Apex Book Company

1. A Stenchtown Tale

Blakenjel bilong mi is black like unlit coal. His open wings are like smokers’ lungs. His skin is taut and fine like expensive vellum that was blackened in flames. There are many blakenjels, but only one bilong mi. I follow him in the darkness.

“Smell this!”

“Sniff my hair!”

“Taste my breath; it’s fresh; it’s fresh!”

“Remember ice-cream? Oranges? Soap? Authentically guaranteed, the smell like you remember!”

But there is not much call for that.

“Sniff my armpits! Real human sweat!”

“Toes! Toes! Inhale the smell!”

And further down the road of Stenchtown, away from the fake smells of oranges and soap, where the great unwashed line the road and put the merchandise on display. At the far end, one white boy almost naked but for a thong. Angelic-looking, almost hairless, fine blond hairs that lie like newborn wheat along the pale contours of his body.

The sniffer comes close to the boy. He wears a dark coat, too hot for this city, this place. His eyes are hooded. The boy smiles. “Smell my crotch?” he offers. The sniffer looks and doesn’t speak. The boy shifts in place and tries again. “Armpits? Hair?” the usual routine. The sniffer doesn’t speak, and the boy’s smile suddenly grows wider. “Sniff my ass?” he whispers, and there is something unspeakably lewd about the way he stands. “Stick your nose deep inside my asshole, let the nostrils touch the brown ring?”

The sniffer twitches in place, and the boy smiles like a predator. “I just had a shit half-an-hour ago,” he confides. “Not wiped, either. Soon as I saw you I could tell you were a connoisseur.”

The sniffer comes closer. His voice is like rusted blades being scraped. “How much?” he says.

“Thirty.”

“Ten…”

“Twenty-five and you can stick your tongue in there, too.”

“Fifteen–” The sniffer doesn’t quite finish the sentiment. His body twitches and his face, which was sheathed in the darkness of the street, becomes visible. The boy steps back, but there is only the wall behind him. He says, softly, “Shit,” and for once it isn’t sales-talk.

It’s fear.

The sniffer smiles. His face is a horrid, writhing mass of unquiet flesh. His eyes are large and round and inhuman, clear and strangely innocent in that ravaged face. He has no nose, but two slits for nostrils gape out of the moving, worm-like scars. “Smell… good…” the sniffer says. His mouth is a jagged line filled with small sharp teeth like a predator-fish. “I… I don’t do f…fear,” the boy says. “Go somewhere else!” But of course he knows it is too late, that he made a bad mistake, and you are not allowed mistakes in this place, this time. The boy whispers, “Open Sore.”

The sniffer raises his arm. His hand extends and grabs the boy’s throat with ease. His nails are claws, long and black and foul. The boy chokes. The smell of shit fills the air, free, and the sniffer’s mouth opens in what may be a smile. A red worm-like tongue protrudes and searches the air.

“P…please,” the boy says, but quietly. “Don’t.”

The other hand reaches for the boy’s crotch. Pulls aside the narrow thong. The boy quivers but remains silent. Perhaps he thinks that this is how it ends–with fear alone, and not with death. But of course that is only delusion. The swamp-thing will kill him when it is done. And so the boy does the only thing he can think of, and in his fear he prays, and so he says, almost inaudibly:

“Blakenjel. Blakenjel bilong mi.”

In the darkness something moves and halts. Fine leathery wings beat once and are still. The blakenjel listens. It is hard to tell what he does next. I cannot see in the darkness, only guess. There are no distances in the darkness.

The sniffer’s face comes close to the boy’s. The naked nostrils open and close like air-vents. The red-worm tongue quests along the boy’s skin. The sniffer shudders. So– although for a very different reason–does the boy.

Suddenly the sniffer’s head is jerked back. His eyes stare at the boy, a few inches away, eyes clear and blue, the way the sky once was. Slowly, there is a strange, soft, sucking sound.

