Prop and he turned to face them.
“You all know me as a mortgage broker,” said Copter Prop, “but I’m actually a witch hunter. I’ve been tracking this woman all year and finally caught up to her. She has cursed her last town.”
“If I die,” Rebecca choked out, “you’ll never find the cure.”
Copter Prop drove the knife into her throat and the crowd grabbed him once again.
“Burn him! Burn the witch hunter!” cried the crowd.
Copter Prop was tied to a stake and wood was stacked beneath him. Most of the crowd sounded in favor of a good old-fashioned witch hunter burning, but Bill didn’t care one way or the other. The witch was dead, the children were cursed, and there was no coming back for Mason.
“There is no cure!” Copter Prop cried. “There never was! She was just saying it to save her skin!”
“He’s just saying that to save his skin!” someone else shouted. “Burn him!”
“Maybe you just want to burn a witch hunter because you’re a witch!”
“She’s a witch! Burn her!”
“He wants to burn witches! He’s a witch hunter! Burn him, too!”
“Save the witches! Burn the witch hunters!”
Bill walked away from the crowd. People were going to start burning soon, and if he looked at somebody wrong or expressed an opinion it could be him. He planned on having a drink on Liquor Street, but didn’t realize until he got there just how empty all of the businesses were tonight. Everyone had gone home from work at the first sign of goblins.
“Hello!” Bill shouted into the night. He banged on a few doors and found no one there. After fifteen minutes he chalked it up to extenuating circumstances and broke the window on a bar to steal a bottle of whiskey. He sat down on a curb to drink it.
“Town’s sure gone to the dogs, hasn’t it?” said a voice from behind him. He turned to find an ancient, bearded hobo lumbering his obese frame down the sidewalk behind him.
“Sure has,” said Bill.
“Shame,” said the hobo. “People are so quick to give in to fear they never even try love. Shame, shame.”
The hobo started to walk away as Bill took another swig and puzzled over the words. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, ‘treat’ this, ‘treat’ that. And everybody throws them candy out of fear, but nobody gives a treat that comes from a good place. Wouldn’t have had to be like this.”
Bill laughed a cynical laugh. “Give candy to goblins with love in your heart? That’s your magic cure-all?”
The hobo laughed. “No, not more snacks. The treat itself has to be love. Like this.”
He slipped a box into Bill’s hands. It was shiny and black with a red ribbon around it and hardly any weight to it. Bill pulled off the ribbon and opened the box.
“Oh my God,” he said. “You’re . . . you’re not . . .” but when he looked up from the treat, the old hobo was gone.
Bill turned and ran, tossing his bottle of whiskey into the gutter. He ran until his sides felt goblin-scratched, until booze-sweat drenched his face and recycled itself back onto his lips. When he reached home, he nearly ripped the front door off its hinges.
“Treat!” he screamed up the stairs.
Mason rushed to meet him. “Treat?”
“Treat!” said Bill, holding out the box. “Treat!”
Mason took it. He opened it and peaked in, then he looked up at his father with an expression of awe. He reached into the box, took the treat from it gingerly, and placed it in his mouth. And a minute later when the treat was finished, Mason was Mason again.
“Daddy, I had a dream I was troll monster for Halloween!”
“I bet you did, Mason.”
Bill hugged Mason and lifted him up in his arms. The two of them went onto the front porch and Bill shouted across the street until all the lights in the neighborhood were on.
“I cured him! I found the cure for my boy! Don’t give them Snickers and Twix and Butterfingers! An old fat man with a beard showed me! Don’t be scared of them! Come in with love and give them candy canes!”
He hugged Mason again.
“I’m so glad you’re okay,” he said. And then he felt the pointy ear against his cheek. He pulled his head back.
“Presents!” shouted Mason. “Presents! Presents! Presents!”
“Oh, God,” said Bill. “Can’t we get through Thanksgiving first?”
Greg Sisco was born in Los Angeles, California in 1988. An independent filmmaker since his late teens and a novelist since his early twenties, he writes darkly comedic fiction mostly within the horror and thriller genres.
Falling's Free, Gravity Costs
Seanan McGuire
My ship—the dazzlingly shabby Mercury Midway, which was a lie in multiple directions at the same time, since she wasn’t built on Mercury, and she wasn’t big enough to contain anything resembling an actual midway—spun lazily in the void of space, not seeming overly concerned with which way was supposed to be “up.” The crew spun with it, all three of us floating in the middle of the cargo bay and trying to ignore the way everything around us occasionally shifted.
It wasn’t easy. The effort was worthwhile, if only because vomiting in zero-gravity is less than no fun at all. Puke goes wherever it wants when the gravity is on. Without it . . .
Washing someone else’s vomit out of my hair was awful enough. I didn’t want to wash it out of my eyes.
“I told you not to hit the gravity generator with a spanner,” said Doc, his sour tone somewhat underscored by the fact that he was currently, to my admittedly biased perspective, floating upside down. One of the bows in his beard had come untied and was drifting serenely away, a ribbon of silver spangle in the otherwise dull air.
“I’ve done it before,” I protested.
“And every time you’ve done it I’ve asked you not to do it again, on the theory that one day something exactly like this was going to happen. Well, it finally happened. You finally shorted out our one reliable source of gravity while we were too far from any planetary body to get a tow. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”
I offered him a toothy grin. “Sort of, yeah. How’s it going over there, Vi?”
Violet Whitman, scientist, techie, and occasional repair bot, pulled her head out of the gravity generator and glared at me. Her curly red hair formed a corona around her head, snarling on everything it could reach. At least she was putting it to good use: she had two wrenches and a handheld torch shoved into the tangles I could see, and more than half of her hair was out of my line of sight.
“You know my father designed this,” she said.
“I do.”
“He worked long and hard. He missed dinners and forgot about my school recitals, because he was making a better, sturdier gravity generator for short-range ships.”
“I know that, too.”
“You know all that, and yet you broke it.”
I put my hands up, a gesture that would probably have been more effective if I hadn’t been rotating gently in midair. “You’re the one who told me you usually started repairs by hitting things.”
“Yes, hitting things like a professional, not like I was playing Whack-a-Weasel.”
“First, it’s Whack-a-Mole, and second, you shouldn’t insult the games that pay for all this.” I waved my arms to indicate the ship around us, setting myself spinning harder in the process.
There are no carnivals in space. Nowhere to set up the midway, no way to keep the Ferris wheel turning. But as long as people like me can keep flying, the spirit of the carnival will live on. Rigged games, questionable safety standards and all.
Violet looked at me disbelievingly. “You seriously want to argue about the social value of Whack-a-Mole when we’re dead in the sky.”
“It’s not like we’re going anywhere.”
Doc laughed, the sound low and bitter. “No, I suppose we’re not.” Pushing himself against the nearest flat surface, he swam through the air to a door. “I’m going to go and check for signals. Maybe someone will come along and take pity on us. Best of luck to you.”
“I don’t need luck,” I said.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” he replied, and was gone.
Violet was still frowning when I turned back to her. I winced.
“How much trouble am I in?”
“What scale are we using?”
“The one where I’m not in too much trouble?” I tried a smile.
Violet wasn’t having it. “Nora. You broke the generator.”
“You said—”
“Percussive maintenance is only a good idea when you’re docked! That way if you break something, you don’t wind up bobbing around, strapping yourself to things and hoping you don’t hit your head! I dislike concussions! They hurt!”
