“Someone want to tell me what’s going on?” I asked.
“I think she’s finally lost it,” Screamer said, shaking his head sadly.
“She’s fantastically beautiful,” Patty said. “More than I even remember.”
I stared at my girlfriend for a moment, realizing she hadn’t been mad at Sherri, she had just been in some sort of fan-girl state with her.
“She’s serious, all right,” Stan said. “And she’s as sharp as she ever was, trust me.”
“So why do you hate her so much?” I asked Stan.
He laughed, softly, something I rarely heard him do. “I don’t hate her. My wife, her sister, thought I fell in love with Sherri and caused all sorts of problems that led to me leaving Helen.”
“You didn’t?” I asked. “Fall in love with Sherri, that is?”
Again Stan just laughed. “I don’t even really know her, to be honest. And Sherri’s been married to Screamer here for a very long time.”
“Over two hundred years,” Screamer said.
“And she left you?” I asked.
“No, I left her,” he said. “When I acquired this new power and could read all her thoughts every time I touched her. Staying together wasn’t fair to either of us until we figured out how to deal with it all. We never got a divorce. It’s been ten years now.”
“So you are still married?” Patty asked, looking at Screamer, who nodded.
“Oh,” was all I could say again. I had been working with this team now for some time and seen the inside of Screamer’s mind more than I wanted to think about, and he had kept all this blocked from me. Clearly he had gotten pretty good at walling off parts of his own thoughts.
“She’s so beautiful,” Patty said, almost sighing. “We have to help her.”
Now both Stan and I were shaking our heads at my girlfriend. Everything was screwy about this assignment and it was making me slightly annoyed. No one was in danger, I wasn’t saving anyone, not even a dog, and I wasn’t playing in a poker tournament. So far all I could see was a complete waste of a perfectly good evening.
Sherri again came back to a place in front of us. “Will you help me?”
“A couple more questions,” I said. “So you need this riddle to find the Janus key?”
She shook her head. “I know where the key is at.”
“So why do you need the lost riddle?” I asked, almost afraid of the answer.
“Stan,” Sherri said, smiling at my boss, “If you wouldn’t mind taking us all out of time for a moment, I’ll answer Poker Boy’s question.”
He shrugged and an instant later the sounds of the casino stopped around us. And so did everyone and everything else.
I loved being able to step between an instant of time. One of my abilities was also to take myself and others out of the natural time flow. But Stan was a ton better at it and wouldn’t have to strain to hold this for hours.
Sherri pointed to a place in the air behind her and an image like a three-dimensional movie appeared.
“That’s new,” Screamer said, looking puzzled.
“Learned it from you, actually,” Sherri said, smiling at her husband. “It’s a projection from my mind.”
“I can’t do that,” Screamer said.
Sherri looked almost longingly at her husband. “We both have our new powers. I would love to talk later.”
I was starting to get the clear understanding that she wasn’t a god, but only a superhero like three of us at the bar. And she was learning new superpowers as she went along just as all superheroes did.
She turned back to the image she was projecting in the air as everyone in the casino remained frozen in their instant of time around us.
The image showed what looked like an old ghost town from a height of about a thousand feet in the air.
“Virginia City,” Sherrie said. “South and slightly east of here.”
The view came down and focused on some old buildings, then flew inside like a bird going through a wall. “Yellow Jacket Mine,” she said. “Part of what most people think of as the Comstock Lode.”
The traveling view of the image floating in the air went straight down, under some water and finally came into a flooded huge cave.
Sherri went on narrating the tour that was coming from her own mind. “The Yellow Jacket Mine broke into this huge cave and couldn’t contain the flooding and had to retreat. No pump could ever clear it. It’s over three thousand feet under Virginia City and the water temperature is over one hundred and fifty degrees.”
At the bottom of the huge cave was a stone stand with a clear glass bubble covering it and protecting what looked like a very old key from the water.
“That’s the second Janus key,” Sherri said, her voice wispy.
“Why couldn’t these stupid keys ever be hidden above ground?” I asked, shaking my head. My warning senses were going off big time just looking at that key so far down underground and underwater.
“So why the lost riddle?” Patty asked, the spell of Sherri’s beauty clearly now broken by the little tour underground.
The image of the submerged cave vanished and Sherri just shrugged. “Not a clue what the riddle does,” she said. “Or even what it is or why it’s lost. I just know it’s attached to this key in some fashion. And we don’t dare touch the key until we understand what the riddle is all about.”
I just shook my head. “This is a very strange hobby you and your sisters have.”
Sherri laughed high and light. “Don’t you think I know that? But after you guys helped my sister get the first one, Mom thinks it would be a good idea to get all four of them and get them really protected. So she’s trying to help us.”
I didn’t want to say that having a key three thousand feet underground in one-hundred-and-sixty degree water wasn’t already pretty protected, but what did I know? Lady Luck thought this was important for some reason. And she was Stan’s boss and Stan was my boss, so by that reasoning I thought this important as well.
Stan let us slip back into the normal stream of time and the noise from the restaurant and distant casino slammed back into use like a tidal wave. And the wonderful smells from the restaurant came back as well, making my stomach rumble again.
