The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “David—Leroy—isn’t in a condition to talk to you right now.”

  “Has he changed form?”

  Tony turned to David; he’d sat down in one of our living room chairs and was squeezing his temples with his palms.

  “No, he’s still Leroy,” Tony said.

  On the other side of the house, the back doorknob rattled. Then a giant rhomboid head with speckled stubble craned in through the open kitchen window. He peered around, looking down at the sink and up at the ceiling, maybe judging if there was room to climb through.

  “Hey,” I said, stepping over to the sink. I picked up the fancy new water sprayer gizmo and gave him a quick spritz in the face. He retreated sputtering and I slammed the window closed.

  By now, David was holding his head in his hands, covering his eyes.

  “Who the hell are these people?” I said.

  “They think I’m possessed by the devil,” he said quietly.

  “So do I, but you don’t see me climbing into people’s houses to get you.”

  “They found me at the boardinghouse, I have no idea how. Melody’s always been able to find me wherever I was like she can feel me, a phantom limb.”

  I wondered if Tony could sense me that way. Probably, knowing him.

  “Do you have anything to drink?” David asked.

  “For you, no,” Tony said. “You smell like a gas tank.”

  “It’s how I listen,” he said.

  Outside, the Mullards began to sing. They weren’t bad a capella, but when the little one started in on the banjo, it was actually beautiful. Beautiful and scary because, Jesus, who carries around a goddamned banjo?

  I glowered at David with my arms folded. “Your whole life is one long episode of Acres of Perhaps, isn’t it?”

  So began a strange siege, me sitting on the couch keeping an eye on the Mullards through the blinds, and Tony sitting in the other recliner watching David. The Mullards sang hymns in low voices while David muttered to himself with his hands clawed into the arms of my chair like an astronaut going up.

  “This is ridiculous,” I whispered to Tony. I probably didn’t have to.

  “Maybe everybody will get tired and go home,” he said.

  “We are home,” I said.

  Not long after, a rancid odor overtook the room. It took me a moment to realize what it was: David, head lolled back and his mouth wide open, had pissed himself in my favorite chair.

  Tony figured it out at the same time. “It’s not like that chair was cheap,” he said.

  I grabbed David by his shirt and yanked him up. A dark spot had bloomed on his pants.

  “David, wake up!”

  He rolled his head to one side and then the other, mumbling. The words were faint and garbled at first but then they resolved like a radio bearing in on the right station.

  “What if people make cities itch?” he said.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “ ‘Antelope umbrellas crying in the wind.’ There. I’m a genius, too.”

  “You’re the one who thinks it’s magic.”

  “People who piss themselves in my house don’t get to ever use that word around me again.”

  He tilted his head back way farther than I thought possible, opened his mouth like the tall front doors of a church, and let out a long, low wail. Then he pivoted his head forward again and said, “Where’s my typewriter?”

  I glanced around in case he’d brought it inside. When I didn’t see it, I opened the blinds and squinted on the porch. There was his black case sitting amongst the Mullards.

  “You really want it?”

  “Barry,” Tony said in his admonishing voice.

  “Yes,” David said. “I’ve got to get this down.”

  “Excellent,” I said. I turned the deadbolt on the door.

  “Are you sure you want to do that?” Tony asked.

  “Never surer,” I said, opening it.

  The Mullards all stood from where they were sitting on the low adobe wall, looks of surprise on their faces.

  “He’s all yours,” I said, shoving him into their arms.

  The two beefy brothers caught him while the mother looked down with disgust. She’d probably have let him hit the cement face first.

  “It’s okay,” Melody said, her hands on the sides of his face.

  “No, it isn’t,” David groaned.

  “Peace be with you, praise the Lord, whatever the fuck,” I said, holding up my hand jauntily and then slamming the door.

  “Hugh’s going to kill you,” Tony said.

