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

by Jonathan Strahan

  Over the following weeks more and more things surrendered their stationary lives to take flight. A personal CD player smashed through a window. Chairs rearranged themselves in a wild dance. Any jar of food left out on a table or shelf was likely to destroy itself.

  Eugenia’s mother, Layla Shade, originally thought some action of her husband’s had backfired, or worse, some spirit he’d angered had invaded their home. No, her husband told her, it was Eugenia herself, or rather an energy configuration, a poltergeist, that sometimes entered teenage girls. He told her their daughter was just an innocent host, but he knew it was more complicated than that. Geists, Jack knew, fed on the confusion, anger, and surging desires of adolescence. Eugenia wasn’t doing it, but probably liked the fear and confusion she saw in her mother.

  Weeks, then months, went by, and Layla begged Jack to do something, an exorcism, a spell, something, she hated being so nervous around her own daughter. Her husband assured her that geists were basically harmless, that teenagers almost always outgrew them, and that aggressive action might only make things worse. Not nearly as certain as he pretended, Jack secretly spent many hours online, especially in the Travelers Archive, a collection of research and first-person accounts that once was stored in underground vaults. Pretty much all of it confirmed what he’d told his wife.

  Still, Jack went so far as to consult his old teacher, whom he had not seen or spoken to in years. “So the archives are right?” he told her. “I do nothing?”

  Anatolie, as she was called, was a large woman with long, thick dreadlocks that coiled around her massive belly like protective snakes. Despite her size, she lived in a fifth-floor walkup in Chinatown, in an apartment Jack always thought was too small for her, let alone a visitor. She agreed with his assessment, but then mentioned, in an offhand manner, “You might want to build up credit.”

  “Credit?”

  “Yes. A conditional vow in case you need help and don’t have time to perform the necessary appeasements. If everything goes smoothly you will have no need to invoke it.”

  “What kind of help?” Jack asked. And, “Help against what?” Anatolie didn’t answer. By her expression she seemed to have lost interest in Jack entirely.

  Down in the street, outside grocery stalls filled with bitter melon and gai lan, Jack called his wife to tell her he had to go out of town for a couple of days. Layla was not happy. “You’re going traveling?” she said. “Leaving me alone with this?”

  “It’s not a job,” Jack said. “It’s to get help.”

  Layla was silent a moment, then said, “So if you—do whatever it is—will that stop it?”

  “Probably not. Or not exactly. But it will give us some insurance.”

  Layla sighed. “Come back as soon as you can,” she said, and hung up.

  Jack rented a car and drove upstate to a place he knew in the woods. The site was not an original but a cognate, a spot with the right configurations to stand in for a location where ceremonies were enacted thousands of years ago. There he lit four small fires, to mark out the action, but also because it was March and he would have to strip naked. Once his clothes were off he used an all-black knife Anatolie once gave him to draw a cross in the dirt connecting the fires. Now he drew the knife down the center of his body from his forehead to his groin. A charge ran through him and he gasped in the chilly air.

  Setting aside the knife he picked up a business card he’d designed for himself, and a magic marker, then stepped into the circle to lie down on the axis between the two largest fires. Beyond the circle he could hear an owl, a deer crashing through some low branches, and a brief high-pitched cry that sounded like a woman’s scream but probably was a coyote. He thought about what he was about to do, wondered if there was some other way. It was still likely the geist would just retreat and his vow would come to nothing. But if his daughter needed him…

  Jack Shade was a freelancer. Jack Choice, as another Traveler once called him, liked to pick his cases, liked to turn away clients who annoyed him. It was one of the reasons he’d broken with Anatolie, who considered Travelers “servants of the soul.” But when you ask for help you have to offer something precious.

  He held the card up high in his right hand. “I, John Marcus Shade,” he said, “make this vow in honor of my daughter, Eugenia Carla Shade. If she ever needs help, if she ever needs a path to open for her, I make this promise. From the moment I should invoke this vow, anyone who finds and brings this card may compel my service. I may not refuse them, I may not turn them away. I offer this for the sake of my daughter Eugenia. May she never need it. May this vow never be invoked.” Then he stabbed the card down onto his solar plexus.

