Cthulhu's Reign

THE SHALLOWS John Langan

“I could call you Gus,” Ransom said.

The crab’s legs, blue and cream, clattered against one another. It did not hoist itself from its place in the sink, though, which meant it was listening to him. Maybe. Staring out the dining room window, his daily mug of instant coffee steaming on the table in front of him, he said, “That was supposed to be my son’s name. August us. It was his great-grandfather’s name, his mother’s father’s father. The old man was dying while Heather was pregnant. We. I, really, was struck by the symmetry: one life ending, another beginning. It seemed a duty, our duty, to make sure the name wasn’t lost, to carry it forward into a new generation. I didn’t know old Gus, not really; as far as I can remember, I met him exactly once, at a party at Heather’s parents’ a couple of years before we were married.”

The great curtain of pale light that rippled thirty yards from his house stilled. Although he had long since given up trying to work out the pattern of its changes, Ransom glanced at his watch. 2:02. PM, he was reasonably sure. The vast rectangle that occupied the space where his neighbor’s green-sided house had stood, as well as everything to either side of it, dimmed, then filled with the rich blue of the tropical ocean, the paler blue of the tropical sky. Waves chased one another towards Ransom, their long swells broken by the backs of fish, sharks, whales, all rushing in the same direction as the waves, away from a spot where the surface of the ocean heaved in a way that reminded Ransom of a pot of water approaching the boil.

(Tilting his head back, Matt had said, How far up do you think it goes? I don’t know, Ransom had answered. Twenty feet in front of them, the sheet of light that had descended an hour before, draping their view of the Pattersons’ house and everything beyond it belled, as if swept by a breeze. This is connected to what’s been happening at the poles, isn’t it? Matt had squinted to see through the dull glare. I don’t know, Ransom had said, maybe. Do you think the Pattersons are okay? Matt had asked. I hope so, Ransom had said. He’d doubted it.)

He looked at the clumps of creamer speckling the surface of the coffee, miniature icebergs. “Gus couldn’t have been that old. He’d married young, and Heather’s father, Rudy, had married young, and Heather was twenty- four or — five. call him sixty-five, sixty-six, tops. To look at him, though, you would have placed him a good ten, fifteen years closer to the grave. Old. granted, I was younger then, and from a distance of four decades, mid-sixty seemed a lot older than it does twenty years on. But even factoring in the callowness of youth, Gus was not in good shape. I doubt he’d ever been what you’d consider tall, but he was stooped, as if his head were being drawn down into his chest. Thin, frail: although the day was hot, he wore a long-sleeved checked shirt buttoned to the throat and a pair of navy chinos. His head. his hair was thinning, but what there was of it was long, and it floated around his head like the crest of some ancient bird. His nose supported a pair of horn- rimmed glasses whose lenses were white with scratches; I couldn’t understand how he could see through them, or maybe that was the point. Whether he was eating from the paper plate Heather’s uncle brought him or just sitting there, old Gus’s lips kept moving, his tongue edging out and retreating.”

The coffee was cool enough to drink. Over the rim of the mug, he watched the entire ocean churning with such force that whatever of its inhabitants had not reached safety were flung against one another. Mixed among their flailing forms were parts of creatures Ransom could not identify, a forest of black needles, a mass of rubbery pink tubes, the crested dome of what might have been a head the size of a bus.

He lowered the mug. “By the time I parked my car, Gus was seated near the garage. Heather took me by the hand and led me over to him. Those white lenses raised in my direction as she crouched beside his chair and introduced me as her boyfriend. Gus extended his right hand, which I took in mine. Hard. his palm, the undersides of his fingers, were rough with calluses, the yield of a lifetime as a mechanic. I tried to hold his hand gently. politely, I guess, but although his arm trembled, there was plenty of strength left in his fingers, which closed on mine like a trap springing shut. He said something, Pleased to meet you, you’ve got a special girl here, words to that effect. I wasn’t paying attention; I was busy with the vise tightening around my fingers, with my bones grinding against one another. Once he’d delivered his pleasantries, Gus held onto my hand a moment longer, then the lenses dropped, the fingers relaxed, and my hand was my own again. Heather kissed him on the cheek, and we went to have a look at the food. My fingers ached on and off for the rest of the day.”

At the center of the heaving ocean, something forced its way up through the waves. The peak of an undersea mountain, rising to the sun: that was still Ransom’s first impression. Niagaras poured off black rock. His mind struggled to catch up with what stood revealed, to find suitable comparisons for it, even as more of it pushed the water aside. Some kind of structure — structures: domes, columns, walls — a city, an Atlantis finding the sun again. No — the shapes were off: the domes bulged, the columns bent, the walls curved, in ways that conformed to no architectural style — that made no sense. A natural formation, then, a quirk of geology. No — already, the hypothesis was untenable: there was too much evidence of intentionality in the shapes draped with seaweed, heaped with fish brought suffocating into the air. As the rest of the island left the ocean, filling the view before Ransom to the point it threatened to burst out of the curtain, the appearance of an enormous monolith in the foreground, its surface incised with pictographs, settled the matter. This huge jumble of forms, some of which appeared to contradict one another, to intersect in ways the eye could not untangle, to occupy almost the same space at the same time, was deliberate.

