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

by Various

  “Oh, shit,” Lane realizes. “I know where he is.”

  * * *

  It takes almost an hour of speed walking before they get to the ninth arrondissement, curled up at the foot of the monstrous hill leading to Montmartre. Lane hates this part of Paris more than ever, and not just because random English fops keep trying to offer Eugenie money for sex; it would be offensive if it wasn’t so funny, and he wasn’t so exhausted from half running across the city, dodging horses and hobos every step of the way.

  “Are you sure Edison’s going to be here?” Eugenie asks, bent over with her hands on her knees, red cheeked and breathless. It’s fetching, and Lane can’t really blame the milquetoast trickle of attempted johns that keep hitting on her, given both her flush and the provoking nature of her uncovered ankles.

  “Pretty sure,” Lane says grimly, and snatches her hand, hauling her up. “Come on.”

  “Now I hate this kid,” she tells him earnestly as they head down the Boulevard de Clichy.

  Lane can already see the lit-up windmill spinning in the distance, and they can track how close they are to the Moulin Rouge by how weird the prostitutes get. By the time they can hear the cabaret music through the streets, Eugenie’s bare legs are too commonplace to garner much attention. That’s nice for her, but only prompts Lane to start having horrible mental images of poor dumb Edison getting sold for parts in the worst corners of Pigalle.

  The crowd around the place is impossible: an enormous jumble of absinthe-addled writers and painters and aristocrats and floozies of all orders rubbing delirious elbows. There’s a person—gender unclear—sporting a fantastically ornamented hat, riling up the crowd and waving expansive arms toward the entrance, calling all comers.

  Lane feels Eugenie sliding her arm through his, pulling him tight along her side as she frowns into the rabble. The warm curve of her breast along his elbow is distracting enough that Lane has to clear his throat three times and shout over the noise: “I say we just leave him. There’s no way we’re finding him in this mess.”

  She shoves at him, playful, and when she tilts her head to the side, smiling up at him with a sparkle in her eyes, Lane feels his knees go a little weak.

  She says, “If he’s here, I’ve got a hunch where he might be.”

  Weak-kneed or not, Lane still has the fortitude to narrow his eyes. “And where would this be?”

  Eugenie’s grin just gets wider. “Come on—it’s out back.”

  Getting there is easier said than done, and along the way there’s a lot of sneaking past guards and trying to look like they belong, which is hard to pull off in dark jeans and gray Chucks, clothes and looks out of time. It also doesn’t help that, apparently, Edward VII is here, contributing a great deal to the overexcitement and the excessive numbers of people and shoving, everyone gasping with curiosity over the Prince of Wales, come to France to see the infamous quadrille.

  Lane ends up using the last of the money to buy tickets to the show, which—unsurprisingly—has far stricter security than the circus, and they stagger in after a bevy of women in floor-length gowns and their gentlemen squires.

  Through the simultaneous blessing and curse that is Lane’s incredibly stupid job, he’s witnessed something like fifteen adorations of the magi, an annoying number of Rococo sexual shenanigans, apocalyptic depictions of the flood and the Earth splitting open, and one horrible run-in with a Salvador Dalí that doesn’t bear repeating.

  But he still feels a little overwhelmed when he looks up and sees the opening number of that night’s cabaret act: the row of heaving bosoms and curvy legs, smoky eyes and smiles. He’s only human.

  Eugenie, bless her, gives him about three minutes to gape at the display—and it is definitely a display—before she slaps him upside the head and drags him away.

  Her hunch turns out to be for the massive stucco elephant just casually lounging in the garden behind the Moulin Rouge, watchful next to a pavilion overflowing with its own set of dancers. He has a curled-in trunk and a long-suffering expression on his wrinkled face, watching over the crowded tables of patrons in the cool October night.

  “This is going to end badly,” Lane says.

  “It’s gentlemen only,” Eugenie explains, giving him a little shove toward the people gathered at the elephant’s knobby knees. She smiles at him. “I’ll wait here.”

  “This is going to end really badly,” Lane revises.

