Borderlands Read online

  Whooooowahsssh!

  "See? It's very sharp. It cuts very clean." The man kissed Dot's temple. "You did a good job."

  "I…I…" Dot's entire body convulsed. He held her firm.

  "The trade. You want to know about the trade." He gestured to the windows on the other side of the room. "You saw in, you can see out. Look."

  And she did look.

  In an instant, all the windows shifted and sparkled. Light danced off them. Green light. The room glowed with undersea jade, with shimmering, beautiful green.

  A city appeared, green castles with spires that jittered and rippled, perched on a hill carpeted with lush grass and tall verdant trees. Fields of orange flowers sprouted. And the windows of the city glanced with light, green light, like jewels, like big green jewels, like–

  The mirrors danced and pirouetted, opened and closed like lenses.

  Dot trembled. "You're the devil."

  "Lady, where the hell are you?" called the other man. The axe man kissed her again. "Don't be silly." He nuzzled her. "Here he comes. He thinks he's so brave."

  "Why? Why do you want to make me do this?" Dot demanded shrilly.

  The man let go of her. She dropped the axe and ran without seeing, slamming into the bannister on the side of the stairway. Stunned, she held on to the rails as if they were prison bars.

  The axe man inclined his head and said, "Listen." "Help," called a new voice, the high-pitched falsetto of a young boy.

  "Kid? Is there a kid in here? Jesus!" the other man bellowed from somewhere in the house. "Kid, hold on! There's a bad man in here! He's got an axe!"

  The boy began to cry. "Mommy, I want my mommy."

  "They'll keep coming," the man said to Dot. "The little people. There will be more. And it'll get harder for you. The trick will become more and more difficult."

  He wiped the blood from his eyelids, then reached into the sockets and yanked out his eyes. His scream echoed down the halls, mingled with Dot's. She flew around him and headed for the door.

  "Trade! Trade!" he shouted at Dot, following her with his outstretched hand. "Do it, Dotty!"

  "Lady!" the other man cried, closer still, and the child's sobs grew louder. "Lady?"

  The door was locked.

  "Everything's locked," the eyeless man said. His gaping sockets dripped. The eyes in his hand stared at Dot. They rolled in. his palm, the irises a vibrant, unbelievable green.

  "Pick up the axe."

  "No," Dot said, flattening herself against the door. "No."

  He paused, sighed. "Then I will." Casually, he flung the eyes over his shoulder—they rolled into the shadows–leaned over, and hefted the axe. "Cold-hearted orbs," he said. "Nothing more."

  And then he stalked her, raising the axe over his head. "I am the great and terrible, I am a wiz of a–"

  And suddenly, more than anything, she wanted glass eyes; it was all right to have glass eyes; it was wonderful-Acrylic, yes, and three fittings by the apprentice to the Eyeball Maker to the Stars–

  please, Mr. Wizard–

  "I was joking!" she shouted. "Joking!"

  He walked toward her slowly, deliberately, drawing the axe over his right shoulder, finding his grip. "I'm not."

  She would wake up, wake up, wake up

  –on the street outside

  –in the hospital

  –in bed, at home on the farm, oh, Auntie Em, and discover she was only a girl, and this was all a dream–

  Dot wept soundlessly.

  "Crocodile tears," the man said. "No tricks, now. None. You can't melt me, you know. I was expecting you."

  Glass eyes glass eyes, going blind and going to die. Why why why and why the fuck not.

  "Help!" the boy screeched as he flew into the room. He wore overalls and a plaid shirt, and his eyes were cornflower blue. He saw Dot, and the axe man, yelled and doubled back, only to run into a tall man behind him, a gaunt, bearded man with long, blond hair. The stranger held an opened switchblade in his left hand.

  The eyeless man ignored them. He stood so close to Dot she could smell what he was beneath the blood. And what he was, was emerald green death.

  "Windows of the soul," he whispered. The shadow of the axe fell across Dot's face.

  Then he turned the axe head sideways and swiped it like a sickle. Dot saw the blade head, saw it coming, saw it coming, screaming, saw–

  White light. Green light. Her eyes, burned to glass.

  And then a world of green, all green, as she hurtled in a whirlwind toward the green-jeweled city, screaming at the stars overhead, the shards of glass, the jagged cracks in her eyes.

  White light.

  Screaming, as a blade sliced open her stomach and in the space that was made, the man with the switchblade and the little cornfield boy pushed up her guts and climbed into her abdomen, stepped down into her bowels, their footsteps loud and echoing.

