TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 88, September 2017

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: September 2017

SCIENCE FICTION

Blue Ribbon
Marissa Lingen

An Ever-Expanding Flash of Light
Timothy Mudie

Carthago Delenda Est
Genevieve Valentine

Ugo
Giovanni De Feo

FANTASY

The Last Cheng Beng Gift
Jaymee Goh

The Magician’s Apprentice
Tamsyn Muir

A Pound of Darkness, a Quarter of Dreams
Tony Ballantyne

Shoggoths in Traffic
Tobias S. Buckell

NOVELLA

Near Zennor
Elizabeth Hand

EXCERPTS

Annalee Newitz | AUTONOMOUS
Annalee Newitz

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: September 2017
Amal El-Mohtar

Media Reviews: September 2017
Joseph Allen Hill

Interview: Theodora Goss
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Jaymee Goh

Timothy Mudie

Tony Ballantyne

Giovanni De Feo

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2017 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Alan Bao

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: September 2017

John Joseph Adams | 1553 words

Welcome to issue eighty-eight of Lightspeed!

We have original science fiction by Timothy Mudie (“An Ever-Expanding Flash of Light”) and Giovanni De Feo (“Ugo”), along with SF reprints by Marissa Lingen (“Blue Ribbon”) and Genevieve Valentine (“Carthago Delenda Est”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Jaymee Goh (“The Last Cheng Beng Gift”) and Tony Ballantyne (“A Pound of Darkness, a Quarter of Dreams”), and fantasy reprints by Tamsyn Muir (“The Magician’s Apprentice”) and Tobias Buckell (“Shoggoths in Traffic”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns, and an interview with Theodora Goss.

For our ebook readers, we have a reprint of the novella “Near Zennor,” by Elizabeth Hand, and an excerpt from the novel Autonomous, by Annalee Newitz.

Awards News

The Hugo Award winners have been announced. The only horse we had in the race this year was yours truly—in the Best Editor, Short Form category—and I lost out once again to the legendary Ellen Datlow. One of our cover artists—Elizabeth Leggett—did win in the Fan Artist category, so big congrats to her, and to all of the other winners. You can see a full list of the finalists and winners in each category at thehugoawards.org.

Meanwhile, the World Fantasy Award finalists have been announced, and I’m pleased to note that Karen Joy Fowler and I are finalists in the Best Anthology category for Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. Additionally, Maria Dahvana Headley is a finalist in the Best Short Fiction category for “Little Widow,” first published in our sister-magazine Nightmare (September 2016) and then subsequently in my anthology (co-edited with Douglas Cohen) What the #@&% is That?. So congrats all around! You can see a full list of the finalists at worldfantasy.org.

John Joseph Adams Books Update

Two new acquisitions to announce!

Dale Bailey’s IN THE NIGHT WOOD, a contemporary fantasy in which the grieving biographer of a Victorian fantasist finds himself slipping inexorably into the supernatural world that consumed his subject, to John Joseph Adams Books, for publication in Fall 2018.

Todd McAulty’s THE ROBOTS OF GOTHAM, a debut novel about a future where the world is on the brink of total subjugation by machine intelligences and a man stumbles on a sinister conspiracy to exterminate humanity. . .and a group of human and machine misfits who might just be able to prevent it, to John Joseph Adams Books, for publication in Spring 2018.

Aside from new acquisitions, here’s a quick rundown what to expect from John Joseph Adams Books in 2017:

In July, we published Carrie Vaughn’s novel, Bannerless—a post-apocalyptic mystery in which an investigator must discover the truth behind a mysterious death in a world where small communities struggle to maintain a ravaged civilization decades after environmental and economic collapse.

“Skillfully portrays a vastly altered future America. [The] focus on sustainability and responsibility is unusual, thought-provoking, and very welcome.” —Publishers Weekly

“An intimate post-apocalyptic mystery [. . .] well-crafted and heartfelt.” —Kirkus

“A compelling, deft post-apocalyptic tale.” —Library Journal

“Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower mixed with a modern procedural mystery […] Wonderfully intriguing.” —Thomas Wilkerson, BookPeople

“Totally fascinating as a thought experiment and compulsively readable.” —Jenny Craig, Seattle Public Library

Also in July, we published Sand by Hugh Howey, a reissue of his acclaimed indie-published novel (which was just announced to be in development as a television show for Syfy, with Gary Whitta and Marc Forster attached):

“Magnificent […] After reading Wool, his other post-apocalyptic series, I didn’t think he could repeat the creation of a great world setting filled with characters you instantly care about. But he did.” —SFF World

“Sand immerses you in its grubby post-apocalyptic world. […] Howey conjures a credible, brutal future.” —Financial Times

In September, we’re publishing Retrograde by Peter Cawdron, a hard SF novel about an international colony of astronauts on Mars, who have been prepared for every eventuality of living on another planet except one: What happens when disaster strikes Earth?

“For lovers of Andy Weir’s The Martian, here’s a true hard science-fiction tale set on the red planet—a terrific blend of high tech and high tension, of science and suspense, of character and crisis.” —Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of Red Planet Blues and Quantum Night

“Science fiction as it should be. Retrograde combines realistic characters with depictions of Mars as our explorers will one day find it in a powerful story. A must read!” —Ben Bova, six-time Hugo Award-winner and author of The Grand Tour series

In October, we’ll be publishing Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey, a short story collection including three stories set in the world of Hugh’s mega-hit Wool and two never-before-published tales, plus fifteen additional stories collected together for the first time.

“I devoured this book! The wildly imaginative tales in Machine Learning tackle everything from AI and aliens to video games and VR, and Howey infuses each one of them with the perfect mix brains, bravado, and heart. Reading the stories in this collection is like discovering an entire lost season of The Twilight Zone in which every episode was written by either Rod Serling or Richard Matheson. They’re that good.” —Ernest Cline, bestselling author of Ready Player One

“Like a knapsack of compact grenades, exploding insight, unexpected innovations, and sci-fi heat. Each one the core of something larger.” —Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired

“Hugh’s stories keep me turning pages not just to find out what happens, but because of the deep common threads of humanity within. I don’t just want to know the ending, I care about every moment.” —Annie Bellet, USA Today bestselling author of The Twenty-Sided Sorceress series

In November, we’ll be publishing Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Will and Temper—a Victorian-era urban fantasy inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which an épée-fencing enthusiast and her younger sister are drawn into a secret and dangerous London underworld of pleasure-seeking demons and bloodthirsty diabolists, with only her skill with a blade standing between them and certain death.

“Tanzer mixes Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray with queer romance and demonology in this subtle, beautiful Victorian-era fantasy novel. [. . .] The perfectly depicted relationship between the sister [protagonists] takes center stage in a complex (though never overplayed) web of art, swordplay, romance, and, much to the sisters’ surprise, actual demons. Gorgeously portrayed three-dimensional characters and sensual prose propel this smoothly entertaining story to an emotionally affecting end.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“An artful, witty, Oscar Wilde pastiche with the heart of a paranormal thriller.” —Diana Gabaldon, bestselling author of Outlander

“A delightful, dark, and entertaining romp with serious intent behind it. The writing is so smart and sharp—Molly Tanzer is at the top of her form in this beautifully constructed novel. Sure to be a favorite of readers and critics alike.” —Jeff VanderMeer, bestselling author of the Southern Reach trilogy

“There has never been a better time for a spirited, feminist reinvention of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Molly Tanzer has taken a wickedly sensuous classic and transformed it into a lively supernatural tale featuring lovestruck teenagers, diabolical botanicals, mysterious paintings, and—oh, yes—demons. Creatures of Will and Temper is a wild ride from start to finish, beautifully and boldly written, and a most worthy successor to Oscar Wilde’s scandalous novel.” —Amy Stewart, author of Girl Waits With Gun

“Decadent Victorians clash with dueling demon-hunters in this page-turning reinvention of Oscar Wilde’s classic tale. I loved it!” —Charles Stross, award-winning author of The Delirium Brief

A bit further out, in Spring 2018, we’ll have The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp, about a magician with a talent for finding lost things who is forced into playing a high-stakes game with the gods of New Orleans for the heart and soul of the city. And then in late 2018, we’ll have Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker, an epic fantasy about a group of siblings battling for control of a vast empire while a powerful demonlord pits them against each other.

That’s all the JJA Books news to report for now. More soon!

• • • •

Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a new SF/Fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, as well as the USA Today bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent projects include: Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Loosed Upon the World, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist eleven times) and is a seven-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

Blue Ribbon

Marissa Lingen | 5010 words

I should have known when I didn’t hear whooping and hollering and congratulations from Chornohora Station when I crossed the finish plane. My sister Luzia and I eked out a win over Scott and Ferenc Nagy in the maneuverability race even though Luz was just barely old enough to compete in the teen division. Usually that sort of thing calls for celebration, and Luz was not going to let it go without some.

“Wooo!” she hollered into the comms. “That’s right, Pinheiros have beaten you again, even without Amilcar’s help!”

Scott’s voice sounded admiring and rueful: “Sneaky little demons. Next time, though . . .”

“Next time will have to wait awhile, with you guys in adult competition next year and us still in 4-H,” I said. “You’d better spend that time trying to improve, maybe even looking at the throttle on that thing. Chornohora Station, I think we’re ready for our victory lap, so go ahead and pop the champagne corks, we are coming in.”

And . . . silence. Real silence, not just chatter unrelated to my obstacle-racing victory (teen division). I get that not everybody is thrilled with 4-H racing, especially not every adult. There are infinite varieties of 4-H contests, from chicken genetics to hydroponic tomato sauce competitions to straight-out speed races in the STL ships, and nobody can get excited about all of them, not even during the fair. But mostly the people manning the station comms during the race were racers themselves as kids and more than happy to give us feedback as needed.

“You getting anything from the station, guys?” I asked the Nagys.

“Negative,” said Ferenc, the most he’d said all race.

“Not a word,” Scott concurred.

“Us either.” I tried switching frequencies. “Chornohora Station, hello?” Still nothing.

There were another couple of Muspel 670s hanging near the finish plane, nearly identical to ours in lines but painted wildly differently. They weren’t from our race—those losers were still coming in and would be for quite some time, thanks—but I wasn’t sure what they were from.

“Hailing the blue Muspel,” I said over the comms. “This is the Pinheiro sisters, Luzia and Tereza. Do you require assistance?”

“I don’t know,” said a rather small voice. “This is Simon Chao-Cohen. I’m here with my in-cousin Huang Fu Chao-Cohen. We finished our race—”

“Which race?”

“Maneuvers preteen.”

“Okay, sorry, go on.”

“We finished our race, and nobody answered our hails. That was maybe two hours ago.”

I frowned. Two hours was far too long for everyone to be busy with incoming ships, especially at this stage of the fair. We had been nearly the last ones in, and Luz and I had had to scramble into our Muspel and go in order to make our race registration cutoff—we hadn’t even gotten to see the inside of the station yet. Nobody would be later than that for one of the year’s three big fairs.

And nobody would leave a preteen division out there in radio silence for hours.

“Hang on a sec,” I said. “My uncle taught me several miner emergency frequencies. I’ll hail on those.”

I tried the entire broad band to no effect. Another few Muspels straggled in from our race, and the little kids from the preteen course started to cluster theirs up with us, together, hanging in a constellation outside the station.

Finally I heard a voice, but it was not a response, or at least not the kind of response I wanted. “Attention, incoming ships. This is the Chornohora Station auto-response system. The Station customs and immigration personnel are unable to process your ship at this time. Please proceed to another station for your trade and leisure needs. Chornohora Station is closed for quarantine. Please proceed to another station for your trade and leisure needs. Chornohora Station is closed for quarantine. Please proceed . . .”

I punched the “accept” button so that it wouldn’t keep playing us the same automated message. It would still let me know if the message changed.

Closed for quarantine.

None of the Oort Stations had ever been closed for quarantine. Ever. We learned about it in lessons because it had happened to one of the Jovians once, back before the Oort was even settled—the encephalitic measles, and that was horrible, five percent death toll. Now there was something on Chornohora that warranted a quarantine.

And our family was on the station.

“Tereza?” said the little voice I had come to identify as Simon Chao-Cohen. “What are we going to do? We can’t go to another station like it says. Muspels don’t have FTL, and all our parents’ FTL ships are locked up to the station in the quarantine.”

“I know, Simon,” I said. “It’ll be okay.” Luz shot me an incredulous look, but I just kept talking. “You’ve got emergency rations in your Muspel, right?”

“. . . sort of?”

“Okay, we’ll sort out ‘sort of’ when we’ve got everybody gathered. Meanwhile let’s see who’s here and go on to—hey, Scott, will you look for a good rock while I take attendance here?”

“Sure thing,” he said. I might make comments about Scott and his in-cousin Ferenc when we were in the heat of the race, but it was all in good fun. They were some of my best friends, and I was glad to have them to count on in a crisis. Scott was going to marry my out-cousin Amilcar in another year, but they hadn’t decided who would be the in-spouse and who the out-spouse. If Amilcar out-married, he and Scott would have more position on the Nagy ship, more seniority; with a single-ship family like the Nagys (or like my own), it was much easier to make your voice heard, much less likely that you would be drowned out by still-living generations of ancestors, all of whom felt they knew more about mining, art, and life than you.

But if Amilcar in-married, Scott would have access to everything the Gouveia family had, which was a lot. Really a lot. A lot of ships, a lot of possessions, a lot of connections . . . anything at all that they wanted to do, anything their contract-children wanted to do, would be possible with the Gouveia family. My out-cousins were a pretty big deal.

It’s part of why Dad out-married into the Pinheiros: He didn’t like being just another Gouveia artist, without anyone who could keep track of what he did differently or why.

The point was: Scott was nearly family. So he ran the calculations while we took notes on who was who and who was where. We had four ships from the preteen division—it sounded like they’d lost, poor mites, and the winners had made it into the station before the quarantine shutdown. Which might have made them even unluckier. The rest of our division of teen maneuverability pilots was limping in a few at a time, and Luz and I hailed them and took stock of who they were, which families they were from.

Then I zapped the coordinates Scott had picked out to their ships, and we regrouped to an asteroid not far away: big enough to let us anchor our ships to it and power the artificial grav that way, but not far enough away that we wouldn’t hear about it if in-system med ships came to Chornohora, or if the quarantine was lifted or like that. We formed a ring on the surface, able to pass things with waldos if they were vacuum-safe but not actually connected by airlocks. Can’t be too careful in quarantine.

Chornohora was one of the three big fairs of the year, so pretty much all my family was in that station except for Luz, even my out-cousins, except Amilcar’s ship of them. I kept hoping we’d get the all-clear and laugh about it a little nervously with Mom and Dad and Grandpa and Grandma later. I started thinking about how to make them laugh, telling them about how we had to hang out in space sweaty and stinky from our victory. That many hours of obstacle-racing adds up; you get pretty rank together. But then the Chao-Cohens made it clear that they didn’t have the regulation amount of emergency rations, and I got funny and serious stuff all in one package.

“What do you mean, you don’t have the regulation amount? Come on, the Chao family practically founded Oort mining. You guys know better than this.”

“Simon kept stashing things to eat and then coming back and eating them,” said Huang Fu, speaking for the first time. He sounded, if anything, younger than Simon.

“Have you got anything to eat in there?”

“Oh yes!” chirped Simon. “I’m going to enter the preteen baking section for nuts.” Of course. We were all 4-Hers—that’s who sponsored the racing, and in fact most events at the annual fairs. So Luzia and I wouldn’t be the only one with our competition entries in our ships.

“Nuts? I bet,” said a little girl’s voice I recognized as one of his competitors, one of the Aafjes girls—either Grace or Anni, I couldn’t tell yet which.

“It’s got nuts in it, stupid! They’re plum dumplings with ground walnuts, and they’re really good, and just for that, you can’t have any.”

“None of that,” I said sharply. “No name-calling, and absolutely no threats of food-hoarding, do you understand?”

“Yes ma’am,” muttered Simon.

“We’re entering the competition for novel flavors of lichen-based proteins,” said the other Aafjes girl. I’m pretty sure that one was Anni. “We’ve got durian mac and cheese.”

There was a general outcry on the comms.

“Not real durian!” Anni protested. “I know it’s banned for the sake of the air vents. So we did our best to replicate durian flavors with lichens. It’s really good!”

“We’ve got spruce beer,” said Ferenc. Usually he lets Scott do the talking, so it must have been his spruce beer.

“Didn’t anybody else do vacuum emergency kit competition this year?” I said plaintively. It transpired that the two little Van Haanrade boys, Liwei and Mikko, had, and also three of our contemporaries. In addition, we had my currant mustard, Luzia’s dilly beans, and several more entries in the lichen competition. Everything had been canned except the dumplings.

“Okay, so, you keep the dumplings,” I said to the Chao-Cohen boys. “We can’t share those without risk.”

“What do you mean, without risk?” asked Liwei Van Haanrade.

I took too long to answer. Luzia jumped in for me, and less delicately than I would have. “Look, there’s some nasty disease on the station, right? Well, that means someone must have brought it, right? And the odds are pretty good that those of you who were on the station got exposed to it before you started your races. So we can’t link life systems. We have to pass everything with the waldos and let the vacuum sterilize it.”

“Will that work?” asked Scott.

“It’s the best chance we’ve got,” I said. “We can’t let the Chao-Cohen kids starve, dumplings or no dumplings. Everybody comm me what you’ve got for supplies, and we’ll share them out evenly.”

“Does this mean I won’t win with the durian mac?” said Grace Aafjes.

“I think we’ve won all we’re going to win today, Grace,” I said.

“But we didn’t win! We came in at least fifth, maybe sixth. The logs aren’t auto-updating, so I can’t see.”

I did not feel like trying to explain to her that if we were dealing with plague protocols, just being alive and in a separate life-support system from the victims might be a win condition. So I just didn’t argue. Instead, I did the calculations while Luzia manned the waldos, passing hardened vac-safe jars of preserves and lichens up and down the chain of ships on the tiny rock we’d found.

The sour smell in our Muspel was not going to get better any time soon.

We were chewing through our allotted mouthfuls of salt-and-pepper lichen (good) and washing them down with spruce beer (which is not alcoholic, for the record; being alcoholic might have helped the flavor, so: not good) when Luz issued a very dramatic sigh. “We’re missing the Saloma concert.”

Saloma is my sister’s favorite singer. Mine, too. We’d only ever been to her concert at the previous fair at Servaas Station. It was out of this ecliptic. I said, “We can put on one of our recordings.”

“I guess,” said Luz, “but we do that all the time. It’s not the same.”

“Luz . . . they might not even be having the concert.”

“You think Saloma’s sick?”

“I think anybody might be sick.” Then I was glad I’d turned the comms off to the younger kids’ ships, because Luzia started crying, loud and ragged and scared, and she didn’t stop for quite awhile. I put my arms around her and muttered meaningless encouragement, and then when she got herself calmed down and curled up in one of the emergency blankets to listen to her favorite Saloma song, I had to go lock myself in the head so I could cry, too.

Tear-streaked and stinking of old sweat, I picked up the inside of the Muspel as best I could. There was a comm indicator. “Tereza?” said a little voice. It was Mikko Van Haanrades. “They’ll let us in tomorrow, right?”

“I sure hope so, Mikko,” I said. “You guys look after each other in there, all right? Try to get some sleep.”

I followed my own advice as best I could. I woke up with a crick in my neck and my hair stuck to my face. Luzia looked no better. The comm alert was going off. I pressed it, hoping for a station message.

“Tereza? They’re still not answering,” said Simon Chao-Cohen.

“It’s awfully early, Simon,” I said. “It looks like it’s a real quarantine, not a drill, so we’re probably stuck here until they get the med-ships out from Ganymede.”

“Shouldn’t we . . . try to get somewhere else?” he said.

I sighed. It’s really easy to forget how big the Oort is when you’re always using FTL drives. Then get stuck in a Muspel 670 or something else with only STL, just a little mining vehicle, and see how big it feels. At top speed, we could probably make it to the next station in only four or five years, except that we’d run out of fuel and have nowhere to get more in less than a month. Food also. Earth people would probably compare it to trying to get from Oslo to Cape Town on a tractor. You’d be better off with a musk ox cart, because musk oxen can swim, or if you get too hungry, they’re much tastier than a Muspel 670.

