Fantasy

by Rich Horton

  Garrett staggered again. “I need to lie down.”

  “Of course you do. A sleepless night, and the blood you gave to me…on top of the work of the past two days. Forgive me.” He scooped her into his arms like a child—like a doll—and carried her to bed. Mary had made it, tidied the counterpane, placed a new candle on the bedside table to replace the one burned out the night before.

  Blackness like an undertow, Garrett tried to remember the last thing. She yawned jawcrackingly. “Sebastien. You said.…”

  “Ah, yes,” he answered. “The missing maidservant. I haven’t found her yet, but I have her name. Forester. Maeve Forester.”

  Sleep sucking her under, Garrett knew to a certainty that there was something enormously important about that name, but she was damned if she could remember what it was.

  * * * *

  A chill awakened her in the small hours of the morning. Sebastien lay curled beside her, but his body offered no warmth, and her heart hammered in her chest as if she awakened from nightmare. Mike whined by her feet, huddling into the covers.

  “Sebastien?”

  “I feel it,” he said. “Like last night.”

  But it wasn’t. Similar. But colder and stronger, and it froze her to the bone. The curtains on the casement windows fluttered—odd, she thought, those should be tight shut. And she could see that they were, see the glass reflecting the gaslights from the city below. Where is the draft coming from? Teeth chattering, Garrett reached for her wand and struck a light.

  The temperature dropped sharply. Garrett clutched her wand to her chest. Mike growled his terrier’s growl, voice of a much larger dog in a little dog’s throat. Meanwhile, Sebastien swung his long legs out of the four poster and stood. When he spoke, even his cool breath frosted in the icy air. “Ghost?” he asked.

  “Sebastien!”

  Garrett threw herself across the bed, away from the nightstand, jumping up with her back against the far wall, the coverlet dimpling under her feet. Mike scrabbled toward her, crowded her ankles growling, all sharp teeth and powderpuff defiance. Slowly, Sebastien turned.…

  The candle on the nightstand ascended into the air and was joined and circled by others that materialized out of the darkness. A vast, lumpy darkness, clawing with enormous hands like annealed black clots of wax, a ring of candles blazing on the gnarled stump that might have been its head.

  Garrett screamed as the thing reached for her. She leveled her wand at it and spoke a word. A spark flashed between them, did nothing. Mike snarled and would have lunged after the threat, and Garrett swept her leg aside, knocking her indomitable companion from the bed. He yelped, and she flinched, but for a second he was safe from the squelching abomination that examined her face with familiar pale eyes.

  It grabbed for her and she twisted away, falling half into the crevice between bed and wall. In a moment, those slick, sucking hands would touch her flesh. “Sebastien! The candles!”

  Sebastien hesitated, hands half outreached as if to grab the monstrosity and haul it away. Candlewax dripped from its crown, spattering the tile floor; droplets that touched its black hide vanished without a trace.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t touch it! The candles! Put them out!”

  Mike growled low in his throat as he found his feet again, eyes gleaming in the flickering brilliance. Something moved through the blackness, flaring light. Candlewax dripped, spattered, ran.

  The thing lurched closer, stepping onto the bed. Sebastien glanced about wildly, caught up a rug from the floor, and swung just as Garrett, half-pinned, shouted a word of magic and hurled her wand like a throwing knife.

  The rug came down on the dark thing’s crown, dashing candles out. Garrett’s wand vanished into its breast, silver tip first. The thing wailed, spinning wildly, reaching for Sebastien with groping, malformed paws. He skittered aside like a toreador, swinging the rug again, smashing the thing in the face. A final candle fluttered out as it fell forward, keening, clutching Sebastien’s shirtfront, and Garrett saw the horror in his eyes as it started to enfold him in devouring blackness.

  And then it sagged to its knees, slid downward, cloth tearing in the grasp of its suddenly human hands. It fell, curled inwards, and buried its face in its knees, dappled moonlight shaking in short red curls.

  * * * *

  Duke Richard waited for her in her parlor, flanked by city Guards. The early afternoon light crept in through white eyelet lace, gilding his hair. He had his hat in his hand, as if he did not intend to linger, but Mike sat on his shoes, tongue lolling.

