The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten

by Jonathan Strahan

  There were ten tongues within one head And one went out to fetch some bread, To feed the living and the dead.

  – Old Riddle

  I

  The Bar Guest

  OUTSIDE THE PUB it was raining cats and dogs.

  Shadow was still not entirely convinced that he was in a pub. True, there was a tiny bar at the back of the room, with bottles behind it and a couple of the huge taps you pulled, and there were several high tables and people were drinking at the tables, but it all felt like a room in somebody’s house. The dogs helped reinforce that impression. It seemed to Shadow that everybody in the pub had a dog except for him.

  “What kind of dogs are they?” Shadow asked, curious. The dogs reminded him of greyhounds, but they were smaller and seemed saner, more placid and less high-strung than the greyhounds he had encountered over the years.

  “Lurchers,” said the pub’s landlord, coming out from behind the bar. He was carrying a pint of beer that he had poured for himself. “Best dogs. Poacher’s dogs. Fast, smart, lethal.” He bent down, scratched a chestnut-and-white brindled dog behind the ears. The dog stretched and luxuriated in the ear-scratching. It did not look particularly lethal, and Shadow said so.

  The landlord, his hair a mop of gray and orange, scratched at his beard reflectively. “That’s where you’d be wrong,” he said. “I walked with his brother last week, down Cumpsy Lane. There’s a fox, a big red reynard, pokes his head out of a hedge, no more than twenty meters down the road, then, plain as day, saunters out onto the track. Well, Needles sees it, and he’s off after it like the clappers. Next thing you know, Needles has his teeth in reynard’s neck, and one bite, one hard shake, and it’s all over.”

  Shadow inspected Needles, a gray dog sleeping by the little fireplace. He looked harmless too. “So what sort of a breed is a lurcher? It’s an English breed, yes?”

  “It’s not actually a breed,” said a white-haired woman without a dog who had been leaning on a nearby table. “They’re crossbred for speed, stamina. Sighthound, greyhound, collie.”

  The man next to her held up a finger. “You must understand,” he said, cheerfully, “that there used to be laws about who could own purebred dogs. The local folk couldn’t, but they could own mongrels. And lurchers are better and faster than pedigree dogs.” He pushed his spectacles up his nose with the tip of his forefinger. He had a mutton-chop beard, brown flecked with white.

  “Ask me, all mongrels are better than pedigree anything,” said the woman. “It’s why America is such an interesting country. Filled with mongrels.” Shadow was not certain how old she was. Her hair was white, but she seemed younger than her hair.

  “Actually, darling,” said the man with the muttonchops, in his gentle voice, “I think you’ll find that the Americans are keener on pedigree dogs than the British. I met a woman from the American Kennel Club, and honestly, she scared me. I was scared.”

  “I wasn’t talking about dogs, Ollie,” said the woman. “I was talking about... Oh, never mind.”

  “What are you drinking?” asked the landlord.

  There was a handwritten piece of paper taped to the wall by the bar telling customers not to order a lager ‘as a punch in the face often offends.’

  “What’s good and local?” asked Shadow, who had learned that this was mostly the wisest thing to say.

  The landlord and the woman had various suggestions as to which of the various local beers and ciders were good. The little mutton-chopped man interrupted them to point out that in his opinion good was not the avoidance of evil, but something more positive than that: it was making the world a better place. Then he chuckled, to show that he was only joking and that he knew that the conversation was really only about what to drink.

  The beer the landlord poured for Shadow was dark and very bitter. He was not certain that he liked it. “What is it?”

  “It’s called Black Dog,” said the woman. “I’ve heard people say it was named after the way you feel after you’ve had one too many.”

  “Like Churchill’s moods,” said the little man.

  “Actually, the beer is named after a local dog,” said a younger woman. She was wearing an olive-green sweater, and standing against the wall. “But not a real one. Semi-imaginary.”

  Shadow looked down at Needles, then hesitated. “Is it safe to scratch his head?” he asked, remembering the fate of the fox.

