Lightspeed Magazine - January 2017 Read online

  What Kaufmann was prepared to do was run, take the next train out of town for some shining new place free of rot and nightmares. The only thing preventing him was the fact that the train rarely stopped, but sped right through as if there really was no platform or station or city. “If I wait for that,” he thought, “we might all be dead by the time it arrives.” He turned to the citizens and said, “I’m going to hunt Daddy down and put a bullet in him.” Only the inspector knew that it would necessarily have to be “a bullet” as he only had one left. Government supplies from the capitol had dried up over a year earlier.

  That night, Kaufmann slept slumped over his desk, pistol in hand, and dreamt of a time before the politicians in the capitol had succumbed to a disease of avarice and sapped all of Grindly’s resources for themselves. Once known far and wide as the “Nexus of Manufacture,” a gleaming machine of commerce, where traffic filled the streets, faces filled the windows, and nobody ate cabbage who didn’t want to, the inspector had a police force, enough bullets, and a paycheck. Again, in his sleep, he watched the city slowly rot from the inside out and eventually stood on the platform at the station waving forlornly as even the petty criminals left town.

  While Kaufmann dozed, Daddy was busy slipping silently through the shadows. He could smell the terror of the populace, a sweet flower scent that drove his hunger. The music played on the strands of web behind his eyes directed his purpose, negating distraction, as he shuffled up a wall, found an unlocked window, and let the breeze in.

  His first victim of that night: The pale and beautiful actress Monique LeDar, who still performed nightly, one-woman shows of the classics, although the stage was lit by candles and squirrels scampered amid the rafters. She awoke in the midst of Daddy’s feeding, and he saw her seeing herself in the myriad reflections of his eyes. He stopped, tipped his hat, and continued. She put her wrist to her forehead and perished.

  The Gazette had the story in its late-morning edition the next day: DADDY’S DOZEN, read the headline. At the end of the lead article that gave a list of the drained and the grisly condition in which each was found, there was printed a formal plea from Inspector Kaufmann for volunteers to help track the killer. That evening, he stood on the sidewalk in front of the Hall of Justice, a mausoleum of an old marble structure, dark and empty inside save for his office. The last set of batteries in the flashlight had died, so, instead, he held like a torch out in front of him a small candelabra of three burning tapers. He’d been waiting for over an hour for the mob of volunteers to form in order to begin the hunt, but, as it was, he stood alone. Taking the gun from his shoulder holster, he was about to strike out on his own when an old woman in a kerchief and a long camelhair winter coat trundled slowly up to him.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?” asked the inspector.

  “I volunteer,” she said.

  He laughed. “This is dangerous work, my dear. We’re after a cold-blooded killer.”

  The old woman opened her pocketbook and took out a blackjack. She waggled the tube of stitched leather with lead in the tip at Kaufmann’s face.

  “That’s an illegal weapon,” he said.

  “Arrest me,” she said, and spat on the sidewalk.

  The avenues and side streets of Grindly were empty. Even the drunks stayed home in fear of being drunk themselves. It was slow going and just as lonely for Kaufmann with Mrs. Frey in tow. He’d barely gotten the woman’s name out of her. She followed five steps behind, not so much his posse as a haunting spirit. He respected her courage, her sense of civic duty, but found her quiet wheezing and the rhythmic squish of her galoshes incredibly annoying, and wondered how long it would be before he used his last bullet on either her or himself.

  It was dinnertime in the city that never woke; the scent of boiled cabbage, the skittering of rats along the gutters. Occasionally, there was a lighted window and the distant, muffled sound of a radio or a child’s glee or an argument, but for the most part Kaufmann and his deputy passed down empty streets of boarded storefronts and burned-out brownstones, where the echo of the wind sounded like laughter in the shadows.

