– 4 –
It is bad to sharpen a goat. I’ve said this on other occasions — much like I have observed that it is bad to nuke picturesque British communities — but people keep doing it anyway. Even Hans did it; or at least, he kept one. He held it captive —
A thoroughly sharpened goat.
He kept it on his farm beneath the surfaces of things — past the centipede that writhes under the Earth; past the Great Gate, with its soap-film surface; past the bridge where march the soldiers of the dead — not all that terribly far, as no crow flies, from Hell.
He kept it, but it escaped him; and it does not fear him, for now Hans is dead.
It has tossed its sharpened head and bleated its goat-wroth out. It has glinted under the light of the sun-birds and it has cut that light. It was a shining and terrible creature, on the hills of the underworld, not all that terribly far from Hell.
Then it gave forth a great cry.
It called them — all those who had been immured. All they still held captive on Hans’ farm; and all the various creatures that were at that time held prisoners in Hell.
It then began to run.
Well, to clippity-clop, anyway. In an ominous fashion.
It has cut its way upwards through all the layers of the underworld. It has mauled past both the army and the bridge. It has pierced the Great Gate, though the Great Gate soaped it; it has clippity-clopped under where the centipede skirls.
The centipede dropped; the bug was cut; and the goat just kept traipsing on.
It is followed now by the spirits of the dead; and the demons; and a few of Hans’ leftover captives; but most of all, it has a retinue of the ants.
You shouldn’t try to use soldier ants to seal the gates of Hell. That was Hans’ idea, and it was bad. When the gates tore open, the ants just died; most of them died; but there were a few —
They didn’t die.
They bred, and grew, instead, suffused with all of the malignity of Hell.
The goat cuts and hacks its way up towards the surface, and behind it is the endless swarming of the soldier ants.
– 5 –
The station rises fast. In the sky above the school, it bristles. The House of Dreams spends some of their time, then almost all of it, in the boot they are building in space.
It is not fast enough.
It rises, but not fast enough.
It is still incomplete — its weapons systems half-functional; its ability to stomp away unreason and impose Tom’s will on the cosmos unfinished — when the scissors finally return.
The world turns.
The sun comes directly overhead, at least, if you happen to be standing right underneath.
The first few pairs of scissors fall.
– 6 –
Lucy is just sitting up there where Bethany used to hang out.
She kind of misses her, though she wouldn’t ever admit to it.
She’s casting the runes, mostly just to hear them clicking, and she frowns at the way they keep coming up blank.
There’s a whisper of sound behind her.
She stands up ready for fighting, her eyes at roughly goat-level —
It’s bad to be attacked by a goat when you’re sitting at the edge of the roof of a building! —
But as it happens, it’s not a goat.
It’s Linus Evans, instead.
He has his palms up and he’s wearing a white hat. His eyes are white and adrenaline has him trembling but he isn’t there to fight his Housemate Lucy Souvante.
“I heard you’re good,” he says.
“No,” she says.
“I mean,” he clarifies, “Good at.”
“Oh.”
She nods.
“My people are coming,” she says. “To avenge my sister, whom you Earthlings killed.”
Linus puts it together.
“Maria?”
Lucy is on her feet. “What?”
“Maria Souvante?”
“. . . yeah.”
“Oh, man,” says Linus. “That’s a blast from the past.”
Lucy’s hackles settle again.
“I suppose that it must be,” she says. She looks at her hands. “They are coming. They will raze this world. And I keep wondering if they would taste better than the humans. But I tell myself repeatedly: that is wrong.”
Her face twists suddenly. She is on her feet. She has Linus by the collar.
“I should kill you,” she says. “You knew her. Maybe you were the Earthling that killed her, ‘antichrist.’”
She is shaking her fist. She is counting off one, two, three —
A pair of scissors shears down from the sky. It lands quivering on the rooftop.
Lucy blinks.
Lucy decides to take a short break from playing rock-paper-scissors. She yawns and stretches elaborately. She pushes Linus back onto the roof and she sits down.
After a while, she says, “Can you tell me about her?”
“She was a heck of a nanny,” says Linus. “There weren’t many people, you know, who didn’t mind my being the antichrist. Mom, and Tom, and Jane, and Edmund, and that Mouser — that was pretty much it, really. And then Maria.”
“She was your nanny?”
“Sometimes,” Linus says, “when you’re trying to kill people, I mean, for money, you need to infiltrate their house and teach them marvelous songs about — hope, and living. I guess. Teach them to love their life and not just stare down the endless eons into the eyes of bleak damnation. First.”
Lucy is silent.
He wrings his hands.
“I liked her a lot,” he says, “until she tried to kill us. And took my mittens. Then I didn’t like her so much. But I think that in the end she was happy.”
“Was she?”
Linus makes a face. He looks away.
His white dog appears. He pats its head. She blinks. The white dog isn’t there.
