Mat Johnson - Pym

“Have you seen Nathaniel? Is he with you?” was the first thing Angela said when she saw me. The last time I saw her second husband, he was being pushed into the exact opposite direction. Whether Nathaniel reached his destination shortly after or had kept moving far off into the reaches of the outer tunnels I had no idea, and I didn’t care. It seemed to me that we were on the extreme outskirts of this village. If we weren’t in the rural area, then certainly we had landed in the Tekelian suburbs. Or maybe, off in this well-worn frozen backwater, inconveniently remote from the main area, we had landed in its ghetto.

“Chris, this is crazy. These things expect me to clean up after them. They’re disgusting. I tried kicking loose what I could, putting it into a pile, and this bitch in there — I mean I think it’s a female, it looks like it has tits — just keeps pointing at the frozen-in bits going ‘Ung!’ Pointing at stuff stuck to the ice for god knows how many years, how many inches down. I’d need an ice pick to get it out.”

“Wait.” I calmed my excitement over the fact I could do something to the benefit of her. Retreating to Augustus’s quarters, I reached through my backpack for one of the only possessions I had deemed worthy of taking with me. Pressed in my reading edition of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym , stuck right by the page where Richard Parker was being served up for dinner, was a nineteenth-century bronze letter opener that had served as my favorite page holder since I had bought it off Benjamin. Without a statement about its history, either sentimental or antiquarian, I made a gift of it to the lady. The gift Angela Latham gave in return, a relieved smile, was greater.

“You’re always there for me, Chris. I always knew that, always loved that about you.” Angela poked the Tekelian air with her little saber as she winked at me. “Look at this thing. I bet Nathaniel could stab a couple of these bastards with this in his hand.”

I didn’t expect to stay the whole night in this Augustus’s hole, huddled for warmth inches away from the site of my labor. I expected Garth to appear in a matter of hours, declare that our communications with the world had resumed, and that we were all shortly going to be getting out of here. I didn’t know how Garth would get this information to me, but I was certain our situation was just temporary. Unfortunately, it didn’t go down like that. The first night was one of suffering. The diet of krakt, as rich as it was, proved quite a shock to my system, the result of which was that I discovered the Tekelian form of plumbing: a visual nightmare that consisted of a hole in the ice (one can only guess how it was excavated) and a Lovecraftian horror within it. It was the following morning, after retreating from this communal commode, which in a bit of olfactory fortune was far down the hall from where Augustus had us staying, that I saw Angela being led by her family of Tekelians.

“Come with me,” she urged, grabbing my hand. Her own temporarily gloveless palm was a skinny thing, I could feel her bones through skin as light as oiled papyrus, yet nearly as cold now as the ice that surrounded us. She was too good for this — I would have felt more guilt in inviting her down here if I wasn’t so relieved to have her near me. With Augustus napping for the second time this morning (Was it morning? I don’t know. There certainly had been a slight ebbing and receding of the glow), I chose to join Mrs. Latham as she walked down the tunnel toward town with her captors. Her hosts apparently accepted the addition of my presence to their party, because after a few hundred yards the monsters were poking and prodding me in their desired direction, just as they were doing to Angela.

At the market, strutting amid the stares of so many of these robed creatures, we quickly noticed the presence of both Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter in the distance. They had been fortunate, it appeared: they were the only two who had been selected for labor together, their bond so visible that perhaps even these alien creatures could recognize it instantly. Despite this, the men’s demeanor did not indicate that their hosts had given them much consideration at all.

“We got to get the fuck out of here” is what Jeffree said to me when we approached him. Jeffree was one of the darkest-skinned among the Creole crew, but his melanin count did nothing to hide the bruise that had welted along the side of his face, punishment for what offense I couldn’t imagine.

“I’ll admit it, I thought we could just hang here for a few days, wait for the next shift of workers to sail in from Argentina, get some footage for the site, some anecdotes for the talk-show circuit. But this is bullshit, man. We got to break out. If they think, they think Brother Jeffree is going to put up with this treatment for another night, then they got another thing coming.”

“Have you seen Nathaniel? Or Captain Jaynes? Has anyone heard anything from the mainland?” Angela tried to press him, but whatever affront Jeffree was reacting to was still spinning behind his glazed brown eyes.

“Man, we ain’t seen nobody, I ain’t heard nothing, and we ain’t about to hear nothing down here either. They even took my man’s camera. Tell them what they did to your camera, Carlton.”

“They took my camera,” Carlton Damon Carter explained.

“Can you believe that? What’s the point of being here if we don’t get it on tape? Forget news of the outside world, we got to make our own news, sister. And the news is freedom. Fuck this!” Jeffree declared, nearly yelling.

“Word!” Carlton Damon Carter echoed behind him, and it was this one loud declaration from the quiet man that made all three of us turn to note the anomaly.

“It doesn’t have to be that bad,” I tried to calm them. “Garth’s still at camp, at the radios: when he hears something, when the satellite malfunction or whatever is resolved, I’m sure he’ll come get us. Think about the story here, think about the experience you’re having, this priceless material falling into your lap, Jeffree. When the world comes back, and it’s got to, think of how many hits you’re going to get on the blog. You’ll have to increase your bandwidth. Think of the movie rights. ” This last bit was for Angela, and it seemed to work, because she paused from darting her head around in search of a sign of Nathaniel to look at me. “Right, you’re right.” She nodded the affirmative before her attention drifted off again.

“Yeah, okay. Okay, man. You right. I guess, I guess I can—” It was just in that first moment of Jeffree’s pacification that his host, a creature whose draped figure I’d previously assumed to be a curtained wall, turned around. What fierce, dead-eyed monsters these were, I thought, staring at it. This one was the most horrific beast I’d seen among them, a full head taller than the rest of his colossal kin and that damn sausage nose, like it had been chewed by a bear before being judged inedible and abandoned. While the overgrown homunculus I called Augustus seemed soft and harmless, like a rotting marshmallow, looking at Jeffree’s sausage-nosed specimen, I was reminded of the ferocity of these barbarians. Without warning and without letting Jeffree finish his sentence, the creature shot out a hand toward Jeffree’s bald head, the impact causing the cowrie-shell necklace that Jeffree always sported to clack like a rim shot.

“Motherfucking kielbasa-nosed prick!” Jeffree responded, and immediately I knew where his welts were from. Jeffree pulled his hand back as if to use it for punching but, taking in the size of his target and the hopelessness of his task, dropped it again in frustration. For his part, Mr. Sausage Nose paid him no mind, merely walking farther along the village path as he had just urged Jeffree to. Carlton Damon Carter, giving his partner a tortured glance, smartly started following the beast, but this had no effect on Jeffree, who after wagging his head several times, turned to me instead.