Free Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer

sea.
    Dislodged pebbles on the path behind you. You start, abandon the path, duck behind a fir tree, pull out your gun.
    The rustle becomes louder, and soon, moonlit, scoured of the veil of pollution, of sickness, two dark figures come into view. One, with its sinuous, curling nose, must be a Ganesha. The other, taller and weasel-sharp, must be another meerkat. The two pass by your hiding place, huffing with laughter, in a jolly mood, conversing in a language of clicks and whistles and yelps. They don't speak in human languages when they are alone. Why would they? The light creates a blue-green sheen across their bodies. The meerkat musk is strong.
    Once they are past, you creep from hiding and follow, feeling suddenly exposed . . . Soon the fir trees become less dense, replaced by strange, thick bushes, then by sinewy roots clinging to brackish land almost the consistency of mud. The white pebble path brings you to genuine mudflats—a narrow strip that buttresses the creek flowing beneath the bridge. From the mudflats, a million eyestalks stare up at you: fiddlers by the thousands, clacking their claws and tracking your movements. Their carapaces shine ghostly.
    You cross the bridge. The water is dark blue—no trace of chemicals, so there must be a strong filter—and through it you catch the silver gleam of strange fish: three-eyed and so scaly as to be coated in armor. They mutter and pout like old men and in their listless motions you discern an icy intelligence.
    Beyond the bridge, the firs close up around you again. The musk of meerkat rises so strong that you fight the urge to sneeze. A light not from the moon glimmers through the trees. You follow it. With each step you recede a little more into the background of some odd fairy tale. The light, diffuse and yet focused, is a fey light. It casts the fir branches in sharp relief. It coats the ground in an ever-nearer sheen of gold. Soon you must shadow it, circle it, not drawing closer until you can be sure of cover—a large bush, an unusually thick tree trunk. From the light comes laughter, chirping speech, and, periodically, the scream of an animal in agony. Moths and beetles cloud the air, burn through it in an insectile fog.
    Finally, you spy movement through the branches, hear individual voices, although the language remains a mystery to you. Then, hidden by a branch you are afraid must be ridiculously small for the purpose, you
crawl
toward the light, stopping just short of the clearing that would reveal all mysteries.
    Your chin scratches the ground and your arms are weary. Through the branches, the wind blowing into your face, you see a congregation of meerkats and Ganeshas in the foreground—lit by a series of lanterns—very animated; all gesturing paws and trunks a-sway like snakes, accompanied by a torrent of clicks and whistles and chirps that must, by the intensity of the interaction, carry equally intense meaning. A number of younger meerkats contentedly groom each other and, spiky-furred and frisky, chase each other around the clearing. In the back, the wavery light of a hologram plays, while a group of meerkats and Ganeshas sit in front of it and watch. Slowly, your gaze is drawn from the foreground, from the middle ground, where you are trying to find Salvador, to the background hologram. The hologram at first is just a flux of images—some even in black-and-white, from archaic flat media, such as photographs or film. But the images are the same, and the sounds are the same: horrible agony, horrible pain . . . against the backdrop of a marketplace a man takes a long, curving blade, and proceeds to flay a dog alive, skillfully cutting off the coat in a few quick strokes while the dog screams, then, furless, looking like a newborn thing, its eyes tightly closed, trembles and pants—pink and vulnerable and in shock while the man goes on to the next dog, and the first one—in extreme close-up—goes into the waiting bag