Fossil Lake II: The Refossiling Read online

  When she entered The Moon Under Water, I felt it. I could not look up. I heard her talking with Todd at the sign-in table. Even over the chatter of a very full room, I could hear her. She was all I could hear. Todd was joyful at her arrival, guffawing like an idiot, asking her if she’d prepared at least two poems to crush her competition with. The disappointment in his voice when he heard her answer.

  But... but you need two, girl! There’s two rounds!

  I’ll only need the one, she said, and in my ears the words sounded true, sounded real, the first real words I’d ever heard. Words understood by the ignorant and wise alike as the prophecy they were, envoys of the doom that lay behind them. I hung my head, in supplication, in fear, and with shuttered eyes waited for her, my lungs straining not to breathe and then she was there, coming around the bar to stand in front of me, and I still could not look at her when she took my hand in hers and placed a soft, pliant thing in my palm.

  You’ll need this. For after.

  It was a key chain, the foam kind that floats. Yellow.

  Everyone expected her to take the slam that night. No one expected her to do it the way she did. And when to raucous cheers and hoots she took the stage and lightly gripped the microphone stand in long-fingered, cold hands and raised her vague eyes to the audience, I turned my face to hers and grateful I fell, finally, from the cliff edge of her to plummet between her lips at the moment she parted them to speak.

  This one is called Home to Carcosa...

  A planet spinning in the dark.

  Black waves, glinting with the light of rubied stars, breaking on obsidian lake shores.

  A moon rising and the towers of a city behind that moon, impossible, an insult to the eye but true, a deep truth that pains and maddens with the knowing of it, and the song that drifts through the ruined streets and haunted causeways of that city, the song of a mother, a queen in a tower behind the moon, a song that mocks sorrow even as it mourns for all the weak, fragile meaning that the girl Castaigne is draining out of the dry, hopeless well of our world with a poem, the last poem anyone in The Moon Under Water will ever hear, a poem built of words that could only be spoken in the living shadows of Carcosa, tattered shadows that spread and lengthen from her feet to engulf and make void and bring all that they touch within her terrible blank gaze.

  The Moon Under Water is there now, translated, and literally so, I know, translated to a grey suburb of the unchanging city at the heart of the Hyades. In fear of the burst of meaningless noise that she is, the judges take up slivers of shattered pint glasses and carve ones into their eternally renewing flesh and laugh. In honour of the lie that is her name, they carve zeroes and weep. The timekeeper sits in a corner where she clicks at her useless stopwatch, measuring out eternity in three minute segments. The slam master silently mouths now the King is coming and now the King is coming and give it up folks for the King in his coming into a dead microphone. With sere mouths and bleeding lips the poets yammer endless empty verses into the dust of each other’s ears. All there thirst. There is no one to tend the bar.

  When the night is clear, and I am able to bear it, I come out onto the deck sometimes and lie down. The light of Aldebaran finds the vacuity of my eyes just as I imagine it finds hers and in that moment I will all the myriad worlds between us to crumble and fall and join me to float in the sea.

  I will it, but I don’t have the words.

  BRUCE TOO

  Jodi Lee

  Aubry James was born ten years before the northern polar ice cap disappeared, covering a great deal of North America in what was re-dubbed Lake Agassiz. In fact, due to the melting of both caps, a lot of North America was either islands, peninsulas or rocky hills where mountains used to be.

  She could remember the rolling grass hills of the prairies though, pastures and farmland as far as her little eyes could see. She’d seen these things often during trips with her parents, following paved roads in an old car. A distant memory, of course, but there nonetheless. Then things changed, and little by little the lands were flooded. Fresh water mingling with sea water decimated whatever fish and aquatic mammals weren’t able to adapt, and Aubry, with her quick mind and fierce drive, determined to save them. She enrolled in bio-engineering, with minors in marine and paleo biology.

