Finch by Jeff VanderMeer Read online

  Through the static: “I'm taking one now. Give it an hour. If I don't call back, check on me.”

  “I will. Be safe.”

  “Thanks.”

  Finch put the receiver down. Be safe. Don't slip on the carpet. Don't fall out the window.

  Which poison first? Finch picked up the orange one. Get the worst over with first.

  Each time he ate a memory bulb, he became someone else. Different when he returned.

  These would be his fourth and fifth. The first had belonged to a girl of ten and had given him nightmares for a year. Montages of a ragged doll. Soup made with dog bones. A bleak apartment without even wallpaper. Turned out there'd been no foul play. Her parents dead, she'd starved to death. The second had been a young man, the third a young woman. A double suicide unspooled in his head. Left him with longings he didn't know he had. Regrets that weren't his. Memories of people he didn't know. Or want to know.

  Finch had never eaten two in one night.

  How many would change him by just a little too much?

  Fuck it.

  Opened his mouth wide. Placed the bulb on his tongue. The taste of the gray cap bulb was dry. Like dirt and sand. The worst part was you had to eat them whole. Crunch down on the ridiculous size of it until your jaw ached. No good cutting them up, grinding them down to paste, adding them to food or water. Ruined the effect. His skin prickled as his mouth took in the strange texture, the taste. An odd, sickening blend of cinnamon-pepper-lime. Sour breath.

  Dread, and yet also a thin layer of anticipation. To be taken out of his own life. If only for a little while.

  He stumbled into the chair. Feral butted his head up against his slack arm.

  Memories didn't come out the way one might expect. Nothing logical or ordered about them. Almost as if you were standing on a street corner as a motored vehicle raced by. As it passed you, a thousand pieces of confetti flew up. You had to try to catch as many of them as you could before they hit the ground.

  Finch closed his eyes.

  Leaned back.

  Let it hit him all at once.

  Come to:

  At the bottom of a well. Layers of rough stone spiraled up to a distant pale light. A wriggling mass of worms or insects or something thick and strange pushing down through the light, extinguishing it. Sudden image of a monstrous City, balanced atop a single building greater than anything ever built in Ambergris, and it all housed in a cavern so huge that the ceiling is lost in blue-tinged darkness.

  Come to (faster now):

  A stumbling, jerky run through a tunnel. A surrounding mob of gray caps click and whistle with insane speed. A glimpse of blue sky,

  winking out. A burning motored vehicle, ancient model. A parade with a huge black cat caged and orange-yellow-green lights spread out along the route. Superimposed: an enormous grub drowning in a sack of its own liquid skin. A dark-green frond of fungus five stories high. Blood, lots of blood, pooling out across the ground. A man's face, in extreme agony, suddenly gone black in silhouette, turning into a huge door made half of volcanic rock and half charred book cover. And on top of the door a smaller door, and a small door set into that one. Hand on the doorknob. Opening ...

  Come to (slower now):

  A stone fortress in a desert. Spinning out into open space-falling, falling, falling. And then a face Finch recognizes, the dead man's, smiling. Beatifically. More mud and dirt and the smell-sound of a river nearby. Side view of water flowing, ear to the grass. Something licks the moisture from his eyes before huffing and going on its way. Falling again, through black fabric studded with stars. The dead man falling, too, staring right at Finch, expression oddly calm. Words from the man's mouth in the clicks and whistles of the gray caps' language. And then, a sudden and monstrous clarity that can never be put into words.

  Come to:

  Moving slowly among a thousand swaying fungal trees in a thousand vision-shattering shades of green. Nearby, a rotting tank with the insignia of the Houses on its side, asleep under the fruiting bodies. The sound of footsteps. A hint of movement other than spores, strained through the heavy sky. Hunting for something. But what? A man. Moving in front of them. Night. Strange numbers and words spilling out emerald against a field of darkness. Shadowing the man. The orange sky dominated by the shambling hulks of floating fungal fortresses. Things crawl and fly and swim between the fortresses. Running now, just yards behind the man. But the man was turning to face them. The man was looking right at him when he disappeared. Winked out. Leaving only the smile. And that only for an instant. An intense feeling of confusion and surprise. Then: falling through cold air and couldn't feel his legs.

