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

by Jonathan Strahan

  “And so you opened the door,” Jack said. Barlow stared at him. “You thought, if you could prove to yourself once and for all that the whispers weren’t real they would have to go away.” Barlow nodded. “Let me guess what you saw. A forest?” Shaking now, Barlow nodded again. “Dense trees, with twisted branches and no leaves, going on as far as you could see. And flames. A kind of faint fire, so pale it didn’t give off any light or heat or even burn any of the trees.”

  Barlow whispered, “Oh God. Oh my God. I’m not crazy?”

  Jack managed to keep the regret out of his voice as he said, “No, Mr. Barlow, you’re not crazy at all.” Barlow sat back in the chair, mouth open. Jack said, “So you slammed the door and ran inside. Now tell me—is that when you found my card?”

  Barlow half-whispered, “Yes.” Behind him, for just a moment, Jack saw the flash of the golden foxtail as it brushed over Barlow’s shoulders and then was gone. A lot of good you are. You give me help on a hand too late for me to use it, but you couldn’t warn me this was coming? Out loud he said, “Mr. Barlow, what you saw was not a hallucination or a dream. It’s a real place, though very few people actually see it.” At least not while alive.

  “Then why am I seeing it? I’m not anything special. I’ve never been, you know, psychic or anything.”

  “It’s not about you, Mr. Barlow.”

  “But I’m—oh, God, it’s Alice. Of course. How could I be so—” His hands began to twitch and he clasped them together. “Is she, you know, a ghost?”

  “There are no such things as ghosts,” Jack Shade said. “At least not the way you see in movies. But sometimes people get stuck.” Sometimes, he thought, they can’t bear being dead. And every now and then someone alive gets pulled in and can’t get back. Or someone sends them there, and that was the worst of all.

  Barlow said, “Mr. Shade, can you help her? Can you get her out? Is that why she had your card?”

  “I don’t really know why she had my card. But I will try to open a way for her.”

  “May I ask—what do you—” He looked away.

  “My fee is fifty thousand dollars,” Jack said. Maybe he couldn’t actually refuse someone who had his card, but the clients didn’t have to know that.

  Barlow hardly seemed to care as he stared again at the desk. “This place. Where Alice is. Is it Hell?”

  “No. It’s actually just what you saw, twisted trees and cold fire.”

  “Does it have a name?”

  “Yes. It’s called the Forest of Souls.”

  Jack arrived the next morning at Barlow’s house, just after dawn. Gone were Gambler Jack’s silk suits and bright shirts and ties. In their place he wore a black shirt with black buttons, and black jeans over black boots. Black Jack Traveler.

  He spent two days and nights in the Westchester McMansion, a house that reminded him of the bland food your mother gave you after stomach flu. The dull creams and light browns of the walls were matched by furniture that might have belonged in a conference room. Barlow had said that Alice took courses and workshops, and in fact there were large faceted crystals and stone incense holders on knickknack shelves in the living room, and a few books scattered around the paneled den with breathless promises of some imminent shift in “world consciousness” (clearly, Jack thought, if they had any idea what that term actually meant they would never dare to write a word) or promises to choose the “quantum reality” you want and deserve. Somehow it all seemed like dust floating on a deep impenetrable pool, a well of emptiness.

  Only in Alice’s dressing room did color manage to break through the dull fog, with yellow walls and light blue trim to match the bottles of perfume and vials and jars of European creams and makeup. The first time Jack went in there he just stood in the center of the room and breathed deeply, as if he could take the color into his lungs and spread it through his body. He realized he’d been closing himself down in the rest of the house, maybe even before he entered it, in a kind of psychic expectation. Only here could he find a place to begin his search for trace elements of Alice Barlow.

  Jack spent a lot of time in that room, the door closed to his client, the lights full tilt as he touched and smelled Alice’s clothes, her makeup, each elaborate bottle of perfume. He lined his eyes with violet kohl, and painted his lips dark smoky red, and probably would have tried on some of her clothes if Alice had not dieted herself down to a size two. A wedding picture in the living room had shown Alice at about an eight. By the time of her death, apparently, a significant part of her had already vanished.