Ransom slid his chair back from the table and stood. The crab’s legs dinged on the stainless steel sink. Picking up his mug, he turned away from the window. “That was the extent of my interactions with Gus. To be honest, what I knew of him, what Heather had told me, I didn’t much care for. He was what I guess you’d call a functioning alcoholic, although the way he functioned. he was a whiskey-drinker, Jack Daniels, Jim Bean, Maker’s Mark, that end of the shelf. I can’t claim a lot of experience, but from what I’ve seen, sour mash shortcuts to your mean, your nasty side. That was the case with Gus, at least. It wasn’t so much that he used his hands — he did, and I gather the hearing in Rudy’s left ear was the worse for it — no, the whiskey unlocked the cage that held all of Gus’s resentment, his bitterness, his jealousy. Apparently, when he was younger, Rudy’s little brother Jan had liked helping their mother in the kitchen. He’d been something of a baker, Jan; Rudy claimed he made the best chocolate cake you ever tasted, frosted it with buttercream. His mother used to let him out of working with his father in the garage or around the yard so he could assist her with the meals. None of the other kids — there were six of them — was too thrilled at there being one fewer of them to dilute their father’s attention, especially when they saw Gus’s lips tighten as he realized Jan had stayed inside again.

“Anyway, this one night, Gus wandered into the house after spending the better part of the evening in the garage. He passed most of the hours after he returned from work fixing his friends’ and acquaintances’ cars, Hank Williams on the transistor radio, Jack Daniels in one of the kids’ juice glasses. In he comes, wiping the grease off his hands with a dishtowel, and what should greet his eyes when he peers into the refrigerator in search of a little supper but the golden top of the cherry pie Jan made for the church bake sale the next day? Gus loves cherry pie. Without a second thought, he lifts the pie from the top shelf of the fridge and deposits it on the kitchen table. He digs his clasp-knife out of his pants-pocket, opens it, and cuts himself a generous slice. He doesn’t bother with a fork; instead, he shoves his fingers under the crust and lifts the piece straight to his mouth. It’s so tasty, he helps himself to a second, larger serving before he’s finished the first. In his eagerness, he slices through the pie tin to the table. He doesn’t care; he leaves the knife stuck where it is and uses his other hand to free the piece.

“That’s how Jan finds him when he walks into the kitchen for a glass of milk, a wedge of cherry pie in one hand, red syrup and yellow crumbs smeared on his other hand, his mouth and chin. By this age — Jan’s around twelve, thirteen — the boy has long-since learned that the safest way, the only way, to meet the outrages that accompany his father’s drinking is calmly, impassively. Give him the excuse to garnish his injury with insult, and he’ll take it.

“And yet, this is exactly what Jan does. He can’t help himself, maybe. He lets his response to the sight of Gus standing with his mouth stuffed with half-chewed pie flash across his face. It’s all the provocation his father requires. What? he says, crumbs spraying from his mouth.

“Nothing, Jan says, but he’s too late. Gus drops the slice he’s holding to the floor, scoops the rest of the pie from the tin with his free hand, and slaps that to the floor, as well. He raises one foot and stamps on the mess he’s made, spreading it across the linoleum. Jan knows enough to remain where he is. Gus brings his shoe down on the ruin of Jan’s efforts twice more, then wipes his hands on his pants, frees his knife from the table, and folds it closed. As he returns it to his pocket, he tells Jan that if he wants to be a little faggot and wear an apron in the kitchen, that’s his concern, but he’d best keep his little faggot mouth shut when there’s a man around, particularly when that man’s his father. Does Jan understand him?

“Yes, Pa, Jan says.

“Then take your little faggot ass off to bed, Gus says.

“What happened next,” Ransom said, “wasn’t a surprise; in fact, it was depressingly predictable.” He walked into the kitchen, deposited his mug on the counter. “That was the end of Jan’s time in the kitchen. He wasn’t the first one outside to help his father, but he wasn’t the last, either, and he worked hard. The morning of his eighteenth birthday, he enlisted in the Marines; within a couple of months, he was on patrol in Vietnam. He was cited for bravery on several occasions; I think he may have been awarded a medal. One afternoon, when his squad stopped for a rest, he was shot through the head by a sniper. He’d removed his helmet. to tell the truth, I’m not sure why he had his helmet off. He survived, but it goes without saying, he was never the same. His problems. he had trouble moving, coordinating his arms and legs. His speech was slurred; he couldn’t remember the names of familiar objects, activities; he forgot something the second after you said it to him. There was no way he could live on his own. His mother wanted Jan to move back home, but Gus refused, said there was no way he was going to be saddled with an idiot who hadn’t known enough to keep his damn helmet on. Which didn’t stop him from accepting the drinks he was bought when Jan visited and Gus paraded him at the V.F.W.”

Behind him, a pair of doors would be opening on the front of a squat stone box near the island’s peak. The structure, whose rough exterior suggested a child’s drawing of a Greek temple, must be the size of a cathedral, yet it was dwarfed by what squeezed out of its open doors. While Ransom continued to have trouble with the sheer size of the thing, which seemed as if it must break a textbook’s worth of physical laws, he was more bothered by its speed. There should have been no way, he was certain, for something of that mass to move that quickly. Given the thing’s appearance, the tumult of coils wreathing its head, the scales shimmering on its arms, its legs, the wings that unfolded into great translucent fans whose edges were not quite in focus, its speed was hardly the most obvious detail on which to focus, but for Ransom, the dearth of time between the first hint of the thing’s shadow on the doors and its heaving off the ground on a hurricane-blast of its wings confirmed the extent to which the world had changed.

(What was that? Matt had screamed, his eyes wide. Was that real? Is that happening? Ransom had been unable to speak, his tongue dead in his mouth.)

