Beneath Ceaseless Skies #127 Read online

  As encouragement for him to continue, Ethan nodded. “I understand.”

  “You don’t,” Alabaster said tiredly. “I believed these diseases to be distinct and tangible, each its own viable entity. If not sentient, at least possessed of rudimentary awareness. And not so deeply entrenched that it would be impossible for them to be isolated and removed. I set out to prove that.”

  “To cure man of his sins?”

  “The diseases of which I speak are not the intrinsic virtues and vices of man. They are parasites with which we are burdened. To which—some would say—we are enslaved.”

  Alabaster raised a hand before Ethan could question him further. “I designed and built specialized instrumentation. I developed procedures—”

  “Surgical procedures?”

  The question seemed to tire Alabaster. He made an indecisive gesture that Ethan couldn’t be certain was intended as acknowledgment or evasion. “I developed my procedures, and I applied them.”

  With one finger, Ethan rotated the top photograph to better examine it. “Your subject—Mikhail?—must have been a man of vile character.”

  “He was unwell,” Alabaster admitted.

  “Your surgery produced this. Yet you consider it a failure?”

  “The intended results were not achieved.”

  “You were attempting to extract the vilest parts of man’s nature. You expected something more pleasant?”

  “You prefer to believe that my subject was Raah?” Alabaster asked. “Was a beast even before scalpel touched flesh?”

  Ethan turned his hands palm up, balancing two imaginary exhibits. “Good and evil are concepts dictated by society. They manifest in physical actions, not in corporeal bodies. What you exposed during your experiment was flesh and blood. Claiming it to be a materialization of the darker parts of man’s nature is absurd.”

  Alabaster’s eyes narrowed. “You listen poorly, Professor.”

  “Your subject was Raah,” Ethan declared. “You would not have known him to be one before you brought him to your laboratory. He might not have known himself. But the evidence speaks clearly—” he pointed at the photographs between them. “Whatever your intent, you stripped it of its mask. You laid it bare.”

  Alabaster looked steadily at Ethan. “Certainly,” he said.

  Ethan stopped short. “You agree?”

  “It is as you say.”

  Stunned, Ethan wasn’t sure how to proceed. He felt certain Alabaster did not agree, but he couldn’t very well debate someone who had conceded. He felt he had overlooked something vital.

  “Mikhail was the third of seven subjects,” Alabaster said.

  This was new information.

  “Three men. Three women. One child.” Alabaster tapped the journal with a crooked finger. “All is documented here. But the child was the last. I could do no more after the child.”

  Alabaster nudged his journal across the table, encouraging Ethan to take it.

  “The first subject died under the knife,” Alabaster continued. “A complete failure. I almost ceased everything that day, but I felt I was close, so tried again. The second subject produced results much like Mikhail did later. In my fear, I destroyed it immediately. I thought something had gone horribly wrong. That I’d made a mistake. So—again.” He tapped the photographs. “Mikhail. Seeing what came from him, I thought that I had selected terrible men indeed, that their wrongs would produce such aberrations. I chose my next subjects more carefully. Are women not more pure than men? Kinder spirits? Gentler souls?”

  Alabaster seemed to expect answers, but Ethan had none.

  “They are not,” the doctor said. “The results were the same: monstrosities.”

  He gestured at the journal in Ethan’s hands. “Read for yourself. Believe what you will. The creatures were destroyed, the husks returned to their families.”

  Ethan narrowed his eyes. “Husks? I don’t understand.”

  “Because you don’t listen,” Alabaster said. “What is a mask without a man to wear it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Not nothing,” Alabaster said, seemingly appalled that anyone would say so. “Let us pretend a clever snake comes out of the woods, or up from the ground. He walks upright; he dresses himself in the skin of a man; he looks and speaks like a man.”

  Ethan raised a hand to belay the doctor. “There’s no need to speak in parables to me.”

