The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “What are you?” Dan said.

  “Where’s Arly?”

  “Watching TV. In the living room.”

  “Can she hear you if you call her? Tell her to come here.”

  The two men he had shot were looking sicker by the second. He didn’t look at Freddy.

  “What the hell are you?” Dan said.

  “Please call Arly.”

  Dan raised his voice. He couldn’t produce a proper shout from his all-fours position, but Arly wasn’t as engrossed in TV as he had indicated. She stepped into the doorway seconds after he called her and responded with an appropriately nineteenth century display of horror. She even covered her mouth with her hand.

  “You’d better come with me,” Gerdon said. “You can’t stay here.”

  Arly stared at Freddy’s body. He could try another swap and walk her across the room, to the door that opened on the stairs, if the swap worked. But that would mean she would be inside his body while he moved. Holding the gun. Buffeted by an emotional storm that would have floored an astronaut.

  “What are you?” Arly said.

  “You can’t stay here with them, Arly. They know what you’ve been doing.”

  “Is that what you’re trying to do?” Dan said. “You’re trying to protect her?”

  Arly’s hand had jumped back to her mouth. She let out a little choked sob and Gerdon decided he had penetrated the storm and triggered the fear that had made him change course and veer into a minefield.

  Arly turned around. She stumbled down the hall on the other side of the door and Gerdon watched her turn into a door. He heard Dan shift his weight and he automatically locked his elbows and pointed the gun directly at Dan’s upturned face.

  “It’s all right,” Dan said. “I’m not stupid. I don’t know exactly what it is you’re doing but I am not going to do anything stupid.”

  Arly came down the hall dressed in the coat she had been wearing when they picked her up. She maneuvered around Dan with her head lowered and walked toward the back door as if she was a demure example of eyes-lowered female modesty, instead of a modern shopping-obsessed woman who apparently couldn’t leave an expensive coat behind if her life depended on it.

  Freddy’s gun was still lying on the desk. Gerdon shoved it into his coat pocket and started backing toward the door. The two pound weight in his pocket felt heavy and awkward but he wasn’t going to leave a gun where somebody like Dan could pick it up.

  The car was still sitting in the driveway. The dark figure behind the wheel was still jittering in time to the earphones he had settled on his head when they got out. He abandoned his post without any fuss when Gerdon showed him the gun.

  He hadn’t thought it through. He had just acted. He had stuck Freddy’s gun in his pocket because it looked like the right thing to do. But was it? They could have told the police Freddy had shot them and shot himself. Gone berserk for no reason. How could they do that without a gun?

  You couldn’t take gunshot wounds to a hospital without saying something. Unless you had connections. Did they have medical arrangements? Were they too small time to have a doctor on their payroll?

  “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Arly said.

  “They knew what you’ve been doing. You were in very serious trouble.”

  “You think they would have killed me? You think a bunch of small timers like that would give up the money I’m funneling them?”

  “They didn’t have to kill you. They would have . . . taught you a lesson. And sent you back to work. On their terms.”

  He turned onto a street cluttered with stores and eating places. This neighborhood changed fast. You drove down a “rich people’s” block with trees and big front yards and twenty seconds later you were surrounded by rundown houses and stores that looked like they sold the kind of stuff the people in the rundown houses bought.

  “You’re the one that told them what I was doing,” Arly said.

  “I gave them some information. I didn’t know what you were up to. I got your account numbers. They hired me to do it. The computer geek took the numbers and verified you were cheating them.”

  “You’re a paranormal.”

  Gerdon glanced down a side street and saw a cluster of overhead lights two blocks away. Cars and trucks sped along a street that looked like a big boulevard—a road out of this part of the city.

  “That’s it, right? You get into people’s minds? You did something funny and got inside my mind.”

  Gerdon had worked his way through a shelf of paranormal romance novels during a month when he had holed up in a room in Liverpool—back in the days when he had still thought he could learn something about himself from books. He had mostly learned that women were attracted to daydreams that were just as absurd as the fantasies that hypnotized men.

  Did women who read Jane Austen novels read that kind of thing, too?

  He had never understood how his thing worked or why he could do it. Or why he seemed to be the only person who could do it. There had been a time when he had thought quantum mechanics might explain it but he had given that up when he had decided all the writers who philosophized about uncertainty and entanglement didn’t know what they were talking about. The people who really understood the subject communicated with mathematics he would never master.

  The Universe was clearly a mysterious place, with wonders his fellow humans had barely noticed. Someday, someone might understand his peculiar aberration. When they did, the explanation would probably be just as incomprehensible as a quantum textbook.

  “That’s what you do?” Arly said. “You’ve got those kind of powers?”

  “I have a trick I can do. It’s very limited. I’m not looking into your head now, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “You did it to me twice.”

  “I did it the second time because I didn’t know what they wanted—what would happen to you. I had your numbers. But I didn’t know why they wanted them.”

  He had turned on to the boulevard. He didn’t know how it fit into the street layout but he knew they were heading south, toward the downtown area.

