By Ian Kappos
I.
His first night up in the foothills, Devin sat cross-legged opposite Sammy.
Trough planters and square openings in the floor lined them on both sides. The trough planters contained a species of tuber, or so Sammy claimed. In the darkness below the floorboards, he said he was cultivating mushrooms.
“How long was your hold?”
“Five days,” Devin said. He sipped his soup. “The first seventy-two hours were involuntary. They can keep you that long if you say you want to kill yourself.”
“Cops,” Sammy said.
“Cops,” Devin agreed. “Doing their job.”
“Doing their job.”
Bit by bit, the tincture Sammy had mixed into the soup was beginning to help Devin sink more comfortably into his body. He did feel a little nauseous, but this was probably due to imbibing it on an empty stomach.
“Got the on-site doctor to increase the Ativan, so I stayed a little longer.”
Sammy nodded. He had this sage-like nod now. They’d done only surface-level catching up since Devin’s aunt dropped him off that afternoon at the bottom of the driveway. Sammy hardly seemed fazed by the sudden arrival of his old friend.
“Emma broke the lease?”
“Me, too.”
“You, too. You left all your shit?”
“Left all my shit.” It hurt, hearing Emma’s name. “All I have is what I brought.”
Sammy produced a wide smile that reached his eyes. He hadn’t smiled like that even when Devin showed up unannounced. He was a big-boned guy, but he’d grown thin.
“That’s the way to go, man.” He slapped his thigh and got to his feet, making the gaslamp flutter. The barn was far from properly insulated for the coming winter months. Devin hadn’t removed any of his layers.
“I should get you something more substantial,” Sammy said.
“Thanks.”
Sammy retreated into the darkness. Devin listened to the noises he made there and thought about why he’d come. He wasn’t sure how to cast light onto the right words.
When his friend reemerged with a plate of mushrooms, Devin asked, “Do you know of an opposite to divination?”
Sammy chewed, in thought. “You mean not seeing the past?”
“No.” Devin popped a mushroom into his mouth and tried not to taste it. He wanted a path, or at least affirmation that one lay ahead. One without Emma. One he could suffer treading.
They ate in silence. When it became apparent that Sammy had no advice to offer, Devin grew frustrated. Sammy was supposed to have answers. Devin downed the rest of his soup, wincing past the bitterness.
“You can stay here as long as you want,” Sammy said finally. “I don’t have a lot, but if you want to borrow the truck, you can. Go down the road, get what you need. I don’t use it much anymore.”
Devin nodded. “Thanks, man.” At last, the tincture’s effects were hitting him full force.
“If you’re hard up for money,” Sammy continued, “there’s a thing I did when I first moved up here. Kind of a morbid little hustle. The guy and his people are really weird, but…” Sammy chuckled.
“But then—so am I, right?” He let out a cackle.
The laugh rebounded off the murky contours of the barn. A jangling echo, as though Sammy and Devin were trapped inside a tin can.
Not the laugh Devin was used to.
* * *
Devin kept one body in the truck with him, even though the windows had to be up to stave off the cold and the smell would hit him soon. He’d decided against putting it in the truck bed like the others; it was so small and light he feared the wind would take it once they got going. He kept the heat off. It was morning but still dark out.
He drove past the fence and into the fog. The dead animals had begun to just accumulate in the yard; he didn’t need to go out as much to find them. Which was good for gas. Sammy had loaned him the truck but no money. The money came from Parkman.
The fog closed back up behind him in a swirl like flushed toilet water. In the gloom, the cargo resembled any other cargo. Devin readjusted his mask. The smell was hitting him now.
* * *
A Parkman met him at the edge of their property. He didn’t know how many Parkmans there were or if there existed any blood relation. When he came by, he was used to dealing with just the old man himself.
“Whutchu got?” she asked.
Devin pulled a pair of disposable gloves on. He reached over the side of the truck bed and began unloading his delivery, extracting in multiple trips its contents until they were in a pile in front of her.
“Wait,” he said. It hurt to breathe in the chill. “One more.”
He yanked a glove off to open the passenger’s side door. With his gloved hand, he brought out the last of his cargo. He set it to the side of the pile.