The sniffer’s left eye disappears inside its socket. There is a wet-red tunnel through his skull. The eye is like a false opening at its end. The eye moves away like a locomotive through his brain. The sniffer tries to scream, perhaps, but the only sound coming from his mouth is the sound of loose nails falling. His hand lets go of the boy’s crotch. The boy feels wetness running down his legs. The sniffer’s other eye disappears with a quiet plop. An eyeless thing stares at the boy, no longer seeing. Then the sniffer falls to his knees.

Behind him there is only darkness. The boy shakes but manages to bow his head. There is a price to pay, there always is, but every time it’s different.

In the darkness I can suddenly smell him, my blakenjel. He has acquired smell. His smell is not pleasant, although it can be intoxicating. It is the smell of fear. My blakenjel flies through the darkness, and I follow his scent.

2. The Grisly Growths of Gristown

There is a scentless boy whose name is Dak who, having lost his path like all the other scentless boys and girls, now works in a Gristown hotel.

Stenchtown lies in a row of crumbling brick houses on top of the hill. Down from it is the sea, black and toxic, where the fishermer hunt by the light of poisoned algae. Away from it, the great mountains rise where, so it is said, the blakenjels go to lay their great obsidian eggs, as hard as diamonds. Between town and hill lies the vast corrupt forest. Things live there: they call them Open Sores. To the west are the swamps where the Open Sores collect like poisoned water dripping down a drain: do not go there. To the east lie other towns, other lost suburbs, the squalid dwelling places of the human-born: Gaslight and Tooth-bridge, Cancer Ward and Golgotha, Smokers Hill–and then there is Gristown.

The boy, Dak, having lost his trade, took gainful employment in Gristown.

Gristown! The things that live in Gristown, it is said, were human once. Dak does not believe it. A race of alien deep-sea life-forms, others say. Who rose from the depths and took to the land when the great darkness came. Dak does not believe that either. They are slumbering gods, others say, but quietly. It is humanity’s duty to ensure they do not awake. And some say they are mutated nano-goo, which is the same as saying gobbledygook.

Those who smell human dare not go to Gristown. The Grisly Growths are always hungry. The scent of meat drives them mad with lust. To feed them, the fishermer provide a steady stream of ocean-spawn, and the scentless boys and girls feed them to the pits, and the 0wnerz grow rich while the cycle of economics is maintained. For the Growths can pay.

Dak works in Pit-Stop Namba Six. He has no name in Gristown. Here he is nambafaef. The others, all more senior, are nambafo, nambatri, nambatu and nambawan. They speak the pidgin of this place, this time. Nambawan is shift-boss. She is a girl, with light-black skin, and deep blue eyes, and gold ear-rings. Outside her name is Naet.

Dak follows Naet on the perimeter of the pit. The Growths pulse below, great masses of organic grief, hungry cancers, shapeless. Dak is tugging a cart. On it are heaped the dead corpses of sea-creatures, poison and evil-smelling, things with fins and things with tentacles and things with eyes like bunches of grapes hanging upside down.

“Sakem,” Naet says, and nambafaef obediently chucks the chunks of rotting meat into the pit. As he comes too close to the edge he totters and almost falls.

“Lukaot,” nambawan says. “Ples is gris.”

Then she sniggers. Dak smiles. It’s an old Gristown joke and has never been particularly funny. “You ever lose anyone down here?” he asks.

“About once a month.”

He stares down at the pulsing mass beneath. Pseudopodia rise from the shifting masses and stare up mournfully. The meat Dak threw ebbs on top of the green-brown mass. Then the feeding begins.

The Growths absorb their food. Dak watches as the slimy masses begin to glow and the rotten poisoned meat is sucked inside them, losing colour, losing definition as it disintegrates into the blobs. Today is a good day. Feeding from above. But on bad days, Dak and the rest are sent down, into the pits, and they have to clean the blobs, massage them, soothe them. They should be in no danger, they are told. Scentless, they are of no interest to the Growths. So they say, but Dak doesn’t believe it, and neither do the others. There have been… accidents. Too many of the workers in the pits are missing fingers, hands, patches of skin. Some have lost eyebrows, teeth. They say you don’t quit working the pits: you merely lose your definition slowly, ebb away, until one day you are simply not there any more.

