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

by Jonathan Strahan

  “THERE IS A crisis,” Trask said, clicking through pictures on his computer. Graffiti someone spray-painted onto the back of the bank – bloodsuckers, vampires, profiting from crisis. “A crisis of accountability! These people did it to themselves. They signed mortgages they didn’t understand...”

  Agnes discretely texted herself the word accountability. She had lost the thread of what he was saying, as often happened during their supervisory meetings. Trask didn’t mind when she texted, when they talked. He did it himself, incessantly. Work is more important than etiquette, he said.

  “How’s everything out on Route 9?”

  “Same old,” she said.

  “No signs of dissatisfaction?”

  “I heard singing in a couple. That could mean –”

  His hand flapped impatiently. “It’s in the reports?”

  Agnes nodded.

  “Good.”

  Around her, the bank bustled. Trask watched the two television screens mounted on his wall. A new stack of spiral-bound printed reports sat on his desk. “What’re these?” she asked.

  “The central bank has a big analysis division, and they’ve been looking at trends on underoccupied homes. These reports are... actionable.”

  He was doing that thing, the thing people had done to her all through school. Trying to make her feel stupid. She didn’t mind it, coming from him. Trask trusted her.

  Once, at a party, someone found out she worked for the bank and started yelling at her about how they had been thrown out when her husband got hurt on the job and couldn’t work. Agnes had kept her mouth shut because the girl was a friend of a friend, but she agreed with Trask: These people did it to themselves. The world didn’t owe you a house. The world is a swamp of shit and suffering and you have to bust your ass to keep your head above water and sometimes you still drown. Sometimes you drown slow. Like Agnes.

  “You were late today,” he said.

  “I know. I didn’t remember what day it was until it was almost too late.”

  “You need to start using a calendar app.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “I’ve showed you how like ten times,” he said, swiveling his monitor to show her the calendar in his browser window, synched to his phone.

  A map of the county hung below the televisions. Hundreds of pushpins peppered it, showing homes the bank owned. Lines divided the county into five transects, each of which had its own spirit maintenance worker. Hers was Transect 4, the westernmost one, the space least densely settled, the one that required the most driving. She scanned the map idly, avoiding even looking at Transect 1, and the pin that stabbed through the heart of the house where she grew up. The house her mother lost. The house that got her this job.

  Agnes picked up a crude jade frog from his desk, weighed it in her hand, felt the tiny spirit inside. Could it see her? Know her heart? Every object had a spirit, and while stories said that long ago the trees talked and mountains moved to hurt or help humans, only homes still spoke. For the thousandth time, she thought of Micah.

  His snarl, his momentary monstrousness, did not make him less appealing. It made him more so. Being with so many bad men had hardwired fear into desire.

  “Lunch meeting,” Trask said, rising. “File the hard copies?”

  Alone in his office, she wrenched open the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet. She flipped through folders, added incident reports and travel logs. Rooting around in the filing cabinet made her feel frightened, like a trespasser. Every time, she had to fight the urge to browse through things that had nothing to do with her. To learn more. To understand. Trask would not tolerate that kind of intrusion. One more way she could lose her job.

  But then – there. 5775 Route 9. The house where Micah lived. Was lived even the right word? Micah’s house. But that wasn’t right either. The house didn’t belong to him. It was him.

  Cheeks burning, she pulled the folder from the cabinet. Deeds, contracts, mortgages, spreadsheets – all the secrets and stories of the house, encoded in impenetrable hieroglyphics. Resolve settled in her stomach, bitter and hard. Like when, ages ago, in another life, another Agnes had decided for the thousandth time to return to whatever bar or trailer park would best get her whatever illegal substance her body was enslaved to then.

  She looked around, wondered if anyone else could see the guilt on her face. Trask’s computer screen was still on, logged in to the property management system. Because he trusted her.

