The Weird Fiction Megapack Page 4

  But in the story, the bird-boy thought he was a heron—

  As I grew older, Father became more secretive, and the customers came no further than the door. Bottles were passed out to them. Then they stopped coming.

  Suddenly the house was empty. I heard strange noises in the night. In the earliest hours of the morning, Father began to receive certain visitors again. I think he summoned them against their will. They did not come to buy.

  Then Mother, my sister Hamakina, and I were locked in the bedroom, forbidden to emerge.

  Once I peeked out between two loose panels in the door and saw a bent, skeletal figure in the dim lamplight of the hallway outside, a visitor who stank like something long decayed and dripped with the water from the river below our house.

  Suddenly the visitor glared directly at me as if he had known I was there all along, and I turned away with a stifled yelp. The memory of that horrible, sunken face stayed with me in my dreams for a long time.

  I was ten. Hamakina was just three. Mother’s hair was starting to go gray. I think the darkness began that year. Slowly, inexorably, Father became, not a magician who worked wonders, but a sorcerer, to be feared.

  * * * *

  Our house stood at the very edge of the City of the Reeds, where the great marsh began. It was a vast place, which had belonged to a priest before Father bought it, a pile of wooden domes and sometimes tilted boxlike rooms and gaping windows fashioned to look like eyes. The house stood on log pilings at the end of a long wharf, otherwise not a part of the city at all. Walk along that wharf the other way and you came to street after street of old houses, some of them empty, then to the square of the fishmongers, then to the street of scribes and paper-makers, and finally to the great docks where the ships of the river rested at their moorings like dozing whales.

  Beneath our house was a floating dock where I could sit and gaze underneath the city. The stilts and logs and pilings were like a forest stretched out before me, dark and endlessly mysterious.

  Sometimes the other boys and I would paddle our shallow boats into that darkness, and on some forgotten dock or rubbish heap or sandbank we’d play our secret games; and then the others always wanted me to do magic.

  If I could, I refused with great and mysterious dignity to divulge awesome mysteries I actually knew no more about than they. Sometimes I did a little trick of sleight-of-hand, but mostly I just disappointed them.

  Still, they tolerated me, hoping I would reveal more, and also because they were afraid of Father. Later, when the darkness began, they feared him even more; and when I wandered in the gloom beneath the city, paddling among the endless wooden pillars in my little boat, I was alone.

  I could not understand it then, but Father and Mother quarrelled more, until in the end, I think, she too was afraid of him. She made me swear once never to become like my father, “never, never do what he has done,” and I swore by the holy name of Surat-Kemad without really knowing what I was promising not to do.

  Then one night when I was fourteen, I woke up suddenly and heard my mother screaming and my father’s angry shouts. His voice was shrill, distorted, barely human at times, and I thought he was cursing her in some language I did not know. Then came a crash, pottery and loose wood falling, and silence.

  Hamakina sat up beside me in bed.

  “Oh, Sekenre, what is it?”

  “Quiet,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  Then we heard heavy footsteps, and the bedroom door swung inward. Father stood in the doorway, his face pale, his eyes wide and strange, a lantern in his upraised hand. Hamakina turned to avoid his gaze.

  He remained there for a minute as if he hadn’t seen us, and slowly the expression on his face softened. He seemed to be remembering something, as if he were waking up from a trance. Then he spoke, his voice faltering.

  “Son, I’ve had a vision from the gods, but it is your vision, by which you will become a man and know what your life is to be.”

  I was more bewildered than frightened. I got out of bed. The wooden floor was smooth and cold beneath my bare feet.

  Father was forcing himself to be calm. He clung to the edge of the doorway and trembled. He was trying to say something more, but no words came, and his eyes were wide and wild again.

  “Now?” I asked without realizing what I was saying.

  Father strode forward. He seized me roughly by my robe. Hamakina whimpered, but he ignored her.