“What are you doing tonight?” Dak asks, and Naet grins and says, “Why, what do you have in mind, nambafaef?”

Dak blushes. Naet has that effect on him. He says, “Would you like to–” and Naet says, “Sure, why not.”

“Oraet,” Dak says. “Oraet.” For a moment they grin at each other. The Growths pulse below.

I follow the blakenjel through the darkness as I always do. He has long lost his human scent. While he still had it, I had the sense, in the middle of the dark, that he had met another. Perhaps the human smell attracted him. I got the sense of leathery bodies meeting, of wings rubbing against wings. But perhaps I merely imagined it. I cannot see in the dark. When it was over I could no longer smell my blakenjel, but I could still follow him. There is no Darktown. The darkness is not a city; it is a living thing.

“How did you lose your scent?” Naet asks Dak that night as they lie in his bed in Gaslight. Dak shares a crumbling old house with plug-in twins: they were once separate but they bored holes through each other and threaded one another’s flesh together, knitting them into one. They can still disengage, although he has never seen them do it. Their names are Amp and Fuse. Apart from them there is a fishermer’s son, living in exile in the flooded basement, and a bird-like thing that hangs upside-down from the ceiling and can speak pidgin, but rarely does. “I dig your pad,” Naet says.

“Thanks,” Dak says. Then, “How did you lose your scent?”

She flashes white teeth in the dark. “Yu no save toktok bilong it, huh?” she says. “Oraet. It no problem.” Then she says, “Nothing complicated. I was born without it.”

“Oh.”

She laughs, and they make love again, with only the bird-thing watching from the ceiling. In the darkness, as they fall asleep together, Dak thinks he can hear Naet saying, softly, “I love you.”

The next day is cleaning day and so the crew go down to the pit, nambawan first, the others following. They walk amidst the pulsing moving Grisly Growths, rubbing them, whispering to them.

“I love you,” nambafo whispers to the green-grey goo. “Mi lovem yu. Mi lovem yu longtaem.”

“You,” nambatu whispers to the Growths. “Just you.” He bends over one blob, his trousers down, his erection rubbing against the pulsating meat. His penis is translucent. “You. Just you. You. You. You.”

Nambawan touches the Growths delicately with only the tips of her fingers. She runs them across their changing skins. “Mother,” she says. “Mother. Mother.” Her fingers leave a strange trail of luminescence on the Growths’ skin. “Mother. Mother. Mother.”

Dak goes slower than the rest. It’s a strange feeling being amidst the Growths. There is a strange sense of calm down there. Almost of euphoria. He taps a gentle rhythm on the Grisly Growths’ flesh, and the body underneath seems to shiver with satisfaction. Dak is lost in the rhythm. He comes closer to the blobs, and closer still. He doesn’t even hear when nambawan breaks from her own trance and shouts to him. By the time she reaches him he had already disappeared into the Growth.

Somewhere I think there is a meeting of blakenjels. I meet another human in the dark. An enjelvaljer. Another like me. “Blakenjel bilong mi,” he says. “Blakenjel bilong mi,” I say.

For one dangerous moment we hover on the edge of light. The darkness recedes around us. We can’t feel our blakenjels.

“Mine was in Smokers’ Hill last night,” the other says. “A woman on the street prayed to be released of cancer. He healed her. He took her cancers away from her. All of them.”
“What happened?” I ask.

“When they were gone there was nothing left of her but a bleached-white skeleton,” he says. “So pretty…”

“Mine was in Stenchtown–” I say, but then I hear the beat of blackened wings and hurry back into the darkness, and the other is lost behind me. I follow my blakenjel through the corridors of night.

