The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (16 page)

“How did you lose
your scent?” Naet asks Dak that night as they lie in his bed in Gaslight. Dak
shares a crumbling old house with plug-in twins: they were once separate but
they bored holes through each other and threaded one another’s flesh together,
knitting them into one. They can still disengage, although he has never seen
them do it. Their names are Amp and Fuse. Apart from them there is a
fishermer’s son, living in exile in the flooded basement, and a bird-like thing
that hangs upside-down from the ceiling and can speak pidgin, but rarely does.
“I dig your pad,” Naet says.

“Thanks,” Dak says.
Then, “How did you lose
your
scent?”

She flashes white
teeth in the dark. “Yu no save toktok bilong it, huh?” she says. “Oraet. It no
problem.” Then she says, “Nothing complicated. I was born without it.”

“Oh.”

She laughs, and they
make love again, with only the bird-thing watching from the ceiling. In the
darkness, as they fall asleep together, Dak thinks he can hear Naet saying,
softly, “I love you.”

The next day is
cleaning day and so the crew goes down to the pit, nambawan first, the others
following. They walk amidst the pulsing moving Grisly Growths, rubbing them,
whispering to them.

“I love you,”
nambafo whispers to the green-grey goo. “Mi lovem yu. Mi lovem yu longtaem.”

“You,” nambatu
whispers to the Growths. “Just you.” He bends over one blob, his trousers down,
his erection rubbing against the pulsating meat. His penis is translucent.
“You. Just you. You. You. You.”

Nambawan touches the
Growths delicately with only the tips of her fingers. She runs them across
their changing skins. “Mother,” she says. “Mother. Mother.” Her fingers leave a
strange trail of luminescence on the Growths’ skin. “Mother. Mother. Mother.”

Dak
goes slower than the rest. It’s a strange feeling being amidst the Growths.
There is a strange sense of calm down there. Almost of euphoria. He taps a
gentle rhythm on the Grisly Growths’ flesh, and the body underneath seems to
shiver with satisfaction. Dak is lost in the rhythm. He comes closer to the
blobs, and closer still. He doesn’t even hear when nambawan breaks from her own
trance and shouts to him. By the time she reaches him he had already
disappeared into the
Growth.

Somewhere I think
there is a meeting of blakenjels. I meet another human in the dark. An
enjelvaljer. Another like me. “Blakenjel bilong mi,” he says. “Blakenjel bilong
mi,” I say.

For one dangerous
moment we hover on the edge of light. The darkness recedes around us. We can’t
feel our blakenjels.

“Mine was in
Smokers’ Hill last night,” the other says. “A woman on the street prayed to be
released of cancer. He healed her. He took her cancers away from her. All of
them.”

“What happened?” I
ask.

“When they were gone
there was nothing left of her but a bleached-white skeleton,” he says. “So
pretty...”

“Mine was in
Stenchtown—” I say, but then I hear the beat of blackened wings and hurry back
into the darkness, and the other is lost behind me. I follow my blakenjel
through the corridors of night.

3. The Corridors of Night

“Dak? Dak, can you
hear me? Dak!”

But he can’t. When
he wakes up it is dark. It feels like being in a coffin. He can’t move, he
can’t breathe. Cold slimy tendrils brush against his skin. Somewhere in the
distance, was that sound?

“Dak!”

Nothing. The silence
presses on him. And in the dark, and in the silence, the tendrils caress him.
And something comes.

Not sound. Not
vision. But something. It communicates with him, a rhythm against his
motionless body. He is a drum. He is a tamtam. If the rhythm had words it might
have said something like:

The savages beat
tamtam drums

The ocean echoes
with their sound

The waves gang up
against the reef—

This night, they
say, you’ll come to grief.

The moon beats like
a great ill heart

And silver light
falls down like dust

The waves are
choked, the trees are still—

This night, they
say, is ill, is ill.