  Alabaster slammed a hand to the table, jarring Ethan. “You come into my home with talk of Raah disguised as men and tell me to refrain from fairy tales?” He leveled a finger at Ethan. “You’re an unlikable young man, did you know that? You’re arrogant, and I dislike arrogance.”

  After glaring a moment more, Alabaster began again, this time louder. “A snake pretends to be a man. He is excellently disguised, and deceives everyone—even a woman, who marries him and bears his children. These hypothetical children: are they human, or are they snakes?”

  “They are half of each.”

  “And that,” Alabaster declared, “is why you fail to understand. There are gaps in your knowledge, and because you cannot think beyond your own assumptions, you’ve filled them with invention.”

  Ethan opened his hands, inviting enlightenment. “What then are the children?”

  “The children are snakes,” Alabaster said. “They are snakes through and through. But to you and I, they seem as any other children born of any other woman. And now we see that the story has never been about their father—the snake who knows he is a snake—but rather about the children, who do not know they are snakes.

  “Now answer this, exposer of forgeries, how is one to know the difference between a child and a snake who merely believes it is a child?”

  “Peel back the skin,” Ethan answered with offhand confidence, knowing that Alabaster was speaking of the Raah regardless of whether he understood his own story.

  “The children grow,” Alabaster continued, not bothering to judge Ethan’s answer. “They are handsome children, though they have the appetites of snakes. We cannot blame them for this; who among us can help what he is? But one day their mother discovers her precious children swallowing mice in the garden.”

  “You’ve described the Raah,” Ethan said calmly. “Though I would have compared them to wolves rather than snakes.”

  “No.” Alabaster said. “I’ve described Man. And my story is not done.” Though very warm in the study, he tugged his overcoat tighter around himself.

  “Mortified, the woman summons her husband the snake, and together they strip the disguises from those snakes they call their children. And now they have two skins the exact size and shape of children. The skins have long been part of the deception and so carry on out of habit and instinct. They go on being little children, you see?

  “Another question, Professor—you may answer or not, as you like. Is the skin more or less grotesque than the snake it once concealed?”

  “I don’t know,” Ethan said. Then, “Less.”

  “Less?” echoed Alabaster. His passion subsided, he seemed to have fallen to distraction. “I kept the child for days,” he said, “because I was afraid of what I’d done. And I hoped she might recover. Sometimes she spoke, but her words never meant anything. Mostly she sat and stared, barely responding. She shuffled between rooms looking for familiar things, performing meaningless gestures. Everything was a mystery to her.”

  Alabaster touched his temple, as though the act of remembering exhausted him. “What should be done with such things? And what with snakes?” Apparently at a genuine loss, he looked to Ethan. “What is done with forgeries, Professor, when they are discovered?”

  Ethan shrugged. “That is the owner’s prerogative.”

  “Are they not destroyed?”

  “A rare few, I imagine. Most are simply taken away and sold elsewhere, to someone lacking the prudence to verify their legitimacy.”

  “But if it were your decision?”

  “I would rather see them destroyed
.”

  Alabaster looked away, perhaps remembering a time when he had faced the same question. At last, he shrugged helplessly. “Perhaps that is best, but who has the heart for such things? If a beautiful painting is copied, is the copy not beautiful in its own right?”

  Ethan thought not, but said nothing.

  Alabaster sighed. “In my little tale, the children were sent to bed; the snakes were destroyed. You would have done otherwise, I know. But me—” he lifted his shoulders. “How can I be wiser than those in my own tale?”

  The doctor looked at Ethan’s drawings. He nodded and tried to smile, though it seemed more a grimace. At length, he said to Ethan, “A man should know himself.”

  “As should a people.”

  “We are more alike than you think, Professor,” Alabaster concluded. “We find the same thing in different places, but call it by different names.”

  With that, Alabaster put his hands on the table and pushed himself wearily to his feet. “And now I’m tired, and I want to sleep. Take the journal. Use any of it—all of it—to further your research. Find the truth, if you can. But remember, the truth has sharp teeth, and often resents being unmasked. My advice to you, though you didn’t ask for it, is that you stop searching for the Raah.”

