The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Three

by Jonathan Strahan

  I carried those words around with me for days, shivering with pleasure when I replayed them in my head. The magician believed I was like him. He believed I would be great, like him. I would be nothing like the person I'd thought I was.

  My first task was to connect two places that had yet to be connected. I couldn't feel the earth through the wheels of my car, so I went for walks. I quickly discovered, to my dismay, that most places were already connected in the suburbs, albeit in terrible ways. Thoughtless roads linked houses to strip malls, churches, synagogues, schools. Trees clung for dear life to other trees by the roads of their roots. Animals left roads with their scents, roads that faded over time, but provided all the connecting they needed. I could connect houses to other houses, but people put up wardings to frustrate me: wooden fences, electric fences, stakes marking exactly where their property ended, even in the middle of the woods.

  I explained these problems to the magician, and he laughed at me. "You're being very literal," he said, like it was cute.

  I walked on the cul-de-sacs and main roads and driveways and unfinished dirt tracks in the development the magician and I shared, feeling the way the earth groaned and strained against the ill-placed swaths of asphalt. The people who didn't drive around the neighborhood—children—zigzagged in all directions, flying past property markers, hopping fences (much to the consternation of family dogs), and avoiding the roads whenever possible. The only things that hemmed them in were the big busy roads that surrounded the development, when clearly all they wanted was to run, on and on and on.

  A four-lane road separated us from a farm that sold ice cream. Children crashed against the barrier like waves on a cliff, looking longingly at the freshly plowed cornfields and dairy cows and signs announcing Cho-co Mint Chip! At first I thought about building them a bridge, but I didn't know the mechanics of air, even if a road was involved. A crosswalk was a silly idea, but I considered anyway; I drew scale diagrams and observed the road late at night, to see if the cars disappeared for long enough to paint (they didn't). I already knew how to dig. A tunnel it was.

  There was an undeveloped lot across from the cornfield, so I started digging there, at the edge of the road. I dug at night, and dumped the dirt in the lot next door, where they were digging the foundation of a house. The earth was wet and heavy from the spring rain, and at night I could still see my breath. It was exhausting work, and by the third day, I wasn't sure I could go on. But when I arrived the next night, I found a little boy waiting for me, holding a plastic shovel. I let him help. The next night there was another child, then three more, then ten. Thirteen children dug along with me using sandbox shovels, garden trowels, and even a real shovel or two. Bikes were rigged with buckets and hitched to wheeled trashcans, and the children hid the dirt in their playhouses, in their parents' mulch piles, or out in the dry, grassless plain of the undeveloped lots. On the twelfth night, we finished digging and planted mailboxes on each end of the tunnel, though there were no houses in sight. On the thirteenth, I slept in the center of the tunnel alone and asked the earth to remember what it was like to be a hard and sturdy stone as the cars rumbled above me.

  The next afternoon we were together, the magician and I walked across the development to see my handiwork. We had spent so many hours together in the basement that the sight of him in the sunlight was shocking—he was so strange looking, tall and translucently pale, with his too-big T-shirt and long, skinny pants. I was embarrassed that someone might see him loping beside me; I was ashamed to feel that way, but I still hid my face from passing cars.

  We crossed the scrubby, vacant lot to the lone mailbox. It was shaped like a goose in flight, flying towards its sister mailbox. I had given in to a little bit of silliness and bought another one shaped like a swan, also in flight, so it looked like they were heading for an epic battle. Goose vs. Swan.

  I made this joke, but the magician didn't smile.

  "So?" he said, nodding at my twin mailboxes. "What is it?"

  "Pull the goose's beak towards you," I said.

  The magician reached out a long wiry arm and pulled. The whole mailbox came with it, as well as the piece of earth the mailbox was rooted in, revealing a ladder that glinted in the sunlight, and a dark tunnel below.

  "Ha!" the magician said. He climbed down, and I followed, closing the trapdoor behind us.