“She did it to herself,” Linus says. “We couldn’t have killed her. She just — I think she didn’t want to live as an assassin that didn’t kill anybody any longer.”
“I tried to tell her,” says Lucy.
He puts his hand on her shoulder. She knocks it away.
“Blockhead,” she mutters.
So he doesn’t say anything for a while.
Then: “I need a favor,” Linus says.
“You killed her,” she says.
It’s unfair but he elects not to deny it. He lets her believe it; except she doesn’t actually believe it, in the end. “I used to believe in things,” he says. “I used to think there was hope for the world. And then the cleaning man took that away.”
“Yeah?”
“I want to find him,” Linus says. “I want to kill him. He hurt Tom. I think he hurt my mother. He’s a monster. I’ve just been reminded, I want to kill him. But I don’t even know where he lives.”
“Why would I help you?” she says.
“I’m just asking.”
“You’re a goat, ain’t ya?” she says. “Antichrist? Goat? Right? You’re my big enemy, aren’t you?”
“I’m sorry,” Linus says softly. “I’m not.”
“I could eat you,” she says, “and —”
She shakes her head.
“Fine,” she says, “whatever.”
She tosses the rune stones. They’re blank. She drinks tea. It is leafless. She stares with her white eyes out at the cosmos, she reads the signs, and there aren’t any. They’ve been scrubbed. They’ve been cleaned.
But she’s not just anybody. She’s not just some random prophet-beast.
She’s Lucy Souvante.
She’s the evil prophet of space.
She casts her gaze over time and space and possibility; she bats aside the falling scissors and she flattens out her hand and she feels the shape of worlds.
Her white eyes find the one name in the phone book that is invisible to her; the one place in all the world that she cannot see.
Gotterdammerung approaches. The world shudders and writhes.
She spells it out in unwriting. She speaks it in unwords. She writes it down backwards and she looks in the mirror and says, “I have an address for one ‘Jeremiah Clean.’”
– 1 –
I can’t say they’re all bad.
They’re not. Not really. There’s the pair of scissors that cuts into the head of Mr. Thornton, of Birmingham; but then again, there’s that chessmaster in Eritrea who sees the scissors falling and finally perfects her game.
There’s all the people in the world whose hearts are struck by a sudden, awful fear. Whose skin crawls and whose stomach twists and who suffer because the scissors have returned.
That bit’s pretty bad.
And the origami bridge of Texas is definitively shown to be even more of a boondoggle than it was originally thought to be.
And the scissors that fall into the sea perturb it. They wound it. They bring about and hasten a certain stirring in the waves.
— but then again there’s that old woman in Kaohsiung. She’s dreaming of the children that she’s lost. She’s walking along the street. She’s tottering; and scissors fall.
She jerks back. They’d almost cut her! She looks down at the scissors, accusingly, fearfully, her heart pounding like a squeaky toy, and then looks up.
Why, look!
Her daughter, whom she’d thought was dead, is being discharged from that hospital over there!
There’s the Hubble Space Telescope, which gets scissors stuck in it, and that’s bad.
But then — then there’s Inedible the cat.
She clanks about dismally in the Gulleys’ mansion. Now and then she tries to catch a mouse, or a squeaky toy, but she can’t do it! Her footfalls — they’re just too loud!
Too loud, that is, until —
The. Scissors. Fall.
A pair slews past the cat Inedible.
She takes a clanking step —
No, wait. That’s not a clanking step. That step was silent.
Then again. And again.
The cat dashes down the hall. She stops. Her ears twitch. Her expression turns goofy. She spins around twice and she dashes the other way. She rolls silently over and over on the carpet, stretching, lashing her tail, and wriggling, and then begins to lick silently at her mussed-up fur.
It’s the best thing ever. It’s a thing of glory. At last (she thinks) her minions Edmund and Mr. Gulley have fulfilled her faith in them:
After all these years of doleful clanking, Inedible is free.
– 2 –
Jane sits on her blocky pink one-seater sofa.
She looks at her feet.
“I have feet,” she comments, to Martin, who is trying to eat his cereal without having a discussion of feet and has, once again, failed.
“Do you need more?” Martin says.
“It’s just, they could have fallen off. Sometimes that happens. Then if I was a good footist, I could grow more. But if not, I’d have to get prosthetics.”
“We can’t afford prosthetic feet,” Martin says. “We have no obvious means of income.”
“I could make some out of socks,” Jane points out. “They’d be squishy when I walked because of not having feet in them. But if I sat really casually then no one would ever know my feet were gone.”
Martin grimly chews on his Lucky Charms. Crunch. Crunch. That’s a shooting star — the marshmallow kind, not the real one — that he’s chewing now. It burned brightly in his spoon but now it’s just sugar to the stomach. Crunch.
“I’m not,” Martin says, “having you go around in empty socks.”
“Then gold?”
“What?”
“We could get gold prosthetics!”
