The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror
Page 39
They do.
Just a weak glow at first, but then that first bulb’s on, and the red’s climbing, wrapping, opening some connection, a conduit, a fissure.
I shake my head no, please. No no no.
But then there’s a touch on my thigh, my hip, my hand.
I look over, am thinking of my old German shepherd growing up, how he’d always nose me in the morning, just nudge me awake.
This isn’t my dog, though.
It’s a boy, maybe three years old already—time moves different over there—his hair long and wild on his shoulders, glinting with fiberglass. Too dark to see his face, quite, but his mouth, the lower jaw, it’s just hanging, so there’s just this black oval. A void.
And he’s tugging at my hand, like he should be.
It’s Tanya’s other twin. The one she buried. Mine.
He pulls on the side of my hand and I let him, stand, follow. He looks back once to be sure and I’m reaching ahead, for his tiny shoulder.
I lose him in the hallway, though, step into the kitchen where a little black body would be stark against all the white cabinets.
I open my mouth to shape his name, whatever I would have named him, but look to the phone instead.
The bone behind my ear, it’s alive again.
My hand stabs out, pulls the receiver to the side of my head before it can ring.
It’s Quint. He’s breathing heavy, guilty, wrong.
“Hey,” he says, his whole body cupped around his phone, I can tell, so Tanya won’t hear, “hey, yeah, you’ve got to come down, man, see this. It’s, it’s—”
I balance the receiver on top of its cradle without hanging up, so that the connection’s still there.
I came the wrong way, that’s it.
There was fiberglass in his matted hair. Fiberglass.
From the attic, the crawlspace. Insulation.
Of course. Footsteps in the attic, not on the roof.
I feel my back into the hallway, see the silhouette of Sherry sitting up in the bed, and she sees me too, I think, but I’m just a shadow, less. I open my mouth to apologize to her, for everything, but all that comes out is the blue ratchet sound. One click, a thousand identical ones tumbling into place behind it.
It’s better this way.
At the other end of the hallway is the only ceiling vent in the house. So the attic can breathe. It’s ten inches by six inches, and just a cut-out in the sheetrock now, the vent already pulled up, balanced on two rafters.
Ten inches by six inches.
Just enough for me to reach up, grab onto each side, try to force my head in.
In a rush of shadow, my son pulls me the rest of the way through.
Danny knows you can never tell which compromises the gods will understand—for the sake of a good effort—and which ones bring down their wrath. He learns you can work most arcane rituals with nothing more than a sharpened paper clip and grass cuttings . . .
MOTHER URBAN’S BOOKE OF DAYES
JAY LAKE
In a basement that smelled of mold and old cleansers, Danny Knifepoint Wielder prayed down the rain. The house wasn’t any older than the Portland neighborhood around it. Most driveways were populated with minivans, children’s bicycles, heaps of bark dust and gravel accumulated for yard projects postponed through the dark months of winter. None of Danny’s neighbors knew the role he played in their lives. They would have been horrified if they had.
Not making it to church on time carried scarcely a ripple of consequence compared to what would happen if Danny didn’t pray the world forward. Lawn sprinklers chittering, children screeching at their play—these were the liturgical music of his rite.
“Heed me, Sky.”
Danny circled the altar in his basement.
“Hear my pleas, freely given from a free soul.”
Green shag carpeting was no decent replacement for the unbending grass of the plains on which the Corn Kings had once vomited out their lives to ensure the harvest.
“I have bowed to the four winds and the eight points of the rose.”
Wood-grain paneling echoed memories of the sanctifying rituals that had first blessed this workroom.
“Heed me now, that your blessing may fall upon the fields and farms.” With a burst of innate honesty he added: “. . . . and gardens and patios and window boxes of this land.”
“Daniel Pierpont Wilder!” his mother yelled down the stairs. “Are you talking to a girl down there?”
“Mooooom,” Danny wailed. “I’m buuuusy!”
“Well, come be busy at the table. I’m not keeping your lunch warm so you can play World of Warships.”