  The fires all flashed high, then burned out at the same moment. Even as he lay on the dark cold dirt Jack realized he could not feel the card on his body.

  Too exhausted to drive further than the next cheap hotel, Jack got home the next day. The moment he stepped in the house Layla ran up and grabbed his arms. “Did you do something?” she asked. “Did it work?”

  Nervously, Jack said, “I did something. But we won’t know. Not for a while.”

  Layla pulled back from him. “No,” she said. “You were supposed to fix this. I can’t stand it anymore.” Jack looked past her to see his daughter on the wooden stairs to the bedrooms. She was wearing a too tight halter top and too short miniskirt, and spike-heeled sandals—everything her mother would have forbidden if Layla wasn’t afraid of her. She raised her middle finger toward her mother, and then clumsily walked upstairs with an exaggerated sway of her narrow hips. They’d reached a dangerous stage, Jack thought. The poltergeist wasn’t Genie but she wanted to believe it was. She liked the power.

  Jack spent the night on the couch. When his wife told him she wanted to be alone he did not contest it.

  He slept late, woken finally by the sound of his wife’s voice, high and tight as she shouted at her daughter. Jack ran into the kitchen. The date was March 9, 2005.

  The first thing Jack saw was his wife, dressed in a blue sweat suit, shouting at their daughter, who was laughing as she leaned back against the doorway to the dining room. Eugenia wore a red dress and neon-pink sneakers. And then Jack ignored them, suddenly focused on everything else he saw in the kitchen. Iron pots. Large ladles. Knives.

  Eugenia said, in a singsong taunt, “Good morning, Daddy. Mommy seems all upset about something.”

  Jack ignored her. “Layla,” he said, trying to keep his voice even, “what are you doing?”

  “I’m making lunch!” his wife shouted. “I’m making lunch—for my family—in my own fucking kitchen.”

  Jack said, “We agreed—”

  “No! You agreed. You gave the order. The great Jack Shade the Traveler. I won’t live like this anymore. My husband and my daughter don’t get to boss me around in my own kitchen.”

  Jack turned to Eugenia. In that same steady voice he said, “Genie, I need to talk to your mother. Please leave the kitchen.”

  His daughter laughed. “Whatever,” she said, and moved from the doorway. Then, “Nah, I think I’ll stay,” and she went back to where she’d been standing. “This is too much fun.”

  Layla said, “Goddamn it, do what your father says. I don’t care what thing you’ve got inside you. You’re fourteen years old and he’s your father. If he tells you to do something you do it.”

  “Please,” Jack said. Later he would wonder if he’d been speaking to his wife, his daughter, or the “thing.” It didn’t matter. None of them was listening.

  A pot flew past Jack’s head to hit the wall opposite the stove. Hot tomato sauce spilled down to cover a framed photo of the three of them at Disneyland when Eugenia was seven.

  Layla screamed. Eugenia jumped up and down and clapped her hands. “Good one!” she said. “Let’s see what else we can do.”

  “Genie!” Jack cried. “This isn’t you. You can fight it.”

  “Why?” she said. “It’s fun.”

  Then the knives starte
d. They came at Jack, all different sizes, end over end or straight toward him. He flailed his arms like a windmill, spraying blood even as he batted most of them away. It was the smaller ones that got through his defense. Two small paring knives and a long-tined fork caught his right jaw and the side of his neck.

  And then it was over. Jack was on his knees, his left hand pressed against his neck to stanch the blood. He saw his daughter first. She stood frozen in the doorway, ludicrous in her cheerful red dress, her mouth open but unable to make a sound. He looked at her for a long time, afraid to turn his head. When he finally did he saw his wife, and there she was, his beloved Layla, on the floor in a thick puddle of blood. The vegetable cleaver that lay next to her had cut right through her jugular. He crawled over to her and cradled her empty body.

  “Daddy,” Eugenia whispered. “I didn’t—it wasn’t—”

  “I know, baby,” Jack said. “It wasn’t you. It’s not your fault.”

