Household Gods and other narrative offences Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Contents

  ORLANDA

  THE FLYING ORCHID

  HOUSEHOLD GODS

  BONE

  HONOURABLE MENTION

  THE MADWOMAN OF IGBOBI HOSPITAL

  SLIP ROAD

  HOUSEHOLD GODS

  AND OTHER NARRATIVE OFFENCES

  Tade Thompson

  Copyright © 2020 Tade Thompson

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Image: ‘Like This, Like That’ © 2017 by Tade Thompson

  This book is not for sale.

  It is to be freely distributed.

  For the quarantined.

  Things to know…

  Here’s a bunch of stories to amuse you while you’re locked away or Social Distanced or Quarantined, or whatever.

  They are creepy and disturbing tales, so be forewarned. Also, probably not for kids.

  ORLANDA has never appeared in print anywhere. I was going to find a market for it, and I think I submitted it to one place, but I got terribly busy so here it is. It’s a weird sci-fi story that kept hanging around my subconscious until I wrote it down. THE FLYING ORCHID was previously published in 2013 as BUDO in STEAMPUNK WORLD anthology and 2016 in Escape Pod where you can find an audio version. (https://escapepod.org/2016/01/20/ep517-budo/)

  HOUSEHOLD GODS originally appeared in 2016, Myriad Lands Anthology. BONE, the oldest story here, was published in 2008 as flash fiction for Tailspin Magazine and earned me £50.00, which I think was the most I’d ever been paid for a story till that point, so don’t mock. The magazine might be defunct because I can’t find the link.

  HONOURABLE MENTION, a nasty tale of sleep deprivation first appeared in the Dangerous Games anthology in 2014. THE MADWOMAN OF IGBOBI HOSPITAL was first published in the on-hiatus Interfictions Online in 2016 and has nothing to do with either madness or ghosts. SLIP ROAD started life in Expanded Horizons magazine in 2009, reprinted in Unconventional Fantasy in 2014.

  Obviously, copyrights for each story are the dates above.

  What else?

  Be kind to your neighbours and don’t believe post-apocalyptic sci-fi. Our humanity is defined by our ability to cooperate and share.

  If your circumstances permit, go forth and do something like this.

  If I happen to get sick and die from COVID-19 (I still like CORVID-19 better) then this is my valediction. It was fun.

  CONTENTS

  ORLANDA

  THE FLYING ORCHID

  HOUSEHOLD GODS

  BONE

  HONOURABLE MENTION

  THE MADWOMAN OF IGBOBI HOSPITAL

  SLIP ROAD

  ORLANDA

  A year after my arrival, while I was still in good odour with the planetary authorities, and while my language comprehension still lagged behind my good intentions, I went to visit my friend Orlanda, but when I got there I found her crying.

  My friend, she said, help me.

  Why? What is wrong?

  She pointed to her chest and condensation billowed from her mouth with each word she spoke. There is a chill in my heart. I feel I shall freeze and break apart.

  I entered her heart through a gap in a reality TV show, a rare moment of true feeling, and there, trapped in the fibrosus sinister, was a frost queen, used by Orlanda to fix a broken heart long ago, forgotten, ossified into the cardiac skeleton.

  Why are you here, I asked.

  Orlanda made repairs around me, and now I am trapped, said the frost queen.

  How can I free you, frost queen, I asked.

  You must break the heart again, then I will be able to escape.

  I cannot do this, for she is my friend, and I love her. Shall I kill you, frost queen, will that restore Orlanda to normal?

  Maybe if you run her through with a consecrated blade, said the queen. Maybe if you stab her through the breastbone she won’t die, but I will.

  I don’t want to kill you either, I said.

  Then what pathway left for you, asked the frost queen.

  I shall build Orlanda an electrical heart, one that winds up every day.

  Will I die from this, asked the frost queen.

  No, once installed, Orlanda will have two hearts, one on the left, one on the right. You will be safe, frost queen.

  I told Orlanda to sit down and not alarm herself, after which I went to my workshop. I built the heart out of an electric chair, a telephone, a rumour, a wax recording of chain-gang singing, a gold watch and the string from a pendulum. It took me sixteen days and sixteen nights. When I returned to her it was all I could do to keep my eyes open and focused.

  I opened her chest with an axe, but I miscalculated. The frost had made the rib cage brittle and one swing shattered the sternum. The transmitted force killed Orlanda for three minutes and the frost queen for much longer. The mechanical heart brought Orlanda back and kept her alive. After my labours, I slept for four days.

  I returned to my life after this, but a month later a man came knocking on my workshop and he wanted a mechanical foot. He did not mention Orlanda, but I knew he had come from her. I built it out of a velocipede, a kerosene lantern, a Redcoat’s bayonet, piano wire and a song from the last true castrato.

  *

  I am not from here.

  When my vessel crashed most of the crew died on impact, and others from disease and broken hearts. My friends. I alone survived the injury and the pestilence, persisted on the mountain, eating reptiles and grubs, drinking water that flowed down from the peaks.

  I knew there were settlements around me, I just did not know how to interact with them. I was not a linguist, but I listened to recordings of the language and taught myself the basics.

