Unusual Suspects: Stories of Mystery & Fantasy

by Dana Stabenow

  That had always bothered him, and at times it had even tested his own faith. As the sun rose over Young Nick’s Head in New Zealand the day after Christmas, the list would be blank, a slim binder whose paper glistened like arctic snow. Then, within seconds, names would begin to appear. The fat man could not bear to watch as the names of the naughty, the neglected, the shunned, lined up row after row. The list keeper, Young Bob, a staunch member of the old guard, watched them and subtracted their names from the census with thick black pencil before the sleigh ever rose from the ice.

  Once when the fat man had asked the old elf how he felt crossing the names off, all Young Bob would say was, “We didn’t put them on the naughty list, Boss, they did it themselves. That’s free will. What’s the point of being good if you don’t choose it on your own?”

  The fact that Bob’s free-will argument had some philosophical weight added to Santa’s consternation. He wasn’t a philosopher. All he had ever wanted to do was give gifts of celebration to every single creature on earth. It should have been universal, like the gift of the sun which continued to rise over the sea. But somehow the idea had not caught on.

  They rigged the sleigh. The deer were restive and cranky, tired like the others after their work. They fought their harnesses, and a couple of them lay down in their traces. “I know I am asking a lot of you,” Santa said, “but believe me I wouldn’t do this if it weren’t important. We must be home at once, for the list is missing and one of our own has become horribly lost. Please. You will have my gratitude and the gratitude of everyone who works with us.” With that the reindeer stood up and, after a few tentative hops, rose into the air pulling the fat man and the drunken elves up into the morning light.

  Flying behind the reindeer was one of the things he still loved about the job. The creaking of the leather just under the rhythmic pulsing of the bells. The musty smell of their sweat-soaked hides as they warmed to their work. The tropical air was damp and full of scent as he rose higher and higher, up into the thinner atmosphere. As the island nation shrank away beneath them, he inhaled one long lungful of humid air, then left its fragrance behind.

  The animals were tired, but still they were able to push north and west in a steady long arc toward the northern darkness that curved over the world. Stars winked alive in the purple sky as farther north they ran, and the fat man regretted whatever irritation he had held against his absent helper. The beauty of the northern sky had a calming effect on him. Its cold purity made him remember the blessings of his warm home, resting as it did in the coldest place on earth.

  Cletus had been a fine, sweet elf, fussing over each package to be delivered. Young Bob would check the list, and Cletus would dig into the sack and find the correct present, fluffing the ribbon and repairing any nicks in the wrapping.

  Like the names on the list and the mechanics of his travel, Santa did not understand the nature of the sack. It wasn’t big enough to contain all the gifts at once. It appeared to be some kind of cornucopia. The correct presents were always there. He did not know why, and neither was he terribly curious as to how. They simply were there in Cletus’s hands, and he would put them in the fat man’s smaller delivery pouch.

  They would stop. Bunny would steady the stock. The engineering elf would check the harnesses. Young Bob would be working on the next list, and Cletus would stand watching Santa disappear into the house, until Young Bob would yell at him to stop daydreaming and get back to work.

  Cletus had been a truly generous soul. Others were industrious and some were reliable, but Cletus, unlike most of the others, was enraptured by the spirit of the season.

  The blue of the night sky seared and flashed with aurora, the ion particles shimmering on the harnesses and hides of the stock. The whole outfit glowed with St. Elmo’s fire as they pushed up past the Bering Sea, where waves frothed up phosphorescence to match the sparkle of the stars. The old man pulled on his hood and tightened its fur ruff around his face.

  “Generous… generous… generous…” the fat man said aloud to himself.

  They landed on the ice, the tired animals bending their necks down against their harnesses. Jets of hot breath pushed from their muzzles and rose to mingle with the steam rising from their hides. The elves and dwarfs hopped off the sleigh to help Bunny unhook the harnesses and get blankets fastened around the reindeer’s necks so that they might not cool down too fast.