So I talked that through to the satisfaction of half a dozen ten-year-olds, all of whom were smart, all of whom were well-trained, all of whom just wanted their families. Nor could I blame them.

And failing their families, they wanted something to do, and I couldn’t blame them for that, either. We all had movies and music and books downloaded to our Muspels for quiet moments of travel and letting the ship automate some of the less interesting mining functions, but that’s not nearly enough when you’re trying to distract yourself from a plague at your doorstep.

Luz set up a round-robin Go tournament, at which she soundly spanked all comers, and I taught the little ones to play cribbage through the ship computers. Squabbling and technical difficulties took care of most of a day, and we older ones got very few questions about where the med ships were and when we were going to get there.

We got to the end of a day-cycle out there in the dark and cold, and everybody was cranky and tired and getting smellier by the minute. So I did what I was taught to do: I tried to start a sing-along.

Other people are not very good at sing-alongs even when they’re perfectly good at singing.

But oh, I did my best. I taught them “Rose, Rose” and “Sweet Deep Black” and “John Jacob Jingelheimer Schmidt,” which is apparently a song about in-cousins whose mothers did not consult sufficiently about their names. Luzia tried to get everybody to sing Saloma’s “Out-Cousin’s Lullaby,” which is a great song, but it’s terrible for people who have less vocal range than Saloma, which is pretty much everybody, especially Luz. Ferenc unexpectedly saved the day then and jumped in to teach them “I Hate to Wake Up Sober on Europa,” which under ordinary circumstances I would not teach to preteens, but what the hell, their parents could yell at me later.

If their parents were still alive.

I resolutely did not think of that, and I kept not thinking of it when he taught them the song about the seven old ladies and their misadventures in the head, and I was almost doing fine when he taught them the one about the miner and the chicken, which is dirty in at least two languages that I know of.

And then, very quietly, Liwei Van Haanrade said, “Tereza? I miss my auntie.”

“We all miss our aunties, sweetie,” I said. “We’ll get to see them soon, when the med ships come.”

But he continued, “Tereza, I don’t feel good.”

“He’s all feverish,” his brother Mikko reported, “and I think I’m a little feverish, too.”

“Probably too much of that yummy yummy durian-flavored lichen the Aafjes gave us,” I said heartily. “Get some sleep.”

“It was durian mac and cheese,” said Grace Aafjes, and we all agreed that it was unforgettably that, that if she was going for durian mac and cheese, she had certainly achieved it. And then we went to regular comms for the night, and Luz said to me, “They’re sick. The Van Haanrades. They’ve got whatever it is on the station.”

“We don’t know that,” I said, but we had a pretty good guess at it.

Up until that point, we could almost convince ourselves that this was just another adventure, like a survivalist course under the domes or something. Like Earth people who go camping. None of us had ever been anything like camping, so—we read old Earther kids’ books, and we could sort of half-convince ourselves it was similar.

But then I woke up in the night to Mikko comming me that Liwei had been throwing up blood. And there was honestly not a damn thing I could do except talk to them, sing to them, use my most soothing voice with them and be there through the comms. I had everybody inventory their emergency med supplies, but honestly I didn’t expect much, and that’s what I got. Muspels aren’t meant to be far away from their parent ships for long. There are a few adhesive bandages and some mild painkillers, and that’s about it.

And Liwei did not get better, and Mikko got worse, and even if I had been willing to expose myself to the plague—even if I’d been willing to throw precaution to the wind—there was literally nothing I could do except listen to these two little kids, brothers in their ship like Luz and I were sisters in ours, vomiting blood. Then shitting blood. And I’m not sure what-all happened toward the end there. It sounded bubbly and horrible.

I just know they died.

Early on, I got Scott to handle the rest of the little kids, and I got him to tell everybody not to comm the Van Haanrades. If they’d had particular friends, I would have let them say goodbye, but we were just all Oorter kids who knew each other’s families a little from fairs. There was no one who could be more comforting than I was, and what a sad state of affairs that was.

And the last thing I needed was more of the little ones to freak out.

That is, any more than was strictly necessary.

Which, frankly, was quite a lot. Luz and I held each other and cried and repeated reassurances about how we hadn’t even been exposed to the station air. But that didn’t help much.

Nobody took it well when I told them the Van Haanrade kids were dead. I didn’t expect them to. The littler ones had started thinking of me as someone who was in charge, so I spent hours trying to explain to terrified, upset kids why I hadn’t saved the others. They asked me the horrible questions, about whether I would let them die, too. Because somewhere along the line, my 4-H pledge to the community had come to mean them, and they just could not wrap their brains around the idea that I couldn’t fix it.

Scott tried to say something consoling over the comms, but he had to talk to Luz at that point, because I was not listening to anything but the white noise in my head.

The next morning, Simon Chao-Cohen commed me with a timid little voice saying, “Tereza?” And my heart went right back to my feet. I was just sure it would be another little kid vomiting blood.

In some ways it was harder than that.

“Tereza, our life system is malfunctioning. Help?”

“Oh shit,” I said coherently. “Oh shit, oh shit, Simon, what have you got left?”

“Two hours. Can we come in with you?”

I looked at Luz. Luz looked at me. The Chao-Cohen kids had been on the station for days before the race, and we hadn’t been there at all. Maybe we should try to shove them off on someone else. But the Muspels were small, and I had put myself in charge, so . . .

“Just a second,” I said. I turned the comm off.

“We’re taking them,” said Luz. She sounded tired. No thirteen-year-old should ever have to sound like she’s accepting her own death.

“We have to split them up. One each. A Muspel with four people in it would be completely unbearable, even if three of them are you and little bitty sprouts like those boys.”

“But we’re taking one. Scott and Ferenc can take the other—give them Huang Fu. He and Ferenc can be quiet together. Scott’s used to it. But honestly, Tereza, which of our other competitors has shown the slightest bit of backbone? They can’t take care of a little kid. And the Aafjes are just little kids themselves. And there’s no way to sterilize the Van Haanrade vehicle thoroughly without losing most of the remaining life support anyway.”

I forebore to mention that Luz was only one year out of the preteen division herself—that at this time last year, I’d been partnering with Amilcar for competitions like this one and watching Luz dazzle the single-digit set. I flipped the comms back on. “Okay, here’s the plan,” I said.

It sounds like Luzia and me, we were these amazing angels, so selfless and so wonderful, or alternately like we were just ordinary humans doing what you always hope ordinary humans would do. And maybe both of those were true.

What’s also true is that the Chao family—all nine branches of it—are some of the most powerful people in the Oort. So . . .yeah, we were taking a pretty big risk. On the other hand, we could have the gratitude of an entire great clan if we succeeded.

Mostly, though, we took them in because if I was going to listen to another little boy cough and cry and die, I was going to do it where I could damn well rub his shoulders and stroke his hair and clean him up a little.

Maybe that makes me stupid. I don’t know.

Simon cried for half an hour when he got into our ship and got his suit off, I think mostly with relief but also some with exhaustion. He had carefully brought his rations, good boy that he was. Once he finally stopped crying, Luz showed him cat’s-cradle tricks and got him calmed down.

And then the med-ships came.

We saw them approaching the station first and hailed them. One of them broke off from the main group and approached us immediately.

“We’ve lost two little boys in the third ship clockwise in the ring from me,” I told them. “Do you know anything about what’s going on there on Chornohora? We haven’t been able to raise any kind of comms since the auto-signal went on.”

“They have no spare personnel,” said the Ganymedan medic. “I’m not sure how many are still alive, but certainly not enough to keep them out of emergency shutdown mode. It’s pretty bad.”

“What kind of bad?”

“We don’t know, but it’s hemorrhagic,” he said grimly.

“Hemorrhagic” is one of those words you never, ever want to hear used near your loved ones. I had the urge to clap my hands over my sister’s ears. But Luz had been coping with all of this just as I had, and when I turned to her, she had her hands over Simon’s ears.

That’s my girl.

The med-ship personnel were using special suits to get in and out of Chornohora, and as long as nobody started running a fever, we were low priority. They passed us supplies through the airlock. It was a really bad sign that they were not sparing any of the Ganymedan personnel to keep our spirits up—they just took Liwei and Mikko’s bodies and left us, and brought us rations from time to time.

It was another week before they actually towed the Muspels away to a big in-system med ship and let us out of them. They were going to separate me and Luzia to talk to me, but Luz wasn’t going anywhere without me. She didn’t actually threaten to bite anybody, but I think the implication was clear.

The in-system official waiting for us was not Ganymedan, as I’d expected from the med-ships. She was Europan.

Which meant there were finances involved.

“Tereza Pinheiro,” she said. “And Luzia Pinheiro, I presume, though you were not called for.”

Luz jutted out her chin. “I came anyway.”

“Well, girls.” She looked at her handheld as if it carried new information, though I was sure she had loaded and read everything long before we’d walked in. “Looks like you could use a shower and a hot meal.”

“And a beverage that isn’t spruce beer or recycled water,” I said fervently. “What—what’s happening?”

“You have the gratitude of a grateful Chao family,” she said. “So there’s that for you. The seven branches want you to know that you can call on them at any time.”

“Nine branches,” said Luz, because in-system people don’t always know.

The Europan glanced at her, and I saw that she was desperately trying to be kind. “No, honey. Seven.”

I sat down in the ugly chair they’d provided and gripped the edge of the metal table for support. “Everyone’s gone. Aren’t they.”

“I’m sorry. In addition to the gratitude of the Chao family, you have an offer for a new berth. Both of you. I’ll send your accounts the details. Think it over. You don’t have to rush.” She looked at us both carefully, greasy and stinking and smudged. “It sounds like you did the lion’s share of the work of keeping the other kids from completely panicking. If you play your cards right, that will serve you well in the future. Inasmuch as Chornohora has a hero, it’s you.”

She left us alone, left us to shower and eat and think and cry. We met up with Scott and Ferenc in the corridor, freshly scrubbed and stunned.

“Our offer is from the Gouveias,” I told them all. “Our out-cousins say we can be in-cousins now.”

“Then you’ll be with us,” said Scott. “I’m going to out-marry Amilcar—no reason not to, now—and we’re making special arrangements to adopt Ferenc. He’ll be my firstborn son, legally.”

Ferenc tried to grin at that, but his mouth was only going through the motions.

“But we won’t be Pinheiros any more,” said Luz urgently. “We won’t, will we, Tereza? They won’t make an exception?”

“Honey, I don’t think they can,” I said.

“I don’t want to be a Gouveia. I’m a Pinheiro, and you’re a Pinheiro, and we were supposed to grow up and be Pinheiros together and do our own thing. I don’t want to be a Gouveia!”

“I bet they’ll call us ‘those Pinheiro girls,’” I said. Honestly I don’t think Luzia had the least notion of how much worse things could be. We could keep the official legal name Pinheiro and get shipped in-system and not have it mean anything more than Argleblargle. Family names are like that in-system. They’re noise.

“It’s not the same,” said Luz.

Scott bent down to talk to her, and I think he was the only one who could do it without Luz taking the opportunity to throttle him at that point. “Luzia, sweet, look. This way you and Tereza can be together, right? And you can be with me and Ferenc and Amilcar. And we’ll be our own little unit inside the Gouveias. And then when we make enough money—”

Bless Scott. Bless him, oh, bless him. “That’s right, Luz, when we make enough money, we can get our own ship and be Pinheiro-Nagys. And neither of us will out-marry, we’ll make any men we meet in-marry or gene-donate, and we’ll have the babies for the new Pinheiro-Nagy ship.”

Luzia’s sobs slowed to sniffles. “You promise?”

“I promise, honey.”

And Scott and Ferenc promised, too, and I expect they had time to go off and cry by themselves, as I did. But mostly we focused on taking care of Luz and each other, because that was the only way we could win now.

©2015 by Marissa Lingen. Originally published in Analog. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marissa Lingen is a science fiction and fantasy writer living in the south suburbs of Minneapolis with two large men and one small dog. She bakes bread, plays the piano, and makes paper art. She is currently at work on a novel featuring kelp dryads and were-sharks.

An Ever-Expanding Flash of Light

Timothy Mudie | 4790 words

“Ladies and gentlemen, everyone you know—the entire world you know—is now dead.”

Murmurs ripple through the assembled cadets. Not because they’re shocked—everyone knew what they were signing up for—but because it all happened without fanfare, a jump across light-years of space unaccompanied by any grand orchestral swell or roaring engine thrusts. The wiry guy with a shaved head standing next to Tone mutters, “Jesus, I didn’t even feel anything.”

The staging deck has no windows, but Tone knows that if he could see outside, the stars would all be askew, inexplicably in the wrong places, like the sky had been ransacked and hastily reassembled by sloppy spies. He pictures Orion with his belt drooping, toga around his ankles. The striding bears Ursa Minor and Major curled up in hibernation.

“Dreaming about your mommy, Coleman?” Sarge snaps, jumping out of her rehearsed spiel to berate Tone, bringing him back to the present. “If I see so much as a hint of a tear, so help me . . .”

Tone thrusts his chest out, head back, spine straight. “Sir, sorry, sir,” he says. It’s an odd mix, the Earth Merchant Force, a chimera, hard to tell just where civilian life ends and military begins. And he was never one for rigid rules, following orders. But there’s not a lot of jobs out there, and he needs the money. The money and the time.

Sarge paces, her tight black braid swinging every time she rotates. She returns to her speech, and Tone wonders just how many times she’s given it, how many generations have passed on Earth while she’s flitted back and forth trading with alien worlds.

“The time dilation means that more than a century has already passed. Another and change by the time your tour is up and we drop you back home. Those of you who survive the next year of ship-time will be returned to a new world, a world devoid of everything familiar. Many will turn right around and sign up for another jaunt. When you do, I will shake your hand and welcome you aboard. Hell, I’ll pour you a drink.” Sarge stops and faces them. “Until then, you are mine. The Earth you know is gone. Everyone you loved is dead. I am your mother, your father. The people to your left and right are your siblings. This is your family from now on. Let that sink in.”

She finishes up, dismisses everyone. Some walk shell-shocked back to bunks, others mingle, getting to know the people they’ll be spending the next year with. Tone stands in place, a smile playing on his lips. Maybe everyone they know back on Earth did just die as the ship jumped a hundred years into the future due to the quirks and magic of general relativity. But Tone knows someone they don’t.

• • • •

“I picked a stupid thing to study,” Tone says. “I’m sorry, baby. I regret it every day.”

“Don’t say that,” Irina says firmly. “It’s not like quantum physics is exactly a high-demand job market either.” They are lying next to each other in bed, her head on his chest, his arm wrapped around her back and shoulder, a finger tracing her cheekbone. “I can’t ask you to do this. I don’t want to ask you to do this.”

“I know. But nothing else makes sense.”

“We’ll think of something.” She burrows her head into his shoulder, relishes the crinkle of her hair against his skin, realizing she might need to start counting down the number of times she has left to do this. Then realizing that she’d started counting down unconsciously before this conversation ever began.

“A cryopod’s the only way to buy time,” Tone says. “And the Merchant Force is the only way we can afford it.”

Irina props herself on her elbow. Tone stares at the ceiling like he can’t look at her.

“It’s going to be okay,” she says, but she knows that nothing she says can reassure him. He has an idea in his head. He won’t let it go.

“How much time do we have?” he asks.

“Which option?”

“Cryopod. Putting you to sleep.”

This makes her burst out laughing. “Jesus, don’t put it like that!”

A second for it to sink in, and then Tone is laughing too, finally looking at her, falling atop her and planting kisses on her forehead, her cheeks, her nose, her neck.

When the laughter subsides, Tone gets sad again. He tries to hide it, but Irina knows what her husband looks like when he’s sad and doesn’t want to show it. His eyes are soft and hollow as a dandelion in autumn.

“Buying time,” he says, shaking his head. “What a turn of phrase. Something’s almost poetic about it.”

“See?” Irina says, poking his chin with her forehead like a cat. “Who said studying poetry was stupid?”

• • • •

There’s a planet that the Earth Merchant Forces always visit, though it isn’t inhabited by any form of recognizably intelligent life. Not that there isn’t life on the planet, or that it isn’t in its own way intelligent. But the massive carnivorous and ambulatory flowers that dot the lush tropical jungles of the planet, known only by a string of letters and numbers that Tone can never keep straight and so refers to as the Flower Patch, either cannot communicate with humanity or have no desire to.

“All right,” Sarge barks in their morning review, “which of you little lambs wants to go pick some flowers?”

Tone volunteers. Not because he’s brave or trying to get on Sarge’s good side—and frankly, he doubts she has a good side—but because despite the drills, the exercise, the classes, this is his first chance to get off-ship, and he’s going stir crazy. The ship is enormous, but it is no substitute for open sky and solid ground.

It’s been a month, and his already lean body has turned sinewy and hard. His poet’s mind has been rewired to think not of rhythm and meter, but target and trajectory. Courses covering everything from fixing a malfunctioning oxygen regulator to Galsheki high-court protocol. Tone knows the risks, believes he’ll be safe.

Five others accompany him to the planet’s surface, Sarge monitoring all the while through their helmet cameras. She’ll go on missions—no accusations of softness here—but not this one. Let the kids out to play.

They fan out, approaching a clearing filled with decomposing flowers that, if they were still alive, could swallow each of the merchant-soldiers in two bites like armored canapés. The petals of the dead flowers are graying, but still the area resembles an explosion in a paint factory, shades of blue and red and yellow and pink all swirled and spread across the jungle floor. Tone and three others make the points of a diamond, heat rifles aimed into the surrounding trees, protecting the remaining two merchant-soldiers while they ransack the flower graveyard, searching for pods of pollen, which will be brought back to Earth, turned into expensive medicine. A few might try to pocket the edges of some petals to grind up, sell on the black market as a powerful hallucinogen. It’s said that the Earth Merchant Force looks the other way from such side business.

Tone knows realistically that any medicine to be discovered probably has been already, and that anyway it wouldn’t be someone like him who discovered it. But the unrealistic part of him—the poet part—imagines he’ll stumble onto some overlooked miracle. He’ll go home early, a hero.

He’s so deep in his daydream that he doesn’t notice the vine snaking from behind a tree and into the clearing, dipping above and beneath dead flowers and undergrowth. Doesn’t register the rustling until prickly green fingers wrap around his ankle and yank it out from underneath him.

Shouts burst out all around him as he goes down hard on his back, a sharp pain shooting from his tailbone to his shoulder blades. The heat rifle drops from his hands. He reaches for it frantically, jerking his foot back, trying to scrabble away from the flower. Behind the veil of trees and foliage, he sees something bright and pink, the inside of a very large mouth. The gun slips farther from his fingers, the tendril around his ankle tightens.

The others battle more attacking flowers, too focused on their own survival to help Tone at the moment. He just needs to get his rifle and he’ll be okay, he thinks. A blast of heat at the flower, and the vine will release, it will rush away, and so will Tone and the others. A scream pierces the air, and Tone smells something like iron and pork.

Like a child struggling with poorly tied shoelaces, his fingers probe and pry at the vine around his ankle. He digs his nails into it. Thin green fluid seeps from it onto his fingers and wets his pants. It drags him closer to the mouth.

The air around him ripples and shimmers and his face is instantly dry, feels baked and sunburned. The pink maw blackens and the vine loosens. He kicks it off, and pushes himself backward, almost knocking down a woman named Bethwell, his savior. She pulls him to his feet, screams in his face to move, get back to the ship. He doesn’t argue.

It’s only as the excursion ship approaches the docking bay, once his heart slows to something like its normal rate, that he recognizes something off, a strange feeling on his hand. His thumb moves to confirm as his eyes do the same. His wedding ring is somewhere below, mixed with the dead leaves and flowers or threaded on the tip of a murderous vine. He tries—he yells, demands, tries to override the controls—but no one takes him seriously when he says they need to go back.

• • • •

Irina dreams. She dreams of losing her hair, of her teeth dropping out one by one, clicking together on the ground like dominoes. She dreams of rushing toward the door of her apartment building, but no matter how fast she runs, how many steps she takes, it gets further away, shrinking into the distance. She dreams of her dreams, and scoffs at how predictable they are, straight out of an intro to psychology textbook.

She dreams of Tone, their wedding day, their first date. She dreams he looks down on her in her cryopod and whispers that he loves her. She dreams that she smiles.

