The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine Page 11

  “I...I don’t do f...fear,” the boy says. “Go somewhere else!” But of course he knows it is too late, that he made a bad mistake, and you are not allowed mistakes in this place, this time. The boy whispers, “Open Sore.”

  The sniffer raises his arm. His hand extends and grabs the boy’s throat with ease. His nails are claws, long and black and foul. The boy chokes. The smell of shit fills the air, free, and the sniffer’s mouth opens in what may be a smile. A red worm-like tongue protrudes and searches the air.

  “P...please,” the boy says, but quietly. “Don’t.”

  The other hand reaches for the boy’s crotch. Pulls aside the narrow thong. The boy quivers but remains silent. Perhaps he thinks that this is how it ends—with fear alone, and not with death. But of course that is only delusion. The swamp-thing will kill him when it is done. And so the boy does the only thing he can think of, and in his fear he prays, and so he says, almost inaudibly:

  “Blakenjel. Blakenjel bilong mi.”

  In the darkness something moves and halts. Fine leathery wings beat once and are still. The blakenjel listens. It is hard to tell what he does next. I cannot see in the darkness, only guess. There are no distances in the darkness.

  The sniffer’s face comes close to the boy’s. The naked nostrils open and close like air-vents. The red-worm tongue quests along the boy’s skin. The sniffer shudders. So— although for a very different reason—does the boy.

  Suddenly the sniffer’s head is jerked back. His eyes stare at the boy, a few inches away, eyes clear and blue, the way the sky once was. Slowly, there is a strange, soft, sucking sound.

  The sniffer’s left eye disappears inside its socket. There is a wet-red tunnel through his skull. The eye is like a false opening at its end. The eye moves away like a locomotive through his brain. The sniffer tries to scream, perhaps, but the only sound coming from his mouth is the sound of loose nails falling. His hand lets go of the boy’s crotch. The boy feels wetness running down his legs. The sniffer’s other eye disappears with a quiet plop. An eyeless thing stares at the boy, no longer seeing. Then the sniffer falls to his knees.

  Behind him there is only darkness. The boy shakes but manages to bow his head. There is a price to pay, there always is, but every time it’s different.

  In the darkness I can suddenly smell him, my blakenjel. He has acquired smell. His smell is not pleasant, although it can be intoxicating. It is the smell of fear. My blakenjel flies through the darkness, and I follow his scent.

  2. The Grisly Growths of Gristown

  There is a scentless boy whose name is Dak who, having lost his path like all the other scentless boys and girls, now works in a Gristown hotel.

  Stenchtown lies in a row of crumbling brick houses on top of the hill. Down from it is the sea, black and toxic, where the fishermer hunt by the light of poisoned algae. Away from it, the great mountains rise where, so it is said, the blakenjels go to lay their great obsidian eggs, as hard as diamonds. Between town and hill lies the vast corrupt forest. Things live there: they call them Open Sores. To the west are the swamps where the Open Sores collect like poisoned water dripping down a drain: do not go there. To the east lie other towns, other lost suburbs, the squalid dwelling places of the human-born: Gaslight and Tooth-bridge, Cancer Ward and Golgotha, Smokers Hill—and then there is Gristown.

  The boy, Dak, having lost his trade, took gainful employment in Gristown.

  Gristown! The things that live in Gristown, it is said, were human once. Dak does not believe it. A race of alien deep-sea life-forms, others say. Who rose from the depths and took to the land when the great darkness came. Dak does not believe that either. They are slumbering gods, others say, but quietly. It is humanity’s duty to ensure they do not awake. And some say they are mutated nano-goo, which is the same as saying gobbledygook.

  Those who smell human dare not go to Gristown. The Grisly Growths are always hungry. The scent of meat drives them mad with lust. To feed them, the fishermer provide a steady stream of ocean-spawn, and the scentless boys and girls feed them to the pits, and the 0wnerz grow rich while the cycle of economics is maintained. For the Growths can pay.

  Dak works in Pit-Stop Namba Six. He has no name in Gristown. Here he is nambafaef. The others, all more senior, are nambafo, nambatri, nambatu and nambawan. They speak the pidgin of this place, this time. Nambawan is shift-boss. She is a girl, with light-black skin, and deep blue eyes, and gold ear-rings. Outside her name is Naet.

