Kzine Issue 3 Read online

He shook his head. ‘Your father is not dead.’

  I frowned. ‘Papa?’ A surge of hope struggled to the surface. I dropped beside his body and knelt. ‘Papa?’ I felt his jugular vein for a pulse. I must have pressed too hard; I eased up. I couldn’t feel anything. ‘I-I don’t—’ I stared at the alien’s face on the screen.

  He raised his voice. ‘Remove it now, Aurora.’

  Papa wasn’t moving. He looked so… dead. Hot tears drained from my eyes. My fingers twitched. I reached for the knife, even as the muscles in my arm writhed disobediently. A strangled gasp escaped, and I sobbed as my hand closed on the wooden handle. I will never forget the sound of the blade leaving his flesh.

  ‘Open the door,’ the alien messenger said. ‘Allow me to help.’

  I choked, staring at the blade in my hand. The blood ran from it in thick gobs and splattered Papa’s shirt.

  ‘No,’ I breathed. ‘You’ve done enough.’

  I was on my feet. My palm pressed flat against the scanner. The bolts slid back and the door swung open.

  The messenger’s thin lips parted to speak, and what looked like a bewildered expression creased his smooth brow. But it didn’t last long.

  I plunged the knife into one glistening black eye and drove it with both hands as hard as I could. I remember there was screaming—but it hadn’t come from him. I shrieked with everything in me, all the fear and rage and confusion tangled and messy and roaring out of me as the black orb popped, splashing, as the blade of the knife pierced whatever kind of brain the alien had behind his eye, as he toppled over and I fell on top of him with an unyielding grip on the knife, the same blade that had killed my father.

  I grunted, my hands covered in thick black mucus. I stared down at the grey face. Frozen, it gazed up into the night sky, one eye intact but lifeless, unable to blink away the rain, the other deflated and wrinkled around the blade in its hollow socket.

  As if in a dream, I heard an impossible barking sound behind me. Papa was trying to cough, but blood pooled in the way, garbling his efforts.

  ‘Papa?’ I released the knife and crawled back inside, moving behind him and lifting his head onto my knees. ‘Papa, can you hear me?’

  He coughed and blood trailed from the corners of his mouth. His chest heaved, gushing life from his open wound. ‘Aurora… Baby?’

  ‘I’m here, Papa. Right here. You’re going to be all right.’ I wiped my hands on my shirt, but the black mucus clung to my skin like a fungus. I had to find something to wipe it off—and to stop Papa’s bleeding, apply pressure to the wound.

  A strained chuckle passed his bloody lips. ‘Just a branch… knocking… and all this.’ He coughed hard. More blood spilled out.

  ‘Papa…’ I could tell his injury was severe, but he was talking, and that had to be a good sign. ‘I’ll call the doctor, and she’ll—’

  ‘No—’ he rasped, his eyes rolling up to meet mine. ‘No doctor… too late for that.’ Again he chuckled, weak and strained. His head rocked side to side. ‘Oh, Aurora… a fool’s death… for an old fool. I’m sorry… so sorry—’ He coughed in a violent fit.

  My tears came all at once, blurring my eyes and streaking my cheeks. I could not speak.

  ‘Just the wind…’ Papa gasped, his chest heaving with the effort to breathe. ‘Just the wind.’ He smiled sadly up at me. ‘There wasn’t anybody there—’

  Thunder shook our small farmhouse to its foundation. Then lightning struck down, and we lost power. Papa lay still, breathing shallow, and I sat with his head in my lap, caressing his cool, moist forehead in the darkness. I don’t remember how long I stayed with him.

  But I became aware of my hands, that I was rubbing them hard against the slick floorboards. The strange black mucus remained. And it was spreading. Already, the stuff had climbed to my elbows. I could only stare. My stomach heaved at the sight of it.

  How was this possible?

  Stifling a sob, grimacing as my fingernails dug into tender flesh, I scratched and tore at the sticky black. But it was no use. The mucus was like tar, holding fast to my skin. And it continued to creep up my arms and shoulders as if the scrubbing had awakened it somehow, catalyzing it into action.