• • • •

Outside the cryopod storage building on the outskirts of Cork, Tone and Irina stand holding each other as tightly as they can. Hours from now, Tone will get on a ship, leave Irina asleep for a year, for hundreds.

The courtyard of the building is ringed with planters of stumpy hydrangeas, interspersed with benches. The people sitting there pretend to eat their lunches, to scan their tablets, to not eavesdrop.

“It’s just a year for you,” Irina says into his shoulder. “It’ll be over before you know it.”

“It’s going to be so long for you,” Tone says. “Centuries. Who knows what you’ll wake up to. I don’t—” He can’t go on.

“They say cryosleep is like a dream,” she reassures him. “Things will happen in my mind, but they’ll dissipate when I wake up. Like fog in sunshine. Time won’t mean anything to me.”

Tone steps back, holds her hands in his, runs his thumb over her wedding band, tungsten because they couldn’t afford gold. She never minded. She never cared about money, their lack of it.

“Don’t worry about me,” Irina says, and smiles. “Think about your adventure. The things you’ll see. From Earth, your ship could go anywhere. Light spreading out in an ever-expanding cone, in all directions, and you’re going to ride it. You’re going to spend a year seeing things I can only dream of.”

“Now who’s the poet?” Tone says, and he smiles too, but his lips quiver. Irina hugs him again. She’s not a crier. She likes that Tone is. She kisses his cheek, soft, then his lips, hard.

When they finish kissing, it’s time for them to part, her to the cryopod, him to the bus that will bring him to spaceport farther down the coast.

“I’ll miss you,” she says, “but I won’t know it. Don’t miss me too much.” Another wan smile. “But don’t miss me too little, either.”

“I love you so much,” Tone says fiercely. Then he smiles too. “I’ll love you to the end of my light cone.”

“Oh, sweetie,” she laughs. “That’s not even close to making sense.”

• • • •

He sees worlds of endless cities, moons of ice and eruption. Stars that seem to dance with the ship as it slingshots around them. His year passes while he looks the other way. The next thing Tone knows, the ship jumps toward Earth. His tour is over.

Conciliatory, almost friendly, now that her merchant-soldiers are just people again, Sarge shakes his hand when he disembarks. “Maybe I’ll see you again,” she says, smiling. It was a good trip. Losses within expectations.

Tone smiles back. “I hope not.”

Walking on Earth shouldn’t feel any different from being on the ground of other planets, shouldn’t even feel any different from being on the ship. Gravity is gravity. But something about it just feels right, and Tone can’t keep a grin from his lips as he puts his foot on the pavement outside the ship. They’ve landed in the same spaceport they left from, not far from Cork, not far from Irina. His tablet starts buzzing and pinging the instant he’s outside. It knows what he wants to learn, and he holds his breath for a moment as he reads what it has to tell him. His heart rises and collapses. He thinks about turning right around, getting back on the ship, but he wants to see Irina first. Even if she can’t see him. Even if she’ll never know he was there.

The trip between the spaceport and Cork is faster than it was before. More people on the transport shuttle, more people on the roads, biking or else packed into automated cars like matches in a book. All these years, some two centuries since he’s left, and there still aren’t flying cars. So many things have changed, but so many things are the same. Like walking into his childhood home, and all the furniture is the same, the same pictures on the walls, but everything shifted one foot to the right. Plus ça change, he thinks, but can’t remember the rest of the phrase. Irina would probably know.

Half-dazed, he makes his way to the cryopod storage building, which has a new sign, but is otherwise unchanged. A new building has sprouted next to it, full of more cryopods, more rich people freezing themselves to wait for a better world or to free their brains to roam in posthuman awareness. Tone gives Irina’s name, her pod number, is led down rows of cryogenically frozen people. He looks at his wife’s face under hard plastic. He’s not allowed to touch it, doesn’t know why he even wants to. What comfort would he get from running his fingers along cold steel and plastic? He sits for as long as he can take it, quietly says he will see her again soon. Leaves the storage facility and takes the ride back to the spaceport, where he will sign up for another tour, another chance to let time pass.

It’s been more than two hundred years since he left Earth. The greatest minds of those generations have worked on the problem. Posthuman intelligences have pooled their collective knowledge and quantum processing speeds searching, experimenting. There is still no cure for cancer.

• • • •

Tone rises to the point where he stands beside Sarge while she tells the new merchant-soldiers that everyone they know is dead. She knows by now that this isn’t true for Tone. Over the past three years, they’ve become, not friends exactly, but compatriots. At night, they’ll sometimes share a drink, stories of an Earth that the new recruits have only seen in history vids.

Three years gone, more than half a millennium. Tone has spent a cumulative hour at most with his wife and she has no idea.

The first night of his fourth tour, Tone sits in Sarge’s cabin long after the recruits have been intimidated and dismissed. He sniffs at the glass in his hand, an amber rum. Notes of vanilla and leather.

“One benefit of this shit,” Sarge says, lifting her glass in a toast then taking a small sip. “I buy one barrel of this before going out, and by the time I come back I have a stash of nicely aged bottles waiting for me when I get back.”

Tone mirrors her toast, drinks the rum, swirling it around on his tongue. “I don’t use the word genius lightly . . .”

Sarge laughs, then turns somber. “I’m sorry to see you back, Tone. Really. Every time, I always hope—”

“We always come back,” he replies, waving her off. “Good old EMF has a hell of a reenlistment rate.”

Sarge sniffs. “That’s because none of us have anything to go back to. You . . .”

Tone eyes his rum, takes another drink. “Yeah, well,” he says. “Maybe next time.”

• • • •

Three months into his fifth tour, Tone’s ship visits a planet he’s never been to before, a rarity these days. The Galsheki are an old race, around long before humanity, before any of the other star-faring species that anyone knew about. An ancient and venerable people, that was how Tone had been instructed to refer to them in his courses on Galsheki etiquette and protocol, which he has been taking since his first tour on the off chance that the ship would visit their system. They don’t take well to outsiders, don’t encourage travel and expansion at all. Ruins of their cities dot worlds around a dozen suns, but now only their home planet remains inhabited. They don’t talk about why. Not asking about Galsheki history is another thing Tone has been taught about them. His instructor quickly amended that lesson. Better not to ask the Galsheki about anything. Keep your eyes averted, leave whatever you’ve brought, take whatever they give. All the details would be worked out ahead of time by people above Tone’s rank and pay-grade.

What no one knows is that Tone has been planning for this moment. Signing up for the protocol courses on those first days in anticipation of this later opportunity. Setting everything up, waiting for the payoff.

His heart pounds as the Galsheki workers place nondescript crates in front of the Earth Merchant Force delegation, Galsheki ambassadors standing back silently, observing that everything unfolds as it should. Tone knows he should stand where he is, eyes down, but head up, not reacting, certainly not speaking. Words bubble up his esophagus.

The Galsheki are covered all over with a fine downy hair, clear, reflecting all light back so their bodies glow snowy white. As if the hairs pick up on the vibration in Tone’s throat before he even speaks, the workers suddenly stiffen, the ambassadors turn their many stately eyes upon him.

One of the ambassadors—they are a gender-fluid species, treating human gender norms with the same bemused tolerance they treat most everything about humanity—speaks a single word, cutting off Tone’s nascent question.

“No,” they say, but softly, as if this ambassador at least feels sorry for Tone. They don’t shake their head—that isn’t a universal trait—but they convey the same.

Tone bulls ahead, hoping to convince the Galsheki ambassador, to explain. “Please, you must have a cure. My wife. She has cancer. Please help me.” His eyes water. He tries to hold back the tears. The other merchant-soldiers shift toward him, back away, look to each other for guidance. Is it a bigger faux pas to tackle one of their comrades or let him keep ranting at the Galsheki? The course didn’t cover this.

The Galsheki ambassador that spoke holds up both their hands to placate the merchant-soldiers, a gesture learned from many years of trade with the Earth Merchant Force. “No,” they repeat. “We cannot help you. There is no cure.” They pause, stretch their spine almost like a cat. “My own . . . Someone I was close with. I am sorry.” They fade back into the ranks of ambassadors.

It’s as if a spell has broken. Like a record needle has scratched off of an album, but is now replaced. The world starts to spin again, two merchant-soldiers firmly grip Tone by each biceps. Without making a scene, they haul him back. He goes willingly, no fight left in him. He launched his Hail Mary pass and watched it flop to the ground. He’ll be punished back on the ship, discharged maybe. He can’t bring himself to care. Without his job as a merchant-soldier, there’s no way Tone and Irina can afford the cryopod. But if a species as advanced, as old, as the Galsheki haven’t come up with a cure, what’s the likelihood of anyone doing so? How long can Irina stay in the cryopod, dreaming of a day that will never come?

• • • •

Before Irina says a word about her diagnosis, before she’s even home from the doctor’s office, she knows how Tone will react, can anticipate him almost word for word, lip quiver for furrowed brow. It comes close to making her smile, but she doesn’t. A smile now wouldn’t be appropriate. She couldn’t explain it to Tone in a way he’ll understand. Her sweet, sensitive man. Her dewy-eyed poet.

“They must be able to do something,” he says. “Surgery. Or radiation. Chemotherapy.” Reciting the words like a litany of protection.

Irina shakes her head. “It’s too deep to operate, they said. And too far along for anything else.”

“There’s always something else. What about some sort of experimental surgery? What do they call it? A clinical trial.”

“There’s no way our insurance will cover that.”

“Did you check?” Now Tone’s brow really beetles, as though he can just put his head down, focus extra hard, and figure this out.

“You know it won’t.”

All along, the plan was to let Tone down easy, but what she hadn’t counted on was him trying to keep lifting himself up. Lifting up them both.

He pulls her into a tight hug. “Don’t give up. Please.”

“That’s not what this is, and you know it,” she says into his shoulder. He nods and shudders, and she knows he’s trying to hold back tears. She lets him cry silently into her for a minute. Then she steps back from his hug. “Okay,” she says. “What can we do now?”

• • • •

Wild, impossible ideas flit through Tone’s head. Waiting until they pass close to the Flower Patch, then taking a shuttle and rocketing out on a search for his lost ring. Going back to the Galsheki, begging, demanding, offering up his life for whatever knowledge they have, any hint of a hope for a cure. Something to hold onto. He grasps at straws and knows it and doesn’t care.

Somehow, he still has his job, though he’s been demoted a rank. Sarge acts as though he hasn’t. She still shares her rum.

“You got off easy,” she says, standing in the doorway of his cabin while he cleans it, preparing to move back to shared quarters. She takes the bottle of rum from under her arm, finds a clear spot on his bunk-side table, pours them each two fingers. “I’d’ve flogged you.”

Tone kneels, rummages under his bunk and pulls out his duffel bag, places carefully folded clothes in it, tops them with his few possessions. A framed photo of him and Irina on their wedding day, an oversized worn paperback book titled Understanding Physics. He zips the bag, stands, and takes the rum from the table. Holds it out in a toast.

“Sláinte,” he says, tipping it back.

For a long moment, Sarge just looks at him, head cocked, ghost of a smile forming. “We’ve still got a ways to go,” she says. “Before you’re home.” She shakes her head. “Surprised you made it this long, honestly.”

Tone smiles back, finishes his rum. “No one ever accused me of being a fast learner.”

“Yeah, well,” Sarge says. She holds her rum up in the air, watches the butterscotch light refracting through it. “L’chaim.” She downs the drink. When she goes, she leaves the bottle behind. Tone puts it in his bag and heads for the shared barracks.

• • • •

A light cone, as best Tone understands it—which admittedly isn’t great; he’s a poet, after all—is what is formed when a light flashes in one specific time in one specific place, bursting out in all directions of space-time. That pinpoint flash of light expands outward in space while simultaneously moving into the future and past. Along that cone are all events that will happen, all events that have happened. Everything along the cone, interacting with each other, all events and times and places lining up to create one past, one future, stretching infinitely, inextricably linked.

• • • •

Earth still revolves around the sun, people still live on it, cars still don’t fly, cancer still has no cure. Tone learns all this before he’s even on-planet. He doesn’t bother to catch up on world news or anything else, makes his way to Irina in her cryopod as quickly as he can. Being away from Earth for so long has taught him that even though what he sees might look inconceivably new and different, nothing really changes. Not important things.

The young man at the front desk scans bio-signature with a device the size of a house key and confirms that Tone is allowed to wake Irina.

“She’ll be in room four,” the man says, tilting his head toward a hallway. “Down there on the left. It’ll be a few minutes.”

Waiting, his knee bouncing like a nervous little kid’s, Tone wonders if he’s doing the right thing. But he couldn’t wait any longer, it didn’t matter how long they waited anyway, and if he did wait much longer, he’d start to get old too. Already, he’s older than Irina. He wishes the room had a mirror. Does he look older? She’ll recognize him right away, won’t she?

More than a few minutes pass. Tone worries what could be taking so long, plays out nightmare scenarios in his head. He paces. He drums his fingers on the arms of his chair. He counts upward until he forgets what number he’s on, then starts again. Finally, just as he’s ready to storm out front, to demand answers, the door hisses open, and Irina stands in front of him for the first time in nearly a millennium.

He tries to say hello, I love you, anything, but words fail him and he gawps like a goldfish.

Irina crosses to him on unsteady legs, arms out, smile threatening to split her face in two. “You’re back,” she says again and again. “You’re back.”

“You’re here,” he replies, and she laughs, the greatest sound he’s ever heard.

“Where else would I be?”

He pulls her close and holds her as tightly as he can, and that’s when the tears start. Everything he’s been through, but he can’t keep from crying now. “I’m sorry,” he says through halting sobs. “I don’t have anything. There’s no cure.” He holds up his left hand. “I lost my ring.”

“It’s okay,” Irina says. She strokes his back, kisses his cheeks, his lips, his chin, his neck, everywhere she can reach. “I still have mine.”

“There’s no cure,” he repeats. “Not here. Not anywhere else. I looked, I swear. I tried. Irina, I’m so sorry.”

She shakes her head, sniffling laughter. “Stop apologizing. We’re together. That’s all that matters.”

“I should’ve kept waiting. I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to be with you. It was the only thing that was important.”

All this time talking into each other’s hair and shoulders. Irina steps back, Tone’s hands in her own. “Honey, I figured that out centuries ago.” She looks around the windowless room. “What’s it like out there these days?”

Tone shrugs. “I came right from the spaceport.”

“Well,” Irina takes a step toward the door, holding Tone’s hand, leaning on him slightly to support her weakened legs, “let’s find out.”

©2017 by Timothy Mudie.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Timothy Mudie has had fiction published in Lightspeed, Metaphorosis, DarkFuse Magazine, Perihelion SF, Abyss & Apex, and several other magazines and anthologies. He lives outside of Boston, where he works as an editor at a publishing house.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Carthago Delenda Est

Genevieve Valentine | 3930 words

Wren Hex-Yemenni woke early. They had to teach her everything from scratch, and there wasn’t time for her to learn anything new before she hit fifty and had to be expired.

“Watch it,” the other techs told me when I was starting out. “You don’t want a Hex on your hands.”

By then we were monitoring Wren Hepta-Yemenni. She fell into bed with Dorado ambassador 214, though I don’t know what he did to deserve it and she didn’t even seem sad when he expired. When they torched him, she went over with the rest of the delegates, and they bowed or closed their eyes or pressed their tentacles to the floors of their glass cases, and afterwards they toasted him with champagne or liquid nitrogen.

Before we expired Hepta, later that year, she smiled at me. “Make sure Octa’s not ugly, okay? Just in case—for 215.”

Wren Octa-Yemenni hates him, so it’s not like it matters.

• • • •

It’s worse early on. Octa and Dorado 215 stop short of declaring war—no warring country is allowed to meet the being from Carthage when it arrives, those are the rules—but it comes close. Every time she goes over to the Dorado ship, she comes back madder. Once she got him halfway into an airlock before security arrived.

We reported it as a chem malfunction; I took the blame for improper embryonic processes (a lie—they were perfect), and the Dorado accepted the apology, no questions. Dorado 208 killed himself, way back; they know how mistakes can happen.

Octa spends nights in the tech room, scanning through footage of Hepta-Yemmeni and Dorado 214 like she’s looking for something, like she’s trying to remember what Hepta felt.

I don’t know why she tries. She can’t; none of them can. They don’t hold on to anything. That’s the whole point.

• • • •

The astronomers at the Institute named the planet Carthage when they discovered it floating in the Oort cloud like a wheel of garbage. They thought it was already dead.

But the message came from there. It’s how they knew to look in the cloud to begin with; there was a message there, in every language, singing along the light like a phone call from home.

It was a message of peace, they say. It’s confidential; most people never get to hear it. I wouldn’t even believe it’s real except that all the planets heard it, and agreed—every last one of them threw a ship into the sky to meet the ship from Carthage when it came.

• • • •

Every year, they show us the video of Wren Alpha-Yemenni—the human, the original—taking the oath. Stretched out behind her are the ten thousand civilians who signed up to go into space and not come back, to cultivate a meeting they’d never see.

“I, Wren Alpha-Yemenni, delegate of Earth, do solemnly swear to speak wisely, feel deeply, and uphold the highest values of the human race as Earth greets the ambassador of Carthage.” At the end she smiles, and her eyes go bright with tears.

The speech goes on, but I just watch her face.

There’s something about Alpha that’s . . . more alive than the copies. They designated her with a letter just to keep track, but it suits her anyway—the Alpha, the leader, the strong first. Octa has a little of that, sometimes, but she’ll probably be expired by the time Carthage comes, and who knows if it will ever manifest again.

Octa would never be Alpha, anyway. There’s something in Alpha’s eyes that’s never been repeated—something bright and determined; excited; happy.

It makes sense, I guess. She’s the only one of the Yemennis who chose to go.

• • • •

Everybody sent ships. Everybody. We’d never heard of half the planets that showed up. You wonder how amazing the message must be, to get them all up off their asses.

Dorado was in place right away (that whole planet is kiss-asses), which is why they were already on iteration 200 when we got there. Doradoan machines have to pop out a new one every twenty years. (My ancestors did better work on our machines; they generate a perfect Yemenni every fifty years on the dot—except for poor Hex. There’s always one dud.) Dorado spends their time trying to scrounge up faster tech or better blueprints, and we give our information away, because those were the rules in the message, but they just take—they haven’t given us anything since their dictionary.

WX-16 from Sextans-A sent their royal house: an expendable younger son and his wife and a collection of nobles, to keep the bloodline active until the messenger arrived. We don’t deal with them—they think it’s coarse to clone.

NGC 2808 (we can’t pronounce it, and sometimes it’s better not to try) came out of Canis Major and surprised everyone, since we didn’t even think there was life out there. They’ve only been around a few years; Hepta never met them. Their delegate is in stasis. Whenever that poor sucker wakes up, he’s going to have some unimpressed ambassadors waiting to meet him. They should never have come with only one.

Xpelhi, who booked it all the way from Cygnus, keep to themselves; their atmosphere is too heavy for people with spines. They look like jellyfish, no mouths, and it took us a hundred and ten years to figure out their language; the dictionary they sent us was just an anatomical sketch. Hepta cracked it because of something Tetra-Yemenni had recorded about the webs of their veins shifting when they were upset. The Xpelhi think we’re a bunch of idiots for taking so long. Which is fine; I think they’re a bunch of mouthless creeps. It evens out.

Neptune sent a think-tank themselves, like they were a real planet and not an Earth colony. They’ve never said how they keep things going on that tiny ship, if it’s cloning or bio-reproduction or what; every generation they elect someone for the job, and I guess whenever Carthage shows up they’ll put forward the elected person and hope for the best. Brave bunch, Neptune. Better them than us.

Centauri was the smartest planet. They sent an AI. You know the AI isn’t sitting up nights worrying itself into early expiration. It’s not bothered by a damn thing.

• • • •

Octa makes rounds to all the ships. She’s the only one of them who does it, and it works. Canis Major sent us help once, when we had the ventilation problem on the storage levels. She didn’t ask for help; they’re not obligated to share anything but information. But when she came back, an engineer was with her.

“Trust me, I know everything about refrigeration,” he said, and after the computer had translated the joke everybody laughed and shook his hand.