  White light.

  And she looked up and saw that she was flying upward, into a sea of green that pulsed, pulsed, with the rhythm of a heart.

  And the pulse thundered all around her, throbbing, bleeding into her, cascading down her throat, behind her eyes, her glass eyes.

  Her throat of glass, her eyes of glass, her heart of glass–shattered.

  The Grass of Remembrance

  John DeChancie

  John DeChancie is well known as a writer of science fiction and fantasy, but his contributions to the HDF genres have been very infrequent. If you ask him why, he’s likely to tell you it’s because he really doesn’t like horror and doesn’t really understand it as a literary form. He wrote a book with me (Crooked House, Tor Books) that was kind of an experimental haunted house novel, and the entire time we worked on it, he claimed he didn’t know what he was doing. Most people who read the book felt he knew exactly what he was doing. John can be a very funny guy—even when he’s not into his Rodney Dangerfield routine.

  Born in 1946 in Pittsburgh, he is a second generation Italian-American. His family name was DiCiancia until his father had it legally changed. Still living in the city where the three rivers meet, he is currently working on a new fantasy series. Of the following story, I think it’s the only piece of short fiction he’s ever published. But “The Grass of Remembrance” is so totally original and so purely a horror story, you’re going to wish this guy has taken more journeys into HDF territory.

  When Ted Kirby saw the brown UPS truck creeping down the street toward his place, he knew it had something for him. He was expecting delivery of the “miracle” grass seed any day now. In fact, he had been waiting impatiently for months.

  He was kneeling by the dead azaleas near the concrete front walk, struggling with the intractable taproot of what had been a sprawling ugly weed. He had cut off the top of the plant and exposed the enormously thick root enough to grasp it tenuously with a thumb and two fingers. He was tugging at it, gently and steadily, not wanting to break it off near the surface and have the demonic thing regenerate its leathery dark green leaves and bilious yellow flowers yet again. This time he’d get it all. The ground was sodden after a week of rain, the soil nice and loose, and if he were patient enough…

  “That’s it, baby. Easy does it.”

  He looked up, continuing to pull on the root. The UPS van had stopped about five houses down, the driver peering out into the bright afternoon sun, looking at house numbers.

  “Over here, pal. I’m the one you want.” He spoke not nearly loudly enough for the driver to hear. “Come on, baby,” he said, looking down again, his voice ironically sweet and cooing. “Easy does it. Come to papa.” He was losing patience quickly, as he usually did. He wiped his hands on his faded jeans, scrunched the brim of his baseball cap down, and tried for a better grip. “Come to daddy, honey. That’s it.” Then, his voice turning bitter, he began yanking on the thing. “Come on, come on…no good, lousy, stinking, rotten, filthy prickweed BASTARD!”

  With a snick, the root broke, but an astonishing foot and a half of it came slit
hering up, a yellow-white, tapering, waxen rope. Kirby half expected to see magma welling up from the hole.

  “Son of a bitch must go halfway down to hell,” he muttered. Sighing, he threw the root aside and levered himself to his feet. He looked around at his lawn. Wrong. Couldn’t call it a lawn. Couldn’t call a good three-quarters of an acre of clay, gravel, rain-carved ruts, hordes of thriving weeds, and occasional sickly clumps of burnt-out grass a lawn. A weed arboretum, maybe.

  He had tried everything. The last three years had been a titanic struggle of one homeowner against the worst soil upon which any developer had ever plunked a tract house down. The “topsoil” the landscaping contractor had supplied, a pungent hash of mine tailings and cow manure, had washed away in a heavy rain shortly after Kirby and his wife had moved in. With good topsoil going for thirty dollars a small truckload, Kirby had called the contractor and had demanded a new lawn.

  The contractor’s reply: “Hey, talk to the man upstairs. We just throw the dirt down and plant. Rain ain’t our department.”