Remain inside, and
shut the door

Pretend that all is
as before

And when the tamtam
drums do beat—

Into your cold dark
bed retreat, retreat.

Dak screams without
sound.
Let me be!
The rhythm is of laughter. The rhythm shows him
things. Machines, their blueprints. An abandoned altar in a cave that lies below
the tide-line. Star charts. Insectoid silver-black creatures darting through an
electric storm. And he learns something: this is how the Growths pay. This is
what the 0wnerz get. The rhythm laughs harder.
You have just been paid with
knowledge,
it seems to say.

Paid for what?

The rhythm grows
excited. Hard. It beats on his skin in thousands of shards. Dak sees something
black like unlit coal. Something black like the corridors of night.

Blakenjel,
the rhythm says.
Blakenjel!
Blakenjel!

No,
Dak wants to say.
There is always a price to pay.

The tentacles
withdraw. He is left alone, unmoving, cold. The dark and the silence grow like
fungus, and inside his head he screams.

The tentacles
return. A tap-tap-tap, gentle and slow. They seem to be saying—so?

Dak would pray. He
would do anything. But suddenly, although he is frozen, something from the
outside penetrates, someone calling, and Dak cries,
No!

Naet calls a
blakenjel. Dak screams, and feels the triumph of the rhythm against his skin.

In the darkness he wails.
Cold tentacles drag slime against his cheeks.

Blakenjel bilong mi
stops in the dark. In the dark I feel him ponder. His wings rustle and I feel
the slow movement of his head. It is as if he were tasting the air. I hurry
after him, groping blindly.

In the darkness of
his coffin Dak can move. The walls of his coffin are mucous. They ooze. They
are dissolving. What do the Growths want with blakenjels? His head pulls out of
the mass. He is new-born. He tastes the air and sees the blakenjel.

The darkness seems
to emanate from within the Grisly Growth. Has time passed? Have the blakenjel
and the Growths somehow communicated? He doesn’t know. He sees the darkness
rise from the Growths and he cowers, but it isn’t for him that it comes.

It is for Naet.

The blakenjel kisses
her. There is the sense of leathery wings flapping in an unseen wind. Then Dak
is out of the Growths and on the ground. His clothes have been dissolved. The
flesh of his arms is translucent. He stares up at Naet, and he wants to cry, he
wants to scream, he wants to be a baby again. Naet looks at him without
expression. She shakes her head, a confused gesture. Why did she call the
blakenjel? Never mind. She doesn’t seem to have lost anything, and it is time
to get back to work. She turns to address the new boy.

“Nambafaef,” she
says. “Go bak bilong wok, hariap.”

Dak, helpless, says,
“Naet...”

“Nambafaef,” she
repeats. “Go back to work, quickly.”

The blakenjel is
gone. The Growths pulsate lazily like oversized brains. And Dak stands up and,
without words, walks away.

There is always a
price to pay.

My blakenjel is
different as he stalks through the corridors of night. He is burdened with a
terrible thing. My blakenjel loves. In the darkness I hear sounds. My blakenjel
sings. It is a horrid sound. There are cries and howls in the dark. My
blakenjel stalks through the darkness, never stopping. What is he looking for?
Maybe, I think, he wants to find another blakenjel with this thing, this love.

But perhaps the love
he has acquired is of the unrequited kind.

4. 0wnerz

That night Dak
sleeps with the bird-thing who lives in the ceiling. The sex is short, savage
and unsatisfying. The bird-thing keeps speaking Pidgin throughout it. “Mi fakem
yu. Mi fakem yu. Faken as. Yu kan. Mi fakem yu.” Its vocabulary is not large.
That night, when the bird-thing falls asleep, Dak cries. Then he makes a
decision. He will follow the blakenjel. He will summon him back. He will fight
him. He will plead with him. He will get Naet’s love back.

