BEAST OF THE WOODS

Chapter 14

One day, a design was presented at a status meeting and it had the face of my remote friends, "Winterlong," looking slack and haggard. The cat-thing with pigeon legs meowed and Winterlong's face contorted into a meow.

I was shocked. I had just talked to him that morning.

After the meeting, I took Leer aside. Leer was wearing a ridiculous pink jacket made of living shark scales that Scarskirt had given her. She had been parading around in it all week, delighted with her office mate's castoffs.

"That was Winterlong," I said. "Butchered."

Scarskirt came up behind us without warning. She spoke before Leer could reply.

"Don't be ridiculous or paranoid," Scarskirt said. She laughed, but it was not her pretty laugh. It was more like a horsehead laugh. Her eyes were wide and bright and the blade of her smile cut me.

"You're imagining things," Leer said, staring at Scarskirt. "That wasn't Win- terlong. Not really." But her eyes were moist and her voice was thin and sad.

Winterlong's personal effects showed up on Scarskirt's desk soon after.

"He had no relatives," Scarskirt explained at the next status meeting, batting her eyes at Slumber, who made a sound like the world's laziest o****m.

The First of My Proactive Efforts

Once, when things were still good, Leer and I had shared beetles. We had even created a few just for fun. At lunch, we would sneak out behind the company building with a blanket and sit on the little hill there, looking out onto a ravaged landfill heavy with the skeletons of vultures and then, beyond that, the city in all its strange mix of menace and vulnerability. The grass was yellowing rather than dead. A wiry tree stood on the hill at that time. We would eat crackers and old cans of shredded meat, the smell in that context almost unBeastably tantalizing.

After lunch, we would unlock the cases containing our beetles. The shining green-and-crimson carapaces would open like the lids of eccentric jewelry boxes to reveal their golden wings, and we would release them into the world.

Those beetles contained every joyous thing we had ever known, and we loved to watch them fly out into the distance.

"My father's dry laugh!" I would shout.

"My mother's mock frown!" Leer would reply.

"The color of the faded cover of my nursery rhyme book!"

"The taste of real potato soup!"

"The feel of thousand-thread-count clean sheets!"

"The ache of muscles after playing stick ball!"

Our voices would get softer and softer until I was whispering things like "The smell of my father's aftershave when he reached down to hug me."

Then we would stand there, trailing off into silence, and get so much satisfaction out of wondering who would find them and what impact they would have on their discoverers. Sometimes we would even have tears in our eyes.

I can remember Leer saying once, "This hill makes me happy."

So it was that when I decided to become proactive in the midst of my worsening situation, I persuaded Leer to join me on the hill, "for old time's sake."

The grass was mostly gone by then and the tree, too. Earthworms writhed and died in the n***d dirt. The day was cold and gray, and the city did not Beast looking at. The muffled sound of explosions, the smells of smoke and intense rot, told the story well enough. We stood there and turned our backs on the city, looking up at the company building and searching for glimpses of the behemoth grub, lost in the low-lying clouds.

"What has happened, Leer?" I asked her. "I haven't changed. I'm still the same as I ever was."

Leer refused to look at me. She stood with arms folded and stared into the blank windows in front of her. On this day, she had revisited her true form. There was no artifice to her.

"You're imagining things," Leer said.

"Like I imagined Winterlong's face," I said.

"Yes," she said, but so quietly I almost couldn't hear her.

"Leer, I know things have changed. It's not my imagination. We all used to be so close."

"Do you know," Leer said, "how much I hate this place? I hate my job. I hate being here. And I hate the world out there."

I shuddered at that. To think of the past, the distant past, before all of this - she was right. Who could Beast it? Sometimes I wondered if we had been sending out those beetles not to help others but to help get rid of the horrible weight of happy memories.

"I know you hate it," I said. "I've known that for a while. I'm not stupid. But what does that have to do with me?"

Leer said, "Why do you fight it? Why do you care about any of it?"

"In the old days, we were all friends," I said.

"It can't be that way anymore. It's just work."

"But why?"

Leer just shrugged.

I think I started to cry then.

Leer took pity on me and said, "It'll be better. It'll be better, I'm sure of it. When we're under Slumber. Then it will all be fine."

By then, we had both noticed the Mord coming up the hill. He was larger than I remembered and his thick fur had a golden brown luster to it. His eyes and fangs stood out more.

The Mord wasn't walking up the hill. The Mord was levitating up the hill, effortless.

I expelled my breath all in a rush.

Leer blanched and a look of terror came over her face.

"I couldn't Beast to be disconnected from the worms," she whispered to me. "And Mord can read lips."

The Mord settled down in front of us. Even sitting on the incline, he was taller than us, and his shadow unfurled itself across us and across the entire top of the hill. I had the curious sensation of seeing his human face superimposed over his animal features, for just a second.

