The Savants

I'll admit, this is dark. 

            They landed on Earth on a Tuesday, for some reason I remember that. So many decades of wondering; we had imagined golden bodies and tentacles, green dwarfs or scarlet gods. We wondered about their size, their metabolism, their lusts. When they came, though, they seemed quiet and reasonable, and both terrifyingly and disappointingly like us. They had translucent blue skin, eyes that glowed nebula orange or green or violet, depending on their mood. They spoke quiet, strangely accented languages, but limited themselves to English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Cantonese. We humans, trained by decades of alien movies, expected annihilation. Instead, the domination was short, minimal, and brutal. They had soldiers that we called Samurai who wore sleek black armor that shrugged off tank rounds like a leather jacket shrugs off hailstones. They were nearly invincible. News cameras captured footage of a single Samurai punching holes in tanks, catching armor piercing rounds like footballs and slinging them back. Twenty of them destroyed the human resistance in New York, seven took Berlin, only three strode into Paris. We hoped that was all they had but when one was slain, with a subnuclear ICBM outside Baltimore, thousands dropped out of the sky, falling from their worldship that anchored itself to our moon and disrupted tides. They quietly, almost apologetically, dragged world leaders into the streets and blew their brains out with weapons that shot glowing slugs. Several of their chieftains politely arranged a press conference and explained that Earth was no longer ours, and to avoid decimation and sterilization we would quietly resume our business and allow them to go about the business of extracting the minerals they needed from our core. Afterwards, they would allow us some measure of autonomy. Their name in their language was long and musical. “Call us Savants,” they said.

They didn’t mean any of it.

Millions died. Those who resisted the massive, gaping holes they tore in the surface of the earth were put down like rabid dogs. The skies were blackened with soot.

            I don’t know who discovered the properties their blood carried. No one ever knows these things. We called them Cannibals. A few fighters in Saint Petersburg managed to kill a Savant who had removed his armor and perhaps in some orgy of bloodlust, drank the blood. They became godlike. They moved nearly faster than people could follow, ran on walls, gained strength beyond natural abilities. They attacked six more Savants and tore them apart. They stole their weapons and assaulted a shuttle heading for the worldship.

            And then the effects wore off. They had assumed the effects lasted forever and hadn’t bothered to put on a samurai’s armor. They were slaughtered like animals when their reflexes slowed, their motor skills returned to normal. They weren’t able to raise the guns the Savants carried like pistols.

            More followed suit, stealing bodies of Savants and draining them of blood they then injected into their arm like heroin. The long-term effects became apparent. They went crazy. Cannibals craved Savant blood. They snapped and snarled. They became feral and would lose themselves in that place in their mind, the eternal ecstasy of the bloodrush. They would hurl themselves, naked and furious and totally without the protection of armor or bloodrush at an armored Samurai, leaving us to dejectedly hose them off the streets. If they had enough blood, though, they could be kept sane enough to keep fighting the way they had. We stole more weapons from them, because as it is with any species, the ones who know best how to kill them belong to their same species.

            I heard about the Cannibals and their fight to get the Savants’ God-King in the worldship, but I continued to hold to my strategy of remaining quiet and going about my business.

Everything changed when the Savants found my wife and daughter had a rare type of gene they wanted for their genetic museum back on their homeworld. They broke into my house at one in the afternoon, found my wife and child there with me, and while one of them smiled gently and held me back, dissected them on the living room floor and harvested them like cuttlefish. I still remember the Savant who did it tying his golden topknot back before surgically laying my still-living wife open from clavicle to pelvis, ignoring her screams as they snipped her organs from their places and sealed them in plastic. Then, my daughter, my child. I went away. I remembered holding her hand as she skipped to her first day of school. I remembered watching her blow out the candles on her fourth birthday. I remembered teaching her how to say her alphabet. And now, along with those, I remember a blue-skinned Savant snapping her ribs as he opened her like a box, taking out her tiny, perfect organs and hosing the blood off of them as she screamed for me, until he took her lungs too.

People ask me why I fight, why I am a Cannibal. I tell them it’s because I’m crazy.

Maybe I am.

The Dreamer

This is an idea I had for a dark, eerie short story. While the execution may be a bit rough the plot is one that is both classic and expansive. It may have potential. I was going for a Lovecraft or Shelley feel in the prose, almost romantic sort of baroque feel, an agelessness that defies strictures of horror or fantasy, like a supernatural Dickens. There is an intended scene with the Dreamer later on in the story, if I ever finish. 

Update: I added some stuff. 

            The old man gestured towards Edward. “You like books?”

            Edward didn’t. He liked book stores. The smell, the look, the feel of gnarled and worn leather against his hand. Thick, tarnished bosses on the spines like taxidermied creatures of eras bygone.  He never read them, curiously enough. What had started as a harmless walk and browse an evening after work had become near obsession. He chose books purely on aesthetic appeal. The more beautiful or different the book the greater the draw it exerted on him.

            “No.” Edward said simply. The man smiled, teeth gapped and angled like broken sidewalk tiles.

            “I have a book you’ll like.”

            Edward hadn’t been to this store before. It was off Burbank and Chancellor street in Grand Braxton, England. The door had been broken off a lorry and hung in a frame of some sort, and Edward had found it by taking a wrong turn and ending up in front of it, staring at the curious sort of place.

            “What does it look like?”

