The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (17 page)

Dak nods. Dak
follows the man into the house. Dak is scared shitless. The house is warm and
well-lit and pleasant. There are two couches and a desk and a desk-lamp and a
sturdy wooden cabinet and a low table and two chairs made of the same
honey-coloured wood as the cabinet. “Hey, sit down, man. Make yourself
comfortable.” The man closes the door. The hafmek stay outside.

Dak sits down on one
couch. The man takes the one opposite. “So glad to meet you, Dak. Pit Stop
Namba Six, right?”

Dak nods. “And
before that, Stenchtown?” The man gets up and walks over to Dak. He bends over
the boy. His face comes close to Dak’s. The man trails his nose along Dak’s
cheekbones, down to his neck. Dak can feel the man’s soft breath on his skin.

“Remarkable,” the
man says. He stands up and returns to his couch. “Can I get you anything? Tea?
Coffee? A beer? Are you hungry?”

Dak shakes his head.
The man smiles. “Oraet, Dak,” he says, switching to Pidgin. The smile melts
away. “Yu-mi gat wan problem. Yu gat wan samting bilong mi.”

What? Dak says, “I
took nothing—” And the man shakes his head. “You gat savvy bilong mi,” he says.
“Let’s not yu-mi plaeplae, Dak. The knowledge you have is mine. I’m an 0wner.
The 0wner of Pit Stop Namba Six, as it happens. So what you have in your
possession—” he shrugs “—belongs to me. It’s a fair trade, don’t you think?
They feed us knowledge. We feed them poisoned fish and clean them and keep them
alive. I think that’s more than fair. I think that’s fucking
generous
.”

Dak says, “I—”

The man says, “Are
you an 0wner, Dak?”

Dak says, “I—”

The man says, “No.
You’re not. Are we agreed on that?”

Dak nods.

The man smiles.
“Oraet,” he says. “So we have a problem. So what do we do?”

Dak shakes his head.
The man’s smile grows larger. “I could kill you,” he says. “I could torture you
to see if you remember any more stuff the Growths may have divulged to you.
Even their scraps have
value. You know what
this is? This is an information-scarcity enviro
nment we live in, Dak.
Information is
God
, Dak. How to build certain machines. How to
manufacture certain pills. How to do things you didn’t even know you wanted to
do until you found out you could do them. You following me?”

Dak shakes his head,
then nods. The man says, “I won’t kill you, Dak. Why should I? I’m not a bad
guy. I’m into knowledge for its own sake. Do you know what I am, Dak?”

Dak nods. He knows.
He wishes very hard to be away.

He says, “You’re
Open Sore.”

Blakenjel bilong mi
stalks through the darkness like an avenging angel. He is not calm. He goes and
he comes. In the early hours of the morning someone calls for him, a skull-head
from Golgotha, coming down hard from Plateau. He begs for the power of the drug
to be taken away from him. My blakenjel complies. As he leaves, I hear the
screams of the skull-head. The drug can no longer affect him. But the wild
craving remains, and it could never now be satisfied.

My blakenjel stalks
away. He cannot stand still. I feel the passing of other blakenjels in the
dark. It is a dance of blakenjels. I think they are speaking, and I wonder what
they say.

“Open Sore,” the man
says with amusement. “Yes, well. That’s what they call us, isn’t it?” He stands
up and stretches. “Etymologically interesting. But what we are—what 0wnerz are
all about, Dak—is open
source
. Do you know what open source is, Dak?”

Dak knows. It’s in
the jungle all around them. It’s in the scarecrow frozen in undeath outside.
It’s in the swamp-things. Open Sore. He wishes the man would stop calling him
by his name. It is making him very nervous.

“Open source,” the
man says. “Information wants to be free. Not free to everyone, of course—that
would be madness—but free to the people who
matter
, Dak. People who make
a
difference
. We work to save the world. We’re the fucking
heroes
,
Dak!”

The man is no longer
smiling. He is pacing around the room. There is the slightest sound of whizzing
motors and Dak realises the man has mek inside him. Mek and the blakenjels know
what else. The man says, “Why did the Growths want you to summon a blakenjel?”

And now, Dak
realises, they are coming to it. The reason he is not, at this precise moment,
a smear of blood on a ceiling in Gaslight.

He says, “I don’t
know.”

The man backhands
him. The impact throws Dak across the room. He groans, and thinks, with a
savagery that surprises him,
You fucking
freak
.

The man stands above
him, looking down. “Stand up,” he says quietly. Dak gets up.

Suddenly the light
dims and changes. Around the man others appear: men, and women. They seem to
materialise out of the air itself, a blakenwaet rainbow forming around him.
Some of them are hafmek. Some of them have growths coming out—one woman has
tentacles emerging from her nostrils as if a shell-creature lived inside her
skull. The man who was speaking to Dak begins to change then. His features run,
just as the scarecrow’s did; he seems to melt in place. His skin turns a darker
shade, and wings unfurl from his shoulder blades and open with a snap. The
0wnerz look at Dak. They are chanting.

“We are the open
source,” they say, “We are the 0wnerz. We protect you, we employ you, we give
you life. We are open source.”

Other things crawl
and slither into the room. Jungle-things. Wild things. Open Sore things. There
is a swamp-man with a lizard’s tongue hissing out of the gap that is his mouth.
There is an armoured crocodile with human eyes and grafted metal blades for the
ridge on its back. They form a perfect circle around Dak. Their chanting rises
in pitch and intensity. “We are Open Source. We defend you. We
save
you.
We are the 0wnerz and we 0wn you!”

And Dak, terrified,
prays to his blakenjel.

And only then does
he see the triumph in the 0wnerz’ eyes.

5. Blakenjel

For the length of a
heartbeat, nothing happens. The 0wnerz close on Dak. Then the room is plunged
into darkness.

