Yet my heart beats, but how could it beat if the rot and fumes of my corpse (I dare not say my body) did not feed it abundantly.
—Lautréamont
A soft, heavy mass. The waves of sleep were slowly abating. A weight on his chest. Eb leapt up and the crushing became traction. A pain, too, below his left breast. His eyes and hands fell on the sensitive spot at the same time and he saw the toad. Huge! Looking like a deformed, scaly baby sucking his tit. Its mouth glued to his skin, its eyes closed, savoring the blood that slowly formed little, powdery beads beneath his abdomen’s transparent skin. Eb grabbed it and pulled with all his might; the toad groaned, then let out a piercing shriek. Its body was jumping around now on the shiny floor of the lounge. The buccal parts were still biting flesh, the spur planted between two ribs, the digestive apparatus rolling around on Eb’s belly. His fingers tried to slip under the band of cartilage around the toad’s mouth. The mass of viscera peeled off with an obscene sucking noise and exploded on the ground, spreading an orange liquid mixed with blood and digestive juice.
Eb was white, the room blue. Death orange.
The wound was not too painful, being there in a zone that the animal had been careful to anesthetize with its tongue to conceal its crime.
A little irritated by the animal’s intrusion in his sleep, Eb slipped on his insulated suit, unlocked the waterproof door and went out into the refrigerated corridor.
After driving for about an hour, he saw the first meat districts far off in the distance. They emerged, ice and mist, like gigantic red tongues hung on giant hooks. Eb smiled. He was thinking the species was extinct, the whole herd of muscles and bone vanished into thin air! By now he was twenty kilometers away from the first frozen rooms of the kitchen. He loaded the truck bed. He always tried to put in as much as possible, but it did not make any difference. The meat districts in the highest locations, at the summit of the red mountain, always ended up falling on the way back. If Eb noticed the fall, he stopped, loaded them back in… and they fell again a few meters farther on. Useless. He could not save time for the next trip.
Eb closed the door of the refrigerated corridor behind him and sat in the closest chair. He was exhausted.
“Well, boy, not too tired?” Paul Rigutti, his boss, the grand butcher of the colony, entered the kitchen in his white overalls.
Colony is perhaps going too far. There were the Stanfords, Danny Ucello, the Grubers, Lise Berton, Paul Rigutti and Eb. The sim-villas planted underground, minuscule habitation complex in the flanks of the planet-ship. And up above, very far away, at the end of a twenty-kilometer pole, in his panoramic cockpit, the pilot, Crazy Hawk.
But madness was lying in wait for them all. Ever since the walls started liquifying and the mutant animals, all kinds of hybrids, invaded the bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens and offices.
“A toad almost killed me,” muttered Eb.
“But it didn’t.”
“I killed it first.”
Rigutti burst out laughing. “Come on, you know that all these ghouls don’t exist. It’s the space sickness, sonny, nothing else. Let’s go, it’s work time.”
“And if they really were coming from the surface, modified by the powerful radiations emanating from the stars?”
“There’s no more air on the surface.”
“That’s what they say.”
“Listen, I can’t be wasting time. The meat has to be cut up and sent to the others. We’re already a week late… so no stalling.”
Eb had the fleeting vision of a steak, three fingers thick, well done, dripping with cognac sauce.
He immediately followed his boss.
Lise Berton was roasting under a battery of infrared lamps. A pudgy homunculus walked on her body, licking her sensitive parts. She sat up abruptly and the homunculus crashed onto the floor. Its thin legs broke, sounding like dry wood, crushed by the abdominal mass. It started screaming.
“Shut up, half-pint, you only have to behave yourself!”
Lise Berton was angry. Despite the pleasure she could get, she hated all this crap coming from the surface. The homunculus wailed louder than ever. She took it by the scruff of the neck and threw it onto the bed. She pushed the potentiometer full blast and lowered the lamps as close as possible to the little being. Its skin instantly turned brown and all its fat began to melt. It tried in vain to crawl on the smooth surface of the bunk. It was vanishing in front of her. Its eyes floated in its sockets; its tongue, charred, jutted out of its mouth like a licorice stick.
Soon there remained only a few bones, buried at the bottom of a brown paper bag.
After throwing the remains of the homunculus in the incinerator, she was disturbed by the hateful and gratuitous act that she had just performed. She had killed coldly, calmly and no emotion affected her. Then she thought what Paul Rigutti kept saying. Space sickness. Now she had proof of what he said: none of these little beasts existed! On the other hand, everyone was becoming whacko. The planet-ship was transforming into an insane asylum.