Octa stood beside him like a mother until they had taken him into the tunnels, and then she tucked her helmet under her arm like she was satisfied.

“They’re good people,” she said to the shuttle pilot, who was making a face. “With no ambassador to keep them going, they must feel so alone. Give them a chance to do good.”

“I’ve got the scan ready,” I said. (I scan her every time she comes back from somewhere else. It’s a precaution. You never know what’s going on outside your own ship.)

“Let’s be quick, then,” she said, already walking down the corridor. “I have to make some notes, and then I need to talk to Centauri.”

(Centauri’s AI is Octa’s favorite ship; she’s there far more often than she needs to be. “Easier to come to decisions when it’s just a matter of facts,” she said.)

Octa did a lot of planning, early on, like she had a special purpose beyond what Alpha had promised—like time was short.

Of all the copies, she was the only one who ever seemed to worry that her clock was ticking down.

• • • •

All the Yemennis have been different, which is unavoidable. Even though each one has all the aggregated information of previous iterations without the emotional hangover, it can get messy, like Hepta and Dorado 214. Human error in every copy. It’s the reason her machines all have parameters instead of specs; some things you never can tell. (Poor Hex.)

It’s hard on them, of course—after fifty years, it all starts to fall apart no matter what you do, and you have to shut one down and start again—but it’s the best way we have to give her a lifetime of knowledge in a few minutes, and we don’t want Carthage to come when we’re unprepared.

I don’t know what’s in the memories, what they show her each time she wakes. That’s for government guys; techs mind their own business.

• • • •

There’s a documentary about how they picked Alpha for the job, four hundred years back. One man went on and on about “the human aesthetic,” and put up a photo of what a woman would look like if every race had an influence in the facial features.

“Almost perfect. It’s like they chose her for her looks!” he says, laughing.

Like Carthage is going to know if she’s pretty. Carthage is probably full of big amoebas, and when they meet her, they’ll just think she’s nasty and fragile and full of teeth.

They have a picture of Alpha up in the lab anyway, for reference. No one looks at it any more—nobody needs to. When I look in the mirror, I see a Yemenni first, and then my own face. I have my priorities straight.

Wren Yemenni is why we’re here, and the reason none of us have complained in four hundred years is because she knows what she owes us. She’s seen the video, too, with those ten thousand people who gave up everything because someone told them the message was beautiful.

No matter what her failings are, she tries to learn everything she can each time, to move diplomacy forward, to be kind (except to Dorado 215, but we all hate those ass-kissers so it doesn’t matter). She knows what she’s here to do. It’s coded deeper than her IQ, than her memories, somewhere inside her we can’t even reach; duty is built into their bones. Alpha passed down something wonderful, to all of them.

Octa doesn’t look like Alpha. Not at all.

• • • •

Just before Dorado 215 hits his twenty-year expiration, he messages a request that Octa accompany him on an official visit to the Xpelhi. There’s something he wants to show them; he thinks they’ll be interested.

Everyone asks her to go when they have to talk to Xpelhi. We gave everyone the code once we cracked it (we promised to exchange information, fair and square), but no one else is good at it and they need the help. The Yemmenis have a knack for language.

“I hate him,” she says as I strap her into her suit. (It’s new—our engineers made it to withstand the pressure in the Xpelhi ship. It’s the most amazing human tech we’ve ever produced. Earth will be proud when they get the message.)

“If peace didn’t require me to go . . .,” she says, frowns. “I hope they see that what he’s offering won’t help anyone. It never does.”

She sounds tired. I wonder if she’s been up nights with the playback again.

“It’s okay,” I say. “You can hate him if you want. No one expected you to love him like the last one did. It’s better not to carry the old feelings around. You live longer.”

“He’s different,” she says. “It’s terrible how it’s changed him.”

“All clones feel that way sometimes,” I say. “Peril of the job. Here’s your helmet.”

She takes it and smiles at me, a thank-you, before she pops it over her head and activates the seal.

“I feel like a snowman,” she says, which is what Hepta used to say. I wonder if anyone told Octa, of if she just remembered it from somewhere.

I stay near the bio-med readout while she’s on the Xpelhi ship; if anything starts to fail, the suit tells us. If her lungs have collapsed from the pressure, there’s not much we can do, but at least we’ll know, and we can wake up the next one.

Her heart rate speeds up, quick sharp spikes on the readout like she’s having a panic attack, but that happens whenever Dorado 215 says something stupid. After a while, it’s just a little agitation, and soon she’s safely back home.

She stands on the shuttle platform for a long time without moving, and only after I start toward her does she wake up enough to switch off the pressure in the suit and haul her helmet off.

I stop where I am. I don’t want to touch her; I’ve worked too hard on them to handle them. “Everything all right?”

She’s frowning into middle space, not really seeing me. “There’s nothing on the ship we could use as a weapon?”

Strange question. “I guess we could crash the shuttle into someone,” I say. “I can ask the engineers.”

“No,” she says. “No need.”

It was part of the message, the first rule: No war before Carthage comes. We don’t even have armed security—just guys who train with their hands, ready in case Octa tries to shove any more people in airlocks.

She hasn’t done that in a while. She’s getting worn down. It happens to them all, nearer the end.

“There’s been no war for four hundred years,” she says as we walk, shaking her head. “Have we ever gone that long before without fighting? Any of us?”

“Nope.” I grin. “Carthage is the best thing that hasn’t happened to us yet.”

Her helmet is tucked under one arm, and she looks down at it like it will answer her.

• • • •

The Delegate Meeting happens every decade. It wasn’t mandated by Carthage; Wren Tetra-Yemenni began it as a way for delegates to have a base of reference, and to meet; no one has even seen the new Neptunian Elect since they picked her two years back, and they have to introduce Dorado 216.

We’re not allowed to hear what they talk about—it’s none of our business, it’s government stuff—but we hang around in the hallways just to watch them filing in, the humanoids and the Xpelhis puttering past in their cases. The Centauri AI has a hologram that looks like a stick insect with wings, and it blinks in and out as the signal from his ship gets spotty. I cover my smile, though—that computer sees everything.

On the way in, Dorado 216 leans over to Octa. “You won’t say anything, will you? It would be war.”

“No,” she says, “I won’t say anything.”

“It’s just in case,” he goes on, like she didn’t already give him an answer. “There’s no plan to use them. We’re not like that—it’s not like that. You never know what Carthage’s plans are, is all.” Then, more quietly, “I trusted you.”

“215 trusted me,” she says. “You want someone to trust you, try the next Yemenni.”

“Watch it,” he says. A warning.

After a second, she frowns at him. “How can you want war, after all this effort?”

He makes a suspicious face before he turns and walks into the reception room with the rest of them.

Octa stands in the hall for a second before she follows him, shoulders back and head high. Yemmenis know their duties.

• • • •

After the Delegate Meeting, Octa takes a trip to the Centauri AI. She’s back in a few hours. She didn’t tell anyone why she was going, just looks sad to have come back.

(Sometimes I think Octa’s mind is more like a computer than any of them, even more than Alpha. I wonder if I made her that way by accident, wishing better for them, wishing for more.)

In the mess, the pilots grumble that it was a waste of shuttle fuel.

“That program shows up anywhere they need it to,” one of them says. “Why did we have to drive her around like she’s one of the queens on Sextan? They should expire these copies before they go crazy, man.”

“Maybe she was trying to give us break from your ugly face,” I say, and there’s a little standoff at the table between the pilots and the techs until one of the language ops guys smoothes things over.

I stay angry for a long time. The pilots don’t know what they’re talking about.

Yemennis do nothing by mistake.

• • • •

Alpha was the most skilled diplomat on the planet.

They don’t say so in the documentary; they talk about how kind she is and how smart she is and how she looks like a mix of everyone, and if you just listened to what they were saying, you’d think she hardly deserved to go. There were a lot of people in line; astronauts and prime ministers and bishops all clamoring for the privilege.

And she got herself picked—she got picked above every one of them; she was the most skilled diplomat who ever lived. She could work out anything, I bet.

• • • •

There’s an engineer down five levels who looks good to me, is smart enough, and we get married. We have two kids. (Someone will have to watch over the Yemennis when I’m gone, someone with my grandfathers’ talents for calibrating a needle; we’ve been six generations at Wren Yemmeni’s side.)

We celebrate four hundred years of peace. All the delegates put a message together, to be played in every ship, for the civilians. For some of them, it’s the first they’ve heard of the other languages. Everyone on the ship, twelve thousand strong, watches raptly from the big hangar and the gymnasium level, from the tech room and the bridge.

They go one by one, and I recognize our reception room as the camera pans from one face to another. They talk about peace, about their home planets, about how much they look forward to all of us knowing the message, when Carthage comes.

Wren Octa-Yemenni goes last.

“I hope that, as we today are wiser today than we were, so tomorrow we will be wiser than we are,” she says. Dorado 216 looks like he wants to slap her.

She says, “I hope that when our time comes to meet Carthage, we may say that we have fulfilled the letter and spirit of its great message, and we stand ready for a bright new age.”

Everyone in the tech room roars applause (Yemennis know how to talk to a crowd). Just before the video shuts off, it shows all the delegates side by side; Octa is looking out the window, towards something none of us can see.

• • • •

One night, a year before she’s due to be expired, I find Octa in the development room. She’s watching the tube where Ennea is gestating. Ennea’s almost grown, and it looks like Octa’s staring at her own reflection.

“Four hundred years without a war,” she says. “All of us at a truce, talking and learning. Waiting for Carthage.”

“Carthage will come,” I promise, glancing at Ennea’s pH readout.

“I hope we don’t see it,” she says, frowns into the glass. “I hope, when it comes, all of us are long dead, and better ones have taken their places. Some people twist on themselves if you give them any time at all.”

Deka and Hendeka are in tubes behind us, smaller and reserved, eyes closed; they’re not ready. We won’t even need them until I’m dead. Though it shouldn’t matter, I care less for them than I do for Ennea, less than I do for Octa, who’s watching me.

Octa, who seems to think none of them are worthy of Carthage at all. She’s been losing faith for years.

None of these copies are like Alpha. They all do their duty, but she believed.

• • • •

At the fifty-year mark, Octa comes in to be expired.

She hands over the recording device, and the government guys disappear to their level to put together the memory flux for Ennea, who will wake up tonight and need to know.

“You shouldn’t keep doing this,” she tells me as we help her onto the table and adjust the IV.

There are no restraints. The Yemennis don’t balk at what they have to do; duty is in their bones. But Octa looks sad, even sadder than when she found out that the one before her had loved someone who was already dead.

“It’s fine,” I say. “It’s the best way—one session of information, and she’s ready to face Carthage.”

“But she won’t remember something if I don’t record it? She won’t know?”

Octa’s always been a little edgy—I try to sound reassuring. “No, she won’t feel a thing. Forget Dorado. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Octa looks like she’s going to cry. “What if there’s something she needs to know?”

“I’ll get you a recorder,” I say, and start to hold up my hand for the sound tech, but she shakes her head and grabs my sleeve.

I drop my arm, surprised. No one else has even noticed; they’re already starting the machines to wake up the next one, and Octa and I might as well be alone in the room.

After a second, she frowns, drops my hand, makes fists at her sides like she’s holding back.

The IV drips steadily, and around us everyone is laughing and talking, excited. They seem miles away.

Octa hasn’t stopped watching me; her eyes are bright, her mouth drawn.

“Have you seen the message?”

She must know I haven’t. I shake my head; I hold my breath, wondering if she’s going to tell me. I’ve dreamed about it my whole life, wondering what Alpha knew that made her cry with joy, four hundred years ago.

“It’s beautiful,” she says, and her eyes are mostly closed, and I can’t tell if she’s talking to me or just talking. The IV is working; sometimes they say things.

She says, “I don’t know how anyone could take up a weapon again, after seeing the message.”

Without thinking, I put my hand over her hand.

She sighs. Then, so quietly that no one else hears, Octa says, “I hope that ship never comes.”

Her face gets tight and determined—she looks like Alpha, exactly like, and I almost call out for them to stop—it’s so uncanny, something must be wrong.

But nothing is wrong. She closes her eyes, and the bio-feed flatlines; the tech across the room turns off the alarm on the main bank, and it’s over.

We flip on the antigrav, and one of the techs takes her down to the incinerator. He comes back, says the other delegates have lined up in the little audience hall outside the incinerator, waiting to clap and drink champagne.

It’s always a long night after an expiration, but it’s what we’re here to do, and it’s good solid work, moving and monitoring and setting up the influx for Yemenni’s first night. Nobody wants a delay between delegates. You never know when the Carthage is going to show up. We think another four hundred years, but it could be tomorrow. Stranger things have happened.

Wren Ennea-Yemenni needs to be awake, just in case; she’ll have things to do, when Carthage comes.

©2009 by Genevieve Valentine. Originally published in Federations, edited by John Joseph Adams. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Genevieve Valentine is the author of Mechanique, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, Persona, and Icon. She has written CATWOMAN for DC Comics and XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS for Dynamite. Her nonfiction and criticism has appeared at NPR.org, The Atlantic, LA Review of Books, and the AV Club. Her love of bad movies is evergreen; you can read about it at genevievevalentine.com.

Ugo

Giovanni De Feo | 7230 words

That’s how Cynthia and Ugo met.

The Easter egg hunt had just started when little Cynthia noticed a dark, short-haired nine-year-old boy, all alone, sitting by the church steps. Her first impression of him was his quietness, and the way he stared at her. When she told him (well, shouted) that it was impolite to stare at strangers, and why wasn’t he running like all others?—the dark-haired boy walked quietly over and told her that they didn’t need to hurry, for the grand prize, three enormous chocolate eggs, was located right under the picnic table that was set up for lunch.

And as for the staring, she was no stranger to him.

“No? What is my name then?”

“Your name is Cinzia¹ and we will marry ten years and one month from today, in this very church, on an April’s day.”

• • • •

Of course after that she was too scared to want to see him ever again, especially since the three chocolate eggs were found under the table. Then summer came. Not many families in Caversham West could afford to go to the seaside. So old Mr. Brown—the owner of the White Trout—organized badminton matches at the church on Sundays. It was mostly an excuse to be outdoors, as none of us were big enthusiasts. But we did have a lot of time on our own. Especially Ugo. He was almost always alone and off to the side, “just watching.”

Every time Cynthia saw him, she missed the ball. Her blunders sent waves of mirth through the opposing team. This went on for quite a while until—ears red—she marched up to Ugo and asked him to leave.

Suddenly his cool was gone like a blanket snatched by the wind. Behind it, he looked red-faced, raw and trembling. It was painful to watch. He left without a word. But his reaction had so impressed her that, after the match, she went to look for him.

She found him sitting on the top of a wall like a child Humpty Dumpy, looking every bit as fragile. Years later, Cynthia had only a vague recollection of what they talked about that day, probably cartoons they both liked. He told her he had a bike that could go faster than the wind. She in turn told him about ice skating, her passion; her mother said she would become a star, one day. At that, Ugo glanced at her sideways, as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t. When she asked him why he got so upset when she asked him to leave, Ugo smiled. He couldn’t figure out how, in just an hour’s time, they would end up here, considering what would happen next.

Cynthia frowned. What would happen next?

“This,” he said, and kissed her on the mouth.

It was an adult kiss, with lips and tongue and teeth, one so shocking, so unexpected for a nine-year-old that Cynthia froze on the spot. When it was finished, he quietly hugged her. They stayed like this for so long that Cynthia felt her feet growing numb. His body was thin, and yet it was so warm she felt scorched down to her bones.

“Now we are together,” he said.

• • • •

It turned out the whole kissing business had been a Leap.

That’s why he had behaved with such certainty: He had to play his part to the end. This was the really unsettling bit of Leaping. For when he came to the moment in time he had experienced beforehand, he still felt—in his mind—the presence of his younger self, watching.

Later on, Ugo developed a theory about it. He said that in reality everybody Leaps all the time. The proof? Déjà vu. The feeling of having already experienced what is in fact happening for the first time was for him the ultimate, definitive evidence of Leaping. The only difference between Ugo and everyone else was that he remembered, while we don’t. Why? Because our brains are incapable of retaining the memory of the future. But then how was he able to? He didn’t know. Bit by bit, Cinzia came to the conclusion that his mind could hold the future because deep down he was so desperate to escape the present.

Ugo moved to Cinzia’s neighbourhood when he was eight. His parents had just divorced, after the failure of Ugo’s father’s sports career (he was a basketball pro). His mother was an Italian meteorologist who held a PhD from Reading University but didn’t have a job in her field. She got by translating cookbooks, which I always found quite amusing since she couldn’t fry an egg to save her life. She came from a large family from a town near Naples, and spoke with a strong Italian accent Ugo had somehow inherited, though to a lesser extent.

By the time his family moved, two years had passed since his first Leap at the age of six. The first time Ugo skipped ahead in time happened in a parking lot, right after his father hit him for losing a soccer match. Since then, Ugo had Leaped twenty-three times. Most Leaps were short, lasting a couple of minutes. But three had been quite long, and one huge. Ugo called those bigger spells “vacations” (I will tell you everything about them later). They lasted instants in “base-time,” but weeks or even months in his mind. Not only that, they put a mark on him, a feeling of otherness that never left him entirely.

There was something in Ugo that was always out of place. Sometimes people didn’t react to his presence, as if he weren’t there at all. Even at his best, he was always out of sync, a creature caught between two worlds. Sometimes he struggled to talk like a child. School came easily to him, especially math. What was really difficult for him was social interaction. He could only warm up to people he had “seen” in his future, of whom there were very few. With the others, he behaved as if they were ghosts. Which in a way, for him, they were.

With time Cinzia experienced both sides of Ugo’s Leaps. She was there when his mind fugued, and she was there when he was possessed by the younger version of himself. With the latter, usually there was a hesitation she had learned to recognize. The worst, though, was when he came back from his longer explorations. These were his “vacations.” Instantaneous in base-time, they lasted weeks in his mind. In these cases, he had got stuck in his future-self. Until something triggered a memory of the exact time period when his Leaps started. Right at that very moment, he came back. Violently.

Before their marriage, Cinzia had experienced only two of these episodes. One, in middle school, was really nasty. They were at the Berkshire Spring Fair, bargaining for new ice-skate blades, when Ugo’s eyes rolled back and he collapsed. She caught him easily, thin as he was. He came around quickly; cold and rigid at first, then all of a sudden warm again, hugging her so tight it hurt.

“Oh my God, you are still here,” he said, “you are still you.”

He never explained what he meant, or his out-of-character display of public affection. For they had agreed since the first kiss to hide their relationship. Adults don’t believe in the loves of children. They would show their mutual affection later on, so that their parents could gradually adjust to the idea of their early marriage.

• • • •

For months after that episode Ugo acted more strangely than ever. He snapped easily, at home as well as school, at other students and even at teachers. Only Cinzia understood what was really the matter. He was resentful of being treated like a child again.

“It’s like all of a sudden you’ve become a baby. To everyone you look normal because they think this is how you should look. So they put you with the other babies. And you should feel all right because they do look like you. Only they really are babies, and you’re not. So you have to pretend. You learn to pretend so well that you forget what it was like, to be free, not having to ask permission just to exist. And when you have finally forgotten, then you Leap again.”

“Is that what we look like to you? Little babies?” said Cinzia.

“There are some,” he said after a while, “who are always themselves, no matter where in time they are. It’s like people are trees. As they grow, they start to lose their shape, and become so different from what they once were that if you saw them, you wouldn’t recognize them. I am not talking about the way they look, it’s something deeper than that. The way they talk to dogs, the way they laugh, the way they look at the sky, the way they shut their eyes against a sudden wind. These secret ways show their inner shape. Most people lose it almost entirely, but some don’t. It’s not like they stay the same, they do change, they evolve, but because they’ve kept their shape, they always grow in the same direction, skyward. That’s how you recognize them: Their branches are the tallest.”

“And me—?”

“You are the tallest and brightest I have ever seen.”

• • • •

On the last day of middle school, while we were celebrating with a furious battle of water-balloons, one of our classmates, a boy called Norwitz, darted out of the parking lot and was hit by a lorry.

While we waited for the ambulance, we sat in shock on the curb. The teachers did their best to calm us. Many of my classmates were crying, boys and girls alike. It was then that Cinzia saw Ugo. There was a funny expression on his face, something she had seen before.