  “Pardon me, sir,” Clive said, “but do you know what you are going to do about”—the little Maori stammered with discomfort—”whoever did this to Cletus?”

  “Take care of the stock, boys. And again, you all did a fine job this winter. Take care of the stock, then get yourselves something good to eat. Try not to wake the others. I’m sure they’re all asleep yet.”

  So the little men wiped down the reindeer and led them to the fine dry barn. The fat man himself personally gave each of the deer a cube of sugar and smoothed their hide where they had sweated against the harness collars. Then he walked down to the shop floor and made his way to the office where Young Bob had kept the list.

  The old elf was sitting with his head in his hands.

  “This is not a mystery story, old friend.” Santa Claus said.

  “I know, sir,” Young Bob said, without startling at the sound of the big man’s voice.

  “I don’t know why you ran,” the fat man said in the same kindly voice he used for all the children of the world.

  “He was giving gifts that should have rightfully gone to others. He was giving gifts to those on the excluded list.”

  “I know,” the fat man said, smiling with sympathy at the old elf.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt him,” he said into his leathery palms.

  “I know that too.”

  “We got in a fight. He said that it shouldn’t matter. That everyone deserved something no matter what they had done. And I said even if they had done something really terrible, and he said yes. And I said even if you hurt someone, even if you hurt someone who didn’t deserve it, and he said yes, then…”

  “Open the book,” the fat man said, and the old elf reached around behind him and opened the book to the first page. He grunted and shook his head, then turned it around for Santa to read.

  And, of course, there on the first page was Young Bob’s name. The first entry in the book for the new year.

  “I feel awful,” the old elf said. “Will I ever be forgiven?”

  “You are already forgiven, Bob. But still, you must go.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know.” He got up.

  The fat man put his hand on the thin and shivering shoulder. “Bob?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Why don’t you take this with you.” He handed the little man the list, which was gaining names as quickly as stock quotes in a Wall Street office.

  “All right,” Young Bob said as he walked out onto the glowing ice of the long, arctic night.

  Death was rare enough that some of the elves had to consult with the old books on how to bury Cletus. They prepared his clothes and sang the songs required by ritual. They gathered and ate afterward. They told stories and gave support to those who grieved him most.

  And then, of course, they got back to work.

  Young Bob was taken to the corner of the Canadian arctic, where he walked into a small village. He eventually found work in a traveling magic show that featured a talking dog and a woman who could eat broken glass and razor blades.

  The next year, of course, you all remember. It was the year that everyone got a gift. Men and women in prison for the first time woke up to a small package of socks or a candy cane. Politicians who had lied to their constituents and stolen money found kittens in their stockings. Even the most hardheaded military dictators for whom Christmas had no meaning found something sweet on their breakfast tables, and even if they ignored it or threatened to behead their household staffs for putting it there, a certain generous sweetness nagged at them the rest of the day.

&nb
sp; And in a trash-strewn lot in Saskatchewan, where the roustabouts smoked their first cigarette of the day while still in bed, and the talking dog trotted out of the caravan to take an urgent pee, Young Bob opened up his lovingly wrapped Christmas gift and felt the weight of the world settle on his tiny, still-beating heart.

  Illumination

  Laura Anne Gilman

  The boat was long and lean, and so was the guy pulling the oar. I leaned out so far over the bridge, I probably would have fallen if Joseph hadn’t grabbed the back of my belt.

  “Darling, the water level is high enough. No need to add your drool to it.”

  “But… pretty!”

  Joseph has known me since I was eight. He was there when my hormones kicked in, there when I went through the “boys or girls?” agita. He was there for all of my not-too-stellar high school career, and he was there when I settled into semiresponsible adulthood. I don’t think he’s blinked once.

  Well, maybe when I got into Amherst. I think he blinked then. He wouldn’t admit to crying.

  “Your mind on the crisis at hand, please?” he said without too much hope.

