The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  Lucy was a mean and stubborn woman. She walked through the storm and did all the things that should bring luck and power.

  She threw three copper coins in a certain fountain at midnight.

  She put seven pennies, standing on edge, between the bricks of a certain wall.

  She turned her jacket inside out, like a woman who has been led astray by pixies and means to break the spell.

  She found a four-leaf clover in the wet grass of the park and tucked it behind her left ear.

  At dawn, Johnson found her sitting in the park. “Do me a favor?” she asked without looking up. “Can you make it rain tonight?”

  He shook his head slowly. His face was set in a frown and his hands were deep in his pockets. “It won’t do you any good,” he said. She did not look up at him. “You can’t just stay and look and wait.” He waited a moment, but she did not speak. “You really are upset, aren’t you?”

  She plucked a daisy from the grass beside her. “He was a friend. I didn’t think I could lose a friend so easily.”

  “Tomorrow night, the stars must shine,” he said unhappily.

  “It’s a long and lonely run,” she said slowly. At last she looked up at him. He could not read her expression. “But I have until twilight.”

  “It’s no good, Lucy. You’re looking for an explanation, and—”

  “I’m looking for trouble,” she said with a touch of her old tone. “I’ll find it.”

  As the sun rose over the city and began to burn away the fog, Lucy went back to the tunnels on the East Side. (Trust me: you couldn’t follow the directions there if I gave them.) Her footsteps echoed in the darkness. The construction site was empty and the corridors were dark and silent. She went looking for trouble and she did not find it.

  She ended up back at the phantom subway stop, alone and unhappy. But she was a firecatcher and a lady of some power. Even tired and hurt, she had some power. She traced a figure in the air, outlined it with light. A cap like a rag picker, boots like a rancher. Face in shadow, of course.

  “You know, I don’t understand,” she said to the figure. “And I don’t think you do either.” A train rumbled through the station and the figure disappeared for a moment in the brighter glow of the headlight. Lucy did not move. A slight tremor went through the glowing shape like a ripple in a reflection, starting at the battered boots and ending at the stained cap. “I’m confused and I don’t like being confused.” She glared at the figure for a moment. It did not move, did not speak.

  She walked away, leaving a trail of glowing footprints. At the entry to the tunnel (You still want to know where the tunnels are, don’t you. Ha! You’ll never find out now.) she looked up at the night sky, toward the Little Bear, her particular constellation.

  She walked across town to the library, where she knew Johnson would be. “I came to say good-bye,” she said.

  “You’re leaving on the Run?”

  She nodded. “It’s a tricky run.” Her voice was young and soft. “I may not be back.”

  Johnson tried to take her hand but she stepped back and laid a hand on the head of one of the lions. “It’s all right,” she said. “I just need a different point of view for a while. I’ll be fine. I might be back later.”

  Johnson shook his head. “Hey, if I see that shadowborn, what do you want me to—”

  “Don’t say a word,” she said. “Don’t explain a thing.”

  She stood with one hand on the head of the lion and she looked up toward the Little Bear, a constellation that had always seemed to be missing a star. And she began to fade—her hair changing from the color of steel to the color of twilight, her face losing its craggy reality, her body losing its harsh line. In a moment, she was gone and away on the Starlight Run.

  She hasn’t come back yet. That’s why you can’t see many stars in the city—they’re short a firecatcher still. She became a star herself, sitting up in the far-off, throwing gobs of light down at the world. (And if you want to know how she became the North Star, ask the man who lives by the great stone lions at the library. He may tell you, if you have the right look about you. Or he may not.)

  What do you mean—the North Star was always there? Haven’t you been listening? The world is not as it seems. Ask any poet. Ask any bag lady. Ask anyone who sees in the twilight and knows of the fireborn and the shadows.

  Down in the tunnels and secret ways of the city, the white cat mated with a black tom and gave birth to litters of kittens that pounce and play with paper scraps that dance and flutter but never live. A faintly glowing figure still waits in the Phantom Subway Station for a train that never will stop.