“You’re Leaping, aren’t you? Right now.”

Ugo didn’t say a word but his eyes looked frantic, trapped.

“So you knew this would happen, all along. Why didn’t you try to stop it?”

“I-it doesn’t work like that,” he said, slurring his words.

She wondered who was talking, the older or the younger Ugo?

“No? How does it work then?”

“What happened, happened. And I can’t speak of it, or . . .”

“Or?”

“. . . if I speak to change it, I’ll come undone. I know, it’s nothing I can prove to you, but I know it’s true. I will cease to be.”

“Okay, let’s say I believe you. Then tell me: Why is your life more precious than Norwitz’s?”

“I never said it was.”

“You didn’t, but you think so. Because you are oh-so-special, and we are just babies. You never even tell me what you see. You say we are going to be married, but I don’t know how many children we’ll have, what kind of woman I’ll be, what kind of man you’ll be. You see how unfair all this is?”

“Of course it’s unfair,” he said, “more so since you don’t know what this knowledge would do to you, while I do.”

“Then tell me, will I keep on ice skating? Will I? Now listen: Why would I even bother to work my butt off every day, six hours a day, if I knew that ten years from now my skating won’t matter? Why?”

He said nothing, but she could feel the anguish in his eyes, the impotence of his silence. She turned away from him.

“Ugo, I’ll make it simple,” she said, “we won’t ever marry for the very simple fact that I’m breaking it off now, and I won’t change my mind, ever. So you see, your time-jumping was good for nothing.”

“It is always good for nothing,” he said, and his voice was so full of despair that she was almost pleased. But then she realized. The frightened look belonged to the younger Ugo, watching. But the one talking, this one knew. In fact, he had always known they would break up on the last day of middle school. She turned and broke into a run.

They would not speak to each other again for three years.

• • • •

High school came in like a storm. More and more she felt she understood what it felt like to be trapped among babies. Only in her case the babies were boys, while the Tall Ones were girls. And they didn’t look like children anymore either: They branched out under the boys’ eyes, taller, fuller, their shapes changing, shifting, blooming.

Hormones came, and so did her first blood. Her father chortled his amusement at lunch when they told him, and her little brother moved into her small room and she took her big sister’s, who moved out to Christchurch. She remembered the pains of trigonometry, her discovery of the Romantics (oh Byron! and Shelley!), Laura expelled for smoking hash, the first time she really felt her breasts. She had her own group of friends outside school, mostly girls who figure skated. The competition was terrifying, but she kept on winning. She had something to prove, and not just to herself. Ugo had never come to see her skate when they were together. Now he didn’t miss a single practice. He would sit here with his red cap and stare. But now, under his gaze, she didn’t trip. She was tall, muscular, strong; her clumsiness had melted away, while he still looked so fragile, almost brittle.

She had lots of boys, of course. The first high-school kisses were such a disappointment. She became notorious as “the tiger.” Well, if they couldn’t kiss, at least she could bite them back. After all, Cynthia had been French-kissing since she was nine. Those bubble gum smooches tasted like water to someone accustomed to spirits. She felt the same insipidness in their tentative touches, in their “grown-up” talks. They were the opposite of Ugo, pretending to be adults when they were really just children. At times she wondered why she bothered. But she knew why. Because, if she stopped, she would go back to him.

Patryck was in Year Twelve and was different from anyone she had dated. He didn’t pretend to be older; he was just himself, a boy with a witty talent for language and a weird sense of humour. All the class talked of how he had once stood on a table in the canteen and recited in full a poem he had written himself. Cynthia loved him for that, especially because the last lines were about her.

Together they went to Oxford for picnics, to Jericho, by the river barges, her arms all white with mosquito cream, as he stood up and read poems to the swaying willows. His kisses were different from Ugo’s: tender, soft. In spite of his Celtic brooding, there was no anxiety about him. In this regard he was quite the opposite of her time-traveller, edgy on the outside and quiet within.

In her last year, Cynthia decided she wouldn’t continue to Uni. She wanted to become an athlete, not a scholar. Of course her parents didn’t agree. Her dad was a German teacher, her mum worked in university administration. They said she needed to “keep her options open,” an expression she despised. Patryck, though, was very supportive. He said that, for example, in poetry only losers get PhDs. Like those who added “PhD graduate” on the back covers of their books, as if it mattered. He was all riot and turmoil, her sweet poet.

On the day of the selection for the European Figure Skating, Patryck didn’t show up. It was a very important competition, and for the first time, she failed. She was seventeen, young for many other disciplines, but almost too old to reach peak performance in ice skating. The horrible part was that nothing had gone wrong; there were simply too many others who were better. When she left the rink, she was trembling all over. Why wasn’t Patryck there? She kept looking for him until she saw Ugo, by the exit. They hadn’t seen each other for over a year. The clumsy adolescent was gone, replaced by a tall, dark-haired stranger. It was like his body had finally caught up with his eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

Was he sorry for her failure or apologizing for his behaviour? Both, maybe. But there was a third meaning that she would only understand later. She found out through friends they had in common. On that very day, Patryck had sat the tests for prep school and passed. He was going to Uni after all. When Patryck finally showed up at her house to apologize, with a bouquet of flowers and a poem on his lips—Cynthia’s little brother was laughing himself to death—she opened her window and threw a bucket of cold water on him. He sputtered and cursed and then left, his Celtic pride wounded, never to be seen again.

Had Ugo known about all this? Probably.

That night, she phoned him. They stayed up until five o’clock in the morning, Cinzia (who was not Cynthia any more) whispering into the receiver under the bed sheet, pretending he was there with her.

“Do you want me to come over now?” he asked.

“No. First I want to want you so much it hurts. And anyway, you already know you won’t come tonight, don’t you?”

“I don’t know everything. Not always.”

“What about this: Will we make love soon?”

His silence was an answer.

“Good. So you know it won’t be my first time.”

She could feel his silent laughter pressing on the receiver.

“Whatever you say,” he finally responded.

“God, you are impossible! Of course you know! How can you live like that?”

“I don’t live: I watch. That’s why it’s so important you don’t become like me. Do you understand now?”

“So you won’t tell me anything, ever.”

A long, slow sigh.

“I’ve thought it over. I can, but it can only be really small things. Trivial details, things that don’t matter.”

“So you still won’t tell me if I’ll succeed as an ice skater.”

“No.”

“Why? I could dedicate my life to something else. Maybe my parents are right, I should get a degree, I could do the right thing.”

“Of course not. What would happen is that you’d watch yourself as you do the wrong thing, trapped in that choice anyway.”

“But how could you possibly know for sure?”

“Because that’s exactly what I have done.”

His voice cracked, she could hear the splinters in his throat.

“I knew . . . I knew I would lose you for three years if I replied the way I did that day outside school . . . and yet I had no choice, I had to. Do you understand what that felt like? Three years Cinzia and I—”

“Oh!”

“—what’s so funny?”

“I almost forgot. The way you say my name. Say it again.”

“Cinzia.”

“So nice. I like the soft ‘ch’ sound. You know it’s three years.”

“Since I’ve said it?”

“No, till we marry. That will take everyone by surprise, won’t it? We’d better start working on it, don’t you think?”

• • • •

There had always been two of her, Cynthia and Cinzia.

The former was how she would have been if she hadn’t she met Ugo. In the months following that phone call, she realized that being Cynthia had been only a “vacation,” like one of his, only to a parallel universe where Ugo’s presence was unaccounted for. Which, of course, was impossible. Cynthia and Cinzia were two very separate identities. Still, they were part of a unity, a unity that stretched over time. Cynthia had not known how her life could turn out. But Cinzia knew they would marry. And knowing made all the difference.

“Will we have children?” she asked him.

“Yes.”

“How many? Boys or girls?”

A begrudging silence.

“Okay, will we stay in Reading or move out of Berkshire?”

“Both.”

“I knew it! I knew you were going to say that!”

In time, she learned a good deal about the small things. They would have a dog, a German shepherd named Jericho. Their first house would have a huge hawthorn bush that would catch fire at their first barbecue. She would buy a second-hand Vespa from the sixties that she would paint pink (Cinzia was too masculine to be afraid of pink).

Bit by bit, all these things came to pass. Cinzia wondered: Did they choose the flat with the hawthorn bush because he had told her about it or because it was meant to be? Did she buy an Italian scooter to fulfil his prophecy? Did any of it matter at all?

High school ended on a rainy June day that left them soaked and kissing fiercely on her porch. They had both decided to get jobs, temporary job manager him and council clerk her. That was earlier than almost everyone they knew, but that independence went with the early marriage they had always foreseen for themselves. Sometimes her parents complained; they called her new apartment “her room,” as if she were still the reclusive teenager they knew before. Yes, her daily routine was complicated by ice skating, and she always came home very late, knackered, incapable of speech but for some low grunts. But the truth was she loved her adult life, even her strife; it was her own.

Ugo took care of her tenderly, taking her clothes off, carrying her to the steaming bathtub. On Sundays, they stayed in bed until noon, eating sweets and letting the sunlight slowly fill their bedroom.

At the end of their first year of living together, they announced their marriage. Their parents were still surprised but in the end they didn’t resist, not as much as she had thought. Ugo’s mother, in fact, was more than happy to have a daughter-in-law. She hadn’t remarried and—coming from a big family—felt the need to connect with an extended family. As for Cinzia’s family, they had always liked Ugo. Her father especially was intrigued by the smart boy’s mind. Why didn’t he apply for computer science at Oxbridge? Yet when he was confronted with such questions, Ugo flashed his sphinx-like smile, and quietly said:

“It was not meant to be.”

• • • •

They married in the church where they had met ten years and one month earlier. Later, Cinzia would remember a day full of light, even if all her friends told her it that in fact it had rained. She didn’t care. That day there was enough light for all the rainy days to come.

• • • •

They struggled with money, but most of all Cinzia battled with the constant stress of her sport. She had come to resent it so much that she sometimes talked of quitting. He would shake his head and tell her that skating was her life, she would feel empty without it.

“So you know it’s going to be part of my future.”

“I know it’s part of your present,” he said, stroking Jericho.

“And of my future,” she said, frowning at the dog’s antics.

“We’ve been over this countless times. I won’t tell you, sorry.”

“Okay, then I quit.”

“No you won’t.”

“Why? It’s my choice! You can’t decide for me.”

“Do you know how rare it is to have your gift? I’ve seen all the little girls watching you skate. You inspire them.”

He was always right, as if he had seen how it would end. And actually, he had.

• • • •

Things started to change soon after that. In six months, Cinzia won three European skating competitions. The money was sufficient to pay for her training, so she quit her temp job. An important skater, Davor Timuresku, invited her to train at his rink. Cinzia commuted to London every day, taking the seven o’clock train. It was still dark when Ugo helped her pack her cucumber sandwiches, Jericho licking his hands. When they kissed at the train track, she felt like one of those war-spouses saying goodbye to her husband.

There was some tension too, of course. Her parents said she was stressing out too much, that she slept way too little. Ugo, too. Sometimes his support seemed less enthusiastic, like something that was expected of him, something he had to do. In those moments she had a hard time fighting back her irritation. Was Ugo behaving like that because he knew she would fail? Or was he resentful of her success?

Finally, the big selection to enter the new Winter Games came. The International Skating Union would choose a team of six female figure skaters to represent the UK in Turin at the Olympics. Her dreams had never been so close, never so terrifying.

Sometimes she stayed up at night, unable to sleep, watching Ugo’s white body afloat in the deep waters of a dream. Knowing that her husband knew, that inside he was preparing either to celebrate or to console her, was unbearable. At times she wanted to rip his dreams open and look inside them, to see the colour of their blood.

• • • •

The day of the ISU selection, Cinzia looked at Ugo like the citizens of Delphi must have looked at their Oracle just before a battle. The way he dressed, the way he spoke, the way he moved, were all harbingers of her success. It’s not like she didn’t understand or appreciate his efforts. But he knew. He knew whether her passion would carry her far or if she would just stay behind. The selection started. She performed a combination of loop jumps and a cherry flip, scoring very high on the Grade of Execution Table. When the applause started she was beaming, her parents in the stands in tears. She looked at Ugo, but his smile was that of a sphinx, a mirthful bow to eternity.

In spite of this, Cinzia was relaxed. The second contest was a series of axel jumps, with two extra rotations, something she excelled in. She started well, storming her opponents with her flawless tempo. Yet as she landed on her last axel, she suddenly lost her balance and fell. A deep sigh from the crowd. She grimaced. Not only had she lost vital points, she felt her ankle swelling up.

She started to cry. Not out of pain but out of fear. In the infirmary, Timuresku was implacable. If she continued, she could damage her ankle. Permanently. It was her choice, her risk. She looked up in despair, only to find Ugo at her side, staring at her.

“I’m so very sorry,” he said, “I really am.”

So that was it. She quietly asked Timerusku and the nurse to leave. Her coach gave her a sharp look and walked out. As soon as the door closed, she let it out. It wasn’t a scream but rage liquefied, turning to sound just outside her mouth. Ugo jerked back, or rather, the small kid in him did. After that she spoke in a low, coarse voice.

“Are you happy now? I know you are. It’s all come to pass, finally. Finally we can go back to our little lives, have our children, grow our vegetables in the backyard. I see it now, I see it in your eyes. This was the turning point, wasn’t it? The moment when I almost escaped your small-town dreams. You were right: In the end, we have no choice. But if this is my last act of free will, then I will make full use of it by spitting on your small-town happiness. For, apart from your Leaps, you are a mediocre human being, Ugo Forster. There is nothing in you but a wide-eyed spectator, ready to judge other people’s talents, incapable of having any of your own.”

Even before she finished, Ugo’s features were seized by such a violent anguish that it seemed his face was coming undone. He had the same raw nakedness she had first seen on the badminton field, only on an adult it looked obscene. His voice was also different, not just slurred but child-like. When he made an effort to speak it was as if every word was a shard of glass, it sent tiny shivers all through his face.

“I-it’s not like you said,” he croaked, “it is far worse. For you are right, when you say I have no talent but my time Leaps. But you are also wrong in that regard, because—in fact—I don’t even have that.”

“What do you mean,” I said, slowly standing up.

“I knew your name that day because I asked the priest. And I knew where the chocolate eggs were because I was the one who hid them. This is my secret. I lied to you. I’ve always lied. Always. There is no time travelling, there are no Leaps. If there is one talent I truly had, it was making up stories. I have fainting spells, that’s all. All the rest is a make-believe story. A story I told first to myself, to have the confidence to kiss you that day, and then to convince you we would be together. That was the only way I could keep a person as extraordinary as you. I could tell you now that I’m sorry for what I have done, but I am not, because all these years I had you, which was more than enough of a victory for me. As for your future, I can’t tell you what it is for the simple reason I don’t know it. I never did. You are free, Cinzia, as you always have been. Go out there then, and win.”

• • • •

And this I did.

It wasn’t easy, with the searing pain in my ankle, but I had too much to prove. I couldn’t afford to lose; and I didn’t.

The young woman who came out of the infirmary was certainly not Cinzia, but not even Cynthia, for even the latter had lived only in the absence of Ugo. And he was gone now, gone so completely it felt like he had never been there. I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t see him in the cheering crowd, nor with my parents later on, when we celebrated with Timuresku and our staff. For, in the end, he was right. The moment I was freed from his future, I could realize my own. I had won. I would compete in the Olympics. My life was on course.

I was happy my parents were tactful enough never to mention Ugo. As for me, my feelings were tangled. There was a mix of regret, guilt, but most of all relief. I felt a terrible anger for having being deceived by such childish nonsense, and for so long. And yet, I had to admit that my husband’s exit had come at the best time.

When I finally returned to our apartment, I was astonished by how thoroughly he had removed himself from my life. Not one picture, not one shirt, not even his smell remained. I wasn’t surprised he had also taken Jericho; the dog had always been more his than mine.

So I went back to live with my parents. No one ever talked about Ugo, I think not to upset me. I was in fact so concentrated on the task ahead I might not have noticed if they did. The frantic six months before the Olympics were the most terrible time of my life. I lived the life of a monk. The only things that existed were the rink, my skates.

It’s not that I never missed him, but his revelation had become suspended inside me, like a kite in a glass sky. Had it really happened? Had I married a man because I believed him to be a time traveller? Was he insane? Or was I? Sometimes even my memories of him seemed unreal. My wedding ring had left no mark. That’s how I felt: unwritten, a frozen lake before the first skater scarred its surface.

• • • •

What is it like to realize one’s childhood dream?

Very few people find out, and I should feel fortunate. And yet, how bitter is it to know that by achieving something, you have to lose something else. And how harsh, knowing you won’t be able to share your discovery. For the loneliness of a winner may make a good story, but only a winner himself would want to listen to it.

So in the end, I went to the Olympics and won two medals, one bronze and one silver. On the last day, I had seventeen job offers, the weirdest of which was to be the ice skating trainer of an Emir. Do they have ice in Arabia? I had won, but in the process my soul had grown thin, like the last of the butter spread over too much bread. Exhaustion was my second name. I kept falling asleep in the most embarrassing places. When the plane from Milan landed in Gatwick, I wanted nothing else but to get into a hot shower. And yet, in Reading, there were journalists waiting at the train station. I was answering their questions when I suddenly realized that I had expected him to be there.

Hadn’t my victory also been his? In the days right after the competition, I had come to see Ugo’s revelation differently. For, in the end, he hadn’t lied to me, but to the little girl I had been. And to what end? To woo me, to make me believe a story that we shared together. His withdrawal had been so complete it was startling. Not a phone call, not an email, not a text message; not even after my victory. So when I saw that he was not there, I started to feel a strange, pulsing dread.

I kept dozing in the taxi, something that alarmed my sister (I had slept fifteen hours just the day before) until we finally passed through my neighbourhood. I had a brief glimpse of Ugo’s flat. Had he already moved out? I asked my sister, but she frowned at me and didn’t answer. Apparently his name was still taboo.

I was happy to hear so many friends’ voices on the answering machine. Yet his wasn’t there. When I finished my shower, I finally felt ready. I dialled his number. A recorded voice told me the line was disconnected. That was a bit of a surprise. I called the landline. Nine rings; nothing. A slithering anguish began to crawl around my neck. Still in my robe, I went down and asked my mother what had happened to Ugo. It was the first time I had mentioned him in seven months. What horrified me was not her answer, but her blank stare.

“Oh . . . you mean Gilbert’s second son? Oh dear, that’s so sweet of you to ask, he is doing all right, I guess, he will be more than happy to meet his auntie now that she has become all famous.”

I was not amused. No, I didn’t mean my nephew, I meant my husband. Mother blinked twice and asked me to repeat the question. I did. At that she spun around and said, to no one in particular:

“Oh dear, that’s . . . Oh dear. Roger, can you come in for a sec?”

My father came in, bespectacled and scruffy.

“What is it?” he said.

“Cynthia is . . . well, see it for yourself.”

“What is it darling?”

“I want to know where my husband is. Is that too much to ask?”

“Your . . . Honey, are you all right? Do you want to sit down?”

Then I knew. All that followed was just a part I had to play, excruciating and unnecessary. I told them I didn’t feel the need to sit, and where was my husband, please. My voice had already begun to shoot up; little bro and big sis came down immediately. I knew what they believed, but their unwillingness to address the subject maddened me. So I became more and more insistent, until finally my mother said it. There was no husband. I had never known a boy called Ugo, I never dated him, I never married him. There was no Ugo.

I fled upstairs. In my room, I took off my robe and—naked—I started to look for my old pictures. I rummaged desperately, looking for a picture of Ugo when we were little. There were so many photos, saved from our shared flat. Yet I couldn’t find him. I was in all the pictures; he wasn’t. I kept on looking until I found the Easter egg hunt picture. That was our very first picture together, one so clear in my brain I could have drawn it with eyes closed. But when I opened them, there was only me.

• • • •

This is where I would love to tell you that—the following day—I filled my bathtub with hot water and slashed both my wrists. It would have been appropriate, at the very least. But I am a Brit and in our despair we are often underwhelming. It was worse, of course, the slow dark tide trapping me in a corner of my room where I rocked back and forth, gnawing at my fingertips till they bled. It lasted nine weeks. When at last I came out of it I didn’t need to be told I needed to see a doctor: I went to the hospital on my own.