  Dak follows Naet on the perimeter of the pit. The Growths pulse below, great masses of organic grief, hungry cancers, shapeless. Dak is tugging a cart. On it are heaped the dead corpses of sea-creatures, poison and evil-smelling, things with fins and things with tentacles and things with eyes like bunches of grapes hanging upside down.

  “Sakem,” Naet says, and nambafaef obediently chucks the chunks of rotting meat into the pit. As he comes too close to the edge he totters and almost falls.

  “Lukaot,” nambawan says. “Ples is gris.”

  Then she sniggers. Dak smiles. It’s an old Gristown joke and has never been particularly funny. “You ever lose anyone down here?” he asks.

  “About once a month.”

  He stares down at the pulsing mass beneath. Pseudopodia rise from the shifting masses and stare up mournfully. The meat Dak threw ebbs on top of the green-brown mass. Then the feeding begins.

  The Growths absorb their food. Dak watches as the slimy masses begin to glow and the rotten poisoned meat is sucked inside them, losing colour, losing definition as it disintegrates into the blobs. Today is a good day. Feeding from above. But on bad days, Dak and the rest are sent down, into the pits, and they have to clean the blobs, massage them, soothe them. They should be in no danger, they are told. Scentless, they are of no interest to the Growths. So they say, but Dak doesn’t believe it, and neither do the others. There have been...accidents. Too many of the workers in the pits are missing fingers, hands, patches of skin. Some have lost eyebrows, teeth. They say you don’t quit working the pits: you merely lose your definition slowly, ebb away, until one day you are simply not there any more.

  “What are you doing tonight?” Dak asks, and Naet grins and says, “Why, what do you have in mind, nambafaef?”

  Dak blushes. Naet has that effect on him. He says, “Would you like to—” and Naet says, “Sure, why not.”

  “Oraet,” Dak says. “Oraet.” For a moment they grin at each other. The Growths pulse below.

  I follow the blakenjel through the darkness as I always do. He has long lost his human scent. While he still had it, I had the sense, in the middle of the dark, that he had met another. Perhaps the human smell attracted him. I got the sense of leathery bodies meeting, of wings rubbing against wings. But perhaps I merely imagined it. I cannot see in the dark. When it was over I could no longer smell my blakenjel, but I could still follow him. There is no Darktown. The darkness is not a city; it is a living thing.

  “How did you lose your scent?” Naet asks Dak that night as they lie in his bed in Gaslight. Dak shares a crumbling old house with plug-in twins: they were once separate but they bored holes through each other and threaded one another’s flesh together, knitting them into one. They can still disengage, although he has never seen them do it. Their names are Amp and Fuse. Apart from them there is a fishermer’s son, living in exile in the flooded basement, and a bird-like thing that hangs upside-down from the ceiling and can speak pidgin, but rarely does. “I dig your pad,” Naet says.

  “Thanks,” Dak says. Then, “How did you lose your scent?”

  She flashes white teeth in the dark. “Yu no save toktok bilong it, huh?” she says. “Oraet. It no problem.” Then she says, “Nothing complicated. I was born without it.”

  “Oh.”

  She laughs, and they make love again, with only the bird-thing watching from the ceiling. In the darkness, as they fall asleep together, Dak thinks he can hear Naet saying, softly, “I love you.”

  The next day is cleanin
g day and so the crew goes down to the pit, nambawan first, the others following. They walk amidst the pulsing moving Grisly Growths, rubbing them, whispering to them.

  “I love you,” nambafo whispers to the green-grey goo. “Mi lovem yu. Mi lovem yu longtaem.”

  “You,” nambatu whispers to the Growths. “Just you.” He bends over one blob, his trousers down, his erection rubbing against the pulsating meat. His penis is translucent. “You. Just you. You. You. You.”

  Nambawan touches the Growths delicately with only the tips of her fingers. She runs them across their changing skins. “Mother,” she says. “Mother. Mother.” Her fingers leave a strange trail of luminescence on the Growths’ skin. “Mother. Mother. Mother.”

