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There’s a certain point, halfway up the ladder, where it seems impossible.  Just a little farther, you try and coax yourself.  Just a little; I’m halfway there, surely I can finish this, surely it’s not that hard?  And no matter how silvery-tongued and gold-throated you make yourself, your body won’t buy any of it, not so much as a penny’s-worth.  I’m done, it says.  Go find yourself a new body, because this one’s fed up and is about to let go and splat itself.  And you’re forced to agree, and your wind-numbed grip begins to loosen – just a little – and then you realize that you’re now two-thirds of the way up the side of the tower since you’ve started this suicidal little conversation. 
It’s much easier after that.  Well, most of the time.  Every year or two, someone loses the argument. 
It’s messy. 

The view from the top of the ladder makes up for it, I said to myself, as I rubbed down muscles that complained louder than my grandchildren.  It really does.  The village down there, on top of the peak, it has a nice view.  The top of the ladder, the fishing platform, that little wooden skeleton floating in the upper zephyrs all those hard-fought yards above?  That has a grand view, a view to make kings and priests drop to their knees and gasp.  You can see everything as far as the clouds will let you, from the top of the sky to the foot of the mountain, all those thousands of yards below, drowning in the thickness of the lower atmosphere. 
The air up here is different from down there; as sharp as a glasscutter, as cold and clean as a glacier’s spine.  It makes you see spots for hours after your first ascent, and you never quite stop building up a tolerance.  An expert skyfisher can stay up here for half the day and come down with a twinkle still in his eye, if not a spring in his step.  I slept overnight once, thirty years ago, fuelled as much by bravado as exhaustion.  I don’t recommend it.  Not unless the catch is really worth it. 
Today’s wasn’t.  I looked over the big basket – a big man could stand in it nicely – next to Davro, my niece’s husband.  Davro was a good skyfisher, but all he’d been able to grub up today were a few birds: some skinny Stovelings with their tubby, muscular bodies that could fly for days (and had to stew for hours for the least bit of tenderness), and an immature Banewing, all talons and beak and wide eyes that looked more puzzled than fierce on its adolescent frame.  A sad sight, to see it go before it had a chance to really learn how to ride the wind down on its prey.  And it was mostly bone and sinew, with very little meat. 
“Scarce,” Davro agreed with my silent appraisal of his catch.  “Not much out there today.   The migrations must’ve stopped a little early this year.”
“They started late, too,” I said. “That’s true.  But we’ve got a good catch from the summer still stashed away.  Remember that Moaner family?  Got all four of them, and there’s enough meat on those to feed a family each for half the winter.”
“You want to eat Moaner for half the winter?”  Tender the big, passive cloud-wanderers might be, but tasty they weren’t.  Not bad, just bland enough that one steak would drive a man to murder for some salt. 
Davro grimaced.  “Point made, Uncle.  Still, we won’t starve.  And that’s something.”
“Half the old coots down there would rather starve than live off Moaner meat.  Or at least I wish they would.  It’d save us all a lot of crabbing come midwinter.  I swear, they’ll out-moan their meals.”
“You aren’t so far off from one of those old coots yourself, Uncle.  ”
“Bite your tongue, boy.  The difference between me and them –”
“–is you’d rather climb the ladder up here than sit around and listen to each other complain about back pains?”
“–is that I’ve still got my looks.  And that too.  It isn’t the backs that’s the worst part, though.”
“Oh?”  Davro’s bamboo pole bucked in his hands, and he began to reel in the line, twisting it this way and that with old practice guiding his fingers. 
“No.  Carbuncles.  And piles.  Don’t get me started on the way they get started on carbuncles and piles.”
“A gruesome picture, Uncle.”
“And then there’s the warts.”
“Wonderful.”
“And the haemorrhoids are simply –”
“Uncle, I can’t reel this in while trying not to gag at any vivid haemorrhoid description you may have readied and aimed at my sensitive, lily-like ears.”
“Soft, weak.  You can’t go skyfishing with a delicate stomach, nephew.  What’ll you do if that’s a Plowmaw you’ve hooked there, and you loose your dinner looking at its pretty face?”
“If this were a Plowmaw, I’d be halfway across the sky right now, arching gracefully, and just reaching the point where I start falling, then screaming.”
“And spraying your last meal to the four corners of the wind right then’d be downright unpleasant, wouldn’t it?”
Davro chuckled as he snagged his catch in the nets strung up around him like a spider’s web.  A single, smooth movement of his arm snapped up the wooden cudgel at his side and bludgeoned the squirming prey into passivity.  It was a mature male Scudhoppler, beautiful plumage dulled and fletching into its winter coat now that its breeding days were done.  Not the plumpest of birds, but those four skinny little wings of its crisp up nicely after just a few minutes in a pan.
“That’s it for me, Uncle,” said Davro.  “Hope you have better luck on the evening watch, but I’m for home and food now.”  He fixed a lid over his basket of catch, shoved it onto the big hook of the lift, and set about fastening all the ropes and knots that prevented it from spilling onto our roofs halfway down the descent.  It wouldn’t take anything much bigger than a Stoveling to put a hole through a house from this height, or even half it. 
“You know,” said Davro as he set the winch moving to drop the basket down, steady but slow, “I still remember the first time I asked you why we didn’t just use one of these to get up and down from here.”
“Oh yes.”
“You told me to stop asking stupid questions and whacked me on the head.”
“Well, I remembered my uncle telling me that back in the day.  I figured I owed it to him to pass it on.”
Davro laughed – louder than the lame joke had required for it to be socially acceptable – and headed down the ladder, moving in parallel with his ticking, creaking cargo.  If you were really good, your foot would touch dirt just before the basket did, so you could catch it.  If you weren’t really good but thought you were, you’d probably fall off trying to beat it.  A good weeding mechanism for braggarts, although a bit wasteful. 
I stood up there for a minute before I moved to work, savouring the sounds that coloured the silence.  The creak and whistle of the bamboo framework underfoot that made and held up this little island in the sky, our fishing platform.  The rush and rumble of the wind and the clouds.  Something out there, calling for food, warning, a mate, or just for the hell of it. 
I sighed happily, and felt those aching muscles fade into insignificance.  Davro was a nice boy, no bore to talk to, but up here wasn’t really meant for talking.  Not even during the big migration rushes, where every inch was crammed with men and equipment straining as hard as they could to bring down the quarry, the platform so overloaded with flesh dead and living that it seemed like it was going to crash down on the spot.  Even then, no one talked unless they had to.  This was a place for doing things. 
So I did things.  I pulled my rod from my back, assembled it with care, all the long, whippy, hollow feet of it, stretching out and giving me a reach that spanned yards.  I threaded its tip with the strong stuff, the string woven by my Vedna, near as tough as wire and nearly as stiff.  I had a devil of a time knotting it, but when it was done, nothing short of a Plowmaw would snap that line, and I liked to think that even one of those brutes would’ve had to strain itself.  I dotted its length with small glass-blown buoys, airy little things containing just enough helium to keep the line near-neutrally buoyant. 
That was the bulk of the preparations.  Now, the location, my favourite spot, a little nook tucked away on the northernmost dock.  The skyfishing platform was roomy enough for a score and a half of men to scurry about, but it never felt large, not in the face of all that empty air.  You were forever surrounded by a view that made the biggest man feel like an ant.
The sun had begun its dive.  I baited the tip of the line, placed a big soft lump of Vedna’s thickbread on its tip.  Heavy, firm dough riddled with all manner of fragrant little nuggets, meats, fruits, and vegetables alike.  Not so good for a human to eat, not unbaked, but the smell brought the game in like fleas to a roaming cat.  And as soon as they found it, they had to taste it, with just a quick mouthful, a little nip at the bait.  Which usually ended up sampling one of the two dozen or so barbed hooks of varying shapes and sizes that studded the entire doughball.  A nasty business, but I liked to think I was good enough to make sure it was over quickly. 
Preparations: done.  Location: done.  Baiting: done.  I whirled the line and cast, watched it soar into a nearby cloudbank.  And then I sat back to wait and skywatch and politely ask myself what in the name of all the sticks in the forest what I was doing up here. 

I was old.  There was no denying that, dance around the issue with Davro as I might.  Skyfishing was not a job for old men, or aging men, or anyone that wasn’t ready for an hourlong climb followed by a six-hour marathon of heaving in struggling prey and wrestling it to death, all in thin air.  So was I doing it because I wanted to pretend I was still young?  Or was the company of my near-peers really as grating as I talked it up to be? 
Or was I just determined to do this because I didn’t know anything else?
I stared moodily at my bobber, a shiny bit of metal that glinted in the slowly-reddening light of the setting sun.  Let’s face it, Farlen, I told myself, you love this.  You like the view, you love the sweet sting of the cold breeze, you love that ache you don’t care about that pops up in your arms as you try to subdue a Moaner calf while its parents get ready to charge you.  And you’ve spent your whole life doing it, and you’re damned if you’re going to step off that ladder, touch dirt, and never see the sky again except from below. 
Except you’re going to have to, because your bones hurt and your back aches and all those piles and carbuncles you were bandying about with young Davro – who isn’t young, and is just a sign of your own advancing age, calling a midyears man young! – belong to you, and the only difference between you and those coots downstairs is that they’re smart enough to know when to leave off work and take up complaining. 
Huh.  I bet that they were drinking tea right now, while I shivered up here.  I smiled through blue lips.  Bastards didn’t know what they were missing. 
The line shook, my mind snapped to attention, and the first catch of the eve started its laborious progress towards the dinner table. 

Time spent on the skyfishing platform was different from time on the dirt.  It had two modes, two tempos: waiting and reeling.  Waiting, it slowed, swirled, eddied around me as smooth as a summer breeze.  The line bobbed, the little buoys on it shimmered, and the cold settled in with the insidious ease of a cuckoo in a nest.  Then would come reeling, where the world shattered into a new form instantly, where everything but the line and the muscles dropped out of sight and out of mind and overheated, bones baking against blood from the sweet, sweet strain of sweat. 
Then with the plop of the catch’s body in the basket it was back to waiting, mind making a tally that sat unchanged somewhere in the back of the brain until it needed adding to again. 
The first catch was a wandering Sicklejaw, a rarer sight than most (reptiles in the sky were always rare, scaly, gliding things, and ones this high up scarcer still), and a fierce fight until I managed to wrap my hands around its neck (a riskier, but faster kill than the cudgel, and one I preferred and maintained took more skill).  Slightly rank flesh, but it was a female with a clutch tucked up in her long, curved underbill.  The eggs were protected from all by her iron-hard beak, but now lay exposed to her poisonous saliva as the muscles in her jaw gradually relaxed.  I placed them in the basket with care, and wrapped my blanket around them for cushioning.  I wouldn’t need the warmth for now anyways.  Vedna had knit that blanket, it was as thick and warm as could be and still light enough to be an easy carry al the way up.  I didn’t really deserve her company. 
Three Stovelings were next, the last of the evening, all spaced apart by no more than ten minutes, all with very little fuss.  My mother had cooked them the best of anyone I knew, even Vedna, though of course I’d never tell her that.  Most people thought the name was about their chewy, rubbery flesh, but she’d always said otherwise.  “They’re like little stoves, of course,” she told me, and she’d hollowed out their tiny ribcages and stuffed them with whatever she could, fruit or vegetables.  It tenderized them wonderfully fast. 
A vast-winged, tiny-bodied Spiralling Crover, on its way down from the vaults of the sky above where it slept in the day to the lowlands of the underclouds, aching to feed on small nightbirds and bats.  A bony, knobbly-poor meal, but with beautiful plumage and soft, insulating down that would make a fine pillow or coat lining, perhaps something for one of the grandchildren.  Maybe little Aniese?  Or wait, she wasn’t so little anymore, and would take resentment as being “babied.”  Was Olmin still the youngest?  They all grew up so fast, such a tired line that the old people had told him when he was young. 
Now here was a real catch, a sturdy tug on the line with real weight behind it.  No bird this, a bat, a Gloompounder, a big, slow browser of the high-altitude insects, the earl of batkind: fat, sleepy and thick, but with excellent taste.  A real feast, and that short, thick fur would be handy.   Easy catches too; if you could get by that first shocked and appalled outburst of theirs when they felt the hook’s prick, you were pretty much set.  This would be a fine, tasty meal.  I could share it with Davro, as thanks.  He’d always been my favourite nephew.  My brother was a better father than I was.  Had been a better father than I was.
I grew cold all at once, and reclaimed my blanket from the Sicklejaw eggs, carefully nestling them on the fur of the Gloompounder’s belly and covering it with a wing. 
Damnit, I was old. 

Another Gloompounder bit the line as soon as I’d replaced it, a smaller specimen that might have been the other’s mate (hard to check the gender on Gloompounders, especially in the oncoming dusk).  Another good meal, and a good sign.  The night was proving fruitful, and I decided I’d lord it over Davro a little when I got home.  Just ribbing, of course – luck couldn’t be helped. 
The next catch soured my optimism as soon as I heard the squealing.  It was a Chittle-Whistler, all legs, compound eyes, and carapace, with that damned pig-screaming orbiting it like a comet.   My father had sworn by their meat, but he was the only man I’d ever known who’d willingly eat the things when other food lay nearby, or even things that were only food under the most relaxed definitions.  Those things did not count among their number Chittle-Whistler meat, as far as I was concerned.  If you wanted to eat bugs, you should at least eat little ones.  Trying to consume one the size of a large boy seemed excessive. 
I smacked it between the eyes with the cudgel – nothing to strangle, and there was no way I was touching that thing – moved to throw it over the side of the skyfishing platform that faced down the mountainside, far from the village, and stopped to consider an idea.  Maybe I didn’t like Chittle-Whistlers.  Maybe no one in the village liked Chittle-Whistlers.  But there were plenty of things out there that did like them, and maybe I was being a tad too quick to discard useful bait. 
I cut free the legs – no sense in making the lure too bulky – and set them aside, then re-attached the limbless head and torso to the line, setting aside the chewed-upon scraps of the sweetdough (it had been near finished anyways – but with this, the night could stretch on a bit longer).  The buoys were measured, checked, and another four or so were added on to compensate for the heavier drag.  Then with a cast, it started all over again.  Something in the back of my head pointed out that the sun had set, and I should be heading home inside the hour.  Vedna and the family would be setting out dinner without me now, it warned, and I’d miss the scraps.  I devoutly ignored it. 

It was a matter of minutes before the next catch was champing at the Chittle-Whistler’s bit, and the weight and heft of it nearly caused me to lose my feet from glee alone.  Up up and up over the side it came, rattling and thrashing against the bamboo hard enough to rock the platform, a big fat Twulkee’s Owl, the black sheep of its particular family with its long (for an owl) beak and small (again, for an owl) eyes.  It hissed at me, and I laughed back as I brought it down.  Good stewing flesh, and that beak would make a fine razor.  But only a razor for the cautious.  The beak was sharp, yes, but just a little too sharply curved at the tip.  Treat it like a straight blade and you’d have a slit throat before you knew what from when. 
A Spreadwing Gloompounder was next up, the giant of its particular family, as fat and round as a butterball with wings like big paper fans.  It put up much more of a fight than its lesser cousins had, if only because of its impressive weight.  Towards the end it grew exhausted and hung limp, and the force of the dead weight nearly dragged me over the edge. 
Deep breath, stretch your back.  My, that hurt, didn’t it?  Odd, didn’t feel so bad at the time.  Deep breath again, keep it coming, back to work. 
Another Chittle-Whistler, never a species to shy from cannibalism.  I smacked it between the disgusting eyes and threw it away, allowing myself the brief luxury of watching the body pinwheel to a speck and then nothing against the grey rocks.  Very satisfying, perhaps inappropriately so.  The air made me gasp, and it reminded me of that one fistfight I’d had up here with brother Rackle, Davro’s father.  We’d loved the same girl.  He’d won the fight, found the girl wasn’t worth it, and moped for three years before finding his wife Yema.  And her sister Vedna, well, she’d found me soon after, hadn’t she? 
The best fight of my life, although I couldn’t breath properly for weeks after it. 