  “The gods don’t send visions just when it’s convenient. Now. You must go into the marshes right now, and the vision will come to you. Remain there until dawn.”

  He dragged me from the room. I glanced back once at my sister, but Father merely closed the door behind me and barred it from the outside, locking her in. He blew out his lantern.

  The house was entirely dark and smelled of river mud and worse. There was a trace of something burning, and of corruption.

  Father raised a trapdoor. Below floated the dock where all our boats were moored.

  “Down you go. Now.”

  I groped my way down, fearfully, shivering. It was early in the spring. The rains were nearly over, but not quite, and the air was cold and full of spray.

  Father closed the trapdoor over my head.

  I found my boat and got in, and sat there in the darkness cross-legged, my feet drawn up under my robe. Something splashed nearby once, twice. I sat very still, clutching my paddle firmly, ready to strike at I knew not what.

  Slowly the darkness lessened. Out beyond the marshes, the moon peered through thinning clouds. The water gleamed silver and black, waves and shadow. And it was then that I made out what seemed to be hundreds of crocodiles drifting in the water around me, their snouts barely breaking the surface, their eyes sparkling in the dim moonlight.

  It was all I could do not to scream, to keep silent. It was the beginning of my vision, I knew, for these beasts could easily have tipped over my boat and devoured me. In any case, there were too many of them for them to be natural creatures.

  It was as I leaned over to slip off my mooring line that I saw, quite clearly, that they were not even crocodiles. Their bodies were human, their backs and buttocks as pale as the flesh of drowned men. These were the evatim, the messengers of the river god. No one ever saw them, I’d always been told, save when he is about to die, or else when the god wishes to speak.

  So my father had been telling the truth. There was a vision. Or I was going to die, then and there.

  I paddled a short distance off, very carefully. The evatim parted before me. The tip of my paddle never touched one.

  Behind me, in the darkness, I heard someone coming down the ladder onto the dock. Then something heavy splashed in the water. The evatim hissed, all as one. It was like the rising of a great wind.

  I paddled for what felt like hours among the posts and pillars and stilts, groping my way with my paddle sometimes, until at last I came to open, deep water. I let the current take me a short distance, and looked back at the City of the Reeds where it crouched amid the marsh like a huge, slumbering beast. Here and there watchlamps flickered, but the city was dark. No one goes outdoors in the city at night: because the mosquitoes swarm in clouds at sunset, thick as smoke; because the marsh is full of ghosts who rise up out of the black mud like mist; but mostly for fear of the evatim, the crocodile-headed servants of Surat-Kemad, who crawl out of the water in the darkness and walk like men through the empty streets, their heavy tails dragging.

  Where the city reached into deep water, ships lay at anchor, bulging, ornately-painted vessels come upriver from the City of the Delta. Many were ablaze with lights, and from them sounded music and laughter. The foreign sailors do not know our ways or share our fears.

  * * * *

  In the City of the Reeds, all men who are not beggars wear trousers and leather shoes. Children wear loose robes and go barefoot. On the very few cold days they either wrap their feet in rags or stay indoors. When a boy becomes a man, his father gives him shoes. It is an
ancient custom. No one knows the reason for it.

  Father had hurried me out of the house without even a cloak. So I passed the night in quiet misery, my teeth chattering, my hands and feet numb, the cold air burning inside my chest.

  As best I could, I steered for the shallows, in among the grasses and reeds, making my way from one patch of open water to the next, ducking low beneath vines, sometimes forcing my way through with my paddle.

  A vision of sorts came to me, but all disjointed. I did not understand what the god was trying to say.

  The moon seemed to set very suddenly. The river swallowed it, and for an instant moonlight writhed on the water like Mother’s thousand-jointed crocodile image somehow glowing with light.

  I set my paddle down in the bottom of the boat and leaned over, trying to make out the thing’s face. But I only saw muddy water.

  Around me, dead reeds towered like iron rods. I let the boat drift. I saw a crocodile once, huge and ancient and sluggish with the cold, drifting like a log. But it was merely a beast and not one of the evatim.