  I was frail compared to many of the sentients, and I did not think my chances would be favourable if I made direct contact. I also knew I could not survive on the side of a mountain if the weather dipped in a seasonal change.

  I made up and wrote down a legend of a princess, stranded and asleep on a mountain, waiting for a kiss from her true love. Anyone who could make it up the mountain to kiss her would have her heart. I set traps along the way to discourage those without purity of purpose or ruggedness of constitution. Then I waited, slept, for the snows were on their way.

  I woke up once to find a ruffian attempting to copulate with me, his foul saliva already all over my lips and in my mouth. I sliced his neck open and endured his spurting blood before he went limp. His spirit still bounces off the walls of the wreckage of my vessel, trying to find an exit to the local afterlife. His body nourished me through winter.

  I knew I would never return home. My body was so colonised by the bacteria in this place that I would not be allowed back.

  Orlanda was the fifth person to make it up there, and she said she did not wish to kiss me, that she just wanted to know if the legend was true. I told her it both was and was not. We became friends, and within weeks I left the mountain for good.

  *

  Orlanda worked at the local ghost academy. She had trained three successful ghosts in her time. Three does not sound like much to you because you know nothing about ghost tutelage, but most practitioners only hooked one or two in their entire careers. The three ghosts followed Orlanda around, stored in her subconscious like impending neuroses.

  Tutoring ghosts was done in hospitals, on the dying. In this world, only ghosts did the time travel work. They shot off into the future and returned with information which transcribers took down immediately before memories faded. This future-mining drove technological advancement. Transcription was a high
ly skilled job as the ghosts’ speech could often descend into metaphor and arcane symbology. Orlanda’s job was to teach them how to conceptualise a space-time future, and how to communicate with the living while they themselves were still alive. They had to pretend to be ghosts before they became ghosts. Chemotherapy and small vessel brain disease sometimes meant the training did not take, or was distorted at the point of death.

  Orlanda told me that with her brand new artificial heart, she could no longer teach ghosts. She could not love or hate. She could not even lust.

  *

  The frost queen, once revived, pursued me for six weeks, then lost interest, returning to Orlanda’s heart.

  *

  It was not just the microbes that prevented me from going home. The entire reality was slowly changing me. I felt myself being limited by their thoughts and their perceptions and preconceptions of what I should be. I was moulded by their language and senses and superstitions. I was not me. The longer I was present, the more different I became, and with this, crushing loneliness. Alienated from my own self, unable to escape the defining syntaxes of the locals, I took a pilgrimage up the mountain, to the downed vessel that was my birthplace, a second-life uterus. It was not there. I took a week in the freezing rain to verify this. This perplexed me until I began to see tiny offspring here and there, new technologies born not of forays into the local future, but from dissection of my ship.

  I had to do something, said Orlanda. Don’t you see? I would have been useless, all my training would have been for nothing. I told them where to find your ship. Anyway, it’s your fault. This heart you built has ruined me.

  I could tell that she did not believe her own words, and that she and I had differences in our definition of friendship. What you need to know is that where I’m from friendship is taken seriously, and that bad faith on one side does not affect the quality of friendship on the other. Among my people kinship is determined by friendship, and not by consanguinity, which strikes me as absurd. How can your people be those to whom you are related by blood? I disliked most of my blood relatives, and found it far easier to form my own group by incremental addition of friends. This is one area that remained unaffected by where I was. Betrayal hurts, but it cannot define my enactment of friendship. Thus, Orlanda still had my faith, even though her own was atrophic.

  *

  They came for me in daylight, in full view of the settlement. Not a single person protested. By this time Orlanda had lived two lifetimes of her peers and was attracting fear for being immortal. They called her a witch and she pointed to me.

  *

  They took liberties, extracted advantages and subjected me to rigorous analysis down to my molecular make up. It was not painful, but I had learned embarrassment since my arrival, and it is that which flashed red like a beacon of kinship. I felt the shame when they unravelled my genetic material and exposed my tendency to rare respiratory infections for all to see. Not that they could understand it, but I found it shameful all the same. Genes should be private.

  They tried to duplicate me with their primitive sciences. This was a mistake.

  I should say that Orlanda was the subject they chose for their manipulations and she died as a result, but because she had a mechanical heart her body continued to function. The mindless body escaped and she wreaked havoc along her path home.

  What I saw was a swathe of destruction, mainly dead bodies, not just lifeless, but flattened as if crushed by a heavy weight, and some property damage with crumbled houses and a fallen pedestrian bridge along a vector that I assumed she took. I followed. I thought, in retrospect, that I should have used some hope and some charity while constructing the heart.

  After a fortnight of carnage, following became redundant. The destruction continued but I was no longer affected. I hunted instead for my vessel, but I knew it had been taken apart. Instead, I took one of their creations, pale imitations of mine, but the best on the planet.

  I couldn’t, as I have said, go home, but I could leave this planet, this reality.

  Before departing, I contemplated the mountain, my loneliness and Orlanda. I remembered what she did for me. I found her at the shore of an inland sea, having murdered her way there. She had broken the air force and armies of several countries.

  When she attacked me I told her heart to stop, and it did. The frost queen emerged, and froze Orlanda’s body.

