2014 Campbellian Anthology

by Various

  Xinhua watched the both, leaning back against the table.

  “You have gone soft, line-daughter,” Jia said in slow English, and shook his head, frowning. “It is good your daughter has taken up the mantle of the Xun Long. She is still fierce,” he said proudly, looking to Xinhua to support him.

  “Actually, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” Xinhua said, offering an apologetic smile to Jia.

  He raised an eyebrow, his gaze flitting between Xinhua and Lin. “Talk to me about what?”

  “Well, I—” began Xinhua.

  “—Xinhua has found work,” interjected Lin.

  “Mom!”

  “She won’t be able to patrol anymore,” Lin said.

  “Is this true?” Jia asked Xinhua, bewildered. “You are abandoning the mantle of the Xun Long?”

  “Well, I don’t know for sure if I have the job yet, but….” Xinhua shrugged, seeking the right words. “Well, between college and the new job I do need to cut back on the patrolling.”

  Now Lin looked bewildered. “You said you wanted to drop it entirely.”

  “No,” said Xinhua, putting up one finger to ward off her mother’s words. “I said I wanted to cut back on patrolling, I didn’t say I was giving up the mantle. I want this in my life, I just… I don’t know exactly how it fits right now.” She looked to Jia, then to Lin. “I wasn’t going to bring this up now. I…. You know what, I’m just gonna go be in my room for a while.”

  Lin opened, then closed her mouth. “Will you be back down for dinner?”

  Xinhua ran a hand through her hair, short black strands waterfalling around her fingers, as she turned back to her mother. “Maybe. I don’t know yet.”

  Jia watched Xinhua go, his youngest line-daughter disappearing up the stairs as Lin unpacked Xinhua’s bag. “You cannot let her do this,” he said.

  “She needs to have a life.” Lin paused between the table and the fridge, one hand clutching a plastic bag of milk. “Other heroes have risen where once the Xun Long stood alone,” she said to Jia. “And we are no longer a community of strangers, of outsiders. We are citizens of a different land, protected by its laws and by heroes who will fight for us as well as their own people.”

  “You are still so naïve, line-daughter. I never could train it out of you.”

  “No, not naïve….” The refrigerator made a soft sucking noise as she pulled it open to slip the milk into its empty plastic container. “… Hopeful.”

  She smiled at the ghost of Jia.

  • • •

  Xinhua stood in her room, half undressed with her shirt tossed on the bed and the door closed, when Jia’s voice spoke from behind her. “Your mother makes an interesting argument,” he said in Mandarin.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Xinhua jumped, snatching up her shirt from the bed and holding it across her chest.

  “Talking to you?” Jia said, switching to English.

  “It was sort of okay that you randomly showed up in my room when I was six, awkward when I hit puberty, and now it’s just incredibly creepy.”

  “Jia shrugged his spectral shoulders and made a face of disinterest. “I am indifferent to the pleasures of the flesh.”

  “So not the right answer,” said Xinhua, moving past Jia without looking at him. “What do you want?”

  “To talk to you about your decision to… suspend… or scale back, or… I do not know what you are planning on doing with your activities as the Xun Long,” Jia finished awkwardly, watching Xinhua open her closet, hang up the formal shirt she had worn to her interview, and pull out a faded tee-shirt.

  “I’m not giving it up if that’s what you’re afraid of.” Xinhua’s words were muffled as she slipped into the change of clothes. “Do you mind turning around?” she asked as she reached for a pair of skintight leggings.

  “I did not think you were,” Jia said, turning his back on Xinhua and studying the soft rug of her room. “But your mother said something that….”

  Xinhua listened, changing her pants, then said, “Yes?” when Jia didn’t continue.

  “Xinhua, what do you see as the role of the Xun Long?” Jia asked, turning around as his line-daughter pulled the leggings up to her waist.

  “To protect others,” she answered without hesitation.

  “Yes, but who are those others?”