  A bit later I sat in a stagnant pool surrounded by sleeping white ducks floating like puffs of cotton on the black water.

  Night birds cried out, but I had no message from them.

  I watched the stars, and by the turning of the heavens I knew it was no more than an hour before dawn. I despaired then and called out to Surat-Kemad to send me my vision. I did not doubt that it would come from him, not from some other god.

  At the same time, I was afraid, for I had made no preparation, no sacrifice.

  But Surat-Kemad, he of the monstrous jaws, was not angry, and the vision came.

  The light rain had stopped, but the air was colder yet, and, trembling and damp, I huddled in the bottom of my boat, both hands against my chest, clutching my paddle. Perhaps I slept. But, very gingerly, someone touched me on the shoulder.

  I sat up in alarm, but the stranger held up a finger, indicating that I should be silent. I could not see his face. He wore a silver mask of the Moon, mottled and rough, with rays around the edges. His white, ankle-length robe flapped gently in the frigid breeze.

  He motioned me to follow, and I did, silently dipping my paddle into the water. The stranger walked barefoot on the surface, ripples spreading with every step.

  We travelled for a long time through a maze of open pools and tufts of grass, among the dead reeds, until we came to a half-submerged ruin of a tower, no more than a black, empty shell covered with mud and vines.

  Then hundreds of other robed, masked figures emerged from the marsh, not walking on the water as had my guide, but crawling, their movement a curious waddle, their bodies swaying from side to side as does that of a crocodile when it comes out on land. I watched in amazement as they gathered around us, bowing low at the upright man’s feet, as if in supplication.

  He merely spread his hands and wept.

  Then I recalled one of my father’s stories, about a proud king, whose palace was more resplendent than the sun, of whom the gods were jealous. One day a crocodile-headed messenger came into the glittering court and hissed, “My master summons you, O King, as he summons all.” But the king, in his pride, bade his guards beat the messenger and throw him into the river whence he came, for the king did not fear the gods.

  And Surat-Kemad did not care to be feared, only obeyed, so the Great River flooded the land, swallowing the palace of the king.

  “That’s not much of a story,” I’d complained to Father.

  “It is merely true,” he said.

  Now I looked on in awe, desperate to ask so many questions but afraid to speak. But the sky lightened, and the weeping of the standing man became merely the wind rattling in the reeds.

  The sun rose, and the supplicants removed their masks and became merely crocodiles. Their robes were somehow gone in the shifting light. I watched their dark bodies sink into the murky water.

  I looked to the standing man, but a long-legged bird remained where he had been. It let out a cry and took to the air, wings thundering.

  * * * *

  The warm sun revived me. I sat up, coughing, my nose running, and looked around. The sunken tower was still there, a heap of dead stone. But I was alone.

  It was midday before I got back to the City of the Reeds.

  The city is a different place in the daylight, bright banners waving from towers, houses likewise bright with hangings and with designs painted on walls and roofs. The ships of the river unload by day, and the streets are filled with the babble of tongues, while traders and officials and barbarians and city wives all haggle together.

  It is a place of sharp fish smells and strange incense and leather and wet canvas and unwashed rivermen who bring outlandish beasts from the villages high in the mountains, near the birthplace of the river.

  By day, too, there are a thousand gods, one for every stranger, for every tradesman, for everyone who has ever passed through or resided or merely dreamed of a new god during an afternoon nap. In the street of carvers one can buy idols of all these gods, or even have new images made if one happens to be divinely inspired at the time.

  At night, of course, there is only Surat-Kemad, whose jaws rend the living and the dead, whose body is the black water, whose teeth are the stars.

  But it was by day I returned, making my way through the tangle of ships and smaller boats, past the wharves and floating docks, then beneath the city until I came out the other side near my father’s house.

  Hamakina ran to me when I emerged through the trapdoor, her face streaming with tears. She embraced me, sobbing.