  Ethan smiled tightly. “Because they do not exist.”

  “No. Because we find what we seek.”

  Sliding his effects into his valise, Ethan rose to bid the doctor farewell. As he donned his hat in the foyer, a thought occurred to him, and he stopped with his hand on the door. There had been so much talk of serpents; so much talk of masks. The doctor had accused him of not listening, while saying nothing—or not enough. Turning to face Alabaster, Ethan wondered:

  “What are you hiding?”

  Instead of expressing indignation, Alabaster turned a sly smile on Ethan, as though they shared a wicked secret. The doctor shifted his shoulders, which for a moment gave the impression that his body was reconfiguring itself beneath the overcoat. Ethan couldn’t see the doctor’s hands, and felt vaguely threatened by this. It might have been he’d pulled them into his sleeves for warmth; it might only have been him hunching his shoulders.

  “You’ve seen,” Alabaster said. “You know.”

  Ethan opened the door. “Goodbye, Doctor.”

  “It’s the same thing you hide, Professor.”

  * * *

  Ethan studied his face in the mirror of the shared lavatory at the end of the hall. Having just finished bathing, he was neither dried nor dressed.

  Seven subjects, he thought. One of them a child. All of them physically torn into two distinct beings: a functional husk, and an abomination. He had read Alabaster’s journal. The subjects had come from different families, different boroughs, different backgrounds. None of them had known any of the others. All of them Raah?

  Impossible, thought Ethan, rinsing his face with water.

  All diseased, then?

  No, Ethan decided. He could not believe in such diseases as Alabaster proffered. To find such horrors in men was expected. In women, acceptable. In a child? No.

  Ethan opened his mouth, stretching wide his lips to better inspect his teeth. He probed them with his tongue, then with his fingers. He counted them.

  “Masks,” Ethan said to his reflection, evoking Alabaster’s tone. “What are men without their masks?” And what was the mask without the man? And which of the two, Ethan wondered, would he recognize as himself?

  Ethan unfolded his razor and leaned close to the mirror, his face inches from the glass. Holding his own gaze, he turned his head slightly. He touched the ebony-handled razor to the tender skin just beneath his right ear.

  We find what we seek, Alabaster had said.

  Ethan’s flesh opened with surprising ease. Blood filled his palm as he dragged the razor down the curve of his jaw. It warmed his wrist and coursed from his elbow to patter in the clean, white sink. He pressed deeper, and layers of muscle parted with a kind of shocked, thankful relief, as though bound too tight for too long.

  The truth, as Alabaster had promised, was possessed of many sharp teeth.

  Copyright © 2013 Greg Kurzawa

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Greg Kurzawa studied theology without purpose before being handed a career in information technology. Together with his marvelous wife he is busy building a happy family. Some people know him as Gage Kurricke, with whom he co-authored “Gideon’s Wall.”

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  THE CROOKED MILE

  by Dan Rabarts

  No way, Rosco knew, that Sheriff Dylan would let a killer walk the town loose for no good reason. But Sheriff Dylan weren’t around when the stranger rode up with two bodies slung over his saddle all shot to pieces, just Rosco; Rosco, with his shiny new deputy’s badge and his Pappy’s six-shooter that his Momma had given him after Pappy hadn’t come back from down the Mile, all that was left just his gun and his boots and what little pieces the sheriff could find.

  Rosco guessed he’d have to handle the situation, what with the sheriff being away down the Mile and all. He stepped out into the main road that ran down the middle of Gutshank, population one-hundred-fifty-three, and rested a hand on the pearly handle of his revolver. Tried to look mean, like his Pappy would’ve done.

  “Trouble, partner?” Rosco hailed the stranger.

  The man’s cold eyes settled on him from a-ways off. “Yup,” he growled around a mouthful of tobacco, “I got me some wizard trouble.”

  Rosco swallowed hard. Anything to do with wizards was trouble of the worst sort.

