The Weird Part 120

Each doll's murky history was unfolded to me; the old woman picked them up and dismissed them with such confident authority I soon realised she knew all the little girls whose names she'd given to the dolls intimately. She must have been the nanny here, I thought; and stayed on after the family all left the sinking s.h.i.+p, after her last charge, that little daughter who might, might she not? have looked just like my imaginary blonde heiress, ran off with a virile but uncouth chauffeur, or, perhaps, the black saxophonist in the dance band of an ocean liner. And the retainer inherited the desuetude. In the old days, she must have wiped their pretty noses for them, cut their bread and b.u.t.ter into piano keys for them...all the little girls must once have played in this very nursery, come for tea with the young mistress, gone out riding on ponies, grown up to come to dances in wonderful dresses, stayed over for house parties, golf by day, affairs of the heart by night. Had my Melissa, herself, danced here, perhaps, in her unimaginable adolescence?

I thought of all the beautiful women with round, bare shoulders discreet as pearls going in to dinner in dresses as brilliant as the hot-house flowers that surrounded them, handsomely set off by the dinner-jackets of their partners, though they would have been far more finely accessorised by me women who had once filled the whole house with that ineffable perfume of s.e.x and luxury that drew me greedily to Melissa's bed. And time, now, frosting those lovely faces, the years falling on their head like snow.

The wind howled, the logs hissed in the grate. The crone began to yawn and so did I. I can easily curl up in this armchair beside the fire; I'm half asleep already please don't trouble yourself. But, no; I must have the bed, she said.

You shall sleep in the bed.

And, with that, cackled furiously, jolting me from my bitter-sweet reverie. Her rheumy eyes flashed; I was stricken with the ghastly notion she wanted to sacrifice me to some aged l.u.s.t of hers as the price of my night's lodging but I said: 'Oh, I can't possibly take your bed, please no!' But her only reply was to cackle again.

When she rose to her feet, she looked far taller than she had been, she towered over me. Now, mysteriously, she resumed her old authority; her word was law in the nursery. She grasped my wrist in a hold like lockjaw and dragged me, weakly protesting, to the door that I knew, with a shock of perfect recognition, led to the night nursery.

I was cruelly precipitated back into the heart of my dream.

Beyond the door, on the threshold of which I stumbled, all was as it had been before, as if the night nursery were the changeless, unvaryingly eye of the storm and its whiteness that of a place beyond the spectrum of colours. The same scent of washed hair, the dim tranquillity of the night light. The white-enamelled crib, with its dreaming occupant. The storm crooned a lullaby; the little heiress of the snow pavilion had eyelids like carved alabaster that hold the light in a luminous cup, but she was a flawed jewel, this one, a shattered replica, a drawing that has been scribbled over, and, for the first time in all that night, I felt a pure fear.

The old woman softly approached her charge, and plucked an object, some floppy, cloth thing, from between the covers, where it had lain in the child's pale arms. And this object she, cackling again with obscure glee, handed to me as ceremoniously as if it were a present from a Christmas tree. I jumped when I touched Pierrot, as if there were an electric charge in his satin pyjamas.

He was still crying. Fascinated, fearful, I touched the s.h.i.+ning teardrop pendant on his cheek and licked my finger. Salt. Another tear welled up from the gla.s.s eye to replace the one I had stolen, then another, and another. Until the eyelids quivered and closed. I had seen his face before, a face that had eaten too much bread and margarine in its time. A magic snow-storm blinded my eyes; I wept, too.

Tell Melissa the image factory is bankrupt, grandma.

Diffuse, ironic benediction of the night light. The sleeping child extended her warm, sticky hand to grasp mine; in a terror of consolation, I took her in my arms, in spite of her impetigo, her lice, her stench of wet sheets.

The Meat Garden.

Craig Padawer.

Craig Padawer (1961) is an American fiction writer whose work has appeared in Conjunctions, Fiction International, and After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology. He received his master's degree in fiction writing from Brown University. 'The Meat Garden' (1996) comes to the weird from the surreal, creating a snapshot of a war both familiar and dislocatingly strange. According to Padawer, the story had its inspiration in both the Iraq War and 'the notion of a body at war with itself...[the tumor] that would inevitably bloom into my father's death was growing essentially in his mind. It was transforming him in every possible way not just physically, but mentally. I still find that notion simultaneously terrifying and somehow absurdly beautiful.'