  I had instructed the kids to leave a stash of flashlights at the foot of each ladder, but they hadn't done it yet, and the tunnel was pitch dark. I had dug it, dreamt it, but this perfect blackness paralyzed me. The magician breathed next to me.

  "Do you have to stoop?" I whispered. It seemed wrong to speak normally.

  "A bit," he said.

  "Follow me," I said, and fumbled backwards for his hand. He took mine loosely, leaving it up to me to hold on. His fingers fidgeted over the back of my hand.

  It took us only a minute or two to cross the tunnel, but every second felt essential as our two bodies moved through the cold, clammy dark. Even the sound of cars overhead disappeared. The magician bumped his head twice, and once he inhaled sharply, as if something surprising had occurred to him. His hand continued to fidget over mine; the space between our palms grew warm.

  "This is remarkable," he said. "Just remarkable."

  He squeezed my hand when he said this, and then held on tight. I shivered.

  "Cold?" he said with an odd urgency.

  "No!" I said, equally jumpy. "No, no, I'm fine."

  I walked right into the ladder with a deafening clank. I giggled and released his hand. After a brief hesitation, he let go too, and laughed.

  I put a foot on the ladder, ascended a rung.

  "This really is remarkable," the magician said again. "You have real talent."

  I paused mid-climb to bask in his praise, and the magician's chest brushed against my arm; we were closer than I realized. "Thank you?" I said. My chest was tight.

  The magician reached for my hand again. In the darkness, his breath brushed my neck. The sensation was delicious, but my stomach felt sick.

  I took back my hand and climbed.

  I busied myself with brushing the dirt off my clothes in the sunshine as the magician emerged from the tunnel. The field beneath my feet was a dark, wet brown, freshly turned and rich. Green shoots rose in rows all around me, fresh and alive in the sunshine. The magician set the mailbox back in place and laughed to himself in a high, odd way. I kept my back to him. I didn't want to see what an absurd figure he cut in the sunlight, what an ugly person made my heart hammer, my skin sweat.

  "You made a lovely road," the magician said behind me. I turned around; he was running a finger along the edge of the swan mailbox, taking it in. He looked up at the roaring cars between us and home. "Should we . . . go back down?"

  My stomach jumped. "I'll just run across," I said.

  He had been holding my eyes, and when I said this, his face crumbled.

  "All right. Run away," he said with a small laugh. "I'm going to take another look."

  For a long, tense moment he hesitated, while I waited for a space to open between cars. Finally, he pulled the trap door open and disappeared below ground. A second, maybe two, of space opened between the cars, and I ran. When I got across, I forced myself to slow to a walk, but I walked hard, like I knew someone was following me. My fists balled at my sides, and a steady stream of fuck you fuck you fuck you ran through my head. But all my skin could feel was the caress of his thumb across my palm, the rush of his breath, and the thick, humid feeling of his warmth underground.

  I did not see the magician for a few weeks after that. I had some legitimate excuses, a few fabricated ones. Family vacation, Easter, "sick" with the "flu." I wasn't leaving forever, but I didn't want to go back until I was more anchored in the real world. I had decided it was time for me to become a real teenage girl again.

  My mom was thrilled to take me shopping for bright T-shirts and flowery flip-flops at the mall. My dad was equally thrilled when I joined the
stage crew for the spring play (to put my building skills to use)—he called it "a healthy hobby." In school, I sat with old friends at lunch for the first time in months and started cracking jokes in class. I said nothing about magic, and no one asked. When I went back to the magician, we sat a respectable distance apart and were back to holes and blues records. He didn't offer a new task, and I didn't ask.

  Then I started dreaming.

  I couldn't remember the dreams at first. Images would bubble to the surface, ruined cities, swollen rivers, skyscraper trees, but I didn't know why I woke at dawn drained, disoriented, sometimes aroused, sometimes afraid. I finally put a notebook by my bed, and when I woke put pen to paper. My hand moved on the paper; I read what I was writing.

