The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-I

by Jonathan Strahan

  "She didn't used to be like that," remarked Kaiser. "Her head was all pink, and bald, and empty like a balloon. Then she got hair, like chick feathers, and Wolf wanted to borrow her but I said no. I let him borrow a baby bird once, and when he gave it back it wasn't the same anymore." Kaiser ceased, a shadow of a frown creasing his forehead. There was something too eager in the way the stranger watched the girl, as if he were feeding on her, as if somehow he could draw her in through his eyes and steal her away.

  "She's mine," repeated Kaiser.

  Wolf strolled in from trawling the spilt oil in the gutter puddles, his eyes shining like grease and his pockets full of rainbows. Wolf, whose smile went on and on like a horizon. Wolf in his great coat with the bird-skull buttons. Wolf straddled on the bar of the little roundabout, kicking the ground away and away with his cowboy boots. The stranger's defeat was in his nose, so he grinned, and watched, and waited for him to die.

  "She's mine," whispered Kaiser.

  "No harm in him looking, if he's here to buy." Eve propped the metal claw she had been fashioning on the anvil. It drew its nails along the metal with a screech, and felt blindly for the edge with a clatter like cutlery. "You know the rules. Everything is for trade."

  "Ticket goes away now. Ticket goes away to sleep." Kaiser raised his voice slightly.

  The girl stood and moved off towards the helter-skelter. The rattle of feet on the metal stairway dwindled, until a pale face appeared for an instant at the uppermost window. Then a thin hand reached out to pull across the tarpaulin like a curtain.

  Paul realized suddenly that it was evening, and could not swear that he had not spent a whole day staring at the straw-fair girl, or watching her ascend her clown-painted tower. His mind told him he was alone now in the dusk, but the part of his mind that smelt the mud cooked to the crack and understood the ache in the wood-pigeon's cry could hear the stir of steps, and voices that seemed to settle on his mind like dust, rather than passing through the medium of his ears. When he slept he dreamt dimly of the long-faced man who widdershinned about and about in the grey light, watching him with hot, black eyes as great as sunflowers and waiting for him to die.

  * * *

  Paul woke to the smell of frying bacon. A slender, little man, quick as a stoat, was stirring the contents of a great, charcoal-black pan with fastidious care. His velvet waistcoat wore its black and blue ink-stains like bruises.

  "Still here, young man? I thought you came here to die." The older man's eyes twinkled like quartz chips in an old wall. "Gave up your shoes, didn't you? Weren't planning to go anywhere. Gave up your wallet, didn't you? It had your name in it. Shouldn't give away your name if you're still going to be using it." The tall man with the broad-brimmed hat and the many-layered coat strolled past, pulled a piece of bacon out of the hot fat, tossed it, and snapped it out of the air with his teeth. He strolled away, pulling the rind loose from the clamp of his grin. "He thinks you're his, anyway. Wolf does. Longer you stay here, the more he'll watch for you."

  With slender tongs the diminutive chef drew one rasher from the pan and held it slightly raised, like someone teaching a dog to beg.

  "Three words," he demanded.

  "Please?" suggested Paul, perplexed.

  "Please is an old word. Only new words are any use to me." Bewildered, Paul rattled off a term he had encountered in a computer manual, a makeshift word from an advertising jingle and one of the indelicate little euphemisms for redundancy he had heard used by the personnel manager the day before. A second later his hand was full of hot, greasy bacon, and the words he had just spoken were withering in his head like leaves, losing their meaning. Paul left the other man smoothing back his grey hair and repeating the new words over and over, as if he could taste them.

  On the steps of the fortune-teller's hut Wolf chewed a grass stem and watched Ticket as she sewed the new patches onto his coat. Paul recognized their navy-blue fabric as that of his own jacket, which he had abandoned on the Ardenbeck train. Elsewhere the coat was padded and patched with tweed of catkin greys and greens, plastic from refuse sacks, fringed brown suede, canary-colored polyester, rayon-red and great swathes of boot-leather, still studded with lace holes and buckle straps.

  Eve backed out of the fortune-teller's tent, ducking under the fringes of its Persian rug roof. She was rubbing at three long gashes in her forearm.