A wait, a pause, and then a heave and a pull.  And what a heave, what a haul!  I could recognize that pull anywhere, in my sleep, in my grave; it was a Highbacked Trellmador, a grand swimmer of the skies, a bird built like the beautiful, delicious, unnatural offspring of a fish and a bull, with a beak that was a blunt instrument.  My whole body was the rod for an hour there, a long, hard wrestle of skinny arms against wings that could concuss a  horse with a blow.  Twice my feet nearly left the platform’s surface, and each time I hazily considered checking to see if I’d remembered to tie the knots in my line securely, each time dismissing it – I might lose the catch!
At last it hurled itself at me head on, with a screech like cracking rocks.  I skipped, hopped, and fell over, it couldn’t check itself, and with a thud that shook the ladder to its roots it smacked onto the platform, too stunned and exhausted to even flap. 
It took me five minutes to kill the thing, tired as I was, thick as its skull was.  And what a haul  I’d send this down with the basket strapped to its side, in a special harness.  Out of season by a great magnitude – Highbacked Trellmadors were early migrators, and they might not fly fast but they flew long.  This thing’s kin should be clear to the winter nesting grounds by now, and I had no idea what on earth had possessed it to stay so long as the nights grew cooler.  
I turned to the basket, then hesitated and looked at my rod and line.  The Chittle-Whistler, though ragged, remained intact.  And Highbacks tended to flock in mated pairs.  Maybe this was an unlucky bachelor heading home alone after a long, fruitless search for a partner.  Maybe it wasn’t.  Maybe I should find out before I started to climb down the ladder, completely exposed and open, with no shelter and nowhere to run.  Highbacks paired closely, to say the least. 
Besides, said that little thing in the back of my head, you want to prove that you’re still the best.  That you’re not old.  I told it shut up, and then realized I’d spoken aloud without intending to. 
All right then.  The last cast.  Just to be sure, to be safe.  The air was getting to me.  I heaved the rod back, flicked, and watched the ungainly, half-chewed corpse go spinning away into the night, bobber shining in the flicker of my lantern. 
It vanished suddenly, and I had barely any time at all to grin before that familiar, deep haul rung in on me, with a savage undercurrent that told me I’d been exactly right.  I laughed a bit – well, coughed, what with the cold and all – and thanked every star above me that I hadn’t tried to leave the shelter of the platform, however simple it was. 
Of course, now I had an angry bird twice my size and my full weight attached to a string that I couldn’t let go of.  Still, it was probably better this way. 
The line shook, and I spilled half out over the ledge, gripping firmly to the railing with my hips as best as I could.  I tipped uneasily as it yanked this way and that. 
Well, it was probably better. 
A wrench, a yank, and my grip started to slip.  I didn’t want to think what would happen if the Trellmador got ahold of my rod.  I wasn’t about to head down that ladder with it lurking, and the thought of replicating my little overnighter of so many years ago gave me the chills in my chills. 
The line shook, I jerked another half inch towards a thousand feet of air, and then it slumped with a crunch, slackening in a flash.  I was so surprised, I nearly threw myself off the edge. 
Something rumbled out there in the darkness, effortlessly overwriting the pained squawk of the Trellmador.  Bones crunched, and the line twitched and soared this way and that, entirely independent of my muscles.  The Trellmador went quiet, and the only sound was the tearing now, like someone tearing apart wet chunks of wood. 
Then a quiet nudge, a deliberate yank on the line, experiment, cautious, intrigued. 
I dropped the rod.  It was a good one, used for fifteen years, made by my oldest son, and I was sure he’d be happier to have a living father than an intact skyfishing rod, which he wouldn’t have in any case if I chose to hang on to it.  Whatever was out there, it wasn’t something I would go after along, or with rod and line at all.  We’d need the harpoons we took down Moaners and Great Green Rumblebacks with, the summer hunting tools for when the updrafts were warm and the sun shone bright.  All tucked away safely in the sheds around the ladder’s base, damn it. 
Whatever it was grunted, and the sounds of busy consumption drifted away on the breeze, quieter by the second. 
All right.  Escape next.  Hopefully it’ll move on fast.  Hopefully.  If not, if it finds me down that ladder, I’m dead.  Probably. 
I looked at the basket, and the winch for the basket drop. 
“This is a very, very, stupid idea,” I told myself aloud, whispering. 
Still, what were the alternatives?
So it was, after a few worrying minutes of preparation and starting at night sounds, that I finished rigging the basket together with the Trellmador corpse.   I had one foot on the ladder and one hand on the trigger switch and my heart in my mouth. 
“Stupid idea,” I reminded myself, and I flipped the switch. 
The cargo dropped what seemed almost instantly, like a rock.  So hypnotizingly speedy was its descent that I very nearly forgot to start climbing, muscles locking up like children’s hands on candies. 
Over the whir of the moving dropline, something rumbled again.  That got me moving. 
It was the fastest I’d ever gone down the ladder, and in the worst state.  I was too jumpy to think or move, and my body was too numb and stiff to bend.  Yet somehow, I managed, skipping steps, releasing grips almost as soon as they were found, keeping one eye on the darkness and another on my hands, neither of which were in any state to notice anything smaller than a house.  Still, I paid close attention to them, so much that I neglected my ears, which is why it took me so long to realize that the cargo line had stopped its descending hum. 
I paused, and in the sudden, extreme moment of focus I found myself in, I heard a rumble from below. 
You don’t want to move too fast in a situation like that.  It can get you in trouble.  So I spun around so quickly that I nearly twirled off the ladder. 
Right there, right beneath my feet, cargo basket in its claws, half of the Highbacked Trellmador vanishing into its maw, was a flying reptile, streaked in grey and flecked in black and shadowed everywhere with blurred markings.  Its eyes were small and bright orange, its claws were as long as my hand, and its wings seemed to be blotting out half the sky from my view.  I hadn’t ever seen one in person, and it was only because I was too shocked to actually think that the little voice in my head promptly and politely coughed up its name from my grandfather’s ancient old book of wildlife: a Mokie Highdrake.  They were northern predators, they had no natural enemies, fed mostly on whatever was too slow to outrun them, and weren’t much studied because things that couldn’t outrun them included humans.  This one was probably migrating extremely late, and had wandered a little far south. 
It blinked up at me, eyelids flicking in irritation as the slackened cargo rope dripped across its face. 
I let go of the ladder.  I had something that wasn’t quite a plan in my head, and if I stopped to think about it I was sure it would be ruined.  The back of my head explained to me that this was completely insane approximately five times over in the two seconds it took for me to land on the basket as it dangled from the Highdrake’s claws. 
There was a snap, a thump, and a bump, and I was freefalling again, cushioned against the feathers and fur of a half dozen or more corpses.  That big rumbling roar came from above me as I fell, and my scattered vision caught a blur of orange eyes as it came streaking down after me in full dive, claws glittering in and out of view.  The rope jerked against my back, tangled in its wings, and I began to slow practically before I started. 
This is very stupid, I reminded myself, in case I forgot.  The Highdrake hauled upwards, yanking the tether in its teeth, slack looping about itself as I drew closer and closer. 
Something else was in its teeth, something twitching back and forth with each heave and pull – the handle of my skyfishing rod.  It was practically close enough to touch, so I reached out and grabbed it.  It slid out remarkably easily.  Except for the hooks. 
The Highdrake’s first instinct was to pull back.  That did its job as far as getting out the hooks went.  It also removed a good part of its tongue.  That triggered its next instinct, which was to open its mouth and hiss.  That released the rope, which promptly shot taunt under my weight plus the entire combined mass of my cargo. 
This wouldn’t have been an issue for the Highdrake if the rope hadn’t looped around its neck as it pulled.  That wouldn’t have been an issue for the Highdrake if the slight weight change hadn’t caused its right wingtip to brush the framework of the ladder. 
A falter turned into a lurch turned into a splintering snap, and down came everything, extremely quickly but just fast enough to watch. 

The landing was odd.  I blacked out on the crash, then woke up from the sheer, ear-shattering noise it made.  The hollow bones of the Highdrake seemed to pop as loud as fireworks, and the chorus of yells from around the town as people woke up at what sounded like the end of the world didn’t make things any quieter. 
That was quite a fall.  The farthest I’ve heard of.  Maybe I’d even survived it. 
I decided I’d find out later, and passed out. 

Vedna was the first thing I saw when I woke up, somehow in my bed at home.  For a horrible moment she looked worried, then angry, then she hugged me and told me I was awful.  That was reassuring. 
“How’s the ladder?” I asked. 
“Shush,” she said. 
“How’s the ladder?” I asked Davro. 
He shook his head.  “Standing.  But not by much.”
“Sorry.  Unavoidable.”
“With what you just brought down, I don’t think we’ll need the extra food.  We’ll have all winter to work out how to rebuild it.”
“Good,” I said, vaguely.  My head felt like it was full of feathers.  “Good.”
A thought popped up, slowly but surely.  “No, not quite.”
“Sorry, Uncle?”
“No ‘we.’  I think it’s time I stopped climbing that ladder.  You’ll have to build it without me.”
Davro gave me a sympathetic look.  “Age catches us all, Uncle.”
I shook my head, wincing as my back ached.  “No, not that.  I just don’t think I can ever top that catch.”

 

“Skyhooks” copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor. 

The sky looked troublesome today, thought Matthias.  There was something about the curve of the clouds, the texture of the atmosphere, the firmness of lines encompassed by the horizon.  It was altogether not quite perfect, which meant, as he was quick to remind himself –
“You just wasted the whole morning.”
Matthias gave as evil an eye as he could possibly manage to the nine-foot, hirsute bird squatting in the sand next to him.  “I was quickly reminding myself of just that,” he reproached his critic.  “The worst criticism is unnecessary criticism.”
“The worst criticism is unconditional praise,” retorted the bird. 
“I wish I had some of that,” said Matthias.  “It would be a nice change.”
“I always knew you were a lazy rube at heart.  A quick job, a once-over to make sure no major bits are missing, and bam, cash out.  Philistine.”
“You wound me, Gershwin.”
“Prove me wrong.”
Gershwin stretched his neck and shook it, an avian yawn that sent his big axe-beak fluttering about in the sun like a ten-pound leaf.  Matthias admired the ridiculousness of his companion’s form even as he privately wished great misfortunate and discomfort upon its wearer.  If a bear had learned how to fly, then forgot how, it would’ve looked something like Gershwin.  It would’ve had the same attitude, too.
“In any case,” he said, “the morning isn’t a total washout.  The beach looks nice.”
“Passable.”
“Maybe not my best work, but it’s quite pretty, I think.”
“Not with that disaster masquerading as weather hanging over its head.  Tear it down and start over.”
Matthias sighed deeply.  “I suppose you’re right.  A little.  You manage it now and then.”  He picked up his palette from where it lay carelessly discarded in the sand.  Mere minutes ago he’d been so caught up in his painting that he’d let it drop at his feet as he reached up to do the high bits, and now he couldn’t imagine how the work in front of him had ever captivated his imagination. 
There were three big colours on the palette’s smooth surface: red, yellow, and blue.  There were a bunch of little ones, stuff like infrared and ultraviolet, which came in after the main job was done. 
There was a single, carefully-separated spot on the palette, which was impossible to look at.  It made Matthias squint as he dabbed his brush carefully in it. 
“I hate this part,” he said as he poised his arm. 
“Get it over with.”
Matthias did.  One long sweep, a swing, a graceful backslash, and the beach had no sky again, just like it had an hour ago.  The ocean’s waves rose up to greet blankness, turning the soft sounds of water on the shoreline somewhat confused.  A hasty sketch of a gull’s outline that had been circling overhead screeched in alarm as it suddenly found itself on the ground, the air vanishing out from under its wings. 
“There.  Much better.  Now, are you ready to try again?”
Matthias looked at all that empty space, and shuddered at the thought of filling it in again.  “No, no, I don’t think so.  I think I’ll go sketch for a while.”
“Suit yourself,” said Gershwin.  “I’ll wait.”
Matthias picked up his coat and hat and left the beach and its missing skyline.  He went to a desert for a while, and drew some pretty good rocks.  They caught the sunlight with a spider’s boldness, and he cheered up a little.  Just to reassure himself that he could still do it, he left a quick outline for a sunset overhead, so he could come back later and practice.  He didn’t feel like doing more atmospheric work just yet. 
“Better?” asked Gershwin as he stepped back onto the beach. 
“A bit,” said Matthias.  “Let’s go start up a fresh one.  I’ve got some ideas.”
So they went to another spot, a good blank one, and Matthias started drawing.  First, some water…
“You always use too much water.”
“I like water.  Besides, it’s important.  Most of the really exciting stuff only happens if you’ve got some water around somewhere.”
“Don’t overspecialize, all the same.  Do you want to be summed up as “that guy who wouldn’t quit with the water”?”
And then for the coast, a lot of pebbles, big rounded smooth ones.  Well-aged pebbles with just the right colour (dark grey to black) and lustre (shinier than a star when wet, flat and plain otherwise). 
“Either a bit dull or a bit depressing.”
“Just wait and see.”
And then (the important bit, the part that had popped into his head as he watched the sun glimmer on the rocks), with big smooth strokes, the ice.
“More water?”
“Entirely different state of matter.  Besides, you didn’t complain about me using rocks again for the ground.”
Gershwin grumbled to himself, and Matthias knew he’d scored a point.  He drew faster, with a heart growing freer by the moment.  Big swirls of ice studded the water, which took on dark curls and bleak tones.  Sweeping plains of snow stretched into the distance.  And over it all, he started to fill in the sky.  A greying, washed-out-white eclipsed in purity by the puffed and ruffled chest feathers of the ridiculous little birds he covered the rocks in.
Matthias felt Gershwin’s gaze grow frosty, and he very carefully refrained from smiling.  Although a small giggle did lodge itself in his throat and refuse to leave. 
“Parody,” said the critic, “has its place.  Is this it?”
“Pardon?” said Matthias.  He traced out a long, thin line in the water, the back of a sausage-shaped seal with the barest hint of a razory canine peeking out of its lip. 
“Hmmph.  Mind that it makes sense on its own.  The best parodies always do.”
Matthias took the point, and put some fish in the water.  “There,” he said.  “Food source and predator both attended to.  Happy?”
“Needs detail.”
Matthias drew many little nests among the rocks, made from cunningly woven twigs. 
“Did you say there were going to be trees down here?”
Matthias drew many little nests among the rocks, made from beak-chipped and carved ice.
“That doesn’t seem very safe for unhatched eggs.”
Matthias drew many little nests among the rocks, made from painstakingly relocated other rocks.  His hand was starting to hurt. 
“That’s better.  Say, where are you going to put this?”
Matthias flexed his palm.  “Well, the gallery’s south end is empty.  I figure we could always drop it down… wait, are you serious?”
“Absolutely.  Good, original work.  I should get you sulky more often if this happens afterwards.”
“I could do a companion piece for the other end,” suggested Matthias, thoughts unfolding and reshaping in his head like a pile of energetic origami.  “A counterbalance, a contrast.”
“Absolutely not.  You’ll ruin its distinctiveness.  Do you want to be one of those people that does nothing but push out sequels to their best-seller?”
“You’ll see.”
“I hope I will.”
So Matthias packed up the landscape very carefully and walked to the north end of the gallery.  He picked up his brush and considered the horizon, then redrew it. 
“Looks familiar already,” groaned Gershwin.  “Copy, copy, copy.  You’re redrawing old news again.  Creatively stagnant layabout.”
“Wait for it.”
He drew the snow.  He drew the water.  He drew the ice.  He drew and drew and redrew half the original scene until he could feel Gershwin’s urge to remonstrate him vibrating in the air like a big bomb, and then he took his brush, put it to the empty, silent vista in front of him, and he drew a really big bear. 
That set him back on his heels a bit.  “What’s the idea there?”
“Look,” said Matthias, and he put in a seal.  “Wait a moment,” he said, and put some ice over the water.  Then he put in a hole for the seal, which stuck its head out of it.  The bear smashed its head in and ate it. 
“Creative,” commented Gershwin.  “Disgusting, but creative.” 
“Thank you.”  On second thought, all those rocks didn’t really fit in.  What about more ice?  More water.  Matthias scribbled and rescribbled, blotting out whole chunks of land without so much as a twinge.  More ice floated in the water, big mounds and mountains of it.  A whale poked its head out in the space between floes, and for a lark he fitted it with the same colours as the penguins, adding elegance to an already sleek figure. 
“Very pretty,” said Gershwin, “but aren’t you forgetting something?”
Matthias’s fingers beat a rapid pit-a-pat-a-bat on his palette as he considered the sky.  Its blankness was making the polar bear confused; the poor thing kept giving him the most forlorn looks. 
He tried white again.
“Predictable.  And a little too close to before.”
He tried blue.  
“Too normal.”
He tried puce, in a fit of irritation.
“No tantrums now.  Come on, act your age.”
Matthias tried black, with some stars.
“Setting it at night?  Wonderful.  Paint everything black and call it a job.”
Matthias tried throwing his palette.  Gershwin ducked amiably, and it splattered all over the sky. 
“Now look at what you’ve done,” he said. 
Matthias was opening his mouth to scream something, and then thought again. 
“What is it?”
“Look at that, won’t you?”
Gershwin turned around and looked.  “My word.”
The sky was streaked and spattered with all sorts of colours, smeared in sheets that dribbled across the constellations like delicate silks.  They rippled up and down, jostling on the breeze, and there was a strange little spot at their hearts that seemed impossible to see, no matter how hard you squinted. 
“That can’t be safe,” said Matthias, gingerly picking the palette up from the snow.  One of the bears hopefully licked the stains, checking for edibility, and turned its tongue permanently purple.
“Who cares?” said Gershwin, staring at the aurora borealis with the rapt concentration he normally reserved for small, edible mammals.  “It’s the best thing you’ve done since those big lizards.  And don’t you dare try to fix it – you’ll just end up tossing out half the gallery and starting over again.”
“You were entirely too attached to those reptiles.  I just wanted to try drawing some things that looked like me for a change.  And I have to change those – there’s some of the correctional blotter left in the middle of them.”
“Piffle.  Pish tosh.  As long as no one looks at them too hard, who’ll know?  Besides, no one’ll visit up here anyways.  Too cold.  They’ll stick to the central hall, and you’d know it, what with all the tasty fruit you kept adding in there.”
“I was hungry that day.”
“I take that as agreement.”  Gershwin clacked his beak in satisfaction.  “You know, today hasn’t been half bad.  If you fix up that beach’s skyline before you go slouching off to bed, maybe you’ll even be ready to open the place up to the public before you’re completely senile.”
Matthias, inspired by the unexpected and rare praise, not only finished the sky but fired off three new delicious kinds of fruit before going to bed, one of which was unexpectedly and ebulliently toxic. 

He wasn’t sure if it was that or his furtive decision to copy the aurora in the southern piece – just experimentally, no one would notice – that led to Gershwin attempting to peck his eye out the next day. 

 

“Watercolours,” copyright 2010 Jamie Proctor.

There was a village, and it was the world, at least as far as the people living there were concerned.  There were the farms, and the meadows, and the forest surrounding it like some sort of herbaceous asteroid belt, and everything beyond that was probably not worth your time, regardless of what those strange people that came wandering down the road kept saying.  But that didn’t count, not really.  The village was the world, and it was everything. 
Well… not quite.  There were some holes in that particular cozy mental framework, that had to be covered with less-than-liberally-sized blind spots. 
One of them was Old Man Morris. 

“So, is he real?” asked Simon at Charlie’s retreating back. 
“Yup,” said Charlie.  He slipped on a rock, sending a spray of gravel just past his friend’s face, then caught himself on a bush.  A raspberry bush. 
“He isn’t real,” said Simon, loudly over the inept cursing. 
“Is so.”
“My daddy said so.”
“Well your daddy’s wrong.”
Simon glared at his friend’s foot, then hastily cut his malevolence short as a fresh wad of mixed soil and slender-rooted plants hailed downwards.  Casting doubt on the word of a father was a serious thing.  But Charlie did it without a moment’s hesitation.  Clearly, this was worth exploring. 
“Well, prove it,” he said. 
“Doin’ that.”
“Howja find out anyways?”
“That time I got lost looking for the cows last week,” said Charlie, as they heaved themselves over the final yards of cliff face and onto the weedy, long-grassed, tree-shaded peak of the Big Hill.  “Almost walked into him.  Now shh!”
“What’re you –” managed Simon before Charlie slapped his hand over his mouth. 
There were such things as desperate times and desperate measures, Simon knew.  He could imagine a thousand things that would make Charlie do something like that.  Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of anything that’d let him stand it, especially right after his father’s all-knowing powers had just been disputed, and so instead of staying quiet he punched Charlie in the gut. 
The resulting tussle, doomed to tininess as it was, ranged far and wide across the hilltop, with much energy and ruckus had by both.  But not by all, because the third member of that distinguished group was less than pleased when they rolled directly through the basket of mushrooms he’d been picking. 
“Eep,” said Simon. 
“Hullo, Old Man Moss,” said Charlie. 
“Hmmph,” said Old Man Morris. 
He was tall and bent quite short and broken, a big man who’d spent too much time fiddling with small things.  One of those small things was manifestly not at all his beard, which was so thick and tangly that it could’ve been a sweater. 
His sweater, on the other hand, was rather threadbare. 
Probably blue once. 
“Hmmph,” repeated Old Man Morris.  “That’s Morris.”
“Moss,” agreed Simon, companionably.  It was true; seated where he sat on the old, old stump, the man looked mossy.  He could’ve out-willowed a willow in full weeping. 
“Hmmph,” reiterated Old Man Moss.  “Go away, boys.  Bad enough you bother me yesterday, and the day before, and the day before, and all to last week with your spying.  Bad enough.  Now go away and stay away, and take your friends and acquaintances with you.”
Charlie picked his nose without malice.  “My daddy told me,” he announced as he inspected the extracted particles, “that you’re a wizard.”
“Go away, boys.”
“A crazy old wizard that lives all on his own and talks to the bugs and the weeds.”
“I can do what I want.  Leave me be.”
“And that my mommy smacked him and told him to Mind His Words, and that you were my grandpa’s uncle’s cousin.  Once removed.”  Examination complete, the mote was flicked away into the grass. 
Old Man Moss’s brow wrinkled further, amazingly.  “She a Nickel?”
“Nu-uh.  Daddy’s a Clay.  We’re Clays.  But mommy said she used to be.”  He grinned in gap-toothed triumph.  “I’m Charlie Clay and this is Simon Adams and he’s my friend.  You’re my grandpa’s uncle’s cousin”
“-once removed-“ reminded Simon. 
“-once removed-“ agreed Charlie, “-and we want to see you do a magic trick!”
Old Man Moss sighed into his beard, setting it whistling and rattling like branches in the winter.  “Like what?”  He gathered up his mushrooms, palms a deeper dirt brown than the soil he’d plucked them from. 
“Can you whistle?”
“Hmmph.  Anyone can whistle.”
“The special whistle.”
Old Man Moss kept his back turned so they didn’t see his face.  “Quit fooling around, boy Clay.”
Charlie put his fingers in his mouth, moved them around so they were plugging the right gaps in his teeth, twisted his tongue the secret way, and out came a cold clear whistle, the up-and-down slip of it as sweet as a songbird’s, any songbird, the one in the trees above.  It warbled its approval and slid down to Charlie’s hand as smoothly as a diving leaf in autumn, which it inspected hopefully for traces of worms.
“Mommy taught me that,” said Charlie proudly.
Old Man Moss rubbed his back.  He’d turned around very fast for someone so gnarled; it had been like watching an oak get up and dance a jig.  “Your mommy, her name’s Edith?”
“Yup.”
Old Man Moss glared down at the boys from his head’s creaky old perch.  “Scat.  Both of you.  And you tell your mommy to mind what she teaches, unless she wants more than she can handle.  It ain’t anything to be proud of.”
Simon tugged at Charlie’s hand.  He didn’t like what he saw in the old man’s eye.  It was that nasty gleam grownups got when they had a new way to keep you busy.  Charlie shook it off.  “Show us a whistle-trick first then,” he said, stubbornly.
“Clays,” grumbled Old Man Moss, loamy as an apple orchard, gravelley as a coal mine.  He puckered his lips and shook his head, and he gave a low, whirling whir, as dronesome as a bumblebee in a long fog.  It made the boys’ teeth twitch and the air hum, and then it was been and gone, out over the forest. 
They waited. 
“That didn’t do anything,” complained Charlie. 
“Takes a moment,” said Old Man Moss.  There was a huffing and a puffing and a great big bear’s head burst through the bushes at his side.  It shook its fur and grunted into the air, hot damp pouring out of its lungs.  “Now scat.”
The boys scat, aided by the galumphing of the bear at their heels.  They ran all the way home, and received a pair of hide-tannings apiece: one for going out all that way to bother that crazy old man, and one for lying about bears.  There were no bears within a month’s walk or more, not since Simon’s great-grandfather had shot the last as it went for his cows. 