Like so many cranes raising and lowering, the cluster of smaller limbs that rose from the center of the crab’s back was opening and closing. Ransom said, “I know: if the guy was such a shit, why pass his name on to my son?” He shrugged. “When I was younger — at that point in my life, the idea of the past. of a family’s past, of continuity between the present and that past, was very important to me. By the time Heather was pregnant, the worst of Gus’s offenses was years gone by. If you wanted,

I suppose you could say that he was paying for his previous excesses. He hadn’t taken notice of his diabetes for decades. If the toes on his right foot hadn’t turned black, then started to smell, I doubt he ever would have returned to the doctor. Although. what that visit brought him was the emergency amputation of his toes, followed by the removal of his foot a couple of weeks later. The surgeon wanted to take his leg, said the only way to beat the gangrene that was eating Gus was to leap ahead of it. Gus refused, declared he could see where he was headed, and he wasn’t going to be jointed like a chicken on the way. There was no arguing with him. His regular doctor prescribed some heavy-duty antibiotics for him, but I’m not sure he had the script filled.

“When he returned home, everyone said it was to die — which it was, of course, but I think we all expected him to be gone in a matter of days. He hung on, though, for one week, and the next, and the one after that. Heather and her mother visited him. I was at work. She said the house smelled like spoiled meat; it was so bad, she couldn’t stay in for more than a couple of minutes, barely long enough to stand beside Gus’s bed and kiss his cheek. His lips moved, but she couldn’t understand him. She spent the rest of the visit outside, in her mother’s truck, listening to the radio.”

Ransom glanced out the window. The huge sheet of light rippled like an aurora, the image of the island and its cargo gone. He said, “Gus died the week after Heather’s visit. To tell the truth, I half-expected him to last until the baby arrived. Heather went to the wake and the funeral; I had to work. As it turned out, we settled on Matthew — Matt — instead.”

His break was over. Ransom exited the kitchen, turned down the hallway to the front door. On the walls to either side of him, photos of himself and his family, his son, smiled at photographers’ prompts years forgotten. He peered out one of the narrow windows that flanked the door. The rocking chair he’d left on the front porch in a quixotic gesture stood motionless. Across the street, the charred mound that sat inside the burned-out remains of his neighbor’s house appeared quiet. Ransom reached for the six-foot pole that leaned against the corner opposite him. Careful to check that the butcher knife duct-taped to the top was secure, he gripped the improvised spear near the tape and unlocked the door. Leveling the weapon, he stepped back as the door swung in.

In two months of maintaining the ritual every time he opened any of the doors into the house, Ransom had yet to be met by anything. The precaution was one on which his son had insisted; the day of his departure north, Matt had pledged Ransom to maintaining it. With no intention of doing so, Ransom had agreed, only to find himself repeating the familiar motions the next time he was about to venture out to the garden. Now here he was, jabbing the end of the spear through the doorway to draw movement, waiting a count of ten, then advancing one slow step at a time, careful not to miss anything dangling from the underside of the porch roof. Once he was satisfied that the porch was clear, that nothing was lurking in the bush to its right, he called over his shoulder, “I’m on my way to check the garden, if you’d like to join me.”

A chorus of ringing announced the crab’s extricating itself from the sink. Legs clicking on the wood floors like so many tap shoes, it hurried along the hall and out beside him. Keeping the spear straight ahead, he reached back for one of the canvas bags piled inside the door, then pulled the door shut. The crab raced down the stairs and to the right, around the strip of lawn in front of the house. Watching its long legs spindle made the coffee churn at the back of his throat. He followed it off the porch.

Although he told himself that he had no desire to stare at the remnants of his neighbor Adam’s house — it was a distraction; it was ghoulish; it was not good for his mental health — Ransom was unable to keep his eyes from it. All that was left of the structure were fire-blackened fragments of the walls that had stood at the house’s northeast and southwest corners. Had Ransom not spent ten years living across the road from the white, two-story colonial whose lawn had been chronically overgrown — to the point he and Heather had spoken of it as their own little piece of the rainforest — he could not have guessed the details of the building the fire had consumed. While he was no expert at such matters, he had been surprised that the flames had taken so much of Adam’s house; even without the fire department to douse it, Ransom had the sense that the blaze should not have consumed this much of it. No doubt, the extent of the destruction owed something to the architects of the shape the house’s destruction had revealed.

(There’s something in Adam’s house, Matt had said. The eyes of the ten men and woman crowded around the kitchen table did not look at him. They’ve been there since before. everything. Before the Fracture. I’ve heard them moving around outside, in the trees. We have to do something about them.)

About a month after they had moved into their house, some ten years ago, Ransom had discovered a wasps’ nest clinging to a light on the far side of the garage. Had it been only himself, even himself and Heather, living there, he would have been tempted to live and let live. However, with an eight- year-old factored into the equation, one whose curiosity was recorded in the constellations of scars up his arms and down his legs, there was no choice. Ransom called the exterminator and the next day, the nest was still. He waited the three days the woman recommended, then removed the nest by unscrewing the frosted glass jar to which it was anchored. He estimated the side stoop the sunniest part of the property; he placed the nest there to dry out. His decision had not pleased Heather, who was concerned at poison-resistant wasps emerging enraged at the attack on their home, but after a week’s watch brought no super wasps, he considered it reasonable to examine it with Matt. It was the first time he had been this near to a nest, and he had been fascinated by it, the grey, papery material that covered it in strips wound up and to the right. Slicing it across the equator had disclosed a matrix of cells, a little less than half of them chambering larvae, and a host of motionless wasps. Every detail of the nest, he was aware, owed itself to some physiological necessity, evolutionary advantage, but he’d found it difficult to shake the impression that he was observing the result of an alien intelligence, an alien aesthetic, at work.

