Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer Read Free Book Online Page A

level.”
    Shadrach looks out at the waves once more.
    You take his left hand in yours. It is a rough, callused hand that will never forget twenty-four years of hard life below level. It is more knotted than you recall, and the odd swirling scar on the back of his hand, near the thumb—the place he picked at when he was nervous—is scarlet, almost to the point of infection.
    â€œAm I upsetting you, Shadrach—or is there something else?”
    He wrenches his hand away.
    â€œI have made a mistake, Nicola.” A great, coiled sadness has entered him, and his hands are clenched fists.
    â€œWhat does that mean, Shadrach? You must tell me what that means!”
    He seems on the verge of speaking, but looks past you in the same moment that you smell something musky, thick, not entirely agreeable. The same scent you found in Nick's apartment. You turn away from the canal and there stands a meerkat, staring down at you. From this vantage, its four-foot height is absurdly menacing. It has ginger fur flecked with white. Its claws, half-transformed by the bioneer's art into hands, hang ridiculously at its sides. Its eyes are liquid black. You avert your gaze, embarrassed to be outstared by an animal.
    Shadrach smiles at you, but it is a thin smile of pain, the smile of someone torn between two extremes.
    â€œI mean, of course,” he says with great difficulty, “that it was a mistake to talk to you. I'm sure your brother will turn up if that is any comfort.”
    He rises, leans over to take the meerkat's paw, and walks off, soon disguised, hidden by the crowds. Watching them, you cannot tell who is leading whom. He does not look back—there is a frightening finality to his departure.
    The sun fades over the great walls and the dirigibles dock for the night: great floating whales breaching with a snort of hydrogen. The sun—mauve and electric red and metallic green—cuts into the heart of you.

CHAPTER 5
    Morning brings with it a too-bright sunrise through half-shaded windows, the welcome realization that it is the weekend, and a knock upon your door.
    The knock repeats itself, despite the early hour. You throw on a bathrobe, brush your hair in two quick strokes, start coffee with a mumbled command. The knock comes again—a child's knock, not loud, but confident. Who else but a child would fail to use the doorbell?
    Enough suspense. You clap your hands and the door opaques itself, starting at the top and slowly teasing downward. At eye level there is still nothing. Then: Is that something moving? Something blue? The tips of blue ears appear. Is that a blue bit of hose or flexible pipe now curling its way upward?
    â€œWho is it?” you call out, although you'll know in a few seconds.
    â€œDelivery,” comes the muffled reply.
    â€œOf what?”
    As the answer is spoken to you, the answer is also revealed in the flesh, for the door fully opens and there, oblivious to your scrutiny through the one-way glass, stand a Ganesha and a meerkat.
    The Ganesha, a dark blue, is dressed in a top hat and hopelessly outdated tuxedo. The poor meerkat is clothed in nothing but its own fur. The Ganesha doffs his hat and, with a single fluid motion, transfers it from top right hand to bottom right hand, to bottom left to top left. The blue trunk, meanwhile, is an inquisitive snake. The eyes are bright gold, the mouth toothy with two tiny tusks. The blue belly paunches out below and the stubbly legs end in flat feet.
    They are so like a cartoon that you half expect them to be badly dubbed, to move at one-and-one-half speed, to prance and prattle like poorly made toys. Entertainment. Servitude. Comedy. But they don't. They stand there, awaiting your attention. This suaveness, this smoothness frightens you. This is a dance you do not understand, a pattern that doesn't repeat itself enough times to instill its nautilus self in the grooves of your brain.
Nicholas used to make creatures like these
. .