3. The Corridors of Night

“Dak? Dak, can you hear me? Dak!”

But he can’t. When he wakes up it is dark. It feels like being in a coffin. He can’t move, he can’t breathe. Cold slimy tendrils brush against his skin. Somewhere in the distance, was that sound?

“Dak!”

Nothing. The silence presses on him. And in the dark, and in the silence, the tendrils caress him. And something comes.

Not sound. Not vision. But something. It communicates with him, a rhythm against his motionless body. He is a drum. He is a tamtam. If the rhythm had words it might have said something like:

The savages beat tamtam drums
The ocean echoes with their sound
The waves gang up against the reef –
This night, they say, you’ll come to grief.

The moon beats like a great ill heart
And silver light falls down like dust
The waves are choked, the trees are still –
This night, they say, is ill, is ill.

Remain inside, and shut the door
Pretend that all is as before
And when the tamtam drums do beat –
Into your cold dark bed retreat, retreat.

Dak screams without sound. Let me be! The rhythm is of laughter. The rhythm shows him things. Machines, their blueprints. An abandoned altar in a cave that lies below the tide-line. Star charts. Insectoid silver-black creatures darting through an electric storm. And he learns something: this is how the Growths pay. This is what the 0wnerz get. The rhythm laughs harder. You have just been paid with knowledge, it seems to say.

Paid for what?

The rhythm grows excited. Hard. It beats on his skin in thousands of shards. Dak sees something black like unlit coal. Something black like the corridors of night.

Blakenjel, the rhythm says. Blakenjel! Blakenjel!

No, Dak wants to say. There is always a price to pay.

The tentacles withdraw. He is left alone, unmoving, cold. The dark and the silence grow like fungus, and inside his head he screams.

The tentacles return. A tap-tap-tap, gentle and slow. They seem to be saying – so?

Dak would pray. He would do anything. But suddenly, although he is frozen, something from the outside penetrates, someone calling, and Dak cries, No!

Naet calls a blakenjel. Dak screams, and feels the triumph of the rhythm against his skin.

In the darkness he wails. Cold tentacles drag slime against his cheeks.

Blakenjel bilong mi stops in the dark. In the dark I feel him ponder. His wings rustle and I feel the slow movement of his head. It is as if he were tasting the air. I hurry after him, groping blindly.

In the darkness of his coffin Dak can move. The walls of his coffin are mucous. They ooze. They are dissolving. What do the Growths want with blakenjels? His head pulls out of the mass. He is new-born. He tastes the air and sees the blakenjel.

The darkness seems to emanate from within the Grisly Growth. Has time passed? Have the blakenjel and the Growths somehow communicated? He doesn’t know. He sees the darkness rise from the Growths and he cowers, but it isn’t for him that it comes.

It is for Naet.

The blakenjel kisses her. There is the sense of leathery wings flapping in an unseen wind. Then Dak is out of the Growths and on the ground. His clothes have been dissolved. The flesh of his arms is translucent. He stares up at Naet, and he wants to cry, he wants to scream, he wants to be a baby again. Naet looks at him without expression. She shakes her head, a confused gesture. Why did she call the blakenjel? Never mind. She doesn’t seem to have lost anything, and it is time to get back to work. She turns to address the new boy.

“Nambafaef,” she says. “Go bak bilong wok, hariap.”

Dak, helpless, says, “Naet…”

“Nambafaef,” she repeats. “Go back to work, quickly.”

The blakenjel is gone. The Growths pulsate lazily like oversized brains. And Dak stands up and, without words, walks away.

There is always a price to pay.

My blakenjel is different as he stalks through the corridors of night. He is burdened with a terrible thing. My blakenjel loves. In the darkness I hear sounds. My blakenjel sings. It is a horrid sound. There are cries and howls in the dark. My blakenjel stalks through the darkness, never stopping. What is he looking for? Maybe, I think, he wants to find another blakenjel with this thing, this love.