  Returned whining. Keening. A low, animal sound from deep in his throat. Lay curled up on the chair. Sweating. Things crawled around inside his skull. Didn't know how much time had passed.

  An enormous grub drowning in a sack of its own liquid skin.

  Coughed. Sat up.

  A rotting tank with the insignia of the Houses on its side, asleep under the fruiting bodies.

  Feral rubbed up against his extended arm. Finch got up, made it to the phone, dialed Rathven, said “One done, one to go” when she answered, and hung up. Grabbed the second memory bulb. Collapsed back to the chair.

  A monstrous City, balanced atop a single building.

  Started laughing. Didn't know what was so funny or why he couldn't stop.

  Falling through cold air and couldn't feel his legs.

  Wondered how much this would mess him up.

  Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

  6

  he night half over. Something important slipping away?

  Drank more whisky, and let it swirl around his mouth. Held the burn in the back of his throat. Followed by numbness.

  The sounds out in the dark beyond the window hadn't made him shudder or start for a long time. Skitterings. Moanings. A cut-off shout of alarm.

  A spotlight of lavender and crimson painted itself across the far wall of his apartment, then leapt away. Once, Finch had seen a shoal of spores take the form of a huge, bloated green monster. Spiraling red eyes. It had bellowed and dived into a neighborhood to the north. Smashed itself into motes against the ground.

  A child might see that and cry out in delight.

  Sidle, quick-shadow, scuttled up the side of the wall near the window. Pursuing moths that had flown into the apartment. Sidle was a happy little predator with bright black eyes. Didn't care about anything but his next meal. Finch could put him in a cage with a branch and water, and Sidle would be content his entire life. So long as he got fed.

  “I guess we'll soon find out what kind of bastard he was,” Finch said to an oblivious Feral. Feral was looking up at the wall. Mesmerized by Sidle's stalking of the spiraling moth. Finch wondered how many Sidles Feral had caught over the years.

  Finch forced the second bulb into his mouth. Chewed it into a dull paste as he moved from the chair to the couch. Lay down. Swallowed.

  The room spun a little. Righted itself.

  The ceiling had a few odd discolorations but nothing to suggest infiltration. Invisible spies. Who lived upstairs, anyway? Sometimes lately he had heard a person pacing across the floorboards in the middle of the night.

  After a minute or two, Finch sat up. Nothing seemed to be happening. Nothing at all.

  The dead man sat in the chair next to him, smiling.

  “Uhhh!” Finch leapt to his feet.

  The man was flanked by a Feral grown large as a pony. A Sidle grown as large as a Feral. They both looked at him the way Sidle had been looking at the moths.

  “Sit down,” the man said. An order, not a suggestion. In a strange accent. The man looked much younger than he had on the floor of the apartment. Had lost the fungal beard.

  Finch sat down slowly. Didn't take his eyes off the man. Left hand groping across the cushions. Where was his gun?

  “I've been waiting for someone like you,” the man said. “You won't understand it, but I'm going to give you w
hat I know. Just in case.”

  The window behind the man no longer showed the city. What it did show was so impossible and disturbing Finch had to look away. And yet the image entered into him.

  The man said Finch's name. Except he didn't say “John Finch.” He used Finch's real name. The one buried for eight long years.

  Finch tried to slow his breathing. Failed. Chest felt like something was going to explode.

  He must be inside the man's memories.

  Then why is the man sitting across from you?

  “Who are you?” An obvious question. But it kept pounding against the inside of his skull. So he had to let it out.

  The man laughed.

  “I didn't say anything funny.”

  “More to the point,” the man said, “who are you? And who are you with?”

  “Shut up. This is just one of your memories. Manifesting in me. It isn't real.”

  Blindingly, unbelievably bright, a light like the sun shot through the window. The night sky torn apart by it. Through the tear: a turquoise sea roiling with ever-changing patterns.