  It was dinnertime for Daddy as well, and he moved along the rooftops, keenly aware of the warm spots in the cold buildings beneath, heat signatures of those who might find themselves on his menu. He was hunting for the essence of the young. His last kill of the previous night had been Tharshmon the watchmaker, a man made old by lack of work and self-respect. No one cared any longer to know the time in Grindly. It was better left unmentioned when the future arrived. As dozens of pocket watches chimed in Tharshmon’s studio at 3:00 a.m., Daddy interceded without a struggle. The bereft watchmaker’s fluid was overripe, though, insipidly sweet and watery. It gave no energy but bruised the will and loosened the bowels.

  Daddy skittered down the side of a four-story apartment building. At the lighted window on the third floor, he settled upon the fire escape. With his face to the glass, he saw two young children dressed in their pajamas, playing in a bedroom. He tried the window, but it was locked. He tapped at the glass with one long nail. Their big pink faces drew close to see him, and even before they undid the latch, his system was creating the chemical needed to digest their juices. He had learned it wasn’t helpful to let them see him drool.

  At the same moment, three blocks away, Inspector Kaufmann was passing the Waterworks. He turned and peered back up the sidewalk to see Mrs. Frey’s bent form inching along through the weak glow of the block’s one working streetlight. He set the candelabra on the ground, holstered his gun, and took out his last cigarette. He’d traded a pair of official police handcuffs, with key, for the pack it came from. Leaning down, he lit it on the flame of the center candle. He was cold and tired, and every scrap of newspaper that rolled in the wind or bat that darted out of a blasted window momentarily paralyzed him with fear. He took a drag and heard Mrs. Frey’s galoshes drawing closer.

  The old woman had nearly caught up and there was still a good half of a cigarette left when he heard a desperate scream come from off to his right. “Shit,” he said, flicked the unfinished butt into the gutter, drew his pistol, and ran across the street. There he entered an alley and ran through the dark, avoiding piles of broken furniture and old garbage. The alley gave way to another street and then another alley, and when he was almost winded, there was again a shrill scream, and he saw a woman at an open window three stories up.

  “My babies,” she wailed. Kaufmann scanned the sides of the buildings for Daddy. He heard something move amidst the trash and caught a darker spot in the darkness out of the corner of his eye. As he lifted the gun, something wet and sticky smacked him in the face. He fired blindly.

  By the time Kaufmann had wiped the web from his eyes, Daddy was gone, the distraught mother above had spotted the inspector and was yelling for his assistance, and behind him, Mrs. Frey, pocketbook on her wrist, the candelabra in her right hand, the blackjack in her left, shuffled inexorably closer. The inspector dropped the gun and ran away.

  Daddy sat atop the smokestack of the abandoned Harris Electric Loom Mill, nursing the wound to his leg where the bullet had grazed his calf. The spider in his head unhooked the strings that sent pain, and then nestled back into the center of things, half high from the effects of the rich essence of youth. His imagination took off, and he plucked the silver strands, composing as he played, spinning a web of an idea. “Herd them,” Daddy said in a voice that cracked and clicked. The spare, scattered pattern of the lights of Grindly required design.

  Exhausted from running, Inspector Kaufmann leaned against the coral facade at the entrance to Grindly Station. His own thoughts were as scattered as Daddy’s were inspired. Against what would have normally been his better judgment, he chose to believe that for some reason the train would, that night, stop at the platform and take him aboard. He hurried on so as not to miss it. His quick footsteps echoed across the wide rotunda, and he passed through another set of doors into the dome that held the station platform. He was surprised to fi
nd himself the only passenger.

  Kaufmann cupped his hand behind his ear and cocked his head toward the track in order to check for vibrations of the coming train. He thought he felt the merest rumble deep in his chest. After listening for a long time, all he really heard was the sound of water dripping. It interfered with the anticipation of escape. Then he realized it wasn’t water dripping but more a tapping. It stopped and then started again. He looked up at the inner dome and froze.

  In an eyeblink, Daddy leaped down on a forty-foot thread of web and stood before Kaufmann. Mandibles clicked together, and Daddy did a bad job of hiding the drool. From some forgotten byway of his brain, the inspector’s years of experience on the streets of Grindly engaged. He made a fist and swung with everything he had. The punch hit the mark, cracking the left lens of Daddy’s rose-colored glasses and sending him stumbling backward a few feet. The inspector didn’t know whether to flee or continue to attack, and in the empty moment of his indecision, he definitely heard the train coming.