  “I don’t understand,” Xinhua said as she ruffled her short hair and bound it back with a thin hairband.

  “When I first called upon Tianlong,” Jia said, passing a hand through the air, a furl of his chi flowing after it, “our people were still new to this city. We had been in Toronto in number little more than a generation. We were feared because of who we were when we came to this country, and I sought to protect the young communities we had made in this city from that fear. From that ignorance. I did it for our people.”

  “You sought to save them from the hatred of others,” Xinhua said, asking And, so? with a shrug of her shoulders.

  Jia thought for a moment, drifting past Xinhua. He used his chi to pull back the hidden panel at the back of the closet to reveal the costume of the current Xun Long: the figure-conforming black polymer fibre with its breathable face covering, so different from Jia’s own original shenyi and mask. “Spirits live in the past, Xinhua. That is all that we know. The world passes us by because we are no longer a part of it. Cannot be a part of it.” Jia turned to his line-daughter. “I am beginning to wonder if I have done you all a disservice through what I taught you.”

  “What was it Mom said to you?”

  “That the Xun Long is no longer needed,” Jia said, scrutinizing the carpet beneath the mist trailing from the hems of his pant legs.

  Xinhua crooked an eyebrow up. “What? Seriously?”

  “Not in so many words,” Jia said. “But she wants you to have a life, and I cannot deny that she is right in that. No, your mother said that there are others who can do now what once only we could. And that they protect our people as well. So what need is there for us now?”

  “Maybe,” said Xinhua, reaching into the back of the closet to retrieve her costume from the hidden recess. “But just because other people can do it doesn’t mean I don’t have an obligation to do so as well,” said Xinhua, slipping into the bodysuit one limb at a time. She stopped when she reached the mask, leaving it hanging in bunched folds at the back of her neck. “I don’t just protect our community, xianxian. I use our gifts to help everyone, because I can’t imagine doing otherwise.” Xinhua closed her closet behind her and opened the door of her room. “Once,” she said, glancing at Jia and leaning half out of the open door, “our community needed a protector for its own people, when no-one else would stand up to help them. Now we are in a position to help other communities; people who need protection just as much as we did, and still do.” Xinhua leaned fully out of her doorway. “Mom! I’m heading out. You don’t have to wait dinner for me. I’ll grab something on the way back!”

  “Be careful!” Lin called up from the kitchen, her voice ringing off walls and around corners.

  “Always!” shouted Xinhua. She turned to Jia as she pulled her door half-closed. “I don’t know how I’m going to balance everything yet, but I will.” She walked to the window and opened it. Xinhua closed her eyes and breathed in and out, the visible expansion and retraction of her focused chi flexing on the air. She drew the cowl of her costume up and over her head, stretching it down across her face and securing the material to seal at the front of her neck. “There are too few heroes as it is,” she said, and climbed over the lip of the open window and was gone.

  Jia watched his line-daughter fade into the gathering dark. He felt the weight of time passing—a slow river dragging him along in its currents.

  Eventually, Lin came up to join him, and together they stood watching out the window, waiting for Xinhua’s return.

  WEARY, BONE DEEP

  by Michael Matheson

  First published in Chilling Tales: In Words, Alas, Drown I
(2013), edited by Michael Kelly

  • • • •

  HE SITS crouched in front of the grill. Waiting. Three nights he has caught glimpses of it skittering there in the darkness behind the yawning black of the small air duct. There is never enough light to see it clearly. He has studied the metal behind the laced interwoven bars repeatedly, and still he is unsure how deep the emptiness beyond truly goes. He can hear rats scuttle. And other things. Smaller, uglier things. But he is not listening for them.

  He has tried to tell his mother, but she tells him he is imagining things and that there is nothing hiding in the darkness. She made little of the thing dwelling within the closet too. But then where did all the special lost things go? The things that only he remembers having. He knows that whatever lives within the hidden, shifting recesses of his closet has stolen even the memories of these things from the rest of his family. He has felt its hoary, cloying breath when his father, drunk and reeking of sweat and rage, locks him in the closet. He can hear it there with him, its sickly-sweet breath loud in the cool dark.