  Fifteen minutes, a lot of fast talking with the elephant guards, and the discovery that Eugenie can cry on cue convincingly later, Lane says, “I’m psychic,” because he finds the kid, but finds him in the belly of the elephant, drunk and watching a private burlesque show with the future King of England. In shambles around them are a number of empty champagne bottles, some firecrackers, two men in suits passed out on a bench, and a dwarf in a ball gown.

  “Edison,” Lane snarls, grabbing the kid by the back of his collar and nearly overturning a table of champagne glasses, fizzing merrily away, “you’re dead.”

  “Another American!” Edward VII declares, almost as red-faced as Edison. “There’s no rush, you may join us as well! The madam is merely changing costumes!”

  Edison, huge eyed, stares at Lane. “She said she’s coming back with a snake,” he murmurs reverently.

  “Alexander James Edison,” Lane tells him seriously, “forget the snake. It’s going to be a miracle if I don’t drown you in the Seine on our way back.”

  * * *

  The kid almost skids down the elephant’s staircase three times, and Eugenie’s first reaction when they reach the ground is to seize Edison with operatic maternal joy, yelling something crazy sounding in French and squeezing out a few more alligator tears. Lane is never falling for her “I’m just so tired and frustrated will you please move all this heavy stuff for me while I cry pitifully” act again.

  “Who—?” the kid asks, muffled through Eugenie’s shoulder while the elephant guards look on approvingly at the reunion.

  “For the purposes of this lie, she’s your mom,” Lane says. “Be convincing.”

  Thankfully, squirming out of Eugenie’s grasp is totally convincing behavior for a kid his age. The guards just laugh and allow her to pepper them with grateful kisses on the cheeks, thus underlining yet another reason Lane hates this job and wants to be back on the other side of the painting, where Eugenie doesn’t pepper anybody with kisses while he’s forced to watch bitterly.

  Lane checks his watch instead of watching this foolishness and winces. It’s been five hours since they climbed into the painting, now past closing time at the museum and past the point of smoothing this over with parents as a case of a wayward student gone lost in the guts of the Met. He’s already entertaining visions of lawyers and furious parents parked in front of Le Cirque, inconsolable, the minute they climb out the other side.

  “Is it bad?” Eugenie asks, untangling herself from the guards.

  “About five hours,” Lane says, and glares at the kid. “Your parents are going to have you murdered, buddy.”

  “I thought you were going to drown me in the Seine,” Edison says, snotty.

  “Parents have ways,” Eugenie assures him, and peers into the kid’s eyes with a thoughtful expression that melts into one of horrified amusement in under a minute. Whirling around to Lane, she gasps, “Is he drunk?”

  Lane covers his face instead of answering.

  “There was this cancan dancer,” Edison says reasonably, “and when she saw Eddie—”

  Eugenie frowns. “Eddie?”

  “Edward VII,” Lane elaborates. “Prince of Wales.”

  Now it’s Eugenie’s turn to cover her face.

  “—she yelled, ‘Champagne’s on you, Wales!’” Edison concludes.

  Recovering, Eugenie grabs Edison by the collar—woman after his heart, truly, Lane reflected—and starts to march him out of the Moulin Rouge garden, leaving a wake of curious bystanders as they go. “Unbelievable,” she mutters. “How did you get in here
, anyway?”

  Edison shrugs, unrepentant, and waves at a trio of dancers as they alight the pavilion stage in a flurry of corsets and frills. “I’m short. I just snuck in.”

  “There is no way you just snuck into the elephant,” Lane protests, and Edison’s response is to look a tiny bit sheepish.

  Eugenie frowns down at the kid. “Oh, that one I know. Apparently he told the guards he was part of a midget performing troupe.”

  Lane stares at Edison, who stares back for a long time before saying: “What? It worked, didn’t it?”

  “You’re in for a life of crime, aren’t you?” Lane asks, reluctantly impressed. “Ten years from now, when I see your face on the ten o’clock news, I’m going to tell people I had to drag your skinny tail out of an elephant back when you were still in school.”