  Dak goes slower than the rest. It’s a strange feeling being amidst the Growths. There is a strange sense of calm down there. Almost of euphoria. He taps a gentle rhythm on the Grisly Growths’ flesh, and the body underneath seems to shiver with satisfaction. Dak is lost in the rhythm. He comes closer to the blobs, and closer still. He doesn’t even hear when nambawan breaks from her own trance and shouts to him. By the time she reaches him he had already disappeared into the Growth.

  Somewhere I think there is a meeting of blakenjels. I meet another human in the dark. An enjelvaljer. Another like me. “Blakenjel bilong mi,” he says. “Blakenjel bilong mi,” I say.

  For one dangerous moment we hover on the edge of light. The darkness recedes around us. We can’t feel our blakenjels.

  “Mine was in Smokers’ Hill last night,” the other says. “A woman on the street prayed to be released of cancer. He healed her. He took her cancers away from her. All of them.”

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “When they were gone there was nothing left of her but a bleached-white skeleton,” he says. “So pretty...”

  “Mine was in Stenchtown—” I say, but then I hear the beat of blackened wings and hurry back into the darkness, and the other is lost behind me. I follow my blakenjel through the corridors of night.

  3. The Corridors of Night

  “Dak? Dak, can you hear me? Dak!”

  But he can’t. When he wakes up it is dark. It feels like being in a coffin. He can’t move, he can’t breathe. Cold slimy tendrils brush against his skin. Somewhere in the distance, was that sound?

  “Dak!”

  Nothing. The silence presses on him. And in the dark, and in the silence, the tendrils caress him. And something comes.

  Not sound. Not vision. But something. It communicates with him, a rhythm against his motionless body. He is a drum. He is a tamtam. If the rhythm had words it might have said something like:

  The savages beat tamtam drums

  The ocean echoes with their sound

  The waves gang up against the reef—

  This night, they say, you’ll come to grief.

  The moon beats like a great ill heart

  And silver light falls down like dust

  The waves are choked, the trees are still—

  This night, they say, is ill, is ill.

  Remain inside, and shut the door

  Pretend that all is as before

  And when the tamtam drums do beat—

  Into your cold dark bed retreat, retreat.

  Dak screams without sound. Let me be! The rhythm is of laughter. The rhythm shows him things. Machines, their blueprints. An abandoned altar in a cave that lies below the tide-line. Star charts. Insectoid silver-black creatures darting through an electric storm. And he learns something: this is how the Growths pay. This is what the 0wnerz get. The rhythm laughs harder. You have just been paid with knowledge, it seems to say.

  Paid for what?

  The rhythm grows excited. Hard. It beats on his skin in thousands of shards. Dak sees something black like unlit coal. Something black like the corridors of night.

  Blakenjel, the rhythm says. Blakenjel! Blakenjel!

  No, Dak wants to say. There is always a price to pay.

  The tentacles withdraw. He is left alone, unmoving, cold. The dark and the silence grow like fungus, and inside his head he screams.

  The tentacles return. A tap-tap-tap, gentle and slow. They seem to be saying—so?

  Dak would pray. He would do anything. But suddenly, although he is frozen, something from the outside penetrates, someone calling, and Dak cries, No!

  Naet calls a blakenjel. Dak screams, and feels the triumph of the rhythm against his skin.

  In the darkness he wails. Cold tentacles drag slime against his cheeks.

  Blakenjel bilong mi stops in the dark. In the dark I feel him ponder. His wings rustle and I feel the slow movement of his head. It is as if he were tasting the air. I hurry after him, groping blindly.

  In the darkness of his coffin Dak can move. The walls of his coffin are mucous. They ooze. They are dissolving. What do the Growths want with blakenjels? His head pulls out of the mass. He is new-born. He tastes the air and sees the blakenjel.

  The darkness seems to emanate from within the Grisly Growth. Has time passed? Have the blakenjel and the Growths somehow communicated? He doesn’t know. He sees the darkness rise from the Growths and he cowers, but it isn’t for him that it comes.

  It is for Naet.

  The blakenjel kisses her. There is the sense of leathery wings flapping in an unseen wind. Then Dak is out of the Growths and on the ground. His clothes have been dissolved. The flesh of his arms is translucent. He stares up at Naet, and he wants to cry, he wants to scream, he wants to be a baby again. Naet looks at him without expression. She shakes her head, a confused gesture. Why did she call the blakenjel? Never mind. She doesn’t seem to have lost anything, and it is time to get back to work. She turns to address the new boy.

