Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror (51 page)

  First, that I could still feel things with the limb, changed though it might be. In fact, the sensation of touch seemed to have been enhanced—as if the entire limb had the sensitivity of a fingertip.

  Second, what had been my skull was not completely gone. A hard but malleable kind of gristle formed a protective cage around my poor human brain, a cartilaginous cranium, and some kind of similar ridges protected my eyes.

  My mouth, however, had been transformed into a lipless, toothless maw that seemed to exude a viscous liquid. My nose was simply gone—not even nostril slits remained.

  But I was still breathing . . . in some way.

  That was when I began to hear the Bronx-cheer buzzing again, and realized it sounded from what had once been my neck. I focussed on moving the arm again and managed to brush it over a place where ripples of flesh seemed to rise up when I exhaled and draw down when I inhaled.

  Sudden realization swept over me. Gills? Great God, I had gills!

 
 
bustling sound came from the doorway and a white smocked male figure entered the room, closely followed by two nurses.

  He stopped when he reached the foot of the bed and looked at the chart. "This is supposed to be a David Thompson," he said sarcastically. He threw back the sheet in front of him, exposing my midsection and upper thigh. "This is not a human. Is this a hoax?"

  I felt his hands move over what had been my hip and over what used to be my thigh.

  "Wait!" he said suddenly. "What's this?"

  I felt him squeeze the skin of my former thigh together and felt an uncharacteristic lump under the skin.

  "I bet I can get this without even requiring a local," he muttered to himself. He looked around and took a scalpel from a tray, then made a sudden quick, small incision. I felt a bit of pressure and then something seemed to pop. I can't describe it any other way. It actually clattered on the tray.

  "Some sort of round metal object," he observed, picking it up carefully. "It's about the same size as a bottle cap." He turned to the second nurse. "Suture that incision closed. I'm going to look at this through the lab microscope."

  But he took only a few steps before he seemed to freeze. "What the fu . . . !"

  He never finished what he was saying. His voice rose up in a rapid wail and became a scream. His hand snapped into a fist around the object, and he fell heavily to the floor. There he continued to writhe, his screams growing more shrill.

  I could not sit up to see clearly, but I guessed immediately what was happening.

  Poor bastard, I thought. Now there are two of us.

Michael Marshall Smith

Michael Marshall Smith is a widely published British author of novels, short stories, and screenplays. His novels include
Only Forward
(HarperCollins, 1994),
Spares
(HarperCollins, 1996), and several novels published as by Michael Marshall. Among his short story collections are
What You Make It
(HarperCollins, 1999) and
More Tomorrow and Other Stories
(Earthling, 2003). He is a five-time winner of the British Fantasy Award.

 
 
alfway through unpacking the second red bag I turned to my wife—who was busily engaged in pecking out an e-mail on her Blackberry—and said something encouraging about the bag's contents.

  "Well, you know," she said, not really paying attention. "I do try."

  I went back to taking items out and laying them on the counter, which is my way. Because I work from home, I'm always the one who unpacks the grocery shopping when it's delivered: Helen's presence this morning was unusual, and a function of a meeting that had been put back an hour (the subject of the terse e-mail currently being written). Rather than standing with the fridge door open and putting items directly into it, I put everything on the counter first, so I can sort through it and get a sense of what's there, before then stowing everything neatly in the fridge, organized by type/nature/potential meal groupings, as a kind of Phase Two of the unloading operation.

  The contents of the bags—red for stuff that needs refrigeration, purple for freezer goods, green for everything else—is never entirely predictable. My wife has control of the online ordering process, which she conducts either from her laptop or, in extremis, her phone. While I've not personally specified the order, however, its contents are seldom much of a surprise. There's an established pattern. We have cats, so there'll be two large bags of litter—it's precisely being able to avoid hoicking that kind of thing off supermarket shelves, into a trolley and across a busy car park, which makes online grocery shopping such a boon. There will be a few green bags containing bottled water, sacks for the rubbish bins, toilet rolls and paper towels, cleaning materials, tins of store cupboard staples (baked beans, tuna, tinned tomatoes), a box of Diet Coke for me (which Helen tolerates on the condition that I never let it anywhere near our son), that kind of thing. There will be one, or at the most two, purple bags of frozen beans, holding frozen peas, frozen organic fish cakes for the kid, and so on. We never buy enough frozen to fill more than one purple carrier, but sometimes they split it between a couple, presumably for some other logistical reason. Helen views this as both a waste of resources and a threat to the environment, and has sent at least two e-mails to the company about it. I don't mind much as we use the bags for clearing out the cats' litter tray, and I'd rather have spares on hand than risk running out.

  Then there are the red bags, the main event. The red bags represent the daily news of food consumption—in contrast to the contextual magazine articles of the green bags, or the long-term forecasts of the purple. In the red bags will be the Greek yoghurt, blueberries, and strawberries Helen uses to make her morning smoothie; a variety of vegetables and salad materials; some freerange and organic chicken fillets (I never used to be clear on the difference, but eleven years of marriage has made me far better informed); some extra-sharp cheddar (Helen favours cheese that tastes as though it wants your tongue to be sad), and a few other bits and pieces.

