The Weird Fiction Megapack Read online

  In an open place, which might have been the center of the garden, a wooden shelter stood half-buried amid drifts, a domed roof atop squat pillars. The roof was shaped into a wide-mouthed, staring face, the mouth already clogged as if the thing were vomiting gray powder.

  Hamakina sat waiting for me there, on a bench beneath that strange roof. She too was barefoot and in rags, plastered with ash. But her cheeks were newly streaked with tears.

  “Sekenre…”

  “I’ve come to take you back,” I said gently.

  “I can’t go. Father…tricked me. He told me to eat the fruit, and I—”

  I waved a hand toward one of the white trees.

  “This?”

  “It didn’t look like this then. The trees were green. The fruit was wonderful. It smelled wonderful. The colors were…shining, changing all the time, like oil on water when the sun touches it. Father told me to, and he was angry, and I was afraid, so I ate…and it tasted dead, and then suddenly everything was like you see it now.”

  “Father did this?”

  “He said it was part of his plan all along. I didn’t understand a lot of what he said.”

  “Where is he?”

  I drew my sword, clutching it tightly, furious and at the same time aware of how ridiculous and helpless I must have seemed. But it was my sword now, no longer my father’s, given to me by the Sybil for a specific purpose—

  “Sekenre, what will you do?”

  “Something. Whatever I have to.”

  She took me by the hand. Her touch was cold. “Come on.”

  I don’t know how long we walked through the ash garden. There was no way to measure time or distance or direction. But Hamakina seemed to know for certain where we were going.

  Then the garden was gone and it seemed I was back in the cramped, swaying darkness of the Sybil’s house again. I looked around for her luminous face, expectant, but my sister led me without any hesitation across a rope bridge above an abyss, while vast leviathans with idiot, human faces swam up out of a sea of guttering stars, splashing pale foam, each creature opening its mouth to display rotting teeth and a mirrored ball held between them. I gazed down through the swinging, twisting ropes and saw myself reflected there on the curving glass.

  Somehow Hamakina was no longer with me, but far away, down below, inside each mirrored sphere, and I saw her running ahead of me across featureless sand beneath a sand-colored sky. Then each monster sank down in turn and she vanished, and another rose, its jaws agape, and I saw her again.

  There were black stars in the sky above Hamakina now, and she ran across the sand beneath them, a gray speck against the dead sky, receding into the black points which were the stars.

  And each leviathan sank down and another rose to give me a glimpse of her, and from out of the abyss I caught snatches of a song she sang as she ran. Her voice was still her own, but older, filled with pain, and a little mad.

  “When I am in the darkness gone,

  and you’re still in the light,

  come lie each day upon my grave;

  I’ll lie with you each night.

  Come bring me gifts of fruit and wine.

  Bring them from the meadow.

  I’ll bring dust and ash and clay;

  I’ll bring gifts of shadow.”

  Without any transition I could sense, I was suddenly on that endless expanse of sand beneath the black stars, and I followed her voice over the low dunes toward the horizon and a black shape that huddled there.

  At first I thought it was one of the stars fallen from the sky, but as we neared it the thing resolved itself, and I slowed to a terrified walk when I saw the pointed roofs and the windows like eyes and the familiar dock beneath the house, now resting on the sand.

  My father’s house—no, my house—stood on its stilts like a huge, frozen spider. There was no river, no Reedland at all, as if the whole world had been wiped clean but for this one jumble of ancient wood.

  When I reached the dock, Hamakina was waiting for me at the base of the ladder.

  She turned her head upward.

  “He is there.”

  “Why did he do all this to you and to Mother?” I said. I held onto the sword and onto the ladder, gripping hard, trembling more with sorrow than with fear or even anger.

  Her reply startled me far more than anything the dreamer Aukin had said. Once more her voice was older, almost harsh.

  “Why did he do all this to you, Sekenre?”

  I shook my head and started climbing. As I did the ladder shivered, as if it were alive and felt my touch.

  And my father’s voice called out from the house, thundering:

  “Sekenre, I ask you again. Do you still love me?”

  I said nothing and kept on climbing. The trapdoor at the top was barred from the inside.

  “I want you to love me still,” he said. “I only wanted what was best for you. Now I want you to go back. After all you have done against my wishes, it is still possible. Go back. Remember me as I was. Live your life. That is all.”

  I pounded on the trapdoor with the pommel of my sword. Now the whole house shivered and suddenly burst into white, colorless flame, washing over me, blinding me, roaring in my ears.

  I let out a yell and jumped, barely clearing the dock below, landing face-down in the sand.

  I sat up, sputtering, still clutching the sword. The house was not harmed by the fire, but the ladder smoldered and fell as I watched.

  I slid the sword under my belt again and started climbing one of the wooden stilts. Once more the white flames washed over me, but they gave no heat, and I ignored them.

  “Father,” I said. “I am coming. Let me in.”

  I reached the porch outside my own room. I was standing in front of the very window through which Hamakina had been carried away.

  All the windows and doors were barred against me, and flickering with white flames.

  I thought of calling on the Sybil. It would be my third and last opportunity. Then, if I ever did so again—what? Somehow she would claim me.

