Джефф Вандермеер - The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

Father Walter took this as a cue to move on, and he left the altar of the shrine and ran back to the church to fetch a case of whiskey that the Lord had recently delivered onto the beach after a terrific thunderstorm. The young couple produced a hash pipe and a tarry ball of the drug, which bore a striking resemblance to the last knuckle of the middle toe of Saint Ifritia’s foot.

Late that night, high as the tern flies, the young man and woman left and headed out toward the end of the world, and Sister North’s sisters loaded into their wagon and left for their respective homes. Father Walter sat on the sand near the bell in the churchyard, a bottle to his lips, staring up at the stars. Sister North stood over him, the hem of her habit, as she called the simple grey shift she wore every day, flapping in the wind.

“None would stay the night after your story of murder,” she said to him. “They drank your whiskey, but they wouldn’t close their eyes and sleep here with you drunk.”

“Foolishness,” he said. “There’s plenty still left for all. Loaves and fishes of whiskey. And what do you mean by murder?”

“The driver in your sermon. You could have let him live.”

He laughed. “I did. In real life, I let him go. A sermon is something different, though.”

“You mean you lied?”

“If I shot him, I thought it would make a better story.”

“But where’s the Lord’s place in a story of cold-blooded murder?”

“That’s for Him to decide.”

Sister North took to her shack for a week, and he rarely saw her. Only in the morning and late in the afternoon would he catch sight of her entering and leaving the shrine. She mumbled madly as she walked, eyes down. She moved her hands as if explaining to someone. Father Walter feared the ghost of the driver had somehow slipped into the churchyard and she was conversing with it. “Because I lied?” he wondered.

During the time of Sister North’s retreat to her shack, a visitor came one afternoon. Out of a fierce sandstorm, materializing in the churchyard like a ghost herself, stepped a young woman wearing a hat with flowers and carrying a travel bag. Father Walter caught sight of her through blue glass. He went to the church’s high doors, opened one slightly to keep the sand out, and called to her to enter. She came to him, holding the hat down with one hand and lugging the heavy bag with the other. “Smartly dressed” was the term the father vaguely remembered from his life inland. She wore a white shirt buttoned at the collar, with a dark string tie. Her black skirt and jacket matched, and she somehow made her way through the sand without much trouble in a pair of high heels.

Father Walter slammed shut the church door once she was inside. For a moment, he and his guest stood still and listened to the wind, beneath it the distant rhythm of the surf. The church was damp and cold. He told the young lady to accompany him to his room where he could make a fire in the stove. She followed him behind the altar, and as he broke sticks of driftwood, she removed her hat and took a seat at his desk.

“My name is Mina GilCragson,” she said.

“Father Walter,” he replied over his shoulder.

“I’ve come from the Theological University to see your church. I’m a student. I’m writing a thesis on Saint Ifritia.”

“Who told you about us?” he asked, lighting the kindling.

“A colleague who’d been to the end of the world and back. He told me last month, ‘You know, there’s a church down south that bears your saint’s name.’ And so I was resolved to see it.”

Father Walter turned to face her. “Can you tell me what you know of the saint? I am the father here, but I know so little, though the holy Ifritia saved my life.”

The young woman asked for something to drink. Since the rainwater barrel had been tainted by the blowing sand that day, he poured her a glass of whiskey and one for himself. After serving his guest, he sat on the floor, his legs crossed. She dashed her drink off quickly, as he remembered was the fashion in the big cities. Wiping her lips with the back of her hand, she said, “What do you know of her so far?”

“Little,” he said and listened, pleased to be, for once, on the other end of a sermon.

Mina GilCragson’s Sermon

She was born in a village in the rainy country eighty-some odd years ago. Her father was a powerful man, and he oversaw the collective commerce of their village, Dubron, which devoted itself to raising plum fish for the tables of the wealthy. The village was surrounded by fifty ponds, each stocked with a slightly different variety of the beautiful, fantailed species. It’s a violet fish. Tender and sweet when broiled.

Ifritia, called “If” by her family, wanted for nothing. She was the plum of her father’s eye, her wishes taking precedence over those of her mother and siblings. He even placed her desires above the good of the village. When she was sixteen, she asked that she be given her own pond and be allowed to raise one single fish in it that would be her pet. No matter the cost of clearing the pond, one of the larger ones, she was granted her wish. To be sure, there was much grumbling among the other villagers and even among If’s siblings and mother, but none was voiced in the presence of her father. He was a proud and vindictive man, and it didn’t pay to cross him.

She was given a hatchling from the strongest stock to raise. From early on, she fed the fish by hand. When she approached the pond, the creature would surface and swim to where she leaned above the water. Fish, to the people of Dubron, were no more than swimming money, so that when Ifritia bequeathed a name on her sole charge, it was a scandal. Unheard of. Beyond the limit. A name denotes individuality, personality, something dangerously more than swimming money. A brave few balked in public, but If’s father made their lives unhappy and they fell back to silence.

Lord Jon, the plum fish, with enough room to spread out in his own pond and fed nothing but table scraps, potatoes, and red meat, grew to inordinate dimensions. As the creature swelled in size, its sidereal fish face fleshed out, pressing the eyes forward, redefining the snout as a nose, and puffing the cheeks. It was said Jon’s face was the portrait of a wealthy landowner, and that his smile, now wide where it once was pinched, showed rows of sharp, white teeth. A fish with a human face was believed by all but the girl and her father to be a sign of evil. But she never stopped feeding it and it never stopped growing until it became the size of a bull hog. Ifritia would talk to the creature, tell it her deepest secrets. If she told something good, it would break out into its huge, biting smile; something sad, and it would shut its mouth and tears would fill its saucer-wide eyes.

And then, out of the blue, for no known reason, the fish became angry with her. When she came to the edge of the pond, after it took the food from her hand, it splashed her and made horrid, grunting noises. The fish doctor was called for and his diagnosis was quickly rendered. The plum fish was not supposed to grow to Lord Jon’s outsized dimensions, the excess of flesh and the effects of the red meat had made the creature insane. “My dear,” said the doctor in his kindest voice, “you’ve squandered your time creating a large purple madness and that is the long and short of it.” The girl’s father was about to take exception with the doctor and box his ears, but in that instant she saw the selfish error of her ways.

After convincing her father of the immorality of what they’d done, she walked the village and apologized to each person privately, from the old matrons to the smallest babies. Then she took a rifle from the wall of her father’s hunting room and went to the pond. A crowd gathered behind her as she made her way to the water’s edge. Her change was as out of the blue as that of Lord Jon’s, and they were curious about her and happy that she was on the way to becoming a good person. She took up a position at the edge of the water, and whistled to the giant plum fish to come for a feeding. The crowd hung back, fearful of the thing’s human countenance. All watched its fin, like a purple fan, disappear beneath the water.