But perhaps the love he has acquired is of the unrequited kind.

4. 0wnerz

That night Dak sleeps with the bird-thing who lives in the ceiling. The sex is short, savage and unsatisfying. The bird-thing keeps speaking Pidgin throughout it. “Mi fakem yu. Mi fakem yu. Faken as. Yu kan. Mi fakem yu.” Its vocabulary is not large. That night, when the bird-thing falls asleep, Dak cries. Then he makes a decision. He will follow the blakenjel. He will summon him back. He will fight him. He will plead with him. He will get Naet’s love back.

When he falls asleep at last, his sleep is restless. Perhaps it is only the ground-tremors that shake the house at night, the after-thought of seismic forces out at sea. But he is used to them, just as he is used to the occasional short, sharp screams outside that end in sudden silence, or to the hiss and splatter of the steam engines as they go about their tracks, the coal-beasts running and belching and the metal bob-sledges go grind and go bump. There is something else, something new out there, and it filters into his sleep until it wakes him, but by then it is, of course, too late.

There are four shadows standing by his bed like bed-posts and the bird-thing is a smear of red wetness on the ceiling. Goodbye, avian friend. And I never even knew your name. The four shadows move forwards and a light comes on, emanating from them, green and sickly, and Dak sees they are hafmek, and he thinks, Oh, shit. Instinct tells him to keep quiet. There is little point in pleading or gabbing. The hafmek move with the whirring of motors. Their legs are wrought-metal tree trunks with delicate designs etched into the metal, whorls and vortices. Their bodies are patchwork armour, their heads the only vaguely human thing about them, although they bear more similarity to the swamp mutants than they do to people like Dak. Their eyes are hidden–How trite! Dak thinks even as he is frozen in his bed–by mirrorshades. The four hafmek pick him up–delicately, as they would something terribly light yet valuable–and carry him outside. There is a near full-moon that night and it gives the buildings of Gaslight an insubstantial appearance, and the air is humid and there is a smell of rotting vegetation, as if the jungle were that night encroaching into the town. Dak notices all that as the hafmek carry him into a giant steamroller and then climb inside themselves. The vehicle is like a moving house. There is something faintly organic about the walls. It rolls away from Gaslight, and strange beams of radiance erupt from its underbelly as if it is moving forward on light. It is some tek Dak had not seen before, although that, he readily admits to himself, isn’t saying much.

They go over Tooth-bridge, cut across Cancer Ward, avoid Golgotha and pass into Gristown and beyond, moving away from the sea. The dark mountains tower above them.

Dak says, “Where are we going?” He is not expecting an answer.

One of the hafmek turns its head fractionally. It is hard to tell what lies behind the mirrors of its eyes. It says, “Open Sore.”

Dak stares out of the window of the steamroller. They are away from the suburbs. They are going into the jungle. They are going beyond Man Place. Further inland than he has ever been, or wants to be. Open Sore. Shit shit shit.

He says, “Why?”

This time the hafmek don’t bother with an answer.

The steamroller rolls across a land of enormous, unhealthy growth. The moon lights up gnarled trees, branches looped and shaped like giant spiders’ webs, flower-heads as large as skulls, as pale, that follow their movement on long sinuous stalks that are like blind, malevolent snakes.

They come to a halt. There is a clearing in the forest, and in the clearing a house. It is a shocking thing to see in the midst of this place. It has a red tiled roof and light shines in the windows, and outside there is a small garden and a vegetable patch. There is a scarecrow positioned between two rows of plants. The hatch of the steamroller opens. The hafmek step out and Dak follows them. It is a place from a picture-book. A place that should no longer exist.

They walk up to the house through the vegetable patch. Dak brushes past the scarecrow and the moonlight falls down and the scarecrow’s hand falls onto Dak’s shoulder and holds him, and the scarecrow screams. Dak fights for release. The scarecrow looks like a mockery of a human body, moulded in some dark-green, pliable gunk. Its features run as it fights Dak. Its eyes are smeared across its face. Its mouth melts as it screams. Dak screams too. The hafmek watch impassively.