  And Mac? You want to know what happened to the shadowborn? It’s possible that he never was at all. But if he was, then probably he still is and probably he is happy and quite likely he never found the light sculpture that leans against the dark wall of the phantom subway station. Probably.

  So that’s the story and you can draw your own conclusions. But one warning: if you have a streak of the shadow in you, don’t follow the North Star. She may lead you astray. Lucy can be like that; she can hold a grudge.

  And if you do have the shadow in you, don’t worry. I made the whole thing up. There—feel better? All right? All right.

  Edgardo Sanabria Santaliz (1951– ) was born in Puerto Rico and earned a Ph.D. in Literature from Brown University. He studied music at the Royal Conservatory in Madrid and later became a professor of Latin American, Spanish, and Puerto Rican literature. He is the author of various books for adults and children, including numerous collections of stories, poems, and essays. He has won several literary prizes for his work, including the National Prize of the PEN Club of Puerto Rico. In 1996, he was ordained as a priest of the Dominican Order and is now retired and living in San Juan. “After the Hurricane” was first published in 1984 in El día que el hombre píso la luna.

  AFTER THE HURRICANE

  Edgardo Sanabria Santaliz

  Translated by Beth Baugh

  I

  AFTER THE HURRICANE, the house and the whole immense—and hours before—green and raised area of the coconut grove would appear completely desolate, covered with fish. One would see octopus, squid and cuttlefish tentacles hanging from the cornices, opalescent, moist with a gentle teary luster that would form slow phosphorescent puddles on the floor, a large curtain in tremulous tatters of stalactites in the round—as if the roof—or what remained of the roof—were melting beneath the hot gray mist that would still fall. Through the enormous hole between the tiles, through the unprotected shattered glass windows, torrents of spray would have burst, devastating everything, pulverizing the little fragile objects, pulling the heavy mahogany furniture from the floor in whirlpools and making it sail with the lightness of rafts from room to room, dragging some things forever, driving out others—pictures, carpets, an old pendulum clock—that would then be found kilometers away on the boundaries of the coconut grove, ornamenting the countryside. It would prove to be almost impossible to walk through the salons and to climb the stairs with all the sargasso tangling the feet, with all the moving water making it slippery: it would be easy to discover sea horses and starfish, purple or cinnamon-colored crabs of elusive and exquisite forms, conches, snails, minuscule fishes sparkling like gems in the drawers, within armoires and trunks, adhering to the backs of chairs, tables and mattresses. One would find everything that could contain any volume of water—bathtubs, kettles, sinks, vases—in ebullient precipitation, overflowing with groupers, snappers, sturgeon by the dozens, sifting and showing an inanimate and perfectly circular eye for one, two seconds on the surface of that sea that would dazzle with its scanty proportions and absence of sand. Outside, looking from the detritus-filled terrace in the direction of the beach, not even a trace would be seen of the stone barrier that used to separate the sand from the smooth terrain of emerald grass in which the hous
e was set. Only stretches of a filth of weeds mixed with sand and palm fronds, gravel, split coconuts: the avenue that would open the tottering rows of coconut palms would signal the passing of the Great Wave that came from the ocean in the most extreme moment of the cyclone.

  When Acisclo Aroca returned from his hurried flight his eyes filled with tears of grief and consternation, and he had to cover his nose with a handkerchief against the stench of rotting shellfish that was beginning to spread all over, as was the black cloud of flies. It had been a sudden unavoidable flight, principally determined by the fact that Acisclo lived alone, almost never seeing anyone in a house that could have comfortably held an entire army: at the last minute, the horizon now filling with monstrous clouds, some fisherman from around there remembered him and gave warning. He hadn’t time to take anything with him, even less to secure the windows or to gather up what loose things remained here and there. He escaped because he saw in the fisherman’s terrified look—sweaty below the growing, pressing shadow—that what he was saying was true: “Leave, or you won’t wake here tomorrow!” Now, facing all this, he understood that the fisherman had been right. But he wasn’t thanking him, he would have preferred a thousand times more to disappear with his possessions than to face what he was seeing. Nevertheless, at the crucial moment he didn’t believe so much destruction was possible. He thought on his life, and that it was better to run the risk of some adequately reparable destruction than to lose the only thing that couldn’t be replaced. Never had the idea of a similar devastation passed through his mind, that in one night what had taken him so many years to construct had been demolished.