They humped it over metal hills and down through tortured valleys of sc.r.a.p and smoking slag. For two days, Pilorus had been b.i.t.c.hing about how he was swelling inside his suit. His tongue grew so thick that the grunts couldn't understand what he was saying anymore but it didn't matter: they'd been hearing it for days. By late afternoon he was having trouble breathing, lagging badly behind the column so that Wally had to keep falling back to push him along. That night, in their trench, while he tried to eat a can of peaches, something broke inside his throat. And then the thing happened to his hands. It was awful and beautiful and later Wally would feel guilty at the way he'd just sat there, watching in fascination as Pilorus went through those hard changes. The hardest changes Wally had ever seen, until the Consolidation came along and rewrote the rules.

Toward the end, his head burst in a blizzard of seeds that hung in the lamplight and drifted slowly to the ground like a tiny division of poison paratroopers. Only then did Wally reach for his mask and scuttle out of the trench.

The platoon took friendly fire from behind and was hara.s.sed along its flanks by rogue Vegan units that had skipped over to Mack through some warp in ideology or the mysterious exigencies of politics. They wore their body armor even after the deep heat had set in, and on certain blistering noons Wally thought he could smell himself cooking inside the government steel. A crack leafhead sniper could thread a seed through a seam in an armadillo suit with all the accuracy of a seamstress, but a grunt would pay any price for the illusion of safety. And so they sweated it. In some sectors the air was so thick with pod shrapnel and spore that they had to wear pollen masks. And they took weird casualties there.

It was a problem of sensation. If it sometimes took minutes to realize you'd just lost your leg to a Mechanical Mary, it could take days before you knew that a Vegan round was germinating inside you, and weeks before your body began to blossom into death. Seed flak pa.s.sed into you like a bullet fired in a dream, soft and bloodless you couldn't tell an entry from a mosquito bite; and there were artillery spores so small they could enter the flesh without leaving any wound at all. In the absence of any pain by which to forecast his death, every grunt imagined he was dying at any given moment.

Mack fire, when it came, was almost a relief. A clock rocket with its shrapnel of escapements and flaming numerals provided instant blood, bones, burning hair. The ringing alarm let you know your time was up as the blast blew the memories out of your meat like a bad odor. And a television bomb would instantly blind you with its eruption of images as its icons burned through your flesh and imprinted themselves on your bones in tiny hieroglyphs that recounted the brief history of the body's destruction. There was no ambiguity to such wounds. You were either hit or whole, and you knew which pretty quickly.

But a Vegan wound was a covert wound. Once planted in flesh, the round put out roots and tendrils. It drank the blood out of the body and began to feed on the meat until its branches grew inside the victim's skin like a second set of bones and the body burst into flower. Sometimes you could see a grunt's face freeze with the knowledge. But most of the time it just arrived, like some sudden agonizing spring, some personal season of devastation. The body ripened with that secret penetration and then almost overnight the wounds opened and the limbs went rigid. A grunt's first reaction always seemed to be a sort of admiration for the beauty of his own destruction. Wally watched guys look on in fascination as their fingertips burst and the first buds unfolded from their bones.

Vegan ammunition took root in the rubble and the grunts came down out of molten metal hills into steaming basins of greenery where birds clotted the trees and shrieked above their tents at night. They ran spider wire out on the perimeter and laid down trip flares and mirror mines designed to kill the enemy with his own image. Mack anti-floral units operating in their sector hauled spare bladders filled with Blue Elixir and shrivel spray: Intel reports said they could defoliate a Vegan ammo dump in twenty minutes, but what the grunts knew was that the stench could melt your eyes. The enemy was doing such a thorough job that HQ decided to can their crop dusters. Anyway, Mack was just relocating the vegetation: the next barrage would fall two clicks north or east and begin to sprout in a matter of hours. From the air, the sector looked like a scorched grunt undergoing hair restoration. Acres of sc.r.a.p and dust patched with horticulture. Jungle rose and fell overnight. Their maps were meaningless. And each temporary forest was an ambush waiting to happen.

One night in some nameless cube of greenery not marked on their maps, Wally crawled out of his tent to squat in the rain and he watched through the hole in his poncho as a scissor of lightning clipped through the canopy and suddenly revealed the jungle to be a vast impersonation of vegetable artillery, bark boots and moss fatigues. He was crawling back in a panic when the first zook whistled through the leaves and exploded against the backdrop of trees with a heavy splurt. He screamed ambush but something had happened to his ears and he couldn't hear himself. Tracers flashed through the canopy and the grunts were spilling out of their tents with defoliant grenades and half-a.s.sembled flame guns. As Wally scrambled in, Reno tossed him a piece and he found himself crouched in a nest of vines firing a music gun that he'd lifted off a dead Mack a week before. Wherever he aimed, the notes blew holes in the rain and trees exploded in flaming arpeggios. He spotted a sniper clothed in leaves beneath the slow fall of a phosphor flare, and when he pulled the trigger, music erupted from the barrel and entered the verdant figure in the form of a vicious dance that bent his bones into clefs and fiddled off his flesh in melodic intervals as his body disintegrated into music and the meat's melody multiplied into the cacophony of death.

