The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7

by Jonathan Strahan

  He cleared his throat. “Anyway, Mr. Nelson, as I was saying, I’m interviewing all the contactees I can find, like George Van Tassel, and Orfeo Angelucci—”

  “Yes, yes, and Truman Bethurum, and them,” I said. “She talked to all them, too.”

  “Bethurum?” he repeated. He flipped through his notebook. “Wasn’t he the asphalt spreader, the one who met the aliens atop a mesa in Nevada?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  He looked worried now. “Um, Mr. Nelson, you must have misunderstood her. Truman Bethurum died in 1969. He’s been dead eight years, sir.”

  I stood there looking at the rhododendron and seeing the pretty face and round hat, hearing the singsong voice, like she had learned English from a book.

  I turned and went into the house, let the screen bang shut behind, didn’t bother to shut the wood door.

  “Mr. Nelson?”

  My chest was plumb hot now. I went straight to the junk room, yanked on the light. Everything was spread out on the floor where I left it. I shoved aside Marilyn, all the newspapers, pawed through the books.

  “Mr. Nelson?” The voice was coming closer, moving through the house like a spooklight.

  There it was: Aboard a Flying Saucer, by Truman Bethurum. I flipped through it, looking only at the pictures, until I found her: dark hair, big dark eyes, sharp chin, round hat. It was old Truman’s drawing of Captain Aura Rhanes, the sexy Space Sister from the planet Clarion who visited him eleven times in her little red-and-black uniform, come right into his bedroom, so often that Mrs. Bethurum got jealous and divorced him. I had heard that old Truman, toward the end, went out and hired girl assistants to answer his mail and take messages just because they sort of looked like Aura Rhanes.

  “Mr. Nelson?” said young Ketchum, standing in the doorway. “Are you okay?”

  I let drop the book, stood, and said, “Doing just fine, son. If you’ll excuse me? I got to be someplace.” I closed the door in his face, dragged a bookcase across the doorway to block it, and pulled out Miss Rhanes’ card, which was almost too hot to touch. No writing on it, neither, only a shiny silver surface that reflected my face like a mirror—and there was something behind my face, something a ways back inside the card, a moving silvery blackness like a field of stars rushing toward me, and as I stared into that card, trying to see, my reflection slid out of the way and the edges of the card flew out and the card was a window, a big window, and now a door that I moved through without stepping, and someone out there was playing a single fiddle, no dance tune but just a-scraping along slow and sad as the stars whirled around me, and a ringed planet was swimming into view, the rings on edge at first but now tilting toward me and thickening as I dived down, the rings getting closer, dividing into bands like layers in a rock face, and then into a field of rocks like that no-earthly-good south pasture, only there was so many rocks, so close together, and then I fell between them like an ant between the rocks in a gravel driveway, and now I was speeding toward a pinpoint of light, and as I moved toward it faster and faster, it grew and resolved itself and reshaped into a pear, a bulb, with a long sparkling line extending out, like a space elevator, like a chain, and at the end of the chain the moon became a glowing lightbulb. I was staring into the bulb in my junk room, dazzled, my eyes flashing, my head achy, and the card dropped from my fingers with no sound, and my feet were still shuffling though the fiddle had faded away. I couldn’t hear nothing over the knocking and the barking and young Ketchum calling: “Hey, Mr. Nelson? Is this your dog?”

  Great-Grandmother in the Cellar

  Peter S. Beagle

  Peter S. Beagle [www.peterbeagle.com] was born in Manhattan on the same night that Billie Holiday was recording “Strange Fruit” and “Fine Mellow” just a few blocks away. Raised in the Bronx, Peter originally proclaimed he would be a writer when he was ten years old. Today he is acknowledged as an American fantasy icon, and to the delight of his millions of fans around the world is now publishing more than ever. He is the author of the beloved classic The Last Unicorn, as well as the novels A Fine and Private Place, The Innkeeper’s Song, and Tamsin. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Mythopoeic awards, and is the recipient of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. His most recent book is the collection Sleight of Hand.

  I thought he had killed her.