  "It must be finished," she said by way of explanation. "Last night it ate all the mice." She closed the wooden-slatted door behind her, carefully, drawing across the dozen or so knitting needles that served the function of bolts.

  "Hullo," she said, on seeing Paul. "Kaiser said you were here to die, but you're not, are you? I'm Evening Performance. You don't have a name anymore, do you?" Ticket bit through the thread, then folded one hand in another and gazed into her palm. "What are you looking for? I do leavings soup and goose fool. I do animals too, but they tend to come out strange. What you lost? I got socks and watches and manners. I got safety pins and teaspoons and those metal things with handles that you kept under the stair and couldn't find when you moved house. I got spirit levels and rubber bands and ambitions and bottle openers. I got lots of wedding rings." Paul crouched beside Ticket, feeling her awareness of him like sun. "You want her? Talk to Kaiser."

  Kaiser at this moment was waking in his tiny bed in the baby-blue carriage of the big wheel, to find that the wind had blown the wheel around and left him at the apex. This did nothing to improve his temper. Goose feather beds were, he was assured, supposed to be the epitome of luxury, but he found that the feathers tickled his nose, and blew everywhere when he sneezed. Besides this, they pricked at him, and embedded themselves in his clothes. Shaking them like snow from his hair, he climbed from his precariously swinging cradle, and slid down the bar of the wheel to the axle, then dropped to earth, still shedding feathers like a mangled cherub.

  Rising from his knees he saw Paul, still breathing, still in fascinated contemplation of the gold-white girl. Wrong, said Kaiser's frown, wrong.

  "I'll buy her from you. For a day."

  "Just a day?"

  "A day." Paul slipped off his wrist watch and after a pause the boy took it. With adjustment to the strap it fitted his chubby wrist.

  Ticket stood and lifted her eyes. They were blue-violet, and blinding. They filled the sky, and suddenly it was evening. Paul knew that they had walked alone for a whole day. She had opened her pale mouth, and he had seen the warm pink of her inner lip as she had said things that startled him immensely, and which he forgot immediately. He felt an appalled, poignant sense of loss, like a condemned man who wakes to find he has slept sweetly through his last few hours of life. Ticket lowered her eyes and drifted away in the direction of the helter-skelter. She wore a new necklace of beads that gleamed black and gold. Their pattern bothered Paul, and he suddenly recalled the trapped, frustrated battering of the wasp against its glass prison. He heard the dim clatter of her steps, like a nail being run down a metal comb.

  The next day he bought breakfast from Sharmadyne with some obscure terms he had encountered in a Times crossword. Then he bought an afternoon with Ticket for three ballpoints and a pencil rubber. The time was sweet and melted to nothing in an instant, like candy-floss. He slept with a haunting sense that she had told him things with greatest earnestness, things that had slid off his mind like water off wax.

  The next day he traded a handful of nicknames for a bowlful of blackbird stew. Then he bought a few hours with Ticket for a cigarette lighter and both his socks.

  All this while Wolf watched him with taxidermist's eye.

  Eve watched too, as she rolled out mouse biscuits for the thing in her tent.

  "You'll have to set a final price on her, you know," she told Kaiser. "You'll get a decent price. She's becoming a Maker, and a good one."

  "I think I'm going to keep her."

  "It's against the rules. We don't really own anything. It just passes through our hands, and sometimes we change it, that's all. H
e has asked you to set a price, and you must do so."

  So Kaiser set a price, and Paul agreed to hand over his dreams. Ticket saw it happen, saw the fine handful of gold, frail as corn, pass from the hand of the stranger to that of her owner and could do nothing to prevent it. She could only watch as a blind numbness spread across the stranger's face, and she felt herself vanish from his view.

  Paul was woken from his brown study by the slamming of the restaurant door. The clock on the wall showed three hours were still to run before lunch. He snatched up the mop to swab the spillage from the kebab racks, dodging the waitresses and ignoring the stink of grease. He stooped to pick up the trampled litter and flung it binwards. The sesame seeds got up under his fingernails.