  “Course it is,” said the white-haired woman. “He loves it. Don’t you?”

  “Well. He practically had that tosser from Glossop’s finger off,” said the landlord. There was admiration mixed with warning in his voice.

  “I think he was something in local government,” said the woman. “And I’ve always thought that there’s nothing wrong with dogs biting them. Or VAT inspectors.”

  The woman in the green sweater moved over to Shadow. She was not holding a drink. She had dark, short hair, and a crop of freckles that spattered her nose and cheeks. She looked at Shadow. “You aren’t in local government, are you?”

  Shadow shook his head. He said, “I’m kind of a tourist.” It was not actually untrue. He was traveling, anyway.

  “You’re Canadian?” said the muttonchop man.

  “American,” said Shadow. “But I’ve been on the road for a while now.”

  “Then,” said the white-haired woman, “you aren’t actually a tourist. Tourists turn up, see the sights and leave.”

  Shadow shrugged, smiled, and leaned down. He scratched the landlord’s lurcher on the back of its head.

  “You’re not a dog person, are you?” asked the dark-haired woman.

  “I’m not a dog person,” said Shadow.

  Had he been someone else, someone who talked about what was happening inside his head, Shadow might have told her that his wife had owned dogs when she was younger, and sometimes called Shadow puppy because she wanted a dog she could not have. But Shadow kept things on the inside. It was one of the things he liked about the British: even when they wanted to know what was happening on the inside, they did not ask. The world on the inside remained the world on the inside. His wife had been dead for three years now.

  “If you ask me,” said the man with the muttonchops, “people are either dog people or cat people. So would you then consider yourself a cat person?”

  Shadow reflected. “I don’t know. We never had pets when I was a kid, we were always on the move. But –”

  “I mention this,” the man continued, “because our host also has a cat, which you might wish to see.”

  “Used to be out here, but we moved it to the back room,” said the landlord, from behind the bar.

  Shadow wondered how the man could follow the conversation so easily while also taking people’s meal orders and serving their drinks. “Did the cat upset the dogs?” he asked.

  Outside, the rain redoubled. The wind moaned, and whistled, and then howled. The log fire burning in the little fireplace coughed and spat.

  “Not in the way you’re thinking,” said the landlord. “We found it when we knocked through into the room next door, when we needed to extend the bar.” The man grinned. “Come and look.”

  Shadow followed the man into the room next door. The mutton-chop man and the white-haired woman came with them, walking a little behind Shadow.

  Shadow glanced back into the bar. The dark-haired woman was watching him, and she smiled warmly when he caught her eye.

  The room next door was better lit, larger, and it felt a little less like somebody’s front room. People were sitting at tables, eating. The food looked good and smelled better. The landlord led Shadow to the back of the room, to a dusty glass case.

  “There she is,” said the landlord, proudly.

  The cat was brown, and it looked, at first glance, as if it had been constructed out of tendons and agony. The holes that were its eyes were filled with anger and with pain; the mouth was wide open, as if the creature had been yowling when she was turned to leather.

  “The
practice of placing animals in the walls of buildings is similar to the practice of walling up children alive in the foundations of a house you want to stay up,” explained the muttonchop man, from behind him. “Although mummified cats always make me think of the mummified cats they found around the temple of Bast in Bubastis in Egypt. So many tons of mummified cats that they sent them to England to be ground up as cheap fertilizer and dumped on the fields. The Victorians also made paint out of mummies. A sort of brown, I believe.”

  “It looks miserable,” said Shadow. “How old is it?”

  The landlord scratched his cheek. “We reckon that the wall she was in went up somewhere between 1300 and 1600. That’s from parish records. There’s nothing here in 1300, and there’s a house in 1600. The stuff in the middle was lost.”

  The dead cat in the glass case, furless and leathery, seemed to be watching them, from its empty black-hole eyes.

  I got eyes wherever my folk walk, breathed a voice in the back of Shadow’s mind. He thought, momentarily, about the fields fertilized with the ground mummies of cats, and what strange crops they must have grown.