Seed flak shredded the leaves overhead and ricocheted off the trees. Grunts were caught without their armor and the rain fed their wounds. The darkness was filled with cries and moans. Men were laying fire down into the feet of the trees, and in some small corner of the night a figure burned inside its uniform of leaves. The air smelled of phosphor and blossoms. The grunts called in for arty, for air, but n.o.body was sure of their coordinates. And then someone yelled for them to back it out of there before the leafheads sewed them in. The Cav was coming. They began to withdraw, leaving their gear behind and hauling only as much ammo as they could strap to their backs. But when they hit the perimeter, they got caught up in their own wire and had to cut their way out with heat knives while the vegheads routed them with seed flak and compost pellets. In the panic, Tibs tripped one of their own mirror mines and what it did to his image in that instant made his face break like gla.s.s.

When the wire finally fell, the grunts broke from the treeline and regrouped, hauling what wounded they could. Stimpfel and Weeps set up a chatter gun on a nearby hilltop and kept the veegs pinned to the horticulture until the Cav came in and laid down dispersion foam. Grunts were stripping down in the rain and frantically running flashlights over their bodies, searching for anything that looked like seed entry. They radioed for medevac and set up triage behind a hill of blistered tin out of which the half-melted corpses of Macks erupted like an expedition of puppets frozen in a glacier.

Wally was tearing open packets of herbicide with his teeth and handing them to Slice. Cec.u.m had taken two rounds of high-speed seed in his gut before being hit by a nitrogen pellet, and the wound was blooming fast. His right arm burst and the medic lopped it off to stop the spread. But the fertilizer was feeding the seeds now and the bullets wrapped their roots around his bones, burrowing into everything inside Cec.u.m that was soft and vital. They'd kept him standing to cut down on the ground surface, and now his boots had broken open and his feet had taken root.

'That's cool,' Slice kept saying, 'that's what we want.'

Air support thundered over their heads and the rain fell and grunts were screaming to be pruned, and in the middle of all the s.h.i.+t coming down on them, somebody was singing. At first Wally thought it was a music gun, but then he recognized Vomer's voice. He was crooning a weepy ballad about a woman who fas.h.i.+ons a tiny man out of chicken to remind her of her lover gone away to war; she lets the little man build a house for himself inside her v.a.g.i.n.a, and when one day the lover returns she is forced to choose between responsibility and desire.

Whatever was growing inside Cec.u.m had made him rigid, and he stood there in the downpour with his arms forking out along the horizon as if he'd been crucified to the rain. 'I'm f.u.c.ked. Oh man, look at me, I'm f.u.c.ked,' he wailed until his screams turned to leaves and his eyes burst into blossoms, and Slice told Wally all they could do now was pack him for flight.

A lone leafhead was still sniping at them with a compost gun and some grunts had gathered around the chatter rifle and were taking bets on who could pop him.

'Dumb f.u.c.ker,' Stevo laughed, his voice edging into hysteria. 'Who's he think he's gonna hit with that fert? Cec.u.m here's already a f.u.c.kin' forest. And I know I didn't catch any seed.'

'Yeah,' Vomer grinned, 'how d'you know that?'

'I just f.u.c.kin' know, a.s.shole.'

Dustoff finally showed, dropping down through the rain in a swarm of lights and wind. They clipped Cec.u.m's roots, sprayed him down with liquid starch and wrapped him in wet burlap like a tree about to be s.h.i.+pped through the mail. Then they strapped him to a chopper and scrambled out from under the blades.

The Cav dropped in a team of Root Rangers with ugly hardware, and after the greenery had been leveled the grunts went in behind them to mop up. They unzippered the trees and found the roasted corpses of leafheads curled like fetuses inside their wooden wombs.

The veegs must have had a Mack advisor attached to their unit because the grunts found a Wooden Colonel lying scorched in that burnt wreckage of trees. It sat in the mud with its legs broken beneath it and its wooden head swollen with rain. The mouth tried to speak but all that came out was a clicking sound and the grunts stood around draped in their ponchos like great dark birds, joking nervously while Litz radioed back for orders. The Mack's chestpan was cracked and someone reached in there with a stick and tickled the pink flaps of flesh dangling through the breach in the steel. The thing coughed feebly and puked up a bit of pulp wrapped in threads of radiator sputum.