At last someone says, “Enough.” The scarecrow freezes. Dak tears away. His palms are covered in green slime, like foul-smelling resin. The speaking voice is cool and calm and pleasant. “Please,” the voice says. “Come in.”

Dak looks up. The man standing in the doorway is of medium height and has brown hair and a mild, pleasant face. He extends his hand towards Dak. “Hey, man. Great to see you. Come in.” A little dazed, Dak shakes his hand. “Dak, right?”

Dak nods. Dak follows the man into the house. Dak is scared shitless. The house is warm and well-lit and pleasant. There are two couches and a desk and a desk-lamp and a sturdy wooden cabinet and a low table and two chairs made of the same honey-coloured wood as the cabinet. “Hey, sit down, man. Make yourself comfortable.” The man closes the door. The hafmek stay outside.

Dak sits down on one couch. The man takes the one opposite. “So glad to meet you, Dak. Pit Stop Namba Six, right?”

Dak nods. “And before that, Stenchtown?” The man gets up and walks over to Dak. He bends over the boy. His face comes close to Dak’s. The man trails his nose along Dak’s cheekbones, down to his neck. Dak can feel the man’s soft breath on his skin.

“Remarkable,” the man says. He stands up and returns to his couch. “Can I get you anything? Tea? Coffee? A beer? Are you hungry?”

Dak shakes his head. The man smiles. “Oraet, Dak,” he says, switching to Pidgin. The smile melts away. “Yu-mi gat wan problem. Yu gat wan samting bilong mi.”

What? Dak says, “I took nothing–” And the man shakes his head. “You gat savvy bilong mi,” he says. “Let’s not yu-mi plaeplae, Dak. The knowledge you have is mine. I’m an 0wner. The 0wner of Pit Stop Namba Six, as it happens. So what you have in your possession–” he shrugs “–belongs to me. It’s a fair trade, don’t you think? They feed us knowledge. We feed them poisoned fish and clean them and keep them alive. I think that’s more than fair. I think that’s fucking generous.”

Dak says, “I–”

The man says, “Are you an 0wner, Dak?”

Dak says, “I–”

The man says, “No. You’re not. Are we agreed on that?”

Dak nods.

The man smiles. “Oraet,” he says. “So we have a problem. So what do we do?”

Dak shakes his head. The man’s smile grows larger. “I could kill you,” he says. “I could torture you to see if you remember any more stuff the Growths may have divulged to you. Even their scraps have value. You know what this is? This is an information-scarcity environment we live in, Dak. Information is God, Dak. How to build certain machines. How to manufacture certain pills. How to do things you didn’t even know you wanted to do until you found out you could do them. You following me?”

Dak shakes his head, then nods. The man says, “I won’t kill you, Dak. Why should I? I’m not a bad guy. I’m into knowledge for its own sake. Do you know what I am, Dak?”

Dak nods. He knows. He wishes very hard to be away.

He says, “You’re Open Sore.”

Blakenjel bilong mi stalks through the darkness like an avenging angel. He is not calm. He goes and he comes. In the early hours of the morning someone calls for him, a skull-head from Golgotha, coming down hard from Plateau. He begs for the power of the drug to be taken away from him. My blakenjel complies. As he leaves, I hear the screams of the skull-head. The drug can no longer affect him. But the wild craving remains, and it could never now be satisfied.

My blakenjel stalks away. He cannot stand still. I feel the passing of other blakenjels in the dark. It is a dance of blakenjels. I think they are speaking, and I wonder what they say.

“Open Sore,” the man says with amusement. “Yes, well. That’s what they call us, isn’t it?” He stands up and stretches. “Etymologically interesting. But what we are–what 0wnerz are all about, Dak–is open source. Do you know what open source is, Dak?”