  Eugenia said, “Help me. I don’t think I can hold it.” The knives had begun to swirl around her legs, a few inches from the floor.

  “I know,” Jack said again. His voice wet, he called out, “I, Jack Shade, invoke my vow. I demand payment!”

  “Daddy?” Eugenia said. “What are you doing?”

  Ignoring her, Jack said, “Take her somewhere. Somewhere safe, where she can’t hurt anyone.”

  For months afterward Jack would wonder—did he want what happened? Was he trying to punish her? He would lie in bed and try to bring back that exact moment. He could never decide.

  A door appeared in the room. Stone, unmarked. “Oh my God,” Jack whispered. Then, “No! That wasn’t what I meant.”

  Eugenia just stood there, looking up at the door that somehow stood taller than the room. Jack called out, “Genie. Get away from it. You don’t have to go there.” But she didn’t move, and neither did her father, though he fought to get up against an invisible hand that pressed him to the floor, even as he yelled to his daughter to run.

  The door swung open, and Jack heard the Forest before he saw it—wind first, then voices, swirls of hushed voices. As it opened wider, so that his daughter stood framed in clouds of trees, Jack tried once more to move, but now he couldn’t even speak, not to tell Eugenia to fight, not to try once more to take back his vow. He could only watch as his daughter walked, robot-like, into the world of whispers.

  And then the door closed, and a moment later vanished, and he was all alone, Jack Shade with his dead wife in his arms—Johnny Lonesome, on the floor of a kitchen covered in blood.

  Two Houses

  Kelly Link

  Kelly Link [www.kellylink.com] published her first story, “Water Off a Black Dog’s Back,” in 1995 and attended the Clarion Writers Workshop in the same year. A writer of subtle, challenging, sometimes whimsical fantasy, Link has published close to thirty stories which have won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, British SF, and Locus awards, and been collected in 4 Stories, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. Link is also an accomplished editor, working on acclaimed small press ’zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and publishing books as Small Beer Press with husband Gavin J. Grant, as well as co-editing The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series with Grant and Ellen Datlow.

  Wake up, wake up.

  Portia is having a birthday party. The party will start without you. Wake up, Gwenda. Wake up. Hurry, hurry.

  Soft music playing. The smell of warm bread. She could have been back home, how many houses ago? In her childhood bed, her mother downstairs baking bread. The last sleeper in the spaceship House of Secrets opened her eyes, crept from her narrow bed. She rose up, or fell, into the chamber.

  The chamber too was narrow and small. It was made up of soft pink light, invisible drawers, bed and chambers, all of them empty. The astronaut Gwenda stretched out her arms, scratched her head. Her hair had grown out again. She dreamed, sometimes, of a berth filled with masses of hair. Years and decades and centuries passing while the dreamer slept beneath that strangling weight.

  Now there was the smell of old paper. The library where Gwenda had spent summers as a child, reading fairy tales. Maureen was in her head, looking at old books with her. Monitoring her heart rate, the dilation of her pupils, each flare of her nostrils. Maureen was the ship, the House and the keeper of all its Secrets. A spirit of the air; a soothing subliminal hum; an alchemical sequence of smells and emanations.

  Gwenda inhaled. Stretched again, then slowly somersaulted. Arcane chemical processes began within her blood, her nervous system.

  This is how it was aboard the spaceship House of Secrets. You slept and you woke up and you slept again. You might sleep for a year, for five years. There were six astronauts. Sometimes others were already awake. Sometimes you spent a few days, a few weeks alone. Except you were never really alone. Maureen was always there. She was there with you, sleeping and waking. She was inside you too.

  Everyone is waiting for you in the Great Room. There’s roasted carp. A chocolate cake.

  "A tidal smell,” Gwenda said, trying to place it. “Mangrove roots, and the sea caught in a hundred places at their roots. I spent a summer in a place like that.

  You arrived with one boy and you left with another.

  "So I did,” Gwenda said. “I’d forgotten. It was such a long time ago.”

  A hundred years.

  "That long!” Gwenda said.

  Not long at all.

  "No,” Gwenda said. “Not long at all.” She touched her hair. “I’ve been asleep…”

  Seven years this time.