Blakenjel bilong mi.
blakenjel bilong mi. The words are swallowed in the velvety darkness. The words
are cushioned by the absence of light. Blakenjel bilong mi. Blakenjel bilong
mi.

Somewhere in the
last hours my blakenjel acquired a voice. A singer from the opera-pits of
Cancer Ward, begging to be released. He left her voiceless, and for once, in
peace.

In the darkness he
croons. In the darkness he sings. In the darkness he whispers words of love and
of grief. I trot behind him. I am always there.

My blakenjel stops.
My blakenjel snaps open his wings. My blakenjel turns, and I follow him.

The darkness expands
across the room. Outside a howl sounds, of something feral moving around the
perimeter of the house, and it is echoed inside by the 0wnerz. Something wet
flops to the ground and someone screams, and the scream is cut short.

In the inky
blackness Dak imagines he can hear voices.

Why should I let you
live?

“Grab him!”

Laughter. A warm
thick wetness sprays Dak’s face. There is another scream.

“Wait!”

An amused, expectant
silence.

“What
are
you?”

Is that all you
wanted to know?

“Yes!”

We are blakenjel. We
suffer you to stay. We protect you. We are your shepherds.

“I don’t
understand.”

This is our place.
Enough.

The sound of a body
falling to the ground. The smell is suffocating.

“Wait!”

Silence.

“What do the Growths
want with you? Why did they summon you?”

They do not belong
here. Like you, small human. We let them in like we let you in. But now they
want to leave. The dark is no place for the quick.

The
human voice, the 0wner’s whose house this is, is excited. “Leave? Go where? How
did they come here? How did people come here?”

The blakenjel says,
There
is always a price.

There are no more
sounds. Dak blinks. His eyes are wet. The house is quiet. There is no life
inside. The darkness compresses around him. Light coagulates at its edges,
tracing, like an artist’s brush, the outlines of the carnage, corpses like
chalk-figures sprawled on the floor, the light picking out small details, a
smeared eyeball there, a puddle of green goo
there
, a surprised
expression in a dead crocodile’s curiously human eyes, and there—

There is a man
standing in a corner of the room, where the walls and ceiling meet in a pyramid
of shades. The man is small and bald and white and his skin is flabby and hangs
loosely from his frame. The man looks at Dak hungrily. He has nervous eyes and
he blinks a lot.

The darkness coalescences
before Dak. He bows his head.

His blakenjel is
there.

Blakenjel bilong mi.
Blakenjel bilong mi! I hate him. I hate to share him. I hate to follow him. I
want to be free of him. I look at the boy and know that my blakenjel loves him.
He does not love me. He came to me as he always comes when he is called. And he
granted my wish, as I knew he would. He let me follow him. In my case, the wish
and the price paid were the same.

The boy bows his
head to my blakenjel. And my blakenjel embraces him.

The blakenjel feels
like old leather and metal wires. The blakenjel has no smell. The blakenjel
doesn’t speak. But the way he touches Dak is familiar: it is the way Naet once
touched him.

The blakenjel
caresses him.

Then something
happens. The blakenjel pulls away. The sudden light nearly blinds Dak, but then
his eyes adjust, and he can see.

All around him, the
bodies on the floor, like darkness, coalesce. They re-form. They reassemble in
hideous forms. They manufacture pseudopodia, eyeballs and naked mouths hanging
on grisly stalks, and they speak as they ooze closer. “We are the source. We
are
open
source. We are the 0wnerz—” and a familiar voice, the first
0wner, Dak thinks, shouts, “Grab him!”

The blakenjel turns
and whirls. The re-formed 0wnerz ooze light. Dak wants to run, but there is
nowhere to go. “Grab him!”

But it isn’t to him
that they go.

The mutilated
corpses assemble into crawling, grabbing things, and they approach the corner
of the room where a small bald white man with loose skin is standing kneading
his hands. “Enjelvaljer!” the cry goes. “Grab him! Take the vulture!”

In the centre of the
room there is inhuman laughter. The blakenjel comes to Dak. He wraps his form
around him, and light and sound fade.
Come be with me,
the blakenjel
says,
and be my love, and we shall all the darkness prove.

Behind them Dak
imagines he can hear a faint scream, but he can’t be sure. He follows the
blakenjel into the corridors of night.

6. Codicil

You measure out the
days in sunsets

And months in moons

And dread the darkness.

Dak follows his
blakenjel and he loves, which is a rare thing. He follows him through the
corridors of night.

Once they return to
Open Sore. They emerge from the darkness in a clearing and Dak sees the things
that call themselves the source, and they are hideous yet still alive. They are
tenacious. But the blakenjel pays them no attention. In the centre of the
clearing is a shrunken wasted man, with skin grey-white and ill, and he is
hanging upside-down from a gnarled and twisted tree. The man’s thin lips move
silently in prayer. It seems that he is saying, over and over,
Blakenjel
bilong mi. Blakenjel bilong mi.

Dak looks at the
0wnerz. They clamour and they try to speak, they ask questions—they beseech.
But the blakenjel pays them no heed.

He kills the hanging
man with one sweep of his great sharp wings, and Dak follows him back through
the darkness. There is always a price to pay.

And once, Dak
follows his blakenjel to the high mountains that rise away from the towns,
beyond Open Sore, where the air is clean and cold and it is quiet; and Dak’s
blakenjel lays a great obsidian egg in the fine-grained black sand.

Behold: Skowt!

Jason Heller

My eyes are dinosaur eggs. My
tongue cracks like lightning. I been there, done that, drunk it, fucked it, lived
it. I am the hole in the roof where the brains leak in. I eat jerks like you
for breakfast. Behold: me! Behold: Skowt!