“Warcraft, Mom,” he muttered under his breath. But he put away his knife, then raced up the steps two at a time.
Behind him, on the altar, his wilting holly rustled as if a breeze tossed the crown of an ancient oak tree deep within an untouched forest. Oil smoldered and rippled within the beaten brass bowl. Rain, wherever it had gotten to, did not fall.
That night Danny climbed up the Japanese maple in the side yard and scooted onto the roof. He’d been doing that since he was a little kid. Mom said he was still kid, and always would be, but at twenty-two Danny had long been big enough to have to mind the branches carefully. If he waited until after Mom went to her room to watch TiVoed soap operas through the bottom of a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, she didn’t seem to notice. The roofing composite was gritty and oddly slick, still warm with the trapped heat of the day, and smelled faintly of tar and mold.
The gutters, as always, were a mess. Something was nesting in the chimney again. The streetlight he’d shot out with his BB gun remained dark, meaning that the rooftop stayed in much deeper shadow than otherwise.
Sister Moon rising in the east was neither new, nor old, but halfway in between. Untrustworthy, that was, Danny knew. If Sister Moon couldn’t make up her mind, how was Sky to know which way to pass, let alone the world as a whole to understand how to turn? This was the most dangerous time in the circle of days.
He had his emergency kit with him. Danny spent a lot of time on his emergency kit, making and remaking lists.
Nalgene bottle of boiled tap water
The Old Farmer’s Almanac
Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes
Silver Stainless steel knife
Paper clips
Sisal twine
Spare retainer
Bic lighter (currently a lime green one)
Beeswax candles (black and white)
That last was what he spent most of his allowance on. Beeswax candles, and sometimes the right herbs or incense. That and new copies of the Almanac every year. The Booke of Dayes he’d found at a church rummage sale—it was one of those big square paperback books, like his The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Magic, with a cover that pretended to look like some oldtimey tome or grimoire. The entire kit fit into a Transformers knapsack so dorky looking he wasn’t in any danger of losing it on the bus or having it taken from him, except maybe by some really methed-out homeless guy or something.
Danny had figured out a long time ago that he’d get further in life if he didn’t spend time worrying about being embarrassed about stuff.
This night he lay back on the roof, one foot braced on the plumbing vent stack in case he fell asleep and rolled off again. The black eye he’d gotten that time had taken some real explaining.
It hadn’t rained in Portland for sixty days now, which was very weird for the Pacific Northwest, and even the news was talking about the weather a lot more. Danny knew it was his fault, that he’d messed up the Divination of Irrigon specified in The Booke of Dayes to shelter the summer growing season from Father Sun’s baleful eye. That had been back in June, and he’d gotten widdershins and deosil mixed up, then snapped the Rod of Seasons by stepping on it, which was really just a dowel from Lowe’s painted with the Testor’s model paints he’d found at a rummage sale.
You could never tell which compromises the gods would understand
about, for the sake of a good effort, and which ones brought down their wrath. Kind of like back in school, with his counselors and his tutors, before he’d quit because it was stupid and hard and too easy all at the same time.
Anyway, he’d gone the wrong way around the altar, then broken the Rod, and the rain had dried up to where Mom’s tomatoes were coming in nicely but everything else in the yard was in trouble.
Since then, Danny had been studying the Almanac and the Booke of Dayes, trying to find a way to repair his error. He was considering the Pennyroyal Rite, but hadn’t yet figured out where to find the herb. The guy at the Lowe’s garden center claimed he’d never heard of it.
He’d finally realized that having offended Sky, he would have to ask Sky how best to apologize. And so the rooftop at night. Sky during the day was single-minded, the bright servant of Father Sun. Sky in darkness served as a couch for Sister Moon, but also the tiny voices of the Ten Thousand Stars sang in their sparkling choir. Sometimes a star broke loose and wrote its name across heaven in a long, swift stroke that Danny had tried again and again to master in his own shaky penmanship.
Tonight, as every night for the past week, he hoped for the stars to tell him how to make things right.
