Beneath Ceaseless Skies #96 Read online

  I want to love you Cherry, and I do love you. I will always love you. But you died in the ink mines, Cherry. Someone came out with your body, but it wasn’t you.

  He didn’t have your smooth skin, Cherry, or your blue eyes or your soft hands or your strong arms. He had the body of a monster. A paper snake shedding its skin. A body of plague and pulped muscle. A body covered with red-black nonsense. A body whose mouth moved and words came out but that I couldn’t hear. A terrifying body holding a bag of seres. Enough to buy half of Lacuna if they had been made of gold instead of paper. They were made of paper, monster. You kept screaming gold, you knew in your crumpled heart they were gold, but they were paper. They crumbled in my hands, but you just made more. You tore chunks out of your body and wrote in blood on them and they transformed into seres. Paper seres. Less than worthless.

  I will not tell you where I’m going. I pray this stays hidden, but I know better. I love you Cherry. If any part of you remains, seek out the shop called Ink. Tell Francini you know me. I’m going there now to get dipped in a fixative that will kill off any of the plague you may have left on me. Maybe it will help you live just a little longer. It will at least mean that you can’t infect anyone else.

  Be good, Cherry. If only for me.

  Trinia

  * * *

  The Inked Man tossed the pages torn from Trinia’s journal onto the smashed pile in the center of the Chapel. He went back to the altar and slid it on back. Inside, the altar housed a wooden box. He tore a strip of skin off and wrote “open gently.” The box’s lid swung out with a soft groan. He gathered the huddled form within into his arms and walked back to the center of the Chapel.

  The Inked Man set Trinia down on top of the letter she had left for him, hands crossed in front of her small chest. He wrote “fire and make it hot” on his chest and sat next to Trinia, playing with her brittle hair. The letters on his chest shone bright and began to smolder.

  The Inked Man kissed her with a tongue of flame.

  Copyright © 2012 Adam Callaway

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Adam Callaway is a freelance baker, avid ping ponger, transdimensional neosurrealist, and a dedicated writer. He lives in Superior, Wisconsin, where summer is blissfully short and mild, with his wife and two dogs. He has had stories published in AE and Flurb, and his story “Walls of Paper, Soft as Skin“ in BCS #73 was reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2012, ed. Paula Guran. He can be found lurking at adamcallaway.blogspot.com.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  SERKERS AND SLEEP

  by Kenneth Schneyer

  I was very small when we killed my uncle.

  Like every fisherman in Badger Stone, my uncle Mallard owned the thick wool-and-leather gloves, sleeves, and vests that protect you from serk bites. But they slow down your hands and hobble your fingers, and in the summertime they are miserably hot. On the most sweltering day of the year, he took off his sleeves to haul the net into his boat more quickly. The two serk in the net bit him before he knew it.

  He made the best of his affliction, building four houses and clearing an acre of timber in the two days of strength the serk gave him. He didn’t hide it from anyone, which some serkers try to do. When the strength left him and the early stage yielded to the late, my poor uncle was sitting in a circle of us, his friends and family, all gathered around him to say goodbye. We were ready when the madness took him, and his brothers killed him quickly, before he had the chance to murder any of us.

  It’s the civilized way to do it. I’ve heard stories of whole families, even half a village, killed by a late serker. A responsible, loving man like Mallard couldn’t let that happen, so his kin took him as humanely as they could.

  I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know about the serk, like warnings not to touch knives or stick your hand in a fireplace. But they’re so rare that no one I knew had ever seen one before.

  Maybe it’s my imagination that my mother used to smile more often when I was little, that there were more jokes told back then. That whole year, after the accident, she never let me or my brother out of her sight.

  * * *

  I was nine when Marmot the sorcerer told me how the serk do what they do.