'Hey, don't f.u.c.k with that thing, man.'

Litz crouched in the mud, his ears plugged into the ether. 'They want us to break him down,' he said.

's.h.i.+t.' Vomer spat into the rain. 'f.u.c.kin' spooks.'

The Mack wasn't dead yet, so they stapled it to the dirt, and as they worked it watched them through lenses clouded with lymph. They ran a wire into him and when they opened his seams with a heat knife and a portable saw they found a live pigeon in there, its body woven through with wires. Vomer clipped the fibers, then held the bird by its wings and beat it against a tree until it looked like a feathered mojo bag leaking gruel. The apertures of the Mack's eyes clicked closed. 'You're set,' someone said. Reno hit it twice with an air chisel and its head broke open. Vomer checked it out for triggers and when nothing showed they fished out the map cylinder with a wire, cataloged it and sent it back to Intel in a sealed pouch. Then they cut the lenses out, crouched in the smoldering mud and drew cards for them.

f.u.c.k protocol. They'd lost seven men.

That autumn, Mack sh.e.l.led the city and fire roosted above the buildings like some new form of weather. Toward the end of October a team of wooden guerrillas with wires and rubber fingers commandeered one of the radio stations and Emma saw an old woman and her chauffeur killed in their car by a b.o.o.bytrapped song. Their heads seemed to swell with music and then burst against the gla.s.s, and when the cops finally cut through the hood, clipped the battery cables and opened the car the interior looked like one of those canva.s.ses she'd seen before the war in uptown galleries specializing in Impact Painting. At night, despite repeated protests from the Vegan amba.s.sador, defol trucks rumbled down the avenues, watering the asphalt with herbicide. Come morning the air had a thin bitter smell and the trees sewn to their cubes of dirt stood dark and crooked against the dawn. The panic was on. Everyone was holding their money or s.h.i.+fting it out of the city in preparation for flight, and of necessity the skin industry seemed to pa.s.s overnight into a division of the War Department. The premier flesh houses were occupied by noncom officers and spooks from Intel, while the rest of the waterfront was overrun with grunts on three-day pa.s.ses. Of the civilian clientele, only a few hardcore fatalists still haunted The Hairy Clam, Merkle's Rubber Womb or the black and blue bar of The Iron Tongue, where the wh.o.r.es had to unzipper their faces to suck you.

Emma's girls were skittish. The blare of a car horn sent them bolting from their beds, and every Friday at noon, when the carting company came through, the crash of the dumpster out back brought them up out of their sleep still dripping dreams and togaed in sheets damp with business and fear. They would pull on their pollen masks and clot the hallways like trapped crickets, chittering, goggle-eyed and anonymous, and no amount of Darvon could coax them back to sleep.

She had the house on Albacore Street by then. Her maids swept throat clamps and bits of metal out of the beds in the morning. At night, tracers st.i.tched the northern sky with messages too brief to read, as if the war were some subliminal advertis.e.m.e.nt for a product no one could name. When the peace talks collapsed in early November, Emma s.h.i.+fted her money into an offsh.o.r.e account, had her windows painted with anti-flak lacquer and installed an escape ladder in her third-floor bedroom. At Hippolyta's urging she increased the brothel's security budget and rented a goon from one of the waterfront temp agencies in order to beef up the door during business hours. They kept a riot gun, a pair of pruning shears, a spray rifle full of Blue Elixir and two canisters of silence foam behind the bar. But the threats were myriad; there were only so many precautions Emma could take and inevitably the changes brought by the war left her confused and depressed. All these attempts to reduce risk, to make the city safe, to quantify it, were like trying to capture fire inside a paper box. The war could not be reduced to something logical. Her clientele had changed drastically, their desires mystified her, and for the first time since she had opened her own house Emma was scared. On her afternoon rounds of the rooms she came across ominous objects deposited in ashtrays and toilets. Three teeth wrapped in leaves. Dried vegetable ligaments. A pair of paper ears. A knackle of wet seeds webbed in pulp and hair. And once, in one of the third-floor bathrooms, something small and dark unfurling in the water at the bottom of the bowl, bleeding color.