Dr. Buchanan is a tall black woman of fifty-five, and I liked her immediately. She knew who I was even before I began to explain what had happened to me. Afterward, she told me that she had read in the local papers that I had had a breakdown because of the Olympics. I asked her what she thought of it. She smiled at my directness.

“I think you had a psychotic episode my dear,” she said. “What is peculiar is that you didn’t hallucinate a presence, but an absence.”

In the days that followed, my life was put under a magnifying glass. Dr. Buchanan listened attentively to my side of the story. She was not only very surprised at how extensive my memory of my “imaginary husband” was, but that often while I told my story I spoke about myself in the third person, and even called myself two different names.

I shrugged. That didn’t feel special to me. I had done it so since kindergarten. This, she said, was typical of schizo-affective behaviour. I associated that word with split personalities and homicidal rages. It turned out it meant the inability to see thoughts for what they were, mistaking them for perceptions: voices, smells. Sometimes these intrusions became coherent, bringing on sub-personalities. However, such a detailed delusion, an entire past with an imaginary human being, was uncommon. That’s why she wanted to consult with some colleagues, and could I be admitted for observation?

So here I am, the self-hospitalized athlete, estranged from family and friends. I spend my days in this room reading and writing, as Dr. Buchanan has encouraged me to. By writing Ugo’s story, I might not only remember it better, but give it a new meaning—she said. That’s why she told me to write it all down as if it was a story. I know what she wants to get at. She wants me to write his story so that I can see it is a fiction. I won’t tell you that I’m not tempted.

Maybe it’s the medication they are giving me, but remembering Ugo has become more difficult. What did his hair smell like? What did it feel like when he was inside of me? Did he talk when we made love? I have this image of a boy whispering in my ears. I know what the doctor would say, that this is a personification of schizophrenia, murmuring intrusive thoughts I’ve taken for memories.

It’s like waking up. So many flashes come to my mind now.

The way sometimes people reacted to Ugo, ignoring him completely. My friends’ surprise when I talked about him. The plain fact I didn’t have any friends in common with him. I can’t remember a single time when I was with a friend and with Ugo. How is that possible? And my wedding day: How is it I can’t remember any details except that it was a sunny day? And then our shared apartment, our daily lives. My parents told me I never left home. How could I in fact hold a job, train for ice skating, and pay the rent at nineteen? How likely is that? The doctor says I didn’t just “make up” a person. A part of my mind created a whole parallel life, the ideal way I wanted to live my youth. In love, independent, married, with a future that was mine alone.

Until, on the day of the Olympic selections, the ideal world of my childhood came into conflict with my ambition. Why did I want to talk with Ugo alone? Because there was no one there but me.

But no. That’s what they want me to believe. That Ugo was the invisible companion I conjured up from my lonely childhood. This is where his imperfections save me. His aloofness, his infuriating smile, all those traits I’d always resented: How could I have made them up? The greatest objection to his existence came from my sister. If, in his Leaps, he couldn’t change the future, and if he saw we had a lifetime together, why had he made his revelation? And why did he disappear after that?

Oh, but can’t you see? This is exactly why I still cling to him. Only now I understand what he did. The moment he realized the Olympics were my life’s dream, he fought to change what he had seen, to reshape my future so that I could win. But why did he do that? He had already seen that in the end we would be happy together, that my words were just a momentary fit of anger. Or maybe . . . maybe what awaited us was not what I thought. That was my idea of romantic marriage, as a teenager would imagine it. But Ugo saw what it really would be like. All our dreams fulfilled and then broken, one by one. Can you imagine what this could do to a child? Seeing how love will end, how routine slowly would erode everything you believe in?

Is that the reason why he hugged me at the Fair, after his long Leap? Was it because he missed the girl I had been, replaced by the acerbic wife I would be? In the end, he acted like the romantic he truly was. Instead of giving me our shared happiness, however brief, he gave me its absence. I’ll never know what our shared life would have been like; and therefore it will stay intact, an untouched horizon inside me.

¹. In Italian, Cinzia sounds like Cheensia and Ugo like Oo-go. Luckily most called him Hugo.

©2017 by Giovanni De Feo.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Giovanni De Feo, a Clarion 2016 graduate, is a fabulist writer in the tradition of Italo Calvino. His Italian novels have been described as “a baroque cross between Terry Gilliam and Miyazaki.” He has published short stories in English for Conjunctions and Nightmare, among other venues. An IB literature teacher, he’s also a storyteller and a screenwriter. Next year he will be on sabbatical leave to complete his Oneiro Hike, a five-month-long trip on foot (and bike) to collect people’s dreams and nightmares through storytelling.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

The Last Cheng Beng Gift

Jaymee Goh | 3025 words

There was definitely something to be said about being Mrs. Lim, even into the Underworld: something about comfort, something about privilege, something about a status quo carried into the afterlife. The previous matriarch that bore the title of Mrs. Lim had moved on long before Mrs. Lim got there, but since Mrs. Lim had not liked the domineering nature of her predecessor, this did not bother her overmuch.

One of things to be said about being Mrs. Lim was that during Cheng Beng, she received many, many presents. These many lush things from her children helped her keep abreast with the living world, to a certain extent. It was unusual for anyone to keep receiving Cheng Beng gifts so long after dying, but then, Mrs. Lim was of a family with unusually high expectations.

Mrs. Lim was always vaguely pleased with the gifts. Her children were secular in their beliefs, but clearly not in their practice. Even an offering made automatically without any real intent behind it was something that contributed to her otherworld comfort. And if the gifts faded at their edges, who would notice, when she received so many? Even if she did receive fewer than she had before.

Best of all, Mrs. Lim did not even have to share them with Mr. Lim, who had, as in life, been too full of overabundant energies to remain in the Underworld for very long. Once he had been satisfied that he had accomplished all he had meant to do in this life—the goals had been to expand his family’s business and raise fine children that would take over said business in order to produce fine grandchildren—he opted instead for Meng Por’s forgetfulness tea and went straight for reincarnation.

So this had been the case, until the tenth year of her death, when she received from her daughter, Hong Yin, a coupon for a visit to the fish spa.

Mrs. Lim turned the coupon in her hand over and over, confused at the invitation, and a bit annoyed. Couldn’t Hong Yin have sent her something more fitting for the Underworld, like new clothes? Mrs. Lim liked receiving them, just as she had liked buying them for the dead when she herself had been alive.

“So creative!” Ah Fong gushed. “Your Ah Hong Yin always so one kind. When you go, I also want to go!”

“Aiya, you know lah Ah Hong Yin, always love going to the fish spa one,” Mrs. Lim replied. “I dunno why she love it so much.”

Mrs. Lim didn’t want to confess, even to her best friend, that she had never been to a fish spa before, even in life.

Hong Yin had not been a bad child, but there was something about her which had put her at odds with Mrs. Lim. Mrs. Lim always felt bad—for thinking that perhaps Hong Yin should not have been her child, perhaps Hong Yin would have been happier raised by her Auntie Blur, one of Mr. Lim’s distant cousins, who would have not noticed all Hong Yin’s strangeness, her difference from Mrs. Lim’s other children. Mrs. Lim knew that these were unmotherly thoughts to have, but they inevitably rose whenever Hong Yin sent anything during Cheng Beng. They had been acceptable, if odd, gifts at first: lingerie (pretty, but not appropriate for someone Mrs. Lim’s age); a flat screen TV (Mrs. Lim had not been disposed to watch much TV when she had been alive); a house in some strange contemporary style (also an impetus for Mr. Lim moving on; if their youngest child could afford to send a house, then his work was truly done).

But Mrs. Lim had never rejected any of her children’s gifts, dead or alive, and she saw no reason to reject this one. So she went to the fish spa at the ghostly address her daughter had dreamed up for her. Luckily, the Underworld being an existential state with no fixed geography, there was no need to call a taxi.

The receptionist had an approximation of a friendly face. “Oh, using a coupon? Got reservation or not? Under what name?”

“Mrs. Lim,” she said tersely to the ghost receptionist.

Once upon a time, if anyone had asked her, she would have said to call her Ah Wen, or Auntie Wen. Perhaps even Xiao Wen; she always thought she had a pretty name. But she had the fortune to marry into the leading Lim family, the first son even, and Lim Teck Meng towered so large in their circle of friends and acquaintances, Xiao Wen quickly became Mrs. Lim, to distinguish her from the other women who married into that illustrious family. The Mrs. Lim, who managed to bag a rich husband despite looking so boring and plain. The Mrs. Lim who herded her three children into successful adulthoods and an entire extended family into successful annual reunions. The Mrs. Lim who was her husband’s most stalwart support.

Mrs. Lim remained Mrs. Lim into death; she saw no reason to give up the name, even into death.

The server, who doubled as a masseuse apparently, showed her where to put her shoes, rinse her feet, then step up to the platform around the fish tanks where she could sit down and stick her feet in.

The fish swarmed around her feet immediately. She jerked her feet away from them, jostling the water. She sucked her teeth in annoyance. Perhaps she was doing this wrong. Perhaps she was supposed to sit still.

The fish circled about her feet, wary after her initial reaction. When they began their work again, Mrs. Lim waited for the expected ticklishness.

Did ghost feet feel ticklish? Mrs. Lim had never considered this before. She watched in fascination as the ghost fish performed their duty in death as they must have in life. They were not real, and Mrs. Lim knew that they should be, in their own way. What did real fish feel like? Why did she not know? Why had she never known?

She jerked her feet away from the fish, glaring at them in lieu of glaring at Hong Yin. Difficult Hong Yin, who asked stupid questions even though she was clearly so smart, who picked fights over such unnecessary things. Why should Mrs. Lim have known such things? And why should Mrs. Lim think about them now that she was dead?

These thoughts did not leave her when she left the fish spa, utterly unsatisfied with her visit, and thus, with Hong Yin, who had failed to deliver a satisfactory Cheng Beng gift. She went to visit Ah Fong to complain about it.

“Haunt her,” Ah Fong suggested. “Whenever one of my children send me something I don’t like, I visit their house.”

“Ah Fong!” Mrs. Lim was scandalized.

Ah Fong laughed. “What? It’s good for them to know I’m still around for them!”

Mrs. Lim didn’t subscribe to the same opinion. “Dead people shouldn’t be among the living. It means something is wrong.”

“If my kids send me something I don’t like, that’s something wrong what.”

Mrs. Lim dropped the subject.

• • • •

The next year came the usual gifts: new clothes, a Gucci handbag, a laptop computer. Also, more mischief from Hong Yin: a house with its very own fish spa. She invited her friends to come enjoy it, and was envious of their delight in re-experiencing the novelty of the nibbling fish. She even invited Mrs. Tan, the Mrs. Tan of the leading Tan family. The matriarchs had not gotten along in life, but their rivalry mellowed in the afterlife. They were cordial, if not friends.

“How come you never go before!” Ling Mo exclaimed upon learning Mrs. Lim’s secret.

“Too busy,” Mrs. Lim said.

“Ah Lim tai-tai was always too busy for silly things like this sort of thing, you know!” Ah Fong laughed.

“Good thing you’re dead then,” Ling Mo said, “now got time to enjoy.”

Mrs. Lim didn’t feel like she was enjoying herself much, watching the fish have a go at everyone’s feet. The fish pecked at her feet; she had an internal argument with herself over whether she actually felt them, or whether she pretended to. Her friends gossiped about their children around her, while she intently watched the water.

Bite by bite, the fish were supposed to stimulate the chi lines on the foot, and suckle by suckle, they were supposed to slough off old skin from the feet, leaving them callus-clear. But Mrs. Lim was dead; she had no real skin to clear anyway.

“Your girl so clever hor, making a spa for you like this,” Mrs. Tan said, drawing Mrs. Lim back into the conversation. “She architect is it?”

Mrs. Lim had some vague memory of Hong Yin showing her some drawings. “Nice, nice, very nice,” Mrs. Lim had said, because she had read in some parenting book that that was what parents should say to their kids. But when it came time to go to college, Mr. Lim had very specific ideas for what his kids should do. “Engineer.”

“Must be easy work if she got so much time to make such nice things for you.”

“Maybe she bought it,” Mrs. Lim said, sloshing her feet into the water, knowing better.

• • • •

During the seventh month that year, Mrs. Lim decided to take advantage of the Underworld’s gate opening for the Ghost Festival. It would be her first time visiting her children. Specifically, Hong Yin.

Hong Yin now lived in a Tampines apartment. Mrs. Lim was not surprised to see her daughter living on the other side of the island from the rest of the family, but she frowned to see that it was low-cost housing. She had expected, what with the extravagant gifts, that Hong Yin would be more successful, perhaps even bought a landed house. After all, Hong Yuen, her eldest, had moved into the family home in Jurong as the new patriarch of the family after Mr. Lim’s passing. Hong Wen had bought a luxury condo in nearby Lakeside, although he spent most of the year in Australia.

Hong Yin was, to Mrs. Lim’s horror, living with a man. And a practicing Muslim, even! Yet she couldn’t help but drift through the rooms, examining their personal effects: the embroidered Quranic verse on the wall over the front door, the Guan Yin altar facing the entrance, the electric piano in the corner, the ugly couches draped with lace doilies, the unmade beds, the study room where she found Hong Yin.

Hong Yin was sitting on the floor, working on some elaborate papier-mâché project. Mrs. Lim glanced at the day-by-day calendar on the wall, pleased to find Hong Yin still used the traditional almanac calendar. But then she frowned: It was a weekday afternoon. Shouldn’t Hong Yin be at the office? Mrs. Lim crept closer to see what Hong Yin was doing.

A rollercoaster. The rollercoaster that had appeared last year during Ghost Festival! So this had been Hong Yin’s work? Mrs. Lim had not wanted to ride it. She had never ridden one, even though she had taken her children to the theme parks many times when they were young. She would wait with them in line, then hold their things for them as they got on. The line in the underworld was too long, and she had preferred to join her friends for feasting.

Mrs. Lim began hunting for more clues about her daughter’s life now: the planner open on the desk, the paint materials, the pencil shavings filling up the wastepaper basket. Pamphlets pinned to the walls announced exhibitions by Lim Hong Yin going back several years.

Since Mrs. Lim’s death.

For a moment, Mrs. Lim was annoyed. All that money for Hong Yin’s education in engineering, gone down the drain! All that hard work impressing onto Hong Yin the importance of a good stable job with financial security, ignored, for art! Mrs. Lim huffed.

Yet, she didn’t have it in her to be angry at Hong Yin, who hummed cheerfully as she painted, in delicate calligraphy, the traditional Chinese characters that would bring the joss rollercoaster to life in the underworld. She had loved her children while alive, had done everything a loving mother should have: prepared lunches, picked them up from school, sent them to tuition, sent them to good universities overseas. She had cleaned childhood scrapes and listened to their problems, even if she had not understood them. She had beat them when they were naughty, scolded them softly or harshly as the situation demanded. She had bought them new clothes every Chinese New Year, and made sure they wanted for nothing.

Only Hong Yin had been unsatisfied: the only daughter mad at being taught to cook and clean (even though Mr. Lim had hired maids, both he and Mrs. Lim were of the opinion that girls needed to learn how to take care of their families), who cried through piano and violin lessons (she had wanted art lessons, but art teachers were less valuable than piano teachers), shouted at curfews imposed on her where her brothers came and went as they pleased (maybe she had a point there). Hong Yin who spent her time in her room avoiding family events. It would have tired any parent; it tired even Mrs. Lim.

Mrs. Lim sat down on the floor next to Hong Yin to watch her now. She had had so many things to do to keep the Lim family’s good standing in their social circles: the endless receptions, the new clothing to buy, the visits with the right kind of people. There were many things she remembered Hong Yin trying to persuade her to do: go for manicures, travel on cruises, and, yes, go to the fish spa. She had no memories with which to draw upon to enjoy them in the afterlife. The afterlife, Mrs. Lim thought, was a place where nothing new could happen, because it is not, after all, a place of living.

“Why do you care about such things!” Mrs. Lim cried out in a sudden fit of spite, the only way to relieve her frustration she had, then and now.

Hong Yin jumped up in startlement, as if she’d heard Mrs. Lim, who hoped that she had. She stared at the rollercoaster in disbelief, then looked around the room wildly. Her hands across her chest gripped her arms so tightly the smeared paint was starker on her fingers than before, a gesture Mrs. Lim recognized as something Hong Yin did only did when she was being shouted at.

Mrs. Lim had a moment of self-righteous satisfaction that even in death, she could make Hong Yin feel her displeasure, but even that dissipated when Hong Yin crumpled against the wall, crying. It hadn’t been uncommon for Mrs. Lim to encounter Hong Yin weeping for no apparent reason, and the familiar discomfort roared to the fore, of the guilt at partaking in the pain, of the helplessness at the unfixable.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She squatted next to Hong Yin. “I didn’t know. I still don’t know. I just wanted you to be happy.” Mrs. Lim thought she had known the best way to be happy, and she had thought it would be good for Hong Yin. But it had not been, and now this gulf of difference yawned between them. What if she had done something different? What could she have known?

She stayed until Hong Yin stopped crying and began working again. The rollercoaster was done, it seemed, since Hong Yin carefully moved it into a corner and began work on something new. Careful fingers unfurled rolls of delicate joss paper in many colours that stained. The calligraphy brush glided effortlessly across surfaces, with well-wishes and poetry. The rustle of papers as they were crumpled, folded, glued, and set pushed against the silence of the room.

A garden, with large rocks, a pathway, and a little pond with its own ducks, spread out across the floor. How Mrs. Lim had always wanted one, always sighed about having one to her husband who had refused due to feng shui. She had joked, on her deathbed, that she hoped before she died she would get a beautiful garden. Hong Yin had gamely sat down with her with a pen and paper, sketching out the details.

They had said nothing about how it was only towards the end that they could set aside their differences and resentments. What was there to say that could have closed that gulf? It was too late then, so they had to do the best they could.

And true to her quirkiness, Hong Yin added steps into the pond. Mrs. Lim rolled her eyes to find it was yet another of those ridiculous fish spa things, but outdoors, surrounded by natural beauty . . . and what looked to be a full-body experience this time. At least Hong Yin was happy, and Mrs. Lim couldn’t find any fault with the aesthetics of the garden, really. It was perfectly balanced to Mrs. Lim’s tastes.

“You are a good girl, Hong Yin,” Mrs. Lim finally admitted. “A good, good girl.”

• • • •

Mrs. Lim said goodbye without the fanfare that had accompanied Mr. Lim’s departure from the underworld. Ah Fong, Ling Mo, and a few other old friends followed her to Meng Por’s pavilion at the edge of the chasm. They had to wait in a long queue, during which her friends tried to persuade her to not leave. After all, didn’t Mrs. Lim have some of the best real estate in the Underworld? Without her there to enjoy it, the property would fade, unused cosmic energy returning to other states. Mrs. Lim felt that her friends secretly wanted to keep enjoying her things.

“Are you sure?” Ah Fong burst out, when it was finally Mrs. Lim’s turn.

“Yes,” Mrs. Lim said firmly.

“But your kids—!”

She shrugged.

Then she stepped up to Meng Por’s table to take the proffered cup.

©2017 by Jaymee Goh. | Art © 2017 by Alan Bao.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jaymee Goh is a writer of fiction, poetry, and academese. She is currently a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Riverside where she is affiliated with Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies and Southeast Asia: Text, Ritual and Performance. Her work has been published in Expanded Horizons, Stone Telling, and Crossed Genres. She is an editor of The Sea is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia (Rosarium Publishing). She has written on racialized and postcolonial steampunk for the WisCon Chronicles (Aqueduct Press), co-written an essay on steampunk fashion and race for Fashion Talks (SUNY Press), and contributed to Tor.com, Racialicious.com, the Apex Book Company Blog, Beyond Victoriana.com, and Steampunk III: Revolution (Tachyon Publications). She tweets a lot: @jhameia.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

The Magician’s Apprentice

Tamsyn Muir | 4860 words

When she was thirteen, Mr. Hollis told her: “There’s never more than two, Cherry. The magician and the magician’s apprentice.”