  Some women diet for social approval or self-esteem, but Jack was pretty sure Alice did it to diminish her place in the world. “What were you running from?” he whispered to the mirror as he held a silk camisole against his cheek. Was it Barlow? Jack shook his head. The man was as dull as the house. He wasn’t the cause of Alice’s desire to disappear, he was just part of her strategy.

  Jack had made sure to warn Barlow not to come in during his “psychic investigatory procedures” in the dressing room. Subtle, even dangerous, energies ran through the room at such times, he said, and if Barlow just knocked on the door he could bring down the entire framework Jack was constructing. All of that was partly true, but mostly Jack did not want to repeat the scene of some years back, when a client had walked in on Jack Shade wearing his dead wife’s clingy black dress.

  Outside the dressing room, Jack talked with Barlow for hours about Alice, their marriage, the things they did together, Alice’s hobbies and interests, which apparently came and went. She’d tried knitting, book clubs, French cooking, but gave them all up after a few months. The cosmic crystal phase had lasted longer than most, nearly a year when she died, but Barlow suspected it had already begun to fade. There’d been a lot more of the “dolls and things,” he said, and then one day he noticed she’d gotten rid of about half of them. He’d never asked her what she’d done with them.

  There were no kids. Alice had had “medical issues,” Barlow said, and when she said she didn’t want to adopt he’d just agreed. “Maybe I should have pushed it,” he told Jack. “Maybe she would have been happier.” Jack didn’t know if that was true, so much of what Barlow said seemed layered over with guilt like archaeological sediment. Maybe if he’d done more, he said, read some of her books, joined the cooking classes, they could have traveled more. She always seemed to pick up on trips, especially Paris, she loved Paris. Just like the song, Jack thought.

  Most of all, Barlow built palaces of guilt around the fact that Alice had died at all, at least before him. He was the one who broke his diet, whose numbers had crept up despite the statins and the dreadful low-salt food. All his preparations, the will, the retirement accounts, they all began with the same assumption, that Alice would outlive him.

  How did she die? Jack asked. They were sitting at a brown oval dining table. Aneurysm, Barlow said. Undetectable and as unexpected as a thunderstorm when the weather bureau had promised a sunny day. “How could that happen?” Barlow asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “I’m not a doctor. Or a theologian.” He knew he was being hard, but he’d never get anything done if he had to hold the client’s hand all day.

  Barlow blinked, stared at Jack a moment, then said, “Mr. Shade—can you find her? In that place, that forest?”

  “Yes.”

  “And release her?”

  “Yes.” Jack might have said, “I can try,” but in fact he’d succeeded in every case but one. And that one was special.

  Barlow said, “And will I stop hearing those noises? And seeing the trees?”

  “Yes.”

  Barlow looked down at the table. “When you release her—where will she go?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “I have no idea.”

  The first night Jack was there Barlow had asked if they should stay up together and wait for the whispers to “manifest,” a term that probably came from one of Alice’s workshops. It didn’t work that way, Jack said. The Forest ten
ded to conceal itself when a Traveler came to investigate. He told Barlow he’d have to go track it down himself. He didn’t say that in fact he knew exactly where the entrance was, and it was a garage on West 54th Street.

  Jack slept that first night in the guest room and realized almost immediately it was a mistake. Many women saw their guest rooms as a chance to indulge their more extreme decorating ideas, but this one looked like it was copied from a magazine, or even a furniture catalog. The white bedding, the dull peach-colored walls, fake flowers in the fake antique pitcher, they were all as lifeless as a plastic doll house.

  Despite what he’d told Barlow, Jack went down to the kitchen in the middle of the night. He walked past the butcher block counter and island stove to open the back door. With his head cocked slightly to the left he said quietly, “Alice? Where are you?” Very faintly he heard the whispers of the Forest, far away and nothing like the roar Barlow had heard. And when he stepped outside all he saw was the patio and lawn furniture, more dead than Alice Barlow.