The next day there were the two of them and Simon’s little sister Margaret, who’d wrestled the story out of her brother after bedtime and demanded to come along on threat of alerting their mother, a fearsome woman who would’ve led her own horde in another time and place.  They waited for Old Man Moss at his mushroom patch.  Far too long, as far as Margaret was concerned.  
“You said he’d be here,” she whined. 
“He was!  He will.  He’s just taking a while.”
“I’ll tell mom if you were lying.  Liars get tanned.”
“You do that and I’ll tell her you made us bring you out here.”
“Wouldn’t dare!”
“Would so!”
They were interrupted by the thud-thud-rustle of big feet, and up came Old Man Moss himself, rising up through the greenery like the king of the marsh.  It was a strange thing, seeing him on the move, like watching a hill tiptoe to one side.  He stopped short his stumping as he caught sight of the children. 
“You,” he said, flatly.  “I told you all to scat.”
“This is my sister Margaret,” said Simon politely.  “We call her Margie.  She’s little, so she isn’t very smart.  Say hi, Margie.”  Margaret smacked him. 
“Hrrmmph.  Get going before I whistle up another friend at you.”
“How’d you do that?” begged Charlie.  “There’s no bears here.  Daddy said there’s no bears here.”
“I didn’t call that one from here.  I whistled him in from… elsewhere.”  Old Man Moss’s face moved under that beard in something that could’ve been a frown.  “Now get going.”
“How far away can you do that?” asked Charlie with interest, picking his nose again. 
“Scat.”
“How big a thing can you move like that?” asked Simon. 
“Shoo!”
“You’re making that up,” complained Margaret.
“Pfah!”  Old Man Moss eyebrows rippled together like fighting snakes as he glared down the children, mouth working in weird shapes.  Out of that jumble of tongue and teeth came a short, sharp switch of sound, a slap across the ears, and up popped a blade of grass that shot straight up and smacked Charlie across the nose.  He yelped and fell over.
“Told you,” he mumbled, pawing inside the stinging orifice.  His finger had been driven somewhat deeper than he’d intended by the blow. 
“Neat!” chirruped Margaret. 
“Hrrmmph!  Go away.”
“Can you do that with a whole bunch at once?” asked Simon. 
“Bah!”
“What about one, but a reeeeaaallly teeny one?” asked Margaret.
“Agh!”
And so on and so forth went the day, with the children taking turns at pestering and bothering until Old Man Moss would give in with a grump and show off some thing or another that would make them gasp and gape and giggle.  Charlie tried a few of the sounds, but they didn’t work.  The puckers sent his tongue diving into the back of his throat and the very first whispers of sound made his lips tie themselves up in granny knots.  The notes that managed to come out at all came out wrong. 
“Just as well,” said Old Man Moss.  “Shouldn’t do that sort of thing at your age.  Not safe.  Now go home!  Scat!”
And then they asked him another question. 

The next time, they brought along Charlie’s other friend, Thomas.  And Thomas’s brother, Sam.  And Christopher Petey, because he was desperate to hide from his father and they felt too badly to say no to him. 
“Bah!” said Old Man Moss the moment he saw them, and he whistled up the bear at them.  They ran away and got lost in the woods, and it was some time before they found their way back. 
“No fair,” complained Charlie. 
“I thought you’d gone home,” said Moss, testily.  He was starting to wonder if the mushrooms on the Big Hill were worth the trouble they were getting to be nowadays. 
“Why’d you go and do that for?”
“A bear not scary enough for you boys?  Fine then.”  The new whistle was wild and fresh, like a bowlful of ice cold lakewater to the face.  The wind wooshed and howled and before the boys could so much as open their mouths to complain down came a great big eagle, claws wide, mouth open, shrieking the wild call that made the breeze seem small.  It chased them all the way home, where they each received separate, individual tannings. 
“Next time,” complained Simon to Charlie, “I’m bringing my sister.  He didn’t make a bear chase her.  She’s too little.”
Though Charlie’s pride was against it, his rear was for it, and so Margaret was re-invited with grudging politeness on the followup trip the next day. 
“Hmph!” snorted Old Man Moss, and he didn’t take it farther than that.  From then on Margaret was a permanent, smug fixture on their visits, a solid core with Simon and Charlie that the other children of the village dropped on and off of as the mood for adventure struck their fancies.  Adventure mostly consisted of hurled tidbits of debris, endlessly being told to “go ‘way,” and at least one viciously channelled and directed beehive, but you had to take what you could get. 

Charlie didn’t show up one week.  Old Man Moss kept his voice lower and softer, and his gaze farther away.  A thinking look.  He kept ignoring questions, but with silence instead of words. 
“Your Clay all right?” he asked Simon at the day’s end. 
A blank stare answered him. 
“Charlie.”
“He’s sick,” said Simon.  “He’s in bed.”
“Hmm,” said Old Man Moss, trailing away the grunt that had been forming in his mouth.  “Bad?”
“Dunno.  We wanted to see him but his mommy wouldn’t let us.”
“Hmm.  Hmmph.”  Old Man Moss breathed in deep through his nose, as if to refresh its purpose and remind it of its station in life.  “Right.  Go away.”
They nodded and didn’t.  He let them be until late on in the afternoon, when most of them started to remember chores that needed doing and drifted away awkwardly.  Not being chased off or stomped away from was a new and unsettling thing for them. 
Charlie was in bed that night, but not asleep.  The things he saw whenever he shut his eyes were too alarming for that.  So he lay there in bed, swamped in the covers and pillows, and he tried not to blink.  The moon was full, and the light made his eyes burn. 
There was a stomp-stamp outside his window, slow but sure, and then a shadow that smelled of leaves and mould. 
“Charlie-Clay.  You sick in there?”
Charlie made a noise that he guessed was positive.  The air in the room felt dry and strange whenever he tried to speak with it. 
“Ah, you’ve got it hard there, Clay.  Not too hard though.  I can fix that, but you have to let me.  Listen careful now, Clay.  You hear me?”
Charlie lolled his head around in something like a nod. 
“That’s good.  Now, listen careful here, Clay…”
It was strange, sitting there, half out of his mind with the new tune, the new tone rolling its way about his skull like a marble in a tight passage, but Charlie tried hard.  The whistle was queer and sad, wobbling and wavering like an indecisive robin, but it slid through his throat more sweetly than any of his mother’s medicine had, and by the third go-round he was letting it slip as easily as breathing.  Which was a lot easier, all of a sudden.
“Sleep now there, Charlie-Clay.  And you keep that tune safe, hear?”
Charlie did.  And the sleep came quick. 

He was better the next day.  Point of fact, he was so much better that his mommy said that if she hadn’t seen his fever the night before, she’d have called him a faker and tanned him.  As it was he was shoved out the door to play all day under firm instruction not to hurt himself and give her another fright like that ever again. 
Charlie went up the Big Hill late, after a leisurely breakfast had been thrust upon him.  Most of the others were already there, talking and poking.  One or two were helping Old Man Moss gather up mushrooms, under the unhelpful supervision of Margaret. 
“Thank you very much,” he told him, as politely as he could recall his mother telling him. 
“Mmm,” said the old man through his beard, and said no more of it.  He showed them how to whistle through a grass blade that day, and the next he showed them how a cricket dances.  The rhythm and feel had changed on the Big Hill, and after a few suspicions of poisoning later that month, when he gave them apples to take home, they adjusted happily.  A little clearing was worn into the hill’s crown from pacing feet, and a crude trail blazed up its side, a path of hand-and-toe-holds and smoothed surfaces polished by slipping grips. 
It was about that time that the families of the village finally started to notice their children vanishing every afternoon, especially since some had taken to doing it during chore time.  Lips were kept sealed and earnest lies unfolded, but eventually someone got around to spilling the beans – Russell Petey’s youngest son, Malcolm, under threat of a leathery backhand – and Russell was none too shy to share the news with the rest of the village. 
“Who knows what kind of devilry’s afoot up there?” he told the other parents, after all the scoldings and stay-in-that-house-until-I-say-sos had been said.  “Nothing good.  Teach ‘em all a lesson and make them stay home, I say, and warn off that old vagrant while we’re at it too.”
There were murmurs, but as much against as for.  Charlie’s mother was tapping her foot pointedly – the mention of her father’s uncle’s cousin once removed being up to any sort of no good irked her – and the words being spoken, however appealing, were coming from Russell Petey.  The best thing that could be said about the man was that he never struck any harder when he was sotted than when he was sober.  And even then, he never struck any lighter, either. 
In the end, a few of them went up to talk to Old Man Moss.  There was Charlie’s father, and Russell Petey, and Simon’s uncle. 
“It is getting in the way of their chores,” said Charlie’s father. 
“Damned waste of time, should’ve run him out long ago,” muttered Russell Petey. 
“They keep talking about whistling,” inquired Simon’s uncle.  “What’s that about?”
“Hrrmph,” said Old Man Moss, and he glared at Russell Petey, and he put two fingers to his mouth and did something complicated that made a sound like a bell being eaten by a parrot.  Then a trio of mice ran out of Russell Petey’s pant legs. 
“Now cut that out!  Make ‘em go away!” he screamed, stamping and swearing.  More mice peeked out from his pockets, and dropped out of his shirt. 
“Hmm.”  This whistle was scratchy, clawing at the air, and it produced a cat.  Inside Russell’s shirt.  He ran home yelling, tripping on the underbrush. 
“Just try not to teach them too much of this… stuff, will you?” asked Charlie’s father, before they left. 
“Don’t worry any.  They can’t manage it.  Except your boy.  Damned Nickels, always could carry a tune, even when it does them no good.”
“Well, at the least we can give you a little in return for keeping them out of our hair,” said Simon’s uncle.  “I’ve got some eggs spare to hand every few days, and I expect you could use a loaf or two of bread.  I know for a fact Harriet makes the best around, right Bill?”
“Hmmph,” said Old Man Moss, waving them off.  But he didn’t send back the eggs when they arrived with Simon the next Wednesday, or the bread that Charlie brought in after the Saturday baking. 
The next month, Thomas and Sam complained of an ill turn that had hit their father’s cow.  The poor thing had sunk up to its knee in a burrow something careless had left in its meadow, and snapped its leg quite properly. 
“That so?” asked Old Man Moss.  He thought for a moment as the breeze washed his beard in the wind.  Margaret futilely attempted to jump atop him from behind and failed, as was her wont. 
“Let’s go look,” he decided, and stood up and left almost before the children could follow him, a noisy entourage through a quiet wood.  They sent all the songbirds fleeing, and drew every eye in the village as they marched through its center, a pilgrimage of rags and sticks. 
The whistle he used down there at the farm of Thomas and Sam’s father was a sturdier, simpler version of a tune that rang bells in Charlie’s head.  He didn’t say a word, as promised, but he tried to remember it too.  Just in case. 
“She’s good,” said Old Man Moss, as the cow took a wobbly step, surprised at its own daring.  “Just let her rest for a bit before she goes trotting around like normal again.”  And he was out and gone, before the farmer had time to say so much as a thank-you-kindly. 
That was the beginning of the third time, the longest one, and the best one, and it got better as it wore on.  The children visited the old man in the hills in the afternoons, after his morning walks, the grownups asked for his help with this-or-that in the late-day and evenings, and as night fell he walked back off into the woods, off to who knew where.  The only complaint (from anyone that wasn’t Russell Petey) that was had of him was that the tunes he used that caught the mind so easily were impossible to mimic by any mortal tongue – save that of Charlie, who took much smugness from it, and the occasional cuffing. 
“Everything wants to move,” he explained to his sister self-importantly, “it just has to hear the right tune to get it up and motivated.”
Margaret pinched him, making him yelp. 

The first signs of the downfall happened in late autumn.  The children still followed Old Man Moss as he walked around village – still looking as out of place as a sheep in a bedroom – if in fewer numbers than before, and so it was that a few witnesses were on hand for it.  The procession was on its way over to see about loosening a stubborn tree stump lodged in the fields of Simon’s uncle when a call came floating across the way, a call from Russell Petey.  He was leaning against the fence on his run-down property, swapping tobacco with his hand, Devon.  The big man barely ever talked, barely made any noise at all.  When he wasn’t around, the grownups would say that was because with Russell near, he didn’t need to.  The children never said anything about him.  Ever.  Those big ears were all too listening, and that little smile that never left his face all too knowing.  He had too much time on his hands, Devon did – nothing on that land was fixed or mended, not by him or anyone – so what did he do with it all?  And none of the cats in town liked him.  Not even the old tabbies that had drunk so much milk in their lives that they’d sopped up all its mildness into their furry tummies for all time and beyond. 
“On your way, hey, on your way?” he asked, half-joking in a voice that sounded too hearty to come from him.  He laughed.  “Given any more thought to my questioning?” he asked. 
“No,” said Old Man Moss, curtly. 
Russell’s smile stayed, but the face behind it seemed to close up some.  “You sure about that, ol’ friend?  I wasn’t joking around with those numbers.  I could bump ‘em up a mite, even.”
Old Man Moss turned his back and walked away, children in puzzled trail, looking back hesitantly.  Devon grinned at them, and they quickened their pace. 

Up came the first snows, and the visits to the Big Hill started to lessen.  It was a tough climb in the snow, and a cold one.  Old Man Moss was busy as always, walking into the village without an escort now, attracting the children from every doorway like a magnet still, but not from so far.  He cleared chimneys, helped mend fences, helped colds.  He was everywhere, anywhere, and he was talking more and more now, even to the grownups.  Margaret claimed she saw him smiling once under that beard, but everyone dismissed it as an idle boast, a baited hook for attention. 
They waited at the gate while he mended Russell Petey’s dog, Brutus.  Russell said that he’d chased a rat too hard and too close, and knocked half the woodshed on himself.  Having heard some of Malcolm and Christopher’s stories, the children were disinclined to believe him. 
“Still have your mind made up?” asked Russell.  Devon was holding the dog still, each hand practically swallowing one of Brutus’s legs.  He wasn’t a small dog, but he looked it then. 
“Yes,” said Old Man Moss, as the last whispering whistle left his lips.  “It’s no good.”
This time Russell couldn’t hide the anger, even if it was just for a moment.  “An’ why would that be, eh?”
Old Man Moss stood up.  Bent as he was, he was still bigger than Russell, and his glare matched his.  “It isn’t.  Leave off.”  He stomped more than usual as he left.  A dog yelped as they passed the half-toppled fence, and for a moment he nearly turned to go back.  Then a laugh drifted out across the snow, and he shook off his shoulders and walked back into his woods, each angry footfall launching a hundred snowflakes from his beard. 