  The year after she received her Masters degree, and allowing time for her studies to achieve her doctorate, Aubry joined the team at PaleoGen. There she would be working under her professor, Dr. Brown, to retrieve or reconstruct DNA from fossilized remains of animals that had lived in the original Lake Agassiz. Animals like the mosasaur, pliosaur, and carcharodon. Dr. Brown hoped to be able to combine the DNA found with that of present-day species having difficulty adapting to their new world, in effect, saving two different species by making them one.

  Aubry was put in charge of mosasaur research. At the end of her four year term and just before she presented her thesis to the board, she was offered a permanent position. Her thesis, a paper on the Hainosaurus pembinensis x megaptera novaeangliae, secured her doctorate, yes, but the research that went into it and the four foot long specimen in the tank at PaleoGen secured her job. She loved the little bugger, as much as any parent could love a child. With PaleoGen’s permission, she named him Bruce Too.

  Bruce was a 43 foot tylosaur – part of the mosasaur family – found in a bentonite mine smack in the middle of the original Lake Agassiz. Aubry had been to see a replica in a museum as a very young child, and it had terrified her. Now, swimming in the tank with a juvenile Bruce Too, she didn’t understand what she’d been so afraid of. He was just a giant reptile, and like any other beast, he could be tamed.

  Unfortunately, Nick didn’t think so.

  She’d been with Nick for a few months, and early on knew he wasn’t right for her, but still… he was something to do after-hours. After a particularly nasty incident in the tank room, though, she told him she couldn’t see him anymore. Aubry knew workplace romances were usually trouble, but she didn’t realize exactly how bad it could get until she broke up with him.

  First, her computer was shut down because of a virus threat, and IT couldn’t save most of her research. Thankfully she’d been smart enough to back everything up on a flash drive nightly, and stored it on an external hard drive at home. She turned the hard drive over to Dr. Brown, and continued on.

  Next, six months of physical research was destroyed when the climate control in the DNA lab failed. IT found wires had been cut between the controls and the machines. Still, she didn’t put it together until Bruce Too stopped eating. Calling in a friend from university, a marine bio tech specialist, Aubry spent a week at the facility with Bruce Too, keeping everything under control and getting him back up to peak condition.

  The smirk on Nick’s face when she returned to the office was enough. She went to Dr. Brown, but his hands were tied. Without specific proof, hard evidence, there was nothing he could do. What he could do, though, was order more security cameras, and hire guards to walk through the tank room regularly.

  That put a stop to the hijinks for a while, at least at work. At home, Aubry suffered through prank calls, broken windows, burning feces at her door, and the occasional drug raid. Changing her phone number didn’t work; somehow Nick always managed to get it again. Finally, she began using throw-away cell phones, and completely got rid of her land line. Even so, she’d only have a week of silence before it all started over again.

  In November of 2045, Aubry, along with Dr. Brown, Nick and fifteen other staff and VIP guests boarded the Starr research vessel and headed across Lake Agassiz. With tears in her eyes, she watched as they lowered Bruce Too into the water, and released him to the wild. He, along with twenty-five other bio-engineered hybrids, slowly swam away into the dark waters. Soon enough, the only acknowledgment of their presence was a chorus of steady beeping from the lab below-deck.

  Aubry was still bleary-eyed when Nick strutted past, nearly pushing her over the low rail. Dr. Brown steadied her, and though
Nick apologized, it was clear to everyone that he’d done it on purpose. The captain escorted her to her cabin, and had one of his men keep an eye on Nick.

  Perhaps now there’s enough evidence to fire the son of a bitch, she thought just as she fell asleep.

  When Aubry returned home from the release trip, she had three messages on the machine. The first was from Nick, his voice high and squeaky with rage. He’d be after her now, she’d better watch her back, blah blah blah. She deleted the message before it had even played through. The second was from Dr. Brown, apologizing for not acting sooner and assuring her Nick would no longer be employed at PaleoGen.