  His father thinks he is crazy too, that the grief has taken its toll on him. They do not believe him. But he knows. When his brother passed from this world to the next he saw it. Saw the thing take the spirit with it, drag it off and down into the depths of the ventilation system, past the illusory borders of grill and metal and stone walls. Down into the unrelenting black.

  He remembers his father’s roared imprecations chasing after him down the length of the narrow hall. His mother’s voice too. Pleading for him not to run from the death of his brother; to face it like the man he must one day become. They did not understand. He was not running from anything; he meant to retrieve his brother’s pilfered soul. But unlike fleeting night-gaunts, beasts of less tangible flesh, he cannot pass through the ever stable metal that girds his family from the less visible terrors.

  Three nights he has waited.

  His mother does not know he is downstairs, waiting in the basement. His father does not know he is downstairs—for which he is truly grateful—watching the grill for any sign of the lurking thing. The thing with limbs that face wrongward, that bend and shape elsewise. He has seen it run with unnatural speed, yanking his brother’s screaming and weeping soul down into deep, untouchable dark. He cried then, but he does not cry now. He is done with tears.

  The spirit of the mangled man who lives in the furthest corner of the basement knows he is here, but does not bother him. The spirit does not frighten him any longer. Once, he lived in fear of it and would not come down to the basement no matter how much his mother pleaded. Then, quite by accident some years before (two? three?) he missed the banister, leaning down while trying to clutch the railing, calling to his mother who had disappeared into the garage. The fall was painful, but it was fear of the dead man below that squeezed his heart and set it beating like an impossible drum. He hadn’t meant to look up of course, but he had. And the spirit had just been standing there, large parts of its outline missing or misshapen. He had almost screamed. And then the spirit put a hand to his head, patted him ever so gently, and smiled.

  It had been the smile that had calmed him. Though the majority of the once-man’s body was destroyed, put through things he couldn’t even begin to name, there was warmth in that smile.

  Then his mother had come running, bleating out her fear like a terrified ewe. She had found him staring into the corner, his gaze unwavering, a look of awe spread across his frozen features. For the better part of the day the look had remained there, his mind numb to all outside questions as the family doctor poked and prodded him. Shock they said, all nodding in dignified chorus.

  But it wasn’t shock. This was different. This was discovering that no one else saw the hidden things that he saw. That he knew. This bothered him, but he had learned to live with it. To hide it. Much as he had learned to hide the bruises and the welts.

  He had seen other things too over the decade of his life; wailing spectral children who floated behind unseeing men and women of middle age with sad, drooping eyes—the dead screaming their non-existent throats out to be heard one last time. That hardens you. Makes you something older than your skin years.

  And so he huddles against the darkness. So much older inside. Waiting. Somewhere deep in there it is hiding. It can’t be moving about. He would have heard it. The thing has such an odd sound to its walk. Something about the way the limbs fold back on themselves makes its gait staggered, if undeniably fast.

  He can hear the dimly faraway ticking of the run-down clock upstairs. The one that never keeps anything close to the right time. The one his father stares at lovingly, and his mother hits with a balled up towel when his father is out of the house. Her beatings upon its surface further unbalance the delicate clockwork mechanisms that he knows linger somewhere inside. He likes to think they resemble great spinning wheels, carved from bone and ivory. He’s never touched ivory, but he likes the thought that something that once belonged to a creature as proud and glorious as an elephant lends the strength of its borrowed spirit to their house. He thinks things like that.

  Soon now. Soon it will have to come out of hiding and face him. He knows it knows he is here. He knows it knows he followed it. It had turned its head in fear, in alarm, maybe just to check what was following, just before it disappeared down that deep tunnel of stone and blackness. He will wait as long as he has to. But the days are not for waiting. The night is much better. People aren’t up and about to ask what the hell you’re doing sitting in front of a grill for hours on end without moving, trying not to breathe. He doesn’t understand how his parents expect him to learn not to swear if they keep swearing at him, but he always lets it slide. It doesn’t do to question such things. His father’s hands are surprisingly fast. And heavy.