Spring’s first runnings came at the end of it all, just as the celebrations were beginning.  Praises over the end of the snow, the opening of the ice on the river, the congratulations-you-must-be-so-happys of Charlie’s new little brother, they all took up time.  The party for little Michael took up all the village by the time it was through, and as the night wore on and the grownups drank grownup drinks and spoke of grownup things the children grew bored and wandered away to do interesting things, under the light of the shooting stars that made Michael’s birth oh-so-lucky.  And the first interesting thing, the thing that popped into Margaret’s head, was to go see if Old Man Moss was at the Big Hill again. 
“That’s stupid,” scorned Simon.  “It’s nighttime.  No one gets mushrooms at night.”
Margaret’s little teeth shone all the wider and whiter.  “Then we can find out where he sleeps!  Come on, aren’t you curious?  We owe him a visit.  Let’s give him a visit!”
“Yes, let’s!” piped up all the younger of the children, and Simon and Charlie and Christopher and the other older, wiser heads knew they were outnumbered and despaired. 
So they walked into the woods, all of them, past the quiet, darkened farms – all of everyone was at that party, really! – and into the trees.  And with the time that had passed since their last visit, and the way they were looking for something they’d never seen before, a bit of turning around happened.  Besides, it was awfully dark.  The light of shooting stars, while pretty, isn’t all that good as a guide. 
“Where’s Margaret?” asked Simon. 
“Here,” said Margaret, behind him, and he jumped.  She laughed. 
“Where’s Malcolm?” asked Charlie. 
“I’m here,” piped up Malcolm, from inside a nearby thornbush. 
“Where’s Charlie?” asked Simon of Margaret, and realized she wasn’t there anymore.  Nor was anyone else. 
“Hello?” asked Simon.  No one answered.
“Hello?” asked Simon, voice wobbling.  No one answered, and he heard something move. 
Simon ran, and strong hands grabbed him, grasps rougher than any rope coiling around him and wrapping his arms and kicking feet tight.  There was a smell of tobacco and sweat and old, unwashed clothing, and the strange, gurgling chuckle that he’d never heard before was as good as a signed autograph: Devon. 
He was dragged away at impossible speed, long pale legs lurching through the slush that was left of the year’s snow like a spider’s.  Up and up they went, Devon’s feet scaling slopes that took minutes to scramble up in less than seconds, and with a thud and a cough Simon was dropped down to the little patch of dirt that was the clearing on top of the Big Hill.  A hand fell upon him right away, yanked him tight to his feet and to Devon’s side.  Something nasty and sharp glinted in its knuckle, held with loving threat near to him as the hand waited. 
“Got yours then?” called out a familiar voice, rough with excitement and malice.  Russell Petey struggled up over the edge of the ledge, wrestling with a wriggling, bucking bundle that Simon recognized from the coat must be Charlie.  Russell flung him to the ground with a curse and kicked him in the ribs, only furthering his resolve. 
“Nasty little bugger, he is.  Bit me hard and clean here on the wrist.  Should take some of his teeth out for that, but no time, no time!  We’ve got a meeting to arrange, some deals to strike!”  Russell glared about him, staring out over the forest beneath and the sky above with blinded eyes.  “Come out, come out, you old bastard!  Where are you at?  We’ve got something you should see right here, someone you should meet!”
“Here,” said Old Man Moss. 
Russell nearly jumped out of his skin, and Simon felt Devon start a little, the metal in his hand dipping uncomfortably near to his neck before the hand recovered.  Old Man Moss stood at his stump, his seating-place, all but invisible.  He looked as near to be a part of it as anything, face unreadable and immovable in the dark.
“Right, yes you are,” grinned Russell.  It was fake, but it was an effort, a recovery.  There was a strain underneath there, a tension years in the building that was all winding up to now, to snap or release, no other choices.  “Yes you are, you are.  And you’re going to give now, you are.  We’ve got your pets, you’ve got your tricks.  Which do you think is faster, eh?  Your throat or our hands?  You’ll do as you’re told or I don’t need to tell you what’s going to happen.”
Old Man Moss made that noise he made, that same sound he’d warned off Simon and Charlie with so many times.  “Hrrrmph.”  There was something different there now.  “Do what?”
Russell waved his arms to either side, trying to grab something bigger than he was.  “Make me – make us rich.  Pucker your withered old lips and whistle us in some gold, some silver!  Whistle us away to a plot of fine land!  Bring me wealth, you crazy old sheep-curer!  I asked you nice, and I asked you sweet, and you told me down like all the rest did!”  Russell’s face was torn between exultation at a long-awaited moment and fury at held-back slights.  “All the same!  Even you, out here in your damned woods, living like a beggar!  Why look down on me, eh?  I’m better than you!  I deserve this!  I deserve to leave here forever and never have to see one of those damned bumpkins look down their noses at me again.  All the gold and silver and, and land I can carry and more!  Give me what I deserve!” 
Old Man Moss turned his head in the night, this way and that, little crooks that reminded Simon and Charlie of an owl.  “Yes,” he said.  “But put them down first.”
Devon hesitated, but at a nod from Russell slowly, reluctantly released his prize.  Simon and Charlie lay on the ground, but held fast still, forced down with boots on their backs. 
“No one’s going anywhere ‘till I get what’s mine,” said Russell.  “’Till we get what’s ours.”  Simon felt Devon’s boot twitch at that, right through to his spine, and he couldn’t stop himself from shivering.  He didn’t want to think about Devon getting anything he wanted. 
“Hrrrrrrrrmm,” repeated Old Man Moss, and Charlie, who’d learned the whistles with careful ears, heard that difference there for what it was.  A growl, a low rumble. 
And then Old Man Moss began to do something strange.  He tilted his head back, back, up, straight up at the skies and the light from above in the inky black.  His mouth gaped open, wide open, so wide even the beard couldn’t hide it, so broad it barely seemed human.  His tongue protruded, his teeth clenched, his eyes rolled and gleamed in the starlight, and a strange sound that wasn’t there leaked out from him, roiling over the hilltop and across the ether.  Strange bones jumped in both the boy’s bodies, resonating to rhythms unheard by ears, and there, at the midst of the highest, hardest note of that unhearable tune, Devon slammed his hands over his ears and shrieked in a voice that was barely there, unable to bear the sound any longer.  Russell was a moment ahead of him, flailing his injured head, clutching at it. 
“Scat!” called Old Man Moss, and the spell was broken.  Feet scrambled under themselves as Charlie and Simon bolted for the edge, tumbling headfirst down slopes half-remembered and bruising themselves on forgotten rocks.  Above them, Russell was yelling something, but it was all lost in the roar from above, the great, earth-shattering boom that rattled their grips out from underneath themselves and sent them rolling the rest of the way to the bottom, where they chanced to look up. 
Big Hill was on quiet fire, its top asmoulder, its sides strewn with broken earth.  The air was quiet.  There were no voices.  There was no sound. 

“Meteor,” judged Simon’s uncle, as they all gathered round the peak of the hill the next day.  “One of the shooting stars brought down to earth.”  No one said anything about Russell, or about Devon.  Simon and Charlie’s tall tales were just wild enough to believe for once, especially with the absence of the farmer and his hand. 
Everything wants to move, thought the children.  And they all held hands just a little tighter than before. 
Charlie’s father looked around.  The peak of the Big Hill was a mess – stump shattered, bushes charred away, grasses and dirt and stone pummelled into a dent, a shiner that would do any prizefighter proud.  “We haven’t found anyone,” he declared. 
The village nodded.
“It’ll stay that way,” he said.  “But that doesn’t mean they’re all gone.  All three.  Well, maybe just the one.”
The village agreed. 
“I think,” said Charlie’s father, “that we ought to leave well enough alone.  And maybe he’ll do the same for us.”

“Still,” he said to Charlie as they all walked home very quietly, “best do as your mother asks and keep practicing those tunes.  Just to be safe.”

“Clear as a Whistle,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2010.

There was a storm.  It wasn’t a particularly big one, nor a notably blustery one, and its rain was of average intensity, volume, and general wetness.  It was in all respects an ordinary and most mediocre storm, which is not an altogether bad thing.  The world needs its middling storms, just as it requires its moderately sloping cliff faces, halfhearted scrublands, and disappointingly tepid public speakers.

It did, however, have an unexpected side effect.  A tree fell in a forest, and no one was there to hear it.  Well, half a tree fell.  The other half remained unfallen, and most irked.

“Damnit!” said the tree.  It then spoke several more words, all of which were unspeakable – quite a mean feat by anyone, particularly an individual that was never blessed with a mouth, tongue, or respiratory system.  All, alas, wasted on its audience of no one.

The broken tree glared at the forest around it.  So many of its weedier, limper, half-hearted colleagues still stood with as much feeble firmness as they could muster, while the tree itself – as vigorous, proud specimen and citizen of phylum — as could be found, in its (exceedingly!) humble opinion – had limply given up half its total mast height without so much as a hold-on-there-bucko.

“This,” the broken tree said, deliberately and menacingly, its roots curling, “is most annoying.  I shall fix it at once.”  And then it leaned over and tried very carefully to pick up its fallen half.  It failed.

The broken tree spoke more unspeakable words, which attracted the attention of the birch next to it.  “Pardon me,” it inquired, “but you seem to have dropped something.  Will you be all right?”

“No,” said the tree shortly.  Doubly shortly.  “I cannot mend myself, and I point-blank refuse to regrow the whole nine-and-three-quarters-yards!  That’s how many years wasted?  Sap’s flowing here, I don’t have the time to throw away!  The whole place’ll be old-growth and I’ll be a seedling still if I faff about with that nonsense!”

“You could ask an arborist,” volunteered the birch.

“No thanks.  As much as I’d gloat over seeing some of these louts regrow from ground zero, I don’t fancy sitting through a fire much myself.”

“An arborist,” the birch enunciated most carefully.  “A sort of tree-doctor.  They can fix anything from bark beetles to leaf-blight.”
“Are you sure?” asked the broken tree, dubiousness exuding from its every twig.

“Positive,” said the birch, who wasn’t.  Its source was decidedly second-hand.  Squirrel-handed, to be precise.  Still, they were usually somewhat correct about thirty to ten percent of the time.

“Then I will see about getting to one of these arborist,” declared the broken tree.  “Where do they live?”
“The city?” volunteered the birch.

“That seems counterproductive of them.  I will set out at once!” said the broken tree, and then it did nothing.

“Blast,” it said.  Roots are much more difficult to remember than you’d think.  “Plan the second then,” it decided, and it whistled sharply, attracting the attention of a passing man.

“Excuse me, man,” said the broken tree, “but I am in dire need of transportation.  Would you mind cutting me loose from my roots?”

“Sure,” said the man.  When you lived in a forest, it paid to be polite to trees.  He walked home, took out his big axe, walked back, and had the whole tree down and chopped before you could correctly spell onomatopoeia.

“Thank you,” said the tree.  And then it failed to move some more.  “Damnation.”

“I could put you up at my place for a while,” volunteered the man.  “Besides, I could use the wood.”
“I suppose I could spare a little,” agreed the tree.  “But NO firewood.  I haven’t seen any of my tiniest twigs used for so much as tinder, and I won’t go farther.  I won’t, won’t, won’t.”

“Sure thing,” said the man.  He hauled the tree back to his house and put it in the woodshed.

“A bit stuffy in here,” the tree complained.
“Shove off you daft twit,” snapped the cordwood.  Their relationship grew no more civil for all the nights they spent cooped up together, and the broken tree came to look forward to those nights that the man grew cold and lit fires.

“I could use a bit of whittling to fret away some evenings,” said the man in November.
“Fine, fine… but mind you don’t take too big a piece,” the tree grumped.

“A little piece off the trunk for a new seat on my stool wouldn’t be too bold, would it?” he inquired in December.

“It would be, but I will allow it nonetheless,” decreed the tree.

“My chest has broken!  I need somewhere to place my things!” was the cry in January.

“Careless!  Spendthrift!  My wood will never break, but be more careful, you reckless fop!”

And so it went on, all through winter and into spring, and it wasn’t until mid-March when the last bit of cordwood had been burnt up (to the tree’s immense satisfaction) that the tree said “Hang on a second… I must be off to the arborist!  Man, I am in dire need of transportation!  Quickly now, before I am all used up!”

“Well, now, there’s no need to be in such a hurry,” said the man.  That trunk was mighty sturdy, and his stool had never been so comfortable.  He was in very little rush to move the tree anywhere.

“I demand movement!” roared the broken tree.

“No rush, don’t worry, it’ll come soon enough, soon enough, as sure and soon as the spring rains die down and the rivers are passable” soothed the man.  He made many fine placating speeches and proverbs, which affected the tree not one whit.  It had the most unpleasant sensation that it had acquired a new set of roots, except these ones opted to forgo extracting nutrients from fertilizer and were made entirely of it.

Time passed and the man stalled, and in late spring his friends came down.  The maple syrup run was on, and they were gathering pails and boiling sap.  A gruesome sight indeed for any tree.  But yet the mob brought hope to the broken tree alone in its woodshed as it heard them chatter and yowl indoors after dark.  Perhaps it could entice help from one of the strange men.

“Psst,” it whispered to a big bulky man as he relieved his bladder against a nigh-bloodless maple three yards away.  “Consider bringing home some magnificent wood?”

“I’ve got that right here,” slurred the man, and he hooted so loudly that he nearly fell over.  The tree thought nasty things at his back as he reentered the house.

“You look a discerning sort,” it praised the second man to saunter outdoors for a leak, a stocky, shortish, bearded bloke.  “Would you care for some fine, aged timber?”

He appraised the tree with a critical eye, nose, and beard.  “Pah!  Barely fit for termites,” he sniffed, and left the door swinging before the tree could come out of its shock long enough to insult his parentage.

The third man kicked his way out of the house, stomped down to the woodshed, and urinated with such vicious force that he cut leaves from stems.

“I’ve HAD IT with that dimwit!” he snarled into the forest at large.

“So have I!” agreed the tree.  It was prepared to classify any and all of the men it had met as the dimwit in question.  “Take me with you!”
The angry man squinted at the tree in the dark.  “You Charlie’s?”
“Most likely.”  The tree had never bothered to learn the man’s name.

“It’d piss him off?”
“Definitely,” said the tree.

“Hell yes!” said the angry man, and he wrestled the broken tree away and into the night before it could egg him on any further.

“I have an urgent appointment with an arborist,” explained the tree to the angry man as they hurried along through the night.

“And I have a project I have to finish by the day after tomorrow,” said the angry man.  “I think this will help both of us.”

“What?” said the tree, but before it could get a straight answer it found itself raced through a sawmill, made into planks, and shoved into a strange, half-tubeish form.

“This is terrible!” yelled the tree.  “How am I supposed to see the arborist now!?”

“It’s a canoe,” said the angry man.  “And you’re going to head somewhere, all right.”
“What?” said the tree again, but once more its answer had to wait, as it was violently tossed into some water and had things piled in it.  Another man in fancy clothes handed the angry man a bunch of shiny bits of metal and then it was away down the river.

“Who the hell are you?” demanded the tree.

The fancy man looked startled.  “Goodness me, a talking canoe.  I must have had a few too many nips from the bottle last night.”

“You aren’t from around here, are you?” asked the tree.  ‘Ignorant swine.”
“My goodness me,” said the man, and his surprise and shock was so great that he quite failed to notice the rapids coming up.  The tree was drifting downstream empty and upside down before five minutes time had passed.
“Men,” it said underwater, “are growing irksome.”  And then a man pulled it out of the water.

“Here boys, a replacement canoe already!” he hollered at his friends.  They were even burlier and hootier than the friends of the first man the tree had met.

“I happen,” said the tree, “to be looking for an arborist.”

“Never met ‘im,” dismissed the man, and he had the tree caulked, sealed, thumped in approval, and shoved back into the water with four men and their supplies onboard before it could so much as sputter indignantly.  It was reduced to choking out swearwords between stretches of white water all the way downstream, for miles and miles and miles.  Then thump-bump, into a dock, splash, thud, off with the clutter, heave-ho, into a shed.  Not a woodshed, but a shed.

“I happen,” the tree said to the man shutting the doors on it, “to be looking for an arborist.”

The man paused.  “That one of them firebugs?”

“Arborist,” clarified the tree.

“Never met ‘im,” said the man, and he shut the door on the tree.  It seethed all winter, and come spring it was on with the loads again, on with the loud men, and down, down, down the rivers and streams, on backs and off again, until it ended up – to its greatest surprise – to be in the city.

“An arborist!  An arborist!  My kingdom for an arborist!” cried the tree across the streets as it was hoisted into a warehouse.  Its calls fell on deaf, ignorant, and uncaring ears.

“You talk too much,” complained the man, and locked it away, solving that problem for a hundred years and a bit as the trading company went bankrupt the next Thursday.

A hundred years later, there was a click-clack and off came the door’s lock.  “Huh,” said the construction worker.  “A bunch of old canoes.”
“I am a tree and I am very, very, very bored,” came the reply, leaden with staid despair as few can produce it.

“Oh,” said the worker.  “My apologies.  Hey, the museum should get a load of this.”
“Wait, what?” said the tree, but the worker was talking into his small squawky metal thing and didn’t pay it any attention.

Some other men came to take it away.

“Are any of you arborists?” it asked as it was heaved with great care into a noisy, cement-y street.

“Naw,” answered the foreman.

“Damnit.”

The tree was put in a large glass case in a large stone building with a small plastic plaque with smaller micro-bits of information on it, mostly concerning voyageurs and the beaver fur trade.

“Are you an arborist?” it demanded of the first (and rather small) man that came across it.

He picked his nose and ate it.  “Mommy, I bored,” he announced, and waddled away before being scooped up by his grudging parent.
The tree did not like the start to its search.

“Are you an arborist?” it asked a man who looked to have seen much in the world.

“Janitor,” he responded curtly.  “I don’t talk to displays.”  And he didn’t ever again, threaten however the tree might.
“Are you?” it asked a bearded, rounded man.

“I am,” the man replied grandly, “freshly unemployed.  And newly single.  And very, very, very, alone.”  And then he burst into hysterical sobbing laughter that lasted until the guards led him away.

“Are you?” it inquired of a man with a face like a terrified gargoyle.

“Elementary school teacher,” came the strained response.  He tottered away, surrounded by his horde of manlings, waving futilely at them.  For a brief moment, the tree knew pity for something other than itself.

“Are you?”

The man blinked several times over.  He was unbearded, untall, unshort, unfat, unthin, and altogether unremarkable.  “Yes.”

“What?”
“I am an arborist.  Why do you ask?”
“An arborist, yes?  Not the other one?  The one with matches?”

“No.  I am indeed an arborist.”
“Well,” said the broken tree, “you took your time!  I have half a trunk missing and I demand that you fix it!”
The arborist examined the canoe.  “You seem to be a bit past worrying about that,” he mentioned.

“Pish tosh!  Are you a proper arborist or aren’t you?  Bark beetles to leaf blight to missing half my trunk, you can and will fix this!”

“Where’s the other half?”
“It’s…” and the tree tried to remember.  “It’s the one next to the birch.  Yes, that was it.  Or maybe it was a sycamore.”
“Hmm.  When did you lose it?”

“A hundred and three years ago, or somesuch,” guessed the tree.  “Well, maybe a hundred and fifty three.  Or maybe not.  Does it matter?”

“Mm,” said the arborist.  “Say, do you like being a canoe?”
“I am a tree,” said the tree testily.
“Right.   Listen, I’ve got an idea.”

The arborist went and got the curator.

“Can you sell it?” he asked.
The curator stroked his thin, hideous beard gently.  “Yeesss….I suppose so.  There were several dozen in the storage room at the time.  Several are in comparable condition.”

“Then you can replace it?”

“I am irreplaceable,” the tree declared proudly.
“Deal,” said the curator.  “It’s disturbing visitors anyways.”  He took some shiny bits of paper from the arborist and helped him load the tree into his pickup truck.

“Where are we going?” asked the tree.

“A place I know,” said the arborist.

Before too long, they were in a big building filled with paper.  There was a large and intimidating-looking machine filled with metal teeth, and the arborist took the tree to it.

“You’re sure this will work?” asked the tree.  There were an awful LOT of teeth.

“Positive,” said the arborist, and he dropped it in.  A tremendous amount of shredding, screaming, pulping, pain, cursing, squashing, flattening, fuming, sheeting, and screeching happened.  The tree came out in a lot more pieces than it had went in, all flat, white, and in a neat stack, which was scooped up by the arborist.

“This,” said the tree, “is not helping one bit.”

“Relax,” said the arborist, as they pulled in at a big brick building.  “I’ve got just the people to solve it.”

The nervous, terrified gargoyle-man met them, and he and the arborist talked.

“It’s a big project,” said the man.

“They can handle it,” said the arborist.  The tree was brought into a room.  A hundred gibbering manling faces stared at it, in varying states of drool and phlegm-expulsion.

“Turn around at once,” commanded the tree.  Those glassy eyes, combined with the bowl of gunk it was approaching, gave it no small pause.

“Don’t worry,” said the arborist.  He swerved away from the bowl, filling the tree with deep relief, and dumped it in another machine filled with metal teeth.  They were much smaller, but just as pointy.  The tree called him things that made the classroom gasp and ooh as it emerged from the shredder’s maw, and then was stifled by the goop.

“Go for it,” decreed the arborist, and the tree was set up and crudely slapped around a skinny metal frame through long, painful hours of maddened giggling.  Paint slopped over it, brown and green.

“This –” said the tree as a brush interrupted it.

“Why –” it began, only to have a careless handprint splotch beige against its features.

“You are –” it managed, and almost fell over as a manling shoved another one into its base, nearly toppling it.

“THIS IS NOT HELPING!” it yelled as loud as it could, as the arborist gently steered it back upright.
“You’re done,” he said, and held up a mirror.  And much to the tree’s shock and surprise, it was.

“Paper-mache,” explained the arborist as it examined its small, crudely-painted leaves and knobbly trunk.  “I made the frame myself, so you’re not missing any important bits.  And you’ve got that trunk back, all in one piece.  Like it?”

The tree considered its options.
“Yes, well, it will suffice,” it managed.