  I had a sister, and we had to build a house. The house was also an ark—it would keep us safe from catastrophe. We made it out of stones, a dome. But when I went inside it was my parents' house, white carpets and sand-colored walls. I opened doors, looking for my dome house, but the rooms were burnt out. Charred, crumbled furniture. Horrible stains on the floor. I found my house in the oven. It was one empty room, dirt floor, with stone walls rising around me. Sunshine fell through an opening. A naked woman waited for me in the pool of light. She had gray hair, large beautiful breasts. I was ashamed. I kept staring at the triangle of hair between her thighs. I wanted her to kiss me, but when she did, my mouth filled with dirt. I stumbled onto my mother's flowered couch, choking because—

  I didn't know how to finish this sentence. I slid my hand beneath my underwear and felt between my legs. I was wet and swollen like—like I wanted someone. But the dreams had left me terrified. Or, the choking left me terrified.

  I went down to the magician's basement that week with my heart thumping. I could barely stay awake in school anymore, because I woke up every morning gasping for breath. Clearly, I had to ask him for help. But this dream felt too personal, too true, to share even with him.

  The magician waited for me on his orange couch, fiddling with his guitar. I sat down on the opposite end of the couch, my butt on the armrest, and leaned forward, elbows on my knees.

  The magician didn't look up from his guitar when he said, "What would you like to tell me?"

  "How did you know?" I said.

  The magician put the guitar aside and smiled at me in a way he hadn't since the tunnel expedition. "You look very intent."

  I looked down at my feet, trying to find the words I needed. "I've been having dreams," I said. "A dream. About a stone house with a secret room." I trailed off, and the magician nodded at me, prompting me for more. "And . . . there's a naked woman. When she . . . when she kisses me, my mouth fills with dirt, and I choke."

  The magician jumped when I said this. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "I—I'm sorry," I said.

  He looked down at his fingers, which were thrumming against his bony knees. He looked like a little boy thinking over a difficult problem. His fingers stopped thrumming, and he reached out for me—the only thing he could reach was my foot perched on the cushion. He held it.

  "How much do you want to know about magic?" he said.

  He was nervous, watching me carefully like I might bolt.

  "Everything," I said without thinking.

  He shifted in his seat; his slick magician pants made a swishing noise against the couch.

  "There are a lot of ways to—manage surges in power, which is what that dream is showing you," he said. "Some ways are faster and more demanding. Others are slower, and safer. The time has come for you to—choose one."

  The moment crystallized—the look in his eyes, his hand on my foot, my shaking legs—and I gazed at the scene impartially, as if from high above. I'd read all the standard texts, heard all the rumors, read my sensational novels. This was what always came next. But in real life, it felt unnatural and unreal.

  The magician started talking again, like the silence spooked him. "Your dream is telling you that your magic—well, that your magic is tied to sex. Earth magicians, they get like that, especially as adolescents, with all the hormones, when I was your age I had dreams and the power and desire that pumped through me made me miserable. Because I couldn't focus it. I—I could help you get through this. Help you ground it, otherwise you'll continue to have these dreams. I understand if this makes you nervous because of the way you've been brought up, but I—"

  I couldn't speak. I just nodded.

  "Yes?" he said. "Yes to what?"

  I had an urge to curl up on the couch and giggle like a twelve-year-old when someone says "sex." I hid my face in my hands.

  "I want you to help me," I said into my palms.

  He leaned towards me. "How?"

  He drew my hands down from my face and rubbed his thumbs against the insides of my wrists. He was so beautiful in that moment, and his face seemed to have layers, like I could see him through time, my handsome old teacher, my hungry young man. I felt ill, I couldn't tell if it was with fear or desire. He had said I might be afraid.

  He looked at me, waiting.

  I kissed him, right on the mouth. He gathered me in his arms and pulled me down on top of him, straddling me across his lap. Our hips aligned, and he was hard against me.

  Fear shot through me again, and I buried my face in his neck. I couldn't look at him. "You can't get tied up in this," he said into my ear. "This is about the work, not me. I'm a married man."

  As he said this, he stroked my head, then slid his hand over my neck, down my back, and held my hip. No one had ever touched me like that, so softly, with such confidence. I saw him howling at the moon on the solstice, that freedom, that crack in the ice. His neck was dry and smelled like clay.

