She must be new.
“What was your dream like?” you ask her.
Her breath catches, but she answers in a voice stronger and deeper than you’d expected. “You killed me.”
You creep closer to the sound of her voice, and you can see her silhouette now, black against the almost black shadows. You try to explain about the dreams your Fisheater buys from Err, the city above the clouds, but she doesn’t understand.
You offer to show her where the dreams come from, talking as if to a child, miming and pointing to the porch railing.
She shrinks away. You wait. You have nothing better to do until the next time your Fisheater calls. Eventually, she rises and follows you, though she does not take your extended hand. You shrug and lead her to the balcony.
Outside, the darkened city descends steeply towards the perpetually flooded piers of Dead Pectoral Harbor, the water like a sea of ink, the clouds above shot through with strange flashes of salmon-colored light.
You hear the scratch, scratch, scratch of your Fisheater scribing the walls below. Another Fisheater scribes beside yours. They both look up at you, hiss, and scuttle around the corner of the building to scratch unobserved.
You point to the flickering lights in the clouds above. You try to explain how you trade dead bodies for dreams, but the offering coffin on the porch is empty, just a shredded piece of funeral shroud from the last offering.
Salmon colored lights drift down through the clouds: the meat hooks descending for the offerings. You search the porch pointlessly for a corpse. There are none, of course, but you search again, and again, overturning bags of trash and piles of dirty clothing, you search until tears wet your eyes and your breath comes in ragged gasps. There is nothing left on the porch save for you and the girl, yet still you search.
Denial has always been a part of your Fisheater’s ritual.
The girl laughs and the sound drains the last bit of strength from your limbs. You collapse bonelessly onto the creaking wood floor of the balcony. You don’t even turn to watch the blade descend.
The knife plunges through your shoulder and pierces your lung. It hurts a lot more than you expected. You whimper and beg even though you promised yourself you wouldn’t.
The girl rubs your blood all over her naked body and dances slow and sinuous. Her Fisheater, stands behind her, stripping tiny shreds of fish flesh from the fish on her staff and eating it, consuming your murder. And you know now that your Fisheater intends to pay the dream merchants with your flesh, to pay this other Fisheater with your blood, and to finally pay you for your services with oblivion.
Sin without guilt, sin without fear. Release without the stain of suicide.
As always, you are grateful for what the Fisheater brings.
The third dream, as always, was the worst.
Jim woke, rolled over, and found himself eye to eye with Leslie, the receptionist at NMHI who had reminded him of the Fisheaters. Her cold, dead, blue eyes stared accusingly into his.
And she was, indeed, dead. Jim knew it even before he sat up and saw the blood-drenched sheets of his hide-a-bed. He knew as well what the police would find in his kitchen.
He pulled on the Levi’s at the foot of his bed, still spattered with blood from yesterday. He walked barefooted to the manager’s apartment and knocked on the door. The manager answered, his mouth open to shout at Jim about the broken window, or the back rent, or the cleaning deposit, and saw Jim clad in nothing but denim and blood.
“Can I use your phone?”
The manager blanched, said something that sounded like, “crazy, motherfucker,” and slammed the door. Jim heard him calling to his fat wife, “call the police. That crazy fucker from 2C is outside covered in blood.”
“Thank you,” shouted Jim.
Jim didn’t fight the police when they came. He answered their endless questions as best he could, showered when they told him to shower, and dressed in the bright orange coveralls they gave him. He walked to the cell they pointed out, and in each cell he passed lay another dead girl, another murdered innocent.
The light in his cell didn’t work, the nearly empty room lit only by the tiny strip of bulletproof glass in the heavy wooden door. Someone lay on the bottom bunk, a shadow whispering into the darkness. Jim crept closer, his ears straining to hear the words that sounded so much like the clicking and whistling language of the Fisheaters.
“Follow me,” said the shadow.
Travis King
THE DREAMLANDS OF MARS
ENTRY 11,245: THE SILVER KEY
VOICE TRANSCRIPTION RECORDED: SATURNI, 7 VRIKASHA 255, 08:11:07 MTC-9 | RJD 84648.31167
FIXED LOCATION: UNITED NATIONS OFFICE, TECHOVSKÁ CITY, WEST OLYMPUS, MARS [VIEW GPS DATA]
STATUS: PUBLIC
MOOD: CURIOUS | EXPAND
I woke up this morning to find an email from the UNPA. An unexpected delivery came in for me on the courier ship Hermes a couple days ago; it arrived at the local postomat yesterday. It was from J. D. Heath, the executor of my parents’ estate. He’d told me months ago that there were some personal effects my parents had left me. He’d never said what, just that he’d send it to me. I’d forgotten in the three months the courier was in transit. Work’s distracted me lately.
There were a couple memory sticks, one labeled DOCUMENTS and the other MEDIA, which I’ll have to sift through in more detail later, and a few miscellaneous personal items — some old jewelry, mostly, with real jewels, not lab-created ones, that my grandmother bought before the UN banned the mining of precious gems. My parents were cremated with their wedding bands, but Mom left me her engagement ring. It was in the package too. It’s so beautiful. My parents were the perfect couple.
Other than that, all that was in the package was an old-fashioned key on a long chain. Who uses those anymore? This one was really old; its silver plating is pretty tarnished. I have no idea what it could open.
The key was wrapped in a piece of paper containing a brief note from my father:
Dearest Merilyn,
The key which I have bequeathed to you, my only child, is a family heirloom. Cherish it. It has been passed down through the family for nearly two hundred years now, since it first came into our possession through your great- great- great- great- great- grandfather, Randolph. Remember, I used to tell you the family legends about him as a child? He was an eccentric man.
The key is shrouded in legend and mystery, and is said to be an object of strange power. It’s been kept covered and locked away for the most part. You know that I lived my life as a rational man, but I would occasionally take the key from its place of storage, and as I held it in my hands, I swear I could feel some otherworldliness about it. I will admit, it frightened me.
Do with it as you please, but be careful, and keep in mind that it belongs to the Carters. Don’t give it away unless you must. As my father told me, and his told him: “This is the key to our past. Keep it close to your heart.”
I don’t know what to make of that, but unlike Dad, I’m going to take that advice literally and wear it around my neck on the chain.
CATEGORIES: FAMILY, LIFE | TAGS: PARENTS, PERSONAL NOTES, THE SILVER KEY | SHOW AUTOGENERATED LINKS
________________________________________________________________
ENTRY 11,246: LONELINESS