  I clawed at my neck, my jaw, my cheeks as the mucus slithered along. I became a victim of my imagination. In my mind’s eye, I could see the stuff seeping into my mouth, my nose, my eyes and ears, and I was powerless to prevent it. I shrieked until my ragged throat allowed no more sound to escape.

  Then everything was still.

  I gazed down at Papa’s head in my lap, his eyes closed, his mouth sagging open like he was sound asleep—only for the first time in my life, he wasn’t snoring loud enough to wake the neighbors, five kilometers away. He was still breathing. He hadn’t heard me scream.

  I watched my hands glide to his wound, drawn to it somehow. My palms met the warm pool of blood and pressed downward. I don’t know why. I don’t remember what thoughts were going through my mind. It was as empty as the vacuum of space. But I remember the warm sensation that tingled down the surface of my arms. It felt like sunlight.

  Papa’s eyes stirred, opened. He inhaled deeply and frowned at his belly where the blood had flowed moments ago.

  ‘Aurora?’ He coughed, his lungs now clear. ‘What’s happened?’

  His big, strong hands touched mine, gently removing them from his wound. Only it wasn’t there anymore. Just the blood stains remained, the only evidence that he had been impaled on his own knife.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ he gasped, squeezing my hands. He looked up at me.

  The light in his eyes dimmed. His smile faded.

  ‘Aurora…’ He swallowed, struggling with his words. It wasn’t that he couldn’t speak. He just didn’t seem to know what to say. ‘Your skin…’ Something akin to horror retracted in his eyes.

  ‘I need to wash,’ I said in a hollow voice.

  I set the back of Papa’s head on the floor and staggered to the bathroom, reeling as if my legs were no longer my own. Behind me, a flash of lighting flared through the open door, briefly illuminating my path. I turned sharply and stumbled into darkness, my knees knocking into the cupboard under the sink, my hands groping for the cold steel handles. They squeaked, and water hissed into the basin. I pumped both palms full of liquid sanitizer and scrubbed at my hands, rubbing the lather up my arms, my shoulders, my neck. Even my face.

  I rinsed the soap from my skin and shut off the water. I dried myself with a soft blue towel.

  I could see it: an aquamarine-blue, Papa’s favorite color.

  The power was out; there were no lights other than the occasional flash of lightning behind me, flaring down the hallway in a blast of white.

  But I could see in the dark.

  I blinked, staring into the mirror.

  My eyes—large, glistening black orbs—stared back.

  THE HORRID MUSIC OF THE HYDROGEN BAND

  by Don Norum

  ‘Raymond? Anyone here?’

  Victor tapped a hand against the metal frame of the barred door to the Special Collections stacks and looked around at the glass waiting area. He felt a little bit shitty doing this. Not bothering Raymond Zimmerman – they went back a ways – but raising his voice in a library. He felt like Sister Chilton would be coming at him with the ruler any second now.

  The electronic lock gave a chirrup of approval and the door swung open – wooden, hollow core, wouldn’t you know. Spend a mint on the locks and framing and then the contractors grab a door off the truck at Lowe’s.

  ‘Victor! Come on in.’ Victor sidled in sideways past Zimmerman’s broad, grinning frame and looked around the restoration lab at the Harrison Smalls Special Collections Library.

  Waist-high lab benches and work tables lined half of the perimeter with thin archipelagoes sticking out into the middle of the room. Beakers of reagents and washes queued up on shelves above binocular microscopes and sterilizing autoclaves, spectrum analyzers and flatscreen monitors.

  The
other side of the room looked more like an artist’s shed. Flat panels of acid-free cardstock hung in wire-frame cradles, muted pastel colors of orange, gray, and dusky blue. Spools of thread wound onto the upraised prongs usually used for drying test tubes or beakers, a peg-board hung with mallets and chisels, flat knives, spatulas and leather awls, and several stained oak book presses with gathered signatures aligned between their jaws.

  Zimmerman walked over to his current project, a leather-bound ledger the size of a telephone book with brilliant crimson illumination scrolling around the margins. The spine had decayed and cracked apart, and he had been taking advantage of the temporarily unbound state to place the volume in a digitizing stand, recording multi-megapixel images of each and every page as he slowly, painstakingly stitched the book back together.

  ‘What can I do for you, young man?’

