The Third Bear

  For a long time, I continued to sit in my chair, holding the revolvers. That the man was dead seemed certain. That it had been Gradus seemed selfevident. That it had all occurred in a vastly different way than I'd expected bothered me. In my imagination, Gradus always approached from afar, visible from a distance, and I had time to think about what I was going to do. In reality, it had been quick, decisive, and without thought.

  As I looked at the body, I began to cry. I began to weep, hunched over in my chair. But I wasn't grieving for Gradus. As if the bullets that had entered Gradus had instead taken the breath out of me, had expelled something from me, I was crying for my past life. I was weeping for everything I had thrown away to get to that point. In that moment, it had finally hit me how irrevocable my decisions had become, and how few decisions I had left before me. I would never again be Jeff VanderMeer. Not in any meaningful way.

  Then, after a while, I dragged the body over to the freezer in the kitchen. I didn't remove the mask. I didn't want to see his face.

  Erratum #7: "The Carving, "Steve Rasnic Tem, issue three

  Then following the flight of chips, white and red and trailing, over the railing's edge and down onto the rocks, she saw the fallen form, the exquisite work so carelessly tossed aside, the delicate shape spread and broken, their son.

  She turned to the master carver, her mouth working at an uncontrolled sentence. And saw him with the hammer, the bloody chisel, the glistening hand slowly freed, dropping away from the ragged wrist.

  This man, her husband, looked up, eyes dark knots in the rough bole of face. "I could not hold him," he gasped. "Wind or his own imagination. Once loose, I could not keep him here."

  And then he looked away, back straining into the work of removing the tool that had failed him.

  should read:

  Then following the flight of chips, white and red and trailing, over the railing's edge and down onto the snow-strewn rocks of Burkhan Cape, she saw the fallen form, the exquisite work so carelessly tossed aside, the delicate shape that had sacrificed itself spread and broken.

  She turned to the man, her mouth working at an uncontrolled sentence, words that must, in their order, be perfect or remain unreleased. And saw him with the hammer, the bloody chisel, the glistening hand slowly freed, dropping away from the ragged wrist.

  The man looked up, eyes dark knots in a rough bark face. "I could not hold him," he gasped. "I could not keep him here. He wanted to be somewhere else. He needed to be somewhere else."

  And then he looked away, back straining into the work of removing the tool that had freed him.

  After I had disposed of the body, and made sure Gradus hadn't left a vehicle out front (he hadn't), I poured myself a glass of vodka and went up to my room on the second floor, leaving Juliette at the bottom of the stairs looking forlorn. I wanted to read James' other letter. I wanted to know why Gradus had come all this way to kill me. I wanted to have had a good reason not to let him kill me.

  The second letter was also on that annoying onionskin paper, but it had no errors and appeared to have been typed by James himself.

  Dear Jeff:

  If you haven't yet seen Ed's Book, you will soon, and once you do, I know that any doubts will leave you. For that reason, this letter may be irrelevant. But I still had to write it, if for no other reason than to clarify where I stand in my own mind.

  Let's be clear: You are coming in late to this whole scenario. From the very beginning, I planned Argosy to represent a major shift in the world, a way to change it irrevocably. Every page, every story, every interview, even every typo has been calculated to produce one certain result: transformation. And that transformation will become apparent upon the publication of your story "Errata." Your work is the final missing piece that will effectuate the Change.

  I know you, like me, believe the world is in a terrible state right now, from the environment to political systems to hypocrisy to "sleepwalking on the tracks," as Thoreau put it. This has troubled me deeply since I was very young, and the feeling has only gotten worse as I have gotten older. I built a time machine when I was a kid just so I could try to go back in time and fix things from the moment they began to break. Of course, that didn't work. How could it? There would be so many things to fix. No one could do it all. Even if the machine worked.

  But now, as an adult, and having talked to Ed and having experienced the Book, my life is committed to this change. For I believe that words can Change the world. I believe that after "Errata" is published, and as the right people in the right combinations read it, you will see a transformation of the world. Like in the old myth I left on your bed: A thaw will come and words will be spoken and heard that have been frozen for years, if not centuries. Like some sort of virus, the world will become a better place. Everything will begin to make sense. There will be some kind of balance again.

  For this, I needed you. I needed a final refocus and correction to what had already been done. I needed someone outside of the system, someone who had given up hope, to undertake the final part of the project. For this, I also needed someone so torn out of their normal balance, their normal world, that they could kill if need be. Because I don't know when you will read this letter. Because Argosy may need a final sacrifice, like those made by the shamans of old. Perhaps my life is needed to bring this all to fruition. Maybe that's what it will take. And maybe not.

  If it has, and you read this letter after, know that I forgive you, and that you are almost done. All you must do is finish the story and send it to my brother.

  I'm telling you: There will be an epiphany. There will be a shift. You will feel it. You just have to wait for it and be patient. And, depending on your timing, either I will be there to experience it too, or I won't. I am at peace with either future.

  Thank you for your time and your efforts.