That same sensation, taken to a power of ten, gripped him at the sight of the structure that had hidden inside Adam’s house. Its shape reminded him of that long-ago wasps’ nest, only inverted, an irregular dome composed not of grey pulp but a porous substance whose texture suggested sponge. Where it was not charred black, its surface was dark umber. Unlike the house in which it had grown up, Ransom thought that the fire that had scoured this dwelling should have inflicted more damage on it, collapsed it. In spots, the reddish surface of the mound had cracked to reveal a darker substance beneath, something that trembled in the light like mercury. Perhaps this was the reason the place was still standing. What had been the overgrown yard was dirt baked and burnt brittle by the succession of fires. At half a dozen points around the yard, the large shells of what might have been lobsters — had each of those lobsters stood the size of a small pony — lay broken, split wide, the handles of axes, shovels, picks spouting from them.

(Matt had been so excited, his cheeks flushed in that way that made his eyes glow. The left sleeve of his leather jacket, of the sweatshirt underneath it, had been sliced open, the skin below cut from wrist to shoulder by a claw the size of a tennis racket. He hadn’t cared, had barely noticed as Ransom had washed the wound, inspected it for any of the fluid (blood?) that had spattered the jacket, and wrapped it in gauze. Outside, whoops and hollers of celebration had filled the morning air. You should have come with us, Matt had said, the remark less a reproach and more an expression of regret for a missed opportunity. My plan worked. They never saw us coming. You should have been there. Despite the anxiety that had yet to drain from him, pride had swelled Ransom’s chest. Maybe everything wasn’t lost. Maybe his son. Yes, well, Ransom had said, someone has to be around to pick up the pieces.)

Ransom continued around the front lawn to what they had called the side yard, a wide slope of grass that stretched from the road up to the treeline of the rise behind the house. If the wreckage across the street was difficult to ignore, what lay beyond the edge of the yard compelled his attention. Everything that had extended north of the house: his next door neighbor Dan’s red house and barn, the volunteer fire station across from it, the houses that had continued on up both sides of the road to Wiltwyck, was gone, as was the very ground on which all of it had been built. As far ahead as Ransom could see, to either side, the earth had been scraped to bare rock, the dull surface of which bore hundred-yard gouges. Somewhere beyond his ability to guesstimate, planes of light like the one on the other side of his house were visible on the horizon. Ransom could not decide how many there were. Some days he thought at least four, staggered one behind the other; others he was certain there was only the one whose undulations produced the illusion of more. Far off as the aurora(e) was, its sheer size made the figures that occasionally filled it visible. These he found it easier to disregard, especially when, as today, they were something familiar: a quartet of tall stones at the top of a rounded mountain, one apparently fallen over, the remaining three set at irregular distances from one another, enough to suggest that their proximity might be no more than a fluke of geology; from within the arrangement, as if stepping down into it, an eye the size of a barn door peered and began to push out. Instead, he focused on the garden into which he, Matt, and a few of his neighbors had tilled the side yard.

While Ransom judged the crab capable of leaping the dry moat and clambering up the wire fence around the garden, it preferred to wait for him to set the plank over the trench, cross it, and unlock the front gate. Only then would it scuttle around him, up the rows of carrots and broccoli, the tomatoes caged in their conical frames, stopping on its rounds to inspect a leaf here, a stalk there, tilting its shell forward so that one of the limbs centered in its back could extend and take the object of its scrutiny in its claw. In general, Ransom attributed the crab’s study to simple curiosity, but there were moments he fancied that, prior to its arrival in his front yard the morning after Matt’s departure, in whatever strange place it had called home, the crab had tended a garden of its own.

Latching but not locking the gate behind him, Ransom said, “What about Bruce? That was what we called our dog. the only dog we ever had. Heather picked out the name. She was a huge Springsteen fan. The dog didn’t look like a Bruce, not in the slightest. He was some kind of weird mix, Great Dane and greyhound, something like that. His body. it was as if the front of one dog had been sewed to the back of another. He had this enormous head — heavy jowls, brow, huge jaws — and these thick front legs, attached to a skinny trunk, back legs like pipe cleaners. His tail — I don’t know where that came from. It was so long it hung down almost to his feet. I kept expecting him to tip over, fall on his face. I wanted to call him Butch, that or something classical, Cerberus. Heather and Matt overruled me. Matt was all in favor of calling him Super Destroyer, or Fire Teeth, but Heather and I vetoed those. Somehow, this meant she got the final decision, and Bruce it was.”