  He sits there waiting. Wondering why it isn’t coming out. Three days is a long time not to feed. He knows it has to feed. Why else would it have taken his brother? He’s known his brother too long to think that if he has a soul it’s a good one. And though he still isn’t entirely sure what a soul means, he knows what one looks like now. He’s seen his brother’s translucent self sloughed free of shackling flesh—torn free by slavering jaws. But since the inner flesh looks so much like the outer, he can’t help but reason that maybe it’s exactly the same as the outside person. Only what’s the point of being two people at once?

  Maybe he should ask his brother about his ‘out of skin’ experience after he gets him back. It’s not that he really wants his brother back. But it’s about honour. And family. And his brother makes a much larger target than his own small body for their father’s inconstant rage.

  Gathering his arms about himself he huddles deeper against the darkness. Waiting. Scratching noises writhe against the sliver of windowpane jutting up against the base of the house. That small slip of dirty-paned window provides the only light in this place. Or it would if the moon were out. Outside, the trees tap and rake against the window, demanding in. But here in the sunken basement there is only cool, and wet. Here where no moonlight breaches there is only darkness. He is sure that it is the blackness that will bring the shambling, broken-limbed thing back again.

  The pitch black is the same as the abyssal darkness that had followed in the swiftly moving creature’s wake as he followed it down the hallway at a run, his own small legs beating like mismatched pistons. Breath coming fast, chest heaving, he had almost caught it. And then it had vanished down into the unending black of the vent. He cannot follow it, but that does not matter. Eventually it will come to him. And as the smell cloys around him, sweet and musty all at once, his eyes can discern only vague shapes. But he can feel the movement of small and crawling things. He can hear them too. Their susurrus movements thunder in the rasping silence of the heavy blackness that permeates the oddly shaped basement. Sounds come distorted in the curvature of walls and the jutting kitty-corners of support pillars.

  His own breathing is loudest of all. Perhaps because he can hear i
t beating in his chest alongside his heart. Two echoes of the same motion. Rise of chest. Fall of chest. Muscles straining in silence and married pulsing rhythm. He hears the blood rushing in his ears, and moves his head to better listen to the tap, tap, rake, tap of the branches against the window from outside. For a moment he fancies it morse. A code meant for his pleading ears only—those desperate trees seeking to send him a message broken by distance and space and the yawning gap of their otherness. His small collection of flesh and bone and blood strains to listen to their wooden beating but can find no meaning in it.

  He huddles more closely into himself, all but a foetal ball now in the dark of the basement. It has become much, much colder than when he first came down those creaking steps and settled in for yet another night of waiting. But then he has not really slept in three nights, so he cannot tell if it is the chill of brick and stone around and beneath him, or his own body’s mounting weakness.

  There is a soft creak from the floorboards upstairs and he cowers, listening for the telltale sign of a heavy tread on the stair. But only the tap of the tree at the window, the distant tick of the clock upstairs and the blood pounding in his ears sound in the wake of the old house’s groaning as it settles with the weight of age and rot; exhaling fitfully. And as the gradually dying clock upstairs ticks off long, full moments, there is the unbidden lure of sleep in the blood-slowing cold of the basement. His head sags and his muscles droop. He snorts and rises, fighting it, his lids already fluttering down again. Somewhere in the back of his mind there is a warning, as clear and sharp as a bell—something about freezing to death in the arctic tundra. But he’s too tired to think his way through the connections, and then there is only black, inside and out.

  He wakes with a start, inhaling sharply. Then freezes. There is something down here with him.

  A liquid darkness shines out against the deeper black of the basement’s uneven contours. It is heavy. Thickset. Its lope predatory. Hungry.