“Good,” said the arborist, and turned to leave the classroom.
“Tell me,” said the tree, making him pause in the doorframe, “do you solve all your clients’ problems this way?”

The arborist chose his next words carefully.  “Just the special ones.”
“Right,” said the tree, vaguely satisfied.  At least it had a professional’s opinion.
All the same, it wasn’t sure it would pass on any recommendations.

“The Life Arboreal” copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor.

Dave was always a tidy guy.  Everything in its place, and a place for everything, that was how he worked.  Which made the way he killed himself really weird.  Blood everywhere, on everything.  He would’ve been livid.
What I should’ve done next was call the cops.  Then I could’ve figured out what the hell he was looking at – “major breakthrough!” and all.
And I did just that.  Sort of.  But I decided to look through what he was reading after the 911 call.  You know, inform the police, right?  Be helpful.  Besides, it was clearly a suicide – how many people were murdered by holding up a butter knife and stabbing themselves in the neck? – so no chance they’d miss fingerprints from a killer if he didn’t exist.  This way I could tell them exactly what my roomie had been going over when he departed this vale of tears mortal coil etcetera etcetera etcetera.
Besides, I was curious.  He’d been obsessing over this project for months.  Research, research, research, and not a drop of information as to what.  No hints, if, ands, or buts, just slammed doors and covered papers and “you’ll see it when it’s ready”s.  A guy can be excused for a little curiosity under those circumstances, right?
So I reached gingerly around his neck and yanked away the papers he’d been looking at.  Straight away, I knew this was a long way from a thesis yet.  Maybe he’d realized it never would be and had done himself in?  Didn’t sound right.
Page one was a bunch of scribbled and illegible notes as to the tone and content of an introduction.  None of it made any sense.
Page two was where it started to get clearer, if not more interesting.  Senseless and weird, but interesting.  A long-winded and badly-written treatise on the superstitions and beliefs of some demi-obscure northern European peoples during the dark ages.  Tedious and not fully edited, but a decent leadin to page three, which was a hodge-podge of facts and myths about an axe some king used for a while.  A very short while.  On the very first battle he used it in, he’d gone mad, decapitated twenty men, eight of which had been enemies, and then been stabbed to death over forty exhausting minutes.  The axe was taken by the king opposing him, who successfully managed to top his score four battles later, when he murdered his entire command staff during a strategic session.
Huh.
Page four.  The axe claimed two more important people before it was deemed cursed – a very right and proper superstition, I’d say – and given to a blacksmith to be melted down and discarded.  Good quality metal, though, as one of Dave’s notes eagerly attested, so the last instruction, he hypothesized, had been ignored.  So the big, fancy suit of plate armour that came out of the blacksmith’s shop a few months later might’ve contained a little crazy-axe.  Who’d know?  Well, no one did, although the man in the armour was probably puzzled some weeks later when it shattered spectacularly during a practice bout, grievously wounding him and sending a jagged piece of metal into his sparring partner’s eye.  Seeing that the deceased man was his brother-in-law and a quite important man in his own right, this led to a very jolly series of events involving a whole bunch more dead nobility.  The armour was deemed unsound and smelted down.  But it was such a waste of good metal, so….
I skimmed ahead.  More reforgings, more gruesome deaths.  A rapier that left an unsettling streak of mutual-mortality duels before someone got skittish and hocked it.  A zweihander – that one had an impressive kill count indeed before its wielder went down, probably because he was an armed and armoured lord overseeing a peasant battalion.
Then things got really strange.  Four pages with no more examples, just ramblings, theorizing, and speculation on the reliability of the evidence.  Followed by assurances of more proof.
I glanced uneasily at Dave’s body.  This wasn’t the sort of thing that healthy people did, and what I was reading sounded like one of those really bad sci-fi movies made with 85% CG and 15% story, but there were an awful lot of sources marked down here.  Some of the names I’d even heard of, big ones.  But squirreled away in odd notes, margins, other things.  Nothing obvious.
Past the semi-delusional justifications, there was more.  A long drought, and then a pistol that exploded in someone’s hand when fired.  A shame to waste something so expensive, so it was taken back, repaired, and exploded during the test shot the smith made in front of the customer to demonstrate its renewed soundness, killing both of them with bits of hurtling metal and wood.
Firearms were the trend for a while, mostly small pistols, occasionally rifles, but almost always finely-made.  Officer’s stuff.  Whatever Dave was tracking never seemed to end up in the hands of grunts, people whose property wouldn’t be important enough to reuse later, or might be lost unclaimed on a battlefield.  No one who’d break the chain of hand-me-downs for long.  There was a skewing from the military trend for a short period – the busiest guillotine in Paris for a year and a month, a razor with an uncanny thirst for the throats of gentlemen.
More digressions.  I glanced at Dave again as I skimmed over the research.  Still no hint as to why he’d done it.  Maybe the last page would have a cited source that made the entire thing make no sense whatsoever and he’d offed himself in the shame of wasting almost a year on it.
A few rifles used by crack snipers, ones that never died on the field but tended to have unfortunate accidents back on shore leave, where their weapons would be claimed by others easily and quickly.  The prototype for the first gatling gun was on its menu.  There was a fun surprise.  One of Custer’s pistols at Little Big Horn.  A World War I-era dreadnought, which fired four times in its career.  The first three shots sank one enemy ship each.  Then they brought it back, tooled it up for repairs, fired a practice volley, and its magazine blew.  All hands went down less than a few hundred feet from shore, and the ship was scrapped.
There was a tank in Germany during the last, nasty fights near Berlin.  Massacred four or five separate squads at once from cover, then took out a bunch of its own soldiers sheltering near it when it blew.  Dave had scrawled a small note here questioning whether the tank’s crew’s bodies had been found.  Or if they’d existed.
And after that, it got hazy.  There was a train somewhere in France that went off the rails, but most of the rest were just examples of AK-47s and such that got swapped around and had misfirings.  Very bland, and some of them were definitely stretches.  I started to realize why Dave might have decided this was a waste of time…except, he’d said he had a breakthrough.
Then I hit the last page, which commented on a story from last year about a state official’s car blowing its engine and swerving off a bridge (no survivors, naturally), and found a little note about its remains being sold to Home Steel.  The rest was all blood spatter from Dave, who’d really made a mess of his jugular.  Awful stuff.
I pulled out my Blackberry – noting as I did that Dave had done the same thing, somewhat worryingly, although his was coated in a thin layer of his bodily fluids – and checked.  Home Steel produced stainless-steel household items, including a full line of silverware.
My head very slowly moved upwards to examine Dave again.  The knife still had butter on it.  It looked entirely innocent.
I turned off my Blackberry, put it in my pocket, reached for Dave’s notes, decided against it, and ran like bejeezus; sprinting through the kitchen, vaulting the living room couch, and slamming the front door behind me with enough force to set off the small, stupid dog of the lady down the hall.  Something very small smacked into the wood against my back, making the whole frame quiver.
I waited for my pulse to drop a little, and heard nothing further.
“A garbage dump,” I said aloud.  “One of the really old-style bad ones.  One of the ones where they aren’t even ever going to try to recycle anything, because it’s probably been breeding down there and building cities.”  It was either that or the Marianas Trench, and I doubted I could get there on a student’s cash supply, let alone quickly enough for it not to find a way to shank me.
Ah, there were the cops.  I hoped I could get them to read the papers before they confiscated the knife as evidence.  Things could get messy otherwise.

“Research Paper,” copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor.

In a great walled city lived a glassblower and his wife, Sara.  He was overworked and she was overdue, and so when the baby came at last both were in a position of considerable stress.  She was in the back of the shop gathering supplies when the pains came, and there was no time to move her, barely time for the glassblower to shove out his customers and run to her side.  By the time the midwife arrived, huffing and puffing and blowing, the birth was nearly through – a fast, hard, sharp one – and it was all too late. 
The baby was weak, the mother was weaker, and wasting fast.  “Let me hold him,” she told her husband, and well, what could he do but agree, even if he’d known the consequences?
So the new mother held her baby, back and forth, shush-shush, don’t cry (he wouldn’t stop), and she listened to him most carefully.  And she saw what the midwife (who had already left, knowing there was nothing in her power to fix here) had missed.  “His heart is weak,” she said.  “Too weak.  He’ll barely outlive me with that heart.”  The glassblower nearly went into a frenzy at that, mad at the thought of losing wife and child both, but Sara was as calm as a lake on a breezeless day.  Her mother had been a witch, her father, a butcher, and between the both of them she wasn’t frightened of anything anymore, not even now.  She didn’t see her death, she saw a problem. 
“We can fix this,” she told the glassblower, sitting propped up in their bed, small but strong-voiced, “but we need a heart.  Can you make one?”
“How?” he asked. 
“Like anything else you make.  Carefully.  Perfectly.  Quickly.  Very, very quickly, if you can.”
“But it’s glass!  Hearts aren’t glass!”
“This one will have to be.  Hurry.”
So the glassblower hurried.  Unlike his wife, he was frightened of many things, and the thing he feared greatest was happening right in front of him.  And as her lack of fear gave her strength, so his terror lent him wings; the heart was finished almost before it began, glowing-hot and perfect, smooth and clearer than a raindrop.  It looked tidier than a heart of flesh, more polished, more perfect.  But it couldn’t beat, and the glassblower didn’t understand why it needed to be made. 
“Please,” he said.  “What will happen?”
“I’ll give him all the love he’ll need.  It’ll have to be enough.  Now, go,” said Sara.  “And don’t come back in until you hear him stop crying.”
It took almost an hour and all of the glassblower’s nails.  And when he entered the bedroom again, he found a softly sleeping baby with a pale pink scar on its chest and no trace of that awful little swish-slosh heartbeat that had warned his wife so.  A very quiet heartbeat now, but a very firm one. 
She was gone, without so much as the warmth left in the sheets to tell that she’d been there. 

The years went by for the glassblower and his son, one growing up, the other wearing down.  The glassblower’s business still kept them fed and housed, but something had gone out of his craft the day his wife had gone.  His pieces no longer gleamed so prettily, his hands were unsteadier on the blowpipe.  The latter was helped along by his drinking, which although never heavy, was near-constant.  The glassblower couldn’t face a day perfectly sober anymore. 
Fortunately, the glassblower’s son was not a demanding child.  He almost thrived off of what may not have been neglect but certainly was grand inattention, growing up raised by the cobbles of the city’s streets as much as his father.  He was strong and broad, in many ways almost a throwback to his grandfather of his mother’s side (yet less heavy, with more of his father’s leanness), but he refused to take part in the popular neighbourhood pastime of quarrelling and fighting that his peers exulted in, something he was taunted and occasionally chased for. 
The real trouble came when he was eight.  As he walked down the street, he saw a girl around his age, one of the neighbour’s children, sitting on the stoop to her house.  She was singing a song he didn’t recognize or care about, and she was doing something peculiar with a cloth and a glittering thing in her hands. 
“What is that?” he asked her. 
She followed his gaze.  “A needle.”
“No,” he clarified.  “What are you doing?”
“Sewing.  What do you care?”
The glassblower’s son cared deeply, though he wasn’t sure why yet.  “Can you teach me?” he asked. 
The girl, whose name was Abigail, gave him a strange look, and for a moment the glassblower’s son was sure she would reject him.  But instead she nodded, picked up needle and thread again, and began to show him.  Both captivated him: one so small and delicate-seeming, yet strong as anything when placed perfectly, the other a deliberate sliver of sharpness in a blunt, clumsy world.  The feel of the careful, repetitive stabbing demanded from it, each slipping of needle in cloth, was soothing. 
After two weeks of this, one of the other boys of the street saw him practicing with Abigail, and he was ambushed on his way home, with taunting and worse.  The other girls made fun of her, her parents admonished her for playing with “that rough boy,” and his lessons and time with her ended. 
He didn’t seem to mind on the surface, but he remembered, and he would see to it that the torment was returned, very carefully.  Things were broken around the victims that only they could have damaged, bringing parental wrath upon them; their pets would disappear; and sometimes worse.  Repayment for his opponents was slow, but always sure.  By the time he was fifteen, the last of them repaid it to the very end of his life, and had to be delicately placed somewhere unseen after dark.  The glassblower’s son dug dutifully, as deep a hole as could be made in a broken old cellar, and he buried with care and thoroughness. 
His father knew none of this, of course.  The boy spoke little, and at home he busied himself in aiding the glassblower with orders.  He as diligent in this as he was in covering his trail, which, by the time he’d reached the age of eighteen, he’d done three more times. 
Carefully. 

Just past his son’s nineteenth birthday, the glassblower began to pull himself together under the wing of one of the neighbours, the widow Lynn.  They were both lonely, and for her sake, he stopped drinking for a while. 
The widow’s son did not like the glassblower’s son.  Fresh as he was to the city guard, he was already showing signs of a lawholder’s instincts, and didn’t like the other youth’s feel.  The glassblower’s son disliked him as well, for more reasons than personality: there were things he wanted that could not be done with two more people working in and about the store. 
One day, the widow Lynn failed to rise from her bed.  It seemed she had confused several boxes of herbs and managed to give herself a fatal dose of wolfsbane in her evening tea.  Forgetfulness was one of her few flaws, and although tragic, the event was accepted as it was.  Her son sold the house and hurled himself headfirst into work to erase all thought, the glassblower turned back to drink, and the glassblower’s son continued to plan for the future. 
Clearly. 

When the glassblower’s son was twenty-one, a rich man entered the shop.  He was surprised at the daze and glare that hung over the glassblower’s head like a shroud – the pieces the place produced were still so fine, too fine to be made by this walking, wasting malady.  His eyes barely brightened at the mention of the piece, a fine vase to be gifted to a noble of the king’s court, but he nodded and mumbled small talk as well as could be expected.  The rich man left no less puzzled, and a little worried for his commissioned piece. 
When he returned for it, he found the glassblower’s son running the shop.  He was calm, polite, and courteous.  The parcel was dutifully handed over, its contents as promised, and when the rich man opened it later for proper packaging, he found that a small and elegant dish had been placed within it, a small note informing him that the glassblower’s soon had produced earlier during the day, and hoped it was not insulting to give it to him with the rest of the order. 
The noble was delighted with both the gifts, and a recommendation was made.  The glassblower was puzzled as to where the wealthier clients were coming back from, but he wasn’t displeased.  He began to spend more of his time in the workshop, as his son handled the customers. 
Smoothly. 

When the glassblower’s son was twenty-five, his father (who had been drying out more and more again since their fortunes began to turn), in a moment of surprising chance, found where he’d been hiding over half their profits.  He confronted his son, as angry as he was bemused, and for the first time in his life he demanded things directly of him. 
The glass needle was very cold, and very brittle, and very thin.  The slightest misplacement of its aim would’ve snapped it to pieces.  But the glassblower’s son was very careful, and the small, quiet funeral to commemorate the unfortunate heart attack (what sort of attack was left unsaid) went ahead as steadily as the blade itself had. 
The son conducted himself most composedly on the occasion, which was attended by many of their best clients.  They remarked on his bravery, and did not fear for their custom.  Even the widow Lynn’s son, now a captain in the city guard, gave him his sympathies – although he detested the son, he had liked the father when he was sober.  He took the words of condolence and approval as he did all else. 
Coldly. 

The glasswork was better than ever, and the clients grew both more numerous and richer.  For the former he hired apprentices, and for the latter he saved now his own two hands and personal attention, which became all the more acclaimed for its rarity.  He remained a quiet conversationalist, but an excellent listener.  He developed a reputation for discreteness in all things, and many a nobleman poured their troubles into his willing ears.  And then one day, listening to a viscount complain of a brother-in-law who was blackmailing him for a little indiscretion – so little, and after all, the man’s sister was so ugly, how could he be blamed for it? – he mentioned that he might know a man who could solve problems of that sort, for some manner of a fee.  Details were scarce, but the man with the glass heart’s word was as good as gold, and the viscount was more than willing to open his purse for it. 
That night, he went out on the town.  He took another long, thing glass needle with him, the finest he could make.  And the next morning, the viscount’s troublesome brother-in-law was discovered to have succumbed in the night to some unknown malady.  His heart had given out. 
The viscount was pleased, and word of mouth took over once again, spreading tales of something in even more demand than fine glasswork.  Clients came, shared tales of their troubles, and the man with the glass heart told them if he thought he knew a man that could solve them.  And they rested their heads in peace, for as they all knew, the man with the glass heart was nothing if not discreet.  Both his careers prospered, and he went about them both as he was expected to. 
Sharply. 

The man with the glass heart was careful, nearly invisible, and he took only the jobs that he was certain would go unnoticed, but still, the patterns were noted by those on high.  Assassins and poisons were the tools of the upper class, and though his methods of killing were nigh-undetectable, the means were easily guessed at. 
The panic was subtle, muted.  It was Not Done to be fearful, overt wariness was a sign of weakness.  The nobility remained defiantly devoted to excess, cheer, and power games, and the man with the glass heart was invited deeper into the fold every day.  He owned a grand workshop, accounted all the finest among his clientele, and was invited to parties, where he was respected – if not lively – and gave short, sage advice to those who needed it.  And maybe a quiet word or two of recommendation as to who might need to be silenced.  His influence grew, his renown swelled, he began to think of how to replace the duke without causing a stir. 
And then, five years from his father’s death, at a celebration of the birthday of the duke’s youngest daughter, the man with the glass heart glanced at something over the shoulder of a particularly dull and vengeful conversation partner, and blinked four times in a row without realizing it.  His chest felt strange, tense, brittle. 
There was a woman standing on the sidelines, speaking with the duchess.  She was pretty, as many of the women at any of these dreary events always were.  The man with the glass heart didn’t notice them.  But he noticed her.  In fact, he noticed her so clearly that he quite lost the thread of what his client was saying, and realized that he was staring at him in total puzzlement. 
Now, what the man with the glass heart should’ve done, would’ve done at any other place and time, would have been to make an observation on the information he’d been given that clearly gave an impressive signal to the client that he had indeed been paying attention and in fact already seemed to know more than he did.  Instead, he pointed at the woman at the fireplace, and asked who she was. 
“Some commoner, someone’s fiancée,” the client said irritably.  “Not a clue.  Now, about my problem…” but his problem could wait and this couldn’t, and he found himself adrift as the man with the glass heart walked over to ask the woman to dance. 
He had no knowledge of it, but was a fast learner, putting as much care and balance as he dropped into a vase for the duke, or the removal of a nobleman. 
“Abigail,” he asked as the annoying music passed unheard, “what are you doing here?”
She laughed a little.  “Teaching the birthday girl to sew, mostly.  I’m her maid.”
The man with the glass heart knew the duke’s daughter.  “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, it’s not all that bad.  You just have to manage her moods, and it did lead me to my husband – oh look, here he is, here he is!”
The man with the glass heart turned about, and shook hands, and the introductions weren’t needed, for here was the widow Lynn’s son, now commander of the city watch.  And somewhere in the back of those deep-set eyes, something was glaring out at him, recognizing him. 
“You two know each other?” he asked. 
“I taught him to sew,” said Abigail.  “Never got very far, poor thing – all the neighbourhood boys made fun of him, and my parents forbid it once my friends told them.”
“Useful skill,” said the commander of the city watch.  “No shame in it.  Honest work.”
The man with the glass heart didn’t like the pointed meaning hiding behind the neutral tone.  He wished with all the will in the world that there would be another dance with Abigail, but the night was winding down and the musicians were retiring; the duke was saying farewells and the nobility were all flocking home to their estates to roost. 
The man with the glass heart thought all the way back home, back to the commander’s mother, the widow Lynn.  He’d already stopped one marriage.  He could stop two. 
There was a customer who he’d promised to attend to tonight.  There was a stained glass window for the new church he’d promised to oversee. 
They could wait.  This was important, so important that his chest hurt.  It had to be done. 