The beer traps next to the lettuce were full of the large red slugs that had appeared in the last week. One near the top was still moving, swimming lazily around the PBR, the vent along its back expanding and contracting like a mouth attempting to speak. The traps could wait another day before emptying; he would have to remember to bring another can of beer with him tomorrow. He said, “Heather found the dog wandering in the road out front. He was in pretty rough shape: his coat was caked with dirt, rubbed raw in places; he was so thin, you could’ve used his ribs as a toast rack. Heather was a sucker for any kind of hard case; she said it was why she’d gone out with me, in the first place. Very funny, right? By the time Matt stepped off the schoolbus, she’d lured the dog inside with a plateful of chicken scraps (which he devoured), coaxed him into the downstairs shower (after which, she said, he looked positively skeletal), and heaped a couple of old blankets into a bed for him. She tried to convince him to lie down there, and he did subject the blankets to extensive sniffing, but he refused to allow Heather out of his sight. She was. at that point, she tired easily — to be honest, it was pretty remarkable that she’d been able to do everything she had — so she went out to the front porch to rest on the rocking chair and wait for Matt’s bus. When she did, the dog — Bruce, I might as well call him that; she’d already settled on the name — Bruce insisted on accompanying her. He plopped down beside her, and remained there until Matt was climbing the front steps. I would have been worried. concerned about how Bruce would react to Matt, whether he’d be jealous of Heather, that kind of thing. Not my wife: when Matt reached the top of the stairs, the dog stood, but that was all. Heather didn’t have to speak to him, let alone grab his collar.”

The lettuces weren’t ready to pick, nor were the cabbages or broccoli. A few tomatoes, however, were sufficiently red to merit plucking from the plants and dropping into the canvas bag. The crab was roaming the top of the garden, where they’d planted Dan’s apple trees. Ransom glanced over the last of the tomatoes, checked the frames. “That collar,” he said. “It was the first thing I noticed about the dog. Okay, maybe not the first, but it wasn’t too long before it caught my eye. This was after Matt had met me in the driveway with the news that we had a guest. The look on his face. he had always been a moody kid — Heather and I used to ask one another, How’s the weather in Mattsville? — and adolescence, its spiking hormones, had not improved his temperament. In all fairness, Heather being sick didn’t help matters any. This night, though, he was positively beaming, vibrating with nervous energy. When I saw him running up to the car, my heart jumped. I couldn’t conceive any reason for him to rush out the side door that wasn’t bad: at the very best, an argument with his mother over some school-related issue; at the very worst, another ambulance ride to the hospital for Heather.”

A blue centipede the size of his hand trundled across the dirt in front of him. He considered spearing it, couldn’t remember if it controlled any of the other species in the garden. Better to err on the side of caution — even now. He stepped over it, moved on to the beans. He said, “Matt refused to answer any of my questions; all he would say was, You’ll see. It had been a long day at work; my patience was frayed to a couple of threads and they weren’t looking any too strong. I was on the verge of snapping at him, telling him to cut the crap, grow up, but something, that grin, maybe, made me hold my tongue. And once I was inside, there was Heather sitting on the couch, the dog sprawled out beside her, his head in her lap. He didn’t so much as open an eye to me.

“For the life of me, I could not figure out how Heather had gotten him. I assumed she had been to the pound, but we owned only the one car, which I’d had at work all day. She took the longest time telling me where the dog had come from. I had to keep guessing, and didn’t Matt think that was the funniest thing ever? It was kind of funny. my explanations grew increasingly bizarre, fanciful. Someone had delivered the dog in a steamer trunk. Heather had discovered him living in one of the trees out front. He’d been packed away in the attic. I think she and Matt wanted to hear my next story.”

Ransom had forgotten the name of the beans they had planted. Not green beans: these grew in dark purple; although Dan had assured him that they turned green once you cooked them. The beans had come in big, which Dan had predicted: each was easily six, seven inches long. Of the twenty- five or thirty that were ready to pick, however, four had split at the bottom, burst by gelid, inky coils that hung down as long again as the bean. The ends of the coils raised towards him, unfolding petals lined with tiny teeth.

“Shit.” He stepped back, lowering the spear. The coils swayed from side to side, their petals opening further. He studied their stalks. All four sprang from the same plant. He swept the blade of the spear through the beans dangling from the plants to either side of the affected one. They dinged faintly on the metal. The rest of the crop appeared untouched; that was something. He adjusted the canvas bag onto his shoulder. Taking the spear in both hands, he set the edge of the blade against the middle plant’s stem. His first cut drew viscous green liquid and the smell of spoiled eggs. While he sawed, the coils whipped this way and that, and another three beans shook frantically. The stem severed, he used the spear to loosen the plant from its wire supports, then to carry it to the compost pile at the top of the garden, in the corner opposite the apple trees. There was lighter fluid left in the bottle beside the fence; the dark coils continued to writhe as he sprayed them with it. The plant was too green to burn well, but Ransom reckoned the application of fire to it, however briefly, couldn’t hurt. He reached in his shirt pocket for the matches. The lighter fluid flared with a satisfying whump.

The crab was circling the apple trees. Eyes on the leaves curling in the flames, Ransom said, “By the time Heather finally told me how Bruce had arrived at the house, I’d been won over. Honestly, within a couple of minutes of watching her sitting there with the dog, I was ready for him to move in. Not because I was such a great dog person — I’d grown up with cats, and if I’d been inclined to adopt a pet, a kitten would have been my first choice. Heather was the one who’d been raised with a houseful of dogs. No, what decided me in Bruce’s favor was Heather, her. demeanor, I suppose. You could see it in the way she was seated. She didn’t look as if she were holding herself as still as possible, as if someone were pressing a knife against the small of her back. She wasn’t relaxed — that would be an overstatement — but she was calmer.

“The change in Matt didn’t hurt, either.” Ransom squeezed another jet of lighter fluid onto the fire, which leapt up in response. The gelid coils thrashed as if trying to tear themselves free of the plant. “How long had that boy wanted a dog. By now, we’d settled into a routine with Heather’s meds, her doctors’ visits — it had settled onto us, more like. I think we knew. I wouldn’t say we had given up hope; Heather’s latest tests had returned better than expected results. But we — the three of us were in a place we had been in for a long time and didn’t know when we were going to get out of. A dog was refreshing, new.”