  Did banks have household spirits? Places where no human had ever lived? Lots of people spent more time at work than at home, but work was different. What difference would that difference make? Once, she’d slept in a hotel. Its spirit had been flimsy, insubstantial, shifting shapes in an abrupt and revolting fashion. Even her car had a spirit. It never spoke or showed itself, but sometimes its weird jagged dreams rubbed up against her own while she slept.

  Agnes shut her eyes and listened. Felt. Called out to the dark of the echoey old space around her.

  And something answered. Something impossibly big and distant, like a whale passing far beneath a lone swimmer. Something dark and sharp and cruel and cold. She opened her eyes with a gasp and saw she was shivering.

  Smiling and confident on the outside, screaming on the inside from joy and terror, seeing in her mind’s eye exactly how this course of action might cost her everything, Agnes took the folder to Trask’s Xerox machine and began to make herself copies.

  HE WAS WAITING for her on the porch of 5775. He hugged his knees to his chest like some people held on to hope. When he saw her, his face split into a smile so glorious her own face followed suit.

  “Hi,” he said, rising, T-shirted, eyes all golden fire from the last of the evening sun.

  “Hello,” she said, and held up a bag full of fast food. “Hungry?” He clapped his hands, his face all joy. “You’re here early,” he said. “You usually only come through here every couple of weeks.”

  “You’ve been watching me for a while now,” she said, handing him the bag. “I don’t know. Something wouldn’t let me stay silent.” He opened the bag, stuck his face in, breathed deep. Happiness made him laugh. Agnes wondered when she had last heard someone laugh from happiness.

  She had made the mistake of visiting 12 Burnt Hills Road right before. It had spoken to her, its voice like bricks dragged across marble. It said I want to show you something, over and over. She did not let it.

  The file on 5775 had told her nothing. The house was fifty years old, had been owned by a perfectly banal couple who left it to their son and his wife, who sold it to a woman who couldn’t keep up with her mortgage when she got laid off when the school districts consolidated, and had been evicted four years prior. No Micahs anywhere.

  He ran down the hall, and came back with a bed sheet. This he spread on the living room floor, and sat on. “Instant picnic!” Micah said, his enthusiasm so expansive she barely felt the pain in her knees when she squatted beside him. Sleeping in the fetal position night after night was beginning to take a toll.

  While he took the food from the bag and began to set it up, she watched his arms. Pixelated characters from the video games of her youth adorned his arms, along with more conventional tattoo fodder – a castle; a lighthouse. “How long have you looked like this?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” He ate a French fry, then four. “Forever? A couple months?”

  “The band on your T-shirt didn’t exist when this house was built,” she said. “Or do you have a whole ghost wardrobe upstairs somewhere?”

  He shrugged. “No. I don’t know why they’re the clothes they are.”

  “Did you ever look like something else?”

  He laughed. Micah laughed. “Sometimes I think so. Did you?”

  “Not that I know of. So there’s not a household spirit Book of Rules?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  They ate burgers, drank sodas. She had so many questions, but what happened inside her chest while she watche
d him eat answered the only real one. He bit off giant greedy childish bites, and barely chewed.

  It made sense that after being empty for a long time, a household spirit might become something different. And lose track of everything it had been before. She asked, “Do you remember the people who used to live here?”

  He nodded, eyes on her, lips on his soda straw. “Well. Sort of. I feel them. I can’t really remember them, but they’re there. Like...” Like a dream you’ve woken up from, she thought, but didn’t say out loud.

  “I’m not supposed to interact with you,” she said. “I could lose my job.”

  “What’s your job?” he asked, all earnestness.

  “I make offerings at houses where nobody lives.”

  He nodded. The last drops of soda slurped noisily up his straw. “They must pay you well for that.”

  “They don’t.”

  “But what you do is so important!”

  “I’m an independent contractor – basically a janitor,” she said, and thought back to the old maintenance man at her high school, muttering prayers and burning incense beneath a defaced wall once he’d washed away the graffiti. “My mother says we’re all doomed,” Agnes continued. “She says these empty houses are going to add up to a whole lot of angry spirits. She says all the oranges and incense in the world won’t make a difference. When people move back in, the spirits will have turned feral.”