The Parkman regarded the final body, eyebrow arched. Unlike the rest, it was swaddled in plastic wrap.
“Three possums,” she tallied, “three cats—small, same litter, I’m guessing—five-ish squirrels, two…and a half raccoons. A deer, mostly eaten. Most of these look better than last time, at least.” The Parkman again studied the carcass beside the heap. She knelt for a closer look.
“Beaver? None this high up,” she muttered to herself. “Fox? Bobcat? Small guy…” She plucked a stick off the ground and prodded it to turn it over.
Devin waited, holding his breath. Not just, he realized, because the breathing pained him.
After a moment, she shook her head and arose, knees cracking.
“Whatever it is,” she said, “don’t think the old man will have use for it.”
Devin let a slow exhale escape through the open edges of his mask, tried to make it soundless. Why had he suddenly not wanted to part with this body?
He cleared his throat. “Okay. How much, then?”
The Parkman gave him a number and he agreed without haggling. She counted out the bills. He received them with his ungloved hand. With the other, he picked up the plastic-wrapped animal and brought it with him back to the truck cab.
Two more Parkmans were already coming down the hill from the depository, each with a dolly. The Parkman he’d spoken with kicked the carcasses into a tighter pile.
Devin started the ignition. No goodbyes.
* * *
He returned to Sammy’s after a long detour to the nearest gas station. As he pulled in, the truck dipped into the embankment bordering the property and struggled to climb out. Soon, snow would replace the sluice. The tread on the tires was all but stripped. All the time Sammy had lived up here by himself, he’d never bought chains.
Along the road back up and around the barn, blue oaks, ponderosas, and Jeffrey pine kept most of the emerging daylight at bay. Emma would have been able to tell him the other trees.
Sammy’s barn stood in the center of the property, solemn and soggy from rain. The small tool shed, once blue but now peeling and off-color like a waterlogged cadaver, sat twenty yards behind it on a hillock. Sammy said he’d “converted” the barn, but Devin didn’t know all the changes made.
No additional lifeless animals had amassed in the time Devin was away.
He stood in the open doorway of the barn, letting his eyes adjust. Gray daylight streaked across the unvarnished floor and rows of doorless trapdoors.
Somewhere in the darkness beyond, Sammy toiled away.
* * *
Stairs along the eastern wall led to the loft where Devin slept. Up there, the barn’s second window, angled to conform to the A-frame, bled wan light across the banister.
Devin hadn’t had the heart to inform his friend that tubers, while capable of sprouting in the dark, needed direct sunlight to actually grow. Emma had taught him that. The single ground-floor window here wouldn’t suffice. Sammy would need, at the very least, some artificial lights. The barn lacked electricity, though.
“I got food,” Devin called into the pitch.
A clatter of clay pots told him Sammy was awake. But he was always awake, it seemed.
His friend emerged, stepping over a trough planter.
“Cool,” Sammy said.
Devin laid the bag of gas station snacks next to the pile of books he kept downstairs to read when there was still daylight. Nearby, a framed picture on a wall—the barn’s single adornment—caught the light. A photograph of a grizzly bear, mouth open in mid-roar, its lower legs engulfed in a blanket of autumn leaves.
He returned his attention to the plastic-wrapped body, turning it over in his hands. It stank despite no visible signs of decay.
“What you have there?” Sammy zigzagged over, minding the gaps in the floor. Teetered up to Devin as if in a dream. Then he bent forward and peered so close at the specimen that his beard grazed it.
From this angle, its short legs and outsized paws, with their indeterminate number of digits, gave the appearance of reaching out for Sammy.
“Hunh,” he said. One of his more overt displays of interest. Still different from the Sammy Devin used to know.
“This was out in the yard like the rest?”
“Yep.”
“They just keep dropping dead?”
“Yep.”
Devin had wrapped it so tight that one of the creature’s eyeballs was flattened against the cling wrap.
Sammy crossed his arms. Seemed to regard Devin’s find with pride.
“Proof,” he said. “Fruits of your labor.”