The man with the glass heart was quiet, oh so quiet, as he slipped in the upstairs window to the commander of the watch’s home, padded in dark fabrics that sapped the colour from his form and bled him into the night, dropping on a thin silk rope from the rooftops.  He felt strange, hesitant.  To kill without pay, for his own purposes, it was not something he’d done in many, many years.  He pulled a glass needle from the little cushioned containers on his waist, and he moved through the house’s rooms, all simple, all straightforward, all safe.  The commander had been practical as a youth, and that had not changed. 
There were two bodies in the big, sturdy bed upstairs.  One was Abigail (oh how his chest hurt), the other was not.  It also was not living – there was no rise and fall of breath. 
The man with the glass heart turned at the doorway to leave, and knew before the short sword hummed through the air at him that it was too late to run.  He ducked, and felt cloth and flesh tear along his chest.  A very shallow cut, but painful. 
“Think I’m stupid, do you?” grunted the commander, pushing him back, into the room.  “Think I’m going to sleep and die?  I know you.  And I know those deaths.  Too many quiet ones.  You like it quiet, don’t you?  Heard about your father.”  He was feinting now, dancing from foot to foot, thud-thud on the floorboards.  A noise from the bed – was Abigail waking?  She shouldn’t see this.  “He was a good man.  Better than you deserved.”  He pushed forwards.  Still back, boots nearly at the bedside.  “Answer me, damnit.  Answer or I’ll bleed you out here and now and we won’t have to waste money on rope.”  He swung, and cursed as the man with the glass heart’s hand moved, leaving glass shimmering sweetly in the flesh of his swordarm.  It snapped as their bodies clashed together, sword spinning away with a clang on the floor. 
The man with the glass heart was smooth, his focus was clear, his head was quick, but the commander was tough, and he’d fought his way to his rank.  Two fists to the gut in a space that couldn’t possibly let him punch, and then a knee to the groin.  The man with the glass heart saw stars, one hand tightened ineffectually at the commander’s throat and the other wrapped around that wounded arm.  His fingers brushed blood-sticky hairs and he squeezed, felt the crunch and slice of the needle as it came to pieces, an elegant weapon used brutally. 
Even then, not a scream – a pained grunt, a groan, a weakening of purpose.  The man with the glass heart threw him to the floor, spun to his feet.  Hand at the belt, needle at the ready, a new one, one of the bigger ones, an emergency weapon that cut like a knife.  He shifted his grip, raised his arm.
Abigail rushed past him, calling a name that wasn’t his. 

Neither of them saw it– he was too blinded by pain, and she was crouched low over him, trying to see his hurts – but they heard it happen.  There was a sob, a gasp, and a great tinkling splintering crash, all at once, like the world’s biggest picture window falling to pieces. 
What they found there, after the fact, was not what they told the others.  He had landed a blow in the dark, and it had taken the murderer a moment to realize it had killed him.  It happened.  It had happened before.  Dangerous, but knowable. 
But what they found on that floor was a man dead, a scar split open, with bloodless shards of smooth glass splitting open the skin from deep inside.  They shone clearly in the moonlight through the window, and then they were gone.  And not a drop of blood remained in the room that didn’t belong to the commander of the city watch. 
“What was he like?” he asked her.  “You knew him before I did.”
Abigail thought as she sewed the cuts.  There were plenty of words that described him, but only one that she thought was proper. 
“Fragile.  Where it counted most.”

 

“Transparency” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2010. 

The biohazard alarm was most inconvenient for Jeremy.  He’d just finished mopping the level 4 hall. 
Oh, the day had begun well enough.  He’d found he had a forgotten box of Cap’n Crunch stored away that wasn’t too stale; the bus ride was quiet and serene; the security guard was brisk and efficient, and above all else, professional about the cavity search; and to cap it off, that one nice-looking researcher had smiled and waved at him as he started his morning rounds.  Too good to last, it had been. 
“PROCEED IMMEDIATELY TO THE NEAREST EXIT,” blared an alarming and terse voice over every intercom in the complex.  “THIS IS NOT A DRILL.  CONTAINMENT BREACH ON LEVEL 4.  PROCEED IMMEDIATELY TO THE NEAREST EXIT.  THIS IS NOT A DRILL” and so on and so forth, an endless nagging loop ordering you to get going and get your precious organs out before some horrible mix-a-match mutant from belowdecks took a fancy to them on its impromptu holiday. 
Third time this week, too. 
Jeremy stared at his mop, still damp and virginal, ready to plunge to the next set of unclean floors and purify them with love and a hint of bleach.  He looked to the pristine, freshly-filled mop bucket, filled with heady and lethal vapours.  And he looked down the hall to the huge reinforced safety door that was even now being dented by hideously strong blows – the steel door he had lovingly and carefully polished not five minutes ago – and something happened inside his head.  Nothing snapped, not exactly.  It was more like the gentle parting of clouds that lets the sunshine in. 

It took two minutes for the misshapen thing that had probably once been some sort of test animal (a dog?  A monkey?) to break apart the door and shoulder its way into the hallway.  It blinked its bleary eyes in the red glare of the emergency lights, took one stumbling, snarling stride forwards, and then slid in four directions at once on the hastily-mopped floor.  It tried to catch itself, but only succeeded with one of its seven legs.  The sound of its jaw – and mandibles – hitting the floor was drowned out by the alarm, but the momentary pause between assurances of not-a-drill was just long enough for the sound of Jeremy’s mop handle crunching its skull to ring strangely loud.  Especially to Jeremy. 
So he stood there – astride his kill, beast vanquished, dragon slain – with his mop in hand.  And he looked into that darkened corridor the thing had come from, with its lights cracked and broken, its floor tiles torn up by the read of warped and clubbed feet, its walls coated in unpleasant bodily fluids, and he spoke his first words of the day that were not idle greeting murmurs. 
“I’m going to need a bit more,” said Jeremy. 

So Jeremy’s first stop was his supply closet.  He did some things while he was there, with some of his cleaners and his bleaches; stuff that he needed to wear his heavy-duty gas mask for, the one he used when he was cleaning out testing pens.  He also found a new and helpful use for that enormous old leaf blower he’d only pulled out of storage twice (the thing was so huge it had to be back-mounted, for goodness’ sakes). And he very, very, very carefully sharpened his mop’s hilt, which didn’t really work.  So he stuck its tip inside the garbage disposal and made do with the resulting jagged metal, at the expense of some really appalling noises.  
The whole affair took maybe twenty minutes.  By the time Jeremy got back to the door, shuffling in his full hazard suit, there were three other things hanging around it, chewing on their brother’s bits and pieces in an idle sort of way.  He wondered if they were the same species, but it was a bit difficult to tell.  The eye was drawn inexorably to the teeth and claws – such an awful lot of both – whenever it tried to focus on fine detail. 
Jeremy looked at his mop-spear.  The things looked at Jeremy.  Jeremy looked at the things.  The things looked at his mop-spear.  Then they casually stood up from where they crouched and began a slow, lurching swagger towards him, spreading out to all sides. 
Jeremy dropped his mop and pulled out his leaf blower.  The clanging ring of metal on tile brought on a quick, involuntary flinch, a little enough thing, but still there.  And that was just enough time for Jeremy to flip the switch and set his blower running, belching out the vaporous results of his combination of bleach and ammonia right into their faces. 
Results were promising, since apparently several of the openings on their faces were nostrils.  They went down choking and screeching, one so rapidly that it might’ve had two windpipes. 
Shoving the bodies into the nearest closet took time, as well as the use of many muscles Jeremy didn’t really possess.  When it was through he stretched his back, sighed, walked over to still-waiting mop bucket, and began to clean the floors again.  He had a schedule, a routine, a properly laid-out neat-and-tidy formula for his day.  And he’d had it interrupted too many times for him to once again quietly shuffle away and wait for the black helicopters to come in and set fire to whoever’s lunchbreak project had eaten a laboratory this time.  No, he was going to clean this place properly now, no cowardly, lazy backing out because of a little light fallout or chemical spill or mutagen.  And if he did it right he could handle it without any jackboots scuffing up the floors. 
Into the dark of Level 4 he walked, mop swirling and back bent. 

Some half hour later, Jeremy was starting to consider that his determination might have been misplaced.  He’d gone through five more of the things, half his supply of chlorinated gas, and, when he’d turned around to dunk the mop and met the gaze of the fifth beast from six feet away, very nearly his underwear.  And he’d only just reached the inner high-security labs, where the big multi-ton titanium door had been torn into nigh-indestructible shreds and dumped about like confetti. 
It was very annoying to sweep up. 
But now he was past that and moving on and in, further towards the cream of the intellectual crop’s ahead-of-the-curve-and-on-the-ball projects, most of which gently rolled over the cusp of sanity and into somewhere a lot more interesting. 
Usually, when Jeremy mopped here, he did it quickly because the security guards – specially trained men and women in complex and sophisticated headgear with extremely small and silvery guns – got suspicious if you lingered, and they weren’t as gentle with their cavity searches as the man out front.  He cleaned fast and hard, as perfectly as possible lest he be accused of inefficiency and shot in the foot.  But now, he had time.  Now, he had a reason to linger and keep an eye out.  And now he could see firsthand what all those complicated labs were housing. 
Lab 01 was currently being used for “Tyrannosaur Reproduction and Reconstruction,” according to the scotch-taped sheet of paper on the door. 
Lab 02, proclaimed a small and official placard on the wall next to it, was dedicated to “Sentient Woodland Development.”  Someone had slapped a small sticker depicting a marijuana leaf to it, which Jeremy dutifully removed.
Lab 03 had seventeen separate warning signs surrounding its doorway, all in extremely bright colours and with large, all-caps lettering.  Jeremy mopped by it quickly. 
Lab 04 had no sign, but its door was four times more reinforced than any of the others and was secured by eight different locking mechanisms, at least three of which didn’t use any alphabet Jeremy could recognize. 
It was at this point that he dropped in the nearby restroom to change the water in his mop bucket.  Normally he would balk at shoving the water straight down a public restroom’s toilet, but he was in a bit of a hurry.  Something growled at him from inside the last stall and he filled the entire place with gas before leaving to a backdrop of thunderous-yet-dwindling coughing. 
Something was different.  It took him past labs 05-07 (Retroactive Human Cloning, Asymmetrical Vertebrate Theory, and Bioexplosive Products) to realize exactly what that was: there were no sounds anymore.  All that made noise was the very, very familiar swish, splash, thud, and slap of his mop at work. 
No sirens. 
No distant crashes and thuds (which had mostly stayed distant, thankfully). 
No returning gunfire. 
The last one worried him the most.  Maybe the men in the black helicopters had been on a coffee break when the sirens went.  Maybe they’d be there in the next few minutes.  Maybe he was making up comforting excuses and they were having a tough time of it.  But still, the monsters fell over with a little chlorine gas.  They weren’t indestructible or anything.
Jeremy shook his head.  Floors.  What he needed to focus on was floors. 
He made it right to the door of lab 08 (Adrenaline Amplification Refining) before something extremely large shoved him to the floor from behind and attempted to remove his spine, sending the mop clattering from his hand.  Putrid breath washed over him, followed by a crunch, an explosive hiss, a yelp, and the gentle gust of something less vile but more lethal.  Jeremy spun to his feet and ran, thanking luck that he hadn’t attached the leaf blower canister too firmly.  The sounds of something thrashing and writhing that was much too large to move that quietly chased him.  Then silence again, except for the pitter-patter-thud-thud of his feet and heart. 
Then a rustle. 

Jeremy entered the very next door he came to without bothering to read it, reasoning that if it wasn’t hanging off its hinges it was probably safe.  This brought him face to face with someone else, who was not a monster.  Surprised by this, they screamed at each other. 
“Oh, it’s you,” said the scientist who had smiled and waved at him that morning.  “Thank goodness.”  He looked much more dishevelled than he had that morning. 
Jeremy’s lungs weren’t working properly, thanks to running in a full suit and gas mask while hyperventilating, and the screaming fit hadn’t helped.  So he nodded.  Well, his head lurched.  It was very similar. 
“I thought you were one of those things for a moment.  They have a nasty habit of popping up where you least expect them.”
Jeremy’s breath began to sulkily refill his lungs again, in fits and starts.  “How they.  Do it?”
“Well, for a while I thought they were using the ducts, but we had those replaced last year after the thing with the guinea pigs.”
Jeremy flinched.  He remembered that one.  It had taken weeks to clean the ceilings. 
“So, it must be the crawlspaces.  We’ve got a lot of plumbing down there, and we need it easy-access in case something carrying something nasty breaks.  So, big crawlspaces.  All it needs is one of the little bastards to open up a whole and whoopsy daisy, they all follow his trail.  Fun.”
“What are.  They?”
The scientist shrugged.  “Not entirely sure.  They were under lab 10’s jurisdiction: bioweaponry for use in guerrilla warfare.  I guess they’re supposed to track down insurgents and eat them or something?  I’m not sure.  Our work never really overlapped all that much.”
“What did you work.  On?” 
“This is lab 09: incredibly delicious fruit.”
Despite his wearing a gas mask, something of Jeremy’s expression must have leaked through. 
“Look, it’s more dangerous than it sounds, okay?  Some of this fruit is dangerously tasty.”
“How?”
“Well… imagine the consequences of bioengineered fruit that is literally in every way the tastiest thing you’ve ever eaten.  It’s cheap to grow and thrives in most climates.”
“Okay.”
“Now, imagine that you find some crippling deficiency in it that say, causes all your bone marrow to wither and dry up after five bites?”
“Does it do that?”
“Version 4.86 did.”
“How far have you gotten?”
“4.87.  We think we fixed it.”  A crashing noise from the hall made Jeremy flinch. 
“It’s all right, you know.  We’re probably the safest place we can be.”
“Why?”
“Well, here’s where they went first.  Right after they broke up they popped up in here, just as we were laying out batch 4.87 alpha for the test subjects.  Must’ve smelled the fruit.  So they ate all they could find and left.  I’d say they’re looking for more, and here is the one place they’re guaranteed not to find any.”
“They got all of it?”
“All of 4.87 alpha and the test subjects, yes.  But not all the fruit.  They just got the latest test batches.  Most of the rest of it is stashed back in the freezer.”
“It tasty?”
“Oh, very.  Well, I mean I suppose so.  If I’d tried it personally, I suppose I wouldn’t be in any state to tell you.”
“Would they eat it?”
“Yes, definitely, but they’ve all moved on.  I tell you, this is the last place in the building we’d find them now.  They could be anywhere.”
Jeremy thought of his broken leaf-blower-cum-chlorine-sprayer as he stared at what looked to be an industrial counter-mounted juicer.  So near, and yet so far. 
“Do you know what they liked?”
“No.  Lab 10 probably had notes on them, but I’m not going in there.”
“Why?”
“The big one’s still there.  Couldn’t fit through the door, poor thing, no matter how hard the others tried to help.”
“Big one?”
“Maybe you’d best see for yourself…”
The scientist was halfway out the door before he realized Jeremy wasn’t following. 
“It’s perfectly safe,” he said.  “Really.  Come on.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“It’s just that I don’t have the mop now, and –”
“Don’t worry.  Come on.”

Surprisingly, it was. 
The doors to lab 10 had not just been ripped off their hinges, they’d been thrown to the ground and broken into as many tiny pieces as possible.  And the doorframe looked like it’d been chewed on. 
“They were chewing on it,” explained the scientist helpfully.  “Couldn’t breach it, though.  Not enough for her.  Go on, take a peek.”
Jeremy sidled up to the doorway, spent a peculiar three seconds recalling that happy time nearly an hour ago when he really only wanted to mop something and wasn’t hanging around darkened corridors that smelled faintly of dread-inducing mucus, and peeked. 
What he saw was…well, he wasn’t sure he had the vocabulary to describe it.  Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure anyone had the vocabulary to describe it.  Or the words. 
So he said: “Oh.”  He wished he had his mop with him.  Or a fuel-air explosive. 
“Amazing, isn’t it?  I think most of them were primate-based, but whatever it is, well, that’s another story entirely.”
“Which would be?”
“Haven’t the foggiest.  Just don’t get too close.  It’s quicker with those…umm…things than it looks.”
“Wouldn’t be hard.”  The animal filling most of the room didn’t look quick.  Or mobile.  Or animate.  Jeremy had seen more lively floor stains, although considering some of the spills the labs could produce, that wasn’t saying a lot. 
“Where are the notes?” he asked. 
“See that laptop behind that, ah, fold of mass right there?”
“No.”
“No, no, there – behind the bits that are sort of bone but not quite.  In the corner.”
“Oh.”
“That’s it.”
“How do we get it?”
“We don’t.  We sit tight back in 09 and wait for the rescue.”
“Isn’t coming.”
“What?  Why?”
“Search me.  But no gunfire or anything yet.”
The scientist sighed, a blustery, overloud sound in the stifling dark.  “Damn it.  Right then, backup plan: you go in and grab it while I make very loud noises over here by smacking the wall and hollering.”
“That’ll work?”
“It should.  Go for it.”
Jeremy hesitated, then leapt forward, the first resounding smack echoing through the empty lab like a gunshot.  The results were immediate: the…central…bit of the thing in the room shifted to face it, and its body began to ripple.  Strange bits and limbs poured out towards the noise, and Jeremy fancied that it acquired a desperate edge to it. 
The laptop’s resting place was an unnerving one, lodged in the corner as it was.  Getting there required circling nearly a third of the thing’s bulk a process that took exactly too long for Jeremy’s mental calm.  He snatched at it, pulled, realized it was cemented fast, pulled harder, and ripped it loose from the countertop with a sucking sound that brought up unpleasant images from the seedier parts of the internet. 
Unfortunately, it was a loud sucking sound.  A very loud sucking sound.  Though not as loud as the unpleasant noise that lurched through his spinal column and probably qualified as some sort of growl.  Either way, it was hard for Jeremy to tell because he was running very quickly again.  Then his foot hit the outstretched bit on the floor that looked like a toenail but more like an appendix and everything became much slower.  He could count the hairs on its surface as he very slowly tipped over onto it, and the moment when his flailing free hand was clasped in another and yanked forwards was almost a bigger shock than the trip itself. 
“Got you,” said the scientist, heaving him briskly from the room.  A collection of organs being used as appendages occupied the space he’d nearly fallen on with extreme prejudice.  Just looking at them simultaneous made Jeremy feel sick and wish he had more bleach on hand.  Or maybe gasoline. 
“Mind letting go?” asked the scientist. 
Jeremy realized his knuckles were whitening to a degree not seen in living people, and released the laptop with some difficulty. 
“Back to 09?” he suggested.
“Yes.  I think I heard something a minute ago.  Not that I could be sure, with the little bit of distraction we had here.”
Jeremy wondered what sort of thing could survive eating at least half a gallon of mixed bleach and ammonia, then wished he hadn’t because his brain was giving him unhelpfully detailed pictures of the last minute and a half all over again. 