With liquid pops, the four coils burst one after the other. The trio of suspect beans followed close behind. “That collar, though. ” Bringing the lighter fluid with him, Ransom left the fire for the spot where the affected plant had been rooted. Emerald fluid thick as honey topped the stump, slid down its sides in slow fingers. He should dig it out, he knew, and probably the plants to either side of it, for good measure, but without the protection of a pair of gloves, he was reluctant to expose his bare skin to it. He reversed the spear and drove its point into the stump. Leaving the blade in, he twisted the handle around to widen the cut, then poured lighter fluid into and around it. He wasn’t about to risk dropping a match over here, but he guessed the accelerant should, at a minimum, prove sufficiently toxic to hinder the plant from regrowing until he could return suitably protected and with a shovel.

There was still the question of whether to harvest the plants to either side. Fresh vegetables would be nice, but prudence was the rule of the day. Before they’d set out for the polar city with Matt, his neighbors had moved their various stores to his basement, for safe keeping; it wasn’t as if he were going to run out of canned food anytime soon. Ransom withdrew the spear and returned to the compost, where the fire had not yet subsided. Its business with the apple trees completed, the crab crouched at a safe remove from the flames. Ransom said, “It was a new collar, this blue, fibrous stuff, and there was a round metal tag hanging from it. The tag was incised with a name, ‘Noble,’ and a number to call in case this dog was found. It was a Wiltwyck number. I said, What about the owner? Shouldn’t we call them?

“Heather must have been preparing her answer all day, from the moment she read the tag. Do you see the condition this animal is in? she said. Either his owner is dead, or they don’t deserve him. As far as Heather was concerned, that was that. I didn’t argue, but shortly thereafter, I unbuckled the collar and threw it in a drawer in the laundry room. Given Bruce’s state, I didn’t imagine his owner would be sorry to find him gone, but you never know.

“For five days, Bruce lived with us. We took turns walking him. Matt actually woke up half an hour early to take him out for his morning stroll, then Heather gave him a shorter walk around lunchtime, then I took him for another long wander before bed. The dog tolerated me well enough, but he loved Matt, who couldn’t spend enough time with him. And Heather. except for his walks, he couldn’t bear to be away from her; even when we had passed a slow half-hour making our way up Main Street, Bruce diligently investigating the borders of the lawns on the way, there would come a moment he would decide it was time to return to Heather, and he would leave whatever he’d had his nose in and turn home, tugging me along behind him. Once we were inside and I had his leash off, he would bolt for wherever Heather was — usually in bed, asleep — and settle next to her.”

He snapped the lighter fluid’s cap shut and replaced it beside the fence. The crab sidled away along the rows of carrots and potatoes on the other side of the beans and tomatoes. Ransom watched it examine the feathery green tops of the carrots, prod the potato blossoms. It would be another couple of weeks until they were ready to unearth; though after what had happened to the beans, a quick check was in order. “On the morning of the sixth day, Bruce’s owner arrived, came walking up the street the same way his dog had. William Harrow: that was the way he introduced himself. It was a Saturday. I was cooking brunch; Matt was watching TV; Heather was sitting on the front porch, reading. Of course, Bruce was with her. September was a couple of weeks old, but summer was slow in leaving. The sky was clear, the air was warm, and I was thinking that maybe I’d load the four of us into the car and drive up to the reservoir for an afternoon out.”

On the far side of the house, the near curtain of light, on which he had watched the sunken island rise for the twentieth, the thirtieth time, settled, dimmed. With the slow spiral of food coloring dropped into water, dark pink and burnt orange spread across its upper reaches, a gaudy sunset display that was as close as the actual sky came to night any more. A broad concrete rectangle took up the image’s lower half. At its other end, the plane was bordered by four giant steel and glass boxes, each one open at the top. To the right, a single skyscraper was crowned by an enormous shape whose margins hung over and partway down its upper storeys. Something about the form, a handful of scattered details, suggested an impossibly large toad.

The first time Ransom had viewed this particular scene, a couple of weeks after Matt and their neighbors had embarked north, a couple of days after he had awakened to the greater part of Main Street and its houses gone, scoured to gray rock, he had not recognized its location. The polar city? Only once it was over and he was seated on the couch, unable to process what he had been shown, did he think, That was Albany. The Empire State Plaza. Those weren’t boxes: they were the bases of the office buildings that stood there. Fifty miles. That’s as far as they got.

He was close enough to the house for its silhouette to block most of the three figures who ran onto the bottom of the screen, one to collapse onto his hands and knees, another to drop his shotgun and tug a revolver out of his belt, the third to use his good hand to drag the blade of his hatchet against his jeans’ leg. The crab paid no more attention to the aurora’s display than it ever did; it was occupied withdrawing one of the red slugs from a beer trap. Ransom cleared his throat. “Heather said she never noticed William Harrow until his work boots were clomping on the front stairs. She looked up from her book, and there was this guy climbing to meet her. He must have been around our age, which is to say, late thirties. Tall, thin, not especially remarkable looking one way or the other. Beard, mustache. when I saw the guy, he struck me as guarded; to be fair, that could have been because he and Heather were already pretty far into a heated exchange. At the sound of the guy’s feet on the stairs, Bruce had stood; by the time I joined the conversation, the dog was trembling.

