Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 97 Read online

  “Carl!” he says, and opens his arms. “We’ve missed you down here. You’re looking well.”

  “As are you,” says Carl, and they embrace with the certainty of every set of old lovers since the beginning of time.

  Louis watches, despair rising like water in a basement, covering over his memorabilia, drowning the steamer trunks of his ancestors, moldering his heirlooms. He silently laments as the Devil and Carl hold one another, leaning back to look into each other’s faces. He thinks about how the Devil always calls him Boy-O.

  “I can’t believe you never told me,” he says to Carl, and Carl shrugs.

  “Almost no one knows everything about anyone else,” he says. “Even the people they love. There are lacunae, and there are lies: these are the basic ones.”

  The Devil nods in solidarity.

  But Louis imagined he knew Carl. He’s spent his career removing the inner workings of animals, and filling them up with other things. If anyone knows everything about a creature, it is Louis. He now knows the soft machinery of all the ghosts in hell, and yet Carl is a mystery.

  “I’m sure you understand why I had to bring you down here,” says the Devil. “Carl stopped returning my telegrams.”

  “We didn’t end well, the Devil and I,” says Carl.

  “No one does with me,” says the Devil, with some regret. “I tried to apologize, but I’d gone too far.”

  Louis stitches up the belly of the last ghost with fierce, tugging stitches. He looks up at Carl, who is petting the Devil’s cheek.

  “Who are you?” Louis asks his lover. “Who even are you?”

  The ghost Louis is holding begins to disintegrate, and Louis strokes its seams. “Stay,” he says. He hammers its plaque in. “Swamp Nightmare,” it reads. “Louisiana.”

  Carl is glowing more brilliantly. He’s a blue-eyed carnival. A variety of demons come to observe. Louis can see their little pitchers of accelerants. He readies himself to defend Carl, though all he has is a needle and thread.

  “No,” the Devil intercedes with his minions. “Not Carl. Carl isn’t for the flames today.”

  “I don’t mind, if it makes you feel better,” says Carl. “Flames have never bothered me.”

  “I needn’t see you burn again, dear one,” says the Devil, and sighs. “Once was enough.” The demons back away, disappointed. The air smells of burnt feathers.

  “How is your collection coming?” the Devil asks Carl, tentatively. “I think of it sometimes. I think of your seraph and your little flock of ophanim in particular. All those beautiful eyes spinning on their wheels.”

  Discovery:

  One may, when falling in with God, miss the point. God, after all, would not, by common reckoning, be comfortable reclined across a bed in a small and tidy flat, drinking strong tea. God may not possess a navel, but that would be less than troubling, if one were a taxidermist and used to the beautiful oddities of nature. God may make love like an angel. God may make a man scream in disbelief. God may startle the Devil into saying ‘darling’ and ‘dearest.’

  The Devil and Carl go off into one of the back rooms of hell, and Louis waits. When Carl emerges, he’s wiping tears from his face, and when the Devil emerges, he is smiling bravely, abandoned again in the Underworld.

  “Boy-O,” says the Devil. “Looks like Carl wants you up there.”

  Louis looks around at the perfectly mounted hydra ghost, at the jellied mold of Dante, labeled simply “Cartographer,” at the feathered phoenix ignitus interruptus.

  “Does this mean I’m dying?” asks Louis. He’s only 28. At the museum he was in the middle of the Nile, and next, it would have been wild game, a particularly nice and nearly intact lion skin acquired from a dowager.

  “Dying isn’t such an awful thing,” says Carl, comforting him.

  “Dying is just a pneumatic tube,” says the Devil. “One goes up, one down.”

  “Does this mean I’m dead?” asks Louis.

  “You’re in demand,” says Carl. “Look at your work.”

  Louis looks down at his stomach instead, checking for a seam. There is none. “Am I an angel?”

  “You’ll be the official taxidermist. There are privileges to your position,” says Carl. “I’m offering you your dream job, Louis.”