City Hall ferried grunts in from the zone on f.u.c.k junkets for R&R. They arrived at the bordello's check-in desk like travelers disembarking from a dream. Eyes baked into a glaze. Skin ravaged by de-fol. Divots of hair scooped from their scalps by parasites, fear and fert burns. They wore necklaces of detonator cable strung with wooden tongues, lung sprockets and scrimshawed stalks of bone. They kept love letters, dried Yap paws, and puppets of cloth and bundled leaves tucked inside their helmet liners to shelter their heads from stray pieces of sky. Some had their nostrils pierced with firing pins; others wore keechee pouches stapled to their tongues and stuffed with curative seeds, twigs and Vegan prayers tattooed on sc.r.a.ps of rind. One grunt had a trained clock spider that lived inside his nose and roamed his face on a thin leash that was anch.o.r.ed to his ear; in a fit of nostalgia he'd removed the spider's trigger and now it was just a gimmick ticking in his head. Others converted to Carnism, swore off flesh and wore the a.n.a.l effigies that the monks s.h.i.+pped to the front by the crateful...and still, come R&R, they shuffled into the madam's kitchen in embarra.s.sment, asking for jars of vinegar in which to soak their effigies while they f.u.c.ked her girls.

One night an Aluminum Terrorist slipped through a checkpoint on the northern border with forged doc.u.ments and a paper face. He took a table at The Golden Triangle, then went into the bathroom, where he opened his own seams with a heat knife and a.s.sembled a music gun from the pieces he'd concealed inside his body. He came out firing staccatos and fugues. The diners were caught with their food in the air. The music funneled into their ears and traveled down their bones, tearing holes in their bodies as it sought some point of exit. In some cases, it erupted from the victims' mouths in a b.l.o.o.d.y song, bursting their tongues and blowing out their teeth, sparing the vital organs. As they lay bleeding, music pouring out of them, the wounded tried to plug their ears with napkins or bits of food. A desperate few pierced their eardrums with toothpicks and chopsticks then cowered beneath their tables as the mechanical a.s.sa.s.sin moved through the nightclub, until finally one of Ho's sumos, his ears sealed with wonton skins, managed to draw his pocket cannon and blow a hole in the Mack's chestpan. Mucus and motor lymph spurted from the wound and the killer's paper clothes began to dissolve as the fluids saturated them. By the time the cops, the AT boys and the spooks from Intel arrived, the sumos had stomped him flat as a cookie sheet. A pair of trigger specialists had to lift him with a spatula and tongs, while the AT crew sprayed everything down with silence foam. They brought in bunting and sound tarpaulins to m.u.f.fle the lingering music, and they wrapped the wounded in soundproof blankets to keep them from contaminating the medical crews.

The following evening G.A.S.M. convened an emergency meeting. By the time Emma arrived everyone was talking about the latest attack. Earlier that day, a typewriter bomb had exploded at a blackmarket skin house over on Eel Street, sending words raining through the cardboard walls of the boudoirs and tattooing copies of the Machinist's 'Twelve Terms' on the bodies of wh.o.r.es and patrons alike. Forty pieces of merch ruined. Their bodies had been obliterated by language, all traces of their s.e.xuality buried beneath a storm of words. There was something horrific about the sight of those who had survived a typewriter attack. Their faces scarred with text, as if they had become hostages to some awful advertis.e.m.e.nt. A few of the victims took to working the streets around the library where bibliophiles sometimes paid them to satisfy their fantasies amid the desolate hush of the reading rooms and the deserted stacks where the only witnesses to this erotic pantomime of the blank body and its printed partner were other words.

Everyone was wearing muscle. Ho arrived dressed in a live suit of sumos, a fat jigsaw of killers tailored into a sort of double-breasted kung-fu affair replete with epaulets of braided hair and a s.h.i.+rt that seemed to have been woven out of eyes. Rumors were rampant. The enemy, someone said, had launched a major offensive to coincide with the spring thaw. The situation was so dire that Morrison Carney himself was expected to attend that evening's meeting. Everyone was a wreck. Galena had doubled up on her vitamin enemas and confessed to Emma that she was undergoing sneeze therapy to deal with her anxiety. And even Merkle seemed to have developed a nervous leak. His cheeks were slack and st.i.tched with fine wrinkles. His clothes hung on him, and the inflation specialist he traveled with was checking his air pressure every ten minutes.

Just as Vito Vesuvius gaveled the meeting to order, there was a commotion out in the lobby. The doors of the a.s.sembly spilled open and Morrison Carney rode down the velvet aisle of the chamber trailing his mute entourage of accountants, Carnite monks and tailored killers, and driving before him the ancient doorkeeper like some gaudy defector from an army of circus monkeys in his blood-colored uniform with its ridiculous panoply of sashes and honorary medals from apocryphal orders and secret societies for the preservation of pleasure: golden p.e.n.i.ses, ribbons, lace garters, and tiny velvet v.a.g.i.n.as embroidered with jewels. Carney's mechanical chair came to rest at the foot of the speaker's podium.