  No, it was not time for that.

  “Father,” I said, “if you love me as much as you say, open up.”

  “You are a disobedient son.”

  “I shall have to disobey you further.”

  And once more I began to weep as I stood there, as I closed my hands together and opened them again. Father had beaten me once for attempting this act. Then I had gotten no results. Now I did, and it was as easy as breathing.

  Cold blue flames danced on my outstretched palms. I reached up with my burning hands and parted the white fire like a curtain. It flickered and went out. I pressed my palms against the shuttered window. Blue flames streamed from between my fingers. The wood smoked, blackened, and fell inward, giving way so suddenly that I stumbled forward, almost falling into the room.

  I climbed over the windowsill and stood there, amazed. The most fantastic thing of all was that I was truly in the house where I had grown up, in the room Mother, Hamakina, and I had shared, and in which I had remained alone for half a night at the very end waiting desperately for the dawn. I saw where I had once carved my initials into the back of a chair. My clothes lay heaped over the edge of an open trunk. My books were on a shelf in the far corner, and a page of papyrus, one of my own illumination projects, was still in place on the desk, with pens and brushes and bottles of ink and paint all where I had left them. Hamakina’s doll lay on the floor at the foot of the bed. One of Mother’s hevats, a golden bird, hung from the ceiling, silent and motionless.

  More than anything else I wanted to just lie down in that bed, then rise in the morning, get dressed, and resume work at my desk, as if nothing had ever happened.

  I think that was my father’s last offer to me. He was shaping my thoughts.

  I walked out of the room, the floorboards creaking. I knocked on his workroom door. It, too, was locked.

  Father spoke from within. He sounded weary.

  “Sekenre,
what do you want?”

  It was a completely astonishing question. All I could say was, “I want in.”

  “No,” he said after a long pause. “What do you truly want, as my son, for yourself?”

  “I don’t know anymore.” I drew my sword once more, and pounded on the door with the pommel.

  “I think you do. You want to grow to be an ordinary man, to live in the city, to have a wife and family, to be free of ghosts and shadows and sorcery—on this we are agreed. I want that for you too. It is very important.”

  “Father, I am not sure of anything. I don’t know how I feel.”

  I kept on pounding.

  “Then why are you still here?” he said.

  “Because I have to be.”

  “To become a sorcerer is a terrible thing,” he said. “It is worse than a disease, worse than any terror, like opening a door into nightmare that can never be closed again. You seek to know. You peer into darkness. There is a certain allure, what seems like unlimited power at first, then glory, then, if you truly delude yourself, vast wisdom. To become a sorcerer is to learn the secrets of all the worlds and of the gods. But sorcery burns you. It disfigures, changes, and the man who becomes a sorcerer is no longer the man he was before he became a sorcerer. He is hated and feared by all. He has countless enemies.”

  “And you, Father? Do you have countless enemies?”

  “My son, I have killed many people in my time, thousands—”

  That, once more, astonished me into helplessness. I could only say, “But why?”

  “A sorcerer must have knowledge, not merely to ward off his enemies, but to live. He hungers for more dark spells, more powers. You can only get so much from books. You need more. To truly become a sorcerer, one must kill another sorcerer, and another, and another, each time stealing what that other sorcerer possesses, which he, in turn, has stolen by murder. There would be few sorcerers left were it not for the temptations, which recruit new ones. Sorcery goes on and on, devouring.”

  “Surely some magic can be used for good, Father.”

  I stopped pounding. I looked down at my hands, where they had been marked, where the flames had arisen so effortlessly.

  “Sorcery is not magic. Do not confuse the two. Magic comes from the gods. The magician is merely the instrument. Magic passes through him like breath through a reed pipe. Magic can heal. It can satisfy. It is like a candle in the darkness. Sorcery, however, resides in the sorcerer. It is like a blazing sun.”

  “I don’t want to be a sorcerer, Father. Truly. I have…other plans.”

  Now, I think, there was genuine sadness in his voice.

  “Beloved Sekenre, my only son, you have looked upon the evatim and been marked by them. Throughout your life you will be scarred from their touch. You have conversed with the Sybil and you bear her mark also. You have journeyed among the ghosts, in the company of a corpse, through the realm of Leshé, the place of dreams. You have drunk of the waters of vision and have seen all that is in Tashé, the land of death. And, at the last, you burned your way into this house with flames summoned from your hands. Now I ask you…are these the deeds of a calligrapher?”

  “No,” I said weakly, sobbing. All my resolve drained away. I let the sword drop to the floor and I slid down, my back to the door, and sat there. “No,” I whispered. “I just wanted to get Hamakina back.”

  “Then you are a disappointment to me, son. You are a fool,” he said with sudden sharpness. “She does not matter.”

  “But she is your child too. Didn’t you love her also? No, you never did. Why? You owe me that much, Father. You have to tell me why…about a lot of things.”

  He stirred within the room. Metal clinked. But he did not come to the door or touch the bolt. There was a long silence. I could see my mother’s hevat, the golden bird, through the open doorway of my own room, and I stared at it with a kind of distracted intensity, as if I could discern all the answers to all my questions in the intricacies of its design.