“This is supposed to happen?” Devin asked. “Animals falling down dead around the barn?”
But Sammy was shaking his head before Devin finished his question. “We’re not supposed to know some things, that’s just how it is. Check out the condition…”
Sammy gripped a corner of the body, startling Devin. He wagged it around as Devin clung on. “Look,” he said. “It’s alive!” He laughed.
It took everything Devin had not to yank it back.
Sammy released the body and clapped the same hand onto Devin’s shoulder. It made Devin want to lay him out. Punch the living shit out of him.
“Soon,” Sammy said, squeezing. “I can tell you feel it coming.”
“Feel what coming?”
Sammy shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “But you’re feeling better, aren’t you?”
The question stumped Devin like a Zen koan.
“Relative to how you felt when you first got here?”
He didn’t want to give Sammy the satisfaction of a gesture of acquiescence. But Sammy seemed to recognize the admission in his eyes. He shook Devin’s shoulder one last time, then removed his hand.
“I poked through some of your texts down here,” he said. “Haruspicy, huh?” Sammy laughed and tilted his head ponderously. “Admit I hadn’t thought of that one. I’m sure you’re onto something.”
He slinked back across the barn to his workspace, which Devin still hadn’t seen up close even though his loft hung directly above it.
“That thing’s got big plans for you!” he called over his shoulder. He followed it up with another one of those unfamiliar, absurd guffaws.
“What are you doing?” Devin called back.
“Back to the project,” Sammy answered, already no longer visible through the shadows.
Everyone had a fucking project around here.
* * *
II.
The lantern went out. It became just Devin and his headache from the carbon monoxide, suspended in the dark.
The passage he’d been reading remained superimposed over the inside of his skull: Following from the liver, the first and most telling step in the process, transition to heart and lungs. Sometimes different anatomies will require their own respective…
“Sammy?” he hollered into the void.
Heavy, percussive sounds from below. Devin never asked what his friend was working on. It was an unspoken challenge to himself: wait until Sammy cared enough to volunteer the information.
“Yeah?”
“My shit went out.”
“Okay.”
How the hell was he working? No light bled up through the floorboards.
“Where’s the propane?” Devin asked. “Is there any propane?” His remaining flashlight had gone out the week prior, and he’d forgotten to snag batteries from the gas station. His phone only had so much juice. Same for the portable charger.
“Um.”
Devin waited.
“Toolshed. Toolshed out back,” Sammy said. “You know it?”
“Yeah,” Devin said.
He sighed and got to his feet. Felt his way to the banister.
* * *
Outside, the nearly full moon and the stars helped only slightly. The trees got in the way. He’d have to use the phone.
He tried getting as far across the yard as he could before conditions forced him to turn on flashlight mode. It wasn’t very far. Six paces out and he tripped over a furred body.
The light bleached the toolshed, transforming it into a crooked tooth. Devin tugged the knob and the door fell open, cracking. It dangled only from the bottom hinge now. Mildew filled his nose.
Shelves lined the walls. Devin glided his phone over them, but movement out of the corner of his eye at the far end of the toolshed caused him to jerk the light in its direction.
Between a cubby hole and a sagging box lay a family of possums. Eight or nine tiny bodies squirmed at the mother, fastened to her torso, feeding. Her eyes were locked onto him.
Emma had once told him it takes several weeks before baby possums can open their eyes.
Alive, Devin thought dully.
“You’re alive,” he said in a low voice.
Without breaking the mother’s gaze, he ran a hand across a shelf until it met a wide cylinder he felt confident was the propane tank.
“Don’t go outside,” he said. “Stay here. Stay away from the barn.”
The mother hissed. Devin retreated.
He tried closing the door to the extent that it could be closed with its remaining hinge. The family would freeze if he wasn’t able to get it back the way he’d found it. The knowledge that he may have put them in mortal danger planted itself in the back of his mind.
He surveyed the door, hanging slightly open still. He might be able to fix it, but the tools would be inside the shed, and Devin felt as though he had intruded upon something sacred. He would have to wait till morning.
Snow began to fall.