The tyc.o.o.n was accompanied by a pair of Mouths, one of whom served as his interpreter. The first Mouth carried a pair of ivory chopsticks in his pocket talking sticks, which he used specifically for the purpose of communicating with the Carnites.

Carney nodded, cheeks puckered as he gummed the stone fetish in his mouth. A couple of Emma's clients were Carnite buffs, and she'd heard it said that the mannequin in his mouth had no face. That the old man's own effigy was the Thirteenth Aspect, CARNEY ABSENT, and that each of his effigies was carved by a blind monk and delivered to the tyc.o.o.n's mansion in an opaque hingeless box of hardened water so that no one but Carney would ever set eyes on it.

The two monks walked up and down the aisles with carved lumen trays tweezered between their Edgar sticks. Piled upon the trays were tiny stone effigies of Morrison Carney affixed with rubber gaskets. 'Mr. Carney must ask you to please seal your ears,' said the first Mouth. He was wearing razor-tipped Teflon espadrilles and a tie made of water. As one of the trays pa.s.sed before him he chose two stones and gently screwed them into his ears. When he lifted his arms, Emma could see the dark lump of the holster fastened to his upper torso like a nylon leech.

The second Mouth was blind and his ears had been sewn shut. Someone had sawn off his fingers and his hands looked like two canoe paddles. Sockets sealed with scars.

When everyone's ears were safely sealed, the monks unmuzzled the blind one's mouth and Emma saw his lips move. Across the room, the prisoner suddenly stiffened in its skin of burlap and blue plastic, and then something inside it softened, some secret wire went slack, and the Mack collapsed in a heap on the floor of the a.s.sembly.

For a moment n.o.body moved. Then Carney nodded hungrily. The monks placed the harness back on the blind Mouth's head and tightened the jaw screws. The one in the Teflon espadrilles removed the effigies from his ears and gestured for the pimps to do the same. The lumen platters were pa.s.sed around and for a moment the only noise in the hall was the sound of the small stones clattering against the trays of hardened light. Emma watched as Carney's monks approached the fallen figure and rolled it over on its back. One began cutting into its chest with a water knife, while the other inserted his sticks into the wound, pried back the edges and removed a dark object: a hardened bird. Emma heard Merkle gasp beside her and for a moment she thought one of the ear effigies had pierced his latex and he'd sprung a leak. But then she heard his sibilant lisp he seemed to be speaking from somewhere inside her hair, murmuring his astonishment.

The extracted bird looked like a statue carved out of bread and the monk waved it in the air as if it were a trophy.

Vito climbed down from his chair and pushed his way through the wall of owners to where the Mouth stood beside Carney and the leashed leathermouth. The Mouth c.o.c.ked his head toward the monks and gestured with one of his talking sticks.

'Go touch it,' he told Vito. 'Don't be afraid. Yes, yes,' he nodded, 'it's all right, touch it! You'll find it's quite dead.'

Vito s.n.a.t.c.hed the ivory stick out of the Mouth's hand and cautiously approached the monks. One of them lifted the hardened bird in his Edgar sticks and Vesuvius stopped in his tracks.

'A little moral support would be nice,' he hissed over his shoulder.

There was a mechanical chorus of clicks as muscle and management alike, reaching into their suits and purses, hitching up their skirts to get at thigh holsters, produced a small a.r.s.enal of weapons and c.o.c.ked them at the object tweezered in the monk's sticks.

Vito poked at the bird with the talking stick. Tapped on it. Then, satisfied, tossed the stick aside and took the bird from the monk. He hefted it in his hands, lifted it over his head and hurled it at the floor, where it shattered into clumps and fine brown powder. He crouched. 'f.u.c.kin' clay.'

'The principle is simple,' explained the Mouth. 'The Word turns clay into flesh. But when spoken in reverse, the Word will render flesh into clay.'

Morrison Carney's thin sticks quivered like two wires nailed into the wooden knots of his hands.

Checkpoint...checkpoint...checkpoint...dull ribbon of road and sentries. Another spring of endless mud has been launched...drenched trenches, flooded lines, scarecrows blooming along the washed-out routes. Couriers to the front carry the Word sealed inside leather mouths. Steel arabesques of wire, a bleeding pigeon flutters in its cage of concertina. The grunts toss canned crackers at it and watch the bird slice itself to ribbons trying to eat.