  Old people forget things, I know that—my father can’t ever remember where he set down his pen a minute ago—but if I forget, at the end of my life, every other thing that ever happened to me, I will still be clutched by the moment when I gazed down at my beautiful, beautiful, sweet-natured idiot sister and heard the whining laughter of Borbos, the witch-boy she loved, pattering in my head. I knew he had killed her.

  Then I saw her breast rising and falling—so slowly!—and I saw her nostrils fluttering slightly with each breath, and I knew that he had only thrown her into the witch-sleep that mimics the last sleep closely enough to deceive Death Herself.

  Borbos stepped from the shadows and laughed at me.

  “Now tell your father,” he said. “Go to him and tell him that Jashani will lie so until the sight of my face—and only my face—awakens her. And that face she will never see until he agrees that we two may wed. Is this message clear enough for your stone skull, Da’mas? Shall I repeat it, just to be sure?”

  I rushed at him, but he put up a hand and the floor of my sister’s chamber seemed to turn to oiled water under my feet. I went over on my back, flailing foolishly at the innocent air, and Borbos laughed again. If shukris could laugh, they would sound like Borbos.

  He was gone then, in that way he had of coming and going, which Jashani thought was so dashing and mysterious, but which seemed to me fit only for sneak thieves and housebreakers. I knelt there alone, staring helplessly at the person I loved most in the world, and whom I fully intended to strangle when—oh, it had to be when!—she woke up. With no words, no explanations, no apologies. She’d know.

  In the ordinary way of things, she’s far brighter and wiser and simply better than I, Jashani. My tutors all disapproved and despaired of me early on, with good reason; but before she could walk, they seemed almost to expect my sister to perform her own branlewei coming-of-age ceremony, and prepare both the ritual sacrifice and the meal afterward. It would drive me wild with jealousy—especially when Father would demand to know, one more time, why I couldn’t be as studious and accomplished as Jashani—if she weren’t so ridiculously decent and kind that there’s not a thing you can do except love her. I sometimes go out into the barn and scream with frustration, to tell you the truth… and then she comes running to see if I’m hurt or ill. At twenty-one, she’s two and a half years older than I, and she has never once let Father beat me, even when the punishment was so richly deserved that I’d have beaten me if I were in his place.

  And right then I’d have beaten her, if it weren’t breaking my heart to see her prisoned in sleep unless we let the witch-boy have her.

  It is the one thing we ever quarrel about, Jashani’s taste in men. Let me but mention that this or that current suitor has a cruel mouth, and all Chun will hear her shouting at me that the poor boy can’t be blamed for a silly feature—and should I bring a friend by, just for the evening, who happens to describe the poor boy’s method of breaking horses…well, that will only make things worse. If I tell her that the whole town knows that the fellow serenading her in the grape arbor is the father of two children by a barmaid, and another baby by a farm girl, Jashani will fly at me, claiming that he was a naive victim of their seductive beguilements. Put her in a room with ninety-nine perfect choices and one heartless scoundrel, and she will choose the villain every time. This prediction may very well be the one thing Father and I ever agree on, come to consider.

  But Borbos…

  Unlike most of the boys and men Jashani ever brought home to try out at dinner, I had known Borbos all my life, and Father had known the family since his own youth. Borbos came from a long line of witches of on
e sort and another, most of them quite respectable, as witches go, and likely as embarrassed by Borbos as Father was by me. He’d grown up easily the handsomest young buck in Chun, straight and sleek, with long, angled eyes the color of river water, skin and hair the envy of every girl I knew, and an air about him to entwine hearts much less foolish than my sister’s. I could name names.

  And with all that came a soul as perfectly pitiless as when we were all little and he was setting cats afire with a twiddle of two fingers, or withering someone’s fields or haystacks with a look, just for the fun of it. He took great care that none of our parents ever caught him at his play, so that it didn’t matter what I told them—and in the same way, even then, he made sure never to let Jashani see the truth of him. He knew what he wanted, even then, just as she never wanted to believe evil of anyone.