  When she entered, he dismissed the Guards.

  “Richard,” she said, when the door was closed.

  “Investigator Garrett.”

  She came a few steps closer, and did not let her hurt show in her face. “I’m glad to see you, your Highness.”

  His jaw worked, and the hat tumbled from his hands as he came to her, pulling her close, all but crushing her in his arms. “Abby Irene.” His voice broke.

  She leaned into the embrace for a long, quiet moment, listening to the pounding of his heart. When he finally let her step back, she did. “I’m safe.”

  “But barely. And I wasn’t there to protect you.”

  “Sebastien was,” she said, and regretted it immediately. “What’s to become of Officer Forester?” He’d been taken away in chains before sunup.

  “He’s cooperated. Named his accomplice. Or his handler, more like—the Lord Mayor’s pet sorcerer.”

  “Neither one implicated the Mayor?”

  “Stayed silent as the grave. To hear Forester tell it, LaMarque— the sorcerer—offered him revenge against the lad who ruined Forester’s sister. Forester took him up on it, not knowing the price. And then LaMarque—and Peter Eliot, of course, but neither one of them has or will admit that—used that consent, once granted, to enslave him. From what he said, he killed the Carlson family first, consumed them…and then chased the lad out into the street to deal with him more messily.”

  Garrett shuddered. “What about the splintered door?”

  “Misdirection. A smart lad. He’ll hang, of course.”

  “Of course.” The door was shut; the curtains were drawn. She laid a hand on his shoulder, leaned her face against his sleeve. “They must have thought I was close.”

  “You were.” He put his arm around her shoulder. “I would have been next, no doubt.”

  She nodded. This is wrong. And yet…what else can we do? “It is a pity that we cannot arrange a search of the Lord Mayor’s domicile. I feel certain that we would find a rifle which I could match to the bullet fired at me.”

  He let the silence hang for a moment before he continued. “What I don’t understand is how Forester got admittance to the houses. I know there are rules of consent and so forth, for these dark things to do their will.” He looked away. And he’s not mentioning Sebastien, although it’s costing him something not to.

  “Each of the houses invaded had apparently received a surprising bargain on candles recently. And an action can provide consent as easily as a word.”

  “I am afraid I’m not following you, Abby Irene.”

  Garrett counted breaths before she answered, pressing her face to his arm. “Consent must be offered,” she said. “Express or implied. But think. You awaken, cold and alone. In darkness with a banked fire. You feel a presence looming over you. What is the first thing you do?”

  “Reach for my pistol.”

  “After that.”

  “Strike a light. Oh!”

  “Strike a light, yes. And reach for the candle by your bed.”

  THE EMPEROR OF GONDWANALAND, by Paul Di Filippo

  “Hey, Mutt! It’s playtime, let’s go!”

  Mutt Spindler raised his gaze above the flatscreen monitor that dominated his desk. The screen displayed Pagemaker layouts for next month’s issue of PharmaNotes, a trade publication for the drug industry. Mutt had the cankerous misfortune to be assistant editor of Pharma­Note
s, a job he had held for the last three quietly miserable years.

  In the entrance to his cubicle stood Gifford, Cody and Melba, three of Matt’s co-workers. Gifford sported a giant foam finger avowing his allegiance to whatever sports team was currently high in the standings of whatever season it chanced to be. Cody had a silver hip flask raised to her lips, imbibing a liquid that Mutt could be fairly certain did not issue from the Poland Springs cooler. Melba had already undone her formerly decorous shirt several buttons upward from the hem and knotted it, exposing a belly that reminded Mutt of a slab of Godiva chocolate.

  Mutt pictured with facile vividness the events of the evening that would ensue, should he choose to accept Gifford’s invitation. His projections were based on numerous past such experiences. Heavy alcohol consumption and possible ingestion of illicit stimulants, followed by slurred, senseless conversation conducted at eardrum-piercing volume to overcome whatever jagged ambient noise was passing itself off as music these days. Some hypnagogic, sensory-impaired dancing with one strange woman or another, leading in all likelihood to a meaningless hookup, the details of which would be impossible to recall in the morning, resulting in hypochondriacal worries and vacillating committments to get one kind of STD test or another. And of course the leftover brain damage and fraying of neurological wiring would insure that the demands of the office would be transformed from their usual simple hellishness to torture of an excruciating variety undreamed of by even, say, a team of Catholic school nuns and the unlamented Uday Hussein.