Addendums to the Battle Manual have been issued: procedures for handling the Word, for implanting the leather mouths inside the routed faces and hollowed heads of captured Macks and recoding their map cylinders so that they return to their platoons and speak the poison.

The courier eats his canned pears in the rain, the forked fruit round and luminous, as if the Army had sealed the pale a.s.ses of infants in syrup and tin. He dreams of his wife back in the city, the child growing inside her. When he returns it will be with a new fear of her flesh and what it harbors. There are barrages aimed at the city. She could be swelling with anything some seed other than his own.

Weeks of mud and broken throats. A crude surgery beneath sandbag ceilings with screws and water saws and stale coffee at noon under the tarpaulin roof of the officer's bar. Rain stuttering against the empty de-fol drums. Mold bearding the wooden faces of the Macks behind their veil of razor wire. The courier combs the sh.e.l.l with soundsticks. Ties off wires. Drills holes in the aluminum skin to administer anesthesia. The leather mouth unsewn and every ear stoppered in case of a malfunction.

The courier's ears are raw from the plugs. He rubs ointment on them. s.n.a.t.c.hes sleep as the jeep rumbles through scorched hamlets and villes...troop movements that the recon readers mistake for a proliferation of the local horticulture...a charred carca.s.s stapled to a tree a small dog or a child with a tail. He's read the Intel reports but the information is always sketchy: Mack moving through animalist villes, burning coops and hooches; children barking down the roads, slaughtered in ditches and sprinkled down with lime and Rot Powder.

He wakes mid-journey to find his travel pillow smeared black with blood.

Early May, LZ Zero. The courier is holed up in a cardboard room under a pale canopy of seed netting. He's got a case of canned fruit, a pound of reconst.i.tuted coffee that he traded for his last pair of dry socks, and a jar of squink he pulled from the reeking wreckage of a Vegan distillery near Hill 186. He's been waiting two days for a transport to come through, to carry him back cityside. He only sees the sun to pee. He's still carrying one leather mouthpiece in his pouch. Couldn't make the delivery. When he got to 186, the hill wasn't there. Gone. Just a burnt pan of dust and stubble weed.

He sleeps and his wife creeps into his dreams with her swollen belly and a tongue of leaves. He wakes into a neon blizzard of fruit flies, burns a bug chip and nurses the bottle. When a wh.o.r.e convoy rolls in at dusk he picks a girl and pays her in chocolate and cigarettes. Out in front of the Media bunker the network vampires in their plastic helmets and high-end eyewear roast pods the size of dogs on elaborate rotisseries. The wh.o.r.es disembark in their combat boots and their cardboard lingerie, their skin brittle with anti-seed sealant. Behind the latrine, the garbage ditch is peppered with disposable vinegar bottles and packets of powdered douche.

That June the platoon crawled into LZ Bravo for debriefing and resupply. Two nights in, Wally was called to the Colonel's bunker. The old man poured thimblefuls of squink from a canteen. The Lieutenant was there with a courier from Intel, and the spook proceeded to give Wally a lecture on the Word. The lecture was like one of those decla.s.sified doc.u.ments that the censors have gone over with a blackout marker.

'I don't get it,' Wally said.

'You're not supposed to,' the courier told him. 'This is a weapon. You're a grunt. Your job is to listen and do what you're told. I have other deliveries to make, so we don't have very much time. All you have to know is that the Word is a sound-based weapon, like a music gun. If your ears aren't properly plugged, it will be the last thing you ever hear.'

It came sealed inside a leather mouth which they affixed to Wally's face with wires and straps. 'The flap fits under the tongue,' the courier explained to the Lieutenant and the Colonel. 'Your people should always wear ear protection when they install this.' Wally panicked and started to struggle when they put it on him. Tasted blood or metal or maybe the Word itself, he couldn't tell which. The Lieutenant put a hand on his shoulder, told him to cut it out and sit still. The Colonel grunted and turned away with a look of disdain, but whether it was intended for the weapon or its wearer Wally couldn't tell.

They strapped him to the chair and brought him something in a cage. A mute yap child dressed in rind with long ears and a pink hairless tail. It cowered in its wire box nervously gnawing the tip of its tail. The courier sealed Wally's ears, unlatched the mouth and nodded to him. Wally opened his jaws and felt the Word being launched from its leather harness. A moment later, the spook leaned forward, latched the mouth shut and removed it from Wally's face. A subtle change seemed to have occurred in the room, but Wally couldn't put his finger on what it was.

'I'll be d.a.m.ned,' the Colonel muttered. The squink had turned to dust in his gla.s.s. And now Wally noticed that the yap had turned an ashen color inside its box of wires. The courier produced a water knife and cut the cage apart. The yap remained motionless.