“The first words out of Harrow’s mouth were, That’s my dog. Maybe things would have proceeded along a different course. maybe we could have reached, I don’t know, some kind of agreement with the guy, if Heather hadn’t said, Oh? Prove it. Because he did; he said, Noble, sit, and Bruce did exactly that. There you go, Harrow said. I might have argued that that didn’t prove anything, that we had trained the dog to sit ourselves, and it was the command he was responding to, not the name, but Heather saw no point in ducking the issue. She said, Do you know what shape this animal was in when we found him? Were you responsible for that? and the mercury plummeted.

“Matt came for me in the kitchen. He said, Mom’s arguing with some guy. I think he might be Bruce’s owner.

“All right, I said, hold on. I turned off the burners under the scrambled eggs and home fries. As I was un-tying my apron, Matt said, Is he gonna take Bruce with him?

“Of course not, I said.

“But I could see. as soon as I understood the situation, I knew Bruce’s time with us was over, felt the same lightness high in the chest I’d known sitting in the doctor’s office with Heather a year and half before, that seems to be my body’s reaction to bad news. It was. when Matt — when I. ”

From either end of the plaza, from between two of the truncated buildings on its far side, what might have been torrents of black water rushed onto and over the concrete. There was no way for the streams to have been water: each would have required a hose the width of a train, pumps the size of houses, a score of workers to operate it, but the way they surged towards the trio occluded by the house suggested a river set loose from its banks and given free rein to speed across the land. The color of spent motor oil, they moved so fast that the objects studding their lengths were almost impossible to distinguish; after his initial viewing, it took Ransom another two before he realized that they were eyes, that each black tumult was the setting for a host of eyes, eyes of all sizes, shapes, and colors, eyes defining strange constellations. He had no similar trouble identifying the mouths into which the streams opened, tunnels gated by great cracked and jagged teeth.

Ransom said, “Heather’s approach. you might say that she combined shame with the threat of legal action. Harrow was impervious to both. As far as he was concerned, the dog looked fine, and he was the registered owner, so there was nothing to be worried about. Of course he looks good, Heather said, he’s been getting fed!

“If the dog had been in such awful shape, Harrow wanted to know, then how had he come all the way from his home up here? That didn’t sound like a trip an animal as severely abused as Heather was claiming could make.

“He was trying to get as far away as he could, she said. Had he been in better condition, he probably wouldn’t have stopped here.

“This was getting us nowhere — had gotten us nowhere. Look, I said. Mr. Harrow. My family and I have become awfully attached to this dog. I understand that you’ve probably spent quite a bit on him. I would be willing to reimburse you for that, in addition to whatever you think is fair for the dog. Here I was, pretty much offering the guy a blank check. Money, right? It may be the root of all evil, but it’s solved more than a few problems.

“William Harrow, though. he refused my offer straightaway. Maybe he thought I was patronizing him. Maybe he was trying to prove a point. I didn’t know what else to do. We could have stood our ground, insisted we were keeping Bruce, but if he had the law on his side, then we would only be delaying the inevitable. He could call the cops on us, the prospect of which made me queasy. As for escalating the situation, trying to get tough with him, intimidate him. that wasn’t me. I mean, really.”

With the house in the way, Ransom didn’t have to watch as the trio of dark torrents converged on the trio of men. He didn’t have to see the man who had not risen from his hands and knees scooped into a mouth that did not close so much as constrict. He didn’t have to see the man with the pistol empty it into the teeth that bit him in half. And he did not have to watch again as the third figure — he should call him a man; he had earned it — sidestepped the bite aimed at him and slashed a groove in the rubbery skin that caused the behemoth to veer away from him. He did not have to see the hatchet, raised for a second strike, spin off into the air, along with the hand that gripped it and most of the accompanying arm, as the mouth that had taken the man with the pistol sliced away the rest of the third man. Ransom did not have to see any of it.

(At the last moment, even though Ransom had sworn to himself he wouldn’t, he had pleaded with Matt not to leave. You could help me with the garden, he had said. You’ll manage, Matt had answered. Who will I talk to? Ransom had asked. Who will I tell things to? Write it all down, Matt had said, for when we get back. His throat tight with dread, Ransom had said, You don’t know what they’ll do to you. Matt had not argued with him.)

Its rounds of the garden completed, the crab was waiting at the gate. Ransom prodded the top of a carrot with the blunt end of the spear. “I want to say,” he said, “that had Heather been in better health, she would have gone toe-to-toe with Harrow herself. weak as she was, she was ready to take a swing at him. To be on the safe side, I stepped between them. All right, I said. If that’s what you want to do, then I guess there isn’t any more to say. I gestured at Bruce, who had returned to his feet. From his jeans pocket, Harrow withdrew another blue collar and a short lead. Bruce saw them, and it was like he understood what had happened. The holiday was over; it was back to the place he’d tried to escape. Head lowered, he crossed the porch to Harrow.

“I don’t know if Harrow intended to say anything else, but Heather did. Before he started down the stairs with Bruce, Heather said, Just remember, William Harrow: I know your name. It won’t be any difficulty finding out where you live, where you’re taking that dog. I’m making it my duty to watch you — I’m going to watch you like a hawk, and the first hint I see that you aren’t treating that dog right, I am going to bring the cops down on you like a hammer. You look at me and tell me I’m lying.

“He did look at her. His lip trembled; I was sure he was going to speak, answer her threat with one of his own. warn her that he shot trespassers, something like that, but he left without another word.

