Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.
Content warnings:
Bodily harm and fluids.
Centuries of war, conquest, and foreign invasion have drawn and redrawn the map of Argia countless times, leaving the country’s boundaries ambiguous and ill-defined. It was in the summer of his fortieth year that Franz Sieber found himself in that contested region, escorted by a small team of mercenaries, guides, and translators. He had come in search of flowers.
According to local legend, the outskirts of Argia were home to the Hyacinthus mercedes—a rare breed whose pollen plays a crucial role in the manufacture of certain microchips that might be profitably incorporated into children’s toys. Sieber knew that a successful campaign would be exceedingly profitable; once he had unambiguous confirmation that the Argian soil could nurture Hyacinthus mercedes, he felt confident that he could persuade certain industry and political connections to redraw the country’s borders in such a way that the flowers were entirely under the control of a puppet dictator who could, in turn, be expected to trade the precious botanical resource well below market value, in exchange for a willingness to overlook the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the Argian capital.
As business ventures go, the plan was risky. It remained unclear whether or not the flowers were truly indigenous to that region, and Sieber knew full well what horrible fate might await him if the team was ambushed and taken hostage by any of the dozen rogue militias who regularly patrolled the area. Worse still, there were legends of even graver threats stalking the Argian plains: creatures the locals only spoke of in hushed tones and with downturned heads. Moreover, Sieber knew that the legend of rare flowers blooming in the ravaged hills of Argia might have been entirely fabricated by the mercenary he had hired to organize the expedition—a man of questionable integrity who, over the years, had lost all but two of his fingers in various ill-advised business ventures.
Franz Sieber had come to that cursed place in search of flowers and, on the fortieth day of the expedition, he found them. This was in a patch of land that Sieber’s hired men assured him had once been the site of an important temple where adherents of a long-forgotten religion sacrificed willing subjects in their worship of a god whose name is known only to the dead. Nothing remained of this monument—if it ever existed at all—and as far as the consensus of recorded history was concerned, this patch of land carried no particular significance, aside from being a convenient place for soldiers to kill one another throughout the centuries, first with swords and crossbows, then with rifles and grenades, and then (most recently) with stones and sharpened sticks.
Even though Franz Sieber was well studied in the science of botany and had seen countless sketches of the Hyacinthus mercedes in textbooks and scholarly articles, he was nonetheless stunned the beauty of the real article. The flowers were more delicate and intricate than any he had ever seen and, owing to a peculiar symbiosis with a species of deadly parasitic worm, each blossom was unique. Like a snowflake or a face or a fingerprint, each flower was broadly similar in form and function, but characterized and differentiated by subtle variations of geometry and texture and colouration. And the flowers bloomed in such abundance that there, before him, the landscape of sun-bleached bones and discarded weapons was draped in a veil of brilliant violet that refracted the sunlight in unexpected ways and trembled playfully with even the faintest breeze.
Franz Sieber knelt to pluck a blossom from the earth when he heard his guide utter a curse in the language of his grandparents and felt a tug at his clothes, urging him to move.
Their party had been discovered—not by soldiers, but by those feral things haunting the vast network of subterranean passages that lie hidden beneath Argia’s blood-soaked plains.
Having lived under the shadow of these creatures since childhood, his companions knew to avert their gaze and make a quick retreat, never turning to face the lumbering things that stalked them across those brilliant violet plains. But Sieber—even though he had received clear and unambiguous instructions on how to comport himself should this situation arise—could not resist the temptation. Though he retreated as fast as his legs would carry him, for a brief instant his resolve faltered and he glanced back over his shoulder, letting his eyes fall on just one of the countless things that threatened his life. It was a fleeting moment—no longer in duration than a step, a heartbeat, a sigh. But it was a moment that would profoundly alter his life trajectory.