  So Kirby spent the next few weekends raking and loosening the hard subsoil, then replanted. Nothing. He watered more. Nothing. He watered less. Nothing. He tried every conceivable seed and seed mixture: Kentucky bluegrass, perennial rye, red fescue, Chewing’s Fescue, red top, Merion blue, velvet bent, creeping bent, meadow fescue, annual blue, white clover…even the zoysias and other exotic strains. Almost none of it came up, and that which did never lasted a summer. He lavished the ground with all manner of fertilizer and chemical nostrum. Commercial concoctions were useless. He top-dressed with sifted compost, hardwood ash, bonemeal, cottonseed meal, superphosphate, and tankage, all to no avail. He spread the excreta of various animals–cow, chicken, horse, sheep, and goat. He had the soil tested, found it to be slightly acid, and spread lime. No luck. Munate of potash–same result. Nitrate of soda–ditto. Mono-basic potassium phosphate, potassium nitrate, calcium nitrate, magnesium sulfate, iron sulfate, ditto, ditto, ditto, ditto, ditto. In a fit of exasperation, he bought a Rototiller, chewed up the entire plot, and remade the lawn. It came up as before, only to choke and wither and die. The struggle became an obsession. He fought on. His wife got to the point where she cringed when she saw him put on his garden clothes and go out to the garage. Outside, he would grumble and curse and mutter continually. His wife couldn’t stand to hear it, shutting herself in the bedroom or flying out of the house on needless shopping trips. He had carried on the crusade three summers running, and spent winter nights reading books on gardening and lawn care. Last winter he had tried the technique of sowing seed on top of the snow. Came spring, and the earth broke open with moist, pale green shoots—which strangled and shriveled when the dry season came. He flew into a rage. Half berserk, he ripped out all the shrubs, even the rhododendrons that were doing passably well. Afterward, he regretted the outburst, and apologized to Jenny. She was beyond being mollified, however, and threatened to leave him, suggesting that he seek professional help. It wasn’t just the lawn, she said. It was everything. He had changed. Did he know that he was always talking to himself? Always, swearing darkly in that half-intelligible dyspeptic murmur of his. She was frightened.

  “Goddamnit, then leave!” He stalked into the garage. She left, finally, about a month later.

  Kirby stood on his sorry lawn as the van pulled in front of the house. He was tired, and felt useless. Two heavy blows last week. He had been furloughed at the plant—and him with a white-collar, middle managerial position. “Things are going to hell in a fucking hand basket,” is the way a fellow employee, also a victim of the axe, had put it. “When they don’t have paper for us to push, you know it’s getting bad.” And his suit against the developer and the landscaping contractor had been thrown out of court. Also, he had had cold comfort in Jenny’s lawyer telling him that she didn’t want the house. Nobody wanted the goddamn thing. “She wants half the capital gain when you sell,” the lawyer had said. When he sold. He had laughed.

  His gaze was drawn to the stacks and spires of Poseidon Chemical jutting above the low hills to the east. He had a resume into Poseidon, but they weren’t hiring. Who was? Besides, chemicals wasn’t his business. Steel had been….

  Chemicals. Maybe somewhere, he thought, somewhere there’s a company that puts out a real miracle growing formula. Just a matter of the right molecules. Little things, molecules; like Ping-Pong balls, arranged in various configurations. Just the right combinations, and—

  “Kirby?”

  It was the UPS driver, yelling from the van.

  “Yeah, right here.”

  Kirby crossed the lawn to the truck, absently kicking at rocklike clumps of clay.

  “Somethin’ for you,” the driver said, handing over a large cardboard box, then passing him a clipboard. Kirby fumbled with the bulky box, put it down, then scrawled his signature on the clipboarded delivery list.

  “Okeydoke!” The driver gunned the van’s engine and pulled away.

  Kirby walked back to the open garage, reading the label on the box. This was it, the fancy experimental grass seed. Probably another rip-off. Another failure. He couldn’t even make out the name of the company. “Os…Os-wee-kim?”

  The label read OSWIECIM HORTICULTURAL PRODUCTS, OSWIECIM, POLAND. He hadn’t ordered anything from Poland. Oh, here it was—IMPORTED EXCLUSIVELY BY GRANT IMPORTS, PASSAIC, NJ. Right. Polish grass. Sounded like a bad joke.

  In the garage, he took a hunting knife to the reinforced strapping tape and ripped the box open. Inside was a large, clear plastic bag full of fine seed. Some literature as well. He took out a small brochure and looked at it. It consisted of one short paragraph repeated in several languages—French, German, Italian, English, and others he couldn’t identify—and photographs of plots of grass.

  “Great.”

  He read the English.

  Plant this seed with a grieving heart, and it will grow where other grasses will not. It will cover that which cannot be covered—shame, despair, tragedy, cruelty, and sin. This is the Grass of Healing. The wounded earth will take it to its bosom. Do not bother to nurture it, for it will grow if the earth has received that which has bled in innocence. This is the Grass of Remembrance.