  Dipper and I were watching Marmot as he tended to Starspots, who’d stopped giving milk. Like anyone who knew things we didn’t, Marmot fascinated us children; we hoped to see something wondrous in the cool spring morning. But at first he just walked round and round Starspots, doing nothing that I could see but staring, and before long, Dipper got bored. She whispered that we should go swimming. I started to whisper back that it was too cold, but I saw Marmot’s stare turn on me, and he wasn’t smiling.

  “Swimming?” he asked. “You mean in the river? While the rapids are still rushing?”

  That wasn’t what Dipper meant, and I saw her pale skin start to turn red as she tried to stare him down.

  “Dipper,” he said. “You don’t mean in the lake. You know better than that!”

  “Never happens,” she muttered.

  “What?” said Marmot.

  “It never happens,” she said louder. “No one gets bit.”

  “It happened to my Uncle Mallard,” I said. She shot me a look that said traitor. Mallard had been the only one bitten in my or Dipper’s lifetime; the last serker had been thirty years before. We’d all swum in the lake, although it was usually Dipper’s idea.

  “Listen to Scuffer,” said Marmot. Dipper nodded, though I knew she was seething. Marmot pursed his lips, then turned back to Starspots.

  He started by putting her to sleep, which involved a strange sculpting movement of his strong hands in the air. She lay down on the dirt and curled up like a cat. Then he continued to dance with his hands, stopping as if to feel the texture of the air, then repeating a figure, then stopping again. This was much more interesting than a swim; we were transfixed. I think we expected to see sparks or hear a roar from the heavens, but nothing like that happened. Eventually Marmot put his round face to the Starspots’s, sighed, and said, “I think that will work. There was a blockage.”

  “How did you get her to sleep?” I asked, forgetting altogether about the lake and his warnings.

  He glanced at me. “I turned some of the lines of potential in her brain.”

  Dipper scowled. Sorcerers always talk about potential when they’re discussing something complicated. He laughed, but not unkindly.

  Dipper asked quickly, “Could you make her sleep for longer? All night?”

  He paused; I don’t think she fooled him for a minute. “Longer than that, if I had to. Days. Some sorcerers might be able to make her sleep for months or years, although that’s too intricate for a bumpkin like me.”

  I put my hands protectively over Starspots. “Would she starve?”

  “No. Her whole body would slow down, as it did today.” He did something else with his hands, and Starspots shuddered and started to rouse. “She’d still age, very slowly, but she wouldn’t need food or water.”

  Marmot stood up, brushing the dirt from his knees. “Now, about the lake—”

  Dipper interrupted him. “Why does a serk bite make you strong?”

  He frowned. “If I were you, I’d worry more about what happens afterwards.”

  “But how? How does it work?” She knew Marmot never could resist the chance to explain something.

  “Well, we think that they carry something in their fangs that changes the lines of potential within a man or woman.”

  I rolled my eyes when he used that word again. Dimples appeared in his sunburned cheeks. “I’m sorry, Scuffer. There’s no other way to explain it.”

  “Is it hard to—to see potential?” Dipper winked at me when I asked the question.

  Marmot laughed again. “It’s like juggling four tools in the air while trying to read a book and scratch your left leg with your right toe. Then actually doing something with it, like untangling a knot, requir
es double the attention.”

  “What does this have to do with the serk?” I asked. Dipper glared at me; I wasn’t following her plan.

  Marmot looked into the distance. “Listen, I have to see Fox and Robin now. If you’d like me to say more, you’d better trot along with me.”

  As we climbed over the four hills between my parents’ farm and Fox’s, Marmot said, “The lines of potential around an early serker seem to bend towards him, as if the air, the trees, even the earth are feeding his muscles, his nerves, his bones. To a sorcerer, he looks as if he were a hundred men wrapped into one. Do you remember the Warrior Serker?”

  “That’s just a story,” Dipper said, eager to show how grown-up she was. Everyone knew the tale: the Lord of the Plateaus sent an army from the eastern plains looking for plunder and slaves, leveling towns, murdering thousands, sweeping across the valley. Then an early serker confronted them, and they were all dead by sunset. My friends had decided it must be a fairy tale, like the Water Maidens or the Sun Spitter.