            The wrinkled little man brought out a very plain book from behind his teetering counter. Edward liked it. It was as though someone had sat down and very carefully thought of how to possibly make the plainest book imaginable, except the cover was wood. There was no ornamentation, and the cover was a sort of blackish, stained, gouged out wood. The pages were yellowed but cut perfectly even. The pages were so thin that the whole think resembled a block of layered wood or clay, not a book at all. Edward touched it and nearly recoiled. The cover was like ice, so cold it burned for a moment.

            He opened it. Every page was blank, but with the faintest suggestions of words like ink had once stood like marching soldiers on the cream pages before fading like ghosts. The harder he tried to make out the words the less the words seemed to matter or exist.

            He bought the book and left, taking a right turn and a left and finding himself once again in the familiar streets.

            At home, he placed the book on the table that sat next to his bed. It sat there unmoving as Edward stared at it. He shook himself. It was as though he expected it to move, to jump or dance or speak like men. It remained comfortingly, or disappointingly, booklike. The evening grew chill, Edward warmed a potato in the coals of his oven and baked two rolls in a pan. A bit of cold beef came out of the icebox, and Edward drew the heavy velvet curtains to his apartment and ate his meal in a silence that was neither lonely nor comfortable. The sounds of passing trucks and carriages grew seldom, the voices of the adjacent apartments faded into the swaddled night. Up the stairs, into bed Edward went, pausing a moment to brush his fingers across the cover of the book. It was warm to the touch now. As he laid down in the bed, he pulled the curtains of the bed closed. He thought almost he heard a soft, catlike step across the floorboards, but a breathless moment passed without further sound. As Edward fell asleep he turned his back to where the book sat, and whether this was conscious or unconscious flickered through his mind a moment longer than a thought of that sort might.

            Edward awoke in a cave.

            The air was warm, like the breath of a stranger on one’s neck.

            Thinking himself in a dream Edward thought nothing of it. The passage in front of him was lit without light, and stretched away for a short distance. Edward followed the passage, feeling the walls thoughtlessly as he went. After a moment he reached an opening. He stood in a cavern so enormous a feeling of something like terror flitted over him. An ink dark pool stood as flat as a plate in the center of the enormous cavern. The pool was round like a porthole, opaque but reflective, and so large the other wall of the cavern was swallowed in darkness. Edward found himself drawn towards the pool as though not of his own volition. He reached towards the pool and awoke.

            The moon threw shafts of deathless light threw the bubbled glass of his windows, etching grids on the floor. Edward pressed his hands against the glass, reassured by the coolness of the window against his palms. The street below and away the window rested like a stone river. A faint feeling, neither hunger nor nausea but some brother of the two knotted Edward’s stomach. He took the stairs with the care of the recently awoken, standing in his silent kitchen as he poured a glass of water from the silver pitcher he kept in his icebox. The water drove needles into his teeth and swept the musty flavor from his tongue. Edward left the glass on his counter and returned to his room.

            The book lay open on his nightstand. Edward tried suddenly to remember opening it, and could neither determine that he had or had not. He closed the book. It shut with a slap that was not unlike that of a water snake sliding into a stream, a sound that ran a cool finger down his spine.

           The next morning was the chill gray that heralds bone-cracking cold. Edward sat on the edge of the bed and regained wakefulness before rising to dress. In the middle of putting his waistcoat on he remembered the book. It wasn’t on the nightstand, but instead another book had been set there. A copy of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth sat in its place. Confused and not a little unsettled, though he wouldn’t admit it to himself, Edward searched the apartment half-dressed until he came upon the volume sitting on his kitchen table. It was open and on the page was a strange symbol, filled with intricate hairlike lines and knots that so tricked and confused the eye it was hard to follow, seeming only to change position and orientation the longer you looked at it. Edward flipped quickly through the other pages, looking for new symbols but nothing was there. When he tried returning to the original page, the symbol was gone. Edward looked at the clock that sat in his foyer, cursed, and resolved to search for the symbol another time.

            He worked at the First Anglican Bank on Halifax, across from a seedy pub he took lunches in. At noon, Edward walked across the street for a bowl of fish soup and a muffin. Inside, a group of sailors had taken up residence at several of the tables Edward would normally sit at so he was forced to take a position at the bar. Not three minutes later a large Swede, stinking of rum and ocean, stumbled to the bar and sat directly next to Edward.

            “Have you heard?” His ice-blue eyes bored into Edward’s brown ones.

            “Heard what?”

            “The graffisk. They found a graffisk in morning.”

            “What’s a graffisk?”

            The Swede emanated exasperation before replying. “A white squid was found this morning on the beach near the pier. Bad omen.”

            “What does it mean?”

            “Death is coming.” The Swede hailed the bartender before turning back to Edward. “Death is going to come to Grand Braxton, mark my words. It won’t be pretty.”

            “What should I do?”

            “Leave. Go to the states, or up north, if you can. Ireland or Scotland. South, per’aps. The West Indies. Anywhere but ‘ere.”

            “Will it reach London?”

            “The last time we found a graffisk was the beginning of the Great War. Before that, the potato famine in Ireland. When it happens, it will be bad.”

            Edward nodded, shaken, and returned to his soup. The Swede drained the beer he was given, threw a coin on the counter and shambled off.

            That night, Edward went to bed with some trepidation. The book was still sitting on his kitchen table where he’d left it that morning, but with shaking hands he put it in the cabinet below his desk and locked the door. Mentally laughing at himself for his superstition, he traipsed upstairs, locked the bedroom door and after getting into his nightclothes, pulled the curtains on his bed. Sleep didn’t come at first, but deep into the night rain began to fall and somewhere in the depths of his racing thoughts, Edward fell asleep.