  The crisis was my dad. As usual.

  J. held the letter in his hand. It had come a few days before, but I hadn’t gotten around to opening it until the previous night. I’d read it halfway, and pinged J. In every way that counted, he was my real father. Zaki Torres was just my genetic donor and occasional pain in the posterior.

  “I think he’s dead this time,” I told J. I wasn’t sure, but it felt probable.

  “Is that gut instinct, or something else?”

  I had to think about that for a minute. “I don’t know. Maybe both.”

  Gut instinct was the normal everyday “I got a bad feeling about this” sort of thing. Something else was, well, something else. And it had a lot less to do with feeling than knowing. Or, as J. put it, with kenning.

  Magic worked like that, sometimes.

  I cast a longing look after the sculler, by then halfway down the river, and sighed. J. hadn’t brought me there for the scenery, more’s the pity. There’d be time for that later, if I was lucky. If not, well, there were always new boys all over the place.

  “Bonnie…”

  “Right.” I leaned against the stonework of the bridge and tried to soak up the cool spring sunlight into my skin. I’m pale like skim milk, with the annoyingly white-blond hair to match, but I keep hoping that some melanin will sneak into my epidermis, somehow.

  “Let’s review the facts. My father, also known as Zaki the King of the Shiftless Losers…”

  J. made an inarticulate sound of protest, but it was mainly a formality. He’s known my dad since I was eight, too. Zaki’s Talent was slight enough to make him almost a Null, so he’d known he had to get someone else to mentor me. Thank God for great favors. Unfortunately, Zaki’s idea of an acceptable mentor for his rather—modesty aside—strongly Talented eight-year-old daughter would probably make a slumlord blush. J. had been walking by on the street below the apartment when Dad tried to make the introductions, and I had been a pretty good judge of character even then. Desperate to find an alternative—any alternative—I had let out what J. later described as a mental all-points bulletin, asking for a mentor who didn’t suck. My exact wording, apparently.

  J. had been upstairs and talking to my dad before either of them knew what was happening. Which was how a back-street lonejack kid got a hoity-toity Council mentor, and don’t think that didn’t raise a few eyebrows and almost as many hackles on both sides.

  But it worked. For us, anyway.

  “He is, J. No use candy-coating it. He has, according to this letter, managed to get himself once again in debt to not only a loan shark, but a loan shark who would think nothing of roasting him over the coals for a human BBQ. What the hell possessed him to borrow from a cave dragon, anyway?”

  “Because cave dragons always have money, and they take a long view. Usually.”

  “Yeah. Usually.” Cave dragons, from what J. had gotten around to telling me, weren’t all that much like their older cousins in Europe and Asia. They were small—only around ten feet long—and sort of dingy looking, and generally didn’t hold with the eating of maidens, razing of homesteads, or stealing of livestock.

  They did like their pretties, though, and stuffed their mattresses with cash, just like all misers. And they liked a nice return on their investments.

  Only an idiot did a runner on a debt owed to them.

  An idiot, apparently, like my genetic donor.

  A dutiful daughter probably would have rushed out into the mountains and demanded an answer—or at least the personal effects and whatever was left of the body. But it was spring, and the mountains were damned cold and muddy just then. And J. didn’t raise a dummy.

  I went to the source, instead.

  “Bonnie! Baby!”

  I dodged the attempted embrace, and sidestepped my way into the apartment. Claire, my dad’s girlfriend, wasn’t bad, as they went—she was clean, sober, and actually cared about him. She was also intent on turning me into the daughter she’d never gotten around to raising, and at nineteen, I wasn’t interested in suddenly having a mommy.

  “Where is he? Where is the moron?”

  “Baby, I don’t know.”

  I stopped, turned and looked back at her. Claire’s baby blue eyes were rimmed with red, and her long red hair—Pippi Longstocking hair, I called it—was done in a single messy plait, not her usual Medusa’s crown of cornrows.