“Okay,” I said, trying to grab onto something that made sense in all this. “Tell me when I get this wrong.”
Stan and Patty nodded and Sherri and Screamer just sort of looked at each other.
I ignored them and started trying to check off what I knew. “The four keys each have one side of the face of Janus on them. Right?”
Sherri and Stan both nodded.
“Apart they keep the doors locked, the Titans in the future, and the war between the Gods and the Titans stopped,” Sherri said.
“Got that,” I said. “And no one wants to start that war again.”
“Exactly,” Stan said.
“Does this Janus still exist?”
“No,” Sherri and Stan said at the same time. They clearly did not like that question and I made a note to ask what happened to him at a later date.
“So why would anyone associate a riddle with a key?” I asked. “And then lose all record of the riddle? I’ve only been around this superhero and god world for a short ten or so years and I’ve come to realize that all you folks have very long memories.”
“Good question,” Stan said. “But the battle between the Gods and the Titans was long before any of our times. Long before Atlantis.”
I nodded to that. I still have never asked exactly how many years all this stretched back. Another question for another time in my history lesson.
I leaned back and just stared up at the back bar. No one else said a word and Sherri moved back down the bar to serve another waitress with a tray full of dirty glasses and a long order of fresh drinks.
I tried to ignore my rumbling stomach and my desire for a cinnamon roll and just think.
On the back bar were a number of bottles of Jack Daniels, all with different co
lors and added names on the labels.
There were other bottles of the same brand, but different types back there as well. I stared at that for a moment and then it suddenly hit me what we were dealing with.
Being able to put things that made no sense together to make sense was one of my super powers, it seemed, and if I was right, I had just done it again.
“Stan, could you call Laverne to come and help us?”
He nodded and a moment later, without him moving, Lady Luck appeared, taking the empty stool to my right.
In my fondest dreams as a poker player, it never would have occurred to me that I would be sitting at a bar with Lady Luck herself.
Sherri finished the orders and came down the bar as her mother appeared.
“You want your usual, Mom?” she asked, smiling. Clearly the two of them had a good relationship.
“Later, honey,” Lady Luck said. “First I want to hear what Poker Boy has to say about all this.”
For the first time in a long time I wished I actually drank. I had a hunch I could use one right now. I took a deep breath and turned toward one of the most powerful gods that existed and asked the question I needed to ask.
“Do the keys have names besides one, two, three, and four?”
Lady Luck looked at me for a moment, then laughed and said, “I don’t know, but I know who to ask.”
She vanished.
I decided I could breathe again. It felt good.
I took a sip out of my Virgin Bloody Mary as Patty touched my leg and sent a calming sense through me.
“You think the key might have a name?” Sherri asked, clearly puzzled.
Stan just smiled and Screamer sort of smiled. They had seen me ask these kind of questions before that got right to the heart of a problem.
“Just an idea,” I said.
It seemed like forever, but then suddenly Lady Luck was again sitting at the bar beside me.
And she was laughing.
“The one you all retrieved from the Titan’s city under Vegas was called Mystery. The two that have not been found yet are called Enigma and Dilemma.”
Then Lady Luck smiled at Sherri. “The one you found, dear daughter, is called Riddle.”
Sherri clapped her hands together and did a little dance as she laughed and smiled. “It’s not protected!”
“I’ll get it,” Lady Luck said, smiling at the joy her daughter felt.
She vanished and then a moment later reappeared holding the key that had been under three thousand feet of Earth and very hot water. She wasn’t wet at all.
She started to hand the key to her daughter who held her hands up. “I don’t want to touch it. Just get it safe and sound.”
“I will,” Lady Luck said.
Then she turned to me. “Once again, Poker Boy, thank you. And to your team as well for taking the time to help with this.”
It never got old having Lady Luck thank me for helping her.
Never.
Then Lady Luck looked down the bar at Screamer and smiled. “Talk to your wife. If you two got back together, she’d make a great addition to this team.”
“Mom!” Sherri said, but Lady Luck was already gone.
For the first time Stan really laughed. And hard. And that also was a rare thing as well for the God of Poker.
“Great seeing you again, Sherri,” Stan said. “And listen to your mother. We could use you.” Then he vanished.
Sherri actually blushed.
Patty smiled at Sherri and then at Screamer and touched my leg. “Come on, I’m dressed up and I think I need to do some dancing.”
“Dancing?” I asked, looking at her. In all our time together she had never told me she liked to dance. Ever.
She winked at me and squeezed my leg just a little higher and I got the message. “Oh! Dancing.”
A moment later we were in the living room of her apartment in Las Vegas, leaving Sherri and her husband alone in a crowded casino in Reno.
“Wasn’t she beautiful?” Patty asked as she headed for her bedroom.
“Sherri?” I asked. “She was all right, but not as beautiful as you by a long ways.”
“You sure know how to say the exact right things,” Patty said.
She looked back over her shoulder at me and smiled a “dancing smile” as her dress vanished, leaving her totally naked and me totally speechless.