She suddenly thought of Eb and her chest swelled. “This evening I will have you,” she murmured, “and after such a night you will never again want to go jerk off behind your meat carcasses. If you resist, I’ll kill you… After all, you, too, are, perhaps, a ghoul come from the surface of my sick brain.
“I’ll feel no guilt stabbing you in the heart.”
Lise Berton’s sim-villa was gorgeous. Solid wood furniture and a central chimney with a copper hood. Behind the false windows were three-dimensional representations of misty, humid forests. In the foreground black swans and golden ducks glided on a gorgeous lake.
On the table mouth-watering dishes aroused the salivary glands of the guests. Braised chunks of beef coated with soy sauce, prawns in hot sauce, sauté pork in caramel, exotic fruits and fine wines.
Paul Rigutti was talking with the Grubers in front of the half-open window and Eb almost managed to make out the words, without hearing them, just by their expressions. Louise Gruber was pretending to listen, but was obviously irritated by the conversation. From time to time her gaze was lost among the trees or captured by the clumsy but graceful flight of the palmipeds that populated the lake. Then her skin would slacken, soften; the wrinkles of annoyance and boredom would vanish from her child’s face and an imaginary breeze rustle her long black hair.
Eb turned to Danny Ucello.
“Don’t you think this excess of food, this… waste is a little shameful. Yesterday I had to go twenty kilometers before reaching the first meat districts. Twenty kilometers!”
“The refrigerated corridor is, maybe, a hundred long, Eb. There’s nothing to panic about.”
“And if it’s only twenty one? And if in a year there’s nothing left to eat? What are we going to do?
“I don’t know… ask for help from another colony, maybe.”
“Impossible. You know just as well as I do that you’d have to go to the surface for that.”
“So. There’s a suit. We could use it.”
“And if the other colonies are in the same situation as we are?”
“I’m telling you, Eb, you’re getting on my nerves. This is no time for dark speculations; it’s a party. So drink, get drunk and forget about all that for now; you’ll be okay.”
Lise Berton had come up to them.
“Well now, my dears, what’s wrong? You seem rather serious. Here, drink some punch, you’ll feel better right away.”
Actually at the bottom of the third drink Eb felt a lot better. The food was excellent and the wine delicious.
As always, at Emilia’s urging, the Stanfords did not hang around too long. Behind the pines and oaks, the sun was setting, curdling the lake, enshrouding the swans and ducks with a gold and bronze powder.
The alcohol gradually softened the forms, pasteled the colors, mellowed the sounds. Lise rubbed against Eb uninhibitedly. The Grubers had left, drunk on Paul’s uninterrupted monologue. Paul himself, tipsy on an incredible amount of wine, had set his sights on Danny who listened to him distractedly. Lise’s hands ventured over Eb’s legs, scratching the fabric. Everything was murky. Eb let himself go, empty of all feeling; his senses too dulled to control any reaction. He was surprised to get hard. And when he looked down at Lise’s hands to admire the ballet that she was performing between his legs, he noticed the slug. As big as an arm, it was crawling, drooling, on the red silk cushion that separated them. He sat up abruptly, knocking down Lise, who whimpered while falling onto the carpet.
“Paul, come here! Come and see one of our hallucinations.”
Eb was red. He was shouting. Choking with rage. Paul came up smiling ironically.
Along the path of the slug the carpet was burnt. It was secreting, apparently, some kind of acid. The exposed concrete slowly boiled along the final centimeters of the path.
“Take it, Paul. Since it’s only a hallucination, you’re safe. Take it and throw it in the fire!” He screamed these last words.
Continuing to smile, Paul bent over and grabbed the beast. Then he went slowly over to the fireplace. He dropped the viscous mass in the flames. It squirmed around for a minute, then a greenish cloud exploded and a dreadful stench of mildew invaded the room. Paul turned around, still smiling. He took a few hesitant steps and then fell onto the ground, right in front of Eb.
His right hand was covered in blood.
The ever more numerous mutants invaded all the rooms, jumping from the air vents on their many feet, jabbing their tentacles out of the enamel sinks in the bathrooms.
Emilia Stanford, who had found herself inhaled by huge suckers while she was urinating peacefully, sitting in the common toilets, dared not relieve herself over any kind of opening for a week. She defecated on paper and urinated in a glass. The madness lit up little sparks in her sad eyes. Before going to sleep she had to carefully make and remake her bed several times, trembling at the idea of lying on a flat spider or a ribbon scorpion.
Paul Rigutti, despite the fresh scars that lined his right hand, was still faithful to his ideas. The little beasts were illusions and their impact on reality an artifact of no consequence. The same sparks, however, danced in his eyes as in Emilia’s.