  “What the hell is this crap?” Disgusted, he crumpled the brochure and threw it into a corner.

  Stooping, he cut open the plastic bag and ran his hand through the seed. Didn’t look unusual—just ordinary grass seed, a pale beige in color. He had nothing to lose. He lifted the bag, carried it to the Scotts Spreader, and dumped the entire contents in. It was late June, possibly the worst time to plant, but what the hell.

  Later, Kirby slouched in the ersatz Eames chair in the living room, sucking absently on a can of beer while he half watched the eleven o’clock news. He was mostly thinking. With one ear he heard the anchorman talking about trouble at the Poseidon works. An employee had blown the whistle on shoddy safety measures at the plant. A controversy had ensued.

  Abruptly, he got up and turned the set off. Had he heard something? Yes, down the street a child was screaming. Laughing?

  He sighed and looked out the curtainless picture window. Jenny had made off with the curtains—why, he’d never know. She’d made them herself, probably. He peered out into the night. Something had been making him feel strange all afternoon, an edgy, antsy feeling. From being alone, most likely. He wasn’t used to it yet. Outside, crickets clicked and chirped, cicadas buzzed in the brush covering the vacant lot next door. From far away came the disconsolate howl of a dog. He didn’t like the way he was feeling, not at all. What the hell was wrong with him?

  The crap in the brochure. The cryptic phrases had echoed in his head all afternoon. Even now. The Grass of Healing. Crazy stuff. The wounded earth will take it to its bosom…What could it all mean? That which has bled in innocence. Why would someone write junk like that in advertising material for grass seed? He couldn’t get it out of his mind.

  He went down to the game room and rewrote his resume.
<
br />   Kirby was still unemployed two weeks later (and still lacked a firm invitation to an interview), but the grass came up spectacularly well. He had not even bothered to water it. It hadn’t rained either—unless he was badly mistaken; the two weeks were a timeless alcoholic blur to him. The ground was parched and cracked, but thick, vibrant shoots were poking through all over, oasis green and resolute. Bare patches missed in seeding soon filled in, colonized by aggressive underground rhizomes snaking from neighboring plants. Weeds shriveled and died all over the lawn, and the dry husks of dead grubs surfaced, crowded out of their hibernation chambers like slum tenants displaced by urban renewal. The grass grew only so high—about two-and-a-half inches—and stopped. Kirby fired up the Sears riding mower once, for form’s sake, and mowed dutifully, but by late August, the grass had gone untrimmed for a month.

  There was not much remarkable about the way it looked.

  Kneeling, Kirby tore a tiny plug out of the thick pelt of turf around him and examined it. Over time, he had become something of an expert. The stem and blade of the individual plant looked like any northern-climate bent grass, but at work here was an auxiliary, above-ground growth mechanisms tolons, also called creepers—that made the plant extremely prolific. In this it was no different from the zoysias and other southern varieties such as St. Augustine grass, but those and others had failed here completely, and bluegrass, which utilized a similar stratagem, had barely held its own.

  Around the first of September, the lawn’s growth curve seemed to reach a point of diminishing returns, and stabilized.

  Then it began to die.

  But not before Kirby started dreaming about Nazis in the vacant lot. The dreams started in mid-July.

  “I don’t want to dream about fucking Nazis again. Please, God, don’t let me dream about them again.”

  Kirby was reduced to whimpering, slumped in the Eames chair with an all-night cable movie station on the tube, buzzed out of his brain on Jenny’s prescription diet pills, an old half-full bottle of which he had chanced across in a kitchen drawer among the balls of string and bits of aluminum foil and other oddments (Jenny had taken most of the culinary utensils). But the beer would finally get through to him, and he would nod off and again dream about the fucking Nazis standing out there in the tall grass of the vacant lot, black-helmeted, black-coated statues of Aryan manhood, the red of their armbands like open wounds upon their souls. They would stare at him, questioning him. He would be working on the lawn, usually reseeding by hand, scattering fistfuls of seed angrily into the wind, Sweat running in ticklish rivulets down the back of his neck. They would stand out there, occasionally moving from side to side, now and then stepping forward toward the lot but never coming out of the weeds to step on the grass. And he would yell, his throat constricted and burning, “What do you want? What do you want from me?” And one of them would answer, “Wo bin die Unschuldeigen Kinder?”