  ‘I was wondering if you had any old astronomy or astrology textbooks.’

  ‘Not studying for the quals, are you?’ A broad smile split his face beneath a close black haircut, one triangular shock of white above the left eye. He was a compact man who’d found his way to Virginia from Canada, a perfect candidate for ursine adjectives, saved by a certain grace.

  ‘No, I’m looking for any old mentions of eclipses, alignments, maybe a meteor if I’m lucky. That sort of thing.’

  Zimmerman looked up at the ceiling and thought.

  ‘So you’re not really looking for a textbook, then.’

  Victor looked at him, head to his shoulder like a bird.

  ‘First textbooks came along maybe fifteenth century,’ he explained, ‘and they were primarily dreadful little religious-philosophical-mathematical works – mathematical as in Platonic solids, not the music of the spheres. No observation. You’d be better off with, let’s see,’ he put one white-linen gloved finger very close to, but not touching, his lips, and continued, ‘travelogues or diaries. The trick, of course, is that there wouldn’t be a mention of them in those terms, nor probably much of a table of contents at all.’

  ‘Any chance?’

  ‘There should be. After all, this could be the perfect opportunity to try out the new OCR software. Show how the digitization helps with traditional archival-sort research. Yes, I think that I can help you out with this here. Send me a list of search terms, any historical terms that wouldn’t be obvious to the layman,’ Zimmerman said as he turned his gaze back to the delicate bibliopegic repair of the monastic record-book, digital camera slowly panning across the layout and adding its images to the database’s terabytes, ‘and I’ll get on it forthwith.’

  ‘Awesome. Thanks a bunch.’

  Zimmerman nodded and waved a hand, reabsorbed into his delicate work.

  So. That was something at least. He wasn’t that certain of this new search idea, much less of his chances of finding any usable events in the record that hadn’t already been done to death (had to be a fresh one, because that infernal Daaniken again had soured so many of the old standbys), but it was something still.

  *

  Cynicism and doubt aside, he tried to be a good scientist, and as a good scientist he intended to do his best to make the class an interesting one. Somewhere down there had to be an historical account that would make the students sit up. Not the Bayeaux Tapestry, because they’d learned about Halley’s comet in grade school. Most eclipses were old hat - Connecticut Yankee and all that. The 1054 Supernova looked like it had been a misinterpretation of the anthropological data - and God knew he didn’t want to open that kettle of fish on the first day. And SN 1572, Tycho’s Supernova, that failed to add anything of the ‘archaeo’ element.

  Monday morning, before class started, (he hadn’t found much of anything in the stacks, although he had left a note with Zimmerman to let him know if there was anything that might turn up in the paper records still being computerized), Victor stopped by Professor Katarina Khovanskaya’s office.

  ‘Is the telescope almost ready?’

  He flipped through the e-mail he’d printed off from the physical plant people.

  ‘Almost. They’re moving the new detector assembly into the instrumentation room this afternoon, and I’ll be down there this evening making sure the cryostats are operating at peak.’

  ‘Will you be ready to start on the eighth?’

  ‘Maybe a few days before, if all goes well. If the signal discrimination is as good as designed, we might not have to switch to the secondary dish. That’ll shave a day or two off of things.’

  Professor Khovanskaya mulled it over and nodded.

  ‘Good. I’m looking forward to seeing some data come in. If you don’t mind, I was thinking I might take one of the first shifts.’ She smiled and rolled her shoulders. ‘It’s been a while since I’ve gotten out in the field, such as it is.’

  She raised an eyebrow at him beneath her graying black hair. Victor shook his head and raised his hands a bit.

  ‘Fine by me. I should be around the offices, if you need me for anything with the mechanics.’

  ‘Good, good. See you then.’

  He nodded and got up.

  ‘Oh -’ He turned.

  ‘Good luck with your class.’

  *

  He stopped off at the undergraduate library, open twenty four hours a day, on his way back from the corner convenience store with his nightly coffee, to check his e-mail. Ignoring the sidelong glares from the University computer advisor-on-duty about his steaming cup beside the keyboard, he clicked up a message from Zimmerman.

  Checking the clock in the lower right of the screen, he saw that he still had time to make it that evening, if the man on door duty didn’t object to his dishabille.

