When it was time for my ferry back to the city, Ruth rose and walked down to the dock with me.
"I saw his sister on TV the other night when they announced she would be appointed to the Senate. I take it she's the one who's looking for him?"
I nodded and she said, “Before too long idiot senators will be trying to lodge civil liberty complaints after martial law has been declared and the security squads are on their way to the capital to throw them in jail. Without Mark she'll be one of them."
Before I went up the gangplank, she hugged me and said, “You think you're looking for him but he's actually waiting for you."
After a few days back in New York memories of Vibeau Island began to seem preposterous. Then I walked down my block late one night. It was crowded with tourists and college kids, barkers and bouncers. I saw people give the averted celebrity glance.
Then I spotted a black man with a round face and a shaven head. I did recognize him: an overnight hip-hop millionaire. He sat in the back of a stretch limo with the door open. Our eyes met. His widened then dulled and he sank back in his seat.
At that moment, I saw gray winter sky and felt the damp cold of the ice-covered Neponset. On old familiar ground, said a voice inside me and I knew Mark was back.
* * * *
9.
Some hours later passengers found seats as our train pulled out of New Haven.
"Ruth said you were waiting for me,” I told Mark silently.
And Red Ruth is never wrong.
"She told me about Decker."
I thought I had selected him. But he had selected me. Once inside him I was trapped. He was a spider. I couldn't control him. Couldn't escape. I led him to Ruth as I was told.
He showed me an image of Ruth pointing an automatic pistol, firing at close range.
I leaped to her as he died. She was more relentless than Decker in some ways. I had to promise to make my existence worthwhile. To make the world better.
"If angels fight, weak men must fall."
Not exactly an angel. Ego? Id? Fragment? Parasite?
I thought of how his father had something like an angel himself.
His body, soul, and mind were a single entity. Mine weren't.
I saw his memory of Mike Bannon smiling and waving in the curved front windows of his house at well-wishers on the snowy front lawn. Bannon senior never questioned his own skills or wondered what would have happened if they'd been trapped in a brain that was mildly damaged. Then he saw it happen to his son.
Once I understood that, he showed me the dark tower again with two tiny slits of light high above. I found hand- and foot-holds and crawled up the interior stone walls. This time I looked through the slits of light and saw they were the eyeholes of a mask. In front of me were Mike and Marie Bannon looking very young and startled by the sudden light in the eyes of their troublingly quiet little boy.
When the train approached Boston, the one inside me said, Let's see the old neighborhood.
We took a taxi from Back Bay and drove out to Dorchester. We saw the school we'd gone to and the courthouse and place where I'd lived and the houses that stood where Fitzie's had once been.
My first great escape.
That night so long ago came back. Larry Cullen, seen through the eyeholes of a mask, stood with his thin psycho smile. In a flash I saw Mark Bannon slack-jawed and felt Cullen's cold fear as the angel took hold of his mind and looked out through his eyes.
Cullen's life was all horror and hate. His father was a monster. It should have taught me something. Instead I felt like I'd broken out of jail. After each time away from my own body it was harder to go back.
Melville Avenue looked pretty much the way it always did. Mrs. Bannon still lived in the family house. We got out of the car and the one inside me said, When all this is over, it won't be forgotten that you brought me back to my family.
In the days since then, as politics has become more dangerous, Carol Bannon has grown bolder and wilier. And I wonder what form the remembering will take.
Mrs. Bannon's caregiver opened the door. We were expected. Carol stood at the top of the stairs very much in command. I thought of her father.
"My mother's waiting to see you,” she said. I understood that I would spend a few minutes with Mrs. Bannon and then depart. Carol looked right into my eyes and kissed me. Her eyes flashed and she smiled.
In that instant the one inside my head departed. The wonderful sharpness went out of the morning and I felt a touch of the desolation that Mark Bannon and all the others must have felt when the angel deserted them.
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FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION MARKET PLACE
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BOOKS-MAGAZINES
S-F FANZINES (back to 1930), pulps, books. 96 page Catalog. $5.00. Collections purchased. Robert Madle, 4406 Bestor Dr., Rockville, MD 20853.
19-time Hugo nominee. The New York Review of Science Fiction. www.nyrsf.com Reviews and essays. $4.00 or $38 for 12 issues, checks only. Dragon Press, PO Box 78, Pleasantville, NY 10570.