  “You did all this for me? You killed Freddy for me?”

  “They would have sent you back on their terms. They would have kept you there until you got caught. You’d go to jail. And it wouldn’t cost them anything.”

  “Are you in love with me? Is that it? You did all this because you’re in love with me?”

  “I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

  “I’ll have to watch for them every time I go out the door.”

  “We don’t know what they’ll do. Freddy’s dead. They don’t know what happened. And they don’t have Freddy telling them what to do.”

  “You’re in love with me. You’re one of those men with a hard shell who doesn’t want to admit he’s in love. And now you’re a murderer. You let yourself fall in love with me. You killed Freddy just for me.”

  “I’m taking you home. You’ll be all right. They won’t bother you after this.”

  “You should have killed Dan. He’s the one that’s dangerous.”

  Gerdon focused his attention on the road directly in front of the hood. He had felt her fear. She had seen the carnage in Freddy’s office. Could she really recover this fast?

  Maybe he should be asking her what she was.

  “You don’t have to worry about Dan. He’s the smart one. He’s not going to do anything that could invite more trouble.”

  “You could take over that whole operation. Freddy was just a midget under all that attitude. You could turn it into something big.”

  “You can’t keep up what you’re doing, Arly. You were just a temporary source to them. They use people like you until you get caught. You go to prison and they find somebody else.”

  “I could keep it up forever if I had you watching out for me. We could be living on top of the tallest building in the city.”

  “You’re safe. You should be safe. They got a real shock
.”

  “We could have everything we wanted. We could fill the biggest closets anybody could build for us.”

  He had placed the bag on a patch of broken concrete, in an area that picked up some of the light from the rumbling expressway over his head. He was standing in the darkness next to a pillar, out of effective pistol range, unless Dan was more of a marksman than most petty criminals.

  It was two-fifteen in the morning. He had told Dan he should arrive on foot, at two a.m., but he wasn’t surprised when a car cruised down the street that ran beside the underpass and turned under the expressway, fifteen minutes late. He had assumed a smart person would create some confusion.

  Litter crunched under the car’s tires. Dan threw open the door and waddled toward the bag in an exaggerated combat-manual crouch, swerving his gun from side to side.

  The crouch had put Dan’s body in an awkward position. It fell backward before Gerdon could get control and he found himself sitting on the ground.

  He had stepped out of the dark as he made the swap. He had a clear view of his own body. The man looking out of his eyes could see everything he did.

  He sat up straight. He placed the gun next to his cheek and held it there—where the bullet would smash through his face and jaw, disfiguring and crippling without killing. Then he raised it and held it against the side of his nose.

  He finished by holding it against his kneecaps. First the left. Then the right. Then he tossed the gun under the car.

  He had thought about a little speech. I can disfigure you. I can maim you. It will hurt me for a few seconds. You’ll live with it the rest of your life. But it wasn’t necessary. Dan would understand.

  He backed into the dark as soon as he had his own body under control. Dan grabbed the money and scrambled into the car with satisfactory haste. The gun was still lying on the ground when the car veered out of the underpass.

  Gerdon wandered through the darkened neighborhood that abutted the underpass, looking for a main street that might attract a taxi. He had done his best. Arly might have to move to a cheaper apartment. She would definitely have to reduce her clothing budget. But she could go to work in the morning and read her romance novels in the evening without wondering if someone was going to attack her on the street or break down her door. He had returned every dollar he owed them. The brain in their newly remodeled organization knew what would happen if they violated their side of the bargain.

  The neighborhood looked pleasant. The houses all looked neat and well maintained. It was a nice city. Could he stay awhile? He did have to make a living.

  Blanchefleur

  Theodora Goss

  They called him Idiot.

  He was the miller’s son, and he had never been good for much. At least not since his mother’s death, when he was twelve years old. He had found her floating, facedown, in the millpond, and his cries had brought his father’s men. When they turned her over, he had seen her face, pale and bloated, before someone said, “Not in front of the child!” and they had hurried him away. He had never seen her again, just the wooden coffin going into the ground, and after that, the gray stone in the churchyard where, every Sunday, he and his father left whatever was in season—a bunch of violets, sprays of the wild roses that grew by the forest edge, tall lilies from beside the mill stream. In winter, they left holly branches red with berries.

  Before her death, he had been a laughing, affectionate child. After her death, he became solitary. He would no longer play with his friends from school, and eventually they began to ignore him. He would no longer speak even to his father, and anyway the miller was a quiet man who, after his wife’s death, grew more silent. He was so broken, so bereft, by the loss of his wife that he could barely look at the son who had her golden hair, her eyes the color of spring leaves. Often they would go a whole day, saying no more than a few sentences to each other.

  He went to school, but he never seemed to learn—he would stare out the window or, if called upon, shake his head and refuse to answer. Once, the teacher rapped his knuckles for it, but he simply looked at her with those eyes, which were so much like his mother’s. The teacher turned away, ashamed of herself, and after that she left him alone, telling herself that at least he was sitting in the schoolroom rather than loafing about the fields.