A siren wailed nearby. Fire engine, Danny thought, and wondered if the flames had been sanctified, or were a vengeance. More likely someone had simply dropped a pan of bacon, but you could never tell what was of mystic import. Mother Urban was very clear on that, in her Booke of Dayes. Even the way the last few squares of toilet paper were stuck to the roll could tell you much about the hours to come. Or at least the state of your tummy.
He listened to the trains rumble on the Union Pacific mainline a few blocks away. Something peeped as it flew overhead in the darkness. The air smelled dry, and almost tired, with a mix of lawn and car and cooking odors. The night was peaceful. If not for the scratchiness of the roof under his back, he might have relaxed.
A star hissed across the sky, drawing its name in a pulsing white line. Danny sat up suddenly, startled and thrilled, but his foot slipped off the vent pipe, so that he slid down the roof and right over the edge, catching his right wrist painfully on the gutter before crashing into the rhododendron.
He sat up gasping in pain, left hand clutching the wound.
“That was not so well done,” said a girl.
Danny’s breath stopped, leaving his mouth to gape and pop. He tried to talk, but only managed to squeak out an “I—”
Then his Transformers knapsack dropped off the roof and landed on his head. The girl—for surely she was a girl—leaned over and grabbed it before Danny could sort out what had just happened.
“Nice pack,” she said dryly. He was mortified. Then she opened it and began pulling his emergency kit out, piece by piece.
Miserable, Danny sat in the rhododendron where he had fallen and looked at his tormentor. She was skinny and small, maybe five feet tall. Hard to tell in the dark, but she looked Asian. Korean? Though sometimes Mexicans looked Asian to him, which Danny knew was stupid. She wore scuff-kneed jeans and a knit top with ragged sleeves.
He had no idea if she was twelve or twenty-two. Of course, Danny mostly wasn’t sure about himself. He knew what his ID card said, the stupid fake driver’s license they gave to people who couldn’t drive so those people who were completely undeserving of pity or scorn could get a bus pass or cash an SSI check. His ID card said he was twenty-two, but lots of times Danny felt twelve.
Almost never in a good way.
“This your stuff?” She turned the retainer over in her fingers as if she’d never seen one.
“Nah.” Danny stared at the broken branches sticking out from under his thighs. “They belonged to some other guy I met up on the roof.”
She laughed, her voice soft as Sister Moon’s light. “You should tell that other guy he’d get farther with a silver athame that with a stainless steel butter knife.”
“It’s the edge that counts,” Danny said through his pout.
The girl bent close. He could almost hear the smile in her voice, though he wouldn’t meet her eye. “You’d be surprised how many people don’t know that,” she said, so near to him that her breath was warm on his face. “A sharpened paper clip and grass cuttings will serve for most rituals, if the will is strong enough and the need is great.”
Now he looked up. She was smiling at him, and not in the let’s-smack-the-stupid-kid-around way he’d grown used to over the years. Then she reached into her sleeve and pulled out a short, slightly curved blade that gleamed dully under the gaze of Sister Moon. “Try this one,” she said, handing it to him, “and look on page two-thirty-eight of the Booke of Dayes.”
Danny stared at the knife a moment, then glanced up again. She was gone. Not mysteriously, magically vanished—he could hear the girl singing in the street as she picked up a bicycle and pedaled away with the faint clatter of chain and spokes. But still gone.
The knife, though. . . . Touching it, he drew blood from his fingertip. Wow, he thought, then raced inside to read page 238 by flashlight under the covers.
Reversal of Indifference
Betimes the Practitioner hath wrought some error of ritual, perhaps through inattention, or even a fault of the Web of the world in disturbance about zir sacred space, and so the Practitioner hath lost the full faith and credit of the kindlier spirits as well as the older, quieter Forces in the World.
Zie may in such moments of tribulation turn to the Reversal of Indifference, which shalleth remake the rent asundered in the fabric of the Practitioner’s practice, and so invite the beneficent forces once more within zir circle of influence. Thus order may be restored to the business of the World, and the Practitioner rest easier in zir just reward.
