The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

“You want a drink?” she whispered.

  “No,” I said. I turned to look at her. We weren’t either of us laughing now. I reached for her and she glanced over at the boy and shook her head. She grabbed the cuff of my shirt and pulled me gently back toward the bedroom.

  It smelled of perfume and hand lotion and a little of mildew. The only light trickled in through heavy, old-fashioned venetian blinds. She untied the bathrobe and let it fall. I kissed her and her arms went around my neck. I touched her shoulder blades and her hair and her buttocks and then I got out of my clothes and left them in a pile on the floor. She ran on tiptoes back to the front of the trailer and locked and chained the door. Then she came back and shut the bedroom door and lay down on the bed.

  I lay down next to her. The smell and feel of her was wonderful, and at the same time it was not quite real. There were too many unfamiliar things and it was hard to connect to the rest of my life.

  Then I was on my knees between her legs, gently touching her. Her arms were spread out beside her, tangled in the sheets, her hips moving with pleasure. Only once, in high school, had she let me touch her there, in the back seat of a friend’s car, her skirt up around her hips, panties to her knees, and before I had recovered from the wonder of it she had pulled away.

  But that was eighteen years ago and this was now. There had been a lot of men touching her since then, maybe hundreds. But that was all right. I lay on top of her and she guided me inside. She tried to say something, maybe it was only my name, but I put my mouth over hers to shut her up. I put both my arms around her and closed my eyes and let the heat and pleasure run up through me.

  When I finished and we rolled apart she lay on top of me, pinning me to the bed. “That was real sweet,” she said.

  I kissed her and hugged her because I couldn’t say what I was thinking. I was thinking about Charlie, remembering the earnest look on his face when he said, “It was just to have sex, that’s all.”

  * * *

  She was wide awake and I was exhausted. She complained about the state cutting back on aid to single parents. She told me about the tiny pieces of tape she had to wear on the ends of her nipples when she danced, a weird Health Department regulation. I remembered the tiny golden flashes and fell asleep to the memory of her dancing.

  Screaming woke me up. Kristi was already out of bed and headed for the living room. “It’s just Stoney,” she said, and I lay back down.

  I woke up again a little before dawn. There was an arm around my waist but it seemed much too small. I rolled over and saw that the little boy had crawled into bed between us.

  I got up without moving him and went to the bathroom. There was no water in the toilet; when I pushed the handle a trap opened in the bottom of the bowl and a fine spray washed the sides. I got dressed, trying not to bump into anything. Kristi was asleep on the side of the bed closest to the door, her mouth open a little. Stoney had burrowed into the middle of her back.

  I was going to turn around and go when a voyeuristic impulse made me open the drawer of her nightstand. Or maybe I subconsciously knew what I’d find. There was a Beeline book called Molly’s Sexual Follies, a tube of KY, a box of Ramses lubricated condoms, a few used Kleenex. An emery board, a finger puppet, one hoop earring. A short-barreled Colt .32 revolver.

  * * *

  I got to the jail at nine in the morning. The woman at the visitor’s window recognized me and buzzed me back. Gonzales was at his desk. He looked up when I walked in and said, “I didn’t know you was coming in today.”

  “I just had a couple of quick questions for Charlie,” I said. “Only take a second.”

  “Did you want to use the office…?”

  “No, no point. If I could just talk to him in his cell for a couple of minutes, that would be great.”

  Gonzales got the keys. Charlie had a cell to himself, five by ten feet, white-painted bars on the long wall facing the corridor. There were Bibles and religious tracts on his cot, a few paintings hanging on the wall. “Maybe you can get Charlie to show you his pictures,” Gonzales said. A stool in the corner had brushes and tubes of paint on the top.

  “You painted these?” I asked Charlie. My voice sounded fairly normal, all things considered.

  “Yessir, I did.”

  “They’re pretty good.” They were landscapes with trees and horses, but no people.

  “Thank you kindly.”

  “You can just call for me when you’re ready,” Gonzales said. He went out and locked the door.