  Mulish, Edison ripostes, “That assumes I get caught.”

  “All right, Al Capone,” Eugenie says pleasantly, hustling him along the wall and toward the exit to the street, “let’s just get home first and you can plot your brilliant career as a criminal mastermind during the small eternity you’re going to be grounded.”

  It takes them almost fifteen minutes to shove their way past the crowd and back onto the street, where Edison takes a few minutes to wave fond goodbyes to the barely clothed members of the revue to whom his brief career as a fake dwarf had bound him in eternal friendship. Lane has a sudden, terrible certainty that this little bastard is going to be a repeat offender and that no painting in the Impressionist gallery is going to be safe from his greasy preteen hands.

  “What the hell were you thinking, anyway?” Lane finds himself asking, once the crowds thin out and they’re walking down now thinly populated streets, meandering back toward the circus in the park. “Most people fall through a painting, they freak out, they try to find a way to climb back out.”

  About half of them are successful, too, which is good because it spares Lane the trouble of going to fetch them, but bad because then he has to spend ages carefully cutting security footage so that when the inevitable inquiry gets raised with the board of directors, the staff have something to point at while looking innocent.

  Still firmly in Eugenie’s grasp, Edison shudders. “Clowns,” he whispers.

  Lane can’t help but think, fair enough, at that.

  “And then, what, once you were out of the tent you decided you needed a few miles of clearance between you and the clowns?” Eugenie asks, because as far as Lane has been able to figure in the years he’s known her, Eugenie is scared of the peer-review process, pigeons, and almost nothing else.

  “Well then I figured if I was already outside I should go check out the Moulin Rouge,” Edison argued, stumbling a little over the edge of a curb and swaying for balance. “My sister’s made me watch that movie, like, a hundred times.”

  Lane remembers Edison’s starry eyes in the elephant boudoir.

  “Oh, I’m sure she ‘made you,’ all right,” he says, and motions for them all to hang a left, down a long, sloping street and back south beyond Pigalle into the city center.

  It’s an unseasonably warm night, and even if they’re running late, the rest of it looks like it may actually be smooth sailing now that they’ve located the kid. The skies are a soft velvet blue, the wind is blowing Eugenie’s hair away from the pale curve of her neck, whipping up the hem of her skirt, and she’s examining every street and passerby with that hungry, interested look that makes him listen to her talk about painting on ungessoed canvas and take her introductory museum walking tours over and over again.

  Lane thinks that this would be the perfect moment to say something, to loop around to Eugenie’s free hand and slide his fingers between hers again. To smile down at her and make her explain Rembrandt to him.

  Edison—who is a life ruiner—thinks this is a perfect time to say: “I don’t feel so good.”

  * * *

  He doesn’t. He feels so bad in fact that they end up stopping all over the place to let him hurl: in a bush, in a gutter, in the part of the Seine that Lane had been looking forward to drowning the kid in. The last round, they’re finally at the park, which is good since Edison manages to nail Eugenie’s shoes, and at least at the park there’s grass to walk on.

  “You shouldn’t walk barefoot outside, there’s probably crack needles,” Edison moans, lying down and using his school blazer as a pillow, releasing intermittent, feeble noises.

  “You should consider that next time you decide to get hammered inside a painting you aren’t supposed to be touching and throw up on my shoes,” Eugenie replies, almost pleasant, and doesn’t look up from where she’s resorted to playing Fruit Ninja on her smartphone until the kid sobers up enough that they can flip him through the frame into the museum again.

  “Plus, I think this is a pre-crack-needle era,” Lane adds.

  Sighing, Eugenie asks, “How much longer, do you think?”

  Lane leans over Edison’s miserable face. “Think you can stand up straight?”

  “Why do adults drink?” the kid moans in answer. “This is terrible.”

  “Maybe another fifteen minutes,” Lane tells Eugenie.

  “Or you can just leave me here to die,” Edison suggests.

  “So tempting,” Lane says, and goes back to his own phone.