  Your friend,

  James Owen

  Ever since reading his letter, Jeremy, I've been sitting in a chair in the lobby, drinking steadily, becoming more and more numb. Because I'll be damned if I go to that freezer and remove the mask of the man I've killed. But mostly because, regardless of anything else he was, your brother was a nutcase. He was completely and utterly cracked in the head. And I was stupid enough to follow all of his insane directions and thus make it to this point, which once seemed like a plateau on the way up, but now feels like a slide into the deeper depths.

  James Owen. Publisher. Author. Entrepreneur. It strikes me that I never really knew him - didn't know nearly enough about his childhood, his parents, his upbringing, his education, to trust him the way I did, to let him manipulate me this way.

  But now that it's almost time, I must tell you that the most extraordinary calm has come over me. Why? Because I have only one hope left, even though it's a fool's hope. Tomorrow, I will hand this entire account over to the toothless Japanese man who - fleeing from horrible crimes of his own devising, no doubt - plays the role of postal worker in these parts. Whether he is competent enough to be trusted, I don't know. (Although he was reliable enough in handing over the money orders James sent me until about a week ago.)

  Hopefully, you will receive and publish this Errata and thus fulfill James' vision. Hopefully, enough people will read it in the right combinations. And then, hopefully, the world will Change as he, in his twisted and yet idealistic way, believed it would.

  In the meantime, I'll wait in this lobby, talking to Juliette. "James promised me," I will say to her. "James told me the world would Change if I wrote a short story."

  "Who is James?" Juliette will reply. "Do I know him?"

  "You may have even met him," I'll say.

  Here's your story, James Owen. Now where's my epiphany?

  God help me, some part of me still believes it could happen.

  And if it doesn't, well, then, I'll just have to put these pearl-handled revolvers to good use, won't I?

  THE GOAT VARIATIONS

  It would have been hot, humid in September in that city
, and the Secret Service would have gone in first, before him, to scan for hostile minds, even though it was just a middle school in a county he'd won in the elections, far away from the fighting. He would have emerged from the third black armored vehicle, blinking and looking bewildered as he got his bearings in the sudden sunlight. His aide and the personal bodyguards who had grown up protecting him would have surrounded him by his first step onto the asphalt of the driveway. They would have entered the school through the front, stopping under the sign for photos and a few words with the principal, the television cameras recording it all from a safe distance.

  He would already be thinking past the event, to the next, and how to prop up sagging public approval ratings, due both to the conflict and what the press called his recent "indecision," which he knew was more analogous to "sickness." He would be thinking about, or around, the secret cavern beneath the Pentagon and the pale, almost grub-like face of the adept in his tank. He would already be thinking about the machine.

  By the end of the photo op, the sweat itches on his forehead, burns sour in his mouth, but he has to ignore it for the cameras. He's turning a new word over and over in his mind, learned from a Czech diplomat. Ossuary. A word that sounds free and soaring, but just means a pile of skulls. The latest satellite photos from the battlefield states of Kansas, Nebraska, and Idaho make him think of the word. The evangelicals have been eschewing god-missiles for more personal methods of vengeance, even as they tie down federal armies in an endless guerilla war. Sometimes he feels like he's presiding over a pile of skulls.

  The smile on his face has frozen into a rictus as he realizes there's something wrong with the sun; there's a red dot in its center, and it's eating away at the yellow, bringing a hint of green with it. He can tell he's the only one who can see it, can sense the pulsing, nervous worry on the face of his aide.

  He almost says "ossuary" aloud, but then, sunspots wandering across his eyes, they are bringing him down a corridor to the classroom where he will meet with the students and tell them a story. They walk past the open doors to the cafeteria - row on row of sagging wooden tables propped up by rusted metal legs. He experiences a flare of anger. Why this school, with the infrastructure crumbling away? The overpowering stale smell of macaroni-andcheese and meatloaf makes him nauseous.

  All the while, he engages in small talk with the entourage of teachers trailing in his wake, almost all overweight middle-aged women with circles under their eyes and sagging skin on their arms. Many of them are black. He smiles into their shiny, receptive faces and remembers the hired help in the mansion growing up. Some of his best friends were black until he took up politics.

  For a second, as he looks down, marveling at their snouts and beaks and muzzles, their smiles melt away and he's surrounded by a pack of animals.

  His aide mutters to him through clenched teeth, and two seconds later he realizes the words were "Stop staring at them so much." There have always been times when meeting too many people at once has made him feel as if he's somewhere strange, all the mannerisms and gesticulations and varying tones of voice shimmering into babble. But it's only lately that the features of people's faces have changed into a menagerie if he looks at them too long.

  They'd briefed him on the secret rooms and the possibility of the machine even before they'd given him the latest intel on China's occupation of Japan and Taiwan. Only three hours into his presidency, an armored car had taken him to the Pentagon, away from his wife and the beginnings of the inauguration party. Once there, they'd entered a green-lit steel elevator that went down for so long he thought for a moment it was broken. It was just him, his aide, a black-ops commander who didn't give his name, and a small, haggard man who wore an old gray suit over a faded white dress shirt, with no tie. He'd told his vice president to meet the press while he was gone, even though he was now convinced the old man had dementia.