  "Seven years,” Gwenda said.

  The smell of oranges, a whole grove of them. Other smells, pleasant ones, ones that belonged to Mei and Sullivan and Aune and Portia. Sisi. All of their body chemistries altered, adjusted for harmonious relationships. They were, of necessity, a convivial group.

  Gwenda threw off the long sleep. Sank toward the curve of the bulkhead, pressing on a drawer. It swung open and in she went to make her toilet, to be poked and prodded and injected, lathered and sluiced. She rid herself of the new growth of hair, the fine down on her arms and legs.

  So slow, so slow, Maureen fretted. Let me get rid of it for you. For good.

  "One day,” Gwenda said. She opened her log, checked the charts on her guinea pigs, her carp.

  This is why you are last again. You dawdle. You refuse to be sensible in the matter of personal grooming. Everyone is waiting for you. You’re missing all of the fun.

  "Aune has asked for a Finnish disco or a Finnish bar or a Finnish sauna. Or the Northern Lights. Sullivan is playing with dogs. Mei is chatting up movie stars or famous composers, and Portia is being outrageous. There are waterfalls or redwood trees or dolphins,” Gwenda said.

  Cherry blossoms. The Westminster dog show. 2009. The Susex Spaniel Clussex Three D Grinchy Glee wins. And Sisi is hoping you will hurry. She wants to tell you something.

  "Well,” Gwenda said. “I’d better hurry then.”

  Maureen went before and after, down Corridor One. Lights flicked on, then off again so that the corridor fell away behind Gwenda in darkness. Was Maureen the golden light ahead or the darkness that followed behind? Carp the size of year old children swam in the glassy walls. Gwenda stopped now and then to watch.

  Then she was in the Galley, and the Great Room was just above her, and long-limbed Sisi poked her head through the glory hole. “New tattoo?”

  It was an old joke between them.

  Head to toes Gwenda was covered in the most extraordinary pictures. There was a Durer and a Dore; two Chinese dragons and a Celtic cross; there was a winged man holding a rat-headed baby; the Queen of Diamonds ripped into eight pieces by a pack of wolves; a green-haired girl on a playground rocket; the Statue of Liberty and the State Flag of Illinois; passages from Lewis Carroll and the Book of Revelations and a hundred other books; a hundred other marvels. There was the spaceship House of Secrets on the back of Gwenda’s right hand, and its sis
ter House of Mystery on her left.

  Sisi had a pair of old cowboy boots, and Aune had an ivory cross on a gold chain. Her mother had given it to her. Sullivan had a copy of Moby Dick, Portia a four-carat diamond in a platinum setting. Mei brought her knitting needles.

  Gwenda had her tattoos. Astronauts on the Long Trip travel lightly.

  Hands pulled Gwenda up and into the Great Room, patted her back, her shoulders, rubbed her head. Here feet had weight. There was a floor, and she stood on it. There was a table, and on the table was a cake. Familiar faces grinned at her.

  The music was very loud. Silky coated dogs chased white petals.

  "Surprise!” Sisi said. “Happy birthday, Gwenda!”

  "But it isn’t my birthday,” Gwenda said. “It’s Portia’s birthday. Maureen?”

  Today is your birthday, Maureen said.

  "But it was my idea,” Portia said. “My idea to throw you a surprise party.”

  "Well,” Gwenda said. “I’m surprised.”

  Come on, Maureen said. Come and blow out your candles.

  The candles were not real, of course. But the cake was.

  It was the usual sort of party. They all danced, the way you could only dance in micro gravity. It was all good fun. When dinner was ready, Maureen sent away the Finnish dance music, the dogs, the cherry blossoms. You could hear Shakespeare say to Mei, “I always dreamed of being an astronaut.” And then he vanished.

  Once there had been two ships. It was considered usual practice, in the Third Age of Space Travel, to build more than one ship at a time, to send companion ships out on their long voyages. Redundancy enhances resilience. Sister ships Seeker and Messenger, called House of Secrets and House of Mystery by their crews, left Earth on a summer day in the year 2059.