  “No, he’s not,” I said absently, watching through the blinds as the Mullard brothers hoisted David on their shoulders like a trophy deer. “Jesus is cheaper than detox.”

  They’d left David’s typewriter behind and, well, you can’t leave something like that lying around. I reached out and grabbed it.

  David was a drunk, an eloquent drunk, and it was hard to blame him because hey, you’ve got to do whatever makes you brave. For some people that’s booze, for others it’s drugs, for others still it’s narcissism or vengeance or desperation. I don’t know what made it possible for me to face the page, but keeping stupid words like “magic” out of my head probably helped—telling myself it was like making a chair or a sandwich instead of something alive.

  It’s not what you think, that I jumped on a chance to take out a rival. After that night, my frustrations with David turned to pity. He happened to be sick in a way that helped him write stories for our television show, but it wasn’t comfortable for him. It hurt him to do. It might even have killed him one day.

  But first, as Tony predicted, Hugh wanted to kill me.

  “ ‘Jesus is cheaper than detox’? That’s what you have to say?” he told me at the studio the next day. “People come back from detox, Barry.”

  “He’ll come back. They might not even get him all the way to Jenkins Notch. We’re going to get a collect call from a Howard Johnson’s in Kansas after he escapes, and we’ll go pick him up. But you know what? He’ll damned well be sober.”

  “You understand he’s the engine of this whole show, don’t you?”

  “Well, I like to think I’m useful, too.”

  Hugh brandished his clipboard over his head. “You’re the brakes! You’re the rearview mirror!”

  “Okay, well, fuck you. But listen. David drunk would last what, another season? At the most.”

  “You don’t know that!”

  “At the most. Then he’d wrap himself around a tree or hang himself by his belt in a closet. You know how many scripts he’d write then? Zero.”

  “They’re going to make him into a revivalist preacher.”

  Okay, I smiled a little to imagine old Leroy Dutton swinging a Bible over his head on a plywood stage somewhere, sweat staining the armpits of his short-sleeved buttoned shirt. He’d be good at it, I thought. Quick on his feet, anyway.

  “Look,” I said. “he’s a married man. He has a wife and responsibilities and we shouldn’t interfere with that just because you think he’s the only way to make a television show.”

  “Married man?” Hugh said. “What the hell do you know about being married?”

  I used to think Hugh only meant about thirty percent of what he said, less when he was angry, but it was funny how even irrational, he still remembered where to hit me.

  I was considering where to hit him back when the stage door opened again and for the second time in as many days, Melody Mullard Dutton was walking through our woods. She was by herself this time, thankfully.

  “There’s something wrong with David,” she said.

  “Of course there is,” I said.

  You know what Tony did every morning for fifty years? He’d open the office curtains facing out to the street, tying them neatly to the side. He’d straighten papers on the desk. He’d set down a cup of coffee he’d brewed on the stove, the way he knew I liked it best. He’d turn on the typewriter.

  And because he did, I sat down every day. Someti
mes I’d peck something out, but mostly I didn’t.

  David had escaped, though he was hardly on the lam: he jumped out of the Mullard’s 1940 DeSoto at the intersection of Wilshire and LaBrea on the way out of town, and now they were pretty sure he was holed up at the Derby. It says all you need to know about Hugh that he was relieved a beautiful woman and her good Christian family had failed to lure his writer to a wholesome life in Jenkins Notch.

  “He knows where his home is,” Hugh said later. “Not shuffling barefoot with a bunch of Snuffy Smith castoffs.”

  The only thing keeping the Mullard boys from storming into the Derby and carrying David out on their shoulders like a sack of grain was that Melody had a plan. In Hugh’s office with her hands folding and unfolding in her lap, she explained it to us.

  “Leroy thinks he’s fallen through that old stump and he’s now living on the other side, right?”

  I had doubts he thought so literally, but I nodded with Hugh.

  “When she taught me how to sew, Mawmaw,”—I think that’s what she called her, and it made me think of a giant double mouth lined with sharp teeth—“told me that sometimes the only way to undo a knot is to push the needle back through it.”