  “They put him into an old house side,” said the man called Ollie. “And there he lived and there he died. And nobody either laughed or cried. All sorts of things were walled up, to make sure that things were guarded and safe. Children, sometimes. Animals. They did it in churches as a matter of course.”

  The rain beat an arrhythmic rattle on the windowpane. Shadow thanked the landlord for showing him the cat. They went back into the taproom. The dark-haired woman had gone, which gave Shadow a moment of regret. She had looked so friendly. Shadow bought a round of drinks for the muttonchop man, the white-haired woman, and one for the landlord.

  The landlord ducked behind the bar. “They call me Shadow,” Shadow told them. “Shadow Moon.”

  The muttonchop man pressed his hands together in delight. “Oh! How wonderful. I had an Alsatian named Shadow, when I was a boy. Is it your real name?”

  “It’s what they call me,” said Shadow.

  “I’m Moira Callanish,” said the white-haired woman. “This is my partner, Oliver Bierce. He knows a lot, and he will, during the course of our acquaintance, undoubtedly tell you everything he knows.”

  They shook hands. When the landlord returned with their drinks, Shadow asked if the pub had a room to rent. He had intended to walk further that night, but the rain sounded like it had no intention of giving up. He had stout walking shoes, and weather-resistant outer clothes, but he did not want to walk in the rain.

  “I used to, but then my son moved back in. I’ll encourage people to sleep it off in the barn, on occasion, but that’s as far as I’ll go these days.”

  “Anywhere in the village I could get a room?”

  The landlord shook his head. “It’s a foul night. But Porsett is only a few miles down the road, and they’ve got a proper hotel there. I can call Sandra, tell her that you’re coming. What’s your name?”

  “Shadow,” said Shadow again. “Shadow Moon.”

  Moira looked at Oliver, and said something that sounded like “waifs and strays?” and Oliver chewed his lip for a moment, and then he nodded enthusiastically. “Would you fancy spending the night with us? The spare room’s a bit of a box room, but it does have a bed in it. And it’s warm there. And dry.”

  “I’d like that very much,” said Shadow. “I can pay.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Moira. “It will be nice to have a guest.”

  II

  The Gibbet

  OLIVER AND MOIRA both had umbrellas. Oliver insisted that Shadow carry his umbrella, pointing out that Shadow towered over him, and thus was ideally suited to keep the rain off both of them.

  The couple also carried little flashlights, which they called torches. The word put Shadow in mind of villagers in a horror movie storming the castle on the hill, and the lightning and thunder added to the vision. Tonight, my creature, he thought, I will give you life! It should have been hokey but instead it was disturbing. The dead cat had put him into a strange set of mind.

  The narrow roads between fields were running with rainwater. “On a nice night,” said Moira, raising her voice to be heard over the rain, “we would just walk over the fields. But they’ll be all soggy and boggy, so we’re going down by Shuck’s Lane. Now, that tree was a gibbet tree, once upon a time.” She pointed to a massive-trunked sycamore at the crossroads. It had only a few branches left, sticking up into the night like afterthoughts.

  “Moira’s lived here since she was in her twenties,” said Oliver. “I came up from London, about eight years ago. From Turnham Green. I’d come up here on holiday originally when I was fourteen and I never forgot it. You don’t.”

  “The land gets into your blood,” said Moira. “Sort of.”

  “And the blood gets into the land,” said Oliver. “One way or another. You take that gibbet tree, for example. They would leave people in the gibbet until there was nothing left. Hair gone to make bird’s nests, flesh all eaten by ravens, bones picked clean. Or until they had another corpse to display anyway.”

  Shadow was fairly sure he knew what a gibbet was, but he asked anyway. There was never any harm in asking, and Oliver was definitely the kind of person who took pleasure in knowing peculiar things and in passing his knowledge on.

  “Like a huge iron birdcage. They used them to display the bodies of executed criminals, after justice had been served. The gibbets were locked, so the family and friends couldn’t steal the body back and give it a good Christian burial. Keeping passersby on the straight and the narrow, although I doubt it actually deterred anyone from anything.”