  Marmot shook his head. “No, it’s true, or I think it is. It goes back, oh, two hundred years, but it fits with other stories from that time. The destruction of the Plateaus army is a fact, and no other explanation makes sense. They say that the army was only a few days’ march from here when it happened. Some people think that the Warrior Serker sought the serk on purpose.”

  It’s one thing to hear stories at bedtime; it’s another to hear a sober man tell you that they really happened. Thousands of heavily armed soldiers, destroyed in an afternoon by a man like a demon, moving too fast to see, strong enough to crush skulls with a fist—I shuddered.

  “Why does the early stage last only two days?” I asked.

  “Sometimes three, and I don’t know. The potential lines change abruptly. The muscles and bones no longer seem to draw power from the world, but the potential in the brain changes—the lines twist.”

  “They’re crazy,” said Dipper, unable to stop herself.

  Marmot stopped walking and pursed his lips. “Well. The late serker thinks that everyone he knows is determined to kill him, that they’ll succeed unless he kills them first. No sorcerer has ever been able to untie that knot in the mind, although we can see it. The serker becomes crafty, smarter than anyone around him; he stalks his friends, even his own children, and picks them off one by one, unless they’re forewarned and can act together.”

  “How long does it last?” I asked.

  “Your uncle Mallard was the only serker I’ve seen with my own eyes, and he was in the late stage for only a few minutes. My teacher told me that the lines of potential in the brain continue to change subtly. I don’t know what would happen if the late stage lasted months, or years. They’re never allowed to live that long.”

  We got to Fox’s farm about then, and Marmot went on to the house without us. Dipper and I didn’t go to the lake, not that time.

  * * *

  I was twelve when I began to read the book.

  On my older brother’s Naming Day, Dipper and I were playing around in the big room in my house. We had sneaked away from the party and spent an hour trying to find my dog. Bigfeet hated crowds, and I wasn’t surprised that he avoided the Naming, but he wasn’t in any of his usual hiding places either. Eventually we got bored with the search, and Dipper wanted to take down my mother’s book.

  My mother had it from her father, who didn’t remember how it had come into the family. On strong linen pages bound by soft maroon leather, blue-purple ink made flourishes and complicated designs on every page to accompany lines of strange, unfathomable characters. We thought it had come from far away, for no one in Badger Stone had the skill to make such a thing, nor had anyone ever been able to read it. Even learned men like Marmot and his teacher Bear could make nothing of the strange writing.

  Dipper knew that the book was an heirloom and that children were forbidden to touch it, but that was exactly what drew her, my daring friend, and I loved watching her eagerness.

  I climbed to the high shelf—Dipper was ready to do it herself, and she was my height, but I was mindful of my mother’s wrath and promised myself that I’d hold it myself, not let Dipper handle it. She plopped down on the floor, squirming with excitement and getting her black hair all tangled, waiting for me to show her the pages. I sat down next to her and opened the book cautiously.

  In the middle of the page I opened, amid all the strange gibberish, sat a line written with perfect clarity:

  Take the left path on the way to the river.

  I gasped, and Dipper turned to me, concerned. “What?”

  I pointed at the sentence on the page. Dipper frowned and squinted at it. “Pretty,” she said, “but so what?”

  “But it says something!” I said.

  “Maybe, but we’ll never know.”

  “But we do. Look at it, it says, ‘Take the left path on the way to the river.’”

  “Scuffer.” She snorted and shook her head. “You can’t read.”

  “I can read this.”

  Dipper motioned me to bring the book closer, and she put her nose a few inches from the page. “Where?”

  “You can’t read either.”

  “Show me anyway.”

  “There.”

  “Sure, if you say so.”

  She couldn’t see it, and after a few minutes, neither could I; the page became a confused jungle again. I put the book back where it came from, wondering how I could ask my mother about this without being punished.