Introduction to “Shadow Side”
Hugo-winning editor and writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch also has a World Fantasy Award on her shelf and many readers’ choice awards in both mystery and science fiction. She writes light paranormal romance novels under the name Kristine Grayson to escape the darkness of her nearly noir Smokey Dalton series, which she writes as Kris Nelscott.
Kris writes a lot of dark fantasy set in Oregon, usually on the Oregon Coast. But “Shadow Side” takes place in Southern Oregon. “When we attempt to take vacations,” she writes, “Dean and I often go to historic hotels. One of the most frightening and spectacular trips we took was in the mountains near the Oregon Caves. Bats at twilight, a narrow windy road, and a locked hotel remain the most memorable part of that trip for me. So far, that terrifying experience has inspired three novels, and two short stories, including this one.”
Shadow Side
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Halfway up the mountain, Dan Retsler regretted returning to Oregon. He had a perfectly good job in Montana. The small town at the base of the Bitterroots had its own charm, and everyone now knew his name. He’d investigated his share of crime too—real crime, from shoplifting to domestic abuse allegations to more than the usual (to his mind anyway) number of shootings.
Yet, when he’d seen the advertisement for a police chief to handle a small town around the Oregon Caves, he’d jumped at the chance.
The Oregon Caves, he told himself, weren’t the Oregon Coast. He wouldn’t find selkies or ghosts or ugly mermaids or any other kind of fantastic creature that he failed to understand.
Instead, he’d be in the mountains, far from the ocean. Tourists would flock here, sure, but he had grown up in a tourist town. He understood how tourists fit into the local economy, and he knew how Oregon worked.
But as he turned west and south out of Grant’s Pass, heading into the Coastal Mountain Range where the spectacular Oregon Caves threaded for miles, his stomach flipped, his shoulders tightened, and he nearly turned around.
He forced himself to continue by reminding himself that the committee expected him. He’d headed these hiring committees. He knew how much of a problem it caused when an applicant didn’t show, particularly one good enough to warrant an interview.
He owed them that much. Besides, he was nearly there.
The committee set the morning meeting at the Marble Chalet, a place he’d never been to. He’d been to the Lodge at the Oregon Caves dozens of times. The Lodge was part of the National Park Service, and had actually been featured on PBS. His family loved to vacation there when he was a kid.
But everyone ignored the equally historic Marble Chalet. It had been in ruins for decades. In the flush 1990s, an enterprising private company restored it, and applied for a permit from the National Park Service to have a second public opening into the miles-long Oregon Caves complex, the opening easily accessible from the Chalet’s parking area.
The Park Service decided a second opening was a bad idea. Retsler never found out why, but it made the Chalet a second-tier hotel by default.
If he took this job, he wouldn’t work at the Chalet. He’d work in Marble Village, which the enterprising private company had originally built to house its workers, but which had grown like crazy. In the flush years before the century turned, a lot of Californians bought land and built homes here, so the village had more amenities than it deserved—from cell phone towers to high-speed internet. It had also lost a lot of amenities to the Great Recession, like the three-plex movie theater, although the faux vaudeville theater, which played old movies and second (or third)-run fi
lms did enough business to stay alive.
Retsler had found out some of this from a quick internet search. He remembered parts of it from his years living in Oregon, and the rest the town fathers had told him as they tried to entice him up here for the job.
They wanted an Oregonian; they made that clear. They were even happier that he was a native Oregonian, since such creatures were rare. They also wanted someone with experience in tourist areas.
He fit that bill.
He just wasn’t sure about the rest of it.
The road forked outside of Marble Village, with the steeper, more difficult part heading toward the Marble Chalet. The initial signs heading to the Chalet were modern, with lettering that would reflect a car’s headlights. But the closer he got, the signs changed, becoming rustic. Eventually, he realized these were the original signs, built in the 1930s, as the hotel itself got built as a WPA project.
For the first time, he actually felt a thread of excitement at seeing the Chalet.
He parked near the entrance to the lodge. A wide sidewalk led him around the rocks. He stopped, his breath gone.
Flower baskets hung from cut and polished Old Growth logs, harvested before anyone realized the old trees had to be protected. The logs formed the brace for a gigantic canopy that covered the walkway leading into the lodge itself. The rock way, made of cut marble, had to have come out of the Caves—again, before anyone knew this stuff had to be preserved.
The front of the lodge looked Swiss as interpreted by a group of provincial West Coasters who’d never really seen anything outside of the United States. The brown-and-white slats, along with the decorated shutters, seemed authentic enough, but the big logs that formed the foundation of the gigantic building ruined any tiny Swiss intimacy.
The word “Chalet” was wrong too. This wasn’t a tiny house with a steep roof; this was a large resort with hundreds of rooms, surprising in its audacity. He wondered if there had ever been a time when all of these rooms had been occupied.
He doubted it.
The big wooden doors stood open, and he stepped into a large lobby. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimness. More flowers stood on tabletops and along both edges of the reception desk. A single dark-haired woman stood behind it. She smiled when she saw him.
Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds Page 13