  “I thought you’d be back,” Charlie said. “Was there something else you wanted to ask me?” He sat on the edge of the cot, forearms on his knees.

  I didn’t say anything. I took the Colt out of the waistband of my pants and pointed it at him. I’d already looked it over on the drive up and there were bullets in all six cylinders. My hand was shaking so I steadied it with my left and fired all six rounds into his head and chest.

  I hadn’t noticed all the background noises until they stopped, the typewriters and the birds and somebody singing upstairs. Charlie stood up and walked over to where I was standing. The revolver clicked on an empty shell.

  “You can’t get rid of me that easy,” Charlie said with his droopy-eyed smile. “I been around too long. I was Springheeled Jack and Richard Speck. I was Ted Bundy and that fella up to Seattle they never caught.” The door banged open at the end of the hall. “You can’t never get rid of me because I’m inside you.”

  I dropped the gun and locked my hands behind my head. Gonzales stuck his head around the corner. He was squinting. He had his gun out and he looked terrified. Charlie and I stared back at him calmly.

  “It’s okay, Ernie,” Charlie said. “No harm done. Mr. McKenna was just having him a little joke.”

  * * *

  Charlie told Gonzales the gun was loaded with blanks. They had to believe him because there weren’t any bullet holes in the cell. I told them I’d bought the gun off a defendant years ago, that I’d had it in the car.

  They called Dallas and Ricky asked to talk to me. “There’s going to be an inquest,” he said. “No way around it.”

  “Sure there is,” I said. “I quit. I’ll send it to you in writing. I’ll put it in the mail today. Express.”

  “You need some help, Dave. You understand what I’m saying to you here? Professional help. Think about it. Just tell me you’ll think about it.”

  Gonzales was scared and angry and wanted me charged with smuggling weapons into the jail. The sheriff knew it wasn’t worth the headlines and by suppertime I was out.

  Jack had already heard about it through some kind of legal grapevine. He thought it was funny. We skipped dinner and went down to the bars on Sixth Street. I couldn’t drink anything. I was afraid of going numb, or letting down my guard. But Jack made up for me. As usual.

  “Kristi called me today,” Jack said. “I told her I didn’t know but what you might be going back to Dallas today. Just a kind of feeling I had.”

  “I’m not going back,” I said. “But it was the right thing to tell her.”

  “Not what it was cracked up to be, huh?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “That and much, much more.”

  For once he let it go. “You mean you’re not going back tonight or not going back period?”

  “Period,” I said. “My job’s gone, I pissed that away this morning. I’ll get something down here. I don’t care what. I’ll pump gas. I’ll fucking wait tables. You can draw up the divorce papers and I’ll sign them.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “What’s Alice going to say?”

  “I don’t know if she’ll even notice. She can have the goddamn house and her car and the savings. All of it. All I want is some time with Jeffrey. As much as I can get. Every week if I can.”

  “Good luck.”

  “I’ve got to have it. I don’t want him growing up screwed up like the rest of us. I’ve got stuff I’ve got to tell him. He’s
going to need help. All of us are. Jack, goddamn it, are you listening to me?”

  He wasn’t. He was staring at the Heart video on the bar’s big-screen TV, at the blonde guitarist. “Look at that,” Jack said. “Sweet suffering Jesus. Couldn’t you just fuck that to death?”

  JUDITH MOFFETT

  The Hob

  Here’s a compassionate, lyrical, and compelling look behind one of the oldest bits of English folklore.

  Although Judith Moffett is the author of two books of poetry, a book of criticism, and a book of translations from the Swedish, she made her first professional fiction sale in 1986. Since then, she has won the John W. Campbell Award as Best New Writer of 1987, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award for her story “Surviving,” and her first novel Pennterra was released to critical acclaim. She has since completed a second novel. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, she now lives with her husband in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, and teaches a science-fiction course and a graduate course in twentieth-century American poetry at the University of Pennsylvania. She has also taught for four summers at the prestigious Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, and was given a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship Grant for her poetry—which she then used to finance the writing of her first novel.