“Amazing,” said the scientist. 
Jeremy looked up from his cleaning.  He’d found an old hand brush under the sink and was taking the chance to relax a little. 
“Amazing,” repeated the scientist.
“You just said that,” pointed out Jeremy, helpfully.
“Did I?  Well, it is.  This entire project…my goodness.”  He shook his head in wonderment.  “I have to say, never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine that we could be sharing office space with something so ill-thought-out, incompetent, and generally inconceivably stupid.  It makes that one project two years ago with the self-cooking farm animals look like a hobnob between Newton and Einstein.”
Jeremy thought about the delicious fruit, but said nothing.  Besides, there wasn’t enough airspace for him to squeeze into. 
“I mean, really.  Use some of the most unpredictable mutagens we have catalogued on selected primates?  Well, so far so good.  Use their half-melted genetic structures as a chance to introduce DNA from carnivores?  All right.  Collaborate with the bacterial warfare group upstairs to give them what is essentially permanent rabies?  Fine, as long as it’s not airborne.  But designing them as a guerrilla strike team/anti-guerrilla infiltrator unit and then forging psychoneurotic links between them and a prototype hivemind made of 02’s castoffs, and well, I can’t see the point one bit.”
“No?”
“Well, it would’ve been so much more sensible to hook it up to some sort of control device.  Or if their mindsets are too tortured and horrifying for humans to view directly and stay sane, maybe a computer or something.  What I’m saying is that we’re dealing with a project that has suffered some seriously unnecessary over-budget expenditure.”
Jeremy didn’t quite know what to say, so he just nodded.  That seemed to work. 
“On the plus side, this makes dealing with this whole sorry mess very, very easy.”
“How?”
“Well, we can just kill the controller, of course.”
“It’ll shut them down?”
“No, of course not, the whole hivemind is too poorly set-up for that.  But we can give them all damned big headaches and slow them down a lot, and hopefully that’ll stop whatever’s keeping the rescue brigade from us, eh?  I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to get the hell out of here.”
Jeremy weighed the chance of reaching the nearest supply closet with nothing but a handbroom and dustpan, and was reluctantly forced to agree.  But there was a flaw. 
“How do we kill it?”
“Remember all that spare fruit we talked about earlier?  The previous batches?”

There was a rather obvious flaw with the plan, in retrospect. 
“It has to have a mouth,” complained the scientist.  “It’s an impossibility for it not to.”
The thing in lab 10 sat there in mouthless silence.  The delicious fruit lay unnoticed at its side. 
“It doesn’t have a mouth,” pointed out Jeremy.
“Can’t be.  There’s no way for something that big that still moves under its own power to get nutrients other than eating other things!”
“Doesn’t have eyes either.  Or proper limbs, or even proper tentacles.”
“The first two aren’t as uncommon as you’d think in here, but the third, I’ll grant you.”  The scientist stared disapprovingly at the unsatisfactorily tentacley appendages in question.  “Fine.  So it won’t eat.  Now what?”
Jeremy was thinking again.  “We make it eat.”
“I’m sorry?”
Jeremy rubbed his hands thoughtfully and walked back down the quiet hall.  “I’m going,” he announced, “to get my mop.”

It was right where he’d dropped it, although something extremely large and ugly had died on top of the handle, its mouth filled with bits of leafblower hull, happily if hideously disproving whatever worries he’d had about the sounds in the dark.  At least whatever it was had some sort of recognizable anatomy, if a repulsive one.  Jeremy didn’t have to invent new nouns to describe its body, so that was an improvement over its fellow in lab 10 right away. 
The preparations took time.  There were obstacles. 
“I see what you’re planning,” said the scientist as Jeremy stopped the blender, which was truly the finest he’d ever operated, “but even liquefied, I don’t think there’s a way to get the fruit inside it.”
“A needle,” explained Jeremy, as he began to pour the gooified fruit juice into his mop. 
The scientist was the one who nodded this time.  He looked a bit too ill to open his mouth. 

The plan, in theory, was flawless.  Dash forwards, stab the beastie, run away and let the natural wonders of science propel a big fat gallon of marrow-rotting fluids directly into whatever it had that resembled something akin to a bloodstream.  Then walk out of Level 4 very slowly and dramatically and go have lunch somewhere nice with a few drinks. 
The execution was less perfect in practice.  In six ways. 
First, Jeremy’s fear of tripping again during the procedure grew so strong that he almost stubbed his toe double-checking himself on the creeping, stealthy approach to the meatier portion of the creature’s mass. 
Second, it took them thirty minutes to realize that it was dead.  In all fairness, it was a very difficult process to begin with, since it had no pulse or lungs.  As the scientist said, describing it as “alive” in the first place was stretching already.
Third, the scientist declared that it was entirely possible that it had dropped dead shortly after trying to grab Jeremy during the laptop retrieval. 
“They did keep it in a big oxygen-free tank,” he noted.  “And it might not have found the outside world conducive to its health.  The exertion of going after you earlier might just have been too much.”
“Why didn’t you mention this?”
“It was in a footnote on page 16 of the appendices.  You don’t honestly think any of us like advertising our project’s defects, do you?  We buried our marrow thing in a backup report to a subreport.”
Fourth, they were only just leaving Level 4 when the lights came back on and all the regular faculty wandered back in, most of whom were confused to their presence and willing and eager to inform Jeremy that he was not even remotely a badass. 
“Oh, it was over in an eye-blink,” assured one of the scientist’s colleagues.  “It turns out that most of the prototypes couldn’t move faster than a brisk stroll under the best of circumstances, and they prefer to eat each other rather than us.  The boys in black took them out in five minutes and we all decided, well, lockdown takes at least another hour to reset at best, why don’t we take the afternoon off?  We all went down and had a coffee in town.  Really, it was the quickest outbreak since those guinea pigs that –”
“We remember,” said the scientist, testily.  “And how’s the lab-10 team holding up?  I’d imagine that with these sorts of results, they’re in for quite a drubbing next budget meeting.”
“A drubbing?  Punishment?  Have you any idea how many applications there are for a this-easily-foilable faux-infestation of hideous abominations?  The most inept human alive could take one out, and they grow from spores, no less!  I tell you, the special effects people in Hollywood will thank us, and with their wallets to boot.  Budget?  With a bit of tweaking, this thing just became half our budget.”
Fifth, the scientist couldn’t make it for lunch. 
“It’s very sweet of you,” he said to Jeremy, “but I’m already seeing someone.  You’re nice, believe me, and if I were free I’d be on it like a shot, but I’m very much committed at the moment.”
“Besides,” he added, “there’s no way I have time to run out and get something now.  We need to redo all of batch 4.87 from notes.  Maybe go to 4.87b.  There’s some alleles we just didn’t have the time to hash out on the last one that really –” and then the conversation had ended, it just took a few more minutes and far more syllables than saying “goodbye” would have.
Sixth, Jeremy’s best mop was now sacrificed for naught, and the – expensive – replacement would be a week in the mail.  Till then he would have to use a communal mop, bummed from one of the other janitors.  A lamentable fate indeed. 

On the other hand, the security cameras had caught footage of some of his cleaning on Level 4 during the lockdown, and he’d persuaded the security staff to give him a copy.  It had hit over 1 million views online so far, and that was the sort of recognition money just couldn’t buy. 

 

“Cleaup Duty,” copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor.

“Hey Joel.”
“What?! What!?  Back, back, back I say!  I warn you, I’m armed and…oh, it’s you.  Hello, Bernie.”
“Calm down, neighbour; you look a bit tense.  What’s that thing you’re holding there, anyways?”
“What thing?”
“That thing you were waving around just now.”
“Oh…  Hedge trimmer.”
“Never seen one with all those glowy bits before.  Or the exposed wiring.”
“It’s second-hand.  I keep meaning to repair it.”
“That so?”
“Say, what brings you over here anyways, Bernie?”
“Well, my lawn mower broke.  Was wondering if you could fix it.”
“I just fixed that thing last week!  What happened?”
“You could say your fixing it is the source of the issue.”
“Can’t be.  A simple tune-up and a change of oil was all it needed!”
“Yes, but whatever you changed the oil for leaks.  And if it touches plants, they melt.”
“Really?  Into what?”
“You’ve got me there, but it’s sort of orange.  And the blades go too fast.”
“I can scarcely see how that’s an issue.”
“It hovers, Joel.”
“Perfect!  Reduces the physical exertion required to move it.”
“It’s hovering twenty feet in the air and it’s tangled in the power lines, Joel.  If my boy hadn’t let go as fast as he did, he’d be barbequed right now.”
“Oh dear.”
“Yup.”
“I must’ve put in the wrong battery.  I guess that explains why this thing is having trouble starting.”
“What thing?”
“Never mind.”
“Come on Joel, we’ve been neighbours for fifteen years.  My son’s asked your daughter out on four really awkward dates.  Our wives share recipes on little bitty index cards.  You can tell me.”
“Promise you won’t tell anyone?”
“My lips are sealed.”
“…it’s a doomsday machine.”
“A what now?”
“Well, it’s more like a demi-doomsday machine.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I mean, it would be a bit of a job for it to destroy a single major metropolitan city, let alone any civilizations.  I think calling it a whole-hog armageddon device would be a tad overconfident.”
“Joel, are you telling me that you have constructed a weapon of mass destruction inside your garage?”
“I’ll have you know that KRUMEK is an autonomic artificially-created entity capable of supporting independent and efficient evolving thought-processes, not some sort of ham-handed and dangerous piece of equipment!”
“Oh, that’s a reli–”
“I strapped those all over his external hull and wired them into his central cortex.  Just most of my leftovers from my postgraduate projects, anyways.”
“How dangerous is this stuff, Joel?”
“The earlier pieces are crude and unsophisticated, so they have no safeties.  The later components are mostly intellectual exercises, and I haven’t actually tested any of them yet, so they may work as planned or do something radically unexpected.”
“Like?”
“Remember that time I made waffles at your place?”
“Oh, right.” 
“But with less maple syrup.  I think.”
“Listen, should you really be making this sort of thing in your garage?”
“Where else?”
“Practically anywhere.  I mean, don’t you have labs for this sort of thing?”
“I don’t know what you think my salary is –”
“You work for the Pentagon, Joel.”
“– but I can tell you this: it’s not nearly enough to cover a mortgage, a college fund, my wife’s knitting habits, my scrap metal and nuclear contaminants collection, and the rental of over a hundred thousand square feet of lab space in an industrial district plus all safety permits, regulation inspections, hazardous waste storage, and security systems.”
“So instead of that, you’re using your garage.”
“It already has a padlock and there’s a drain built right into the floor.  Acceptable substitute.”
“Let’s try a different angle then: why do you need to build this thing at all?  It’s not an official project, right?”
“Definitely not.  If this were from work, hah, I’d be still trying to file reports on safety margins and possibilities of error.  No, this is a true labour of love – shining, free, dancing in the sunlight, loosed under the sky and unburdened with red tape.”
“And covered in experimental and unpredictable weaponry.”
“Same old Bernie, always the cynic.”
“So, why are you building this?”
“Well, partly it was a bit of a whim.  A flight of fancy.  I’ve had all these bits and pieces from my job building up in my garage, a whole mountain of might-have-been projects and dreams and idle fancies, and I just said, hey, why not combine them all at once?  And partly it was a bit of a money issue, because with the mortgage, and the college fund, and my wife’s knitting –”
“Yes, yes.”
“Well, and the third part was that I sort of quit work yesterday.”
“What?!  Really?!  Why?”
“Blew up my boss’s office.  It’s ‘three strikes and you’re out,’ you see, and that was the third that day.  And the fourth, fifth, and sixth all happened within about five seconds after that, so I knew I was past the plead-for-your-career point.”
“And this led to this because…?”
“Well, you know.  Some people cut luxuries, some people go bargain hunting, some people start browsing classifieds…”
“And you decide to build a big pile of weaponry?”
“A big sentient and mobile pile of weaponry.  It’s all basically the same crisis strategy operating within different paradigms of expression, you know?”
“Joel, how is this supposed to help you get money?”
“Well, it’s quite simple.  See, it’s theoretically capable of holding off a small battalion and if need be, me and the entire family can fit into the panic compartment, though it’s a bit of a tight fit.  Add in the emergency rations I’ve stashed in there and we can turn this baby into a temporary home-away-from-home-away for a few weeks, although I might need to install some sort of shower before that’s really viable, or at least a little sprinkler.”
“That’s wonderful, but why are you making a cold war-era bunker, giving it a brain, and then covering it with weapons?”
“I’m sorry?”
“It just seems excessive.  What are you going to need to shoot at?”
“Well, those are just backup.  Insurance.  Just in case.”
“In case what?”
“Well, in case they take my letter of resignation the wrong way, back at work.  I figured better to go that way than to be fired, right?”
“What’d it say?”
“I can’t remember, my ears were all ringing from the explosion, and I’d just taken a triple dose of my meds after forgetting them for most of the week, and I’d had a few energy drinks before work.  I think the energy drinks made me a bit scatterbrained.”
“Yeah, I don’t know what’s in those things.  My son drinks ‘em all the time.  Can’t be good for him.”
“My girl too.  I swear they’re going to give her something nasty when she hits her forties.”
“Damned shame, it is.”
“Too true.”
“Still, you might want to keep a better eye on your pills, too.”
“It couldn’t hurt.  But they always give me this terrible buzzing in my head.  I think much more clearly when I’m off them.”
“It’s your brain.  So, you don’t remember what was in your resignation letter?”
“Not as such.  I think I put in something about a trained seal.  It felt very important at the time.”
“Anything else?”
“The word ‘porcupine.’  Past that?  Nothing.  Wait; and I signed it in blood.”
“Why?”
“All that I had, since I couldn’t find my pen.  Oh damn, I bet it was in the desk drawer.  At least I got a challenge out of it – lovely calligraphy, too.  And I always liked writing in red.  We have to use black ink on all our forms, no other colours allowed – can you believe that?”
“It’s amazing how closely they try to push you around nowadays.  Just rude.”
“It is.  Anyways, KRUMEK is my backup plan if they take it the wrong way.  I’ve almost finished putting the last bits together, and I’ve got the radar on the lookout for anything suspicious.  First sign of a blip, BOOM, in we go and off we trundle to Bermuda.  Might need to hit a bank or two on the way for cash.”
“Have you considered just phoning in to work and clearing the whole matter up?”
“Can’t.  Took out all the landlines and the EMP from the seventh blast fried all the electronics across the complex, so no cell or satellite phones.  Pity too, my wife gave me this one a year or two ago.”
“It’s real pretty.”
“Isn’t it?”
“What’s that spiky bit?”
“Personal defence app, don’t touch.  It’s got a bit of a short trigger and I’m not sure if it’s completely dead yet – look, the legs twitch now and then.”
“Well, I guess you’re a bit too busy to handle my mower then.”
“Sad to say that’s probably true, Bernie.”
“It’s no problem, I’ll just shoot it down with my twelve-gauge.  Say, anything you want me to tell the feds when they interview us?”
“If you could just say I was a pretty good guy but we were kind of distant and didn’t have a lot in common, that’d be nice.  I don’t want you and yours getting into any trouble on my account.”
“It’ll be fine, Joel.”
“Maybe there’s hope for you yet.  Well, I’m just going to weld in a little extra plating and then I’ll see about that sprinkler.  If I’m lucky, I can get in at least three and a ventilation shaft or two before the choppers get here.”
“I sure hope you can.  Bermuda’s a long ways off.  I’ll leave you be now.”
“Oh, before I forget, you might want to take your family down to the basement for the next few hours – just in case.”
“Good luck, Joel.”
“Take care, Bernie.  Have a nice day, and sorry about the lawn.”
“Ah, it’ll wash out.  See you later.”

 

“Neighbourly,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2010. 

Jareef was nine before his father took him out to the god’s-shrine to help with the rituals – unusually old for a shaman’s child.  It wasn’t that Qpiq thought that he wasn’t ready.  He just tended to forget. 
“Shouldn’t you bring the boy out there soon?” his mother had asked, first when he turned seven and many, many, many times thereafter.  And Qpiq had nodded and grimaced and said: “Ah, ah, you’re right, you’re right.  Next time, I will take him.” 
And then next time would come and he would forget again and come back complaining of how heavy the sacrificial bundles had been, especially in the deep snow – oh, how deep the snow was lately, don’t even get him started – and how he wished someone could help him carry them. 
“You have a son, Qpiq,” Jareef’s mother would say. 
“Oh.  Yes, that’s right,” he would reply.  “Next time, next time I will take him,” he said, and then Jareef’s mother would sigh and give up on him.  It was the central part of her pretty-happy life, she told Jareef and his younger sister, Gappa.  “Children, when your father is frustrating and he doesn’t know it, and it’s not his fault, just give up and wait for him to do something else.  He’ll get distracted.”  It was good advice, like all her advice. 
But when Jareef was nine, Qpiq remembered. 

