“Did you hear
that?" Raymond whispered. "Listen."
"I don't
hear anyth--" Carol began, her words cut short as Raymond clamped a hand
on her shoulder, pulling her to a halt.
"Shh,"
Raymond hissed. They waited in silence.
The moon
shone down on the park, the grass and lilac blooms and
tulips alike all rendered in shades of grey. No wind whistled
through the trees, no crickets chirped. There were no sirens
in the distance, no howling coyotes.
"Are they
listening?" Carol asked, looking at Raymond with wide eyes; he only
nodded. Her words suddenly seemed very loud, though they’d been whispering all
night in deference to the quiet sanctuary of the park, away from the world’s
hungry eyes and ears, a world that always watched and always listened.
Behind them, a
cluster of trees rustled soundlessly, branches quivering, trunks swaying
slightly. From out of the darkness and into the silvery
moonlight emerged a monstrous thing - an ear, disembodied, as tall as a
man, its undulating lobe propelling it stealthily, silently
through the grass, toward the young couple.
Raymond turned
to speak to Carol, but when his lips moved this time no sound emerged - and
from the corner of his eye he caught sight of the surreal
monstrosity approaching them. Carol turned to follow his gaze and screamed, a
fist pressed to her mouth - but her horror was muted.
Raymond and
Carol clung to each other, watching helplessly as the thing advanced.
It stopped at two metres away, and listened.
Carol and
Raymond began to tremble. Raymond's weathered features twisted into a rictus of
agony; Carol's chiseled good looks soon followed, her teeth clenched together
so hard she felt they might shatter. For several seconds the couple
shook and writhed, and then, in an instant, their flesh and clothing was ripped
from their bones, sucked into the ear canal in a gruesome tide of
blood and flying organs. The embracing skeletons stood in shocked silence
for one moment, then clattered to the grass together, a brief tympanic
flourish, the closing notes of a mad symphony.
Sated, the ear turned,
retreating into the trees, its cochlea trailing behind. Somewhere, a
coyote howled, and then a police siren dopplered nearby, rising and falling in
pitch and volume in just a few seconds as it sped heedlessly past.
*
* *
"Yup,
that's an ear all right," said Detective Malcolm Judd,
eyeing the severed appendage with a veteran's cool seen-it-all
distance. It lay in the grass not far from the collection
of bones a startled jogger had called in early that
morning. The young officer who'd found the ear wasn't
so sanguine, and was now vomiting his breakfast against a tree a few metres
away.
"Hey
detective, I found another one!" said another officer, pointing toward his
feet. Judd ambled over and knelt to inspect the ear,
waving the police photographer over with one hand.
This ear was smaller than the other one, and hairless -
younger, possibly female. Judd carefully tweezed it into an evidence bag
once the photographer was done.
His partner,
Detective Lorna Ng, tapped Judd on the shoulder. He rose.
"Mooney
found ear number three by stomping on it and slipping on it,"
she reported with a grimace. "A little evidence contamination to start our
morning."
"To ear is
human," Judd quipped.
"Two
stripped skeletons, three ears. Lunch at the Lumberfront says a
fourth ear will turn up before the day is out," Ng
said.
"No
bet," Judd said. The detectives regarded each other, their eyes
speaking volumes; it was time for experience to talk, but neither detective had
seen anything like this: a killer who stripped the skeletons of his
victims so clean that not a drop of trace evidence was left behind...except the ears. The medical
examiner would tell them more, but an initial inspection showed no trauma
to the skeletons - no bullet grazes or slash marks, nothing to
indicate what had killed them. The bones were as clean as those
Officer Mooney left behind on wing night at the Lumberfront. To make
matters worse, footage and audio from the park’s security drones revealed
nothing; the data had been corrupted somehow.
As it turned
out, Judd should have taken Ng's bet; the fourth ear never
turned up, probably gobbled up by a stray dog or carried off by a raven
before the bodies were found. When the detectives
visited the M.E. later that day, Doctor Reed was at a loss for words.
"It's like
someone took a power washer to these remains," Reed said, his words tinny
in the sterile environment of the autopsy room. "I've
never heard of anything like it. As
for the ears, the damage to the back of
each ear is ragged...lots of bruising. It's almost like they were
partially sucked into a powerful vacuum, then spat out, rejected."
Ng and Judd
looked at each other. Reed shrugged. There was nothing more to say.
*
* *
The case
went cold. Within a couple of weeks dental records
confirmed the victims to be 45 year old Raymond Green and his friend,
30 year old Carol Vanders. They'd been reported as missing not long
after the initial discovery of the bodies. Neither had any
enemies, they weren't sleeping together, both lived unremarkable lives; their
digital signatures were clean, online activity within the normal range of
harmless hobbies and mild paraphilias. No one, including their spouses, could
explain why the victims had been out together so late at night
on the evening of their murder, but interviews with friends, family
and coworkers, who universally described Raymond and Carol as good people
and upstanding citizens, revealed only that the meeting was
in all likelihood utterly innocent.