  She may yet live, I said, if I start the heart again.

  Will you?

  No, not in this place. But she is my friend. I will not leave her.

  I took the frozen body into my new vessel and flew away, looking for a place where I would not experience hostility or malignant curiosity; a place where I could undo the crimes done to Orlanda, where I could find silence for her and peace for me.

  THE FLYING ORCHID

  "Being desirous, on the other hand, to obviate the misunderstanding and disputes which might in future arise from new acts of occupation (prises de possession) on the coast of Africa; and concerned, at the same time, as to the means of furthering the moral and material well-being of the native populations;"

  General Act of the Berlin Conference on West Africa,

  26 February 1885

  There is a story told in my village about the man who fell from the sky. The British also tell this tale in their history books, but it is a mere paragraph, and they invert the details.

  In October 1884 I was a Yoruba translator for a British trading outpost. This man from the sky, we called him Budo. He was in the custody of the English, who questioned him. They tortured him with heat and with cold and with the blade, but they did not know what answers would satisfy. I know this because I carried their words to him, and his silence back to them. His manner was mild and deferent at all times, but they held him in isolation. For good reason they considered him dangerous. I will explain this later.

  One afternoon while most of the English were sleeping a white man arrived at the gate demanding admission. One of the Sikh sentries told me he was a scout, and appeared bruised, half-naked and exhausted. He was too out of breath to speak, although he seemed keen to give his report. Kenton, the NCO of the military contingent, asked one of my brothers to bring water while he soothed the scout. The man took two gulps, splashed some on his face, then he looked up at Kenton. He said one word.

  ‘French.’

  The scout vomited over the floor.

  Kenton ordered the men to revive him, but I saw the fear on his face, though at the time I did not know what ‘French’ meant. He also doubled the guard and conferred with other white men. I remained at the periphery and kept quiet and still. Experience had taught me that they often forgot about my presence when I remained silent.

  ‘Let me tell you about the French,’ said one of the enlisted men. ‘They’re very dirty, you savvy? Never do they wash. Eat frogs, don’t they? Kill their royals with a goolly-tine.’

  ‘What’s this goo-lly-tine?’ I asked.

  The man made a chopping motion across his own throat, then guffawed. I could not imagine the spilling of royal blood and I thought to myself what curious creatures these French must be.

  At that moment Kenton strode out of the Commanding Officer’s office, red faced in that way white men get when they are drunk or angry. His gait was too assured and stable for inebriation, besides I had never seen Kenton imbibe. He was sober in all manner of things. He was, as he passed me, muttering to himself.

  ‘Make ready. Make ready. All the fornicating heathen gods! Make ready, he says.’ Kenton stopped, swivelled and stabbed me in the chest with his index finger. ‘You. Get me the Black. Right now. No, wait. Clean him up and give him some water and corn meal. Then bring him to the office.’

  *

  Budo sat cross-legged on the ground and ate with his hands, slowly, deliberately, concentrating on each morsel. I tried to speak but he held up his hand. He was one who favoured full attention on any task at hand. I therefore concentrated on his features while waiting. He w
as darker than most, lanky, with sunken cheekbones. His hair had grown out in captivity, but it was not tangled. He had a Widow’s Peak but large eyes dominated his face. His muscles were flat, like a blanket on his bones. He wore a tattered, filthy loin cloth of indeterminate colour and powerful stench.

  I had grown soft in the house of the oppressors and I am ashamed to report that I could not stand the sight of him, used as I was to more genteel surroundings.

  He drank water in the same way he ate and I grew impatient. From Budo’s cell I could hear the steady hammer of the brothers securing the fortifications and the regular footfalls indicating the drills of soldiers preparing themselves. The predominant smell in the cell came from the outhouse. This was by design.

  When Budo looked my way I felt more naked than he. ‘Tell me why they want me.’

  I did.

  He stood. ‘Take me to Kenton.’

  ‘Change your clothes,’ I said, offering him some cotton shorts, but he would not take them.

  ‘There is no time for that.’

  *

  At this point I should probably tell you why the English wanted Olufemi Budo when they should have been counting their Enfield rifles and begging their gods for a functioning Maxim.

  I have mentioned that Budo fell from the sky. Nobody saw him fall exactly, but some fishermen discovered him in a palm tree one morning, injured, unconscious and wearing a peculiar contraption made of leather and strips of rubber. It was a system of belts and bladders that none of the villagers understood enough to save. When he regained consciousness the first thing Budo asked for was his harness, but nobody understood what he meant. His Yoruba was correct, if stilted and precise. He suffered from malaria and had several fractures which the bone-setter took care of. They also fed him agbo iba until his fever broke.

  Our village was a sleepy place about a hundred miles from the west bank of the Niger. We used to be an occasional reservoir for the transatlantic slave trade before it was abolished. Then we became a reservoir for enforced labour without pay, which I could not distinguish from slavery, but the British priest assured me this was the better condition. Honest labour, he called it. They made us build infrastructure-roads, houses, railroads-designed solely for the purpose of taking goods from the interior to the coast where ships waited to sail for Liverpool and Portsmouth.