  I’m not what you’d call a dispassionate person. In fact, J. says I throw my heart over the hedgerow, whatever the hell a hedgerow is, more often than any steeplechaser he’s ever met. Whatever a steeplechaser is. But when something goes hinky in my world, I don’t freak. Just the opposite.

  Remember what I said earlier about magic? It’s not something everyone gets. Just some of us: Talents. Humans who have the little extra kick of whatsis, lets us do… Stuff. It’s called current these days, not magic, and according to the lectures J. sat me through, it’s directly related to but not exactly like normal electricity. You feel it, inside you, in your gut, like a personal power generator.

  J. says, and so does every other Talent I’ve talked to about it, which isn’t, admittedly, many, that they feel current like this whirling, swirling mess of energy inside them, and the more agitated they get, the harder it is to control.

  Not me. I get upset, I get agitated, or I get worried, and my current goes cold and calm. Instead of panic, I get planning.

  “All right. When did you last see him?”

  “Tuesday.”

  It was Friday now.

  “The fourteenth.”

  The Tuesday before last. The idiot had been missing for over a week. And Claire hadn’t been worried?

  Scratch that. Obviously, she had.

  “He had been fine up until then. Happy, even. He had been whistling. You know how he does that.”

  God, did I. Zaki the wonder whistler. Off-key and under his breath. Maybe someone with good hearing and perfect pitch had killed him.

  “No worries, then?”

  She shrugged, a flailing of arms that looked more Italian than Irish. “When did your father ever worry about anything?”

  When he did, it was too late, anyway.

  “Tell me everything you know.” I tried to keep the request polite. She didn’t seem to mind the edge in my words, thankfully.

  “You’ll find him?”

  She didn’t even ask how I knew that he was gone. Either she had mailed the letter I got, which implied that she knew what was in it, or she believed more of my dad’s stories about being able to use magic than she’d ever let on.

  I steered her toward the sofa, and pushed her on the shoulder until she sat down on the nubby brown upholstery. “Tell me what you know, and I’ll see what I can do.”

  Three hours and a plate of crappy bakery cookies later, I escaped with a pretty good idea that Claire didn’t know shit. Feeling restle
ss and annoyed, and trying to put my brain onto what little I had been able to learn, I reached inside and started braiding lines of current: blue for thought, red for inspiration, green for energy. Not that the colors actually meant anything, but it helped me focus. And focus was what it was all about, in the end.

  The subway took me out of Brooklyn, and dumped me into midtown Manhattan, about ten blocks from where we were staying.

  I could have gone back to the hotel, but the weather was nice, and I had missed being in the city, so I decided to take a walk instead. The feel of the city surrounded me, soaking back into my bones like a warm blanket on a cold night.

  I loved going to school in Massachusetts, loved the slower pace and the whole academic immersion thing, but for a Talent, a big city was like a candy store—all that electricity zipping around, making an easy road for current to travel alongside. Current came naturally—lightning storms and ley lines—and it came artificially—neon signs and electrical wires. It didn’t care, and artificial forms were easy to piggyback on, so hey presto, a ready-made pool of current every time you turned on a power switch.

  There was a downside to it, though.

  “Hey, what the hell?”

  I had been so busy braiding current I hadn’t realized how thick the string had gotten. It crackled and sizzled under my mental touch, and one of those crackles jumped outside of me, touching the overhead marquees and shorting them out, one after another after another, all the way down Forty-sixth Street.

  Oops.

  That was the payoff, for magic. Not that it didn’t like technology, but that it loved it. So much that it always wanted to go where it was, and make best buddies with it. Hang with it.

  But like two cats in a single household, electricity wanted not much to do with current. It could tag along so long as it didn’t interfere, but the moment electricity got annoyed—bam. Sparks, and ugliness, and you had to go out and buy a new computer. Or cell phone. Or anything else that got caught in the cross fire.