When he falls asleep
at last, his sleep is restless. Perhaps it is only the ground-tremors that
shake the house at night, the after-thought of seismic forces out at sea. But
he is used to them, just as he is used to the occasional short, sharp screams
outside that end in sudden silence, or to the hiss and splatter of the steam
engines as they go about their tracks, the coal-beasts running and belching and
the metal bob-sledges go grind and go bump. There is something else, something
new out there, and it filters into his sleep until it wakes him, but by then it
is, of course, too late.

There are four
shadows standing by his bed like bed-posts and the bird-thing is a smear of red
wetness on the ceiling. Goodbye, avian friend. And I never even knew your name.
The four shadows move forward and a light comes on, emanating from them, green
and sickly, and Dak sees they are hafmek, and he thinks,
Oh, shit
.
Instinct tells him to keep quiet. There is little point in pleading or gabbing.
The hafmek move with the whirring of motors. Their legs are wrought-metal tree
trunks with delicate designs etched into the metal, whorls and vortices. Their
bodies are patchwork armour, their heads the only vaguely human thing about
them, although they bear more similarity to the swamp mutants than they do to people
like Dak. Their eyes are hidden—
How trite!
Dak thinks even as he is
frozen in his bed—by mirrorshades. The four hafmek pick him up—delicately, as
they would something terribly light yet valuable—and carry him outside. There
is a near full-moon that night and it gives the buildings of Gaslight an
insubstantial appearance, and the air is humid and there is a smell of rotting
vegetation, as if the jungle were that night encroaching into the town. Dak
notices all that as the hafmek carry him into a giant steamroller and then
climb inside themselves. The vehicle is like a moving house. There is something
faintly organic about the walls. It rolls away from Gaslight, and strange beams
of radiance erupt from its underbelly as if it is moving forward on light. It
is some tek Dak had not seen before, although that, he readily admits to
himself, isn’t saying much.

They go over
Tooth-bridge, cut across Cancer Ward, avoid Golgotha and pass into Gristown and
beyond, moving away from the sea. The dark mountains tower above them.

Dak says, “Where are
we going?” He is not expecting an answer.

One of the hafmek
turns its head fractionally. It is hard to tell what lies behind the mirrors of
its eyes. It says, “Open Sore.”

Dak stares out of
the window of the steamroller. They are away from the suburbs. They are going
into the jungle. They are going beyond Man Place. Further inland than he has
ever been, or wants to be. Open Sore. Shit shit shit.

He says, “Why?”

This time the hafmek
don’t bother with an answer.

The steamroller
rolls across a land of enormous, unhealthy growth. The moon lights up gnarled
trees, branches looped and shaped like giant spiders’ webs, flower-heads as
large as skulls, as pale, that follow their movement on long sinuous stalks
that are like blind, malevolent snakes.

They come to a halt.
There is a clearing in the forest, and in the clearing a house. It is a
shocking thing to see in the midst of this place. It has a red tiled roof and
light shines in the windows, and outside there is a small garden and a
vegetable patch. There is a scarecrow positioned between two rows of plants.
The hatch of the steamroller opens. The hafmek step out and Dak follows them.
It is a place from a picture-book. A place that should no longer exist.

They walk up to the
house through the vegetable patch. Dak brushes past the scarecrow and the
moonlight falls down and the scarecrow’s hand falls onto Dak’s shoulder and
holds him, and the scarecrow screams. Dak fights for release. The scarecrow
looks like a mockery of a human body, moulded in some dark-green, pliable gunk.
Its features run as it fights Dak. Its eyes are smeared across its face. Its
mouth melts as it screams. Dak screams too. The hafmek watch impassively.

At last someone
says, “Enough.” The scarecrow freezes. Dak tears away. His palms are covered in
green slime, like foul-smelling resin. The speaking voice is cool and calm and
pleasant. “Please,” the voice says. “Come in.”

Dak looks up. The
man standing in the doorway is of medium height and has brown hair and a mild,
pleasant face. He extends his hand toward Dak. “Hey, man. Great to see you.
Come in.” A little dazed, Dak shakes his hand. “Dak, right?”