  The man dragged at one of the corpses, letting it flop over. “Dead wizard trouble. I’m here for the bounty.”

  “Bounty?” Rosco was just a deputy, after all. He didn’t know nothing about bounties. But he knew well enough to be shit-scared of anything involving wizards.

  “The federal bounty. Don’t be messing about, Deputy. I killed me some wizards, and I come for my coin.”

  “Well,” Rosco said, trying to sound like he wasn’t trying to sound brave, “that’s the sheriff’s business. He’s down the Mile. You’ll have to wait ‘til he gets back.”

  The stranger stared at him for a long minute, chewing slowly. “Down the Mile, you say.”

  “Yup. He’s got business.”

  “Then I guess I’ll go down the Mile and find him. Got a cell? I want my dead ‘uns locked up.”

  Rosco chuckled, shuddered. Last thing he wanted or needed was a couple dead wizards in his cells. “You’re scared someone might steal ‘em?”

  The stranger’s salt-pepper beard crinkled into a ghost of a smile. “More worried they might walk away on their own. You don’t want dead wizards wandering around your pretty little town now, do you, Deputy?”

  Rosco’s stomach tightened. “Sure don’t. But I don’t much see as how a jail cell’s going to hold ‘em back, neither.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll just have to take ‘em along, when you and me head down the Mile to find your sheriff and get me my bounty.”

  Rosco’s breath hitched in his throat. “Me and you? Sorry mister, but I can’t leave my post. Sheriff’s orders. I’m here to watch for trouble, see.”

  The man leaned forward and hawked a gob of black spit into the sand at Rosco’s feet. “You see any trouble, Deputy?”

  Rosco saw it all right. And he didn’t want nothing to do with it. “You just keep on riding, mister. You head on down the Mile. You go find the sheriff.”

  “So now you and your badge are driving me out of town, me with my rightful claim to the president’s good gold?”

  “Now don’t be talking like that, mister. We’re just a small town, and we ain’t got no cells fit for wizards. If you want the sheriff you’ll have to go find him, and take your wizards with you. They’re your concern, and you won’t be making ‘em mine.”

  Rosco wondered if Pappy would’ve been proud to hear him talking so tough to this dangerous, mean-faced
varmint. The stranger stared, long and hard, and truth was it took all the iron in Rosco’s blood to keep his chin up and his eyes straight as that gaze bore him down. Yep, Pappy’d’ve been proud.

  The stranger nudged his horse into a walk. “I’ll find your sheriff and bring him back here for my coin. Then, depending how I feel, we just might have to settle this here disagreement.”

  Rosco could’ve let it go; he could’ve just let the stranger ride off. But no man with any pride could let a challenge like that hang over his head. He thrust his jaw out, the way he’d seen Sheriff Dylan do. “You threatening me, mister? Because I can lock you up if you’re threatening a deputy, and I can confiscate your bounties, too. That’s the law, that is.”

  The stranger pulled his horse up hard and twisted in the saddle, them cold dead eyes freezing Rosco stiff. “You know about laws, boy? Then you know that these scum here, they break ‘em all, not just the ones writ by men in their warm offices way back east, but the laws of nature and physics and even god. Men like me, we have to do the same, as best we can, to protect weaklings like you who hide behind your badges and your laws. So don’t you be lecturing me, son. I’ve been killing wizards longer’n you’ve been alive. Maybe you’re brave, maybe you’re trying to prove something, but me, I think you’re a fool. Don’t you be crossing my path again, Deputy. Ain’t worth your while.”

  Rosco watched him go, his fingers tight around the grip of Pappy’s revolver secure in its holster. He hadn’t never wanted to shoot a man more than he wanted to shoot this wizard hunter right now, but the law was the law. Until a man did something amiss, he was free to go.

  The townsfolk began to drift away once it was clear that the spectacle was over. Rosco stood for a long while looking down Gutshank’s dusty main road, wondering if he had just done the town a service by moving the vagrant on, or if he’d angered a dangerous man enough that he’d bring them back nothing but grief.