The Year's Best Horror Stories: XVIII

Return To The Mutant Rain Forest by BRUCE BOSTON and ROBERT FRASIER

Years later we come back to find the fauna and flora more alien than ever, the landscape unrecognizable, the course of rivers altered, small opalescent lakes springing up where before there was only underbrush, as if the land itself has somehow changed to keep pace with the metaprotean life forms which now inhabit it.

Here magnetism proves as variable as other phenomena. Our compass needle shifts constantly and at random, and we must fix direction by the stars and sun alone. Above our heads the canopy writhes in undiscovered life: tiny albino lemurs flit silently from branch to branch, tenuous as arboreal ghosts in the leaf purple shadow. Here time seems as meaningless as our abstracted data.

The days stretch before us in soft bands of verdigris, in hours marked by slanting white shafts of illumination. At our feet we watch warily for the trip-vines of arrowroot, while beetles and multipedes of every possible perversion boil about us, reclaiming their dead with voracious zeal.

By the light of irradiated biota the night proliferates: a roving carpet of scavenger fungi seeks out each kill to drape and consume the carcass in an iridescent shroud. A carnivorous mushroom spore roots on my exposed forearm and Tomaz must dig deeply beneath the flesh to excise the wrinkled neon growth, which has sprouted in minutes.

We have returned to the mutant rain forest to trace rumors spread by the natives who fish the white water, to embark on a reconnaissance into adaptation and myth. Where are the toucans, Genna wonders, once we explain the cries, which fill the darkness as those of panthers, mating in heat, nearly articulate in their complexity.

Tomaz chews stale tortillas, pounds roots for breakfast, and relates a tale of the Parakana who ruled this land.

One morning the Chiefs wife, aglow, bronzed and naked in the eddies of a rocky pool, succumbed to an attack both brutal and sublime, which left her body inscribed with scars confirming the bestial origins of her lover.

At term, the massive woman was said to have borne a child covered with the finest gossamer caul of ebon-blue hair.

The fiery vertical slits of its eyes enraged the Chief. After he murdered the boy, a great cat screamed for weeks and stalked about their tribal home, driving them north. His story over, Tomaz leads our way into the damp jungle.

From base camp south we hack one trail after another until we encounter impenetrable walls of a sinewy fiber, lianas as thick and indestructible as titanium cables, twining back on themselves in a solid Gordian sheath, feeding on their own past growth; while farther south, slender silver trees rise like pylons into the clouds.

From our campo each day we hack useless trail after trail, until we come upon the pathways that others have forged and maintained, sinuous and waist-high, winding inward to still farther corrupt recesses of genetic abandon: here we discover a transfigured ceiba, its rugged bark incised with the fresh runes of a primitive ideography.

Genna calls a halt urour passage to load her Minicam. She circles about the tree, shrugging off our protests. As we feared, her careless movement triggers a tripvine, but instead of a hail of deadly spines we are bombarded by balled leaves exploding into dust — marking us with luminous ejecta and a third eye on Genna's forehead.

Souza dies that night, limbs locked in rigid fibro-genesis. A panther cries; Tomaz wants us to regroup at our camp.

Genna decides she has been chosen, scarified for passage. She notches her own trail to some paradise born of dream hallucination, but stumbles back, wounded and half-mad, the Minicam lost, a cassette gripped in whitened knuckles.

From base camp north we flail at the miraculous regrowth which walls off our retreat to the airstrip by the river. The ghost lemurs now spin about our heads, they mock us with a chorus as feverish and compulsive as our thoughts.

We move relentlessly forward, as one, the final scenes of Genna's tape flickering over and over in our brains.

In the depths of the mutant rain forest where the water falls each afternoon in a light filtered to vermilion, a feline stone idol stands against the opaque foliage. On the screen of the monitor it rises up from nowhere, upon its hind legs, both taller and thicker than a man. See how the cellular accretion has distended its skull, how the naturally sleek architecture of the countenance has evolved into a distorted and angular grotesquerie, how the taloned forepaws now possess opposable digits.

In the humid caves and tunnels carved from living vines, where leprous anacondas coil, a virulent faith calls us. A sudden species fashions godhood in its own apotheosis.