Spiffy, jammy, deluxy, bouncy—subscribe to Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. $20/4 issues. Small Beer Press, 176 Prospect Ave., Northampton, MA 01060.
ENEMY MINE, All books in print. Check: www.barrylongyear.net
SYBIL'S GARAGE Speculative fiction, poetry, and art. Ekaterina Sedia, Cat Rambo, Richard Bowes, Steve Rasnic Tem, and more. www.sensesfive.com/
DREADNOUGHT: INVASION SIX—SF comic distributed by Diamond Comics. In “Previews” catalog under talcMedia Press. Ask your retailer to stock it! www.DreadnoughtSeries.com
Space Box 2—Hard Rock telling a Sci-fi story. www.dorncreations.com
The Contested Earth by Jim Harmon and The Compleat Ova Hamlet, parodies of SF authors by Richard A. Lupoff. www.ramblehouse.com 318-865-3735
BUYING Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror magazines and paperbacks. Will travel for large collections. Send list to: Hart Box 421013 Indianapolis, IN 46242 or email [email protected]
WICCANS, MORMONS, and ATHEISTS on Mars! “Mother Mars” by Corwyn Green. America's best colonize Mars! Blasphemy! Ghosts! Babies! War! Basketball! Get it on Amazon.com before it comes true!
Collected Stories by Marta Randall. 12 previously uncollected stories. Available from www.lulu.com.
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SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5, CATTLE 0. The great F&SF contests are collected in Oi, Robot, edited by Edward L. Ferman. $11.95 postpaid from F&SF, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030.
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MISCELLANEOUS
If stress can change the brain, all experience can change the brain. www.undoingstress.com
Support the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund. Visit www.carlbrandon.org for more information on how to contribute.
Space Studies Masters degree. Accredited University program. Campus and distance classes. For details visit www.space.edu.
Learning a foreign language is fundamental to our civilization. Please support the Jamie Bishop Scholarship for German, Virginia Tech Foundation, University Development, 902 Prices Fork Road, Blacksburg, VA 24061.
Giant Squid seeks humans to advise. Apply within. Poor Mojo's Almanac(k), www.squid.poormojo.org
Alaska Writers Guild call for entries for Ralph Williams Memorial short story contest. Grand prize: $5,000, to be presented at 2008 Speculative Fiction Writers Conference, Oct. 1-5, Anchorage, AK. Contest deadline: April 15, 2008. Visit: www.alaskawritersguild.com.
F&SF classifieds work because the cost is low: only $2.00 per word (minimum of 10 words). 10% discount for 6 consecutive insertions, 15% for 12. You'll reach 100,000 high-income, highly educated readers each of whom spends hundreds of dollars a year on books, magazines, game
s, collectibles, audio and video tapes. Send copy and remittance to: F&SF Market Place, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030.
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Curiosities: ‘Uneasy Freehold’ (retitled ‘The Uninvited'), by Dorothy Macardle (1941)
Roddy Fitzgerald and his sister Pamela discover an old Georgian house on a cliff top. It is the house of their dreams, and they promptly seek out the owner, Commander Brooke. He agrees to sell the property, to the dismay of his twenty-year-old granddaughter Stella. She had been born in the house but, when Stella was only three years old, her mother fell to her death over the cliff edge. A few days afterward, a Spanish girl, the mistress of Stella's artist father, also died.
The commander sells at a suspiciously low price. Village gossip implies the place is haunted, and mysterious happenings follow. It becomes a mystery story when it is finally revealed that two ghosts—one benevolent and one decidedly evil—haunt the house. The evil ghost is determined to drive young Stella over the cliff. The benevolent ghost protects her. Is one her mother and the other the Spanish mistress?
Described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the ideal ghost story,” the book sold an immediate half million copies in the UK and was made into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Ray Milland.
Dorothy Macardle (1889-1958) was a famous Irish revolutionary, imprisoned in 1922, but had, by then, made a reputation as an author and Abbey Theatre playwright before becoming a republican and feminist campaigner. Her history The Irish Republic 1916-23 (1937) is still the standard work on the period. She also wrote several supernatural novels and short stories. When she died, she was accorded a state funeral attended by the president and members of all the parties in the Irish Parliament (the Dáil).
—Peter Tremayne
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Visit www.fsfmag.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.
FSF, February 2008 Page 18