That was the first year, and she spent her time sloo-o-owly magicking water from one glass to another as he read the newspaper and drank the coffee. Magician’s apprentice had to get the Starbucks. Caramel macchiato, no foam, extra hot, which was a yuppie drink if you asked her (but nobody did). “Quarter in,” he’d say, and she’d concentrate on the liquid shivering from cup to cup. “Now half. Slower.”

For Cherry Murphy, the water always staggered along. She’d seen him make it dance with a twitch of his fingers. “When do I get to stop bullets? My hypothesis is that stopping bullets would be friggin’ sweet.”

“Maybe when you do your homework,” said Mr. Hollis, and so she’d take out her homework. It wasn’t even magic homework. It was stuff like The Catcher in the Rye. Mr. Hollis was big on literature, so after they cleared the table of glasses he’d trick her into arguing about Holden Caulfield. Could’ve been worse—to make her feel better, he’d given her Catch-22, and Cherry had read it approximately a million times. He said she easily read at college level, though he also said that didn’t amount to much these days.

“All right,” said her master magician, when her chin had started to droop. “Now you eat.”

Magic wore terrible holes in you. Just shunting water around would give her a headache and throbbing nosebleeds, so he’d fry up a steak or fresh brown eggs and watch her gobble them down while saying, “Elbows off the table.” The steak was always bloody. The eggs were always soft-boiled. Food would take the edge off, but not enough. Second lesson: Magic feeds off your soul, said Mr. Hollis. There’s only two ways to not be hungry, Cherry. I’m sorry.

“Two ways? How?”

“One, quit magic, Harriet Potter,” he said, but then he pushed the plate of eggs at her. Her master magician never seemed hungry like she was. “Second’s simple: eat more.”

After dinner, they usually had a little time. She’d told him over and over that Mark wouldn’t notice if she came home at midnight covered in blood, but he always said: “Don’t disrespect your dad,” which was why she thought he was kind of a stiff. Then he’d follow it up with, “He does that enough on his own,” which was why she loved him. So until six-thirty hit, they’d watch the last fifteen minutes of a Golden Girls rerun—or listen to some Led Zeppelin, his iPod strung earbud to earbud between them both. Only then was she really content.

Mr. Hollis was a bachelor with a girlfriend downtown, so his apartment always kind of smelled like Old Spice and dead body, only she would have knocked back neat bleach before saying so.

When six-thirty came, he’d say, “Put on your jacket,” even if outside it was the average surface temperature of the Sun and she’d die of heatstroke. Then he’d say, “See you later, alligator,” and she’d say, “In a while, crocodile,” or, if the day had been crappy, she’d just make a series of grunts. Then she’d skip home through the dusk to her empty house or her passed-out, empty father, and read Catch-22 until she fell asleep.

• • • •

There were spells on which everything hinged, he said; to move, stop and make. The spell that year was “move.” Cool, fine; she was always on the move. Cherry had long spindly limbs like a juvenile spider, and before she’d been an apprentice, she’d taken track and baseball. Her fingers did drum solos if she wasn’t given things to do with them. All of that nervous energy went into her spells, and she worried her lips skinless as her water dripped, her winds scattered, and any attempt to lift stuff embedded it in the far-off wall. Mr. Hollis primly mopped tables dry and set her to roll a marble around on the slick linoleum.

But he made it look so easy. There was not a flicker in those paper-grey eyes as a curl of his hand coaxed a hairbrush out of his drywall, beckoning it to remove itself and have the plaster rework to pre-Cherry wholeness. Objects put themselves back in his hands, ashamed. His marble rolled in perfect madman’s circles.

Once—wild with frustration and knees scored with tile lines—she ignored him when he said: “Leave it. Stop.” Her marble wobbled in a wide spiral. “Cherry.” She feigned deafness. Her head suddenly spun towards him, yanked by invisible iron fingers, and worst of all her marble rolled away lost under the fridge forever.

“Cherry,” he said evenly, “I don’t ask twice.”

“I can do this! Screw you!”

That got her grounded for a week before she realised he technically didn’t have the authority to do so. Cherry sulked to bed each night at nine o’clock anyway.

June. In the summer evenings, Mr. Hollis went off with his girlfriend, so they’d spend three brilliant breakfast hours down at the beach rolling grains of sand from palm to palm. Her skinny arms and legs grew browner if not less skinny, and he made her wear a one-piece instead of a bikini (“Nice try, but no cigar”) but each of those days was more perfect than the last. Homework was John Knowles’s A Separate Peace (“You could give me something with a good movie, Mr. H”) and he sat shirtless under the beach umbrella as she read aloud.

Mr. Hollis had rangy bones and a nerdy fishbelly farmer’s tan, lots of crisp dark hairs on his arms and his chest. It was possible that somebody found him hot, but only theoretically so; the fact that he had a girlfriend was mystifying. Possibly being a magician and the ensuing squillions of dollars, or at least the squillions as was her understanding, sweetened the deal. That summer she also rolled marbles until her nostrils squirted blood and she found herself eating raw hot dogs from the freezer. It was pretty gross. Cherry was hungry until her mouth hurt.

After August, she struggled at his kitchen table, pushing ball bearings. Her head hurt. Sometimes he would ignore her and it was a kindness, as she had her pride even if she was in seventh grade, and sometimes he would briefly ruffle his hand through her short dark hair and say: “Be zen.”

“I’m never going to get this.”

“You’re going to get it, emo kid.”

“If I die, I leave you all my stuff.”

“Try ‘bequeath.’ You bequeath me all your stuff.”

When she did start to get the magic, in between Knowles and A Separate Peace, Mr. Hollis gave her a single brief smile that made the rest of it a cinch. The marble rolled its circle. The water halved into its glass. As a test, he set his Honda Civic in first gear and she pushed it inch by burning inch nine feet forward: she puked bloodied bile afterwards like a champ, him holding her hair, but once her stomach settled he took her out for lobster. It was the kind where you picked your sacrifice out of its tank and were eating ten minutes later. It tasted incredible.

“Congratulations, cadet,” said Mr. Hollis, gesturing with the fork. “Here’s my toast: I’m proud of you. First we take Manhattan, Cherry, then we take Berlin.”

Her joy was wild, and her Coke sweet like imagined champagne.

• • • •

When she was fourteen, Mr. Hollis told her: “The apprenticeship only ends when you know everything the magician knows, and understand everything the magician understands.”

Cherry took this to mean that she’d be an apprentice until she was like thirty. He switched from caramel macchiatos to skinny vanilla lattes, which this year she pointed out was “totally gay,” and earned her a long, indifferent look. Mr. Hollis was an award winner at indifferent looks. He could scratch you with a word, or by flicking his pale aluminum eyes away at any place but you. The hunger still boiled low in her belly as she jumped water from cup to cup to cup, but crushingly all he’d say now was, “Cute one trick, pony.”

Instead he got her to empty the glass out over the sink and try to divert it upwards. Cherry spent most of her time on her feet and mopping at her t-shirt when this proved to be a son of a bitch, and all he did was sit at the kitchen table reading his newspaper. That had started to drive her a little crazy, too. Mr. Hollis was a slob who left the Sports section lying around and never dusted, but when she started scrubbing his stove and looking for his Dustbuster, he said: “Don’t go there. Jen doesn’t even go there.”

He’d been dating Jennifer Blumfield over a year now. Cherry had been introduced as his niece. Jen did accounting and was sweet without being patronizing, but she hated her a little anyway and bullshitted her best smile to hide it. Only complete dumbasses weren’t nice to the girlfriend. Mr. Hollis wasn’t prehistoric, and even though his five driver’s licences showed four different ages, he was allowed to date.

“Are you going to tell her about the magic thing?”

Cherry hadn’t expected the cold shoulder. “You never tell anyone about what we do, Charlene. I didn’t think you capable of being this big an imbecile.”

Her eyes had smarted, and his were turned away.

They went from Knowles to Dickens, David Copperfield. She’d argued it was abuse. That was the year of many long arguments: She liked Marlowe, he liked Shakespeare, he liked Austen and she liked American Lit. Mr. Hollis set her to tossing M&Ms up in the air and slowing their descent, staring down his narrow nose in impatience at any cracks in their hard candy carapaces. It sucked.

And she might have been prodigious for fourteen, but not in science. That was the year she also had to stay half an hour after school for remedial physics, which was stupid, but Mr. Hollis was calmly unsympathetic: “Suck it down. You can’t pass high school with just one subject.” He was equally unsympathetic to the notion that, as a magician’s apprentice, physics was beneath her: “I still have a day job, Cherry.”

“You do not have a day job. Every so often a car comes around and you get in and then you come back with a suitcase full of cash. I’m not judging, I’m just saying that I bet you my whole life you are not making money off a David Copperfield Quiz Olympics.”

Whatever he was doing, he wouldn’t tell her. A big black car would pull up outside and he’d be waiting in a suit, and the driver would even open the door for him and he’d nod coolly like the guy was toilet paper attached to his heel. Cherry would hang around outside for hours and hours until he came back, and even then he’d only let her get a whiff of that new-money smell before the case shut and disappeared. She hoped all the time this meant Disneyland instead of college.

“I don’t care. I’m not countenancing your future ignorance if I have to live with it.” She asked furtively about higher education. “Ivy League, champ.” Oh, Jesus.

On the brighter side, that was also the year Callum asked her to the dance. He was older and wore seriously skinny jeans. Tenth graders usually weren’t all that interested in eighth graders, but they liked the same bands and she’d graduated to a real bra with an underwire and wore short shorts starting May. The first and last time she’d worn them to Mr. Hollis’s, his eyebrows shot up to his hairline.

“You seem to be sans pants.”

“They’re daisy dukes, old man. I am trying to maximise my coolness, okay?”

A newspaper page got flipped. “They looked better on Daisy Duke. Put on my gym pants before you go home.”

“That suggestion is completely horrifying.”

“Yes, Cherry?” Definitely not amused. His professor voice always turned into sharp, hard-edged vowels when he was pissed, like a movie villain. “Are you suffering hearing trouble? You’re a little slow with my lesson of not always getting your way.”

“But—”

“Cherry,” he said. “There are rapists out there. Serial killers. Look at the news for once: Girls get kidnapped constantly, and there are dead joggers in every alleyway. And for the bottom line, I made a request of my apprentice and I don’t ask twice.”

She wore his gym pants home. Wearing short shorts at school didn’t seem a blast any more either, and after the dance, in the back seat, Callum put his hand on her knee and she felt weird about it. The hunger gnawed at her stomach, and she made his car lurch forward in the parking lot each time his hand moved up her leg. “Wow!” she said. “Ghost car!” Callum dumped her the next day. Mr. Hollis handed her Kleenex when she cried.

• • • •

The spell that year was “stop.” She knew enough now to dread it. Mr. Hollis sat with her in meditative yoga poses on the floor of her living room as the scent of rot and old washing tickled her nose: She sneezed, she fidgeted, she popped her knuckles one by one until he came to show her how to hold her hands and then it was easy.

It was stupid easy, really. The trick was understanding gravity (thanks, remedial physics) and that she was working magic to oppose a force, not flow with one as she did rolling ball bearings. Cherry could make marble after marble hang in midair like tiny spaceships. Water shivered to a halt as Mr. Hollis upended a glass over the rug. Her master magician watched her progress over his newspaper or with an eye on a TiVo’d episode of Seinfeld while she tossed up handful after handful of flour to stop dead as fine white mist: The downside was that she got even hungrier than before.

That was the year of the accident. Some douchebag in a Ford came screaming out of the intersection as Mr. Hollis made a June-morning car ride to the beach. Cherry rode shotgun with the umbrella. Brakes squealed as the guy saw his mistake too late, about to plough right into the driver door, and she Stopped his car so hard that her fingernails twisted. Most of the tiny veins in her eyeballs popped. Blood leaked from her mouth and ears and nose as she gave everything, fed everything into the furnace of her magic as a starving body fed on tissue when out of options. The last thing she thought she saw were his hands, raised above the steering wheel, and then she blacked out.

When she woke up it was on his couch, to the smell of food. Every breath made her lungs scream. Mr. Hollis knelt next to her with a bowl and a forkful of gamey meat liberally covered in teriyaki sauce, and that meat smelled like fried chicken, like fudge sundaes and candyfloss, like everything that used to make her mouth water. The first bite she choked on in her eagerness. “For the love of God, slower,” he said, and, “Chew. Please. I’ve long forgotten how to Heimlich, Cherry.”

Each morsel of that meal warmed her from the tips of her toes to the crown of her skull. It was almost enough that she didn’t look at the expression on his face, the grim and painful tenderness, sweat sweeping back his dark hair. There were little sprays of grey at the temples. He wasn’t even forty, and the grey made her terribly sad somehow. But she was less sad than she was starving. “Whash ish thish.”

“Chew, swallow, rinse, wash, repeat,” he said, but the taut line of his mouth was softening. Cherry opened her mouth like a little baby bird for the next forkful. Her master magician hesitated uncharacteristically: “An hour ago this was real live goat.”

“That is literally disgusting,” she said. “Goats are adorable.” Mr. Hollis loaded up the fork again and she licked all the tines. The bloodied crust at her nose and eyes didn’t matter anymore. She could have run a marathon. “Is goat always this good? Because this is awesome.”

“I’ll let you in on a little secret, as your mentor.” The texture of the pale teriyaki fry-up was a little weird, a little dry, but he was mashing his fork against the side of the bowl to get her every last delicious bit. “When something dies, Cherry, it leaves a little bit of itself behind. That part, and I’ll call it life force, starts to dissipate out the body immediately. But if we get it and we get it fresh—well, we’re not hungry after that.”

“So we should just be fruitarians,” she said, wiping her tongue around the corners of her mouth. The hunger had eased, and the pain had driven a couple blocks away. “Pick apples off the trees, eat them right there.”

“If it was that easy, I’d be dismembering broccoli plants.”

“What do you do?”

“Terrible things to God’s own creatures, for you,” her master magician said, which struck her as a little evasive. The bowl went away. Cherry looked at the fine bones of his face as he cleaned up hers, his dignified jaw, his slash of a nose. His eyes: the unbelievably pale grey of snow three days old, with faint crow’s feet. Mr. Hollis was old before his time. Now he was dabbing her forehead, her ears, and he said, “You should have trusted me to take care of that car. Don’t you ever do that to me again, Charlene Murphy, or so help me I don’t know what I’ll do.”

She felt drunk, or at least what drunk probably felt like. “‘Cherry.’”

“You’re a brat.” He was touching her hair. “‘Charlene’ never did suit.”

“I like how you always called me Cherry.” She really was drunk. “Like: ma chérie, am I right?”

Mr. Hollis’s expression smoothed into something careful and polite, and he took his hand away from her hair. “Get some rest,” he said, and he laid his jacket over her legs as he stood up and took the bowl. There was neutral kindness in his voice, the type which made her burn with teen humiliation; or would’ve, if she hadn’t been high off feeling full and sleepy for the first time since forever. “No more magic for a while.”

Before she dozed off, she thought she heard him eating in the kitchen, cramming something into his mouth and chewing before frantic wet swallows.

• • • •

When she was fifteen, Mr. Hollis told her, “We’ve come this far, you and I. You can call me John.”

Cherry slipped up on it all the time, and called him “Mr. Hollis” more than she called him “John.” She practiced in the mirror with it: John, John, Johnny, Jack, John. John Hollis. John Hollis, the magician. Cherry Murphy, the apprentice. John and Cherry, Charlene and John.

She was too old and experienced to be in love with him, seriously, only stupid kids did that with their teachers—and as he said, she wasn’t stupid. He damned with faint praise. Cherry had come a long way: He was a God-King, but she was his lieutenant, his right hand and left, his Holy Ghost. She read Vonnegut and Faulkner without needing his recommendation. Cherry could also drive between the hours of twelve-thirty a.m. and five p.m., which was cool.

This was the year of the cappuccino, and they sat around his kitchen table sipping them as they swapped sections of the newspaper. It was also the year of the world’s most disappointing growth spurt. She’d made five foot one and stopped, resigned to Smurfitude until the next spurt hit, doomed to skinny legs and arms and brown hair that had never gone blonde. It was depressing. Even her eyes were heading more beigewards than chocolate. To cheer herself up, Cherry wore hipster scarves and bobby socks, and she gave all her daisy dukes to the Salvation Army.

“When are you going to move in with Jen?” she said. “This apartment smells like leprosy. I can’t believe how much you pay for it.”

“One day I may want to pick up and leave.”

“So you abide in this creepy shack instead? Are you this afraid of commitment?”

John was a champ with non-responses. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Yes, I would. No rhetorical.”

“Leave my love life alone, Cherry,” he said. “I won’t ask twice.”

He still set her bedtimes: twelve o’clock on weeknights, two o’clock on Saturday and Friday. Her dad was having a mid-life fatherhood AA crisis and kept having family dinners with her, telling her awkwardly she was looking more like Mom each day. To get through those meals, Mr. Hollis sometimes even set her menu. Like: Eat all your green vegetables, but nothing else. They both knew that table food was a joke.

The hunger was an old sickness. Eating the goat ruined her for everything else. Sometimes she and John went down to the sea where he shore fished, gutting his catch in record time, and they sat there gorging themselves on fresh raw perch squirted with hot sauce—but it was never really the same.

When they read together, she found herself leaning in so that their faces were nearly touching. Cherry let her bare shoulder touch the thin polyester of his shirt, imagining the hot blood going through his veins that made his skin warm through the fabric. She sat on the kitchen table and swung her legs from side to side as he worked at his laptop, completely ignored in a way that was nearly acknowledgement.

“Well, fifteen is a gulf away from fourteen,” said John one day, shoulders slumped back in his chair. “I think you’re old enough to have this.”

It was Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita. Cherry turned the book over and over, feeling the weight of it in her hands like it was lead. “His novel about pedophilia,” she said, and regretted how dumb that sounded.

“That’s the obvious reading.” The chair tipped back and forth, his gaze on the ceiling in contemplation. “The other one is about devouring somebody’s life.”

It took her a while to get up the courage to read it. When she cracked open the cover, she broke his rule to spend three sleepless nights finishing the thing, reading it at lunchtimes, reading it in study hall in another dustcover, skipping gym and reading it in the park. When she tried to talk about it, he was so removed on the subject that she stopped, angry somehow, like he’d breached the terms of their contract—and he shook away her hand when she rested her fingers over his own.

“For someone so clever, you can be an unbelievably stupid kid,” he said abruptly.

That shot told. “I haven’t been a kid in a while, John.”

“You’re a child, Charlene. Don’t fool yourself. You don’t know anything.”

So she stopped touching him. That was the year she felt very tired.

• • • •

The spell that year was “make.” If she’d still been riding high on last year’s successes, it would have killed her; as it was, she spent her time mechanically breathing life back into dead matches, watching the blackened wood burst into flame that spluttered out as quickly as it flared. Cherry spent long nights trying to coax water to ice and ice to water again with red raw hands. “Make” was a double-edged sword. Creating things was easy enough, but sustaining them was like eating soup with a fork, and after the most half-assed attempt, she’d be so hungry that she’d chew her hair and her nails trying to make the feeling go away. Sometimes she thought about eating Styrofoam peanuts just to fill up the space in her gut.

Mr. Hollis withdrew from her into an armoured shell, emerging only sporadically, like he was guilty for the absence. Cherry was good at absences, the best, and it hardly hurt unless you thought about it suddenly. He sat across the kitchen table with a crossword, a great wall of silence spanning between master and apprentice as she tried to make a bud unfurl on his spider plant. Sometimes he’d stand by the window and make tiny incisions in the air with his fingers, and then Jen would suddenly show up and she’d be kicked out and flipping the bird at his closed door. She was pretty surprised when that summer came and she got dragged off to the beach as per usual; she almost thought he’d cancel summer due to lack of goddamned interest.

There was no comment on her bikini that long, hot July. She kicked around in the tidal pools trying to make starfishes grow back their legs, slathered with sunscreen and visceral disappointment. John spent his time under the umbrella with the newspaper, and she spent her time talking to dusty blond surfer boys with loud-patterned board shorts.

Seagulls cawed. He was fiddling with his sunglasses, saying nothing. The crow’s feet were tracking deeper indents at his eyes and mouth than they had when she’d first met him; back then she’d never noticed his age, only that he was old. Now he just looked young with premature crow’s feet. “You need some Botox,” she added, and unnecessarily reached out her hand to touch his cheek.