  Discovery:

  Job Description: All things bright and beautiful may be the aim of the collection, but one may, when falling in with God, never realize that one is being interviewed. God, all Alpha and Omega, all open-armed and bare-chested in one’s bed, may never be discovered to be a collector on hiatus from his curation. Nature contains the tentacle and the thorn, the tusk, the membrane, the perfect dusty fish scales of butterfly wings. Nature contains the kissed, the loved and the employed, the insects. Heaven’s inhabitants may only be examples of everything that has ever existed on Earth. A taxidermist in heaven must stitch and stuff, smooth and arrange. Sometimes he may return to the bed of the curator, and stay there a century, drifting in a sea of feathered reckoning. Then will he return to the eternal skinning and sewing of souls. Compensation commensurate to experience.

  Louis takes a moment.

  “What if you die?” Louis says, and then points at the Devil. “What if he does?”

  “Then you preserve Carl and put Carl in the collection,” says the Devil. “Or me, for that matter. One day. You never know. I prefer a barbed wire armature.”

  “I like papier-mâché,” says Carl, “though if it’s available you might be better served by making an armature of spun glass.”

  “If you’re kind, you’ll bring me up to the higher place for display, Boy-O, when I go,” says the Devil, and then he passes Louis his valise, and kisses him on the cheek in the prickly way one kisses the lover of one’s love.

  A little scrap of ghost hangs out of the bag, and Louis tucks it in. If it is so ambitious, it deserves to ascend. He follows Carl into the pneumatic capsule, and then, with shocking speed, the great winds of heaven pull them up, and up, from beneath the skin of the Earth and into the vault of the sky.

  About the Author

  Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the upcoming young adult skyship novel Magonia from HarperCollins, the dark fantasy/alt-history novel Queen of Kings, the internationally bestselling memoir The Year of Yes, and The End of the Sentence, a novella co-written with Kat Howard, from Subterranean. With Neil Gaiman, she is the New York Times-bestselling co-editor of the monster anthology Unnatural Creatures, benefitting 826DC. Her Nebula and Shirley Jackson award-nominated short fiction has recently appeared on Tor.com, and in The Toast, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Apex, The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, Subterranean Online, Glitter & Mayhem and Jurassic London’s The Lowest Heaven and The Book of the Dead, and will soon appear in Uncanny, Shimmer, and more. It’s anthologized in the 2013 and 2014 editions of Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Paula Guran’s 2013 The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, in The Year’s Best Weird Volume 1, ed. Laird Barron, and in Wastelands, Vol 2, among others. She grew up in rural Idaho on a survivalist sled-dog ranch, spent part of her 20’s as a pirate negotiator and ship marketer in the maritime industry, and now lives in Brooklyn in an apartment shared with a seven-foot-long stuffed crocodile.

  Lovecraft

  Helena Bell

  First, a mouth appears. It is four centimeters long, curved along the ridge of the old woman’s collarbone. It is lined with small nubs of flesh, which is why Ann calls it a mouth and not a slit, a laceration, a suppurative wound.

  From the mouth emerges a baby cthulhu: head, tentacles, wings, short arms covered with a soft, pink fuzz. Then another. And another. The number of them does not matter. The old woman does not move as they move. She does not seem to notice their slithering, nor does she acknowledge the quiet, quick barks in rapid succession as they tumble over each other, biting and scrabbling at their siblings while Ann picks them up with a pair of tongs and drops them, one by one, into the garbage disposal and then turns it on.

>   When it is over, the mouth closes, the old woman goes about her day, and Ann washes her hands.

  Such is the way of things.

  Ann met the woman, a middle-aged socialite, while she was studying at the university. She had been asked by a professor to transcribe the oral history of the descendent of one of the school’s founders and Ann dutifully recorded the names and dates, the occupations. She included the story of the surgeon who had been accused of practicing his marksmanship on the cadavers in the basement of Charity Hospital. Others she left out:

  Well, everyone knows that slavery was awful, but there were some good relationships scattered here and there. My great-grandfather and his manservant were so close; they died within a week of each other.

  Ann smiled as the woman showed her the Proteus flag she hung every Mardi Gras from the second floor balcony: a cotton sea of red and white centered by a seahorse wearing a five pronged crown. She nodded as the woman described the dress she had worn (the capped sleeves, the thousands of hand-sewn Swarovski crystals, her furred cape), and the menu at Antoine’s for her Queen’s Supper.