  “Okay,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose. “I think we might be getting a bit too literal here—”

  “So you want to push him back through the Knot again?” Hugh asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “That still doesn’t solve the problem of getting him back to North Carolina in the first place, does it?” I asked.

  “We wouldn’t have to if there was a forest here.”

  Of course, there happened to be the perfect forest not forty feet from us. A week earlier and the stage would have been New York City. A week later and it would be acting as Moon Base Theta. The Mullards had shown up right in the middle of our very own North Carolina backwoods, almost as though it was destiny.

  “All it needs is a Knot,” she added. “Or something he thinks is one.”

  I watched Hugh’s eyebrows lift in excitement as they did before any new production, when the budget shortfalls and actor disagreements and special effects problems hadn’t started yet. If there was ever a man born to build a fake portal between worlds to convince a half-mad, half-drunk genius he was sane again . . . it was Hugh Kline.

  The question, though, was why he’d want to do it, aside from the artistic challenge. As he leaned across his desk with a pencil and paper so Melody could sketch the stump, I wondered what his angle could be. When he glanced at me and grinned, I knew it for sure.

  The Mullards wanted an exorcism. They assumed a sober, demon-free Leroy Dutton would climb out of that stump all blinking in the light of Jesus to return to Jenkins Notch. Hugh, on the other hand, assumed David Findley would climb out, look around at his crazy hick relatives and then never leave Los Angeles again. He wasn’t exorcising the Devil. He was exorcizing the Mullards.

  “If there’s one thing I’ve learned about working with writers, it’s to meet them on their own level,” he told me after Melody was gone.

  “What’s my level?” I asked.

  “You don’t have a level, Barry. That’s why I like you.”

  And hearing that—knowing it—solidified which fate I wanted for David Findley.

  It’s not like I never wrote again after the show went under. I moved on to comedies and little dramas to keep food on the table, not because I was gifted at it, but because I showed up and produced words when they needed them. In Hollywood, that beats genius every time.

  I never knew why guys like David Findley got all the credit for creativity. Anyone can wave his hands and yell, “Magic dust!” or “interdimensional tree stump” to explain everything away.

  We left the set decorator to build the stump while we went to fetch David. He’d slipped away from the Derby by the time we got there, and we checked two bars before finding him again. I don’t remember the place, but I do remember him sitting under the only bright light in the room, writing in a goddamned steno pad with an arc of empty glasses around it.

  “Do we grab him or what?” I asked Hugh.

  “No, let’s try this,” Hugh said, hunching a little toward the back as though he was trying to go unnoticed.

  When David looked up, I could see his eyes weren’t quite focusing on us, and the writing on his pad couldn’t be decipherable even to him.

  “We got rid of them,” Hugh whispered.

  We sat down on the other side of the table.

  “How?” David asked, his voice hoarse.

  “Told them you’d gone to the desert to think things through,” Hugh said. “They’ll be there for another four hours, easy.”

  David glanced down at the steno pad. “Thanks. I appreciate it. I need some room—”

  “What you need,” I said, holding up a hand for a waitress or a bartender or whatever worked in that hole of a bar, “is a celebratory drink.”

  “We all do,” Hugh said.

  “Yeah, we do,” David said, dreamily.

  So that was the plan. We let David drink as much as he wanted, “slaking the demon” as the Mullards would have called it, matching him with one drink of ours for three of his. We figured he’d get drunk enough to drag back to the studio for his exorcism in about two hours.

  It took more like four and the cost of at least one episode to get him to the blubbering mess we required. He descended to that state in layers: first he was sentimental, then he was funny, and finally he was full of strange advice.

  “You know how you can be as good a writer as I am, Barry?” he asked.

  “Please tell me,” I said. By then, I was barely keeping my own liquor down in my stomach where it belonged.

