The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  “Ah, the west wind. The gentle one.”

  “It’s just a name. A family name. Everyone in my family is named after a wind, or a creature of the air. My cousins have the names of stars. Some families like forest names.” She assured herself that she was telling him this to encourage the suspicion of his doom, because why would she tell him anything about her life, unless she knew his wouldn’t last much longer?

  Why would she say anything?

  He dealt another card. The jack of spades. “That makes nineteen for you.”

  “I can count.”

  “Will you stay?”

  She glanced at him.

  “Will you hold?” he said. “Or d’you want another card?”

  Her heart beat. Zephyr was surprisingly nervous about the conclusion of a game whose outcome she had already decided didn’t matter. That heartbeat ratcheted into recklessness. “Another.”

  An ace.

  The breath came out of him slowly. “That makes twenty.”

  “I’ll stay.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I bet you will.”

  He dealt himself a king. He paused, lifted one bent wrist to rub it against the buckled scars of his cheek. “Thought there weren’t any of your kind left.”

  “Humans think they know everything. Don’t stall. Deal.”

  He looked at her. “Why do you want a gun?”

  She wasn’t going to answer that. She wasn’t going to explain that while guns existed in her world, they were simple. Not automatic. Guns were useless against creatures that could become incorporeal, and humans didn’t war much with one another when they had a common enemy in the Shades. Zephyr wasn’t going to tell this boy that she would bring his gun back to her Society, for the Council to inspect and decide whether to use.

  Zephyr felt tired, and suddenly disheartened.

  Joe dealt the two of diamonds that had earlier fallen to the ground. “Gotta keep going, I guess.” He flipped a four, but that made only sixteen.

  When the next card came, it seemed as if they’d both been expecting it: the queen of spades. He had gone over, way over, and Zephyr’s legs went watery, like they might melt, and it was relief that she felt, relief that he had lost, because it meant she didn’t have to kill him herself.

  He faced her squarely. “I don’t understand.”

  It took her a moment to realize that he wasn’t talking about the game.

  “I don’t understand why you had to come here, to this club, on this night, to get a gun. There are thousands of guns in this city.”

  Zephyr looked at the black paint of the closed club door. She sighed. “The music.”

  “You can hear music anywhere.”

  “No, you can’t. Not jazz. Not where I come from.”

  Confusion made his face uglier. So did a trace of fear, finally, now that the game was done. For some reason, Zephyr didn’t like to see that.

  “It doesn’t exist,” she said. “Jazz was never invented. And here…the Green Mill has the best jazz. Your employer demands the best.”

  Joe’s expression seemed to crumple.

  Zephyr held out her hand. “Give me the gun.”

  He stepped back. She thought he was going to try to run away. She braced herself for what she would do to stop him. And she would do it, she would. He was only human, and with the life he led he’d die soon enough anyway.

  But he didn’t run. He opened the club door.

  Music floated out. It infused the night, rich as brassy ozone, light as pattering rain. An upright bass plucked throbbing notes, a drummer brushed the cymbal, cartwheeled a stick across his set. Zephyr heard the trumpeter mute his horn, and it all flowed out into the alley, a music made of the unexpected. A loose-limbered sound, one that made a philosophy of choices, highlighting the fact of them by pretending they didn’t exist, by tripping lightly from one rhythm to the next, from key to key, as if nothing was certain, improvisation was everything, and practice was for fools.

  Zephyr knew better. She knew that the musicians practiced for their master. But this was their art: to make their work seem like a game.

  A game in which everything could change.

  Zephyr looked at her hand, reaching for the gun.

  She didn’t want her hand anymore.

  She didn’t want her arm. Or her chopped hair. She didn’t want her eyes and the way they widened to see fresh fear on Joe’s face as he unslung the gun. The stories his grandfather had told him must have been accurate indeed.

  Zephyr watched the gun swing on its strap as if to the music. If left in Joe’s hands, this weapon could kill humans, who knew how many.

  Zephyr told herself that this was why she said what she did.

  “Keep it,” she told Joe.

  Then she did what she was good at. She vanished.

  Copyright (C) 2012 by Marie Rutkoski

  Art copyright (C) 2012 by Victo Ngai

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  The films just started showing up, everywhere, old forgotten silent movies turning to jelly in warehouses all over SoCal: Anaheim, Burbank, Tarzana.

  I got a call from Al at Hannibal Restoration. “They’re mindblowing!” The old hippie.

  Eight reels of a film about Santa Claus from 1909. Filmed in Lapland. And forty reels of a film it says was produced by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In 1911?

  Cinefex sponsored a program at the LA film festival. They

  invited me, of course; Hannibal invited me as well. I gave the second invitation to my friend Amy.

  I don’t know what I was expecting. L. Frank Baum went bust producing Oz movies. They’re terrible and have very silly special effects, but you couldn’t film them now, or even fake them. They just look like they’re from their era, or even maybe from Oz itself, if Oz were poverty-stricken.

  We all sat down. Al’s partner Tony came on and mumbled something through his beard about provenance and how grateful he was to the sponsors, then Hannibal screened the first film about Santa Claus. For all his work, Al only had one reel to show.