  Somewhere between the description of the main course and the bananas Foster, a small animal fell onto the center of the flag. It spread its wings wide, and hopped once, then twice until the woman folded it up in the thin cloth and bashed it with her balled fists.

  Ann did not tell her about the second: the one she spied crawling up the sides of the armoire. How it sat, perched in the left hand corner like a gargoyle, watching as its brother (or sister, Ann was never able to tell) was reduced beneath the woman’s hands. How it watched her, pitifully and somehow pityingly, and how Ann felt a tightening in her gut and a tingling in her skin. She felt a kinship with this creature she could not describe; it was beautiful and precious and should be treasured. She did not love it. It was not human and could not be loved, but Ann knew in the marrow of her bones that the creature staring at her was hers to protect. As for the other, she could do nothing.

  “Oh,” the woman said after. “I do hope I can get the stain out.”

  Ann helped the woman carefully pour bone and membrane into a plastic bag, tie it, and place it outside next to the recyclables. She agreed to finish the interview the next day, even though there was nothing else Ann needed to know. After the front door closed behind her, she quickly went to the window, following the line of the curtains up and up until she spied the tiny cthulhu hanging upside down like a bat, swaddled in the deep blue silk.

  Over the next few days, Ann found many things to examine and catalog for an archive she claimed the university was interested in creating for the family. She pored over photos, letters, the document of formal censure from the New Orleans Surgery Society expelling Dr. C.A. Luzenberg from its ranks. She arrived day after day, at 9 a.m. on the woman’s front steps, her notebook in hand, eager to begin the day’s work.

  Sometimes she glimpsed the cthulhu spying on her from a particularly high perch. But no matter what she did, it never came near enough for Ann to examine it further: to pet it, to make friends with it, to comfort it in its obvious terror. It did not trust Ann, and Ann did not know how to gain its trust. The only thing she could do was wait, and hope.

  After they finished with the archive, Ann offered to help the woman organize her other papers and books, and later to help her with her social calendar or event planning. One day, as the two women polished the silver, they spotted the cthulhu hanging from the ceiling medallion, its claws (it had some claws, though their number and location seemed constantly to shift) digging into the white wood, turning its head this way and that to watch them with wide yellow eyes.

  “Damn thing won’t let me get near,” the woman said.

  “It must know what you did with the other one,” Ann said.

  “Other ones,” the woman corrected. “Have to get them when they first come out. One or two isn’t bad, but a few years ago I woke up in the morning to find a room full of them. Tearing up clothes, eating the flowers and artwork, making nests out of the good linens. Three maids quit on me in one week. Finally had to tent the house; told them it was termites.”

  “Surely not,” Ann said, as she walked to the center of the room and cooed, lifting her hand up and offering it as a perch.

  “You’re not scared of it?” the woman asked.

  Ann shook her head. “Why should I be?”

  “Because it’s monstrous,” the woman said. “Evil.”

  Suddenly, and without warning, the woman’s neck opened and three more emerged: each identical to the one above Ann’s head. The old woman managed to spear two with salad forks, and yelled at Ann to get the third before it got away. Ann ran to the hearth and picked up a heavy iron poker, and as the woman screamed at her to get it, get it, she finally managed to land a blow directly between the creature’s wings as it ran across the floor. Later, as she scrubbed the carpet with soap and water, she thought she could feel the other one staring down at her and whispering, “You’re just like her, aren’t you.”

  “I’ll make it up to you,” Ann whispered back.

  The woman has never been married. She dated a few boys in college, had been escorted to Le Debut and the Debutante Club by a law student from Connecticut who first gave her a ring from Tiffany’s, and then revealed that it had been worn first by someone else.

  “My mother said never to wear another girl’s engagement ring. It’s bad luck.”

  On Mondays and Thursdays, Ann and the woman drove first to the grocery store on Magazine Street where they had the sandwiches that the woman liked to serve for her bridge club, and then to the smaller store on Prytania, the name of which Ann was never quite sure if she was pronouncing correctly. They filled the basket with fresh fruit and vegetables, one bag of blue runner beans which Ann had never seen the woman cook, and supposed it was just one of those things that southern women liked to store in their pantries. The woman selected her meat and seafood, her preferred juices. After a few weeks Ann realized that the woman bought the same foods, in the same amounts each time, and offered to do the shopping herself, but the woman refused. She liked to walk the aisles, to think about what else she might buy. And sometimes she did buy something new: such as a box of strange, sugary cereal which, had the cashier peered closely, had already been opened and reclosed with the small, lifeless body of a dark-skinned creature hastily stuffed inside.