“Now, take this bundle.  Here, take it.  Don’t let the laces come loose, or it’ll fly everywhere, and you’ll have to gather it all up again.”
Jareef complied obediently, mittened hands fumbling at tanned and intricately decorated leather, crawling over patterns with meanings that Qpiq was under high oath never to explain to anyone not sworn to the spirits.   
“What’s in it?” asked Jareef. 
“Ahhh, lots of stuff.  God-stuff, spirit-stuff.  Things they like, you know?  Bits of good-smelling bark, some nice teas, things like that.  Stuff that moves through the air.  We need that, you’ll see.  Come on.”
And so he came on.  The walk was not a long one, but it took them far.  Up from the shaman’s camp at the edge of the clearing’s treeline, up the winding, narrow path that eeled its slim self against the furrowed slope of the hill, to its almost-bald peak where the three frowning pine trees sprouted from the same spot, twisting apart and away to hold one another at arms length, embraced in needles. 
Jareef thought they disapproved of him, and shrank a little inside his coat.  Qpiq laughed. 
“Don’t worry, don’t worry.  They’re just pines.  Hoary a little, twisted and bitter from the wind, but pines.  Takes a god’s-shrine a long, long time to soak up enough sacrifices and spirit-stuff to get really awake, you know?  They’re just pines.”  He took out his flints, long and specially shaped and kept blessed by his special pouch he kept them in.  “Right.  Now you lay that bundle down there on the snow, and you start piling up that god-stuff in that little hollow right between those trees.  Then stand back and keep quiet, okay?  Don’t speak unless you’re asked to, or you could mess something up, and I want to bring Hleena back her oldest boy in one big piece.”
Jareef did as he was told while Qpiq started up his singing, a deep-chested drone that sounded as though it was coming from a much bigger man than him.  The contents of the spirit-bundle were as his father said: teas, dried herbs, a couple carvings from fragrant woods, things that “moved through the air” as they burned.  He recognized one of the carvings as his aunt Rmea’s handiwork, and wondered how much time had been put into something that was about to go up in smoke. 
His father was reaching the apex of the song, a high, ever-rising note that could make dogs go cross-eyed and cause birds to drop out of trees.  Then it stopped, hanging there in the air without a voice to sing it, and it was in that one magical moment that his father struck a spark with his flint and set the driest and most brittle of the offerings aflame. 
The fire spread so fast that Jareef flinched, roaring up and high over the little wooden carvings and consuming the leaves and packages with avid thirst, turning and flicking through strange colours and shapes.  And up into that whirling vortex, that little pyre too big for its fuel, rose the carvings, the fuel suspended in the flame. 
Ask us, they said.  Jareef’s ears hurt at the voice; it was shaped out of sounds not meant to be heard by human ears, a tool haphazardly made. 
“Well, sure,” said Qpiq.  “I’ll ask, sure.  Now, what we were wondering about… those mammoths, right, the ones we saw last week.  They’re still near here, yes?  Pretty good time to go after them, none of their spirits around them, moon’s dark so they can’t see, we haven’t upset them too badly.  Safe time for a hunt, right?”  Jareef was amazed to see his father as at-ease as ever, talking to this spirit the way he would to his neighbours. 
Yes, said the fire in the pines.  The trees were awake now, awake and whispering in the wind, adding sibilants to the voice.  You know this.  What do you really want to ask us?
“Right, right, just making conversation, don’t worry.  Now then, are there any other gods there?”
The wind rushed low and quick for a moment, then dropped away.  No, said the fire in the pines.  But it said it slowly, and it said it softly.
“Hmmm,” said Qpiq, and he pulled out his pipe and lit it.  “You don’t sound sure.  You sure?”
We know or do not know, said the fire in the pines.  We are sure.  Its voice was harsher now, and Jareef could see the wood beginning to blister and char on the offerings cradled inside its grip. 
“That’s good,” said Qpiq, and he blew smoke into the flame, changing the colours five times over before Jareef could finish blinking.  “That’s very good.  Now, about the weather… I saw five flights of the little yellow birds yesterday down by the stream, with three birds each.”
A warm spell, said the voice in the pines.  You know this, 
“Right, right.  But after the fifth, a hawk came down and ate the last, slowest bird.  Now, what do you suppose that means?”
A cold snap, said the voice in the pines.  You know this. 
“Yes, but then,” and here Qpiq’s voice grew if not sharp, then edged, “I saw that last bird let itself be caught to let the others get away.  Now, what do you suppose that means?”
The voice in the pines did not speak.  Qpiq blew more smoke, this time up into the branches. 
A choice that brings change, one way or the other, the voice said at last.
“Yes, yes, I suppose that sounds right,” said Qpiq, relaxed and smooth again.  Jareef realized he’d been holding his breath, and stopped.  “Well, that’s all changes one way or another.  I guess it’ll work itself out then, I guess.  Changes do that.”  He stretched himself out and emptied his pipe’s ashes on the fire, three clear, calm taps.  “Thank you and thank your kin, and stay warm.”
Yes, said the voice in the pines.  And then it wasn’t there any more, and the fire was dwindling pieces of charcoal no bigger than Jareef’s knuckles. 
“They like the smoke, but the ashes put them off,” said Qpiq.  He picked up the charcoal lumps and put them in a little drawstring bag.  “Best not to leave them lying around, you know?” he told Jareef.  “Can’t have leftover god-stuff.  It makes a mess in a few different ways, big, important ways if let it get out of hand.  Can’t have that.  But we can take this and use it to mark up some important things, use it for paint.  Nothing better.”
He turned to leave, then stopped.  “Oh yes.  You have a question?  You can talk now, forgot to say.”
“Why the weather?” blurted out Jareef, then felt foolish.  But his father didn’t look at him like a fool.    
“Why ask the weather?” he echoed.  “Well, I can tell the weather, you know.  Doesn’t take many symbols or signs to do that, or much of a shaman.  Anyone can do that.  But there’s weather, and then there’s weather.  All kinds of it.  Spirits can help with the other kinds, or at least getting a good warning of it.  And the more you know the spirit, the more reliable it is.  Why we keep the same one, instead of just asking new ones wherever we go.”
Jareef didn’t look at his father with new eyes, but he certainly felt that he saw something different when he turned them to him.  Something firm and immovable hiding underneath that rolling jolliness, that might not shove, but would refuse to ever be pushed.  Except by his mother, as he was reminded when they got back to the tent and she decided that they’d been up there too long for her to be comfortable.  The lecture only ended when he complained of his headache – a relic of the smoke of Qpiq’s pipe – and he went to sleep early. 

The hunt set out the next day, all the men together, Chief Yhal and Uncle Huunj and Strange Breese, the woman who hunted like the men because she could do it better than any of them, and all the rest of them.  And Jareef’s father, Qpiq, because a hunt with no shaman was like a human with no chest.  All the important bits would be there, but there wouldn’t be anything holding them together. 
They were gone three days, and then they came back.  But four of them didn’t, and one of them was Qpiq.  And all of them were quiet. 

Chief Yhal explained it the next morning, when all of the hunters had a full night’s sleep between themselves and what had happened.  A terrible accident, a chance blundering.  A mammoth had barged the wrong way in the night as they herded them this way and that towards the killing ground, and the rest of the herd had pounded after it like the world’s biggest and heaviest lemmings.  They had been too frightened to fight back, but they hadn’t needed to, not in the dark and confused night as bushes being used as cover turned into traps and roots leapt eagerly to snare and tangle feet.  Qpiq had been immovable, all right, said Uncle Huunj.  He had pushed him out of the way, but hadn’t stepped of his own accord, not fast enough.  Jareef’s mother had gotten a funny look on her face then, one that frightened him, but it passed and they hugged and cried a little.  Most of them hugged and cried a little. 
And that was why Jareef was walking up the hill by himself the next dark moon, ritual bundle lugged clumsily in both arms, wearing his old coat with new markings painted onto it hurriedly, a headfull of half-remembered scraps of rhyme, ritual, and stories he thought, he hoped his father had said were important at sometime or another.  It wasn’t too good to have a shaman that young, everyone had agreed, but he was the shaman’s oldest child, and that was just too bad.  Everyone had wished him good luck, some of them so strongly that he was quite un-reassured. 
The singing was the hard part.  He piled up all the offerings in a little heap, but the singing escaped him long and hard, his efforts fading in and out of nasal shrillness and into cracked mumblings and humming.  Finally he gave up and tried to start a spark.  That took six tries, as numbed fingers tried to flex around tools much too big for them.  The final result took him by surprise all over again, hopping back in surprise as the fires rushed upwards. 
You are not the shaman, they said. 
The words were inflectionless, as flat and strange as before, but Jareef still flinched under their meaning.  “No,” he said.  “But I have to be now.”
The shaman is dead, said the fire in the pines. 
Jareef didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t.  It was when he was about to start fidgeting that he realized that he had to speak next.  “I have to do this now.”
You know nothing, said the fire in the pines.  Ask us. 
“Can you teach me?”
The sound that happened next was the worst yet.  It sounded like a forest fire burning small creatures alive, drawn long and slow.  It wasn’t until after, when Jareef had time to run the entire thing through in his head, that he knew the voice in the pines was laughing. 
You will learn, it said.  And then it went out. 
His mother gave him a sympathetic look when he went home, and hugged him when he cried a little.  Then she had to go back to looking after his sister and arguing with Uncle Huunj, who kept leaving his knives lying around where she could get at them. 

By the time the next meeting-time came about, Jareef had learned a few things from his father’s old friends.  One was that you only got so many questions.  The other was that you could squeeze more out with better gifts and the proper manners, but they got vaguer and vaguer if you pushed too hard.  Yet another was the sort of questions he should be asking, because the answers were important for everyone.  The last thing he learned was a mix of herbs that his mother gave him that his father had smoked, and it made him sick for a few weeks before he got a little used to it.  He still coughed like a bone was stuck in his lungs, but he could put it off for a few minutes after his first puffs.
“It’ll help,” she told him.  And he remembered what Qpiq had done, and it made sense. 
Gappa asked if she could come, and he told her to stop bugging him.  Uncle Huunj asked if he wanted him to come, and his mother told him to stop bugging him. 
Ask me, said the voice in the pines, and so he did.  He asked it about the weather, and about where the herds would be going, and if their spirits would be strong and alert or sleepy and restless in the coming weeks. 
The voice in the pines answered, tersely but acceptingly, and it was only after the fire had gone out and Jareef was halfway down the hill that he realized that he couldn’t remember a single thing it had told him.  He was in a terrible state for the next few days until he broke down and told his mother, who told him he must not have sung the song correctly. 
“It’s protection,” she told him.  “Powerful protection.  It keeps their fingers out of your head out of your pockets.  You need to get that song right.”
She asked Uncle Huunj, who asked Chief Yhal, who sent him to Strange Beese, who, surprisingly, was not only the strongest hunter, but also the sweetest singer.  She frightened Jareef a little – well, a lot – but she was a good teacher.  He didn’t dare make a mistake, especially not with her habit of sharpening her knives and spear-tips as she sang.  “It helps concentration,” she told him, and chuckled at his big eyes.  “They can’t hurt you,” she said.  “And besides, they do no harm.  They need a person to do harm.”  He certainly concentrated awfully hard on the blades, but his mind would wander a little from the singing. 

They moved before he could try out the singing at that god’s-shrine.  That was the last time he saw those three pines on that hill, peeking down at them as they walked the trail away and into the forest.  They were glowering again, he thought. 
Heading south was nice one way: the snow fell away and the trees thickened and he didn’t have to wade through snowdrifts to reach the god’s-shrine, which was a little hollow under a big rock.  It wasn’t as far away – he could overhear the noise and talk of camp as he asked his questions – but there were thorny bushes ringing it that gave privacy and snagged at his clothing. 
The shrine was different, so naturally, the god was different.  “The stuff is the spirit,” Chief Yhal had told him.  “Different stuff, the spirit’ll be different.  Same one, though.  One spirit, many forms, many minds.”
The little hollow was filled with water, and for some time Jareef had no idea how he was supposed to light it.  He spent half an hour futilely skimming sparks across it and humming to himself before he hit upon the right of what he was meant to do.  So he gathered up the offering bundle – singing the sacred song as he did so, a proper way, using the tricks of Strange Beese – and unrolled it over the pool, and all the offerings spun out and sunk down, down, down, down.  They were different this time, small, heavy things that glimmered and shone as they spun down, shells and stones and such. 
His reflection stared back at him, and then it went all wrong.  Its eyes were either too small or almost all of its face, its skin and its clothing were too alike to tell the difference or completely unalike, and its mouth was too big, with too many teeth that were all too little. 
asK me, it said, and its voice was like the drip and tremble of water on moss, bulging, rippling, flat, unsettling. 
This time Jareef was ready – pipe lit and mind calm – and he asked all the questions properly.  It answered them, and he felt the answers settle in cautiously in his mind, letting the fingers of his memory clasp them tight.  No spirit-tricks this time. 
therE is much prey here, said the voice in the water.  feW other tribes have come this year. 
“What sort of prey?” asked Jareef. 
deeR.  mastodoN.  elK.  noW and again, bear. 
“Good,” said Jareef, and then he was out of questions he’d been told to ask.  So he went ahead and asked the question he’d kept for himself.  “How did my father die?”
murdereD, said the voice in the water.  nO more questions. 
Jareef stood there for a moment, pipe half-held in readiness to empty, thoughts mixing.  At the last minute he avoided the foolish thing and asked no more.  Instead, he tapped the pipe out, once, twice, three times.  “Thank you and thank your kin, and stay deep,” he said. 
yeS, said the voice in the water, and his reflection was normal again.  It looked very pale. 

Jareef didn’t tell his mother.  She had enough to keep herself busy with, he thought, and from how he felt, the amount of worry delivered with the news would be very large. 
What he did do, though, was ask Aunt Rmea what could kill a shaman.  She gave him a sad, pitying look and hugged him too tightly to be comfortable. 
“Anything that kills a man, little boy.  A spear.  A knife.  A stone.  Water.  Fire.  Jealousy.  Hate.  The last two are the deadliest, especially when they’re secret.”
“Who would hate my father?” asked Jareef, somewhat muffled. 
Aunt Rmea shrugged.  “Not one of us.  Qpiq didn’t get angry.  And you couldn’t stay angry at him.  And he didn’t die from that, little boy.  Mammoth got him, not man.”
That made Jareef feel a little better, and stopped that cold feeling his stomach got whenever he looked around the camp in the evening, looking at people and wondering.  But he still did wonder, and he still did watch. 
True to the spirit’s promise, there was much game at the new camp.  They stayed there long enough for two more meetings, which meant two more questions left over for Jareef to use. 
“What man murdered my father?” he asked. 
nO man, said the voice in the water.  nO more questions.  And that was that for that meeting, and Jareef cursed himself.  Then he thought of Strange Beese, and felt very stupid. 
“What person murdered my father?” he asked next time. 
nO person, said the voice in the water.  nO more questions. 
Jareef sighed.  “Thank you and thank your kin, and stay deep.”  Tap-tap-tap went the ashes, and away went the voice in the water.  And that was all for that meeting, and he cursed himself all the way back to the tent. 
That was the last time he used that god’s-shrine, and the trip to the next big camp was a long, slow slog, through valleys and over hills, stopping only to sleep, living off preserved supplies.  Jareef turned ten years old or so on the trip, and his mother gave him a small knife.  He was careful with it until he cut himself.  Then he was very careful. 
The new campsite was a good one, next to a great roaring river that seethed into a lake no more than a minute’s-walk away.  Jareef had never seen so much water since as early as he could remember, and he felt very small near it.  He thought of the voice in the water, and shuddered at how big it would’ve been if it appeared in that lake. 

The next dark moon, when the spirits of the prey would be sleepy and blind, was far away, and he had some weeks to adjust himself to his new god’s-shrine and prepare his question.  He thought of it carefully. 
The god’s-shrine was a little cave near the lake, an alcove in the rock not much deeper than a tent.  Ivy grew down over it, like a curtain, and a little hearth spoke of burned gifts, things that moved through the air. 
It took all his effort to make the song go as slow and steady as it was meant to, when everything in him was aching to hear it speak now.  He had to think careful of spirit-plucked memories to keep himself focused. 
The fire was small and dark and smoky, and the dense smoke’s voice was smokier still. 
ask, it said. 
Jareef made himself ask all the questions; of the weather, of the game, of anyone else around that might cause trouble, of every little useless detail he didn’t care about any more, and then he asked his final, big question. 
“Who murdered my father?”
And then the strange thing happened.  The voice in the smoke hesitated.  There was a gap, a space where there should’ve been the prompt, steady answer. 
a mammoth, said the voice in the smoke.  And that didn’t sound right either. 
“No,” said Jareef, speaking over the little voice in his head that was telling him what he was doing was very stupid. 
“That was what killed my father.  A mammoth can’t murder people, a mammoth isn’t a person.  It’s like a knife-blade or a spear-tip – it has no purpose on its own.  Who murdered my father?”
There was a long, slow, steaming silence.  Jareef’s knuckles started to whiten on his pipe. 
i did, said the voice in the smoke. 
Just like that, Jareef felt two things at once: soaring exhilaration at knowing, and a fast-growing dread in his gut. 
“Why?” he asked. 
he kept us close.  he kept us from wandering.  he kept us from settling.  we were chained and dragged through a hundred hundred bodies and minds, all different, all changing.  our three-pine-mind-on-fire smothered his call, pushed the mammoth. 
“How?” he asked. 
there was a way out.
“What?” he asked. 
another mind, unguarded, unprepared, opening outside to hide in and ride in and escape.  found the mammoth.  took the mammoth.  murdered the shaman. 
“Me?”  Jareef felt a twinge of a long-ago headache. 
your mind was open. 
Two more feelings: anger and guilt. 
“How do I kill you?” he asked. 
you can’t kill a spirit, said the voice in the smoke.  It wasn’t in the smoke anymore, Jareef realized with a start.  The fire had died altogether, and the air was clear.  And what was that shuffling, stumbling thud he heard from outside, on the path?
Jareef ran without thinking, which probably saved his life.  The bear’s paws swooped in low and over his head as he scurried out of the cave, rank-smelling fur scraping his coat and foul breath gushing past his head.  He saw its roar more than its body as he fled, not daring to look back, but what he had seen felt wrong, strange, broken as a reflection in ripples.  How many eyes had it had?
i see you, whispered the voice, not in smoke or fire, but on its own now, and he almost turned around right then, even as a tree lunged up at his face and he twisted desperately around it.  His flight took him off the path, staggering and stumbling into a berry-laden bush, arms and legs tangling in bounty that would’ve had him jumping for joy any other time. 
i hear you, called the voice on its own, the lumbering bear-gallop and its frothing pant growing louder in Jareef’s ears.  He tore loose one arm, tugged on the other.  His pipe was still in his hand, why was he still carrying his pipe?
i have you, growled the voice, deeper and stonier, as huge arms wrapped around his body, lifted him up in the air, turning him about.  He saw the bear’s face now, but it wasn’t.  No bear had looked like that; it was worse than the ripples.  Jareef still didn’t know how many eyes it had, or how many faces. 
The bear-god held him up high, above its head, all the way up.  Jareef was higher than the tallest men in camp, twice as high as Chief Yhal, high enough to see all the way back to the faintest hint of the tents in the campsite.  He was tipped upside down, arms flying, and it was because of this that at some point his pipe was upside down and a few ash-specks tipped out.  They lit on the bear-god’s snout and it sneezed mightily and violently, dropping Jareef to claw at its nose. 
Jareef landed heavily, face-up, staring at the bear as it rubbed its face and sneezed.  And it was just good luck that his wind came back before the bear’s did, because he knew what to do before it did.  He swatted the bear’s foot with the pipe, and great swatches of it were sprayed grey with ash.  It roared and staggered. 
“Curse you,” said Jareef, somewhere in that roar.  He swung the pipe again – surely there were not that many ashes in it, not enough to cover half the bear’s chest with one blow?  It didn’t roar this time, it screamed, a wailing that didn’t exist outside his head.  “And curse your kin,” he added, fumbling through his pocket as the bear dropped down to all fours, head-thing wobbling above him. 
“And stay in there,” he said, yanking out his mother’s birthday knife.  And with one little boy’s strength behind it that knife dove in clean as cutting through water, right up through the bear’s jaw and into its head as far as his arm could reach. 
The bear-god lurched, swayed, and fell over.  And that was when everyone came running up through the trees, wondering what all the noise was about. 

Jareef told them everything, and they believed him, of course.  Bad luck not to listen to your shaman, and besides, little boys didn’t kill cave bears. 
“What do we do now?” asked Chief Yhal.  “Ask whatever spirit comes by?  They’ll be as truthful as a treacherous breeze.  Have no spirit at all?  The other tribes will laugh at us even as they’re hunting up all our game.”
“No,” said Jareef.  “We can use this one.”
“It’s not dead?”
Jareef pointed at the bear’s head, and they saw that its eyes still glared.  “You can’t kill a spirit,” he said.  And it wasn’t dead, but it was stuck. 
So they took that skull from the bear, steaming and bloody-red.  And they took that bear’s bones, the strongest bones, and they gagged that skull’s mouth tight with them, and they blinded its great mad eyes with its own thigh-bones.  The skull was kept carefully in Jareef’s mother’s tent, and whenever they had a question, they would get together and un-blind it, and loose its tongue, and ask it what they needed.  And if it was good, they would maybe burn some offerings, like the old days.  But if it cursed them, they would laugh at it and gag it again, and Jareef’s mother would pour the ash from Qpiq’s old pipe over its bones.  It stung it like anything. 
“They’re lazy, spirits,” Jareef was told by his uncle, when he asked why this sort of thing didn’t happen all the time.  “This one must’ve been just a little too lazy, enough to choose to do something about it.  Most don’t bother.  Choices and changes.  One brings the other, right?  It chose, so it changed.  Didn’t choose the change, but it chose.” 
Jareef had left the topic at that.  He was quite happy not having to do any of the shaman’s duties – the pipe had always made his throat ache, and the offerings bundle had been very heavy – and speaking of laziness and work brought the topic a little too near for comfort. 
He did miss the singing a little, though. 

 

 

“Spirit-Stuff” copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor.