He drew a deep breath.
—his was the power.
He had made the Tyrant real. They had both killed him, but he had made the Tyrant real.
He had no fire, no ingredients with which to build a new spell. But this was the place of power, the Tyrant’s tower, the hinge-point of the keep, and it was now also a place of sacrifice.
Let the sacrifice be not in vain, said the Lady of Fountains.
Use it, said the Cellarer. It’s there, for good or ill. Use it to do what needs to be done.
Claude, bowed beneath the weight of his responsibilities, knelt at the corpse’s side and began to summon the keep.
“Did you guys manage to get yourselves some lunch? I’m sorry I was so late with the groceries. Annie asked for a lift to town and we ended up having lunch together after her appointment. Did you get some of the zucchini loaf out of the freezer? I hope? Please eat the zucchini loaf. If it’s not gone by next June I may actually have to kill myself. You can build my tomb out of zucchini-loaf bricks. Sorry, morbid humor. Are you okay, Paul? You’re looking kind of rough. What were you guys up to today? Out before breakfast. Did you even eat before you . . . Paul, are you crying? What’s wrong? Did you have a fight? Is that why Claude’s in hiding? Paul. Stop crying. Tell me what happened. Paul, talk to me. Where’s your brother? Where’s Claude?”
He built the keep stone by stone.
He began with the places he knew well: the Cellarer’s door, the laundry and the Wellhouse, the kitchen with its massive hearths. He built the walls along the line of the surrounding hills, and he built the single gate with its gatehouse that rested where the farmhouse stood in his mother’s world. He built the stables, the armory, the many shrines. He built the clerics’ studies and the chatelaine’s offices and the ladies’ solar, but there were no clerics scratching with their pens, no chatelaine jingling her keys, no ladies toying with their jewels and their little dogs. There were no little dogs and no hounds in the kennels; no horses in the stables; no hawks in the mews. No cats in the sunlight; no rats in the cellars; no mice in the walls. No soldiers, no servants; no ambassadors or slaves. But the baileys stood cobbled and sodded within the massive bulk of the keep. The keep stood, thick-walled and many-roofed, riddled with secret passages and cellars tunneling away into an abyss even the Cellarer could not plumb. And at last, but also first and always, the tower stood, the castle rock that was the foundation for all the rest. A great, massy tower, though not so tall as it seemed with the Tyrant’s arrogance stealing the light from the sky. This was the tower as it should have been, as it was once and as it will be now the Tyrant is dead, and at its base, deep in the earth, lies the keep’s crypt. Claude built the long winding stairway, stone by stone, and when it was done, every step solid in his mind, he began to drag the Tyrant’s corpse down from the tower’s peak.
Step by step. Stone by stone.
It was dark as night inside, but that didn’t matter. He had it all in his mind.
They were out until long after dark, Paul and his mother, calling Claude’s name and shining their flashlights into the trees. The woods weren’t so thick in the daytime, but everywhere you shone your light there was a tree, and where there was a tree you couldn’t see beyond. Claude! A frightened grouse exploded like a bomb in the bushes, sounding like an entire flock as it made its escape. Claude!
They found the camp he’d made, with the tarp and the blackened fire pit. That would be reassuring, their mother said, if he were actually here. But he wasn’t, just the tarp and a few unburned sticks. This was where he had made it, Paul knew. This was where he had made the Tyrant—I made him real—no. No. This was where he plotted the last play in the game.
Were you fighting?
No.
Oh, come on, Paul, look at you. Look at your hands.
We weren’t.
What?
We weren’t fighting. We were just . . . playing.
Playing. Playing with what?
He always wanted to play the same stupid game.
What game?
You know. He felt like he was lying. He had never known the truth could be a lie. The game we used to play as kids.
But what happened? Christ, Paul, what do you think I’m going to do to you? I just want to know where my son is!
As if, at that moment, she had only one. As if she had only the one who was not there.
I don’t know where he is. I went one way and he went the other. That’s all I know!
In the morning she called the Search and Rescue team.
He dug the grave with a shard of rock and his hands.
There was nothing else, and that was right. It was real magic he was doing here—not evil magic, though it was bloody and dark. This burial at the tower’s heart was the true end, the only proper kind of end, which is also a beginning. He was setting a foundation stone; he was planting a seed. He dug the grave with his hands in the hard, stony earth, shedding blood into the dirt where it would mingle with the Tyrant’s, and that, too, was right. It was his own power he was burying here; his spell. He shed sweat into the tower’s foundations, and tears. He vomited a thin acrid bile of remorse and fear. And it was all right, it was right, this is what magic is.
The Cellarer told him so, and the Lady did not disagree.
They searched all the next day, all the day after that. Paul clung to his mother’s side until she chased him away like a stray dog; then he walked in the line where the experienced searchers told him to walk. They had a helicopter out, flying over the sparsely wooded hills. They had dogs, trained animals and neighbor’s pets who counted the twins as friends. Paul walked along the bank of the stream that ran down the west side of the valley, knowing with a knot of guilt in his gut that as soon as the searchers climbed the castle rock they would find—
But he wasn’t there. Claude. He wasn’t where Paul had left him. The searchers said so, and they had climbed to the top, looked all around.
Paul couldn’t believe it. He didn’t believe it, and on the third evening he went up the valley himself, exhausted and sick with shame. He had fought with his mother. She wasn’t speaking to him. She wasn’t speaking to anyone, just looking, looking, looking, and calling Claude’s name until she was as hoarse as a crow. So when the rest of the searchers were giving up for the day—night was falling and a wintry cold seemed to be pouring down from the deep blue spaces between the stars—he went back up the valley and climbed castle rock in the dark. Claude was there, as Paul had known he would be, sitting in a litter of dead leaves and smashed plaster and pages torn from a book. When Paul reached the top of the rock Claude looked up, and for a long time they just stared at each other in the last of the daylight. Claude was filthy, bloody, smelling of piss. He looked strangely old, as if the three days had been three years in a fairy hill. He did not speak. They had once been able to read each other’s minds, but Paul could not guess what Claude saw when he looked at him. Paul found it harder and harder to meet his eyes and finally he had to look away.
But he was still strong enough to pull his brother up and help him down to level ground.
Story Notes
Three Days of Rain
I wrote “Three Days” as a tribute to one of the greatest American short story writers, Ray Bradbury. His stories are so often about people trembling on the edge of some great beginning or ending in their lives, and are so full of the power of nostalgia, of the human need to cling to the idea of Home even in the strangest lands, even at the end of the world. Also, and not coincidentally, it typically takes me three days to write the first draft of a short story.
Of course, there is also a certain amount of ecological despair at the story’s heart. If you’ve ever flown into Phoenix, Arizona, and seen all the lawns and golf courses and swimming pools shining under the desert sun . . .
Cold Water Survival
For the longest time “Cold Water Survival” was a title in search of a story. Then the fabulous Ellen Datlow asked me to write someth
ing for her Lovecraft tribute anthology. My favorite Lovecraft story is probably “Shadow over Innsmouth,” but I had recently seen Werner Herzog’s great Antarctic documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, and the breaking up of the massive southern ice sheets was very much on my mind. So “At the Mountains of Madness” became my inspiration, and the story was born.
By the way, I went in with the firm intention to disallow all tentacular activity, but by the end the sneaky little bastards had crept in, in spite of everything I could do.
Brother of the Moon
Yet another story that arises from my fascination with 20th -century history. This one comes from the collapse of the USSR and its satellites. Originally I meant to write about a mercenary company that takes over a country with the attitude that they cannot possibly do a worse job than any of their employers, but then I caught sight of the relationship between our hero and his sister, and the plangent tone of love and loss took hold. Weirdly, considering the undercurrents of war, incest, and suicide, I think it’s one of my sweeter stories, with a rare happy ending.
The Rescue
In the USSR and elsewhere, political dissidents, and especially the rebellious children of the powerful, were sometimes sent to mental hospitals to be tortured in the name of re-education. The people who did this were morally insane. Hence the story.
I have to say, I think it’s one of the tightest, creepiest, most psychologically subtle pieces I’ve ever done, and I love the way the haunting keeps almost to the background until the end. I take no credit for any of that, by the way. This is one of those stories that just used me as an intermediary to get itself down on the page.
Country Mothers’ Sons
I was offered a commission to write a werewolf story, and I was so happy to be asked that I accepted without much thought. Sure, I’d love to! was swiftly followed, however, by, Oh crap, now what do I do? As far as I can remember, my original idea was to write about the crazy guy who lived in the woods outside a neighboring town. How I got from there to a widow in post-WWII Europe I’m not entirely sure, but I like the way her narrative slowly fills in what she doesn’t want to say out loud, even to herself. It’s a fairly self-conscious literary story, and I’m not sure how well it fitted into the anthology it was commissioned for. I’m very fond of it, though. I love the image of the pigeons on the rooftops worshipping the moon.
Proving the Rule
This novella was one of my very first commissions, for an anthology about wizards, and as with “Country Mothers” I had blithely accepted before it occurred to me how seldom I write about conventional magic-user types. In my stories, magic tends to be what happens to my characters, not what they do. So I had to think for a while before I came up with an angle on the idea that I liked, and then it took me a few false starts before I hit upon the early Electric Era setting. That was what really brought the story to life—that, and the image of Graham waiting for Lucy in the pub, so grudgingly in love.
Virgin of the Sands
“Virgin” was more consciously inspired by other people’s fiction than most of my stuff. Olivia Manning’s Levant Trilogy and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient both lent me images and ideas; and the latter, particularly, suggested a sensuality, and a sexuality, that is rather unusual in my writing. I was surprised, though, when the story was picked by two different erotica anthologies. To me it’s a horror story—very much a horror story—about the dehumanizing aspects of war.
Gin
For my excellent mother’s sake I should say that “Gin” does not arise from my personal experience. I think the story really came from the sense I had as a child, of glimpsing the strange inner lives of other children’s families. Certainly the setting is drawn from the neighborhoods I lived in back then: the closed-in house with the dried-out lawn, silence on the outside hinting at the desperation within. The drawer full of broken dishes came from a dream. The mattress full of maggots was a waking inspiration. It still makes me shudder.
Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom
This must be the single most intimate story I’ve ever written. At its heart lies a deep conflict I carry within me, between my very pragmatic and skeptical self who keeps the difference between fantasy and reality extremely clear, and the self who lives in and by my imagination. But what really inspired me—or at least, what energized me—to write “Queen” was the purchase of a very expensive bodhran that I could not afford. I keenly remember walking down an icy street in Ottawa in January, the sun blazing out after an ice storm, the wind blowing skaters down the Rideau Canal, and the whole story, beginning to end, hitting me with such force that I skidded into the nearest café, drum and all, and wrote down the first couple of scenes.
The Long, Cold Goodbye
This is one of my very favorite stories. I loved writing about all that cold. I wrote the story in June, and I can remember looking up from the computer and being thoroughly disoriented by the green grass and flowers outside my window. But it is the tenderness at the heart of the story, and the bittersweet sense of the friendship that should have been a love affair, that makes it live for me.
Mind you, if it unsettles anyone who lives, as I do, on land stolen from indigenous peoples by false or broken treaties, then that’s definitely a bonus.
Castle Rock
I went to high school with two sets of twins. One pair, identical boys, seemed entirely happy with their lot, but the other pair, a brother and sister, were cruelly divided by her congenital bone ailment. The brother-twin seemed to live under a perpetual shadow of guilt. I think those two pairs became a kind of template for me: the doubled self, and the doubled self divided. Add a wary fascination with the cloudy boundary between imagination and delusion, and voila: Castle Rock.
Publication History
“Three Days of Rain” © 2007 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in Asimov’s.
“Cold Water Survival” © 2009 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in Asimov’s.
“Brother of the Moon” © 2007 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in Fantasy.
“The Rescue” © 2010 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in Postscripts.
“Country Mothers’ Sons” © 2010 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in Full Moon City.
“Proving the Rule” © 2008 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in Book of Wizards.
“Virgin of the Sands” © 2006 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in Lust for Life.
“Gin” © 2006 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in Eidolon.
“Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom” © 2007 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in Interfictions.
“The Long, Cold Goodbye” © 2009 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in Asimov’s.
“Castle Rock” is original to this collection.
About the Author
Holly Phillips is the author of the novels The Burning Girl and The Engine’s Child. She is also the author of many short stories, many of which have been collected in her World Fantasy Award-nominated collection, In the Palace of Repose, and have appeared in such magazines as Asimov’s, Fantasy, Clarkesworld, Weird Tales, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, On Spec, and anthologies such as Full Moon City, Interfictions, Shine, and Lovecraft Unbound.
OTHER BOOKS BY HOLLY PHILLIPS
In the Palace of Repose
The Burning Girl
The Engine’s Child
At the Edge of Waking Page 27