When Eb reached the first meat districts, an uneasy feeling rattled him. Something was not right. He looked around, trying to fix his sight on some anomaly, some modification of the environment. That is how he heard the noises; whimpering sounds punctuated with sucking noises. At the same time he discovered the source of his uneasiness: he could not see his breath. He sprinted the final meters separating him from the butchery rooms and saw the toads, stuck to the red and yellow partitions like odd mountaineers taking a break on the side of a mountain of flesh.
Greasy puddles stained the floor along the lines of rotting carcasses. On the left the wall of the refrigerated corridor was cracked and hordes of deformed animals, mostly toads, were jumping on the floor after breaking through.
The walls of the refrigerated corridor streamed quickly past both sides of the truck. Eb slammed on the brakes at the last minute, his mind tormented by the vision of horror that had just burned his retinas, and the truck rammed into the kitchen door. When Eb got out of the truck, Paul Rigutti arrived, out of breath, cursing him.
“No use panicking, boss. Even if it’s screwed up it doesn’t matter. I only hope that the spacesuit hasn’t been eaten by any of this crap and that our neighbors are drowning in extra food. Otherwise, your damn hallucinations are going to end up getting the better of us. And believe me, you won’t be spared!”
The spacesuit seemed unharmed. Dusty and a little moldy in the creases, but apparently useable.
Emilia, bedridden, tossing about on an ocean of sheets and fever, was unsuccessfully fighting off the assault of imaginary monsters. Her husband had given up dispatching meat in order to take care of her. The neighboring colonies were surely going to be surprised at not receiving anything, but the absence of any kind of communication prevented the possibility of warning them. Louise and Charles Gruber were needed more than ever to receive food coming from the other colonies. In haphazard deliveries, it is true, the food was sent arbitrarily, as if under the command of some crazy computer. If the supply stopped, they would have no choice but to die of hunger. For the time being they could still contemplate survival. Danny Ucello had gone to the end of the refrigerated corridor where the meat carcasses were liquefying. He hoped he could fix the damage, seal the crack. Paul smiled.
“You’re all crazy,” he said while chewing on pieces of rotten muscle. “This meat is excellent.”
Lise Berton had disappeared several days before. She did not even play her role as doctor by coming to Emilia’s bedside. No use counting on her. Eb knew what he had to do.
He felt like he was in a body cast. A nasty feeling just like in those nightmares that rise to the surface of sleep, in which you think you can force yourself to wake up, to move… But this proves impossible and sleep throws out its long tentacles to drag you down into the deep of night.
The exterior door of the airlock opened and Eb stepped on solid ground. While moving forward he imagined himself swallowed by a giant and taking over its motor functions after devouring its internal organs.
Eb, the butcher-diver, performed small, agile leaps, slicing through space under the icy twinkling of distant stars, toward the exit door of the neighboring villas, which stood out farther on like the sentry box of a soldier left alone on duty to guard the planet. That is when he saw the trucks. At that very moment a low hiss pierced his right ear. He looked at the gauge. The pressure was slowly dropping. Immediately he bound toward one of the trucks.
He searched in vain for some kind of door. The pressure was falling dangerously low when he noticed the handle on the roof. Of course, there was an airlock. He was stupid to think he could enter directly into the control compartment. The internal pressure was now practically zero and he felt the suit’s fabric mold his arms, legs and chest. His entire body was growing thinner, barely able to support the weight of his big, round head. He was suffocating. The airlock door was stuck; or rather, he did not know how to open it. He gave up and lied down on the metal carcass, exhausted, waiting for death. And he passed out as the ground gave way under him.
WE ARE ALL CRAZY – The banner was taped over his eyes, just before he sank into unconsciousness.
He regained consciousness in the airlock. The door had closed automatically and the glass screen of his spacesuit had broken when it struck the floor. “Clearly, death denies me,” he thought, trying to smile. He stripped off the suit like a reptile shedding its skin and entered the cockpit.
The commands were simple, even simpler than his truck. There were only buttons to push get it going. He pressed on START. He heard a low humming and the big carcass began shaking. He entered the directions for the nearest colony in the onboard computer and pressed AUTOMATIC PILOT. The truck rattled and the powerful tracks that wrapped around the base of the metal monster kicked up a cloud of dust as they drove the machine forward. Everything seemed so simple! But he was too tired to speculate on the degree of reality of the universe in which he was moving. Sleep swooped down on him like a bird of prey.