  Ann filled out the checks: date, payee, amount, and the woman signed them in a clear, fluid script:

  Mrs. C. A. Luzenberg.

  Ann was paid in cash. They had never discussed a salary, or hours, or even the job itself, but on the second Sunday that Ann showed up at the woman’s house, she was handed a white envelope with seven crisp hundred dollar bills tucked inside. Later, when Ann was refused admission to the graduate school, the steady employment with Mrs. Luzenberg allowed her to stay another year to better her application. And again the next year, and so on, as each time she told herself that if it was not meant to be, she would move on to something else.

  The cthulhu didn’t grow very fast. When Ann had been working for the woman for more than three years, it appeared no bigger than the day she’d first seen it.

  “Trick of the light,” Mrs. Luzenberg said. “You have to learn to learn to measure it differently. It used to like to sleep in the bottom drawer of my secretary, curled up like a snake. It always disappeared before I could catch it there, but yesterday I found him spilling out the sides and his head was stuck.” Mrs. Luzenberg always referred to the cthulhus as male; Ann wasn’t convinced.

  “What did you do?”

  “I got some bacon grease and a shoehorn and wedged him out. He cried the whole time of course.”

  “You just let him out?” Though Ann never helped, she knew Mrs. Luzenberg was still trying to catch or kill him: sticky traps, bug bombs, other forms of poison. Ann had been warned not to eat any food, which was uncovered or unwrapped or open in any way. Ann told herself that she continued to work for Mrs. Luzenberg only to ensure
that her cthulhu managed to survive another day.

  “I suppose I’ve gotten used to him,” Mrs. Luzenberg said. “Much like you.”

  The other cthulhus never came out in a predictable or regimented fashion. Sometimes the mouth appeared in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon. There would be three in one day, or a complete absence for a month. Ann asked how Mrs. Luzenberg managed to live with the unpredictability; what steps she had taken in her life to manage such inconveniences.

  “I avoid airplanes and submarines,” she said. “Almost everything else is workable.”

  Ann learned to watch for small signs: a twitch beneath the skin, a shift in the woman’s mood or the tilt of her head. Sometimes she thought she could detect the slightest change in smell: a sudden burst of citrus against the crisp, sterile air. Sometimes she was correct, pulling back the collar of the woman’s shirt as the first indentation appeared, darkening to a bruise before it pulled open and the first smooth, tubular appendage appeared.

  More often, she was wrong.

  When the cthulhu had grown (to Ann’s eyes) to the size of a small dog, it finally allowed Ann to come near. It would sit at Ann’s feet and allow her to rub its belly. Eventually Ann decided to fashion a harness and leash out of old bridle leather she’d found in the attic so that she might take it outside for walks in the fresh air. Mrs. Luzenberg helped Ann measure the cthulhu’s girth and the space between its wings. She showed Ann how to use the punch and awl, how to braid and stich. She found an old sheepskin rug to pad the pieces, which rubbed near the creature’s wings.

  “Not perfect, but it will do,” they declared when the creature stood before them, the freshly oiled leather pieces falling this way and that.

  “If he flies off,” Mrs. Luzenberg said, “I’m not sure you won’t be carried off with him.”

  “If he does, he does. If I am, I am.”

  Ann took him to the cemetery across the street. Though the cthulhu had shown no aggression towards others (not the bridge club, the occasional maid or caterer, the man who had to shoo the cthulhu off the 19th-century French dressing table in the upstairs guest bedroom when he came to appraise it for the insurance company when Mrs. Luzenberg decided she needed a brand new policy), Ann did not feel comfortable taking him around moving cars or the huge groups of tourists who bloated the sidewalks. They wandered among the tombs, Ann reading the names and dates and the cthulhu picking his way carefully among the shifting oak roots, sitting back occasionally on his haunches and rustling his wings when she did not move quickly enough for his liking.