  “Nambafaef,” she says. “Go bak bilong wok, hariap.”

  Dak, helpless, says, “Naet...”

  “Nambafaef,” she repeats. “Go back to work, quickly.”

  The blakenjel is gone. The Growths pulsate lazily like oversized brains. And Dak stands up and, without words, walks away.

  There is always a price to pay.

  My blakenjel is different as he stalks through the corridors of night. He is burdened with a terrible thing. My blakenjel loves. In the darkness I hear sounds. My blakenjel sings. It is a horrid sound. There are cries and howls in the dark. My blakenjel stalks through the darkness, never stopping. What is he looking for? Maybe, I think, he wants to find another blakenjel with this thing, this love.

  But perhaps the love he has acquired is of the unrequited kind.

  4. 0wnerz

  That night Dak sleeps with the bird-thing who lives in the ceiling. The sex is short, savage and unsatisfying. The bird-thing keeps speaking Pidgin throughout it. “Mi fakem yu. Mi fakem yu. Faken as. Yu kan. Mi fakem yu.” Its vocabulary is not large. That night, when the bird-thing falls asleep, Dak cries. Then he makes a decision. He will follow the blakenjel. He will summon him back. He will fight him. He will plead with him. He will get Naet’s love back.

  When he falls asleep at last, his sleep is restless. Perhaps it is only the ground-tremors that shake the house at night, the after-thought of seismic forces out at sea. But he is used to them, just as he is used to the occasional short, sharp screams outside that end in sudden silence, or to the hiss and splatter of the steam engines as they go about their tracks, the coal-beasts running and belching and the metal bob-sledges go grind and go bump. There is something else, something new out there, and it filters into his sleep until it wakes him, but by then it is, of course, too late.

  There are four shadows standing by his bed like bed-posts and the bird-thing is a smear of red wetness on the ceiling. Goodbye, avian friend. And I never even knew your name. The four shadows move forward and a light comes on, emanating from them, green and sickly, and Dak sees they are hafmek, and he thinks, Oh, shit. Instinct tells him to keep quiet. There is little point in pleading or gabbing. The hafmek move with the whirring of motors. Their legs are wrought-metal tree trunks with delicate designs etch
ed into the metal, whorls and vortices. Their bodies are patchwork armour, their heads the only vaguely human thing about them, although they bear more similarity to the swamp mutants than they do to people like Dak. Their eyes are hidden—How trite! Dak thinks even as he is frozen in his bed—by mirrorshades. The four hafmek pick him up—delicately, as they would something terribly light yet valuable—and carry him outside. There is a near full-moon that night and it gives the buildings of Gaslight an insubstantial appearance, and the air is humid and there is a smell of rotting vegetation, as if the jungle were that night encroaching into the town. Dak notices all that as the hafmek carry him into a giant steamroller and then climb inside themselves. The vehicle is like a moving house. There is something faintly organic about the walls. It rolls away from Gaslight, and strange beams of radiance erupt from its underbelly as if it is moving forward on light. It is some tek Dak had not seen before, although that, he readily admits to himself, isn’t saying much.

  They go over Tooth-bridge, cut across Cancer Ward, avoid Golgotha and pass into Gristown and beyond, moving away from the sea. The dark mountains tower above them.

  Dak says, “Where are we going?” He is not expecting an answer.

  One of the hafmek turns its head fractionally. It is hard to tell what lies behind the mirrors of its eyes. It says, “Open Sore.”

  Dak stares out of the window of the steamroller. They are away from the suburbs. They are going into the jungle. They are going beyond Man Place. Further inland than he has ever been, or wants to be. Open Sore. Shit shit shit.

  He says, “Why?”

  This time the hafmek don’t bother with an answer.

  The steamroller rolls across a land of enormous, unhealthy growth. The moon lights up gnarled trees, branches looped and shaped like giant spiders’ webs, flower-heads as large as skulls, as pale, that follow their movement on long sinuous stalks that are like blind, malevolent snakes.