  The third was from a police officer, asking her to call and give a statement about the incident on the Starr. She thought about it, even wrote the number down, but put it off. A clear head was required, and frankly, she was still quite shaken. Over a few days, the scrap of paper with the phone number on it was pushed further and further to the back of the desk, and then one day it slid off, landing on the floor unnoticed.

  Aubry had no further trouble with Nick, and calling the cop completely slipped her mind. For a long time, everything was quiet and life was good. And eventually, Aubry forgot all about Nick.

  In July of 2050, Aubry was once again aboard the Starr, heading out for a six week long check of Bruce Too and the other released specimens. Although they’d kept tabs on the pod of hybrids, they’d only been out on the water twice before, due to funding cuts and lack of research grants. This trip was privately funded, and the sponsor would be joining them in a few days.

  The captain told them stories from local fishermen and pleasure boaters, indicating the creatures they’d created in the lab had not only survived, but flourished. The interesting thing to Aubry were the reports of folks seeing small mosasaurs and pliosaurs swimming about, following and sometimes racing their boats much like dolphins.

  Aubry couldn’t wait to get out there again. She knew Bruce Too’s tag was functional; she’d occasionally turn on the programs and track him for a while. He’d stayed pretty much where they’d released him, and that was where they’d be anchored for a week. She’d packed a special dive suit just to get in the water when – and if – he approached the vessel. Despite Dr. Brown and the captain warning her off, she was determined to say hello to her old friend. The first night on the water, they made a circuit of the area they’d be researching, then in daylight, made for the area she really wanted to be.

  Most of that first day was spent locating each creature, and the staff were thrilled to find that all but four still swam Lake Agassiz. Whether the others were dead or had somehow lost their tags, they’d never know. Eagerly, Aubry watched the screen, momentarily worried that Bruce Too had disappeared as well. When his blip finally appeared, she couldn’t restrain herself and gave a triumphant holler.

  That afternoon, after lowering a speaker into the water and playing the music she used to play for him in the tank, Aubry climbed out onto the dive deck, and stepped off the boat.

  She stayed on the surface briefly, getting used to the water, before diving below. The water was clear for quite a distance, surprising her. The last time they’d been out here, the water had been murky, filled with particulates. Obviously something had changed for the better. Aubry dove deep into the darkness below with only the light on her headpiece to guide her. Spotting a shadow below, she thought at first it was a school of fish, but once she approached realized it was a small pliosaur. No more than five feet in length, the little guy swam right up to her, bumped her once with his nose, then swam off.

  Aubry spent another half hour in the water before she surfaced, coming face to face with a very disapproving Dr. Brown. Enduring a lecture as he helped her aboard, Aubry then recounted all she’d seen below, sparking his curiosity and sending him scurrying to the lab to make notes. She went to the galley and filled a plate; diving always made her hungry.

  Less than an hour later, the Starr received her last passenger, and seeing the man board from the smaller speed boat, Aubry nearly lost her meal onto the deck. Nick.

  “What’sa matter, Bree? You look like you seen a ghost!” Nick shoved his way past her and down into the stairs to the cabins below.

  Aubry sought out Dr. Brown, demanding why he hadn’t told her Nick was the one sponsoring their research, and how he’d come to have the funds to do so. From the look on his face, she realized the professor was just as confused and shocked as she was. “What are we going to do? I can’t stay here with him! He’s…sick.”

  “Now Aubry, we’ll think of something. Perhaps you can request he be banned from your cabin area, and I can make sure he doesn’t step foot in the lab, funding or no funding. It’s a big boat, my girl, you’ll be fine.” Dr. Brown patted her arm and turned back to his notes. Sighing, Aubry left the lab and returned to the deck, watching the calm water for any sign of her Bruce Too. At least she’d have that.

  Aubry pulled the speaker up from the water slowly, letting the sounds drift into the waves as long as she could. Bruce Too had been circling the boat overnight, and today she was going to get her change to swim with him again. She was elated, even though Nick stood not fifteen feet away, smirking.