  Acisclo Aroca will walk alone through the ruins of his house. With his rubber boots he will move dead fish, fragments of tile, remains of objects. He will recognize them if he pays careful attention to retain some trace or appearance of yesterday. Painstakingly, he will travel from one room to another, from the first to the second floor, stopping now and then to bend over and pick something from the floor, and to contemplate it in his fingers, stupefied, as if he were dealing with a prehistoric tool or with something he might have seen in his childhood and that he just now came to remember. It’s not possible, he will murmur, lost, as if he carried a useless compass in the middle of an infinite forest. In the last room he will turn in circles, already tired of the chaos, and he will begin the path again. Suddenly though, he will turn aside toward the terrace with the speed of someone heeding a summons. Going out into the afternoon air, Acisclo will look as though he has aged ten years. To the left, out of the corner of his eye, before finally orienting his vision in that direction, he will be able to make out the silver-blue luminosity of the swimming pool.

  It looks to have suffered the least destruction of his property. Branches, leaves, and every kind of debris had accumulated around the spotless surface of the turquoise oval, creating the impression that the wind had refrained from flinging anything in or that someone had taken charge of cleaning any residue from the water. The pool reflects the platinum light of the huge clouds the hurricane has left behind; the mist (now tenuous, invisible) dots the smooth water, filling it with microscopic waves that break in concentric circles, as though created by the almost weightless alighting of an insect. Acisclo can’t take his eyes off it. Time passes by him unnoticed. When he comes to (moving has broken the enchantment) he discovers that there is a burning elliptical sun floating between a tight string of clouds and the coconut palms that have remained standing: the ellipse of fire threatens to singe what remains of their lopped-off crowns. Again he turns his attention to the pool. When he focuses his gaze he notices, astonished, that his strange hours-long intoxication was in no way one of sight, but rather one of sound, a suspension such that he seemed to be seeing within sound. What he has been hearing is a sort of song, he doesn’t know for certain if he can call it that, but he can’t think of any other word to describe it. It is a song. The most inconceivably beautiful voice that he has ever heard in his life. Singing. The most extraordinary and supernatural music that human ears have heard.

  Then he would see her for the first time. A barely perceptible agitation (not of breeze or lagging raindrops) at the center of the oval. A rising, fountainlike tremor. And suddenly the head crowned with orange coral would emerge, and then the thick, greenish, mossy hair, braided with pearls and covering her shoulders, her back, her breasts, each one in turn veiled by a clinging star stone. She would be looking directly at the terrace, inexplicably immobile in the deepest part of the pool, half submerged in the water that would now have taken on a pewter tone, gilded from the waist up by the slanting glare of late afternoon. She would no longer be singing (yes, it was she who was singing!) but the face turned toward him would be as wondrous as the voice. Never in his life would Acisclo Aroca forget that vision. A little while would pass before he asked himself what the woman was doing there, and seconds later the thought of having been conscious of the song long before she emerged would make him tremble.