  “By not imagining I’m a better writer than you are,” he said.

  “That’s deep. You’re like some alcoholic Confucius.”

  When David started to drizzle down his seat toward the floor, we figured it was time to get him home. I caught him before his head hit the carpet.

  “Jesus,” Hugh said. “Maybe we ought to take him to the hospital instead.”

  “We’re taking him to a spiritual one.” I ducked beneath one of David’s arms. “Come on, lift the other side.”

  We got David into the car. We got the car across town. We got the car through the studio gate. We got David up, out, and onto his spongey feet. We got him out of the California sun and into the North Carolina backwoods in the time it took to write this paragraph.

  The set was the best we’d ever built. I felt the warmth in those woods, the Southern stickiness of them. I smelled the moss. I heard the cicadas. I saw, yes, the winding path of planks leading off into the swamp.

  Standing at the end closest to us was Melody.

  “We’re here to take you home, baby,” she said, reaching for David. “We came through the Knot.”

  He turned into my chest and made a few sloppy skids on the stage to get away. “Get out of here! This place isn’t for you!”

  “It isn’t for you, either,” she said calmly.

  “Come on, buddy,” I said.

  Hugh followed us on the creaking path deep into the soundstage. I hadn’t realized it was that big. Helping David along those planks, I felt the danger of falling into the muck, of stirring up snakes. I felt the trees watching me.

  We came to the stump—the Knot—in only a few minutes, but it seemed much longer. They’d outdone themselves with lumber and plaster: it was giant and creepy and it cost as much as three episodes we’d now have to film on canned sets in the back lot. But you could park a Volkswagen inside if you wanted to. The set decorator must have gotten it right because David recoiled when we got there.

  “We’re going home,” Melody said like a beckoning spirit, a dryad or a nymph, her hand dipping gracefully from her pale wrist.

  We propped David up near the edge. I peered down into the stump and saw the stagehands had lined the bottom with black cloth—a kind of hammock. It would catch him when he fe
ll.

  If he fell. He clutched the stump and wouldn’t even look inside. “I can’t go,” he said.

  Melody steered herself into his vision. “Baby, listen to me. We’re going home now. You’re going to remember this all like a dream because that’s what it is.”

  “I can’t take it back with me,” he said.

  It was growing clear that we’d soon have to toss him into the stump by force unless someone thought of the right thing to say. Everybody turned to me.

  It wasn’t a rational decision, what I said next. It came as some awful belch of the id.

  “There is no ‘it,’ Leroy,” I said.

  He closed his eyes as though that would close his ears.

  “Nothing’s talking to you or through you. You write weird stuff and what does it change? Nothing. Somebody sits up late at night watching our fucking show in an undershirt with a bottle of beer in his hand. His eyes get opened to the dark truths of the Universe. But then he crawls off to bed and gets up the next morning for work. He farts in the elevator, he looks down a lady’s dress . . . it’s all gone.”

  David didn’t say anything, but he did slump further against the Knot.

  “Even if you had something, people would just flush it down the toilet. It’s good they flush it down the toilet because how else are they supposed to sell insurance or sweep floors or wipe baby asses after knowing all of that? It’s a defense mechanism.”

  Hugh’s smile faded. “Hey,” he said.

  “It’s selfish when you think about it,” I pressed. “Shoving people’s faces in lives they’ll never have, things they’ll never feel that you made up out of nowhere.”

  “Selfish?”

  “Yeah. That’s what it seems to me. You’re not supposed to see that stuff and you sure as hell aren’t supposed to make us see it, either.”

  “I don’t—”

  It takes a writer to know how to demolish another writer. And with Melody looking on and her family all praying, I did it.

  “Go home, Leroy. Go the fuck home. This world is lost. The one on your side of the Knot, though? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe you’ll give your magic to your kids. Maybe you’ll just live.”

  David’s voice cracked when he said, “What if I don’t see anymore? What if I can only see here?”