  Micah wiped grease from his lips with his sleeve. “There’s a lot of empty houses?”

  Agnes nodded. Obviously Micah didn’t watch the news or read the papers. She had been imagining that he knew all sorts of things, through spirit osmosis or who-knows-how. “Chase owns hundreds, in this county alone. Bank of America –”

  “That’s sad,” he whispered. His face actually reddened. He was like her. He felt his emotions so hard he couldn’t hide them. The air in the room thickened, grew taut. The hairs of her arms stood on end. His didn’t. At any moment he could start flinging lightning bolts, she thought, or burn us both to ash. She put her hand on his arm, and the crackling invisible fury ebbed away.

  “What’s it like? When there’s no one here?” She was thinking of him, but also thinking of Ganesha. Alone in her old house. The rambunctious thing that had been her only friend for so long, who played strange complex storytelling games with her and gave her spirit candy when she made a wise decision. She could taste the anise of it, still, feel it stuck between her teeth like taffy, although even if she ate it all day it would never give her cavities or make her fat. She had spent years trying not to think of Ganesha.

  “It’s horrible,” Micah answered.

  Agnes scooted closer. He wasn’t human. He could kill her just by thinking it. He was a monster, and she adored him. She took his face in both hands, moved them down so the roughness of his stubble felt smooth, and kissed him.

  “I need to go,” she said, hours later, when she woke with her head on his bare strong chest and her body gloriously sore from the weight of him.

  “No you don’t,” Micah said, his hand warm and strong on her leg. Somehow, he knew. That she had no home, that she slept in her car. He sat up. His eyes were wet and panicky. He kissed her shoulder. “Please don’t go,” he said. “Why do you want to leave?”

  Because Trask sends late-night goons to check for squatters sometimes.

  Because I might lose my job if I stay.

  Because this is not my home – I didn’t earn it, didn’t pay for it, can’t afford it.

  Because I don’t deserve a home.

  Because love makes me do dumb things.

  “You’re like me,” Micah whispered, and his whispers vibrated in her ears even once she was back in the Walmart parking lot in the cramped backseat of her car under a blanket: “You’re on your own. We’re what each other needs.”

  TRASK SAID ROUTINE was the key to success, which is why every morning Agnes woke and went to Dunkin’ Donuts for coffee and an unbuttered bagel and a rest room wash-up and tooth-brushing. Which is what she did the morning after making love to Micah. This time, though, when she emerged from the rest room and a woman was waiting for it, she didn’t think to herself: Oh no, what if she guesses what I was doing in there and immediately knows I’m homeless and pathetic, but rather: What if she’s doing the same thing as me – for the same reason as me?

  Which is maybe why, this time, she broke the routine slightly and instead of heading straight to the bank for her day’s assignments Agnes drove east into Transect 1, feeling her chest tighten, struggling to breathe deeply against the weight that could not possibly be guilt, because she had done nothing to feel guilty about, because she had done the right thing –Trask said so –

  And found the deep raw crater, lined in red clay like a wound in the belly of the universe, where the house she grew up in used to be.

  “AGNES?” TRASK SAID, looking confused. “Everything okay?”

  “Hi,” she said, stopping herself from apologizing for disturbing him. An unscheduled visit was an unprecedented breach of propriety. They texted, or they talked in supervisory meetings. She had never just shown up before.

  “What’s happening to the houses in Transect 1?”

  “We’re demolishing them, Agnes.” His voice now was like when teachers wanted to shame her into silence.

  “Why?”

  “I told you. Actionable recommendations from the central analysis division. Even with emanation placation measures in place, we’ve been noticing some disturbing patterns.”