  Even though he climbed downstairs as quickly as the debris permitted, upon drawing near to the pool he didn’t see the woman anywhere, neither in nor out of the water. Night had already almost fallen, the oval was a limitless eye with a half-closed eyelid, falling, hiding the diaphanous, sapphire-colored iris. Acisclo went around the pool several times, stopping when he called out—as if movement would have impeded the use of his voice—and then did the same thing around the structure of the house, finally arriving at the boundary where the entanglement of the bent, split, unearthed trunks of the coconut grove began. She couldn’t have gone so soon, without leaving so much as a trace of her damp footprints. Unless…it had all been his imagination. But that was impossible, he had heard her, he had distinguished her so clearly! Where was she? How was she able to disappear like that? He approached the pool again. He then remained very quiet, his five senses concentrated on the dark and serene water. He was unconsciously moving his lips, as if counting the minutes a person is capable of withstanding a deep dive. Nothing happened. Now the oval looked like an eye that had hypnotized him. For an instant he believed he had fallen and was sinking—the moon had just risen and its reflection colored the air blue with the weightlessness of the ocean bottom. Suddenly the pool was a mirror through which clouds passed and stars swam. Drained, Acisclo moved back and sat in the grass, supporting his back against the trunk of some tree that had lost its branches in the night. His head nodded sleepily. The distinct, resurgent song, spreading as if exhaled from the heart of an opened and deadly flower (the song that he would have heard, had he been more awake) finished by lulling him to sleep.

  Then he will see her again. He will find himself still reclining against the tree, dozing off; an unexpected splash will make him raise his head. She will be there. Appearing beyond the marble border of the pool, observing him with eyes like drops of the bluest ocean on earth. Acisclo will not dare to move, for fear that she will submerge and never rise again. The coral will shimmer under the moon, over her hair braided with pearls that will radiate an arcane inner light. Perhaps he will say (whisper) something like who are you, but he won’t hear himself pronounce a single word.

  Later, when he makes a deliberate attempt to speak, she will draw back suddenly, as if driven by his voice. She will swim in wide expert circles, with the undulating skill of a fish, her arms at her sides, her raised head leaving the greenwhite wake of her skin mingled with foam. A second before she disappears in the water, he will make out the sweeping iridescent tail. Without knowing how he got there, Acisclo will find himself on his knees at the pool’s edge, leaning over the subtle reflection of his searching face. It will seem to him that centuries have passed before an almost imaginary fluctuation on the surface finally reveals itself, followed by the more fleeting representation of a figure hurriedly sliding by. Swift as lightning he will shoot out his arm, catch and remove something. When he takes the string of pearls from the water, their luster will illuminate his face.
/>   Acisclo Aroca wakes up. In his hands he discovers the string of pearls gleaming in the sun.

  II

  The truck reappeared as soon as the sun set, bursting into the plaza from some street through which the nocturnal wave of murkiness and stars advanced. At once it proceeded to circle the tree-lined rectangle a number of times—secret, stealthy—like an animal searching for somewhere to rest. The old men sitting in a row on the long half-moon-shaped concrete bench turned their heads in time to see it make its slow entrance. It passed in front of them (its dark blue brimming with shoals of luminescent decal art) and, turning off the headlights in the very center, stopped to one side of an arbor blown over a short while before by the hurricane. It was the same enormous, outlandish truck that had gone through the pueblo that afternoon, deafening everyone with its loudspeaker (as the crow flies, or from the top of the belfry, it would have been easy to follow it by ear through the maze of streets). It was a navy blue truck, covered with decals offish, that ended by circling around and around the plaza, from where the echo reverberated, moving away through the series of side streets that fed into it. Then the truck had gone into one of them and disappeared, creating an unusual momentary silence everywhere, as if it had robbed the entire village of sound. Now it was here again, and a man got out, who seemed with his glance to take in the atmosphere of the public park and the white and gravid heights of the temple, dotted with already sleeping doves. He moved toward the back part of the vehicle and struggled with the doors for a while: from inside he brought out several bolts of a grayish material that he unrolled on the ground. In about half an hour the bolts proved to be canvas, forming a small tent attached to the truck. The entrance to this sort of country house was covered with an arch of multicolored lightbulbs that, once turned on, outlined three shining words: THE BEAUTIFUL MELUSINE in the black air of the night. At once the man went inside like a mollusk into the shell, and he didn’t show himself again until the town clock struck eight. By then the line of spectators already extended several times around the square of the plaza.