The Devil Delivered and Other Tales (19 page)

“It’s just colored paste,” Annie said. “It can’t sprout.”

Andy got down on his hands and knees again and began backtracking along the slime trail. “You mean it’s dead, lovemuffin? As in deceased. Expurgated. Obliterated from the realm of the living?” He heard her coming from the kitchen, sensed her pausing, scanning the sunken living room, finding him nowhere.

“Where are you?” she asked, a little edgily.

“Disembodied,” he said from behind the sofa. He’d stopped here, briefly. There’s tiny scratches on the floor. Evenly spaced. Make note of that.

“Plants are lower orders of life,” Annie said wearily, unable to resist the bait and knowing it. “We have to eat to survive. I refuse to see an animal killed for my sustenance. Plain and simple, Andy love, that’s me. Where are you, anyway?”

He crawled out from behind the sofa, carefully tracking the slime. There seemed to be another pause, just outside the closet, but he continued onward as it zigzagged from one hiding place to the next.

Annie had seen him. “Oh, God, Andy. You’re getting … obsessed. It’s kinda scary.”

He scowled. You don’t know the half of it. “You don’t know him like I do,” he said. “He’s up to something. I can feel it.”

“For godsakes get up. I’ve finished the salad, and the soy scramblies are done. Besides, I’ve got to get to the office. I called a meeting. With Lucy, and Don, and—”

“No more names,” Andy said. “The less I know, the better.”

“What do you mean? You know everything.”

“While conveying the appearance of affable, objective innocence.”

“But I want to keep you informed,” Annie said.

He heard the tremor in her tone. Tiny early-warning alarms chimed in his head. Her web’s trembling. Frozen in the center, she’s looking for a lifeline. Desperate is … unsexy. I have to think about this. Make a note. She knows I won’t go down. Thinks I’m a life preserver. Mistake. Major. I want to see contingency plans ASAP. “Relax,” he told her, “you think I can’t guess, with absolute accuracy, who’ll attend this meeting of yours? Beware conspiracies, lovetussle.”

“We’re not conspiring, Andy! We never do that! You know that, you know me, you know!”

“Of course not. Just a gentle reminder, darling.”

Andy came to the trail’s end, his eyes tracking the dried streaks climbing the metal stand, up to the double-latched, locked cover above the glass. “Perception is everything, Annie, my dear.” Take my friend here, for instance. He mimicks, changes color, changes shape even, perfectly reflecting what’s in front of him. I admire that, dearest. Interesting parable, make a note for the minister, maybe he can use it, not in public, of course, but for his private hate sessions. ASAP. “It counts for much, much more than reality. The world’s a game of mirrors. Deflection, reflection, defraction.” He found himself eye to eye with Kit, a quarter inch of glass and a hundred million years of evolution between them. Kit wouldn’t meet Andy’s gaze, the eyes kept shying off to one side. His eight tentacled arms were at rest, their tips drifting lazily in the gentle current created by the water pump. Eye to eye, Kit in the shadow under the rock ledge, Andy on his knees in his penthouse. You don’t fool me, Kit. You’re up to something. I don’t know how you picked the lock. I don’t know what you do once you’re out—it’s not just crawling around, oh no, there’s a pattern, a purpose. “You’re a cephalopod,” he whispered. “A mere octopus. Clever to be sure, with a neural sensory net more complicated and more sensitive than our own. Those tentacles, so deft, so precise—”

Annie’s hands slipped over his shoulders, her fingertips inscribing patterns on his hairy chest. “Oooh,” she murmured in his ear, “another fantasy. I love this bestiality stuff. You want my eight arms around you, darling? So tight, they’ll never let go? Hmmm?”

Andy closed his eyes. Eight? Eight arms? See above, i.e., web imagery. Is this coincidence? Some kind of psychic linkage? Reexamine later, make a note. He made his sigh sound like desire. “What about your meeting?”

“It can wait,” she answered huskily. “Just let me wrap my—ohmigod, look at Kit—he’s frowning!”

Andy’s eyes snapped open.

“Ooh now, Andy! He’s going all red!”

3.

meeting the throwback

Entirely by coincidence, a certain page from a certain newspaper had been plastered on the wall by a handful of poorly rendered grease, and sat stuck there directly above Sool Koobie’s tousled, burr-snagged head whenever he slept. While he couldn’t read, and wouldn’t have been much interested in any case, there was an article on the page discussing his existence.