  “Who were they executing?”

  “Anyone who got unlucky. Three hundred years ago, there were over two hundred crimes punishable by death. Including traveling with Gypsies for more than a month, stealing sheep – and, for that matter, anything over twelve pence in value – and writing a threatening letter.”

  He might have been about to begin a lengthy list, but Moira broke in. “Oliver’s right about the death sentence, but they only gibbeted murderers, up these parts. And they’d leave corpses in the gibbet for twenty years, sometimes. We didn’t get a lot of murders.” And then, as if trying to change the subject to something lighter, she said, “We are now walking down Shuck’s Lane. The locals say that on a clear night, which tonight certainly is not, you can find yourself being followed by Black Shuck. He’s a sort of a fairy dog.”

  “We’ve never seen him, not even on clear nights,” said Oliver.

  “Which is a very good thing,” said Moira. “Because if you see him – you die.”

  “Except Sandra Wilberforce said she saw him, and she’s healthy as a horse.”

  Shadow smiled. “What does Black Shuck do?”

  “He doesn’t do anything,” said Oliver.

  “He does. He follows you home,” corrected Moira. “And then, a bit later, you die.”

  “Doesn’t sound very scary,” said Shadow. “Except for the dying bit.”

  They reached the bottom of the road. Rainwater was running like a stream over Shadow’s thick hiking boots.

  Shadow said, “So how did you two meet?” It was normally a safe question, when you were with couples.

  Oliver said, “In the pub. I was up here on holiday, really.”

  Moira said, “I was with someone when I met Oliver. We had a very brief, torrid affair, then we ran off together. Most unlike both of us.”

  They did not seem like the kind of people who ran off together, thought Shadow. But then, all people were strange. He knew he should say something.

  “I was married. My wife was killed in a car crash.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Moira.

  “It happened,” said Shadow.

  “When we get home,” said Moira, “I’m making us all whisky macs. That’s whisky and ginger wine and hot water. And I’m having a hot bath. Otherwise I’ll catch my death.”

  Shadow imagined reachi
ng out his hand and catching death in it, like a baseball, and he shivered.

  The rain redoubled, and a sudden flash of lightning burned the world into existence all around them: every gray rock in the drystone wall, every blade of grass, every puddle and every tree was perfectly illuminated, and then swallowed by a deeper darkness, leaving afterimages on Shadow’s nightblinded eyes.

  “Did you see that?” asked Oliver. “Damnedest thing.” The thunder rolled and rumbled, and Shadow waited until it was done before he tried to speak.

  “I didn’t see anything,” said Shadow. Another flash, less bright, and Shadow thought he saw something moving away from them in a distant field. “That?” he asked.

  “It’s a donkey,” said Moira. “Only a donkey.”

  Oliver stopped. He said, “This was the wrong way to come home. We should have got a taxi. This was a mistake.”

  “Ollie,” said Moira. “It’s not far now. And it’s just a spot of rain. You aren’t made of sugar, darling.”

  Another flash of lightning, so bright as to be almost blinding. There was nothing to be seen in the fields.

  Darkness. Shadow turned back to Oliver, but the little man was no longer standing beside him. Oliver’s flashlight was on the ground. Shadow blinked his eyes, hoping to force his night vision to return. The man had collapsed, crumpled onto the wet grass on the side of the lane.

  “Ollie?” Moira crouched beside him, her umbrella by her side. She shone her flashlight onto his face. Then she looked at Shadow. “He can’t just sit here,” she said, sounding confused and concerned. “It’s pouring.”

  Shadow pocketed Oliver’s flashlight, handed his umbrella to Moira, then picked Oliver up. The man did not seem to weigh much, and Shadow was a big man.

  “Is it far?”

  “Not far,” she said. “Not really. We’re almost home.”

  They walked in silence, across a churchyard on the edge of a village green, and into a village. Shadow could see lights on in the gray stone houses that edged the one street. Moira turned off, into a house set back from the road, and Shadow followed her. She held the back door open for him.