  And here was the end of it: me standing by my poor, silly sister’s bed, begging her to wake up, over and over, though I knew she never would—not until Father and I…

  No.

  Not ever.

  If neither of us could stop it, I knew someone who would.

  Father was away from home, making arrangements with vintners almost as far north as the Durli Hills and as far south as Kalagira, where the enchantresses live, to buy our grapes for their wine. He would be back when he was back, and meanwhile there was no way to reach him, nor any time to spare. The decision was mine to make, whatever he might think of it afterward. Of our two servants, Catuzan, the housekeeper, had finished her work and gone home, and Nanda, the cook, was at market. Apart from Jashani, I was alone in our big old house.

  Except for Great-Grandmother.

  I never knew her; neither had Jashani. Father had, in his youth, but he spoke of her very little, and that little only with the windows shuttered and the curtains drawn. When I asked hopefully whether Great-Grandmother had been a witch, his answer was a headshake and a definite no—but when Jashani said, “Was she a demon?” Father was silent for some while. Finally he said, “No, not really. Not exactly.” And that was all we ever got out of him about Great-Grandmother.

  But I knew something Jashani didn’t know. Once, when I was small, I had overheard Father speaking with his brother Uskameldry, who was also in the wine grape trade, about a particular merchant in Coraic who had so successfully cornered the market in that area that no vintner would even look at our family’s grapes, whether red or black or blue. Uncle Uska had joked, loudly enough for me to hear at my play, that maybe they ought to go down to the cellar and wake up Great-Grandmother again. Father didn’t laugh, but hushed him so fast that the silence caught my ear as much as the talk before it.

  Our cellar is deep and dark, and the great wine casks cast bulky shadows when you light a candle. Jashani and I and our friends used to try to scare each other when we played together there, but she and I knew the place too well ever to be really frightened. Now I stood on the stair, thinking crazily that Jashani and Great-Grandmother were both asleep, maybe if you woke one, you might rouse the other…something like that, anyway. So after a while, I lit one of the wrist-thick candles Father kept under the hinged top step, and I started down.

  Our house is the oldest and largest on this side of the village. There have been alterations over the years—most of them while Mother was alive—but the cellar never changes. Why should it? There are always the casks, and the tables and racks along the walls, for Father’s filters and preservatives and other tools to test the grapes for perfect ripeness; and always the same comfortable smell of damp earth, the same boards stacked to one side, to walk on should the cellar flood, and the same shadows, familiar as bedtime toys. But there was no sign of anyone’s ancestor, and no place where one could possibly be hiding, not once you were standing on the earthen floor, peering into the shadows.

  Then I saw the place that wasn’t a shadow, in the far right corner of the cellar, near the drainpipe. I don’t remember any of us noticing it as children—it would have been easy to miss, being only slightly darker than the rest of the floor—but when I walked warily over to it and tapped it with my foot, it felt denser and finer-packed than any other area. There were a couple of spades leaning against the wall further along. I took one and, feeling strangely hypnotized, started to dig.

  The deeper I probed, the harder the digging got, and the more convinced I became that the earth had been deliberately pounded hard and tight, as though to hold something down. Not hard enough: whatever was here, it was coming up now. A kind of fever took hold of me, and I flung spadeful after spadeful aside, going at it like a rock-targ ripping out a poor badger’s den. I broke my nails, and I flung my sweated shirt away, and I dug.

  I didn’t hear my father the first time, although he was shouting at me from the stair. “What are you doing?” I went on digging, and he bellowed loud enough to make the racks rattle, “Da’mas, what are you doing?”

  I did not turn. I was braced for the jar of the spade on wood, or possibly metal—a coffin either way—but the sound that came up when I finally did hit something had me instantly throwing the instrument away and dropping down to half sit, half kneel on the edge of the oblong hole I’d worried out of the earth. Reaching, groping, my hand came up gripping a splintered bone.

  Great-Grandmother! I flung myself face-down, clawing with both hands now, frantic, hysterical, not knowing what I was doing. Fingerbones…something that might have been a knee, an elbow…a skull—no, just the top of a skull…I don’t think I was quite sane when I heard the voice.

