Free Fearful Symmetries by Ellen Datlow Page B

dissipates like smoke. I can feel where I’ve been scratching my own arms again. My eye is gummed shut with blood.
    When we stumble back into the main room, Patrick is on his feet with the gun in his hand. Johnny is sitting on the bed, the bony rim of his open skull grown further upward, elongating his head and giving him an alien grace. The fire in the bowl of his head burns briskly, crackling and shedding a warm light. Patrick looks at me, then at the boy with the iron boxes. “You got them,” he says. “Where’s the skull?”
    I take the chain from the boy. The boxes are heavy together; the boy must be stronger than he looks. Something to remember. “In one of these. If it can keep that shit out, I’m betting it can keep it locked in, too. I think it’s safe to move.”
    “And those’ll get us past the thing outside?”
    “If what Johnny said is true.”
    “It is,” Johnny says. “But now there’s only one extra box.”
    “That’s right,” I say, and swing them with every vestige of my failing strength at Patrick’s head, where they land with a wet crunch.
    He staggers to his right a few steps, the left side of his face broken like crockery, and he puts a hand into the rancid scramble of his own brain. “I’ll go get it,” he says, “I’ll go.”
    “You’re dead,” I tell him gently. “You stupid bastard.”
    He accepts this gracefully and collapses to his knees, and then onto his face. Dark blood pours from his head as though from a spilled glass. I scoop up the gun, which feels clumsy in my hand. I never got the hang of guns.
    Tobias stands in shock. “I can’t believe you did that,” he says.
    “Shut up. Are there any clothes in that dresser? Put something on the kid. We’re going back to the city.” While he’s doing that, I look at Johnny. “I’m not going to be able to see. Will you be able to guide me out?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good,” I say, and shoot Tobias in the back of the head.
    For once, somebody dies without an argument.
    I don’t know much about the trip back. I open a slot on the base of the box and fit it over my head. I am consumed in darkness. I’m led out to the skiff by Johnny and the boy. The boy rides with me, and Johnny gets into the water, dragging us behind him. Fire unfurls from his head, the sides of which are developing baroque flourishes. His personality is diminished, and I can’t tell if it’s because he mourns Tobias, or because that is changing too, developing into something cold and barren.
    The journey takes several hours. I know we pass the corpse flowers, the staring eyes and bloodless faces pressing from the foliage. I am sure that the creature unleashes its earth-breaking cry, and that any living thing that hears it hemorrhages its life away, into the still waters. I know that night falls. I know the flame of our new guide lights the undersides of the cypress, runs out before us across the water, fills the dark like the final lantern in a fallen world.
    I make a quiet and steady passage there.
    Eugene is in his office. The bar is closed upstairs and the man at the door lets us in without a word. He makes no comment about my companions, or the iron boxes hanging from a chain. The world he lives in is already breaking from its old shape. The new one has space for wonders.
    Eugene is sitting behind his desk in the dark. I can tell he’s drunk. It smells like he’s been here since we left, almost twenty-four hours ago now. The only light comes from the fire rising from Johnny’s empty skull. It illuminates a pale structure on Eugene’s desk: a huge antler, or a tree made of bone. There are human teeth protruding along some of its tines, and a long crack near the wider base of it reveals a raw, red meat, where a mouth opens and closes.
    “Where’s Patrick?” he says.
    “Dead,” I say. “Tobias, too.”
    “And the atlas?”
    “I burned it.”
    He nods, as though he’d been expecting that very thing. After a moment he gestures at the bone