  “You don't have to understand it. Not now,” the man said.

  Didn't know if he was inside a mushroom or outside the universe. Glimpses of the city from on high: each street, each canal, an artery filled with blood. Hadn't known there could be so many shades of red. Spiking into his eyes.

  “Be careful,” the man said, echoing Rathven, and took Finch's hand. The man's hand was warm. Calloused. Real. “Don't lose your self, no matter what happens.”

  The man and Feral and Sidle disappeared. The window became a huge mouth, and they were all nothing more or less than memory bulbs within it. Finch fell through the same skein of stars he had seen in the gray cap's memory.

  Woke up:

  Teetering on the battlements of an ancient fortress, looking out over a desert, the sand flaring out for miles under the seethe of dusk. Moments from someone else's childhood. A parent's death. Sitting in a blind. Crawling through tunnels.

  Woke up:

  A cavern glittering with veins of some blue metal, huge mushrooms slowly breathing in and out. Seen in a flash of light that faded and kept fading but never went out: more caverns, an old woman's face, framed by white hair; another woman, in her twenties, her thirties, her forties. A shadowy figure hobbling down a street.

  Woke up:

  The insane jungle of the HFZ, almost floating above it, through it, coming out into a clearing ringed by twelve green men planted in the ground, arms at their sides, their mouths opening and closing soundlessly. And the jungle was made of fungus, not trees, poured over trucks and tanks and other heavy machinery junked and rusted out and infested with mushrooms, some of it still slowly, slowly moving. And back to the fortress, at the edge of a man made cliff, many hundreds of feet above the desert floor, and out in the desert a thousand green lights held by a thousand shadows motionless, watching. A sound of metal locking into place. A kind of mirror. An eye. Pulling back to see a figure that seemed oddly familiar, and then a name: Ethan Bliss. Then a circle of stone, a door, covered with gray cap symbols. And, finally, jumping out into the desert air, toward a door hovering in the middle of the sky, pursued by the gray cap, before the world went dark.

  Wake up ... Came out of it seconds, centuries, later. To find Feral and Sidle watching him. Feral on the floor near the couch. Sidle on the windowsill, a large black moth trapped between his clockwork jaws.

  The phone was ringing and ringing. Reached out for it. Put it to his ear.

  “Are you okay?” Rath's voice.

  “I'm going to be fine. I think.”

  Hung up.

  Closed his eyes.

  Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

  TUESDAY

  I: The fanaarcensitii. You said he had fallen from a great height. Did anything you saw in the memory bulbs support that idea?

  F: Instinct. I didn't trust what I saw.

  I: Why not?

  F: Because I haven't felt the same since I ate them. Because they were scenes out of a nightmare. I don't know.

  I: There's one strange thing in all of this.

  F: Just one?

  I: A mention of a fortress. In a desert. Do you know the name of this place?

  F: No.

  I: I think you do.

  F: I don't even know if it was real or not.

  I: Is this real?

  [screams]

  Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

  I

  oke to a weight on the bed next to him. Went rigid. Sucked in his breath. Reached for his gun. Then relaxed. Recognized the smell of her sweat, some subtle perfume behind it. Sintra Caraval. The woman who had been part of his life for the last two years. She smelled good.

  He could feel her staring at the back of his head. Her breath on his back. He smiled. Didn't open his eyes. She kissed his neck.

  She was naked. Smooth, soft feel of her breasts against his shoulders. He was instantly hard. Opened his eyes. Turned over on his back. Sintra turned with him so she was nestled under his left arm. A surge of happiness startled him. Through the window: dim light creating shadows out of the darkness. Her brown skin somehow luminous against it. She'd told him she was half nimblytod, half dogghe. Tribes that had lived in Ambergris since before settlement. Before the gray caps.

  Even in the darkness, Finch knew her face. Thick, expressive eyebrows. Green eyes. Full lips. A thin scar across the left cheek he'd never gotten her to talk about. A nose a little too long for her face, which gave her a questioning look.