  He learned nothing, he did nothing. When his father told him to do the work of the mill, he did it so badly that the water flowing through the sluice gates was either too fast or slow, or the large millstones grinding the grain were too close together or far apart, or he took the wrong amount of grain in payment from the farmers who came to grind their wheat. Finally, the miller hired another man, and his son wandered about the countryside, sometimes sleeping under the stars, eating berries from the hedges when he could find them. He would come home dirty, with scratches on his arms and brambles in his hair. And his father, rather than scolding him, would look away.

  If anyone had looked closely, they would have seen that he was clever at carving pieces of wood into whistles and seemed to know how to call all the birds. Also, he knew the paths through the countryside and could tell the time by the position of the sun and moon on each day of the year, his direction by the stars. He knew the track and spoor of every animal, what tree each leaf came from by its shape. He knew which mushrooms were poisonous and how to find water under the ground. But no one did look closely.

  It was the other schoolboys, most of whom had once been his friends, who started calling him Idiot. At first it was Idiot Ivan, but soon it was simply Idiot, and it spread through the village until people forgot he had ever been called Ivan. Farmers would call to him, cheerfully enough, “Good morning, Idiot!” They meant no insult by it. In villages, people like knowing who you are. The boy was clearly an idiot, so let him be called that. And so he was.

  No one noticed that under the dirt, and despite the rags he wore, he had grown into a large, handsome boy. He should have had sweethearts, but the village girls assumed he was slow and had no prospects, even though he was the miller’s son. So he was always alone, and the truth was, he seemed to prefer it.

  The miller was the only one who still called him Ivan, although he had given his son up as hopeless, and even he secretly believed the boy was slow and stupid.

  This was how things stood when the miller rode to market to buy a new horse. The market was held in the nearest town, on a fine summer day that was also the feast-day of Saint Ivan, so the town was filled with stalls selling livestock, vegetables from the local farms, leather and rope harnesses, embroidered linen, woven baskets. Men and women in smocks lined up to hire themselves for the coming harvest. There were strolling players with fiddles or pipes, dancers on a wooden platform, and a great deal of beer—which the miller drank from a tankard.

  The market went well for him. He found a horse for less money than he thought he would have to spend, and while he was paying for his beer, one of the maids from the tavern winked at him. She was plump, with sunburnt cheeks, and she poured his beer neatly, leaving a head of foam that just reached the top of the tankard. He had not thought of women, not in that way, since his wife had drowned. She had been one of those magical women, beautiful as the dawn, slight as a willow-bough and with a voice like birds singing, that are perhaps too delicate for this world. That kind of woman gets into a man’s blood. But lately he had started to notice once again that other women existed, and that there were other things in the world than running a mill. Like his son, who was a great worry to him. What would the idiot—Ivan, he reminded himself—what would he do when his father was gone, as we must all go someday? Would he be able to take care of himself?

  He had saddled his horse and was fastening a rope to his saddle so the new horse could be led, when he heard a voice he recognized from many years ago. “Hello, Stephen Miller,” it said.

  He turned around and bowed. “Hello, Lady.”

  She was tall and pale, with long gray hair that hung to the backs of her knees, although she did not look o
lder than when he had last seen her, at his wedding. She wore a gray linen dress that, although it was midsummer, reminded him of winter.

  “How is my nephew? This is his name day, is it not?”

  “It is, Lady. As to how he is—” The miller told her. He might not have, if the beer had not loosened his tongue, for he was a proud man and he did not want his sister-in-law to think his son was doing badly. But with the beer and his worries, it all came out—the days Ivan spent staring out of windows or walking through the countryside, how the local farmers thought of him, even that name—Idiot.

  “I warned you that no good comes of a mortal marrying a fairy woman,” said the Lady. “But those in love never listen. Send my nephew to me. I will make him my apprentice for three years, and at the end of that time we shall see. For his wages, you may take this.”

  She handed him a purse. He bowed in acknowledgment, saying, “I thank you for your generosity—” but when he straightened again, she was already walking away from him. Just before leaving the inn yard, she turned back for a moment and said, “The Castle in the Forest, remember. I will expect him in three days’ time.”

  The miller nodded, although she had already turned away again. As he rode home, he looked into the purse she had given him—in it was a handful of leaves.

  He wondered how he was going to tell his son about the bargain he had made. But when he reached home, the boy was sitting at the kitchen table whittling something out of wood, and he simply said, “I have apprenticed you for three years to your aunt, the Lady of the Forest. She expects you in three days’ time.”

  The boy did not say a word. But the next morning, he put all of his possessions—they were few enough—into a satchel, which he slung over his shoulder. And he set out.

  In three days’ time, Ivan walked through the forest, blowing on the whistle he had carved. He could hear birds calling to each other in the forest. He whistled to them, and they whistled back. He did not know how long his journey would take—if you set out for the Castle in the Forest, it can take you a day, or a week, or the rest of your life. But the Lady had said she expected him in three days, so he thought he would reach the Castle by the end of the day at the latest.