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

by Various

  I went through the pile of papers, mailing what needed mailed and making the calls on Father’s list. I loaded the granite marker he’d kept in the mine all these years onto the wagon and drove it into town. He’d had his name and birthdate carved onto it when he had mother’s made. The rest is up to you, his note told me. And so I dropped it with Anderson, Bauer and Sons’ Stonework, picked it up a week later, and planted it at the head of the fresh grave.

  Drummond Angus Farrelly, it said, along with his dates of birth and death. Public servant, cherished father, beloved husband.

  The government men showed up about a month after, briefcases in hands.

  “Miss Farrelly?” the man in the suit asked when I opened the door.

  “Ms. Sheffleton-Farrelly,” I corrected him. “Melody. Call me Mel.”

  The man looked uncomfortable and his partner looked away, clearing his throat. Their pinstriped trousers and jackets looked out of place here on the edge of the world and I wasn’t sure how they kept their shoes so shiny. “Is there someplace we can talk?”

  I nodded toward my father’s office—a shack near the gated entrance of the mine. I dried my hands and laid my dish towel over a wooden chair. “Across the way,” I said.

  I led us across the hard-packed yard and used the key to open the door. There had been little to do in the office, and I’d spent most of my time here arranging and rearranging the items on his desk.

  I sat behind it now, still feeling dwarfed by its size, and waited until my guests sat. They each placed their cases across their knees and opened them. “First,” the spokesman said as he lifted out an accordion file of papers, “let me say how sorry we all were to hear about Drum’s—your father’s—passing. I worked with him on several procurements and had a lot of respect for him.”

  “Thank you.” My father, in addition to his contract for the mine, had also entered into consulting contracts with the Bureaucracy from time to time, leaving me with either the Gustavsons or the Graves—sometimes for months at a time—to ride east and do his part to help put the world right. I’d always hoped to go with him, but for one reason or another, we never made it happen. But I’d write my stories as if I’d gone, weaving tales of our derring-do and heroics on secret missions for the Bureaucracy.

  “That said,” the government man continued, “there are uncomfortable matters to discuss.”

  I nodded. I knew of at least one matter—the pension. Father thought he’d found a loophole that would allow it to pass to me—something about a Board Order from the past century regarding widows and orphans. But I’d read the order and didn’t think it was likely to work in my case. “The pension, right?”

  He nodded. “Yes. I’m afraid you do not meet the age requirements for survivorship to apply.”

  “Understood,” I said.

  “And then there is the matter of the mining contract.”

  My eyes came up to his. “The mining contract?”

  His smile was apologetic as he drew a letter out of the file. “Unfortunately, amendment six removed the assignment clause from the Bureaucracy’s standard terms and conditions. Which means that with the passing of your father—the contractor in this regard—this contract is null and void. I’ve a letter of cancellation for you, notarized by the Board clerk.”

  I felt anger rising in my face. “Amendment six?” I rolled my chair to the file cabinet to my left and pulled open the second drawer. “When was this amendment issued? I don’t recall seeing it. Do you have an executed copy?”

  He shook his head. “It’s just been issued in the last fortnight. But unfortunately, Mr. Farrelly is no longer in a position to….” Here he cleared his voice and looked away. “To sign it.”

  Red tape. My father had created his share of it in the Bureaucracy’s basement.

  I smiled. “Surely you can re-compete it.” The first ten years, father had operated the mine on a no-bid contract. It was the only operating hope mine in the western provinces and that made it eligible for a sole source exemption. But the last two and a half decades, he’d competed for it. No one else had, so of course he was awarded the contract.

  Red tape.

  The government man shook his head. “We are not going to re-procure in this case, Ms. Sheffleton-Farrelly. As you know, the Drawler threat in the north is taking more and more resources. The Bureaucracy is cutting expenses wherever it can.”

  I leaned forward. “Are you giving up on hope altogether then?”

  “No,” he said. “We’ll fund mining efforts elsewhere—certainly where it makes sense.”

  “Just not here.”

  “Not here,” he agreed. Then, he leaned forward. “Ms. Sheffleton-Farrelly, do you have any idea when the last time was that this mine produced a single flake of hope?”

  I rolled back to the file cabinet, this time opening the top drawer to pull out the production journals. “Late autumn,” I said. “Twenty-six-fifty-three, Year of the Dragon.”

  It was the same year my father had gone to seminary.

  “Eighty years,” the man said. “And thirty-five of them subsidized by tax dollars with nothing to show for it.”

  There was little to say after that. They left me with a stack of papers less than an hour later, climbing into their jeep and driving back to the town’s single inn.

  I went over those papers that afternoon, filing them carefully like he would have, and afterward, I adjusted father’s financial projections less his ongoing pension payments and the contract revenue. I checked his notations in the savings ledger one last time before folding it up and tucking it back into the file cabinet. If I were frugal, I had maybe two years left here. And after that?

  There was a form in the paperwork from the Bureaucracy—an application for the civil service exam with a box already marked and initialed on it, authorizing me to take the test in any satellite branch where it was offered and extending bonus points based on my relationship to one Drummond Angus Farrelly, a decorated procurement officer.