  He made a move toward Daddy with fists in the air, but his nemesis twirled with insect precision and speed and clipped Kaufmann under the chin with a foot that struck like the tip of a bullwhip. The inspector was almost brought to his knees by the blow, but instead of going down, he righted himself and backed off. Blood trickled from the side of his mouth. The train was louder now, and a faint light could be seen filling the tunnel. He looked down and saw that the backs of his heels were off the edge of the platform. He put his fists up and kept them moving.

  When Daddy took one long-legged step to the left, Kaufmann saw salvation. The roar of the approaching train filled the tunnel and set the entire platform to vibrating so that it was impossible to hear the squish of Mrs. Frey’s galoshes. She inched up upon him from behind, the candelabra glimmering, the blackjack waggling in her grip. Kaufmann threw a flurry of jabs to distract the arachnid, and the old woman lifted the leather club as high as she could. The locomotive entered the station but didn’t slow.

  In the reflection of rushing windows, Daddy detected treachery. He spun in a blur, his mandibles severing Mrs. Frey’s neck with a swift clip, like cutting a rose. From the hole in his trousers, he shot a blast of web at Kaufmann. It happened so quickly that the inspector could only stand motionless as the strand of sticky thread wrapped twice around his neck. The web’s long tail was pulled in by the rush of the passing train and affixed itself to the handle on the back door of the caboose. Kaufmann was jerked off the platform by the neck, and flew behind the train. The last thing he saw in Grindly was the mosaic face of God. Mrs. Frey’s head hit the platform then and spat.

  The next evening, in an abandoned warehouse by the docks, Daddy stood in total darkness, emitting high-pitched squeals that called all the natural spiders of Grindly to him. When he felt their delicate heaving presence surrounding him, he clicked and blzz ’d out his plan. He gave instructions on rethreading the human brain. He spoke of the ear and the path to take, warning of cul-de-sacs. “A quarter pound of fly meat for every human restrung,” he promised. Spirits were high. Later, when they returned to him for payment, he crushed them beneath his slipper.

  By the time he got done with Grindly, the city shone and ran like one of Tharshmon’s pocket watches. Everything moved as if to music. It became for Daddy a web of human thread. “Purpose without a point,” he often reminded his human electorate, and they tacitly nodded. He continued to feed at night, roaming the rooftops and alleyways, leaving old luggage indiscriminately in his wake. People showed him smiles during the day, but, still, no one wanted to meet him in the dark. The reconfiguration of their brain patterns didn’t eliminate terror, only their ability to react to it. “Fear and Industry” was Daddy’s motto, and it took him far.

  After the train was again making scheduled stops at the station, Daddy boarded with a ticket to the capital one evening. He never returned to Grindly, but instead bit into the larger politics of the Realm and kept eating in a spiral pattern until he reached the center of everything. There, he made a nest for himself.

  *

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Shadow Year. His story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, and A Natural History of Hell. His fiction has won the Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, Edgar Allan Poe Award, Shirley Jackson Award, etc. He lives in Ohio in a hundred plus year old farm house, surrounded by corn and wheat fields, and teaches part time at Ohio Wesleyan University.

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  The West Topeka Triangle

  Jeremiah Tolbert | 8482 words

  As much as the other kids in my neighborhood like to tell me I’m a know-it-all, I realize just how short the list of things I actually know is one cold winter morning in 1987. I know my vocabulary words, everything that can be known about the Bermuda Triangle, and how well-liked a kid is by who they walk to school with.

  Almost everything important that ever happens to me happens on the walk to or from school. My family lives in The Coyote Rise Townhome Co-op, which is one and a quarter miles away from McCarthy Elementary School (according to my stepdad). It’s too close for them to give us bus service, so every weekday morning, twenty-six kids leave our beige box townhouses, falling into our places in the “Coyote pack,” and make the walk without adults. We dart across a busy two-lane road with no crosswalk, pass over the cracked and patched asphalt of the West Topeka Baptist Church parking lot, and into a rarely-mowed baseball field. We stroll down a line of overgrown trees, across a dry creek bed that hasn’t contained water in our lifetimes, then skirt a small pond where mallards nest in the spring. We struggle up a small hill which becomes treacherously slick after rain. At the top of the hill, a cul-de-sac feeds out into streets lined with real houses built in the 1950s, the kind that don’t share walls with their neighbors. We call it the “rich neighborhood.”