  Gifford could sense his cautious friend wavering toward abstinence. “C’mon, Mutt! We’re gonna hit Slamdunk’s first, then Black Rainbow. And we’ll finish up at Captains Curvaceous.”

  Mention of the last-named club, a strip joint where Mutt had once managed to drop over five hundred dollars of his tiny Christmas bonus while simultaneously acquiring a black eye and a chipped tooth, caused a shiver to surf his spine.

  “Uh, thanks, guys, for thinking of me. But I just can’t swing it. If I don’t get this special ad section squared away by tonight, we’ll miss the printer’s deadlines.”

  Cody pocketed her flask and grabbed Gifford’s arm. “Oh, leave the little drudge alone, Giff. It’s obvious he’s so in love with his job. Haven’t you seen his lip-prints on the screen?”

  Mutt was hurt and insulted. Was it his fault that he had been promoted to assistant editor over Cody? He wanted to say something in his defense, but couldn’t think of a comeback that wouldn’t sound whiny. And then the window closed on any possible repartee.

  Gifford unselfconsciously scratched his butt with his foam finger. “Okay, pal, maybe next time. Let’s shake a tail, ladies.”

  Melba winked at Mutt as she walked away. “Gonna miss you, loverboy.”

  Then the trio was gone.

  Mutt hung his head in his hands. Why had he ever slept with Melba? Sleeping with co-workers was insane. Yet he had done it. The affair was over now, but the awkward repercussions lingered. Another black mark on his karma.

  Refocusing on the screen, Mutt tried hard to proof the text floating before him. “Epigenetix-brand sequencers guarantee faster throughput…” The words and pictures blurred into a jittery multicolored fog like a mosh pit full of amoebas. Was he crying? For Christ’s sake, why the hell was he crying? Just because he had to hold down a suck-ass job he hated just to pay his grad-school loans, had no steady woman, hadn’t been snow-boarding in two years, had put on five pounds since the summer, and experienced an undeniable yet shameful thrill when contemplating the purchase of a new necktie?

  Mutt knuckled the moisture from his eyes and mentally kicked his own ass for being a big baby. This wasn’t a bad life, and plenty of people had it worse. Time to pull up his socks and buckle down and all that other self-improvement shit.

  But not right now. Right now, Mutt needed a break. He hadn’t lied to Gifford and the others, he had to finish this job tonight. But he could take fifteen minutes to websurf his way to some amusing site that would lift his spirits.

  And that was how Mutt discovered Gondwanaland.

  In retrospect, after the passage of time had erased his computer’s logs, the exact chain of links leading to Gondwanaland was hard to reconfigure. He had started looking for new recordings by his favorite group, Dead End Universe. That had led somehow to a history of pirate radio stations. And from there it was a short jump to micro­nations.

  Fascinated, Mutt lost all track of time as he read about this concept that was totally new to him.

  Micronations—also known as cybernations, fantasy countries or ephemeral states—were odd blends of real-world rebellious politics, virtual artsy-fartsy projects and elaborate spoofs. Essentially, a micro­nation was any assemblage of persons regarding themselves as a sovereign country, yet not recognized by international entities such as the United Nations. Sometimes micronations were associated with real physical territory. The Cocos Islands had once been ruled as a fiefdom by the Clunies-Ross family. Sarawak was once the province of the White Rajas, as the Brooke clan had styled themselves.

  With the advent of the internet, the number of micronations had exploded. There were now dozens of imaginary online countries pre­dicated on different philosophies, exemplifying scores of different governmental systems, each of them more or less seriously arguing that they were totally within their rights to issue passports, currency and stamps, and to designate ministers, nobility and bureaucratic minions.

