Kraken wiggled her fingers.
Dharthi took her hand, stepped up into the GEV, realized how exhausted she was as she settled back in a chair and suddenly could not lift her head without the assistance of her shell. She wondered if she should have hugged Kraken. She realized that she was sad that Kraken hadn’t tried to hug her. But, well. The shell was sort of in the way.
Resuming her chair, Kraken fixed her eyes on the forward screen. “Hey. You did it.”
“Hey. I did.” She wished she felt it. Maybe she was too tired.
Maybe Kraken was right, and Dharthi should see about working on that.
Her eyes dragged shut. So heavy. The soft motion of the aircar lulled her. Its soundproofing had degraded, but even the noise wouldn’t be enough to keep her awake. Was this what safe felt like? “Something else.”
“I’m listening.”
“If you don’t mind, I was thinking of naming a tree after you.”
“That’s good,” Kraken said. “I was thinking of naming a kid after you.”
Dharthi grinned without opening her eyes. “We should use my Y chromosome. Color blindness on the X.”
“Ehn. Ys are half-atrophied already. We’ll just use two Xs,” Kraken said decisively. “Maybe we’ll get a tetrachromat.”
JOE R. LANSDALE
Prolific Texas writer Joe R. Lansdale has won the Edgar Award, the British Fantasy Award, the American Horror Award, the American Mystery Award, the International Crime Writers’ Award, and six Bram Stoker Awards. Although perhaps best known for horror/thrillers such as The Nightrunners, Bubba Ho-Tep, The Bottoms, The God of the Razor, and The Drive-In, he also writes the popular Hap Collins and Leonard Pine mystery series—Savage Season, Mucho Mojo, The Two-Bear Mambo, Bad Chili, Rumble Tumble, Captains Outrageous, Devil Red, and Hyenas—as well as Western novels such as Texas Night Riders and Blood Dance, and totally unclassifiable cross-genre novels such as Zeppelins West, The Magic Wagon, and Flaming London. His other novels include Dead in the West, The Big Blow, Sunset and Sawdust, Act of Love, Freezer Burn, Waltz of Shadows, The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels, Leather Maiden, Deranged by Choice, and Edge of Dark Water. He has also contributed novels to series such as Batman and Tarzan. His many short stories have been collected in By Bizarre Hands, Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back, The Shadows, Kith and Kin, The Long Ones, Stories by Mama Lansdale’s Youngest Boy, Bestsellers Guaranteed, On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks, Electric Gumbo, Writer of the Purple Rage, Fist Full of Stories, Steppin’ Out, Summer ’68, Bumper Crop, The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent, Selected Stories by Joe R. Lansdale, For a Few Stories More, Mad Dog Summer and Other Stories, The King and Other Stories, Deadman’s Road, an omnibus, Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal, Shadows West (with John L. Lansdale), Trapped in the Saturday Matinee, and High Cotton: the Collected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale. As editor, he has produced the anthologies The Best of the West, Retro Pulp Tales, Son of Retro Pulp Tales, Razored Saddles (with Pat LoBrutto), Dark at Heart: All New Tales of Dark Suspense (with wife Karen Lansdale), The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners, the Robert E. Howard tribute anthology, Cross Plains Universe (with Scott A. Cupp), Crucified Dreams, and The Urban Fantasy Anthology (edited with Peter S. Beagle). An anthology in tribute to Lansdale’s work is Lords of the Razor. His most recent books are a new Hap and Leonard novel, Dead Aim; The Thicket; The Ape Man’s Brother; and a big retrospective collection, Bleeding Shadows. He lives with his family in Nacogdoches, Texas.
Here he sweeps us along with a man who is wrenched out of his proper place and time and thrown headlong into another world, one that proves even more dangerous than going down with the sinking Titantic …
The Wizard of the Trees
JOE R. LANSDALE
I AM HERE BECAUSE OF A TERRIBLE HEADACHE. I KNOW YOU will want more of an explanation than that, but I can’t give it to you. I can only say I was almost killed when the great ship Titanic went down. There was an explosion, a boiler blowing, perhaps. I can’t say. When the ship dove down and broke in half, I felt as if I broke in half with it.
An object hit me in the head underwater. I remember there was something down there with me. Not anyone on the ship, not a corpse, but something. I remember its face, if you can call it that: full of teeth and eyes, big and luminous, lit up by a light from below, then I was gasping water into my lungs, and this thing was pulling me toward a glowing pool of whirling illumination. It dragged me into warmth and into light, and my last sight of the thing was a flipping of its fishlike tail; and then my head exploded.
Or so it seemed.
When I awoke, I was lying in a warm, muddy mire, almost floating, almost sinking. I grabbed at some roots jutting out from the shoreline and pulled myself out of it. I lay there with my headache for a while, warming myself in the sunlight, then the headache began to pass. I rolled over on my belly and looked at the pool of mud. It was a big pool. In fact, pool is incorrect. It was like a great lake of mud. I have no idea how I managed to be there, and that is the simple truth of it. I still don’t know. It felt like a dream.
With some difficulty I had managed a bunk in steerage on the Titanic, heading back home to my country, the United States of America. I had played out my string in England, thought I might go back and journey out West where I had punched cows and shot buffalo for the railroad. I had even killed a couple of men in self-defense, and dime novels had been written about me, the Black Rider of the Plains. But that was mostly lies. The only thing they got right was the color of my skin. I’m half-black, half-Cherokee. In the dime novels I was described as mostly white, which is a serious lie. One look at me will tell you different.
I was a roughrider with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and when it arrived in England to perform, they went back and I had stayed on. I liked it for a while, but as they say, there’s no place like home. Not that I had really had one, but we’re speaking generally here.
I struggled to my feet and looked around. Besides the lake of mud, there were trees. And I do mean trees. They rose up tall and mighty all around the lake, and there didn’t seem anything to do but to go among them. The mud I wouldn’t go back into. I couldn’t figure what had happened to me, what had grabbed me and pulled me into that glowing whirlpool, but the idea of its laying a grip on me again was far less than inviting. It had hauled me here, wherever here was, and had retreated, left me to my own devices.
The mud I had ended up in was shallow, but I knew the rest of the lake wasn’t. I knew this because as I looked out over the vast mire, I saw a great beast moving in it; a lizard, I guess you’d call it. At least that was my first thought, then I remembered the bones they had found out in Montana some years back and how they were called dinosaurs. I had read a little about it, and that’s what I thought when I saw this thing in the mud, rising up gray and green of skin, lurching up and dipping down, dripping mud that plopped bright in the sunlight. Down it went, out of sight, and up again, and when it came up a third time it had a beast in its mouth; a kind of giant slick, purple-skinned seal, its blood oozing like strawberry jam from between the monster’s teeth.