  The elevators had opened to a rush of stale cool air, like being under a mountain, and, beneath the dark green glow of overhead lamps, he could see rows and rows of transparent, bathtub-shaped deprivation vats. In each floated one dreaming adept, skin wrinkled and robbed of color by the exposure to the chemicals that preserved and pacified them. Every shaven head was attached to wires and electrodes, every mouth attached to a breathing tube. Catheters took care of waste. The stale air soon faded as they walked silent down the rows, replaced by a smell like turpentine mixed with honeysuckle. Sometimes the hands of the adepts twitched, like cats hunting in their sleep.

  A vast, slow, repeating sound registered in his awareness. Only after several minutes did he realize it was the sound of the adepts as they slowly moved in their vats, creating a slow ripple of water repeated in thousands of other vats. The room seemed to go on forever, into the far distance of a horizon tinged at its extremity by a darkening that hinted of blood.

  His sense of disgust, revulsion grew as the little man ran out ahead of them, navigated a path to a control center, a hundred yards in and to the left, made from a luminous blue glass, set a story up and jutting out over the vats like some infernal crane. And still he did not know what to say. The atmosphere combined morgue, cathedral, and torture chamber. He felt a compulsion, if he spoke, to whisper.

  The briefing papers he'd read on the ride over had told him just about everything. For years, adepts had been screened out at birth and, depending on the secret orders peculiar to each administration, either euthanized or imprisoned in remote overseas detention camps. Those that managed to escape detection until adulthood had no rights if caught, not even the rights given to illegal immigrants. The founding fathers had been very clear on that in the constitution.

  He had always assumed that adults when caught were eliminated or sent to the camps. Radicals might call it the last reflexive act of a Puritanical brutality that reached across centuries, but most citizens despised the invasion of privacy an adept represented or were more worried about how the separatist evangelicals had turned the homeland into a nation of West and East Coasts, with no middle.

  But now he knew where his predecessor had been storing the bodies. He just didn't yet know why.

  In the control center, they showed him the images being mined from the depths of the adepts' REM sleep. They ranged from montages as incomprehensible as the experimental films he'd seen in college to single shots of dead people to grassy hills littered with wildflowers. Ecstasy, grief, madness, peace. Anything imaginable came through in the adepts' endless sleep.

  "Only ten people in the world know every aspect of this project, and three of them are dead, Mr. President," the black-ops commander told him.

  Down below, he could see the little man, blue-tinted, going from vat to vat, checking readings.

  "We experimented until we found the right combination of drugs to augment their sight. One particular formula, culled from South American mushrooms mostly, worked best. Suddenly, we began to get more coherent and varied images. Very different from before."

  He felt numb. He had no sympathy for the men and women curled up in the vats below him - an adept's grenade had killed his father in midcampaign a decade before, launching his own reluctant career in politics - but, still, he felt numb.

  "Are any of them dangerous?" he asked the black-ops commander.

  "They're all dangerous, Mr. President. Every last one."

  "When did this start?"

  "With a secret order from your predecessor, Mr. President. Before, we just disappeared them or sent them to work camps in the Alaskas."

  "Why did he do it?"

  Even then, he would realize later, a strange music was growing in his head, a distant sound fast approaching.

  "He did it, Mr. President, or said he did it, as a way of getting intel on the Heartland separatists."

  Understandable, if idiosyncratic. The separatists and the fact that the federal armies had become bogged down in the Heartland fighting them were the main reasons his predecessor's party no longer controlled the executive, judicial, or legislative bran
ches. And no one had ever succeeded in placing a mole within evangelical ranks.

  The scenes continued to cascade over the monitors in a rapid-fire nonsense-rhythm.

  "What do you do with the images?"

  "They're sent to a full team of experts for interpretation, Mr. President. These experts are not told where the images come from."

  "What do these adepts see that is so important?'

  The black-ops commander grimaced at the tone of rebuke. "The future, Mr. President. Its early days, but we believe they see the future."

  "And have you gained much in the way of intel?"

  The black-ops commander looked at his feet. "No, not yet, we haven't. And we don't know why. The images are jumbled. Some might even be from our past or present. But we have managed to figure out one thing, which is why you've been brought here so quickly: something will happen later this year, in September."

  "Something?"

  Down below, the little man had stopped his purposeful wandering. He gazed, as if mesmerized, into one of the vats.

  "Something cataclysmic, Mr. President. Across the channels. Across all of the adepts, it's quite clear. Every adept has a different version of what that something is. And we don't know exactly when, but in September."

  He had a thousand more questions, but at that moment one of the mili- tary's top scientific researchers entered the control room to show them the schematics for the machine - the machine they'd found in the mind of one particular adept.

  The time machine.

  The teachers are telling him about the weather, and he's pretending to care as he tries to ignore the florescent lighting as yellow as the skin that forms on old butter, the cracks in the dull beige walls, the faded construction paper of old projects taped to those walls, drooping down toward a tired, washed-out green carpet that's paper-thin under foot.