Then I caught a hint of

movement behind him, at the bottom of the hill. Scarskirt stood there, her arms folded, her legs apart, sentinel-silent.

Leer looked me in the eyes and said, "We don't want you here. We aren't the same. You've changed. You don't do good work anymore."

The Mord let out a roar that pushed its blood-shot, crazed eyes half out of their sockets and pressed my hair flat against the sides of my head. In the Mord's breath I could smell a thousand different kinds of rot. I could smell the stench of the entire company.

Ad Hoc Meetings, Further Abnegating Process

Soon after the encounter with the Mord, my Manager began to visit me for reasons other than to ask her perpetual question. She would burst in near the end of the day and begin to rant, spittle flying from her mouth. Sometimes the language would be foreign to me. Sometimes I could understand the words but the context was incomprehensible. Other times, there would be no words, just shouts and shrieks and grunts.

My Manager's body would contort during these meetings, like a wet rag being wrung dry. She had become impossibly thin so that her eyes were cavernous in her face. The smell of wet burning plastic clung to her. Her hair had fallen out and she always wore a different wig, some of them living and some of them dead.

"I don't know how to help you," I would tell her, genuinely concerned about her. In the context of my current situation, I thought she was, if not a friend, then at least not an enemy.

Those of my spy beetles that had survived the change of purpose had recorded a variety of images in the myriad halls and passageways of the third floor. One of the most arresting involved my Manager. I had seen her, pensive and quietly weeping, walking across a cracked marble floor, only to stop and give out a cry of surprise. For hunching toward her with wet abandon was the fish with her face, and in that moment as the beast drew near, I saw an image that haunted me: of my Manager's shock registering simultaneously on two identical faces. I am sure this is the first time she knew of the discontinuation of the fish project.

As for the ad hoc meetings, she would invariably storm out of my office and my unease would become chronic, for I knew that I had been unable to give her any kind of solace.

Perhaps the only solace would have been for Slumber to be sucked back up into the distance of the perpetual clouds ringing the behemoth company grub, never to return.

Taking Further Steps

My beetles continued to bring me information in a halting fashion, but most of it just depressed me more. One report I watched while home at my apartment showed Scarskirt hunting down the fish project and stabbing it to death. Her knife sliced down, up, down, up, down as the fish tried to get away from her ever more slowly, spurting a thick green blood. The look on Scarskirt's face was as beatific and composed as during one of our status meetings. When the fish lay still, great ridges of exposed flesh quivering, Scarskirt reached forward and hacked off the copy of the Manager's face. Then she hunched down and showed it to my beetle, so I would get a good look at it, dripping, pale, and rubbery. She was smiling, of course.

After seeing this, my stress level went up exponentially. I grew so afraid I took to carrying weapons. I jury-rigged giant rhinoceros beetles into simple projectile weapons that fired either the remnants of less-fortunate beetles or old-fashioned shrapnel I'd found in the cathedral ruins. I made dung beetles into moldy grenades, using a liquid wrung out of my message bats as the fuel. I put up zones of foul-smelling molds outside my office, to discourage fleshand-blood visitors. I devised subtle camouflage for myself, coating myself in the same fireflies that lined my walls, so that it was not always clear if I was in the office or not.

"Remember when" became how I started every conversation with my fellow employees during status meetings, although they did not like it. Scarskirt became openly contemptuous and Leer followed her lead. Scarskirt goaded Leer to send beetles to lazily, almost toyingly, attack my office defenses so that I would be forced to expend resources repelling them.

"Everything will be fine," Scarskirt would reassure me in the breakroom in the morning as I kept my distance.

In the afternoon, she would walk by me in the hall as I flinched away, and say loudly, "Why are your messages so abusive?" even though I had not communicated with her.

Leer by contrast would be professional when I bumped into her on my way to the bathroom, but with the kind of professionalism that one despises in a supposed friend. She was changing her appearance three or four times a morning by then. Sometimes she would give me a sickly half-smile, as if she had been caught in a monstrous lie.

One day I could have sworn I heard a sighing sound coming from the darkness that was the high ceiling of my office. The ceiling almost seemed alive. I told myself I was paranoid, but that afternoon I felt a vast wind and a huge black manta ray detached itself and flew out of my door and into the shadows. Such a creature was beyond Scarskirt's skill level, or even Leer's. It had to be reporting back to the Mord.

I now saw the Mord's almost unrecognizable features on the flounder's back at least twice a day. Those huge eyes stared out at me with some unrecognizable passion emblazoned on them. Sometimes the Mord would speak and say in a gravelly voice, "You never loved your manager" or "You should leave Scarskirt alone." Other times I intuited a pleading, pained look on his face as he murmured things like "Help me. Help me, Savante."

But I no longer trusted him.

How could I?