  I filed it separately from the other papers and snuffed out the lamp. I looked over everything, neatly in its place, before locking the office door. After today, I really wasn’t sure when I’d be back.

  Then I went up to father’s grave for the first time since digging it. I sat heavily upon the ground and leaned against his marker. “You were wrong about the pension,” I told him. “The mining contract, too.”

  And in that moment, I was certain I heard his voice. First, he chuckled. Then, he told me what he’d told me so many times before.

  “Being right,” my father reminded me “is not always required.”

  Myth became life. No one really believed in the Santaman until he came with his tattered red robe and his dripping red sword. No one really believed in his undying love until he burst into our direst need to carve us a new home from the bones of the world.

  We looked up at the whistle of his wolf-stallion. “Why do you weep and whimper?” the Santaman asked from the back of his mount.

  “We whimper for the end of our world,” one of us said. “We weep for the fall of the Singing Literocrats and the breaking of the Dragon’s Back.”

  The Santaman grinned and shook his sword. Blood rained down from it, mixing with the ashes. “Weep also for the Sixteen Princes who have failed you.”

  “Why, Lord?” someone asked.

  The Santaman spun his mount. “For I have avenged you in the Name Above All, and they are no more.”

  We did not waver in our weeping. There was no lull in our lament.

  The Coming of the Santaman

  The Santaman Cycle, Authorized Standard Version

  Verity Press, 2453 YD

  In grief, time moves at inconsistent pace and the bereaved adjust and shuffle forward accordingly. I did not return to my father’s grave again for nearly two years, though I watched it often from the kitchen window or from the yard.

  Each month, I hitched the wagon and went into town to resupply. And on each trip, I endured the sym
pathy of the closest thing we had to a community, so far removed from the rest of the world.

  “What will you do now?” was the most popular question, and I never had a real answer. I took their offered condolences and tucked them away. And I watched the numbers on the savings ledger shrink.

  I pulled the pictures from the Cycle and tucked the book away out of sight, moving the photographs into the treasure box I kept beneath my bed. But after that, I left the box where it lay for a long time and let it find its dust.

  I wouldn’t have known the season but for news of the fighting in the north: more Black Drawlers leaking into the world through the ether, moving further south in their hunger. When I knew the day approached, I went into town to collect what jars and cans I could.

  The mercantile even had red paper, and I bought a sheet.

  But as Dragon’s Mass Eve drew near, the knot in my stomach grew tighter and my eyes went more often to the hill. Finally, I surrendered and found the best dress that still fit me and rode into town.

  Father had never taken me to the church for Dragon’s Mass Eve, but we’d visited one Dragonsday for weekly services. On the ride in, I sat beside him on the bench and we talked about what we were going to see.

  “There won’t be many, I’ll wager,” he said. “But there will be some. Parson Brown will pray and Emily Hopewell will play a few hymns on the organ that we will all sing too. Then the parson will preach about the Santaman and take a collection.”

  When we arrived, the parson’s eyes lit up. “Drum Farrelly,” he said, “you’re just about the last person I expected to show up this morning.”

  I remember my father’s strained smile as he shook the parson’s hand. “Melody was curious,” he said.

  I’d seen Parson Brown around town, but never in the dark robes of his priesthood. It made the short, round man look almost comical. He’d shaken my hand, looking up at me with a smile. “Welcome,” he said.

  We took our seat on the back row.

  Then, just as father said, we prayed and sang and listened and sang again, and as we did, father slipped a small wad of the most recently authorized currency into the plate that passed up and down the pews of scattered faithful.

  On the ride home, we’d had our discussion, and father dissected the components of the service.

  “At the end,” I told him, “they prayed for the Santaman’s return. Do they do it every Dragonsday?”

  He nodded. “Some of them do it every day.”

  “Not just on Dragon’s Mass Eve?”

  “No.”

  “But they believe one day it will work?”

  “Yes.”

  “They really really believe?”

  He nodded again. “They really really believe. And I used to, too. Even your mother, in some ways, believed. Only she believed that if there was a Santaman, he expected us to work while we waited and make things as good as we could.” He looked thoughtful for a moment.

  “But we don’t believe now,” I said.

  He smiled at me. “I don’t believe now. Do you?”

  I smiled back. “No, I really don’t. I think…” I tried to find something to hitch my thought to. I remembered the growing stack of bound cardboard covers he kept in the drawer beside his bed, each containing my carefully written pages of our fictional misadventures spread out over a half-dozen Dragon’s Mass Eves. “I think it’s a good story but I don’t think it’s true.” Then, I said what I knew he was going to say next. “But I suppose being true isn’t always required.”

  He smiled. “Exactly so.”

  I blinked tears away at the memory as I turned the corner onto Main Street and saw the brightly lit building that waited.

  Parson Brown stood at the door and smiled at me. “Mel Farrelly,” he said. “You’re just about the last person I expected to show up tonight.”

  I climbed down and hitched my horse. “Happy Dragon’s Mass Eve, Parson,” I said as I took his hand.

  “And to you,” he said.