One certain theory popular among some scientists held that Neanderthals did not become extinct; rather, they interbred, merged with, and eventually disappeared within the race of modern humans. It followed that, since these genes still persisted, there was always the chance that a perfect anachronistic match could occur within a single individual, creating a throwback. A pure, dyed-in-the-wool Neanderthal, characterized by pronounced brow ridges, an oblong-shaped skull with proportionately smaller frontal lobes behind the sloping forehead, and larger occipital lobes at the back. No chin, a huge nose designed to heat glaciated air, a high larynx and tiny voice box, a robust skeletal frame, and massively large, strong muscles.

For Sool Koobie, the newspaper article on the alley wall above his nest was, could he have read it, redundant, since he himself was the real article, and not in the least concerned with arguments over his existence—theoretical or otherwise.

On this particular night, in the darkness of his cave, Sool Koobie’s eyes were closed, but he was wide awake. In his mind, which ran paths alien and potentially alarming to normal, modern humans, he concentrated on every detail describing, with absolute precision, the next few hours of his life.

He moved within his cave, alone, beyond even the suspicions of the world outside yet so intricately connected to its unmindful pulses that his hair prickled with every passage through the night’s cool air, unveiling in his mind an area that extended six blocks in every direction—encompassing the heart of the city—this city. Through this mental map he danced, slipping from shadow to shadow, padding soundlessly down alleyways, pausing to test the air—nostrils flaring—and cocking his head to the sound of footsteps a block away. He gestured rhythmically with his chert-tipped spear, jabbing it as he leapt upon his unsuspecting victim. He crowed a rasping, voiceless cry, his head tilted back, as the creature stumbled and fell.

So it was, so it would be. The hunt’s the thing. The hunt’s this thing.

Sool Koobie knelt on the grimy floor of his cave, setting aside the weapon that would soon be slick with his victim’s blood, and made propitiation to the quarry’s spirit, which would flee the cooling flesh, hover uncertainly, then float away into the night sky. Duly appeased by the respect and honor Sool was now displaying.

He opened his eyes and blinked rapidly in the musty darkness. He’d let the hearth fire dim to just a few faintly glowing coals, and now his eyes were adjusted to the night. He breathed deeply, swelling his thick, boxy chest. He jiggled his muscles loose in his arms, did the same with his short, stocky, bowed legs. He flexed and splayed out his broad, hairy toes, then finished his preparation with a twitch of his small ears.

Sool’s brain was bigger than the average
Homo sapiens sapiens
brain. Sool possessed big thoughts to match his prodigious gray matter, which is why the city was in trouble—though it knew it not.

The hunt’s the thing. This thing, and another thing, soon to come.

Sool Koobie slipped outside. Within minutes he’d traveled a block, then another, moving unseen, silent and deadly. He found a hiding place, where he could wait in ambush near a watering hole, and settled in.

An hour later he rolled out from under the Cadillac, his wide, flat face smeared black with dirty oil. Heart pounding with eagerness, he sprang to his feet, straddling the curb, and sniffed deeply the night air. The rain had dampened the city’s miasmic smells, but not enough to hide the scent from Sool Koobie’s nose.

There were grass-eaters about, close by. A waft of weeds expelled in the breath of someone near, the slick tang of canola oil palpable on Sool’s tongue. He licked his stubble-ringed lips and tested the air once more, then, hefting his spear, he slipped once again into the shadows.

4.

ambition’s slow burn

Maxwell Nacht sat alone, a huge cup of decaffeinated mocha lait centered on his small table, crowded against the bowl of raw sugar and the beeswax candle—the huge cup his only company this night, like so many others since he’d moved to the city. The coffee had gone cold, its puff of petroleum whip collapsed into a wrinkled caldera, wax drippings from the candle slowly flowing down the cup’s edge, disappearing beneath the foam and secretly growing like an island on the liquid’s hidden surface.

The waitress hadn’t looked his way in forty minutes, so he continued his slow, rhythmic unraveling of the Peruvian straw place mat, plucking out the staples when he found them and dropping them into the golden candle’s sputtering flame.

I’m in my struggling phase, Max told himself. This is a phase in the artist’s life that requires a certain amount of public display. Still, what are these staples doing in this Peruvian place mat?