  Actually, it’s another thirty minutes before they can compel Edison to stand on his own steam, and even then he’s whiny and sullen and not at all happy about having to tramp back through the circus tent and brave the potential presence of clowns.

  “This is not cool,” he complains, clinging to Eugenie like a limpet, burying his flushed face in her side. “This is leaving me scarred for life.”

  Seriously, there’s precocious and then there’s this little bastard.

  Thankfully, Eugenie’s not having any of it.

  “You?” she scoffs. “Hey, kid, which one of us is walking through a circus from 120 years ago barefoot with a pukey child felon here?”

  She’s similarly unsympathetic when they have to sneak into the tent—all the other patrons gone by this point in the night—and find their way to the tape mark, still suspended in an unassuming corner at the far end, away from the risers and the ring.

  Lane reaches for the tape, shaping out the edge of the frame and pressing his hand through experimentally to feel the cool air of the museum on the other side, relief pouring through him like cold water in his veins to know they’re not stuck.

  “We’re good,” he says, trying to keep the shakes out of his voice. “Come here, kid—let’s get you through first.”

  Edison just stares at the empty space in front of them, suddenly wary when he’d been fearless about traipsing through Paris, smuggling himself into the Moulin Rouge, and being a generally mouthy irritation all night. He’s quiet for a long time before saying: “I’m in huge trouble, aren’t I?”

  “Why do you think you’re going back in first?” Lane asks, grabs Edison, and shoves him back through the frame.

  * * *

  All told, between the crying, the recriminations, the bawling out Lane gets from the head of museum security, the multipage nondisclosure agreements everybody has to sign and have emergency notarized, it’s almost midnight before Edison and his furious parents clear out. Lane makes a note to distribute the kid’s picture to every docent and the entire security staff first thing the next morning.

  And then it’s quiet: the easy, comfortable kind, with the distant sound of the night watchmen walking the medieval gallery and the sculpture court, the labyrinth of rooms that make up the European painting collection. Lane has his coat on and his messenger bag slung over a shoulder, and no idea why he ends up back in the Impressionist gallery except that Eugenie went missing five minutes after they’d swanned back into the museum and he thinks he already misses her in some obscure way.

  He’s staring into the luminous evening of Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose when he hears Eugenie say: “This has always been one of my favorites
in the museum, you know.”

  Lane looks over his shoulder to see her standing there in her dusty cardigan and bare feet, toenails painted the same neon blue as her panties, smiling at him.

  “This?” he asks, pointing at one of the soft orange-pink lanterns, lit up from within. “Compared with all the other pictures here?”

  Eugenie tilts her head to the side, looking past Lane to the painting. “Something about the color of the light,” she murmurs, and slanting her eyes toward him, she asks, “It’s funny—why haven’t we ever done it?”

  Lane almost swallows his tongue. “Excuse me?”

  “Go explore,” Eugenie says, either exquisite in her obliviousness or an exquisite tease. She takes three steps closer, reaches out to the gilded frame of the painting, running her fingers along the whorls and flourishes. “With all the pictures we’ve been in and all the times we’ve had to go to that horrible circus—how come we never thought to do it?”

  He holds his bag in front of himself, flustered. “Because we’re adults? Because we have impulse control?”

  This time, Eugenie turns so that her grin hits his full force, fingers lingering on the DO NOT TOUCH plaque inscribed on the frame.

  “Not that much impulse control,” she says.

  Lane feels a little light-headed. “Are—are you serious?”

  Her smile gets wider, and she curls a hand around the frame. “Come on,” she whispers.

  “You don’t have any shoes,” Lane protests, but he’s already reaching for her, lacing his fingers with hers the way he wanted to in Paris, in a way that’s different than when they’d been running across the city.

  Eugenie laughs and tugs him closer, saying, “It’s summer. It’s a field of wildflowers along the Thames, and we aren’t going to need shoes for what I have planned,” before she presses a palm to the canvas and they’re swept away.

  Copyright (C) 2013 by Prudence Shen

  Art copyright (C) 2013 by Faith Erin Hicks (illustration) and Noreen Rana (color)

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