No one would
ever know why Carol and Ray had gone for that walk in the park to
meet their fate, though eventually the circumstances of their doom
could be, and were, guessed at by the few who deigned to read between the lines.
Ng and Judd moved on to other cases. Summer turned to fall with inevitable
splendour.
*
* *
Kulbir Shardesh,
a fourth year engineering student from West Sutani, was the next
victim. His skeleton was found sprawled near the pebbled shore of
Lime Creek, one bony arm flung over his head, one knee raised, as if he were
doing the backstroke. His ears were found
in the riverbed.
Ng and Judd
resumed work on the case until two sour-faced, dark-suited agents
of the National Board of Investigation stepped in, flashed their
copper shields and took over. With Shardesh's murder taking place
over the border, the federal agency assumed jurisdiction.
Ng and Judd were nonplussed, but accepted the situation with weary
resignation; they'd been here before.
The NBI,
despite their bottomless resources, fared no better
than the detectives. The murderer had left no clues, save
an odd track that led from the shore and into the water of
Lime Creek, as though someone had dragged a cardboard box
across the beach.
***
13 weeks later
Amanda Chelleberg, a data analyst at Boggle, notified her supervisor about a
series of strange images captured by a roaming Boggle Maps car photographing a
street in Les Femmes, South Assiniboia. While it was remotely possible
that the raw images streaming from the vehicle could have
been intercepted and faked, the timelines and technical hurdles made
it unlikely. Except, of course, that the images were impossible, for
they depicted a panorama of horror: a series of images that seemed to show a
disembodied ear, at least two meters tall, telekinetically
sucking the organs from a screaming man.
Chelleberg's
report was escalated to senior management, who dismissed it as a prank until a
senior vice-president saw a news report about a baffling missing persons case -
a case in which the woman in question, one Ellen Gordey, had last
been seen in Foolton, a suburb of Les Femmes. That vice-president, beginning to
doubt his own sanity, phoned his brother-in-law, Special Agent Pilatus Norm
of the NBI.
Norm was in
Chelleberg's cubicle at Boggle headquarters the next morning at
precisely 8 a.m. Chelleberg gave Norm a copy of the raw images; Norm
hopped on the first available commercial flight to Les Femmes and
escorted them to the Board's field office there. That accomplished,
he rented a car and drove to the coordinates provided by Boggle,
joining a hastily-assembled NBI forensics team combing the street
depicted in the images.
"Nothing
at the point indicated in the Boggle images?" Norm
asked the first agent in earshot, a wiry, curly-haired rookie named
Jones. The younger man shook his head. "If we don't find
something soon I'm going to call public works and have a couple of guys check
out the sewer system. It's possible a street sweeper came by and blew
all the evidence down the drain."
It was a good
guess. Even before the public works crew arrived an NBI woman found
an ear precariously balanced on a sewer
grate. The remaining ear and a skeleton were quickly
recovered from the drain.
"I think
it's time to kick this case upstairs," mused Pilatus Norm. He
phoned the NBI's Deputy Director, who in turn met
with the Director herself, who then arranged a teleconference
with the head of the Confederation Intelligence Apparatus.
At the end of that strained, incredulous call, the CIA man
reluctantly agreed with the NBI head that the whole affair
had grown bizarre enough that it needed the Cabinet's attention.
In this manner,
step by irrevocable step, was the final, awful confrontation assured.
***
Prime Minister
Goodluck Shariphnaristan's features remained impassive
throughout the entire briefing, held in his old-world office on
Parliament Mountain. His silver wire-frame glasses perched at the tip
of his long, aquiline nose, his blue eyes alert, his famously
prominent ears cocked at attention. He asked no questions, made no
interruptions, not even during the presentation's most ludicrous
moments.
When the women
from NBI wrapped up their briefing, the projector spinning down with
a clanking whirr, the Prime Minister removed his glasses, cleaning the lenses
with a handkerchief of purple silk.
"Ladies,"
he said politely, "What you have shown me is hard to believe. I am being
asked to accept the existence of a giant bodiless ear, which
strips the flesh from the bones of its victims.
A crawling ear, like something from one of those blasticolour
cheapies from the 1970s."
The NBI
women shrugged apologetically like chastened twins. Goodluck sighed. "I
suppose I must ask the Defence Ministry to locate and destroy this
thing," he said. "A giant ear! Like a demon from our darkest
dreams.”
“Or our
nightmares,” one of the women said.