  The individual items may vary a little from week to week, but basically, that's what gets brought to our door most Wednesday mornings. Once in a while there may be substitutions in the delivery (when the supermarket has run out of a specified item, and one judged to be of very near equivalence is provided instead): these have to be carefully checked, as Helen's idea of similarity of goods differs somewhat from the supermarket's. Otherwise, you could set your watch by our shopping, if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor—and this continuity of content is why I'd turned to Helen when I was halfway through the second red bag. Yes, there'd been spring onions and a set of red, green, and yellow peppers—standard weekly fare. But there were also two packs of brightly coloured and fun-filled children's yoghurts and a block of much milder cheddar of the kind Oscar and I tend to prefer. And a family pack of deadly-looking chocolate desserts. Not to mention a six-pack of thick and juicy-looking steaks, and very large variety pack of further Italian cured meats holding five different types of salami.

  "Yum," I said.

  I was genuinely pleased, and a little touched. Normally I source this kind of stuff—on the few occasions when I have it—from the deli or mini-market, which are both about ten minutes' walk away from the house (in opposite directions, sadly). Seeing it come into the house via the more socially condoned route of the supermarket delivery was strangely affecting.

  "Hmm?" Helen said. She was nearing the end of her e-mail. I could tell because the speed of her typing increases markedly as she approaches the point when she can fire her missive off into space. She jabbed send and finally looked up properly. "What's that you said?"

  "Good shop. Unusual. But I like it."

  She smiled, glad that I was happy, but then frowned. "What the hell's that?"

I looked where she was pointing. "Yoghurt."

  She grabbed the pack and stared with evident distaste at the ingredient list. "I didn't order those. Obviously. Or that." Now she was pointing at the pile of salamis and meats. "And the cheese is wrong. Oh, bloody hell."

  And with that, she was gone.

  I waited, becalmed in the kitchen, to see what would unfold. A quick look in the other bags—the greens and purples—didn't explain much. They all contained exactly the kind of thing we tended to order.

  Five minutes later I heard the sound of two pairs of footsteps coming down the stairs. Helen re-entered the kitchen, followed by the man who'd delivered the shopping. He was carrying three red bags and looked mildly cowed.

  "What it is, right," he muttered, defensively, "is the checking system. I've told management about it before. There are flaws. In the checking system."

  "I'm sure it can't be helped," Helen said, cheerfully, and turned to me. "Bottom line is that all the bags are correct except for the red ones, which both belong to someone else."

  When I'd put all the items from the counter back into the bags I'd taken them out of, an exchange took place. Their red bags, for ours. The delivery guy apologised about five more times— somehow making it clear, without recourse to words, that he was apologising for the system as a whole rather than any failure on his part—and trudged off back up the stairs.

  "I'll let him out," Helen said, darting forward to give me a peck on the cheek. "Got to go anyway. You're all right unpacking all this, yes?"

  "Of course," I said. "I always manage somehow."

  And off she went. It only took a few minutes to unpack the low-fat yoghurt, sharp cheese, salad materials, and free-range and organic chicken breasts.

...

funny thing happened, however. When I broke off from work late morning to go down to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, I lingered at the fridge for a moment after getting the milk out, and I found myself thinking:

  
What if that
had
been our food?

  I wasn't expressing discontent. We eat well. I personally don't have much of a fix on what eating healthily involves (beyond the fact it evidently requires ingesting more fruit and vegetables per day than feels entirely natural), and so it's a good thing that Helen does. If there's anything that I want which doesn't arrive at our door through the effortless magic of supermarket delivery, there's nothing to stop me going out and buying it myself. It's not as if the fridge or cupboards have been programmed to reject non-acceptable items, or set off a siren and contact the diet police when confronted with off-topic foodstuffs.

  It was more that I got a sudden and strangely wistful glimpse of another life—and of another woman.

  I was being assumptive, of course. It was entirely possible that the contents of the red bags I'd originally unpacked had been selected by the male of some nearby household. It didn't feel that way, however. It seemed easier to believe that somewhere nearby was another household rather like ours. A man, a woman, and a child (or perhaps two, we're unusual in having stopped at one). All the people in this family would be different to us, of course, but for the moment it was the idea of the woman which stuck in my head. I wondered what she'd look like. What kind of things made her laugh. How, too, she'd managed to miss out on the health propaganda constantly pushed at the middle-classes (she
had
to be middle class, most people in our neighbourhood are, and everyone who orders online from our particular supermarket has to be, it's the law)—or what had empowered her to ignore it.

  We get steak every now and then, of course—but it would never be in the company of all the other meats and rich foods. One dose of weapons-grade animal fats per week is quite risky enough for this household, thank you. We live a moderate, evenly balanced life when it comes to food (and, really, when it comes to everything else). The shopping I'd seen, however foolishly, conjured the idea of a household which sailed a different sea—and of a different kind of woman steering the ship.

  I was just a little intrigued, that's all.

 
 
couple of days later, I was still intrigued. You'd be right in suspecting this speaks of a life in which excitement levels are relatively low. I edit, from home. Technical manuals are my bread and butter, leavened with the occasional longer piece of IT journalism. I'm good at it, fast and accurate, and for the most part enjoy my work. Perhaps "enjoy" isn't quite the right word (putting my editing hat on for a moment): let's say instead that I'm content that it's my profession, am well paid and always busy, and feel no strong desire to be doing anything else, either in general or particular.