  Hannibal had done a beautiful job. The team had remade each frame of film digitally, filling in scratches, covering up dirt, enhancing contrast—sharp, clear, monochrome images. It was like going back in time to see the premiere.

  They had Santa Claus bronco-busting reindeer. Santa was pretty damn robust, a tall rangy guy in a fur-trimmed suit. The reindeer were not studio dummies but huge, rangy antlered beasts. Santa wrestled them to the ground, pulled reins over their heads and then broke them in bareback like it was a rodeo.

  Think Santa Claus western—snow drifts between evergreen trees. Santa chewed tobacco and spat, and hitched up his new team behind a sleigh pulled by even more reindeer.

  The next shot, he’s pulling the team up in front of Santa’s palace, and the only thing it could possibly be is a real multistorey building made entirely from blocks of ice.

  So far, I was saying to myself, OK, they went to Lapland and filmed it almost like a documentary.

  Then he goes inside, and it’s not a painted set, the ice blocks glow like candle wax. Santa finds that the elves have been eating the toys.

  Remember the first time you saw Nosferatu, and the vampire looked like a crossbreed between a human and a rat? Well Santa’s Elves looked like little Nosferatus, only they were three feet high and deranged. One of them was licking a child’s doll between her legs. You could hear the whole audie
nce go Ew!

  Rat teeth stuck out; fingernails curled in lumps like fungus. One of them snarled at Santa, and the old guy cuffed it pretty smartly about its pointed ears, then knocked it to the ground and gave it two smart kicks to the groin.

  Then the reel ended.

  Amy looked at me, her face seesawing between wonder and disgust. “That was a children’s film?”

  The festival director bounced up to a lectern, trying to look spry. He joked about the movie. “It was called The Secret Life of Santa Claus and I think that must be the first X-rated Santa feature.”

  He introduced a representative of the Burroughs family, and a fresh-faced college student hopped up onto the stage. He was, the director said, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s great-grand-nephew. He couldn’t have been older than twenty—sun-streaked hair and baggy trousers that sagged just sufficiently below his underwear line to be cool. He had that Californian polish of sun, wealth, opportunity and honed parenting.

  Appropriate. I knew that everything this guy did would be appropriate. His name was the perfectly appropriate “John Doe Burroughs”, and he made a perfect and predictable speech about how much he admired his famous forebear and how the film had been found inside a family safe.

  “It really had been shut for about ninety years. It was recorded in the erb estate inventory with a request not to try to open it, so we didn’t. Then strangely, the safe appeared to open itself.”

  Oh yeah, sure.

  “And inside were about forty reels of film, in other words about 3 hours’ worth.”

  In 1911? That would make it an epic on the scale of Intolerance, only Intolerance was made in 1916.

  Then my friend Al came up on stage. Soft-spoken, sincere, a fan of old radio shows, a native Angeleno who remembers the Brown Derby restaurant, Al had been my mentor. For a while. Where do nice guys finish?

  He talked for thirty minutes about the restoration. I know, restoring old films is an art, but an art that’s best when it shuts its mouth. It’s like all those dvd extras about costume design.

  Al gave us film history. The producer was Burroughs himself and the director was called Nemo Artrides . . . unknown and probably a pseudonym. The actor, however, was known. He was Herman Blix who stared in one Tarzan film in 1927 and then married Edgar Rice Burroughs’s daughter.

  So what was he doing in 1911? “More questions than answers, but the biggest mystery is the technical achievement of the film itself.” Al, sweet Al, smiled with pleasure.

  From the three hours of film, so far he had twenty minutes to show us.

  The lights went down. Up came the first frame. A black-and-white panel, hand-painted with about ten pieces of information in one screen . . . title, Edison company logo, all in that art nouveau lettering.

  Directed by Nemo Artrides from the histories by Edgar

  Rice Burroughs

  Filmed by permission of the incomparable Jahde Isthor.

  No cast list.

  The first scene looks like what you’d see through a spyglass. There’s a cotton gin, plants and black slaves. The spyglass opens out and we see on opposite sides of a cotton field rows of troops, one side in gray, one in the dark uniform of the Union army.

  “So,” I whispered to Amy. “It is D. W. Griffith.”

  She chuckled. “Ssh.”

  Herman Blix in Confederate uniform rides into shot. He manages to swagger while on horseback. Like old photographs of General Beaufort, he looks crazed, with huge whiskers and a mad stare, and thick, dirty, plastered-down hair. From amid the rows of cotton, a slave stares up at him.

  That’s when I first sat up. There was something in that face. You couldn’t paint it on with makeup; you couldn’t buy it from Hollywood.

  The slave looked as old as the Bible, starved and gnarled. His neck was thin in strands, his chin had no flesh on it; and the skin around his eyes, his cheeks, and even on his nose was crisscrossed with lines of repeated stress cut as deeply as whiplashes. His eyes swam with misery, outrage, a lifetime of abuse.