  The next day he told Barlow he needed to sleep in Alice’s bed. At first he thought the client would object, but no, Barlow just nodded and that evening left fresh sheets neatly folded on the king size bed and went off to sleep on the couch. Jack smiled as he changed the sheets. William Barlow might have to surrender his bed but damned if he would change the linens. Jack was just done when Barlow came to the door with an armful of towels and what looked like shampoo and conditioner. He said, “If you want to step out a moment I’ll freshen up the bathroom for you.”

  “That’s okay,” Jack said and reached out to take the towels and hair products. Barlow hesitated, then nodded, and left. Jack watched him a moment, then closed the door.

  Earlier in the day Jack had pocketed a loose bracelet of silver tiles from Alice’s dressing room. Now, as he held it, he thought about the fact that Barlow had kept everything intact in his dead wife’s room. A check of the closets and drawers in the master bedroom confirmed his guess that nothing of Alice remained, the walk-in closet home now to a lonely rack of suits. So why the shrine in the dressing room?

  It took no more than a few seconds to figure out which side of the bed was Alice’s. It wasn’t physical, Barlow hadn’t left a trough in the firm mattress. But when Jack tried the left side he began to wheeze and cough, an effect that vanished as soon as he rolled to the right. On that side there was only a sense of lightness, a lack of any presence at all.

  And yet she was there, he could feel her all around him, especially in the bracelet that pressed against his wrist as if Alice Barlow was taking hold of him. That lightness, Jack realized, had been there all along, it was there before she died. It was what she left behind. “How did you get so lost?” Jack whispered in tears. “What happened to you?”

  Then he held up his left wrist with the bracelet before his eyes. Louder than before he said, “I’m coming for you, Alice. My name is John Shade, and I will find you. I will find you and set you free.”

  Suddenly exhausted, Jack dropped his arm and settled his head against the too-thin hypoallergenic pillow. For just an instant, heat flared in the bracelet, so intense Jack almost tore it off, but then it went cold again, as chill as moonlight. Tired as he was, he still didn’t expect to sleep that night, so it came as a kind of distant surprise when his eyes pulled down, his limbs grew sullen, and then he was gone.

  He dreamed he was walking in the Forest, only it was disguised, the way it so often was (even in the dream he remembered telling that to Barlow). This time it appeared as some kind of march or demonstration in a city that may have been Manhattan. All around him everyone was holding signs or shouting slogans. Only, he couldn’t read the signs, or understand the loud chants, and then he realized, the souls, the lost, they were not the people in the march, the people were the trees. The souls were trapped inside the fake demonstrators, unable to speak, or to tell Jack what they needed. The fire, so cold, so pale, wound around the tree people with their signs, like a thin fog.

  Jack tried to speak but his words came out all thick, as if his jaw moved too slowly, so he reached up to massage it, loosen his tongue. He was several seconds rubbing his lower face before he realized—there was no scar. He was back the way he was before—before everything fell apart. Back when he was Handsome Johnny, and being a Traveler was, well, something that made you better than other people, all the dumb William Barlows of the world. Disgust twisted his insides. He didn’t want to lose his scars, he deserved them, he needed them. They made sure he never forgot.

  All around him, the people, the trees, stamped and shook their signs. If they were trying to tell him something they were wasting their time, the signs meant nothing, the voices just scrambled sounds. Tree language. He remembered now that he was on a mission, and he called out, “Alice? Alice Barlow? Are you here somewhere? Can you show yourself?”

  His eye caught a flash of motion to the right, and he turned in time to see a thin woman in a pale red dress dart behind the crowd of demonstrators and head toward a kitchen supply shop. “Alice, wait!” he called above the noise of the demonstrators. Pushing aside the tree people, who took no notice of him, he made his way in her direction.

  It was only when he got free of the crowd and their signs, and could see that she had stopped in front of the show window full of knives, that he could see it wasn’t Alice Barlow, it wasn’t even a woman but just a girl. Fourteen years old. Arms and legs stick thin. Long straight hair, her mother’s hair, dyed black, sharp and bright against the pale red dress that echoed the faint fire flickering through the forest.