When he woke up, a strange idea, a result of the dream he had just had, intruded on his thoughts. In his dream he carried out the same motions as he had in reality: he slipped on the spacesuit and entered the airlock of the sim-villa complex, but when his foot was about to touch the ground of the Earth, he was sucked into a void. There was no more atmosphere around the planet that sliced through the emptiness of space; and he stabilized at a certain height, prisoner of the heavenly body’s attraction, a human satellite accompanying the planet to its unknown destiny. And he did not know, really, how it could have been otherwise. His thoughts were wandering like that when he saw the airlock of the neighboring colony just in front of the vehicle. The truck had stopped, awaiting orders. He pressed DOCK. The truck nudged forward and its nose tilted toward the ground. It was now standing vertical and a green light started blinking. The two airlocks were coupled.
He had just entered the first sim-villa that adjoined the entry lock when a thundering laugh pierced his eardrums.
“So Eb, back already?”
Paul Rigutti waddled up to him, wildly. His hands and face were covered with purulent boils, probably manifestations of the tainted meat that he persisted in gulping down.
“It’s not possible,” Eb thought. “I’m the plaything of a wicked trick!” Overwhelmed by sudden anger tinged with panic, he ran at Paul, at what he hoped would be an illusion. The huge bulk of the fat butcher stopped him clean, as if he had just hit a wall. He passed out, almost happy that it was so.
Emilia was dead, struck down by the fever. Richard Stanford followed her right after plunging a knife straight into his heart. The tragedy had allowed Danny and Lise to feed on fresh meat for a few days. Eb could never bring himself to such extremes. “You’re wrong, boy,” Danny Ucello criticized him, “you only have to forget where these barbeque bits came from and you’ll end up finding them excellent.”
“The hypocrite,” Eb thought, “by refusing to eat I’m leaving him my share and all things considered Danny appreciates my refusal.”
The Grubers were barricaded inside the room where the food from the other colonies arrived. What was really not much for seven was more than enough for two. Paul, who still considered himself the chief, responsible for a colony devoured by the entropic forces from the surface, had tried all means to break down the full metal door. But without explosives every attempt was doomed to failure before it even began. When he moved, a purulent trail marked his path, marking the boundaries of his territory, mingling with those left by the acid drool of the slugs. He gradually lost his human character, becoming gastropod, fungid, mold.
After going round in circles for three days in the sim-villa complex, as well as in his head, and after trying to eat some grilled toads without being able to keep them in his stomach for long, Eb decided to try to visit Crazy Hawk. If an answer to all their problems existed, it could be nowhere else but in the cockpit, on high, twenty kilometers above their heads.
When he tried to enter the elevator, the doors refused to open. Letters lit up on the little screen over the sliding doors: SHOW YOUR AUTHORIZATION FOR A MEETING. He started laughing. “What authorization, goddamn box of sardines, open up!” A mini-storm of lights shook up the screen. THE AUTHORIZATION GIVEN BY THE CHIEF OF THE COLONY: MISTER PAUL RIGUTTI. Eb guffawed. “Mister Paul Rigutti? But he’s completely whacko; he’s liquefying day by day. He’s nothing but a pile of tainted meat!” The lights flashed. SHOW YOUR AUTHORIZATION. GOING UP IS FORBIDDEN TO ALL PERSONNEL NOT OFFICIALLY DELEGATED. Eb realized that it was useless to insist. The long fast had plunged him into a more and more uncontrollable cyclothymic state. He teetered between anger and mad laughter and he went laughing to ask for his old boss’ signature.
“I see that you’re finally in a good mood again,” the boss mumbled. His right hand looked strangely like a leprous stump and had trouble holding the pencil. Eb was a little disgusted, but helped him to keep hold of the piece of wood. And somehow or other the lead moved forward on the white sheet. The jovial hysteria abruptly left Eb’s face.
“Shouldn’t stop eating that putrid crap pretty soon? You’re going to croak, boss. Stop messing around! Look around you for a minute: where have the Grubers gone… and the Stanfords? And all those trails on the ground… and your filthy throat stuffed with vermin.”
Paul smiled. “No use,” Eb thought. “I’m crazy to waste my energy like this.” And he went to the elevator laughing, nervously shaking his pass above his head.
“You and me, Crazy Hawk!”
Going up seemed endless. Hours shut up in that cramped compartment; sometimes letting out a furious burst of laughter, sometimes hammering furiously on the sheet metal walls. He really thought, for a little while, that the ascent would last forever, going up to the boundaries of space, drilling through the skin of the Universe… And the door opened. Crazy Hawk was waiting for him, sitting behind a gigantic console that pulsed green, yellow and red.
“Glad to have you in my cabin, Eb. What is the purpose of your charming visit?”