  My mother was right, she thought. They’ve gone feral. His computer made soft pinging noises as the day’s pitches arrived. Every bank routinely made offers for every other bank’s underoccuppied property, usually for ridiculously low amounts, knowing they’d be rejected. Fishing for hunger. Trying to ‘assemble development portfolios’ and other concepts she had not initially understood. “But people could be living there,” she told Trask, knowing, as soon as she said it, that the argument had no financial weight and was therefore worthless.

  “WHAT DO YOU mean, you can’t step onto the lawn?”

  “I just can’t,” Micah said, grinning, face glistening with French fry grease and her kisses. He leaned over the porch railing; reached out his arm to her. “But it’s part of the property,” she said, stepping just out of his reach. Micah shrugged. “Property is a legal fiction,” he said. “Words on paper don’t change anything. A house is a house.”

  “A legal fiction,” she said, and texted the phrase to herself. “I thought you didn’t know The Rules.”

  “Some things I just know,” he said. “I don’t know why I look like this, but I know what I can’t do. And I know that when you’re here, it feels right.”

  “But this is crazy, isn’t it? You and me. A spirit and a person? I’ve never heard of that.”

  “Me either,” he said. “So?”

  “We can’t... be together.”

  “We’re together now.”

  “This isn’t my house.”

  “Why not?” His eyes were wide, sincere, incredulous. She wanted to eat them. She wanted to have them inside her forever.

  “Because it costs money to buy a house. I don’t have money.” Micah nodded, but she knew he did not understand.

  Back in the car, she stared at the wooden block studded with keys. Her roster for the day: three dozen homes, defenseless.

  Agnes had made mistakes before. She’d shattered friendships. She’d had a drink when she knew the whole long list of horrible things that would come next. One thing was always true, though: She knew they were mistakes before she made them. She decided to make a mistake and that’s what she did. The hard part was figuring out the right mistake to make.

  “TWICE IN TWO weeks,” her mother said, stubbing out her Virginia Slim. “You hard up for a place to take a shower?”

  “Happy to see you, too, Mom.”

  Her mom sat back in her chair and sighed, a long aching sound. Her eyes did not seem able to open all the way. Walma
rt had demoted her from the cash register to the shoe section. They talked in terse, fraught sentences until the water boiled and the instant coffee was prepared.

  “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  “Sorry for what?” her mother muttered.

  “Sorry for what I did. To you.”

  Her mother’s mug clinked against the counter. Now her eyes were wide.

  “What did you do?”

  “You know what I did. We both do. You even said so, the last time I was here.”

  “Tell me.”

  Agnes nodded. She owed her mother this much – to spell it out, to look her in the eyes. “I told the bank you were still living there, in the house, after you’d stopped paying the mortgage. After you’d been evicted. I got you kicked out.”

  Her mother’s eyes were harsh, unblinking. Agnes took a sip: The coffee was so strong it hurt to swallow. “Do you know? What they did to it?” Her mother nodded. “I drive by there, sometimes.”

  “I didn’t think I did anything wrong,” Agnes said. Her voice felt so small. “I thought you were in the wrong, to keep on living there when you couldn’t pay.”

  “What changed?”

  Agnes shrugged, opened her mouth, shut it again.

  Her mother took her mug, added hot water, handed it back. “Last time you were here, you asked why the spirit took on the shape of Ganesha. I said I didn’t know, and I don’t. But I have a theory. When I was a little girl, our next-door neighbors were Indian. They had a Ganesha statue on their porch.

  They had a girl my age, we used to play together. She always made me rub the statue’s stomach for good luck. I think when a house finds its perfect owner, it takes on the shape that owner needs to see.”

  Agnes sipped. Diluted to human strength, the coffee wasn’t bad.

  12 BURNT HILLS Road again. She lingered, left an extra orange. The house frightened her, but sometimes being frightened wasn’t bad. Sometimes fear brought you where you needed to be.

  Agnes, it said, when she turned to go. This time the squeal of glass and wood, grinding together: All four windows in the front room trembled together, spoke as one.