“How would we pay for them?”
“You don’t have to pay for gold,” Jane says, smugly. “It isn’t backing the currency any more.”
Martin hesitates.
“Jane,” he says, after a moment, “I believe you were ‘studying methods to increase your effectiveness at cleaning your room’ before actually embarking on this activity. Can I ask you how this relates?”
Jane hesitates. She looks shifty. “Feet can be clean or dirty,” she says. “Between the toes!”
Martin lowers his cynicism goggles for a moment to look down at Jane. It’s somehow even more cynical than when he has his goggles on.
Jane says, in a tightly clipped dramatic voice, “It’s directly relevant because I have feet or don’t have them in the broader context of my personal reality and without them my model of the universe would be subtly different in every conceivable respect!”
There is a long pause.
This does not seem to have gotten Jane off the hook.
“Oh, like you never just stop and think about your feet, ” Jane sulks.
“Snot,” giggles Martin.
They laugh.
– 3 –
Max is dueling Eugenie. She used to be better than him, but he’s gotten stronger; it’s rough on him, but winning is possible; and something’s happened to her summon, the lurching, bloody remnants of a gigantic four-armed ape. He drives her to a draw this time; and they’re panting, there, when Sid walks in.
Eugenie thinks about this for a while. Then she steps aside.
She gestures broadly towards Max.
“Sid,” says Max. “Sid, you shouldn’t be —”
Sid free-summons INTIMATION.
Max gulps. Then Max frowns.
“Wait,” he says. “Is that a free-summoning of an intimation that one day you’ll be able to summon really bad-assed things, or an intimation that one day you will be good enough to bad-assedly manage a free summoning?”
“You shouldn’t fight a summoner,” says Sid, in what he probably thinks is a bad-assed fashion, “if you’re not prepared for some linguistic ambiguity!”
He’s reached the summoners’ circle. He scrawls a summoning circle in the dirt inside it with his toe.
He calls out, PUZZLING ENIGMA!
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” yells Max. He skips back. He averts his eyes from the enigma. He seizes up his stick and stomps it to call up SNOWSTORM.
“I think you’ll find I’m not so easy any longer,” smirks Sid.
“You’ve never been easy,” says Max.
“You hugged me.”
“You were hurting!”
“You pushed me away with hand puppets!”
“I was good at hand puppets!”
“You’re arguing with me instead of fighting!”
“It’s a distraction!”
Snow covers the puzzling enigma. It drives Sid staggering back. Max’s hand comes forward, articulated into a claw, pulling BAD JUDGE’S CALL out of the air. It bumps Sid lightly.
Eugenie holds up a card in the air. She calls the match for Max!
After a while, they’re sitting there, at the edge of the arena, and Max says, “I was scared for you, you know.”
“That was a really bad call by Eugenie,” Sid says. “I had you on the ropes, man.”
“Yeah, well,” says Max. He grins a summoner’s smile. “That’s how it goes.”
He rises. He walks to the door.
He’s got to go. He’s got a hot date! With a prophet! But he hangs out by the door for a moment, looking back at Sid.
“I’m so glad,” he says, “that you’re finally well.”
– 1 –
Long ago, in the winter before the world, a goat began to sharpen itself.
What a bad goat!
It grew sharper and sharper. It began to trouble the great smiths of the svart-alfar. Karl the smith went to subdue the goat, but it was too sharp for him. It cut the rope Karl used to bind it. It ripped the nets. Its fur made Karl’s hands bleed and one horn made Karl’s gut bleed and it left him dying on the snow.
Hans came.
Hans the smith knelt by Karl. Hans fed Karl the svart-drink, but it did him no great good.
“Don’t worry,” says Hans. “I’ll kill it.”
Karl shook his head.
Hans frowned at him. “I shouldn’t?” he said. “Why not?”
But Karl died.
What terrible timing! Hans wound up having to guess.
– 1 –
Many years later —
A whole world later, really —
Bethany alights for a moment in Virginia. She stands and sways at the top of a tree and the nithrid rushes towards her.
She smiles at it, though she’s tired and her arms and hands are raw.
“I need a minute,” she says to the sky.
The nithrid skirls out. It plays for a minute around George Mason. It runs little rivulets of lightning up and down the river. It comes back.
It is almost upon her. She is bracing for the dance.
It does not reach her.
Her life is left empty. She sits down numbly. She cannot even cry. Her garments of red are crumbling to show her stained and faded school uniform underneath.
“Andrea?” she says.
That was the name of the nithrid.
“Andrea?”
And she knows in that moment that there is something worse than a wolf; worse than a nithrid; something worse than Hans or the Devil himself; and there is no reason to oppose it, because there is no thing good in all of life.
She drops to the ground. She curls over. She loses the memory of the lightning.
And there is no nithrid remaining at all.
Sponsors
Today's
STRANGE ENCOUNTER ...
Boot