  In the book, Burroughs bangs on about race. His history of Mars is a history of racial triumph and decline; race explains culture. His hero is a warrior for slavery and an Indian fighter; the opening of the book swiftly combines all of America’s racial catastrophes.

  Our supposed hero raises his sword and strikes the old black man down.

  I sat back in shock. What the hell was that supposed to be? A racist assault? An apology for it?

  There’s a gap, a break I guess, where the film was unsalvageable. Somehow we jump to Mars.

  We see a huge thing with six legs and swivel-eyes hauling Blix by a chain around his neck.

  The brain processes at high speed. Mine said, No. This is never

  1911, this is CGI, now. The glassy frog-eyes turn on stalks; the thing has six perfectly functioning limbs with hands for feet. A Thark, in the books. As I watch, it drops down onto its middle set of legs and starts walking on those as well. The motion is perfect, the design totally disorientating. The thing’s scrawny and bloated at the same time; it moves as tensely as an erect cobra.

  The ground all the way to a near horizon is carpeted with spongy fungus. Herman Blix doesn’t walk across it; he bounces blearily, like he’s on a trampoline.

  He’s stark, bollock naked. Unswervingly naked. You can see he’s circumcised, and even weirder for 1911 Hollywood, his

  pubes are shaved smooth.

  The audience rustled.

  The title panel said:

  No water on a Mars that suffers from climate change.

  Climate change?

  In the low Martian gravity, he does not know his own strength.

  Blix stumbles, fights to regain his balance and springs up into the air, out to the end of his chain, like a guy in weightless simulation. The Thark jerks him back, and he slams down into the moss. He lands badly, rolls, and nurses his knee.

  Distance shot. A caravan lumbers and sways and ripples with a myriad of limbs. It looks like one living thing, a giant centipede. I’d say a hundred extras at least.

  Back to close-up. A Thark rides something that at first is difficult even to see, shapeless and wrinkled. An eyeless, featureless wormlike head splits open, its mouth lipless, like a cut. It seethes forward on what look like thousands of grappling hooks.

  One of the Dead Cities of Mars, says a title.

  The city looks like a chain of deliberately dynamited municipal parking lots, only with statues in the corners and mosques attached.

  “No, no. No, no,” I said aloud.

  This wasn’t a matte painting held in front of an unmoving camera. This wasn’t a miniature. The actors did not troop past some dim rear projection of models. No silvered masked stuffed lizards stood in for monsters like in The Thief of Baghdad. No well-designed full-size dragons moved stiff puppet jaws like in Siegfried.

  An accidentally good set of swivel-eyes I could take. Maybe, like Babylon in Intolerance, they just built the Martian city for real. Maybe they found the young Willis O’Brien to animate the Tharks.

  But not all of it, all at once.

  “This is a fake,” I said deliberately loudly. “No way is this 1911!”

  People chuckled.

  But the thing was, the film didn’t look like Now, either.

  First off, the star really was Herman Blix.

  Herman Blix was twenty-seven in 1927, so he could only have been eleven in 1911. OK, so they got the date of the film wrong. More like 1928 maybe, when he’d already married the boss’s daughter. But Blix didn’t look twenty-eight either. His hair was brushed back, which made him look craggier and older. Older and somehow mummified. Maybe it was all the dry desert air. But in close-ups, there were thousands of tiny wrinkles all over his face. The eyes looked fierce, almost evil, the mouth a thin downward turning line. An
d the eyes. The old film made his eyes, probably blue, look like ice. You could imagine them glowing slightly as if sunlight shone into them.

  And the audience couldn’t stop giggling at his willy. It was a very nice willy, even retracted. But it made the film feel like a silent, slow-motion Flesh Garden.

  “Pre–Hays Code,” Amy murmured, amused.

  Another blip.

  Blix is now wearing a helmet, the hollowed-out head of a Thark. There’s bits hanging down, and speckles of gore on his shoulders, but Blix looks bemused. He starts forward in surprise.

  The silver screen fills with the image of a woman. Her head is lowered. Then suddenly she looks up, jerks in quick time as if the film were speeded up. The audience giggled. But not like they do at Princess Beloved in Intolerance. This was a nervous blurting chuckle. Because one stony stare from that woman and something around your heart stopped.

  The Incomparable Jahde Isthor. said the titles.

  Think Garbo, or Hepburn, but with no makeup. No 1920s bee-stung lips, no ornate metal twirls to cover the nipples. The cheekbones are too high, too large, and the eyes look like a plastic surgeon has pulled them too far back, all the way to the ears.

  THE PRINCESS OF MARS!

  Her tongue flickers like she’s tasting the air. She wears what looks like a cap of snow white feathers.

  The camera pulls back and she’s naked, too, but her pudenda have a fan of white feathers clamped over them.

  Amy giggled. “She looks like a stripper.”

  The Princess sees Herman, and all the feathers on top of her head stand up, like the crest of a cockatoo.

  Jahde Isthor was no kind of actress. She bounced forward, a kind of bunny-hop, and you could see her glance down at the floor.

  She was looking for her mark.

  The hero moves closer to her and bows, but she isn’t looking at him. She’s peering right into the camera, as if wondering what it is.