  An exotic lilt to the ends of her sentences as she whispered in his ear: “I let myself in. I wasn't trying to startle you.”

  He started to get up, to lock the door. She pushed him back down.

  “I locked the door behind me. No one else can get in.”

  Finch stopped resisting her. The key was the greatest act of trust between them. Was that good or bad?

  “Sintra,” he said sleepily, bringing his right arm around to cup one warm breast. “I could get used to you. I really could.” Not really listening to what he was saying. Still waking up. Reduced to the kind of meaningless words he'd mouthed at fifteen. Having sex in his room with the neighbor's daughter while his father was out.

  “You could get used to me?” she said.

  When mock-angry with him, she raised her eyebrows in a way he loved.

  “A bad joke,” he said. Hugged her closer. “I'm already used to you.” Kissed the top of her head. Relaxed against her, the shudder that had been building up overtaking him. Then gone.

  Then, more awake: “Let's escape. Tonight.”

  He'd worked it out in his head hundreds of times. Along the shore of the HFZ at dusk. A rowboat. Not a motorboat. To the end of the bay. Then either west to the Kalif's empire or south to Stockton. West because it was easier to get through the security zones in the desert. He knew places there. Places his father had shown him on maps.

  Escape. Now.

  Imagined she was grimacing, there, in the dark. The way she always did when he mentioned it.

  “Bad night?” she asked.

  “Just don't betray me,” the man said, and took Finch's hand.

  “Confusing night.”

  “Tell me later.”

  Then she was kissing him and he was kissing her. Tongue curled against tongue. The salt of her in his mouth. A hunger. A need. His hand between her muscular thighs. His cock in her hand. A pulse. A current that made him want to touch, to kiss, every part of her. Warmth and softness at his fingertips. Burning in her hand. An intake of breath. A little sighing cry. He turned and turned until he was above her, his forearms brushing her shoulders. Moaned as he slid into her and kept kissing her. Dissolving his poisoned thoughts. Not thinking at all. Becoming someone else.

  She felt so good that he had to stop for a moment. Locked his elbows to hold himself up over her, looked into her eyes, her hands on his chest.

  “I love your neck,” he said, and kissed it. “And your eyes.” Kissed
her eyelids. He could see her better now, light colonizing shadows.

  She wasn't smiling back. Wasn't responding.

  “John,” she said, looking worried. “John, you're crying blood.”

  She wiped a too-dark tear away with her finger.

  “Am I?” he said, trying to smile, and came with a long shuddering groan before the thought could hit him.

  Occupational hazard.

  Later. Lying in bed together. Feral pushing his head against a bedpost, already wanting breakfast. The blood tears had stopped almost as soon as they'd started. Remembered Wyte had told him it could be an after-effect of eating memory bulbs. It hadn't hurt. It had just surprised him. He'd daubed his eyes clean with a bathroom towel. Had stared for a moment at the worn face of the stranger trapped in the cracked mirror.

  A desert fortress. An army of silent gray caps. And Ethan Bliss, Frankwrithe & Lewden's top man for so many years.

  Pushed the thoughts aside. Sintra would have to leave soon. The place on the back of her neck where she liked to be kissed. Soft brown hairs. Crisp salt taste.

  “How was your work yesterday?” he asked her, holding her tightly to him. Skin so warm against his body.

  “The same as always.”

  What did that mean?

  “The same as always,” Finch echoed. “That's good.”

  “I guess,” she said. She sounded distracted.

  Still didn't know what Sintra did, or even where she lived. Remnants of the dogghe and nimblytod had carved out a defiant kingdom for themselves in the ruined Religious Quarter. But Sintra might not even think of herself as one of them, integrated into the city. He'd never asked. Sometimes he daydreamed of her being a rebel agent. Comforting. Utterly unreal. But that didn't matter.

  “I'm lonely. Even with you.”

  “Someday, it will be different . . . ”

  That she preferred him not knowing hurt him. Even though he understood the sense of it. Even though they made a game out of it.