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confused things: a series of regular undulations, troughs and mounds.
    But suddenly the interior gleam grew. I could see more clearly! In my wildest and most reckless hypotheses, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine something similar . . .
    The truth was more incredible and more marvelous than any fiction!
    Shall I say it? I had before me a gigantic, a monstrous brain, to which this mountain, as high as Mont Blanc, served as cranium!
    I distinctly perceived the different lobes as vast as hills and convolutions which seemed to me deep ravines. . .
    The giant organs were bathed in a phosphorescent liquid which made them visible to my eyes, and I saw the arteries and veins beat and leap with the powerful movement of a machine’s piston; it even seemed that a lukewarm heat reached all the way to me, through the thick rampart of translucent stone!
    Never has a man experienced astonishment such as mine. I wondered if I wasn’t the plaything of a diabolical hallucination. This creation, so colossal, so outside the normal hypotheses, left me crushed with a horror that had no name; and, in spite of myself, I remained with my eyes glued to this window opened onto the infinite, without having the strength to flee.
    I was dazed, hypnotized by the staggering spectacle. I finally pulled myself away from the grotto and took refuge in the metal forest; my head was splitting, my arteries beat to bursting, I felt madness take hold of me.

WEIROOT
    Jeffrey Ford
    One of his generation’s best fantasists, Jeffrey Ford has won multiple World Fantasy Awards. His fiction veers from more traditional tales through to surreal, strange compositions like the story included herein, taken from the pages of Weird Tales .
    Weiroot, you mad man, what do you think you’re doing, sitting in the chill of the night, winking at the winking stars? Are you sending them a message? Come visit me? And what if they were to? What if in say a year or two a star fell, swept down out of the dark, trailing green fire, and smashed with an explosion of sparks and black diamond debris into the dunes surrounding your wooden plank palace? What would you do then? Oh sure, you’d call for your four marble men without faces, those savage quadruplets whose stone sculpted arms move with supple grace. “If they get obstreperous, let them have it,” you’d whisper and the four white dolts would nod and flex. But then, imagine your surprise, when the rock from space breaks open and out crawls a little fat baby, purple as a plum with a ridge of webbed spikes like a ladies’ open fan running from the crown of its head back to the base of the skull, orange eyes and a little “o” of a mouth. You know you’d gasp and wave your arms in the air. . .well; at least you’d wear a look of consternation and shake your head, and who wouldn’t? But then, even the four stone flunkies would make amazed faceless expressions when the little fellow from beyond the moon says “Feed me, Weiroot,” in a psychic voice that sounds between the ears. That would snarl your line of thought. So, I can see it now, you’d scoop that star baby up in your robed arms and shuffle with your lame stride back into that cockeyed palace. Then what? A cold leg of mutton? A rasher of game hens from the forest beyond the dunes? Octopus and eel heads you purchased that morning from Yakus, The Bold But Battered? And the miracle is the babe devours all of it. That’s right, that cute little mouth holds rows of needle teeth, and he’s got an appetite. He takes off one of the stone goons’ index fingers in the feeding. Then surprise and a portion of horror when the mewling fright drops a neat little pile of space scat onto the clean swept floor of the dining room. You’d be screaming orders like a second lieutenant in the pontiff’s royal guard, “Drop the rose petals!” “Man the shovel! Haste and earnest effort in the name of all that’s holy!” And after the tumult and chaos of the exigencies of