Disarmed by such a lively introduction, Eb did not know what to say. He mumbled a few incomprehensible words and then flopped into the nearest chair.
“You seem tired, my boy. Space sickness, no doubt. Come, I’m going to give you some good news. The sensors have detected the presence of a hospitable solar system. We are nearing the end of our voyage. Soon we will be in orbit again, married to a new life-dispensing star. Soon we are going to be able to start everything over again from scratch.”
Eb was cradled by the gentle litany flowing from the lips of Crazy Hawk, the android pilot. Looking at the perfect symmetry of his face you could draw no other conclusion.
At that moment the sound of thunder echoed in the room. The lights on the console went haywire and Crazy Hawk went wild on the control levers, like a puppet operated by a puppeteer with Parkinson’s disease.
And all the warning lights suddenly went out. A noise ceased at the same time. A noise that Eb thought was part of the silence until then. A noise that had existed for ages. And suddenly a force field had been broken, freeing the senses to a fury of new stimuli eager for receivers.
A gigantic seabird with an ape-like face was embedded in the broken window of the cabin. It must have struck it head-on, almost on purpose. But Eb was looking beyond and he could make out strange constructions: parallelepiped structures, vibrating and trembling.
Squinting to see better, he noticed some isolated movements and some parts immobile. And he saw with horror that he was watching a city in ruins, teeming with indefinable life. He turned toward Crazy Hawk with a torrential mouthful of abuses and his jaw dropped open.
Crazy Hawk’s flesh was all blistered, covering his clothes in places with strange neuromuscular trimmings. A tie checked with blood and lymph, slipped under his shirt collar; his belt buckle floating like a boat on the flesh of his belly.
“The Earth hasn’t moved,” Eb thought, “but everything has changed. EVERYTHING HAS SNAPPED. They burned the equator, froze the poles… Who are we in this post-Apocalyptic experiment?”
“Everything is false, isn’t it?” he asked, examining the pilot closely. “Reality has just loomed up for the first time before my eyes.”
“What are you talking about, Eb? You’re going crazy; we’re headed for a hospitable solar system… We will be there soon. Look.”
Eb turned around to the window and saw the stars, the inky space where the planet-ship shot out. The bird was still stuck in the cracks of the broken window. Blood stained its golden feathers with fabulous designs. Eb no longer knew what to think.
He nodded to Crazy Hawk while a gust of warm air ruffled the pilot’s hair.
The elevator doors closed behind him.
Danny Ucello was in front of the fireplace, cooking slugs. “Maybe I’ll manage it,” Eb thought. And he ate with his travel companion. Apparently his stomach, though it refused toads, accepted slugs.
Full and sleepy, he lied down on the carpet, refusing any too hasty conclusions… any irreversible step toward madness.
Then Lise Berton’s scream burst into the room.
He ran to her room and was now leaning against the frame of the half-open door, totally winded by the effort. Lise was stretched out on her bed. Several homunculi were scampering on her body, licking her breasts, her sex. But the devotion no longer made sense. Lise was dead. Her innards already sucked dry by a flat spider. The beast’s abdomen was sprawled on her face, its legs wrapped around the occiput like the straps of a carnival mask. A smooth mask, eyeless, mouthless, noseless. White and shorthaired. And under the mask, the head was buried up to the extensible neck in the victim’s mouth, searching for sweetmeats, venomous desserts.
In a final, desperate spurt of energy, Lise’s body braced itself, slackened and crushed an unfortunate homunculus that was now trying to free itself, unsuccessfully, from the mountain of flesh. Its mouth was open in a ridiculous, silent howl. It was suffocating, begging, bawling noiselessly. It was ridiculous. Everything here was ridiculous.
Eb went away bursting with laughter.
The truck had been easy to repair and rolled along quietly. The corridor walls streamed past and Eb seemed pensive.
“Tell me, boss, do you have a cure for space sickness?”
The fleshy mush that could still claim to be called Paul Rigutti turned to him and smiled.
“There’s only one, sonny, you have to believe in Reality. The one and only reality that governs us, that of Faith.”
Eb caught himself smiling. Off in the distance the first meat carcasses appeared.
Jacques Barbéri is a French author of more than fifteen novels and numerous short stories. Thrillers, science fiction, fantasy or the fringes of literature, nothing is off limits to his perpetually mutating imagination. He is also a muscian (with the group Palo Alto), screenplay writer and translator. He can be found on the web at www.lewub.com/barberi.
Michael Shreve is a writer and translator currently living in Paris, France. He can be found on the web at www.dodgytoad.6te.net.