Dak knows. It’s in the jungle all around them. It’s in the scarecrow frozen in undeath outside. It’s in the swamp-things. Open Sore. He wishes the man would stop calling him by his name. It is making him very nervous.

“Open source,” the man says. “Information wants to be free. Not free to everyone, of course–that would be madness–but free to the people who matter, Dak. People who make a difference. We work to save the world. We’re the fucking heroes, Dak!”

The man is no longer smiling. He is pacing around the room. There is the slightest sound of whizzing motors and Dak realises the man has mek inside him. Mek and the blakenjels know what else. The man says, “Why did the Growths want you to summon a blakenjel?”

And now, Dak realises, they are coming to it. The reason he is not, at this precise moment, a smear of blood on a ceiling in Gaslight.

He says, “I don’t know.”

The man backhands him. The impact throws Dak across the room. He groans, and thinks, with a savagery that surprises him, You fucking freak.

The man stands above him, looking down. “Stand up,” he says quietly. Dak gets up.

Suddenly the light dims and changes. Around the man others appear: men, and women. They seem to materialise out of the air itself, a blakenwaet rainbow forming around him. Some of them are hafmek. Some of them have growths coming out–one woman has tentacles emerging from her nostrils as if a shell-creature lived inside her skull. The man who was speaking to Dak begins to change then. His features run, just as the scarecrow’s did; he seems to melt in place. His skin turns a darker shade, and wings unfurl from his shoulder blades and open with a snap. The 0wnerz look at Dak. They are chanting.

“We are the open source,” they say, “We are the 0wnerz. We protect you, we employ you, we give you life. We are open source.”

Other things crawl and slither into the room. Jungle-things. Wild things. Open Sore things. There is a swamp-man with a lizard’s tongue hissing out of the gap that is his mouth. There is an armoured crocodile with human eyes and grafted metal blades for the ridge on its back. They form a perfect circle around Dak. Their chanting rises in pitch and intensity. “We are Open Source. We defend you. We save you. We are the 0wnerz and we 0wn you!”

And Dak, terrified, prays to his blakenjel.

And only then does he see the triumph in the 0wnerz’ eyes.

5. Blakenjel

For the length of a heartbeat, nothing happens. The 0wnerz close on Dak. Then the room is plunged into darkness.

Blakenjel bilong mi. blakenjel bilong mi. The words are swallowed in the velvety darkness. The words are cushioned by the absence of light. Blakenjel bilong mi. Blakenjel bilong mi.

Somewhere in the last hours my blakenjel acquired a voice. A singer from the opera-pits of Cancer Ward, begging to be released. He left her voiceless, and for once, in peace.

In the darkness he croons. In the darkness he sings. In the darkness he whispers words of love and of grief. I trot behind him. I am always there.

My blakenjel stops. My blakenjel snaps open his wings. My blakenjel turns, and I follow him.

The darkness expands across the room. Outside a howl sounds, of something feral moving around the perimeter of the house, and it is echoed inside by the 0wnerz. Something wet flops to the ground and someone screams, and the scream is cut short.

In the inky blackness Dak imagines he can hear voices.

Why should I let you live?

“Grab him!”

Laughter. A warm thick wetness sprays Dak’s face. There is another scream.

“Wait!”

An amused, expectant silence.

“What are you?”

Is that all you wanted to know?

“Yes!” – “Yes!”

We are blakenjel. We suffer you to stay. We protect you. We are your shepherds.

“I don’t understand.”

This is our place. Enough.

The sound of a body falling to the ground. The smell is suffocating.

“Wait!”

Silence.

“What do the Growths want with you? Why did they summon you?”

They do not belong here. Like you, small human. We let them in like we let you in. But now they want to leave. The dark is no place for the quick.

The human voice, the 0wner’s whose house this is, is excited. “Leave? Go where? How did they come here? How did people come here?”

The blakenjel says, There is always a price.