  “Grandson, stop…stop, before you really do addle my poor old bones. Stop!” It was a slow voice, with a cold, cold rustle in it: it sounded like the wind over loose stones.

  I stopped. I sat up, and so did she.

  Then Father—home early, due to some small war blocking his road—was beside me, as silent as I, but with an unfriendly hand gripping the back of my neck. Great-Grandmother wasn’t missing any bones, thank Dran and Tani, our household gods, who are twins. The skull wasn’t hers, nor the fingers, nor any of the other loose bones; she was definitely whole, sitting with her fleshless legs bent under her, from the knees, and her own skull clearing the top of my pit to study me out of yellowish-white empty eye sockets. She said, “The others are your Great-Aunt Keshwara. I was lonely.”

  I looked at Father for the first time. He was sweating himself, pale and swaying. I realized that his hand on my neck was largely to keep me from trembling, and to hold himself upright. “You should not have done this,” he said. He was almost whispering. “Oh, you should never have done this.” Then, louder, as he let go of me, “Great-Grandmother.”

  “Do not scold the boy, Rushak,” the stone rustle rebuked him. “It has been long and long since I saw anything but dirt, smelled anything but mold. The scent of fear tells me that I am back with my family. Sit up straight, young Da’mas. Look at me.”

  I sat as properly as I could on the edge of a grave. Great-Grandmother peered closely at me, her own skull weaving slightly from side to side, like a snake’s head. She said, “Why have you awakened me?”

  “He’s a fool,” Father said. “He made a mistake, he didn’t know….” Great-Grandmother looked at him, and he stopped talking. She repeated the question to me.

  How I faced those eyeless, browless voids and spoke to those cold, slabby chaps, I can’t tell you—or myself—today. But I said my sister’s name—“Jashani”—and after that it got easier. I said, “Borbos, the witch-boy—he’s made her sleep, and she won’t wake up until we give in and say he can marry her. And she’d be better off dead.”

  “What?” Father said. “How—”

  Great-Grandmother interrupted, “Does she know that?”

  “No,” I said. “But she will. She thinks he loves her, but he doesn’t love anybody.”

  “He loves my money, right enough,” Father said bitterly. “He loves my house. He loves my business.”

  The eye sockets never turned from me. I said, “She doesn’t know about these things…about me
n. She’s just good.”

  “Witch-boy…” The rusty murmur was all but inaudible in the skeletal throat. “Ah…the Tresard family. The youngest.”

  Father and I gaped at her, momentarily united by astonishment. Father asked, “How did you…?” Then he said, “You were already…” I thanked him silently for being the one to look a fool.

  Great-Grandmother said simply—and, it might have been, a little smugly, “I listen. What else have I to do in that hole?” Then she said, “Well, I must see the girl. Show me.”

  So my great-grandmother stepped out of her grave and followed my father and me upstairs, clattering with each step like an armload of dishes, yet held firmly together somehow by the recollection of muscles, the stark memory of tendons and sinews. Neither of us liked to get too close to her, which she seemed to understand, for she stayed well to the rear of our uncanny procession. Which was ridiculous, and I knew it then, and I was ashamed of it then as well. She was family, after all.

  In Jashani’s chamber, Great-Grandmother stood looking down at the bed for a long time, without speaking. Finally she said softly, almost to herself, “Skilled…I never knew a Tresard with such…” She did not finish.

  “Can you heal her?” The words burst out of me as though I hadn’t spoken in years, which was how I felt. “She’s never hurt a soul, she wouldn’t know how—she’s foolish and sweet, except she’s very smart, it’s just that she can’t imagine that anyone would ever wish her harm. Please, Great-Grandmother, make her wake up! I’ll do anything!”

  I will be grateful to my dying day that Jashani couldn’t hear a word of all that nonsense.

  Great-Grandmother didn’t take her empty eyes from my sister as I babbled on; nor did she seem to hear a word of the babble. I’m not sure how long she stood there by the bed, though I do recall that she reached out once to stroke Jashani’s hair very lightly, as though those cold, fleshless fingers were seeing, tasting…