* * *
Another trip down the road. Devin didn’t know if he needed the money. He wasn’t particularly hungry. The tank was full enough to last him a little longer. It was perhaps even stupid to be on the road now; snow was coming on heavier, and still the truck had no chains. He found himself hoping something would happen.
Slip, he thought. Careen and bash into the hillside.
Brain yourself.
The corpses were almost all unmarred and young. No evidence of violence, injury, pestilence. As fresh for the world as a body could be without life. He didn’t bother wearing a mask anymore. Or gloves. He imagined Emma chiding him while also goading him on, finding entertainment in his adventurous spirit. But he wasn’t adventurous. He’d never been adventurous. By the time she learned that, though, it was too late and she already cared.
The Parkman driveway was freshly shoveled. The bodies, hardened by death and cold, clattered in the truck bed as Devin pulled up onto the property. Little skulls and little frozen brains. Devin realized he was crying. A valve had been turned on in him, though not all the way.
He wiped his face and stepped out.
A new structure, twelve or fifteen feet tall and at least six wide, had been erected between the depository and the house. At first he thought it was a silo, for grain or wood chips maybe. But as he squinted, the patchwork of fur across its facade sharpened into focus. So that’s what they’d been up to. A statue, or something like it. The beginning of one. Was this part supposed to be a leg?
A Parkman approached as he was hauling the last carcass onto the pile he’d created. A young man this time. Not the old man.
Devin asked, “Where’s the old man?”
“Laid up in bed. The fumes, they…” He seemed to catch himself. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You still have that… one body?”
Instinctively, Devin shook his head.
“Shame,” the Parkman said. “We were talking about it. Who you talked to had it wrong. Old man was interested.”
“Don’t have it,” Devin said, meaning to put a lid on the topic.
The Parkman proceeded to brush off the bodies. He scrutinized each in turn and after a few minutes concluded his appraisal.
“Poison?” he asked.
The question caught Devin off-guard. “No,” he said. His body tensed up.
“What’s your method?”
“No method. I find them.”
“We’re used to knitting the roadkill back to—”
“Not roadkill,” Devin said. “They’re not roadkill.”
He was fuming.
The Parkman regarded him, amused. This only further incensed Devin.
“Fuck you,” he decided to say. “All of you. Tell the old man I said that. Tell him I said he’s a fucking sicko.”
It brought him back, raising his voice. An intoxicant that didn’t inebriate. Just poison. He inhaled hard and fast on his way back to the truck, drinking in the pain of the cold air.
The engine stalled half a dozen times before it finally turned. He threw the vehicle into reverse and peeled recklessly back out onto the road.
“Fuck you,” he said one last time. He realized, driving away faster than he should, that he hadn’t stuck around to collect payment. Fuck it.
* * *
III.
When he got home—could he call it that now?—Sammy appeared straightaway. He seemed animated by a genuine, unadulterated glee.
“Wanna see?” he asked. He was practically bouncing off either foot.
“See what?”
Sammy ushered him along.
Devin cast a glance over his shoulder: the last portion of daylight was spilling through the ground-floor window, moderately bolstered by a rising full moon. He’d spent some time alone in the truck, parked on the side of the road. Mentally reviewing what he’d been putting off. Which would have to wait a little longer now.
He had glimpsed only the crude dimensions, suggested by the occasional lit candle, of Sammy’s living space. A portable stove was kept there; he knew that. Sometimes the smells of Sammy’s elixirs reached him as he lay awake in bed or sat bent over the carpenter desk studying his specimen. He suspected, at times, the smells influenced his dreams.
“Have you ever just wanted to sleep forever?” Sammy asked.
He drew out a lantern, switched it on.
“It’s fine, don’t answer.” Sammy’s voice trembled with excitement. Devin felt a sudden, deep unease. “Question’s unfair. Doesn’t begin to scratch the surface. My bad. I’m just excited.”
Holding the lantern at waist-level, Sammy entered his makeshift quarters. Devin realized part of what had aided the cover all this time was a stable door, apparently spared during Sammy’s renovations.