  Ignoring him seemed to make him try harder to annoy her, but Aubry was too excited about catching Bruce Too’s attention to let Nick’s petty bullshit bother her. As she was already in her dive suit, all she needed to do was strap on her tank and get in the water, and in no time she had done just that. She dove down just below the boat, let her eyes adjust to the darkness, and waited, occasionally squeezing a squeaky toy that had been her boy’s favourite in the research tanks back at PaleoGen.

  Finally, a shape approached from her right. Aubry could see it was massive, at least 40 feet, if not more. Bruce? Maybe. She wouldn’t be able to tell until it came closer. She squeezed the toy again, and the massive beast came closer, gliding past silently. Aubry turned as it circled the boat once, and as it approached her again, she saw it was indeed her little Bruce Too, all grown up.

  Bruce opened his mouth as he came to a stop right beside her. Aubry shivered a little, and not from the chill in the water; Bruce Too’s teeth were perfectly proportionate to his body. In comparison, she was nothing more than an oversized burrito.

  The reptile’s massive teeth did not stop her from reaching out to touch him. As her hand slid against his bulk, a splash from behind her startled them both, and Bruce dove down deep, almost dragging her with him.

  Fighting to keep her place in the water, Aubry turned just in time to see Nick attempt to pull the line on her tank. She swung out at him, but it did little good. They struggled for a few moments, and she began to weaken. He pushed her against the bottom of the boat, the force slamming her head hard enough she saw stars, and the mouthpiece flew out from between her teeth. Loosing herself from his grip, Aubry brought her knee up to Nick’s groin, all the while her hands desperately grasping for her breather.

  When she finally got hold of it and had taken a few breaths, she realized Nick was staring over her shoulder, fear very evident in his eyes. She turned, and there was Bruce Too, coming up fast from behind. Aubry pushed herself deeper into the water to avoid being hit by her creation, but Nick was too slow. Bruce opened his immense jaw and snapped it down again, trapping Nick’s legs inside his mouth.

  Nick’s breather fell in a burst of bubbles as he screamed. She could hear it, feel it in her chest; it reverberated in her blood.

  Aubry could have moved to stop Bruce Too, perhaps he would still listen to her commands.

  But she didn’t.

  Instead, she swam to the surface, climbed the ladder, and quickly shed her gear. No one asked where Nick had disappeared to, and she didn’t bring the subject up either. Only the captain turned and gave her a sharp look when one of the crew noted that there was damage to her head gear and tank, and that another set of gear was missing.

  Back on shore, the trip cut short for ‘lack of funding,’ no one raised much of an alarm. The
captain filed a report that Nick had never re-surfaced after diving on his own. A Coast Guard cruiser went out to the last coordinates given by the captain, but when nothing was found in 48 hours, Nick was listed as a missing person, presumed dead.

  Aubry threw five-pound steaks out into the lake every night for a month, just in case Bruce came close to shore. A meagre thank you, but even if he didn’t get it, she knew Bruce Too understood. Somewhere in that reptile brain, he’d had enough instinct to save his mother.

  As she gazed out over the water, Aubry smiled. Her boy had done good.

  DARK OPERATOR

  Clayton Chandler

  I am the angel on her shoulder. I am the devil whispering in her ear. I am the hand up her skirt, thumbing her panties aside as she puts the razor to her wrist.

  The call came in ten minutes ago. I could hear the chick bawling when I answered the phone. She was really going at it, snorting back tears.

  “I need help,” she stammered. Talking about how her boyfriend just left her. How she’s failing three classes, about to have to drop out of school. Mom’s on her ass. Pressure’s too much.

  “It’s okay ... kiddo,” I say. I can’t remember the chick’s name. She sounds like a brunette, though, and I like brunettes. Not as much as blondes, of course, but close enough. This chick has a nice husky voice. I bet she goes to bars a lot. Party girl. Likes to have fun — just my type.