'If you don't mind, Colonel...your sidearm.'

The old man unbuckled his holster and handed his weapon over in a trance. The courier gently tapped the child on the head with the b.u.t.t of the revolver and the creature crumbled.

The Lieutenant let out a long whistle and crouched on the floor of the bunker, dipping his fingers in the dust and sniffing them.

A week later they kicked north into Yellow Sector, warding off the firefall with voodoo and canned music and rain puppets that the grunts had pinned with prayers and tucked inside their helmet liners. They carried the Word with them, loaded inside its leather mouth and sealed in a lock-box lined with silencing foam, ready to be taken out and affixed to Wally's face at the first sign of enemy movement. It took two keys to open the box (Wally wore one on his tag wire and the Lieutenant carried the other) and the lid was rigged with a trip charge so that if the locks weren't turned in the proper sequence chances were pretty good that Wally and the Lieutenant wouldn't be going home for Christmas.

All that spring and into the summer they humped it through burning hamlets and animalist villes, forcing Mack out into open ground and killing him with language. The new weapon was thorough and unspectacular. It was a stillness that came in the form of a secret sound, hardening the air, turning animals into coal. The grunts left behind them a trail of dead rivers and great sections of sky that had hardened and fallen to ground like broken blue winds.h.i.+elds. Whole fields lay frozen into gray dust. They moved from town to town in mute procession with Wally hoisted on a pole, the automatic mouth strapped to his face and loaded with language...the sound sweeping before them through the long, silent summer and into autumn, until winter arrived to impose its armistice of snow, the war a white page on which the enemy stood hardened in postures of flight: an alphabet of frozen gestures in which Wally searched vainly for some semblance of meaning.

The Stiff and the Stile.

Stepan Chapman.

Stepan Chapman (1951) is a visionary American writer of speculative fiction best known for the Philip K. d.i.c.k Award-winning novel The Troika (1997). His first published story was selected for a.n.a.log by John W. Campbell with other early fiction in the Damon Knight-edited Orbit anthologies. Over the past three decades, Chapman has primarily been published in US literary magazines. Collections include Danger Music (1997) and Dossier (2001). Chapman is best thought of as the b.a.s.t.a.r.d love-child of Mark Twain, Leonora Carrington, and Philip K. d.i.c.k. His underrated tales often take the form of fables or cautionary contes cruels and combine absurdism with the horrific as in 'The Stiff and the Stile' (1997).

In the vast desert known as Oregon, during the peak years of the Bovine Brain Rot, a poor old woman lived all by herself, in a hovel in a graveyard. Her tin roof shed the worst of the acid rain, and she was glad to have the graveyard's thick stone wall between her and the half-starved cutthroats that roved the road. The old woman lived by her wits, venturing by night into the ruins of Portland to steal garbage from the dumpsters there.

One summer afternoon she hobbled into town with a purse full of coins and a shopping basket. She'd resolved to purchase a bit of fresh meat for her larder a string of worm sausages perhaps, or a nice roast of dog.

She d.i.c.kered with a one-legged butcher for over an hour and bought herself an elderly male corpse. The cadaver was a plague victim but in those days no one could afford to be choosy. The butcher thumped the corpse soundly on its skull with a mallet before winding it in butcher's paper. It wasn't completely dead yet, which proved the freshness of the meat.

The old woman grabbed the stiff's ankles and dragged it out of town along the muddy turnpike that led to her cozy graveyard. As twilight fell, she'd got as far as the graveyard wall. Built into the wall was a narrow gap, which served as a stile for foot traffic but kept out the mad cows.

The corpse had submitted gracefully to being dragged through the mud, but at the stile it turned contrary and feigned rigor mortise. Whichever way the old woman turned it, however she shoved it or kicked it or rearranged its limbs, the stiff refused to go through the stile. The old woman had no intention of spending all night on the open road. She shouted angrily at the corpse.

'Stiff, Stiff, go through the stile! Elseways I shan't get home tonight!' But the stiff just stuck out its chin and stared at her rudely. Some people don't know what's good for them.

The old woman called to the graveyard's ditch rat. 'Rat, Rat, bite this Stiff! It won't go through the stile, and I shan't get home tonight!' The rat crept out of the weeds, sniffed the corpse, then scurried off again, sn.i.g.g.e.ring nastily.

The old woman hid the stiff beneath some brambles and started back toward Portland to seek a.s.sistance. She came to a dumpster which was the home of a mutant trash goblin.