There are no more sounds. Dak blinks. His eyes are wet. The house is quiet. There is no life inside. The darkness compresses around him. Light coagulates at its edges, tracing, like an artist’s brush, the outlines of the carnage, corpses like chalk-figures sprawled on the floor, the light picking out small details, a smeared eyeball there, a puddle of green goo there, a surprised expression in a dead crocodile’s curiously human eyes, and there–

There is a man standing in a corner of the room, where the walls and ceiling meet in a pyramid of shades. The man is small and bald and white and his skin is flabby and hangs loosely from his frame. The man looks at Dak hungrily. He has nervous eyes and he blinks a lot.

The darkness coalescences before Dak. He bows his head.

His blakenjel is there.

Blakenjel bilong mi. Blakenjel bilong mi! I hate him. I hate to share him. I hate to follow him. I want to be free of him. I look at the boy and know that my blakenjel loves him. He does not love me. He came to me as he always comes when he is called. And he granted my wish, as I knew he would. He let me follow him. In my case, the wish and the price paid were the same.

The boy bows his head to my blakenjel. And my blakenjel embraces him.

The blakenjel feels like old leather and metal wires. The blakenjel has no smell. The blakenjel doesn’t speak. But the way he touches Dak is familiar: it is the way Naet once touched him.

The blakenjel caresses him.

Then something happens. The blakenjel pulls away. The sudden light nearly blinds Dak, but then his eyes adjust, and he can see.

All around him, the bodies on the floor, like darkness, coalesce. They re-form. They reassemble in hideous forms. They manufacture pseudopodia, eyeballs and naked mouths hanging on grisly stalks, and they speak as they ooze closer. “We are the source. We are open source. We are the 0wnerz–” and a familiar voice, the first 0wner, Dak thinks, shouts, “Grab him!”

The blakenjel turns and whirls. The re-formed 0wnerz ooze light. Dak wants to run, but there is nowhere to go. “Grab him!”

But it isn’t to him that they go.

The mutilated corpses assemble into crawling, grabbing things, and they approach the corner of the room where a small bald white man with loose skin is standing kneading his hands. “Enjelvaljer!” the cry goes. “Grab him! Take the vulture!”

In the centre of the room there is inhuman laughter. The blakenjel comes to Dak. He wraps his form around him, and light and sound fade. Come be with me, the blakenjel says, and be my love, and we shall all the darkness prove.

Behind them Dak imagines he can hear a faint scream, but he can’t be sure. He follows the blakenjel into the corridors of night.

6. Codicil

You measure out the days in sunsets

And months in moons

And dread the darkness.

Dak follows his blakenjel and he loves, which is a rare thing. He follows him through the corridors of night.

Once they return to Open Sore. They emerge from the darkness in a clearing and Dak sees the things that call themselves the source, and they are hideous yet still alive. They are tenacious. But the blakenjel pays them no attention. In the centre of the clearing is a shrunken wasted man, with skin grey-white and ill, and he is hanging upside-down from a gnarled and twisted tree. The man’s thin lips move silently in prayer. It seems that he is saying, over and over, Blakenjel bilong mi. Blakenjel bilong mi.

Dak looks at the 0wnerz. They clamour and they try to speak, they ask questions–they beseech. But the blakenjel pays them no heed.

He kills the hanging man with one sweep of his great sharp wings, and Dak follows him back through the darkness. There is always a price to pay.

And once, Dak follows his blakenjel to the high mountains that rise away from the towns, beyond Open Sore, where the air is clean and cold and it is quiet; and Dak’s blakenjel lays a great obsidian egg in the fine-grained black sand.

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Lavie Tidhar writes weird fiction. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and lived in South Africa and the UK. Most recently he’s lived in the Banks islands of Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, one of the most remote and isolated places on Earth. Lavie’s website is http://www.lavietidhar.co.uk/.

In 2007, Apex Publications released a collection of Jewish adventure stories titled HebrewPunk from Lavie Tidhar. This book is available as a direct order from the Apex Store and from the Apex aStore.

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