His friend laid the lantern on a small, unlacquered table. He went to a corner and struck a match. He proceeded along the edges of the space, candle aflame. Gradually, the features of his private area flickered into Devin’s field of vision. Shelves, stacks of books, overturned milk crates, various tools.
Two more sawed-out openings in the floor were notably different from those in the barn’s central area. From them protruded strange vegetation: wood-like bulbs, tall and wide enough that they broke the perimeter of the trapdoors, straining the planks to the point that they’d snapped to allow them through. The bulbs were rough where something had carved into them, making it hard to estimate their original size.
“See?”
But Sammy wasn’t indicating the plants, or vegetables, or whatever the bulbs were. He gestured beyond them, at the wall. Devin peered, but the most he could make out was a bulky shape against the wall, low to the ground.
His friend directed the candle over what he wanted Devin to look at. A piece of furniture, something like a divan but not upholstered, wobbled under the light. It was composed of three or four sanded chunks of the wood-like material, and large enough to accommodate a person of Sammy’s physical proportions.
“A bed?” Devin asked. “This is what you’ve been working on?”
“You don’t think I’ve earned it?” Sammy laughed. The dark circles under his eyes shone like bruises. “When inspiration strikes, you don’t let up till you cross the finish line.”
Devin studied the gentle curves of the bed. It gave a vaguely alien impression. He had to admit it was beautiful.
“That’s not all.” Sammy set the candle atop one of the pruned bulbs, where the dancing light lent it the illusion of animation. He then pulled a long swathe of fabric from a basket and brought it over to Devin.
At first it appeared nondescript: a plain, monochrome length of cloth. Upon closer inspection, however, Devin distinguished the unmistakable pattern of lamella and a gill-like texture unlike any material he had ever come across. Had Emma never been so obsessed with fungi, it might have escaped his notice.
Sammy’s face strained to its fullest capacity in a grin.
“This is made from mushroom?” Devin asked.
Sammy nodded rapidly. “Innovative, right? I’d like to see someone out in the modern world try and reverse-engineer this. There’s no having the right brain for it, though. It’s in the guts. You could tell ’em a thing or two about guts.”
It dawned on Devin that it was likely Sammy hadn’t slept in quite some time. Tucked away in his little workspace, he labored far into the night, every night. Never sparing a moment for rest.
“Feel it,” Sammy implored him.
Devin pinched the blanket. The material was strong, durable. It made him conscious of the empty yet sated feeling in his stomach. So that’s why he had no appetite. Over the course of his stay, he had sustained himself on a fungus that kept his metabolism occupied.
Sammy wrapped the blanket around himself. It enveloped his body, trailing with a flourish to the floor.
“Have you ever wanted to sleep forever?” he asked again. “Or even just for a season?”
“Hibernate? Have I ever wanted to hibernate?”
Sammy tilted his head. “Sure,” he allowed. “Why not.”
Devin’s answer was, of course, yes. But he didn’t share it. Sammy was already as giddy as could be; he hardly needed Devin’s affirmation to feel fulfilled.
A moment passed. Despite his lack of an appetite, Devin felt a strong, urgent impulse to put something in his body.
“Do you have any more of that soup?”
“Let me put the burner on.”
* * *
The liver is the only organ known across the animal kingdom to regenerate itself.
The lightheadedness he got from the carbon monoxide, paired with the effects of Sammy’s concoction, made for a peculiar but potent high that Devin had acquired a taste for during his weeks spent at the barn. He could no longer check his phone to confirm the time; it had died, joining the mass grave of other electronic carcasses. But he estimated about an hour had elapsed since he drank down the soup.
He had two lanterns going on both sides of the carpenter desk. In the center of the desk rested the body of the creature no one had been able to identify. It still stank after all this time, and still showed no sign of rot.
Sure, Sammy. I know a little about guts. It’s not like you’d given me any suggestions. So, haruspicy it was.
The conical head was scaled yet sprouted whiskers above the lips—lips which peeled back not from fangs but from unstained, blocky teeth. The furred midsection boasted a number of conflicting patterns, all tufting outward where they clashed. Six digits, plus maybe a pair of dewclaws, in the front. The hindquarters, long like a rabbit’s, ended, from what he could discern, in stubs more akin to flippers than paws.