“Of course Heather went inside to track down his address right away. He lived off Main Street, on Farrell Drive, a cul- de-sac about a quarter of a mile that way.” Ransom nodded towards the stone expanse. “Heather was all for walking up there after him, as was Matt, who had eavesdropped on our confrontation with Harrow from inside the front door. The expression on his face. It was all I could do to persuade the two of them that chasing Harrow would only antagonize him, which wouldn’t be good for Bruce, would it? They agreed to wait a day, during which time neither spoke to me more than was absolutely necessary. As it turned out, though, Heather was feeling worse the next day, and then the day after that was Monday and I had work and Matt had school, so it wasn’t until Monday evening that we were able to visit Farrell Drive. To be honest, I didn’t think there’d be anything for us to see.

“I was wrong. William Harrow lived in a raised ranch set back about fifty yards from the road, at the top of a slight hill. Ten feet into his lawn, there was a cage, a wood frame walled and ceilinged with heavy wire mesh. It was maybe six feet high by twelve feet long by six feet deep. There was a large dog house at one end with a food and water dish beside it. The whole thing. everything was brand new. The serial numbers stenciled on the wood beams were dark and distinct; the mesh was bright; the dog house — the dog house was made out of some kind of heavy plastic, and it was shiny. Lying half-in the dog house was Bruce, who, when he heard us pull up, raised his head, then the rest of himself, and trotted over to the side of the cage, his tongue hanging out, his tail wagging.

“Heather and Matt were desperate to rush out of the car, but none of us could avoid the signs, also new, that lined the edge of the property: NO TRESPASSING, day-glo orange on a black background. Matt was all for ignoring them, a sentiment for which Heather had not a little sympathy. But — and I tried to explain this to the two of them — if we were going to have any hope of freeing Bruce, we had to be above reproach. If there were a record of Harrow having called the police on us, it would make our reporting him to the cops appear so much payback. Neither of them was happy, but they had to agree that what I was saying made sense.

“All the same, the second we were back home, Heather had the phone in her hand. The cop she talked to was pretty agreeable, although she cautioned Heather that as long as the dog wasn’t being obviously maltreated, there wasn’t anything that could be done. The cop agreed to drive along Farrell the next time she was on patrol, and Heather thanked her for the offer. When she hung up the phone, though, her face showed how satisfied she was with our local law enforcement.”

Beyond the house, the scene at the Empire State Plaza had faded to pale light. Finished checking the carrots and potatoes, Ransom crossed to the gate. The crab backed up to allow him to unlatch and swing it in. As the crab hurried out, he gave the garden a final look over, searching for anything he might have missed. Although he did not linger on the apple trees, they appeared quiet.

On the way back around the yard, the crab kept pace with him. Ransom said, “For the next month, Heather walked to Farrell Drive once a day, twice when she was well enough. During that time, Bruce did not leave his cage. Sometimes, she would find him racing around the place, growling. Other times, he would be leaping up against one wall of the pen and using it to flip himself over. As often as not, he would be lying half- in the dog-house, his head on his paws. That she could tell — and believe you me, she studied that dog, his cage, as if his life depended on it (which, as far as she was concerned, it did) — Harrow kept the pen tidy and Bruce’s dishes full. While she was careful not to set foot on the property, she stood beside it for half an hour, forty- five minutes, an hour. One afternoon, she left our house after lunch and did not return till dinner. When Bruce heard her footsteps, he would stop whatever he was doing, run to the nearest corner of the cage, and stand there wagging his tail. He would voice a series of low barks that Heather said sounded as if he were telling her something, updating the situation. No change. Still here.

“She saw Harrow only once. It was during the third-to-last visit she made to Bruce. After a few minutes of standing at the edge of the road, talking to the dog, she noticed a figure in the ranch’s doorway. She tensed, ready for him to storm out to her, but he remained where he was. So did Heather. If this guy thought he could scare her, he had another thing coming. Although she wasn’t feeling well, she maintained her post for an hour, as did Harrow. When she turned home, he didn’t move. The strange thing was, she said to me that night, that the look on his face — granted, he wasn’t exactly close to her, and she hadn’t wanted him to catch her staring at him, but she was pretty sure he’d looked profoundly unhappy.”

The crab scrambled up the stairs to the porch. His foot on the lowest step, Ransom paused. “Then Heather was back in the hospital, and Matt and I had other things on our minds beside Bruce. Afterwards. not long, actually, I think it was the day before the funeral, I drove by William Harrow’s house, and there was the cage, still there, and Bruce still in it. For a second, I was as angry as I’d ever been; I wanted nothing more than to stomp the gas to the floor and crash into that thing, and if Bruce were killed in the process, so be it. Let Harrow emerge from his house, and I would give him the beating I should have that September morning.

“I didn’t, though. The emotion passed, and I kept on driving.”

Ransom climbed the rest of the stairs. At the top, he said, “Matt used to say to me, Who wants to stay in the shallows their whole life? It was his little dig at his mother and me, at the life we’d chosen. Most of the time, I left his question rhetorical, but when he asked it that afternoon, I answered him; I said, There are sharks in the shallows, too. He didn’t know what to make of that. Neither did I.” Ransom went to say something more, hesitated, decided against it. He opened the door to the house, let the crab run in, followed. The door shut behind them with a solid thunk.

At the top of the garden, dangling from the boughs of the apple trees there, the fruit that had ripened into a score, two, of red replicas of Matt’s face, his eyes squeezed shut, his mouth stretched in a scream of unbearable pain, swung in a sudden breeze.

For Fiona