Fantastic Metropolis

Then one night, from the deepest part of the southern gloom, a light shone back at her: a violet light, small but intense.

She almost dropped her flashlight in surprise.

Some say it was only the mimic, mimicking her from the safety of the southern gloom. Others, that it was just a reflection in a pool of water. Still others say it was her one true love, created from need and darkness.

“Is it you?” she might have said. “Are you the one?” she might have said. She might have said nothing at all.

But come morning, she was gone, never to return, her flashlight dropped on the floor of the office, and all across the world there were only the sounds of the vine: the bees upon its blossoms, the ants collecting drops of moisture from its leaves, and its own distant hum, vibrating against the earth.

Jeff VanderMeer’s Secret Life is published by Golden Gryphon Press.

A new collection, Secret Lives, will be published in a limited edition hardcover by Prime Books in October 2005. The mass market edition of City of Saints & Madmen has just been released by Pan Macmillan in the United Kingdom. Bantam Books will release his Veniss Underground in 2005, with his new novel, Shriek: An Afterword forthcoming from Pan Macmillan (UK) and Tor (US) in 2006.