  THE HOB

  Judith Moffett

  1

  Elphi was the first of them to wake that spring, which meant he was the first to catch, almost at once, the faint whiff of corruption. Feeling ghastly, as always upon just emerging from hibernation, he dragged himself out of his bunk to go and see which of the remnant of elderly hobs had died during the winter.

  He tottered round the den in darkness, unable as yet to manage the coordination required to strike a light. Nor did he really require one. Hobs were nocturnal. Besides, this group had been overwintering in the same den for nearly a hundred years.

  Tarn Hole and Hasty Bank lay together, deep in sleep. Hodge Hob seemed all right … and Broxa … and Scugdale.… Ah. Woof Howe Hob was the dead one. Elphi checked on Hart Hall, just to make sure there had been only one death, then wobbled back to his own bed to think.

  They would have to get Woof Howe out of the den: he thrust that thought, and the necessity for fast action, into the forefront of his mind to blank out the yawning hollowness, the would-be grief. Every decade or two, now, another of them was lost. The long exile seemed to be coming inexorably to an end, not by rescue as they had gone on expecting for so long, but by slow attrition. Only seven were left of the fifteen stranded in this place, and soon there would be none.

  Elphi rolled out again; these thoughts were unproductive, as they had ever been. He needed a drink and a meal.

  The great stone that had sealed the den all winter posed a problem. By human standards the hobs were prodigiously strong for their size, even in great age, but Elphi—feeble after his months-long fast—would ordinarily not have attempted to move the stone unaided. But he managed it, finally, and poked his head with due caution out into the world.

  Outside it was early April on the heather moors of North Yorkshire. Weak as he was, Elphi shuddered with pleasure as the fresh moorland wind blew into his face. The wind was strong, and fiercely cold, but cold had never bothered the hobs and it was not for warmth’s sake that Elphi doubled back down the ladder to fetch forth something to wrap around himself, something that would deceive the eyes of any unlikely walker still on the tops in the last few hours of light. That done, he dragged the heavy stone back across the hole, sealing in the scent of death, and set off on all fours stiffly through the snow-crusted heather.

  He followed a sheep-track, keeping a weather eye out as he trotted along for any farmer who might be gathering his moor ewes to bring them down “inside” for lambing now. Those years when the hobs slept a bit later than usual they sometimes found their earliest forays cramped by the presence of farmers and dogs, neither of which could be easily fooled by their disguise. When that happened they were forced to be nocturnal indeed.

  But the sheep Elphi saw had a week to go at least before they would be gathered in, and he began to relax. Walkers were always fairly few at this uncomfortable season, and the archeologists who had been working at the prehistoric settlement sites on Danby Rigg the previous summer were not in evidence there now. Perhaps getting rid of old Woof Howe would not be quite so difficult as he had feared—not like the year they had woken in mid-April to find Kempswithen dead and the tops acrawl with men and dogs for days. The only humans he was at all likely to encounter this late afternoon would be hauling hay up to their flocks, and since their tractors and pickups made a din that carried for miles in the open landscape he had no fear of being caught napping.

  The local dogs all knew about the hobs, of course, as they knew about the grouse and hares, but they rarely came on the tops unless they were herding sheep, and when they were herding sheep they generally stuck to business. The problem dogs were those the walkers allowed to run loose, whether under good voice control or no. They could be really troublesome. In August and September, when the heather turned the moorland into a shag carpet of purple flowers forty miles wide and a tidal wave of tourists came pouring up to see and photograph them, the hobs never showed their noses aboveground by day at all. But it was a bother, despite their perfect ease at getting about in the dark; for except from November to April hobs didn’t do a lot of sleeping, and they always had more than enough essential work to see to. Then there was the grouse shooting, which started every year on August twelfth and went on till long after Elphi and his companions had gone to ground for the winter.…

  Of course, the horde of August visitors was also a great boon. All summer the hobs picked up a stream, steady but relatively thin, of useful stuff dropped or forgotten by visitors. August brought the flood, and the year’s bonanza: bandanas, wool socks, chocolate bars, granola bars, small convenient pads of paper, pencils and pens, maps, rubber bands, safety pins, lengths of nylon cord, fourteen Swiss Army knives in fifteen years, guidebooks, comic books, new batteries for the transistors (three) and the electric torches (five). Every night in summer they would all be out scavenging the courses of the long-distance footpaths, the Lyke Wake Walk and the Cleveland Way, each with a big pouch to carry home the loot in.