  The church was full, with men and women crowded onto the pews in their Dragonsday best. I spotted the Gustavsons and the Graces near the middle of the overflowing congregation, and though both families waved me over, I took a spot in the last row in the back corner. My nervous hands picked up the worn hymnal and thumbed through the pages until the parson took to the pulpit and offered the invocation.

  After, there was a small choir that sang a medley of hymns. The room joined in and it was nothing like the scattered voices I’d heard in this very room as a child—it was one voice made of many, booming out into the night in a cry for help that I could nearly give myself over to. But I did not want help from some mysterious red-cloaked and red-bladed avenger. I wanted my father, and the power of that longing flooded my eyes with tears. Still, when we reached “If Dragon’s Mass Eve Be Cold and Clear,” I sang the original words—the writer’s words—and not the softer maybe his hymn had been neutered into.

  “Now tonight,” Parson Brown intoned after the singing, “we have a special treat.”

  My first thought was that he meant to introduce me, point me out to the crowd, and I found myself suddenly wanting to flee. But it didn’t happen. Instead, he nodded to a young man who sat to the side. “Tonight,” Parson Brown said, “Brother Simon will bring the homily. His first sermon, I might add.”

  A wave of murmurs rolled over the congregation and I pressed my mouth together, studying the young man.

  His robes were ill-fitting and his eyebrows and cheekbones bore a hint of the fey. He took the pulpit, thumbing through the leather-bound copy of the Cycle that he carried to it, and he smiled out at us. “Good evening,” he said as Parson Brown took a seat behind him. “Tonight’s message is taken from the Coming of the Santaman, verses one through three.”

  As he read the scripture, I mouthed the words with him. “Myth became life,” he read. “No one really believed in the Santaman until he came with his tattered red robe and his dripping red sword. No one really believed in his undying love until he burst into our direst need to carve us a new home from the bones of the world.”

  Brother Simon closed the book and looked upon us all. When his eyes moved over the back pew, they met mine and I felt the measurement in his level gaze. “I submit to you, brothers and sisters, that like those before us, we do not really believe in the Santaman.”

  From there, he launched into his sermon and I found his words fading and blurring, taking a seat behind him like the parson, as he filled the room with his presence. His hands moved like a magician, illustrating this or that point, indicating this or that observation, as he moved across the platform. His voice was hypnotic, rising and falling in passion and pitch and his eyes continued wandering the crowded room, finding mine on more than one occasion. Those eyes, I knew, were unsafe. They held too many contradicting views—hope and fear, anger and grace, and something more I’d never been comfortable with: conviction.

  When he finished, he sat down abruptly and Parson Brown took over. After singing “The Santman Shall Rise Again” as the plate migrated up and down the rows, he dismissed us to the fellowship hall for cookies and tea.

  I was moving toward the door when Brother Simon caught up to me and shook my hand. The hand was rough and calloused; it caught me off guard. “You’re not leaving are you?”

  I blushed and stammered but didn’t know why. “I have…things to do.”

  “Come have a cookie at least.” Then, as an afterthought: “I’m Simon by the way.” And somehow, the voice compelled me and I let him guide me by the elbow into the fellowship hall before he vanished into the crowd.

  A cup of tea was pushed into one of my hands, a molasses cookie into the other, and I blessed both because it meant I need not shake any more hands.

  I stood quietly in the corner and suffered the kindness and curiosity of a town that had seen little of me and little of my father before me.

  I’d finished the tea and moved for the door when the parson came by with the young
man in tow. “And this,” he said, “is Melody Farrelly. She owns the old hope mine out past the Gustavson’s farm.”

  “We’ve met,” I said and forced a smile. But I shook his offered hand again, noticing once more how rough it was.

  “Brother Simon is our new acolyte. He’s in his last year at the Middleton Seminary. I expect he’ll be taking my place when I retire next year.” He turned to the young man. “Melody’s father, Drummond, spent a year at Middleton.”

  His face lit up. “Is he here with you?”

  I looked away. “He passed away last Dragon’s Mass Eve.”

  The light dimmed and his smile faded. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask,” the Parson said. “Do you know what you will do now? Will you sell the mine?”

  I shrugged. “It hasn’t produced in over eighty years. Not much demand for a hope mine without hope.”

  And then, the conversation folded in on itself and the two of them moved on. I excused myself and slipped out under a cloudy night to find my horse.

  I rode home and tried to eat at least some of the fruit salad I’d made earlier that day. It tasted empty without my father. And I knew better than to recite the Cycle. Instead, I braved his room—something I rarely brought myself to do—and curled up on his large bed. Then, I pulled open the drawer and pulled out the stack of stories I’d written for him through the years.

  As I read them, I found myself laughing and crying and when I felt sleep pulling at me, I gathered them up and took them to my own room. I pulled out the cardboard box beneath my bed and laid them carefully in it.

  My eyes caught the wadded up piece of paper I’d also tucked into the box and I forced them away. That ball of paper was the first to go into my treasure box though I couldn’t bring myself to open it up and smooth it out. It made me too angry and too afraid.

  But now, a strange fancy struck me and I lifted it carefully as a butterfly from a flower. I sat on my bed and held it, remembering my last conversation with my father. Then, I smoothed it out upon my lap.