  “Oh God,” Jack whispered. “Oh my God. Eugenia.”

  She turned around now, slowly, with that adolescent drama smile, and lowered her head slightly so she could look up at him as if she was just a child again. Softly she said, “Hello, Daddy.”

  And the store window exploded, and all those gleaming knives and cleavers came flying at Jack.

  He managed to knock most of them out of the way, all the while shouting, “Genie! Don’t go! I can help you—” But not all. A carving knife and a long-pronged fork hit his face and he screamed in pain. No! he thought, Not again. He looked away, lost focus, for just a moment, and when he turned back she was gone.

  He touched his face to see how much damage the geist had done only to discover there was no blood, no fresh wounds, just the hardened scars of an attack long ago. So Handsome Johnny was gone and he was himself again, Scar-faced Jack, Johnny Ugly. Johnny Lonesome.

  “Mr. Shade!” a man called, and when he turned to see who it was he discovered himself awake, back in the Barlow bedroom, with the client himself trying the locked door and yelling, “Mr. Shade! Are you all right? I heard noises.”

  Jack sat up and discovered books scattered on the bed and the floor around it, bestsellers and art books from the low decorator bookshelf opposite the bed. They must have flung themselves at him while he slept. Could a poltergeist operate from a dream?

  “I’m all right!” he said loudly. “Go back to bed, Mr. Barlow. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  When he heard Barlow leave, Jack lay on the bed, ignoring the books as he tried to steady his breath and lower his heart rate. “Eugenia,” he whispered. He thought, as he did so often, of the early days, when cups or plates started crashing on the floor, and then the coffee table flung itself across the room, and all the drawers of his wife’s dresser smashed into the wall above the bed. He remembered how Layla had screamed she couldn’t stand it anymore, Jack had to do something, how he’d held her and told her, with all the reassurance of his great knowledge, his experience as a Traveler, that it was just a phase, that doing something would only strengthen it. If you left them alone geists just faded away. Lying in his client’s bed, remembering, Jack felt the tears slide down his cheeks until they hit the dead crevices of his scars.

  He lay there until dawn, eyes on the ceiling as he waited until first light would allow him to get up and take the final step before he could leave the gray hous
e. Once he was sure the sun had come up he went into the oversize lifeless bathroom where he washed his face and got dressed, all but his shirt. On his way back from the bathroom he noticed something odd, a small black leather copy of MacGregor Mathers’ translation of the fifteenth-century manuscript, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage. He smiled. Maybe Alice had advanced beyond the dabbler stage. She must have hidden this behind the big showy art books, where she could count on William never noticing it. Softly Jack said, “You deserve better than the Forest, Alice. I’m coming for you.”

  Back at the bed he set down a small black rectangular leather case he’d brought with him from the hotel. Various instruments lay inside it, only one of which he needed. A black knife, unadorned, with a polished ebony handle and a double-edged carbon blade exactly five inches long.

  He held it up and stared at it awhile as he turned it in the morning light. Then he cut a shallow line along the inside of his arm. There was a network of such lines, light scars, and Jack had often wondered if some doctor, or even a cop if Jack was ever careless enough to get arrested, might think he was a junkie. Or self-destructive. He watched the fresh cut slowly ooze with blood, then took a deep breath and finally spit into the wound.

  Jack had to grip his thighs to keep from crying out. There was always pain, but this—

  The action had begun when Jack had shared that simple glass of water with Barlow back in the office. There’d been nothing in the water but Jack had charged it to align the two of them, so that his own etheric pulse would hold some of the client’s bond with his dead wife. When he spit into the cut he temporarily united himself with Barlow, so that the wound could call out to Alice. It was the surest way to find her in the confusion of the Forest.

  The action was never easy—it was like injecting himself with someone’s grief, or fear, or guilt—but he could never remember it hitting this hard. When the pain subsided enough that he could breathe a little easier he discovered his face wet with tears and sweat. He went into the bathroom and washed again, then put on his shirt, packed his knife, and left the house, hopefully without waking his client.