  "You're his now," laughed Kaiser. "Go where he goes! Do anything he says!" Ticket watched Paul furiously sweeping at the ashes and shavings of the fairground floor, dodging imaginary obstacles. A goose fled the thrust of his broom and turned to hiss. Paul wrinkled his nose as if he heard the hiss of rancid meat cooking in its own fat. He looked up and at her, and through her, and reflected in his eyes she saw a dowdy, introverted stranger as irrelevant to his thoughts as a window handle might be to the wasp dedicated to beating itself to death against glass.

  Kaiser had a laugh like a barnful of roosters.

  * * *

  Wolf slept in the ghost train, coat shielding his head like a bat's wing, hat hung on the broomstick of a plastic witch. Kaiser curled like a nestling in a mass of birds' feathers, sheep's wool and cotton scraps, rocked to slumber at the top of the Big Wheel. Sharmadyne cushioned his head with a Book of Birds in the Souvenir stall, and dreamt of dictionaries. Ticket lay cocooned in tablecloths and curtains in her boudoir at the top of the helter-skelter. Paul slept leaning against the anvil in the yard, hugging his broom like a mate. Eve sat up in the Fortune Teller's tent and made moccasins out of jacket lining.

  She moved carefully about her tent to avoid waking her creations, her rounded limbs rolling to and fro slowly like peaches on a bough. The bottle opener stirred and rasped its razor-bill in sleep, then settled. The spirit in the spirit level lay dormant. From the pocket of the apron of bat-wing leather Eve drew a small hammer with a broad head.

  She opened a box at the back of the room, fingering the contents carefully. Two white gloves. A scarf of black silk. A folded poster of a dapper man in a top hat, with white, white teeth, and "Evening Performance" blazoned on a stylized banner above his head. A ball of glass, palm-size.

  Eve muffled the globe in muslin, and carefully tapped it with the hammer until it broke. She continued tapping, crushing it to powder.

  Out she crept, bearing navy-blue moccasins and a muslin bag full of dream. Paul woke when she poured the crushed glass into his opened hand. Reflexively he tried to shake it out of his palm, but she prevented him and closed his hand upon the glittering pile.

  "It's all I got of dreams," she hissed. "I don't know how long it'll last you, but hold on to it as long as you can, however much it hurts." Then she cut off all his shirt buttons as payment.

  Ticket was awake long before Eve reached the topmost stair of the helter-skelter. She rose, already dressed and quite composed, pulling a cloth from an object beside her. They carried it down between them, and left it upright in the yard.

  Paul was dizzy and his hand hurt. With half his mind he saw the dingy lodgings that he knew to be his home, with the black beetles behind the radiator and the tiny crackling television, and with the other he saw Ticket take him by the hand and lead him through nocturnal fields, fleeing the pale stain of dawn. Desperately he clung to the latter image, even while the tiny shards of the crystal ball penetrated his skin. He clung to the early morning chill, and the stab of corn stubble through his moccasins.

  The wind turned the Big Wheel once more, and when dawn came Kaiser awoke to find himself a mere yard from the ground. He alighted from his little cabin like a lord from a carriage, shaking the plumes out of his shorts. There lay the broom, crusted with wood-shavings. Where was Paul?

  "Where's the man without a name?"

  "Can't have gone far." Eve was varnishing a terrapin Wolf had traded her the day before. "Got no dreams, can't see where he's going. Got no shoes, can't run anywhere. Maybe he died, and Wolf took him." A few yards away, Ticket sat in her usual place, intensely studying an object in her palm.

  Wolf did not take kindly to having his sleep interrupted and most found excuses to avoid trespassing upon his territory. Kaiser was just resolving to question him later when the wind picked up. The figure of Ticket toppled, and tumbled, and was torn open by the wind as it skittered and rolled over the fairground floor. A papier-mâché mask fell loose. Bundles of stripped maple-wood fingers tumbled from the sleeves. The straw-gold hair was straw, and the thing in the bleach-blue muslin dress was a corn doll, made to the size of life by cunning fingers.

  Kaiser had a scream like a fox-feast in a chicken coop.

  * * *

  The door of the ghost train was flung wide. Wolf gave a low growl like a lawn-mower engine and shielded his yellow eyes from the sun. Kaiser stood in the doorway, his frown like a crisscross brand on his forehead.