***
The Defence
Minister, for her part, was apoplectic.
"I
thought the point of mass surveillance was to detect threats and
prevent murders," she shouted, slamming a small but rock-like fist down on
her desk. "What are all the phone taps and webcrawlers and
drones good for if they can't pick up on a giant ear that's
sucking the flesh from the bones of our citizens? Mithral,
it's like a bad horror movie," she muttered, slumping back in her fine
leather chair, closing her eyes and sighing.
"Boys and
their toys," barked Brigadier Admiral Peter Adair. "Sneaking around
looking for imaginary terrorists while real threats bubble up from beyond. But
don't you worry, Ma'am, we'll seek and destroy that thing."
Whirling
overhead in the Stygian blackness soared the Confederation
satellites, their inhuman, Cyclopean eyes peering down at the world
below, searching tirelessly for the macabre quarry loaded into their
memory crystals. In the end it was the aging Keystone-11
ARS (Army Reconnaissance Satellite) that
spotted the Crawling Ear. It was early Tuesday morning
when the thing was spotted shuffling through Mandlebra's eastern
desert, on a beeline course for the vast Tetra Cruces resort city -
home to eleven million citizens and twice that many tourists. No longer merely
larger than a man, the ear had grown; it stood a full four stories tall. It had
been feeding handsomely.
The Defence
Ministry mobilized for Operation Silent Slaughter.
***
The threat
of the Crawling Ear was so beyond human experience that
caution demanded a significant array of forces be readied to defend Tetra Cruces,
and so it was done; a wedge of troops, tanks, APCs and rocket launchers formed
a defensive line around the eastern side of the city while
attack helicopters soared through the skies. But in truth, no one
expected anything other than a very short, very one-sided battle, for even now
a B-69 fighter/bomber was winging its way to the city at Mach 4 with
a heavy payload of laser-guided death ready to rain down
on the macabre menace. Images of the Ear's slow advance
were broadcast around the world courtesy of uPhoni videos and GoProbe
HD cameras mounted on independent drones by curious onlookers too stubborn,
crazy or anti-establishment to heed the chaotic Defence Control Zones
established by a baffled military; many troops believed it to be an elaborate
exercise in any case, and certainly not worth shooting civilians over. That
kind of cavalier trigger discipline led to a lot of unpleasant paperwork, and
sometimes even mild discipline.
So there was
plentiful high-quality footage (sans sound) of that fateful moment
when the B-69 unleashed its fat load of
destruction, the bomb falling earthward with silent, eerie precision
- so precise, in fact, that the bomb dove straight
into the Ear's canal. And promptly
vanished. The ear had swallowed the bomb whole, even
though the bomb was too large to fit
inside the ear without causing a noticeable bulge.
The seasoned
B-69 pilot responded expertly, putting his plane into position for a strafing
run. Streaking toward the target at supersonic speed just ten meters
above the scrub, sending tumbleweeds flying, the pilot's
thumb hovered over the guns trigger, ready to spurt a lethal cloud of
high-velocity rounds into the Crawling Ear.
But an instant
before he could fire, the Crawling Ear squirted a thick,
heavy stream of wax from its loathsome canal. It was like flying into a wall of
mud. The plane flattened itself against the wax,
killing the pilot instantly and destroying a $400 million aircraft.
Flaming debris littered the desert floor.
The ear crawled
forward, its pace unaltered even when its massive lobe slowly but inexorably
crushed vehicles and careless humans beneath it. A dozen MeTube celebrities
died in the first moments of that terrible day, either squashed by the lobe or
stripped of their flesh by the bottomless hunger of the ear’s mad lust for
information. Skeletons and smashed corpses littered the famous Goldway Avenue
as thousands of rounds of ammunition hammered the creature, the bullets either
disappearing down the ear canal or ricocheting from its fleshy frame.
Worst of all was
the awful silence. The anguished screams of the fallen and the determined roar
of the rockets were equally impotent in the face of the ear’s all-consuming
quiet fury; it swallowed all sound, turning the battlefield into a
high-definition silent movie, a postmodern apocalypse; a revolution televised,
but silently.
Second
Lieutenant Frank Oberte charged into the cone of silence that marked the ear’s
sphere of influence, valiantly spraying depleted uranium rounds from his GAK-77
urban pacifier. He had no warning when a Big Dumb Bomb (BDB) fell short of its
target, exploding behind him. The silent shockwave propelled Oberte beyond the
ear’s quiet zone, into one of the marble fountains that lined Gold Avenue.
Oberte’s bones shattered as he slammed into an artfully carved fish spraying
water from its puckered lips. The water quickly ran red.
Remorselessly,
the ear crawled on, attack helicopters, tanks and jets scurrying around it like
so many harmless gnats.
