Джефф Вандермеер - The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

“I do feel . . . whole,” admitted Ambrose. He paused for a moment, eyes downcast, thinking of his own reactions. “And I believe . . . I am no longer afraid to be underground.”

“That’s good,” said Kennett. “Because we have a job to do, and I’m afraid a great deal of it is deep under the earth. High, but deep. I’m not fond of the Himalayas myself, but what can you do?”

“Was there actually a German adept who wanted to raise the spirit?” asked Ambrose, as they began to walk together back along the path.

“Oh yes,” said Kennett. “It’s doubtful if he would have succeeded, and the timing was not quite what we said, but Lady S thought we might as well try to get two birds with one stone. The new doctor brought it to her attention that this old spirit had a twofold nature, that as well as trampling the undeserving and so on, it also traditionally sometimes healed the sick and those of ‘broken mind.’ ”

“Broken mind,” repeated Ambrose. “Yes. I suppose that I wasn’t really getting any better where I was. But those demons—”

“They were the emir’s,” interrupted Kennett. “Forced our hand. Couldn’t be helped.”

“I see,” said Ambrose, with a swift sideways glance at Kennett’s face. He still couldn’t tell if the man was lying.

They walked the rest of the way out of the wood in silence. At the road, there was a green Crossley 20/25 waiting, with Jones and Jones leaning on opposite sides of the bonnet, each carefully watching the surrounding countryside. They nodded to Ambrose as he walked up, and he thought that Jones the Larger might even have given him the merest shadow of a wink.

Ambrose’s yataghan was on the floor behind the front seat, and there was a large cardboard box tied with a red ribbon sitting in the middle of the backseat. Kennett indicated the box with an inclination of his head.

“For you,” he said. “Present from Lady S.”

Ambrose undid the ribbon and opened the box. There was a velvet medal case inside, which he did not open; a silver hip flask engraved with his name beneath a testimonial of thanks from an obscure manufacturer of scientific instruments in Nottingham; and a card with a picture of a mountaineer waving the Union Jack atop a snow-covered mountain.

Ambrose flipped open the card.

“Welcome back,” he read aloud. “With love from Auntie Hester.”

Ivica Stevanovic’s “Relic with Fish,” part of his series “The Silence of Many Pattering Feet: Saints and the Bits They Leave Behind.”

Out at the end of the world, on a long spit of land like a finger poking into oblivion, nestled in a valley among the dunes, sat the Church of Saint Ifritia, constructed from twisted driftwood and the battered hulls of ships. There was one tall, arched window composed of the round bottoms of blue bottles. The sun shone through it, submerging altar and pews. There was room for twenty inside, but the most ever gathered for a sermon was eleven. Atop its crooked steeple jutted a spiraled tusk some creature had abandoned on the beach.

The church’s walls had a thousand holes, and so every morning Father Walter said his prayers while shoveling sand from the sanctuary. He referred to himself as “father” but he wasn’t a priest. He used the title because it was what he remembered the holy men were called in the town he came from. Wanderers to the end of the world sometimes inquired of him as to the church’s denomination. He was confused by these questions. “A basic church, you know,” he’d say. “I talk God and salvation with anyone interested.” Usually the pilgrims would turn away, but occasionally one stayed on and listened.

Being that the Church of Saint Ifritia could have as few as three visitors a month, Father Walter didn’t feel inclined to give a sermon once a week. “My flock would be only the sand fleas,” he said to Sister North. “Then preach to the fleas,” she replied. “Four sermons a year is plenty,” he said. “One for each season. Nobody should need more than four sermons a year.” They were a labor for him to write, and he considered the task as a kind of penance. Why he gave sermons, he wasn’t sure. Their purpose was elusive, and yet he knew it was something the holy men did. His earliest ones were about the waves, the dunes, the sky, the wind, and when he ran out of natural phenomena to serve as topics, he moved inward and began mining memory for something to write.

Father Walter lived behind the whalebone altar in a small room with a bed, a chair, a desk, and a stove. Sister North, who attended a summer sermon one year, the subject of which was The Wind, and stayed on to serve Saint Ifritia, lived in her own small shack behind the church. She kept it tidy, decorated with shells and strung with tattered fishing nets, a space no bigger than Father Walter’s quarters. In the warm months, she kept a garden in the sand, dedicated to her saint. Although he never remembered having invited her to stay on, Father Walter proclaimed her flowers and tomatoes miracles, a cornucopia from dry sand and salt air, and recorded them in the official church record.

Sister North was a short, brown woman with long, dark hair streaked with grey, and an expression of determination. Her irises were almost yellow, cat-like, in her wide face. On her first night amid the dunes, she shared Father Walter’s bed. He came to realize that she would share it again as long as there was no mention of it during the light of day. Once a season, she’d travel ten miles inland by foot to the towns and give word that a sermon was planned for the following Monday. The towns she visited scared her, and only occasionally would she meet a pilgrim who’d take note of her message.

In addition to the church and Sister North’s shack, there were two other structures in the sand-dune valley. One was an outhouse built of red ship’s wood with a tarpaulin flap for a door and a toilet seat made of abalone. The other was a shrine that housed the holy relic of Saint Ifritia. The latter building was woven from reeds by Sister North and her sisters. She’d sent a letter and they’d come, three of them. They were all short and brown, with long, dark hair streaked with grey. None had yellow eyes, though. They harvested reeds from the sunken meadow, an overgrown square mile set below sea level among the dunes two miles east of the church. They sang while they wove the strands into walls and window holes and a roof. Father Walter watched the whole thing from a distance. He felt he should have some opinion about it, but couldn’t muster one. When the shrine began to take form, he knew it was a good thing.

Before Sister North’s sisters left to return to their lives, Father Walter planned a dedication for the relic’s new home. He brought the holy item to the service wrapped in a dirty old towel, the way he’d kept it for the past thirty years. Its unveiling brought sighs from the sisters, although at first they were unsure what they were looking at. A dark lumpen object, its skin like that of an overripe banana. There were toes and even orange, shattered toenails. It was assumed a blade had severed it just above the ankle, and the wound had, by miracle or fire, been cauterized. “Time’s leather” was the phrase Father Walter bestowed upon the state of its preservation. It smelled of wild violets.

There was no golden reliquary to house it; he simply placed it in the bare niche built into the altar, toes jutting slightly beyond the edge of their new den. He turned and explained to the assembled, “You must not touch it with your hands, but fold them in front of you, lean forward, and kiss the toes. In this manner, the power of the saint will be yours for a short time and you’ll be protected and made lucky.”