  I walk in the front of the pack because nobody likes me. I’m too poor, the other kids think I think I know everything, and I have big ears that stick out at right angles from my head. Some of the kids call me Dumbo so they can see me cry. It almost always works, even though I know it shouldn’t. My little sister and brother walk in the middle with all the other K to threes. Safe and anonymous. I like not having to worry about them. I have my own problems. Like Brendan.

  “Hey, wait,” Brendan says, hurrying along behind me. His fat cheeks jiggle and he breathes hard like he’s been running since Coyote Rise. His backpack keeps slipping off because he only wears one shoulder strap like the cool kids. That slows him down some, but he catches up with me eventually.

  Brendan walks with me sometimes. I’m an easy target for his insults. To his credit, he doesn’t lean too heavy on the Dumbo thing.

  “Give me that branch, faggot,” Brendan says. “You’re just going to try to shove it up your ass.”

  The day before, I found a fallen tree limb, longer than I was tall, in the trees beside the dry creek. Today, I’m using it as a wizard-staff/walking-stick. Sometimes a group of middle school kids let me play D&D with them after school. I’m almost as obsessed with wizards and elves as I am with the mystery of the Triangle and its victims.

  “I’m not a faggot,” I say. But you are sack of crap, I think, but I don’t say it.

  “You’ve never had a girlfriend,” he says. “That makes you a fag.”

  “But you don’t have a girlfriend either.”

  “Yes, I do. She just doesn’t go to our lame-ass school. Now gimme that stick.”

  I walk faster. Brendan struggles to keep up.

  “If you make me run, I’m really gonna be pissed.”

  I can outrun him. I’m not fast, but I can run farther and longer than anybody at school. I’m always first to finish the “mile” run during phys ed. This one time, I told my stepdad my four-and-a-half minute time at dinner, proud that I was the best at something. He slapped me on th
e cheek and called me a liar. The fastest man in the world can barely run a four-minute mile, he said. So I guess it isn’t really a mile, just four times around our school.

  “You run like somebody is chasing you,” our PE teacher says every year. I think, “of course I do,” but I don’t say it. Somebody’s always chasing me. When he says it, the athletic kids sneer at me, even though they’re good at actual sports like soccer and basketball. Luckily for them, I can’t outrun the speed of sound. They can always call me names.

  “Goddamn it, Four-Eyes, I want that stick,” Brendan huffs. Now we’re out past the pond, where I hope to go check for duck nests after school if Brendan isn’t still hounding me.

  He continues on like this through the rich neighborhood. He gets more and more agitated, and I’m worried he’s going to start hitting me soon. I jog around a corner and shove my staff in the evergreen bushes across the street from school, and then I break into a run when I reach the mowed soccer field that stretches between the school fence and the gym doors. Inside, there’s usually a bored teacher drowning herself in coffee keeping an eye on us kids who come to school early. There’s a whole bunch of us because of what time our parents have to be at work. Some come for the free breakfasts because they’re even poorer than I am. We at least have generic Pop-Tarts and Kix cereal at home. I think Brendan comes early just to have more time to pick on me.

  If he catches up with me before I get inside, I’ll probably take some hits. But he won’t hit me where a teacher can see him. I’m not fast over short distances, though, and I barely make it inside ahead of him. He doesn’t punch me, but he doesn’t shut up either.

  “Where’d you put that stick, dickwad? I want that stick. After school, I’m going to beat you to death with that stick.” He backs me up to the brick wall of the gym over by the window where we get our milk cartons at lunch. He keeps on with his threats. My heart won’t slow down from running. I want to get away. I need to get away, but he’s blocking me in.