  Dipper went home not long after. The party had broken up, and I followed the path down the hill to delay helping my parents clean up after it. The tall grass fluttered and bent in the wind, as if shooing me back toward my home and chores, but I paid it no mind. I came to the fork in the trail, intending to turn right, towards one of my favorite lairs, but then I stopped. Take the left path on the way to the river.

  The left path, not nearly so well-used as the right, was obscured by grass and almost invisible now. I had let it lead me for ten minutes when I heard a familiar whine.

  Bigfeet lay on his side next to a clump of bushes. He was bleeding from his neck, foreleg, and snout, and he couldn’t get up. I didn’t see any tracks, but I was sure he’d tangled with a lynx or a raccoon, or some other animal he had no business fighting. I picked him up and stumbled in the direction of Marmot’s house.

  Marmot confirmed that it had been a lynx, washed out the wounds and did one or two strange things that eased Bigfeet’s pain. When Bigfeet calmed down, Marmot asked where I’d found him. When I told him, he looked up. “On the eastern path?” he repeated.

  I nodded and felt my face get warm. He narrowed his blue eyes and asked, “How did you know to look for him there?”

  It was in my mind to lie, but those eyes told me it would be useless.

  “A book told me to.”

  “A book?” He looked confused; then he stared. “Not the old red one your grandfather had?” I nodded. “You were able to read it?”

  I nodded again. “Only one line, and only for a few minutes.”

  After I told him the story, he said, “The ink did not change. If it had, then Dipper would have seen it too—and you shouldn’t have been able to read it, even if it were written plainly.”

  “I—yes. Yes, I guess so. But I didn’t make it up.”

  “No, I know you didn’t. The ink didn’t change; you did.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I,” he admitted. “But I think I’d better take another look at this book.”

  My father did not thrash me, probably because of Marmot’s interest. With my parents standing nearby, Marmot examined the book, frowning. Then he handed it to me and told me open it. When I did so, a line of text jumped out at me:

  For your eyes alone.

  “Remarkable,” said Marmot. “When Scuffer opened it, I saw some sort of commerce between the potential in his brain and the potential of the book. It’s the work of a very accomplished sorcerer—
more accomplished than I am, anyway.”

  “Do you think it’s doing something to him?” asked my mother, losing color in her face.

  “No, rather the opposite,” said Marmot. “Somehow the book is responding to things that are in Scuffer’s thoughts.”

  We passed it around, but no one else caused any change in the book, and none of them could read the line of writing that I saw.

  “How long has this book has been in the family?” asked Marmot.

  “At least seventy years,” said my mother.

  Marmot wove his fingers together and twiddled his thumbs. “The genius who made this contrivance wanted it to respond to a particular person, or a particular kind of person, maybe at a particular time. I can’t say why it’s chosen Scuffer, or why now.”

  “What should we do?” asked my father.

  Marmot puffed out his cheeks. “On the one hand, the maker went to a lot of trouble to find someone like Scuffer; there was probably a good reason. On the other hand, we don’t know what that reason was, malignant or benign.”

  He walked about all of us in a slow circle, scrutinizing me and the book from different angles. Finally he said, “I think Scuffer should keep the book, at least for the time being. But Scuffer, think hard about the sorts of things it tells you, and on no account follow an instruction that seems to put anyone in any danger.” I gulped a little at this last admonition.

  Over the next months I kept the book by me, opening it several times a day. Usually it told me nothing; perhaps once in a fortnight it would give me some advice, leading me to find a lost object, or avoid a wasp nest, or something just as trivial. Once, after a particularly bitter row with Dipper, it said simply, Apologize now. Marmot chuckled when he heard about that; he was as puzzled as I that so little of consequence was happening. Was it for such trifles that a sorcerer a hundred years dead bent reality itself to speak to me?

  * * *

  I was thirteen when the book saved my life.