  *

  Zimmerman walked into the restoration room dressed in a modest tuxedo from the reception upstairs and a pair of white linen archivist’s gloves. He carried a glass of deep red wine and a small book-box, not larger than two hands clasped together.

  ‘You found something?’

  ‘Oh, yes, indeed.’ He set wine down on an empty table behind him and unwrapped the string holding the book-box closed. ‘I forgot to check the exhibits themselves when looking for that reference of yours the other day, assuming that any books there would show up in the online catalog.’

  ‘This one didn’t?’

  ‘Turns out they forgot to catalog it as a book. It was entered in as a ‘Bibliographic Artefact’ and forgotten in the case.’ He finished unwrapping the string and opened the box to show Victor.

  The book inside was bound in a pale tan shade of faded leather, with smooth marbling around the gilt lettering on the cover. Arabic. Calligraphic. Victor adjusted his own gloves and, at a nod from Zimmerman, opened the volume.

  Inside the covers were perhaps a hundred pages, semi-translucent with age. The vellum was quite fine indeed, with the barest trace of the hair that had once covered it. Dense, compact words in that flowing script marched across the pages on one side only, pages that turned with a liquid bend and curl that no paper could match. In some places the ink had faded and run, dark brown lightening to a deep reddish hue at the edges.

  ‘It’s amazing.’

  Zimmerman sipped his wine. ‘Indeed. Possibly the finest example of anthropodermic bibliopegy that I’ve ever come across, and a, ah, shall we say, doubly holographic copy at that.’

  Victor looked at him puzzled.

  ‘From the Greek, two compound words,’ Zimmerman continued, ‘meaning human-skin book-binding. See how the covering is thin over the boards? Human skin doesn’t have the same thickness, the same heft to it as cow leather.’

  The air conditioners hummed in the background, drawing cool air up and around the rare books in the room. Victor felt as if he were thrust into a microwave oven, his skin burning from within.

  ‘It’s a manuscript copy, of course, written in the author’s own hand – this was a personal journal. You see how the ink runs in places? There, and there – ‘ his gloved finger grazed past Victor’s still hands to point out a few blurred
diacriticals. ‘A side effect of the time elapsed after writing to binding.’

  Victor pulled his hands back slowly, letting the covers slump to the table like the wings of a bird that had just died in his hands.

  ‘Why would that matter?’ he asked in a quiet voice.

  Zimmerman smiled widely as he drank again, the crimson wine setting off the whiteness of the gloves above black suit, below the head of black hair with a white shock above the left eye.

  ‘Because the journal was written on his own skin. Written as a tattoo, up and down thighs, arms, stomach and chest – all those places where you can peel off a nice rectangle. They burned him as a heretic, of course, but not before – how fortunate for us!’ he laughed, ‘ - flaying him alive.’

  Victor said nothing.

  ‘Of course, of course, you’ll want to study it more. I’m afraid I can’t let you alone with this copy,’ he smiled sympathetically as he folded the box back up around it, ‘or else the Library’ll do to me what they did to this poor bloke,’ Heh-heh-heh, ‘but I have a facsimile here, annotated in Greek.’ A trade paperback, thin enough for his pocket, with the matte cover and glue-binding of the University P-O-D Press.

  Zimmerman went softly through one of the doors at the back of the restoration room that opened onto the deep stacks and Victor watched him through the windowed wall picking his way through the labyrinth.

  When he came back and locked the door after him, they left the room, switching off the lights and hearing the quiet whirr behind them as the door closed and the environmental controls returned to standby. Victor fell into one of the overstuffed chairs scattered around the subterranean anteroom to the Rare Books stacks as Zimmerman turned to him from the foot of the stairs. The sounds of the reception above filtered down, bustling fabric and murmurs of nothingness.

  ‘Hope you enjoy it - I have to go and rejoin the land of the living. Don’t spend all night here – you might want to at least stop by the party. Good food.’ He smiled and ascended the spiraling staircase into the dimly lit night.

  Victor sat for some minutes before opening the book, then sat for some hours as he worked his way through the text, mind aching as he recalled Greek vocabulary scanned in passing years ago as an undergraduate, waves of ague flowing across dura matter as he pieced his third-hand translation together.