  “Oh Sekenre, I’m so afraid!”

  “Where is Father?” I asked, but she only screamed and buried her face in my robe. Then I said, “Where is Mother?”

  Hamakina looked up into my face and said very softly, “Gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “She has gone to the gods, my son.”

  I looked up. Father had emerged from his workroom, his sorcerer’s robe wrapped loosely over soiled white trousers. He hobbled toward us, dragging himself as if he didn’t quite know how to walk. I thought there was something wrong with his legs.

  Hamakina screamed and ran out onto the wharf. I heard the front door bang against the outside of the house.

  I stood my ground.

  “Father, where is Mother?”

  “As I said…gone to the gods.”

  “Will she be coming back?” I asked, hopeless as I did.

  Father did not answer. He stood there for a moment, staring into space, as if he’d forgotten I was even there. Then he said suddenly, “What did you see, Sekenre?”

  I told him.

  He was silent again.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It didn’t mean anything. Did I do something wrong?”

  For once he spoke to me tenderly, as he had in the old days when I was very small.

  “No, faithful child, you did nothing wrong. Remember that the vision of your life goes on as long as your life does; and, like your life, it is a mystery, a maze, with many turnings, many things suddenly revealed, many things forever hidden. The longer you live, the more you will understand what you have seen this night. Each new piece of the vast puzzle changes the meaning of all that has gone before as you draw nearer and nearer the truth…but you never reach your destination, not entirely.”

  The cold and the damp had given me a fever. I lay ill for a week, often delirious, sometimes dreaming that the masked figure in the vision stood at my bedside, barefoot on the surface of the black water while dead reeds rattled all around. Sometimes, as the sun rose, he took off his mask and a heron screamed at me, leaping into the air on thunderous wings. Sometimes it was my father beneath the mask. He came to me each dawn, put his hand on my forehead, recited words I couldn’t make out, and bade me drink a sweet-tasting syrup.

  After the fever had gone, I saw him very little. He retreated to his workroom, noisily barring the door. Hamakina and I were left to care for ourselves. Sometim
es it was hard just finding food. We tried to assemble the leftover pieces of Mother’s hevats but seldom got much for the results.

  Meanwhile, lightning and thunder issued from the workroom. The whole house shook. Sometimes there were incredibly foul odors, and my sister and I would spend our nights outdoors, on rooftops among the beggars of the city, despite all the dangers. And once, as I crouched by the workroom door, terrified and holding back tears, Father spoke and I heard him answered by many voices, all of them faint and far away. One sounded like Mother. All were afraid, pleading, babbling, screaming.

  At times I wondered where Mother had gone, and tried to comfort Hamakina.

  But in my worst fears, I knew perfectly well what had happened to her. I could not tell Hamakina that.

  There was no one I could turn to, for now Father was the most feared of all the city’s black sorcerers, and even the priests dared not anger him. Demons of the air and of the river regularly convened at our house. I heard them scratching, their wings and tails dragging, while my sister and I huddled in our room, or kept to the rooftops.

  In the streets, people turned away when they saw us, made signs and spat.

  Then one day Father came to me, moving slowly and painfully, as if he were very old. He sat me down at the kitchen table and stared into my eyes for a long time. I was afraid to turn from his gaze. He had been weeping.

  “Sekenre,” he said, very gently, “do you love your father still?”

  I could not answer.

  “You must understand that I love you very much,” he said, “and I always will, no matter what happens. I want you to be happy. I want you to do well in your life. Marry a fine girl. I don’t want you to become what I have become. Be a friend to everybody. Have no enemies. Hate no one.”

  “But…how?”

  He took me by the hand, firmly. “Come. Now.”

  I was terribly afraid, but I went.

  There was near panic as he came into the city, yanking me along, walking in his strange way with his whole back writhing and rippling beneath his sorcerer’s robe like a serpent trying to stagger on heavy legs.