Zie should gather three mice, material with which to bind their Worldly selves, and all the tools of the Third Supplicative Form before attempting the exercise in the workbook for this section.
Danny didn’t have the workbook—he’d only found Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes by accident in the first place. He’d checked, though; the workbook wasn’t available on Amazon or anywhere. So he’d done without. Most of the time he’d been able to sort out the needed ritual, trusting in his own good faith to bridge any gaps. This was not so different. He understood the Third Supplicative Form well enough. Still, he’d never noticed the Reversal of Indifference before.
It was such a big book, with so many pages.
Mice, and binding, though. There were mice in the basement, in the heater room and sometimes in the laundry closet. He went to set out peanut butter in the bottom of a tall trash bucket, built a sort of ramp up to the lip of the bucket out of a stack of dog-eared Piers Anthony novels, then considered how to bind the sacrificial animals once they were his.
The answer, as it so often seemed to be, was duct tape. Danny was excited enough to want to try the Reversal of Indifference that same night. He had his new athame, and the star had certainly sent him a detailed message in the mouth of that strange Asian girl. A practitioner could only be so lucky, and he aimed to use his luck for all it was worth.
Danny had harvested four mice within the hour, so he left one inside the trash bucket for a spare in case he made a mistake. One by one, he took the other three and wrapped them in duct tape. They were trembling, terrified little silver mummies, only their shifting black eyes and quivering noses protruding.
“Sorry, little guys,” he whispered, feeling a bit sick. But magic was serious business, the lifeblood of the world, and he had failed to call down the rain.
No one would miss a few mice.
Then Danny made himself sicker wondering if one of the mice was a mother, and would little mouse babies starve in some nest behind the walls.
He shifted his thoughts away with the heft of the athame in his hand. The knife was tiny, but nothing felt like silver. The Third Supplicative Form—as best as Danny understood without the workbook available—was a long chant followed by the delivery of the sacrifice.
Usually he sacrificed a candy bar, or maybe a dollar bill. In tonight’s case, the sacrifice was obvious.
This time Danny remembered to take the battery out of the smoke alarm. Then he lit his candles, purified his hands in the bowl of Costco olive oil, and began the chant. The mice shivered on the altar, one little mummy actually managing to roll over and almost fall off onto the green shag. He nudged it back into place and tried to concentrate on magical thoughts instead of what he was about to do.
When the moment came, the mice bled more than he thought they could. One managed to bite his finger before dying. Still, he laid them in the hibachi, squirted Ronson lighter fluid on them, and flicked them with the Bic. The duct tape burned with a weird, sticky kind of smell, while the mice were like tiny roasts.
Guilt-ridden, Danny grabbed the trash bucket to go free the last mouse into the yard, but halfway up the basement stairs he had to throw up. By the time he got outside, the last mouse had drowned in the pool of vomit, floating inert with the potato chunks and parsley flecks from dinner.
He washed his mouth and hands for a long time, but still went to bed feeling grubby and ill.
Morning brought rain.
Danny lay in his little bed—he had to curl up to even lie in the blue race car, but Mom kept insisting how much he’d loved the thing when he was seven—and listened to water patter on the roof. Portland rain, like taking a shower with the tap on low. It didn’t rain so much in August, but it was never this dry either.
He’d done it.
Sky had heard him, and returned blessings to the land.
Danny didn’t know if it was the girl’s athame, or the mice, or just more careful attention to the Booke of Dayes. He wanted to bounce out of bed and write Mother Urban another letter to her post office box in New Jersey, but he wanted more to run outside and play in the rain.
Then he thought some more about the mice, and looked at the red spot on his finger where one of them had bitten him, and wept a while into his pillow.
It rained for days, as if this were February and the Pacific storms were pouring over the Coastal Mountains one after another. Danny performed the Daily Observances and leafed through the Booke of Dayes in his quiet moments to see what else he’d missed besides the Reversal of Indifference. Mostly he let Sky take care of the land and wondered when he’d see Father Sun again.