So small, the whole thing so small. So tiny and delicate. The most exquisite specimen. Sammy had been right about something.
Devin would be able to tell, if not from the liver then later from the kidneys, how to expunge the memories. Replace them with blankness. How to wipe his slate clean.
Given the creature’s unmapped anatomy, though, would he even know where—how—to start? And why wasn’t he peaking yet? Even the second helping of Sammy’s elixir hadn’t stopped the arguments from ringing in his head.
Her dismayed voice. How he’d yelled.
How he’d fucking yelled.
All the things he had thrown, breaking the plaster. The neighbors on the other side of the wall.
The creature’s eyes gleamed. Did it reach out for him, just now?
He plunged his knife into its abdomen.
Out wafted a green miasma and Devin rocked back in his chair, unconscious before he hit the floor.
* * *
He dreamt of a giant, furry man, shackled to the earth yet standing upright and laughing. In good humor despite the situation. As though he knew something his captors didn’t.
The laugh boomed and boomed.
* * *
A tremendous crash broke his slumber. It came from below. Another great sound followed it, filling the barn, but Devin was too befogged to identify it. Smaller noises came later, wet noises, but by then the sensation had returned, enveloping him.
Warmth.
Gas, fumes, potions.
* * *
His scalpel lay slick on the floor beside the mattress, catching the dim morning light. Snowflakes were on his face. He climbed to his feet, feeling a suspicious sense of rejuvenation despite the cold.
His gaze fell on the carpenter desk. He yelped.
The creature was no longer there.
He shot down the staircase so quickly it was only at the bottom that he noticed the vast level of destruction: the trough planters cloven, spilling dirt onto the planking, the planking itself broken in a vague pattern suggestive of a heavy force having trod across it.
A circle—too broad and too perfectly perforated to have been circumstantial—gaped in the center of the barn floor. But Devin wouldn’t be able to divine its significance just now.
Something else caught his attention.
Most of Sammy’s wall had vanished—had been pulverized—and now lay scattered in splintered chunks across the ground and near Sammy’s half-devoured body. Beyond, snow cascaded onto a yard already layered in it.
Numb, Devin walked over. He leaned against the stable wall and stared, glassy-eyed, at the kaleidoscope of gore his friend’s body had been reduced to. Hunks of flesh scooped out. Insides glittering with frost. Bones camouflaged in frost. A giant claw had mauled his face but left enough intact that Devin could recognize the expression. Ecstatic joy. Orgasm. Somewhere in there.
Is this what he wanted? Devin found himself wondering dreamily. Sammy had gone off-grid. Then gone off the deep end. For Devin, it had just been the other way around.
The bear tracks were still fresh in the snow beyond the sundered wall.
He stood there awhile. Then he scooped up Sammy’s blanket and pulled it around himself.
* * *
Where had the creature gone? The other creature. The one he knew yet didn’t know. The one that nobody knew.
Devin turned his back to Sammy and slogged toward the yawning circle in the middle of the barn. Immaculate. A flawless hole-punch.
He got to his knees. Then he made himself prone to poke his head inside.
He found a tunnel: smaller than the opening in the floor, and dug at an angle. Peering closely, he spotted little lines. Claw marks. Tiny claw marks. While only so much was visible, the tunnel seemed to go deep.
Devin could go down, follow the tunnel to its terminus. Or he could climb beneath the floorboards, just lie there in the dirt, shield himself from the cold while he guarded the tunnel’s entrance. Maybe he could do one thing and then the other. Either option meant descent. He had time to decide. He was still warm.
* * *
Ian Kappos grew up in Northern California but currently lives in LA. His work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Seize the Press, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Witch Craft Mag, Maximumrocknroll, and other venues. His debut chapbook of fiction Crossfaded in Narnia is available from Eibonvale Press. He’s played in the bands Cross Class and Fluppies and is a co-creator of Los Suelos, CA, an interactive multimedia fiction anthology benefiting California’s migrant workers. He earned his MFA in creative writing from CalArts. On Instagram, he’s @jung_carl. On Twitter, he’s @kapposyan.