  Mutt had always enjoyed fantasy sports in college. Imaginary leagues, imaginary rosters, imaginary games—Something about being totally in charge of a small universe had appealed to him, as an antidote to his lack of control over the important factors and forces that batted his own life around. He had spent a lot of time playing Sims too. The concept of cybernations seemed like a logical extension of those pursuits, an appealing refuge from the harsh realities of career and relationships.

  The site Mutt had ended up on was a gateway to a whole host of online countries. The Aerican Empire, the Kingdom of Talossa, the Global State of Waveland, the Kingdom of Redonda, Lizbekistan—

  And Gondwanaland.

  Memories of an introductory geoscience course came back to Mutt. Gondwanaland was the super-continent that had existed hundreds of millions of years ago, before splitting and drifting apart into the configuration of separate continental landforms familiar today.

  Mutt clicked on the Gondwanaland button.

  The page built itself rapidly on his screen. The animated image of a spinning globe dominated. Sure enough, the globe featured only a single huge continent, marked with interior divisions into states and featuring the weird names of cities.

  Mutt was about to scan some of the text on the page when his eye fell on the blinking time readout in the corner of the screen.

  Holy shit! Nine-thirty! He’d be here till midnight unless he busted his ass.

  Reluctantly abandoning the Gondwanaland page and its impossible globe, Mutt returned to his work.

  Which still sucked.

  Maybe worse.

  * * * *

  The next day Mutt was almost as tired as if he had gone out with Gifford and the gang. But at least his head wasn’t throbbing and his mouth didn’t taste as if he had french-kissed a hyena. Proofing the advertorial section had taken until eleven-forty-five, and by the time he had ridden the subway home, eaten some leftover General Gao’s chicken, watched Letterman’s Top Ten and fallen asleep, it had been well into the small hours of the morning. When his alarm went off at seven-thirty, he had thrashed about in confusion like a drowning man, dragged from some engrossing dream that instantly evaporated out of memory.

  Once in the office, Mutt booted up his machine. He had been doing something interesting last evening, hadn’t he? Oh, yeah, that Gondwanaland thing—

  Before his butt hit the chair, someone was IMing him. Oh, shit, Kicklighter wanted to see him in his office. Mutt got up to visit his boss.

  He ran into Gifford in the hall. Unrepentant yet
visibly hurting, Gifford managed a sickly grin. “Missed a swinging time last night, my friend. After her fifth jello shot, Cody got up on stage at Captains. Took two bouncers to get her down, but not before she managed to earn over a hundred bucks.”

  Mutt winced. This was more information than he needed about the extracurricular activities of his jealous co-worker. How would it be possible now to work on projects side-by-side with her, without conjuring up visions of her drunkenly shedding her clothing?

  Suddenly this hip young urban wastrel shtick, the whole life- is-fucked-so-let’s-get-fucked-up playacting that Mutt and his friends had been indulging in for so long looked incredibly boring and tedious and counterproductive, possibly even the greased chute delivering one’s ass to eternal damnation. Mutt knew with absurd certainty that he could no longer indulge in such a wasteful lifestyle. Something inside him had shifted irrevocably, some emotional tipping point had been reached.

  But what was he going to do with his life instead?

  Making a half-hearted neutral comment to Gifford—no point in turning into some kind of zealous lecturing missionary asshole Gifford would tune out anyway—Mutt continued through the cube- farm.

  Dan Kicklighter, the middle-aged editor of PharmaNotes, resembled the captain of a lobster trawler, bearded, burly and generally disheveled, as if continually battling some invisible Perfect Storm. He had worked at a dozen magazines in his career, everything from Atlantic Monthly to Screw. A gambling habit that oscillated from moderate—a dozen scratch-ticket purchases a day—to severe—funding an Atlantic City spree with money the bank rightly regarded as a year’s worth of mortgage payments—had determined the jagged progression of his resumé. Right now, after some serious rehab, he occupied one of the higher posts of his career.

  “Matthew, come in. I just want you to know that I’m going to be away for the next four days. Big industry conference in Boston. With a little detour to Foxwoods Casino on either side. But that’s just between you and me.”