  "Where are they?" he demanded. Things rattled down the overhead rail and dangled in the dark like malevolent puppets, leather-skinned and glass-eyed, waiting to observe their master's will. They watched his hands in the brown leather gloves, with the knuckle creases and the nails attached, for the signal to attack, but it did not come. Wolf saw Kaiser's frown and blinked like a chidden dog.

  "They run through the sunflowers," he said.

  * * *

  Ticket heard the distant scream of rage and felt the air change. The early morning sunlight was suddenly paler, and she suddenly seemed to move through silt. The sunflowers around them ceased to thresh their heads indiscriminately in the freshening wind, and started to turn their broad, singed-looking faces to watch the passage of the pair. Wolf is awake, she thought. Wolf sees.

  A bank of cloud was racing with impossible speed in their pursuit, borne by a wind that howled like a thousand little deaths. Kaiser is awake, she thought. Kaiser comes.

  Paul she had to lead each step, to stop him casting a foot from the ragged path through the flowers. Sometimes he would pause, and gaze around blindly, so that it took all her effort to keep him moving. Even as she struggled to support his weight upon her slender arm, she could see behind his eyes her new-found miracle, a wounded, smoky, human mind, half-blind but blood-warmed.

  All the while Ticket's own mind was in moth-wing motion, for her thoughts were as fast as her fingers. From her fosterfolk she had learnt the importance of gathering up the unregarded, and so for years she had silently collected negligently cast remarks and stored them for future use.

  She narrowed her eyes. The air was full of the hiss of the wind-snakes. Reaching up she caught one by its tail. The tug nearly pulled her from her feet, but she hooked her toes among the sunflower roots and held on. Drawing the snake in like a rope, she forced its tail into its own mouth. The wind-snake whirled about and about, trying to loose itself. Taking off her necklace, Ticket pulled loose the wasp-body beads and cast them into the little whirlwind behind her, and hurried on.

  Kaiser raged onward like a forest fire with a following gale. The corn parted before him as if in fear, and the birds drew in their voices. He danced a dance of rage down the little path that zig-a-zagged like a frightened hare through the coal-faced flowers.

  The whirl of the crippled wind-snake caught him unaware. It spun him around so that he almost lost his footing and fell into the grip of Wolf's flowers. Then the wasp bellies struck, and stuck, and stung and stung again. Covering his face he retreated, and fled back to the fairground.

  Kaiser ran to the Fortune Teller's tent, hopping with fury and howling like a storm rising. Eve had hidden her great square bulk under the table and peered out fearfully as he entered, through a hole in the chequered cloth.

  "I need to borrow your car," he said.
Eve covered her earth-brown eyes with her great hands. She heard the catches of the closet open. She heard Kaiser trill as he took the rein of the thing within. She heard the clatter of aluminium hooves and a cry like a violin being tuned.

  It was bigger than Kaiser expected, and he had to pull half of Eve's tent loose from the peggings to get it out.

  * * *

  Ticket looked about the hill for Kaiser's railway station, but saw not a trace of it. There was a field full of pale horses with terra-cotta manes, but not an inch of brick and mortar, nor the dimmest glint of a railway line. She struggled up the hill, one hand hoisting her skirt up to stop her tripping, the other dragging Paul behind her as he complained of the rainy streets and asked to go back to his bed.

  Behind her she heard the wind bring a harsh music of different noises. There was a chorus of squeaks like an orchestra of bicycle wheels, or a war of metal mice. There was a whish and hush like scythes cutting air or the slice of great wings.

  At the very apex of the hill, in the place that Paul had described, Ticket found the station. She found the ravaged cassette tape with its loosened ribbon that fluttered and gleamed like a metal track as it looped about the shoebox with the clumsily drawn windows and door. A rusted toy train the size of her thumb lay nearby on its side. There was nothing else, only a tumble of litter and leavings.

  Behind her the music was clearer. There was a sound like the whetting of knives. There was a long hunting call like a baby foghorn.

  Ticket seated herself on the thick grass and started to work. Her fingers became a white whirl, like the churn of a moth's wings. Cans she crushed into carapaces, rending them to provide aluminium teeth. Crisp packets fluttered under her hands like wings. Corn stalks jointed into legs and clawed the air unsensingly. She drenched their wings in dew, and in the rage of patience. One after another she flung them into the air.