  "I want to," I said, and pulled away from his neck. "I want to be a magician."

  He took my face in his hand and stroked it. "You and I are very much alike," he said, and slid his other hand between my thighs.

  * * *

  Once the magician and I started having sex, I gave up on being a normal teenager. All I wanted to talk about was magic, and the magician, and no one wanted to hear that. My friends nicknamed me Silent Bob in the cafeteria, stopped calling me on weekends. My parents said polite things about my renewed enthusiasm for magic, but in insincere tones, so I would know they actually disapproved. A girl I had been close with on stage crew finally asked me, bluntly, "What's your deal?" and I told her what the magician and I were doing. She rolled her eyes and said, "Of course you are."

  It wasn't "of course you are." It was dangerous and exhilarating. Our time together was full of color, where everything else in my life was grays and beiges. I'd had sex before, exactly twice, with a boy I'd liked so little I'd blocked his last name from my memory. It was fast and painful and existentially disappointing—This is it? This is what makes the world go round? He took more care tying the condom into a knot afterwards and tossing it, ceremonially, out the car window.

  The magician held me like I was a precious thing. He kissed me deeply, brushed his fingers along my face. He buried his mouth between my legs and stayed there until I sweated, screamed, cried. He put himself inside me and told me to concentrate. "What do you see?" he said, over and over, moving inside me. "What do you see?"

  I saw his face, his ear, his arms, his shoulder, his chest. I smelled rich and fertile things. We didn't do magic; maybe we were magic. When I walked home afterwards, the earth lit up beneath my footsteps.

  I stopped dreaming about the house, the dirt, and the woman. Instead, in my dreams I was underground. Beside me were seeds, and corpses. When I woke up, I believed I was one of the seeds, but I thought of those dreams with dread.

  A week before the winter solstice, I found the magician sitting upstairs in his kitchen with his wife. There was a cup of coffee waiting for me.

  I wanted to bolt back out the door. But the magician looked calm, and his wife smiled at me. I looked down at my clothes, as if there were something that would give me away. If she didn't already know that I was sleeping with h
er husband—maybe magicians understood this kind of thing?

  When I sat, the magician's wife announced that she would like to invite me to a women's solstice celebration. She and her husband had agreed that it would be good for me to experience a more traditional rite.

  I looked over at the magician; his face was still blank. His wife still smiled at me. I had no idea what a "traditional rite" was, and that did, with reflection, seem like a flaw in my education. Most of the rites I knew involved messing around with her husband.

  "Sure," I said. Somehow, my voice came out smooth and even.

  "Great!" the magician's wife said.

  Then the magician and I retreated downstairs and began to remove our clothes, as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

  "Does she, um, know?" I asked as he kissed my neck.

  "Please don't discuss it," he said, and kissed me on the mouth, to seal the deal. This didn't answer my question, but I knew enough to let it drop. His hands were already fumbling for my bra.

  "You're warm," he said.

  I smiled against his shoulder. "So are you."

  The solstice ritual took place in a park that had once been a battlefield. Cannons from the Revolutionary War pointed at me as I drove in the main entrance, the heat blasting in my little car. I hadn't had to sneak out this year; my parents had liked the sound of "a traditional rite." I had bundled myself in my thickest ski jacket and snow boots, though there was only a white film of frost on the ground. It had been dark since four thirty that afternoon, and now the dark was so complete that my headlights could not penetrate more than a few feet in front of me.

  My car wound through dark, narrow roads up to a summit Washington's army had once seized from the British. Now it was nothing but frozen grass and hibernating trees, not a hint of ghosts or bloodshed. There was a single other car parked in the spot where I'd been told to leave mine, and a number of bicycles, which seemed like relics of another era on such a cold night. My feet crunched on the frost as I ascended the rest of the way to the hilltop, where a massive bonfire burned. At least ten other women clustered around another cannon; they were removing their clothes and draping them over the cannon's snout.