At a nearby table a conversation was under way, a smooth, oiled machine of elocution chugging along, part dialogue, part performance. Max registered every word, absorbed every nuance. He knew every person at the table, if only by reputation. They were the cream of the city’s art establishment. They were brilliant. Breathtaking. Deep beyond words. They were talking.

“Can’t play the game until you know the rules,” Don Palmister said, shrugging ineffectually somewhere inside his sprawling carpetlike tweed jacket.

Max smiled to himself. Amen to that.

“It’s not a game,” Lucy Mort said, wrinkling her nose in a way someone must have once told her was cute. “It’s my life, it’s what I am, to the very heart of my soul.”

“Absolutely,” Brandon Safeword said, his studied enunciation delivered in a rolling tone, like ball bearings on a teak floor. “When struggle itself assumes an aesthetic modality, for instance.”

A moment of silence, either in homage or bafflement—it didn’t matter which, really. Talent, Max knew—real talent—lay in mastering the ambiguity. With sufficient self-consciousness, one could turn dim-witted stupidity into an intellectual brown study.

“In any case,” Don Palmister eventually said, “it’s a jungle out there, that’s for certain. Clearly—” The professor looked at each of his companions. “—something must be done.”

“Clearly,” Brandon Safeword agreed. The media pundit and self-professed art critic for the Cultural Public Broadcasting station leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. “After all, the core has begun to rot, hasn’t it?”

Lucy Mort gasped.

“No,” Brandon drawled, “not that core, darling. I was speaking of the city’s core.” He waved toward the restaurant’s front window. “This scattering of streets, the various knots of heritage buildings presently untenanted and left to decay.”

“Refurbishment,” Don Palmister said, nodding. “Upscale apartments, condos, people with money…”

The others shared a soft laugh that made Max’s stomach jump.

“Indeed,” Brandon said. “Money.”

Everyone laughed again, the magic word even better the second time around.

A distant shriek from somewhere outside made Max sit up, alarmed. He twisted in his seat and leaned close to the window. Outside, all he could see was the wet street, parked cars, and old, exhaust-stained buildings. Must’ve been a car. Of course it was a car. Whew. He sat back. No one else had heard the sound, it seemed. Unnerving, sitting this close to the dark world outside, but it had been the last table available.

Culture Quo Vegetarian Restaurant was a popular place.

“I’ve found,” Don Palmister was saying, “that the postmodernistic zeitgeist has finally embraced the culminating notion of dismantled meaning.” He paused to roll his eyes and shift again inside his tweed jacket. “It’s been a notion of mine, firmly implanted in my class syllabi for at least ten years.”

Syllabi? Like … octopi? Of course there’s no such word as octopi. The word is octopods. Syllapodes, a many-tentacled description swathed in a cloud of black ink when alarmed.

“Patience,” Brandon said. “The ultra-awareness of pure genius, once delivered into the virgin and perhaps limited minds of your students, Professor, necessitates a certain gestation period before fruition, hah hah, ho ho!”

“Sure, Brandon,” Don said, “but where’s my credit?”

Everyone laughed again, but this time the sound had acquired a timbre of uncertainty. Said in jest or honest vexation—that seemed to be the secret question.

Whining’s always honest. Max nodded to himself. But very artfully done, Professor Palmister. You’ve got them guessing.

The conversation ended abruptly, as did the serene hum of a healthy dining experience, when the door banged open and two young men stumbled inside, faces white and eyes wide with fear—Max hadn’t even seen them coming, but he shrank back from the chill air that swept in around them. The two men skidded to a stop just inside the door, heads whipping as they stared wildly at everyone in the restaurant.

“Someone help us!” the man closest to Max screamed. “Our friend’s been attacked!”

“Kidnapped!” the other shouted.

“This hairy naked man jumped us from an alley!”

“He had a spear—he stuck it in Maury!”

“Maury’s our friend!”

“Maury fell down and the naked guy barked at us—”

“Snapped and showed his teeth!”

“Then he dragged Maury into the alley!”

“Someone call the police!”

“We’re regular patrons here!”

“Maury, too!”

Brandon Safeword surged to his feet, his massive, muscular frame suddenly dominating the room. “My God,” he whispered, “not again!”

5.

lessons in history