  I felt cold. I clutched my shoulders hard, shivering. The slashes the evatim had made in my sides and back pained me again.

  After a while, Father resumed speaking.

  “Sekenre, how old do you think I was when I married your mother?”

  “I—I—”

  “I was three hundred and forty-nine years old, my son. I had been a sorcerer for a long time by then. I had wandered through many lands, fleeing death, consumed by the contagion of sorcery, slaughtering my enemies, raging in my madness against the gods, whom I considered to be at best my equals. But I had a lucid interval. I remembered what I had been, long before. I had been…a man. So I pretended I was one again. I married your mother. I saw in you…all my hopes for what I had once been. In you, that ordinary man lived again. If I could cling to that hope, I too, in a small way, would remain human. So you were special. I loved you.”

  “But Hamakina—”

  “—is mere baggage, a receptacle and nothing more. When I felt the weight of my death on me at last, when I could no longer hold off my enemies, I planted the seed of Hamakina in her mother’s womb, and I raised her as a prize specimen, for a specific purpose. I brought her here to contain my death. The seed of her was something wrought in my laboratory. I placed her inside her mother with a metal tube, while her mother lay in a drugged sleep. So, you see, her life did not come from the River, from the dreams of Surat-Kemad, but from me. I offered this new life to the Devouring God in exchange for my own. It is a bottle, filled with my own death. So I am still a sorcerer, and a great lord in the land of the dead, because I am neither truly living nor truly dead. I am not the slave of Surat-Kemad, but his ally. And so, my son, your father has outwitted all his enemies, evaded all dangers. He alone is not wholly consumed by sorcery. He continues. There is a certain beauty to the scheme, you must admit—”

  I rose to my feet, numb beyond all sorrow now. I picked up the sword.

  “Sekenre,” Father said, “now that I have explained everything—you were right; I did owe you an explanation—you must go away. Save yourself. Be what I wanted to be. You are a good boy. When I was your age, I too was good. I only wanted to do what was right. But I changed. If you go now, you can remain as you are—”

  “No, Father. I, too, have changed.”

  He screamed then, not out of fear, but despair. I stood before the door, sword under one arm while I folded my hands together, then opened them.

  Once more, it was as easy as breathing.

  The flames leapt from my hands, red and orange this time. They touched the door, spreading over it. I heard the metal bolt on the inside fall to the floor. The door swung open.

  At first my eyes could not focus. There was only darkness. Then faint stars appeared, then an endless black plain of swirling sand. I saw hundreds of naked men and women dangling from the sky on metal chains, turning slowly in the wind, mutilated, their faces contorted with the idiocy of hate.

  The darkness faded. The stars were gone. Father’s room was as it had been before the priests had cleaned it out. All the books were there, the bottles, the shelves of jars, the charts, the strange shapes muttering in jars.

  He lay on his couch dressed in his sorcerer’s robe, as I had last seen him, his eyes gouged out, sockets covered with golden coins.

  He sat up. The coins fell into his lap. Fire burned within his eye-sockets, white-hot, like molten iron.

  And he said to me, “This is your last warning, Sekenre. Your very last.”

  “If you are so powerful, Father, where is your power now? You have not resisted me, not really. You only give me…warnings.”

  “What would I have to do then, my son?” he said.

  “You would have to kill me. It is too late for anything else.”

  His voice began to fade, to become garbled, to disintegrate into a series of hisses and grunts. I could barely make out his words.

  “Now all my preparations are undone. You disobeyed me to the last. You did not heed my many warnings, sorcer
er, son of sorcerer—”

  He slid off the couch onto the floor, wriggling toward me on all fours, his whole body swaying from side to side, his terrible eyes blazing.

  I almost called on the Sybil then. I wanted to ask simply, What do I do now? What now?

  But I didn’t. In the end, I alone had to decide what was right, the correct action. Anything I did would please the Sybil. She would weave it into the pattern. Surat-Kemad did not care—

  “My son…” The words seemed to come from deep within him, like a wind from out of a tunnel. “To the very end I have loved you, and it has not been enough.”

  He opened his huge, hideously elongated mouth. His teeth were like little knives.

  At that final moment, I did not fear him, nor hate him, nor did I sorrow. I felt only a hollow, grinding sense of duty.

  “No, it was not enough, Father.”

  I struck him with the sword. His head came off with a single blow. My arm completed the motion almost before I was aware of it.

  It was as easy as breathing.

  Blood like molten iron spread at my feet. I stepped back. The floorboards burned.

  “You are not my father.” I said softly. “You cannot have been my father.”

  But I knew that he had been, all the way to the end.

  I knelt beside him, then put my arms around his shoulders and lay with my head on his rough, malformed back. I wept long and hard and bitterly.

  And as I did, dreams came to me, thoughts, visions, flashes of memories which were not my own, and terrible understanding, the culmination of long study and of longer experience. My mind filled. I knew a thousand deaths and how they had been inflicted, how a single gem of knowledge or power was wrested from each. I knew what every instrument in this room was for, the contents of all the books and charts, and what was in each of those jars and how it could be compelled to speak.