  Earlier and later in the year, however, they were forced to spend more time hunting, and hunting a meal was Elphi’s first priority now. Luckily he and his people could digest just about anything they could catch (or they would not have been able to survive here at all). They were partial to dale-dwelling rabbit and spring lamb, and had no objection to road-killed ewe when they could get it; but as none of these was available at the moment, Elphi settled for a grouse he happened to start: snapped its neck, dismembered it, and ate it raw on the spot, hungrily but neatly, arranging the feathers to look like a fox kill (and counting on a real fox to come and polish off the bones he left behind).

  Satisfied, his head clearer, Elphi trotted another mile to a stream, where he washed the blood off his hands and had his first drink in more than four months. He had begun to move better now. His hands and broad feet shod in sheepskin with the fleece side out settled into their long habit of brushing through the old snow without leaving identifiable tracks. Still on all fours, he picked up speed.

  Now then: what were they to do with Woof Howe Hob so that no human could possibly discover that he had ever existed?

  Burning would be best. But fire on the moors in April was a serious thing; a fire would be noticed and investigated. The smoke could be seen a long way, and the Park rangers were vigilant. Unless a convenient mist were to cover the signs … but the hobs almost never, on principle, risked a fire, and in any case there were far too few stored peats in the den to burn a body, even a hob’s small body. Elphi suddenly saw Woof Howe on a heap of smouldering peats and his insides shriveled. He forced the picture away.

  They would have to find someplace to bury Woof Howe where nobody would dig him up. But where? He cursed himself and all the rest, his dead friend inc
luded, for having failed to work out in advance a strategy for dealing with a problem so certain to occur. Their shrinking from it had condemned one of their number—himself, as it turned out—to solving it alone if none of the others woke up before something had to be done.

  Elphi thought resentfully of the past century and a half—of the increasing complications the decades had added to his life. In the old days nobody would have fussed over a few odd-looking bones, unless they’d been human bones. In the old days people hadn’t insisted on figuring everything out. People had accepted that the world was full of wonders and mysteries; but nowadays the living hobs’ continued safety depended on making the remains of their dead comrades disappear absolutely. They’d managed it with Kempswithen, rather gruesomely, by cutting him into very small bits quite unrecognizable as humanoid, and distributing these by night over four hundred square miles of open moorland. None of them would care to go through that again, unless there were positively no other way.

  Elphi thought about that while he gazed out above the stream bed and the afternoon wore gradually on. The air was utterly clear. Far off to northwestward the peak of Roseberry Topping curled down like the tip of a soft ice-cream cone (Elphi knew this, having seen a drawing of one in a newspaper a hiker had thrown away); and all between Roseberry Topping and Westerdale Moor, where he now risked standing upright for a moment to look, swept the bristly, shaggy, snowy heath, mile after mile of it, swelling and falling, a frozen sea of bleakness that was somehow at the same time achingly beautiful. White snow had powdered over an underlayer of russet—that was dead bracken at the moor’s edge—and the powdered bracken lent a pinkish tint to the whole wide scene. The snow ended roughly where the patchwork fields and pastures of Danby Dale and Westerdale began, and among these, scattered down the dales, were tiny clumps of stone farm buildings.

  Elphi had spent the first, best two centuries of his exile down there, on a couple of farms in Danby Dale and Great Fryup Dale. These dales, and the sweep of bleakness above them, made up the landscape of most of his extremely long life; he could scarcely remember, anymore, when he had had anything else to look at. However truly he yearned for rescue with one facet of his soul, he beheld these dales with a more immediate yearning, and the moors themselves he loved with a surprising passion. All the hobs did or had, except Hob o’ t’ Hurst and Tarn Hole Hob. Woof Howe had loved them too, as much as any.