From an amorphous mass of misplaced limbs and receding gums, Sieber’s gaze had focused on one single creature: a gaunt and pale thing that seemed assembled at random, a mess of misplaced claws and limbs and eyes, defying any notion of form or function. There was nothing special about this particular monstrosity, nothing noteworthy that might distinguish it from its brethren. But it was this beast alone he had laid eyes upon. And now, having known the creature’s face, Franz Sieber would not be free from it.
That night, they camped at the edge of a forest, some miles from the fields of Hyacinthus mercedes. Sieber’s hired men showed little concern about the creature standing watch over their camp, for they knew it was not bound to them. The men cooked their meals and smoked their pipes in silence. And then, as the darkness rose from the earth and the misshapen thing was thrown into silhouette against the bruised sky, each man took his turn appraising Franz Sieber and his fate—the same combination of sympathy, contempt, and disgust etched into every face.
The creature stayed with Sieber as he made his long journey home across deserts, oceans, time zones. When his team of hired men pushed him from their Jeep and abandoned him by the side of a gravel road, the creature was already there, nestled between the weeds, waiting for him. When he took shelter from a band of hooded men armed with machetes in the ruins of a church, the creature was there, perched atop the decaying altar, waiting. When he traded his left ring finger for a ride into the Argian capital on a makeshift rickshaw, the creature rode with him, dangling precariously off the side of the vehicle. On the long flight home it was with him, also, folded upon itself in strange ways and stowed safely in the luggage compartment.
Back in his home country, Franz Sieber went on to successfully negotiate a series of trade deals—each more ethically dubious than the last—that would ensure his lifelong access to an embarrassment of riches. But he was never alone. The creature lived with him for years, sometimes inhabiting a spare room or the crawlspace beneath the stairs or the antique chest of drawers in the attic. Sometimes it stayed out of sight in these obscure places long enough for Sieber to begin to forget about it, to imagine he might be free from the thing at last.
The sense of relief would not endure.
Inevitably, the creature would make its presence felt. When his divorce was being finalized and custody of the children was uncertain, the thing took up residence beneath his bed, clawing at the frame and box spring while he lay sleeplessly above it each night. When his business empire was threatened by a class action lawsuit regarding the surveillance devices they had hidden in a popular line of plushies, the creature perched its great talons on the back of the toilet and watched him shit, shave, brush his teeth each morning. When he lost incalculable sums of money on a speculative trade and his mistress abandoned him, the creature took to dangling from the chandelier in the dining room, taunting him as he ate his lonely meals. It rode shotgun on long car trips, gently nudging the steering wheel from time to time, threatening to send them crashing into oncoming traffic, playfully reminding Sieber that it was in control, that this might all end at any moment.
In his final years, the Argian creature never left Franz Sieber’s shoulders. The thing’s pale flesh gradually fused with his own and became as much part of him as his heart, his gall bladder, his left nipple. Its sharp claws kept a wound open at the back of his head, and the thing nursed itself on a steady trickle of blood. And as the years wore on, so too did the wound. It first carved away the few traces of hair that had not been lost to male pattern baldness, then flesh, then bone. At night, Sieber slept on his stomach to facilitate the monster’s access to the wound—eventually he acclimated even to the sound of his skull being whittled down, millimetre by millimetre.
Once the Argian creature had carved a suitably large hole through the back of his skull, Franz Sieber took his seat at the living room window, fixed his gaze on the setting sun, and waited. It teased him for a time, caressing the smooth surface of the dura mater with its tongue, before piercing through the layers of meninges that enshrine the brain, greedily lapping up the metallic-tasting cerebrospinal fluid that came trickling out in rivulets, tracing strange trajectories over the uneven folds of his cortex. It entered him with its tongue, tasting him, prodding playfully at the interstitial space between the hemispheres. And it consumed him, at last, drawing the remains of Franz Sieber through that jagged hole, bite by bite, leaving behind a hollow shell, still seated in its place by the window, empty eye sockets fixed on the crumbling expanse of the Sieber estate.