John flinched, then pretended he hadn’t. “God only knows, Cherry,” he said, with a little bit of the old humour. “Sometimes I feel there’s nothing left to teach you. Maybe it’s time to move on.”

That made her a little bit crazy, and with hunger it made her frantic. Matches, spider plants, and ice cubes lost all appeal, June lost its sunshine. She threw herself down on her bed and cradled her head like her thoughts would pop off the top of her skull. Fuelled by his retreat and his distance, the specter of that idea haunted her like Casper the Friendly Ghost on meth.

When she turned up on his doorstep at 2 a.m., he didn’t look surprised, just tired. “You can’t send me away any more,” she said. “You see, I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

His apartment at night was full of unfamiliar shapes, the fan wafting stale air around the room and the carpet sticky beneath her feet. Without saying a word, he led her to his hall closet, putting her hand on the doorknob before sitting down at the kitchen table in his sweatpants and t-shirt. John didn’t look at her, just rubbed his hands together like restless birds.

“I was waiting for you to grow up,” he said.

After she flicked the light bulb on, the closet was full of jackets and beach umbrellas, stacks of books and an old vacuum cleaner. Half-hidden beneath a parka was a freshly dead stranger in jogging shoes whose thighs had been carefully sectioned and long strips of meat taken away. There was blood underfoot. At the familiar smell of old putrefaction overlaying new putrefaction, she gagged until tears came into her eyes; it filled her nostrils. It filled her mouth.

“Magicians eat,” he said, looking at her with eyes the colour of ghosts. “We eat more and more and more, Cherry Murphy, of anything we can get our hands on.” A careless shrug. “Just look at me. I ate your childhood.”

The doorframe scored her back as she dropped to her haunches, hugging her knees tightly to her chest. Every so often, she’d involuntarily gag again, rocking back and forth until John came and carried her away. She gagged into his chest and struggled when he put her in his lap, fisting her hands in his t-shirt, wadding it up into her lips so that she wouldn’t scream. His hand threaded hard through her hair. Saliva filled up her mouth and overflowed in trickles down his front.

She was crying so hard she couldn’t say a word. His fingers finally tugged his shirtfront away from her teeth as she drew more and more down her gullet. On her shoulders, his thumbs dug deep into her collarbones, and now that he was looking at her, his eyes were sunken and gleaming like the hearts of white stars. Every line in his face was deep and hard and old.

“It was never goat, was it?”

“Sweetheart, I couldn’t kill a goat,” said Mr. Hollis. “They’re adorable.”

This close up, he smelled of acrid sweat and Listerine and her spittle, and her master magician had his arm around her to tether her down. He’d killed someone. He’d stashed them in his closet. He’d done it before. With an awful, dreadful surety, he slowly pressed her head into the table.

“Ball’s in your court,” said John.

Her stomach growled.

“I want some teriyaki sauce and a fork,” said Cherry.

©2012 by Tamsyn Muir. Originally published in Weird Tales. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tamsyn Muir is a horror, fantasy and sci-fi author whose works have appeared in Nightmare Magazine, F&SF, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, and Clarkesworld. Her fiction has received nominations for the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the World Fantasy Award and the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. She is from Howick, New Zealand.

A Pound of Darkness, a Quarter of Dreams

Tony Ballantyne | 5790 words

There was something sinister about the representative’s perfection. The oiled and combed dark hair, the even white teeth, the polished fingernails. His immaculate dark jacket and trousers, the pressed collar and cuffs of his shirt. He looked as if he’d dressed in the shop itself, not ridden up the damp valleys from Manchester on some dirty, smoking steam train, inevitably acquiring the grime and the dust from the tired upholstery of a grubby carriage. No one who had undertaken the walk down the wet high street should have kept their shoes so polished and shiny.

“What happened to Mr. Baines?” I asked.

“Don’t tell me you hadn’t heard, Miss Scales?”

Even his voice was perfect: a rich and melodious baritone. “There’s been a reorganisation at Keswick’s, after the store’s recent acquisition by Emblem Holdings. New lines, new products. New staff. Splendid opportunities await us all.”

And he smiled, showing those perfectly even, perfectly white teeth.

“Indeed. However, Mr. Baines and I enjoyed an excellent professional relationship for several years, Mr. Black.”

“Not so long, surely, Miss Scales? You’re, what? Twenty-five? Twenty-six years old?”

I stared at him. My age was none of his business.

“Times move on, Miss Scales. Times move on. I’m sure that our relationship will be just as suitable as the one you enjoyed with Mr. Baines. And probably of greater benefit to us both. It must be said, Keswick’s business practices had become distinctly old-fashioned. There’s no need to look so uncomfortable.”

But I did feel uncomfortable. Truth to tell, I’d been on edge since the arrival of the advice circular the previous week. The words themselves were comfortingly familiar: Our representative will have the pleasure of waiting upon you Monday next, the 4th of February. Everything else was subtly wrong. Just like the representative, everything had been a little too polished. The green of the card seemed almost alive, the lettering shone like fool’s gold. Instead of propping the card on the mantelpiece, as was my habit, I’d placed it in a drawer, out of sight.

“I feel perfectly composed, Mr. Black.”

He looked at me for just a moment too long before he spoke, as if indicating he knew I was lying.

“Very good. Very good. So, shall we get down to business?”

The relations between travellers and clients were traditionally one of mutual esteem and respect. Not so with Mr. Black, who clearly thought himself my superior. It was obvious in his manner, in his actions. The way he placed his travelling bag on the counter uninvited, and began to unpack the boxes and packages it contained; spreading them across the surface without regard for any customer that might enter. As Mr. Bennett himself once wrote: “It is a universal maxim in shops that even the most distinguished commercial shall not hinder the business of even the least distinguished customer.” Mr. Black clearly felt that customers were less deserving of attention than his own good self.

I was having none of it. I pulled two sheets of paper from a drawer and placed them before him.

“Here is a list of the items I require, Mr. Black.”

Mr. Black took a notebook from his pocket and laid it open on top of my order. He withdrew an ivory-handled stylo from his pocket.

“Surely you wish to examine our new products, Miss Scales?”

“Perhaps. But I will still require tea and soap and candles, et cetera. I know my customers’ needs.”

I looked with pride around my store. The cans stacked neatly on the shelves: enough condensed milk and corned beef, enough pork and beans and peaches, pears and pineapples to feed the growing families of the town. The neat lines of green and brown bottles: everything from vanilla essence to arsenic. The jars of pear drops, liquorice, and black bullets. I only had to look at the bins of flour and sugar, the yellow block of butter, the tub of raisins, and my mind filled with images of floury arms, the smell of baking. Even the little basket of coconuts on the floor brought to mind the childlike delight of breaking open a shell and pouring the sweet milk into a cup.

Mr. Black followed my gaze, smiling a most unpleasant smile. As if he knew the source of my pride and dismissed it.

“Times are changing, Miss Scales. You must read the newspapers.”

I didn’t need to read the newspapers. Everyone in Downchurch had seen the clouds of yellow steam rising over the distant hills. We’d heard the screams in the night, we’d seen the white ash that blew across the moors and stained the heather each morning for a season. We remembered the day we’d woken to a landscape of dark trees on a bone white moor.

A battle had been lost, and the terms of surrender were still being worked through.

“I know about the world,” I said, softly.

“Then you will allow me to show you our new products.”

It was an instruction, not a request. Before I could object, he selected one item from the many he’d strewn over my counter. A little package the size of a cake of soap, wrapped in green paper stamped in gold. Carefully, he unfolded the paper at one end to reveal . . .

“What is that?” I said. I could see the paper folded back; after that, I saw nothing.

“Darkness,” he said. “Pure darkness.”

Darkness. It seemed to be something beyond that. It was as if a piece of our world had been removed.

“What would I do with that?”

“Use it to lead your stove. Use it to dye your clothes.” He looked me in the eye. “Use it to keep secrets.”

“I have no secrets.”

“Really? Can you say the same about your customers, Miss Scales?”

“My customers’ private lives are their own affair,” I replied, primly.

“For the moment, Miss Scales. For the moment.”

And I realised then that he wasn’t so much smiling at me as showing me his teeth.

He rewrapped the darkness and placed it in front of me.

“It’s yours. A sample.”

“I’m not sure . . .”

He wasn’t listening. He selected a green glass bottle, held it up to the light. Something moved inside it.

“Here,” he said. Somewhat reluctantly, I took the bottle from him. Read the label, gold letters on green.

“Dreams,” I read. “What is it? Perfume?”

“No. A drop in your tea at night . . .”

“So what? I dream anyway.”

Awful dreams. A battle lost. The caw of ravens. The ache of despair. Mr. Black shook the bottle. Silver threads of light moved inside.

“Drink this,” he said, “and you can enter someone else’s dreams. Not only enter them, but shape them. Shape their dreams as you will.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

He looked surprised.

“Come, Miss Scales! Even a shopkeeper has an imagination! You could use this to give confidence to your children. To raise the aspirations of your husband . . .”

He paused. Raised a finger, tapped it to his chin.

“But of course, you’re not married are you?” He leaned closer. I smelled cinnamon on his breath. “One drop of this at night may help that special someone to notice you . . .”

His eyes burned. You’d think I’d find him attractive, but he held no power over me. He was too good looking. Too perfect. And now I understood what he held . . .

“It’s a love potion.”

“It could be.”

“I don’t hold with such things.”

“Ah! Perhaps you don’t, Miss Scales. Can you say the same of your other customers?”

“I won’t sell love potions. They’re nothing more than a rape drug.”

I’d seen that in France, after the war. Some of my fellow soldiers had regarded a few drops in a girl’s drink as less evil than pinning her down and cutting her clothes away with a knife. I’d disabused them of that notion.

“A rape drug? I think you exaggerate, Miss Scales. But I ask again, who are you to judge what others may feel?”

“Excuse me?”

“Come, Miss Scales. Look at you. An independent woman with her own business. How can you judge what may be best for others? Put yourself in Miss Beswick’s place.”

I knew what he was saying. I know where you live. I know your friends. He wanted to discompose me. I fought to keep my voice level.

“How do you know Miss Beswick?”

“Confidentiality, Miss Scales. Confidentiality. You wouldn’t want me to breathe your secrets to others.” And he raised an eyebrow, significantly. “But think of Miss Beswick, sitting in her rooms, tending to her sick mother. No social intercourse, save for yourself. Popping in this shop twice a day to buy a quarter of tea or a pat of butter. All for a brief word. A little company. Hoping to catch the eye of Mr. Wales, the tailor, as if he would ever take an interest in a mousy little thing like her. And in your hand, the answer to a maiden’s prayer. Who are you to deny her dreams?”

“I . . .”

I was lost for words. He pushed the bottle across the counter.

“Take it. Think about it.”

“I don’t want it.”

But already his hands were moving, this time opening the top of a medicine tin, revealing a pale blue powder.

“What’s that?” I asked, despite myself.

“News.” He said. “Blow the powder into the air. Allow it to spread across the town.”

I looked at the lid.

“It says rumour.”

He waved a dismissive hand.

“Rumour, news, it’s the same thing!”

“No, it isn’t!”

“So you say. Think of the unfaithful woman. Shouldn’t her husband know of her infidelity? Or the boy stealing from his grandparents? If they were to know, they could put him on the straight and narrow.”

“Put it away.”

“Really? Don’t you care for this town? Shouldn’t the awful truth be known? What about your duty to help people?”

“They don’t need that sort of help.”

“So you say. Would your customers agree?”

“They’re free to shop elsewhere.”

“But your shop is the only one in this town with an account at Keswick’s.” He lowered his voice. “For the moment, at least.”

I wasn’t having that.

“We have a sole traders contract, Mr. Black.”

“One that is up for renewal in six months’ time.”

And now the charm was gone, the smile was revealed to be nothing more than the challenge it had always been.

“Lost your father and brothers in the war,” he said, softly. “You fought yourself. Signed up as a man and fought like one. Better than a man. You lived, your family died. And then you returned home to take care of your grandfather. They said you couldn’t do it, but you’ve managed. Just. You’re getting by from week to week, turning a little profit. Don’t deny it! I have all the figures! I know what you buy and sell. I know how close to the edge you are. Well, what if you were to lose your contract with Keswick’s?”

“We’d get by.”

“Oh, you’d get by, I’m sure. I know you’ll have seen far worse things fighting in France. But what about your grandfather? How long do you suppose he’d last, once you couldn’t pay the rent on this store? You’d get by in lodgings for a while, I suppose, eking out what little money you have. No hot water and brandy for him at nights, though. No medicine and embrocations. And what then? The road. I’m sure you could handle sleeping in ditches.”

“You bastard!”

“Did you learn that language on the battlefields, Miss Scales?”

That smile. No humour, no warmth. And then his expression softened, just a little.

“But there’s no need to be so harsh. I’m not asking that you take everything I offer. Just one or two little items.”

To begin with. It would be three or four next time. And then five or six. Slowly he’d reel me in.

What could I do but play along? Stall for time whilst I figured out what to do next.

“Put me down for some darkness.”

“Good! That’s a start!”

He made a note on his pad with his ivory-handled stylo.

“I’ll say two dozen packets to begin with? And how about Dream? One dozen bottles? Yes? Good.”

I nodded. After all, I didn’t have to sell the stuff. I could place it in the cellar. It would eat into my profits, but as he said, I could afford it. Just.

He made another mark on his pad.

“You see, Miss Scales? I knew we would get along. Tell you what, I’ll throw in the fliers and the adverts to the local press, let your customers know about the new products. Can’t say fairer than that, can I?”

I gritted my teeth. He thought he’d beaten me. But maybe not. I was persuasive. Perhaps people would listen to me. Caveat Emptor.

“Indeed, Mr. Black. Now, if you don’t mind, Monday is my busiest day. Customers will be arriving soon . . .” Now I mentioned it, it struck me as odd that no one had arrived yet. Still, I pressed on. “You have my order, Mr. Black . . .”

“Have your order, Miss Scales? Oh, I don’t think so. Not yet. We still have the more . . . exciting products to view.”

There was nothing pleasant about his expression now. His eyes were dark, his teeth white and sharp. His breath was rich with burnt cinnamon. This was what he’d been building up to. He pushed forward a little wooden box. A tiny key to unlock it. He opened the lid to reveal six bottles, nestling in green baize.

“Don’t take them out!”

I don’t know why I said that, my voice pitched too high. Some foreshadowing, some sense of what lay within.

“Don’t be silly,” he said, pulling out one dark bottle. The base rounded. Smoky glass. Oil moving within. I knew what it was. I’d seen it in France, seen it in the evenings after battle, the desolate time when the necromancers would wander the fields in their grey robes, stooping at bodies, whispering . . .

“That’s a soul,” I said, hoarsely. “No! I won’t have anything to do with that!”

“Why not?” he crooned. “That’s Dai Williams here. You know Dai. Mrs. Williams’ son. So proud of him, she was. So proud when he marched off to war in his red jacket. And here’s Thomas Milkham. Remember how his father cried, when he got the telegram? He need cry no more! His boy is back! Saved from the battlefields of France!”

“Take it away! I don’t want anything to do with it!”

“Take it away? Really? These boys could be sold off to anyone! The Chinese! The dark aboriginals of Australia! What if the people of the town found out that you’d refused them the chance of saving their loved ones?”

“What? You hypocrite! Why not just let them go?”

He raised an eyebrow in amusement.

“Keswick’s is not a charity, Miss Scales! If we were to go around releasing every soul we found, we’d soon go bust!”

I shuddered.

“Who’s in the other bottles? Which other parents are you going to torment?”

“No one you know. The other bottles are anonymous souls. They’re intended for other uses.”

“I will never sell those!”

I didn’t mean to shout. Mr. Black looked at me in astonishment.

“Why ever not, Miss Scales?”

His tone implied I’d said something incredibly childish. I resented that implication.

“Don’t use that tone on me, Mr. Black. If you own someone’s soul, it changes you. You become more bloated with your own sense of importance, you treat people deplorably.”

“And?”

“There is no debate. I won’t have them.”

He stared at me. And now I saw the edge of red flame in the dark of his eyes. The cinnamon of his breath became the sweetness of corruption. I saw him for what he was.

“Miss Scales, I find your attitude distressing. The new world runs on commerce. The railways are linking together towns and countries. New worlds, even. And you remain here in your little shop, buying and selling flour and butter and worthless trinkets in your splendid isolation.”

“I don’t believe in isolation, Mr. Black.”

“Really? Your actions suggest otherwise. What’s worse, though, is that you make this choice for all those who live in this little town. This little backwater, cast aside from the bulk of commerce, from the rest of the world.”

This little backwater? This little town? I looked past Mr. Black, looked out through the door. This little town. The greengrocers, the butchers. The little coffee shop and newspaper office. The mothers out with their children. This little town where everything ran in sweet harmony. Prosperous, but not overly wealthy. There wasn’t the disparity you got in a place like Manchester, the rich living next to the slums.

This was a place where everyone got along, more or less. A place I took pride in supplying with groceries. I provided a healthy range of goods for people to raise their children, to care for their elderly. And Mr. Black had come here with his dreams and darkness and rumour and bottled souls. He didn’t want harmony. He wanted disruption. He wanted what I’d fought against in France. What my father and brothers had fought against and lost. And now that defeat had followed me home.

I’d fought for this place. And now, this was my to be my last stand. The thought terrified me.

Not that I let it show.

“Mr. Black,” I said.

“Yes?”

“Do you really believe in commerce?”

That smile. That challenge.

“Of course I do, Miss Scales.”

“You wish me to buy things from you. You insist on it.”

He said nothing. He sensed my energy, sensed the tension within me as I came to the decision. I would fight with the last weapon remaining to me. I breathed deeply. Forced my voice to remain level.

“Perhaps you would like to buy something from me?”

“What?”

I reached up to the locket at my neck. Opened it. Pulled out the little piece of paper inside.

“What’s that, Miss Scales?”

Slowly I unfolded the piece of paper. Teased his rising excitement.

“A promissory note. Unconditional and readily saleable. A negotiable instrument.”

“A promissory note for what?”

He knew. He could sense it. His eyes widened and I saw it again, the little red spark in his eyes. I was looking for it now.

He reached for the paper. I snatched it away.

“A promissory note for my soul. Are you interested in a wager, Mr. Black?”

He couldn’t conceal the expression of naked greed on his face. I tucked the paper back into its place, closed the locket.

“Clearly you’re not interested,” I teased. “Clearly commerce does not interest you.”

Oh, he was interested. You could see it in the set of his body. In the dimness of the shop interior his quivering lustre betrayed him. Not a man at all.

A demon.

“How did your soul come to be set against that note?” he croaked.

“The answer to that question comes at a price, Mr. Black. Commerce, remember? But I’ll tell you this. You know I fought in the war . . .”

Mr. Black was gazing at my locket like a cat might gaze at an approaching mouse. Trembling. Enraptured.

“And what would be the nature of the wager, Miss Scales?”

His voice was as dry as snakes. My stomach was hollow with fear. I wanted to turn now, turn and run from the shop. Only a fool would make a wager with a demon.

But I was that fool. I swallowed, once.

“My soul against your promise to leave me alone, Mr. Black.”

“You want to be left alone, you say?” He licked his lips again. “What does that mean? Do you no longer wish to deal with Keswick’s? Your store would go out of business in no time! You would be destitute!”

“No. We would still deal with Keswick’s. But on my terms. There would be no threats from you, or your replacements. There would be no trading in this town—or any other towns—of products I deem unsuitable.”

He looked bitterly disappointed. I’d asked too much.

“I can’t make that promise for all towns. The price is too high.”

I understood that.

“Very well,” I said. “Local towns. Those in Bridleworth.”

It was almost laughable, the way he tried to look as if he were considering the matter. As if he could possibly refuse. But I couldn’t appreciate the joke. I was terrified at the thought of what I had to lose . . .

“That would be . . . acceptable,” he said, slowly. “I could agree to those terms. Shall we shake on it? You understand this will constitute a valid contract?”

“I have witnessed such deals before.”

“Then let us shake hands on the deal.”

He held out his immaculately manicured hand. My stomach flipped. I reached out my own hand. His smile widened.

“One moment, Mr. Black!”

A flash of angry disappointment, quickly concealed.

“Just a minute, Mr. Black,” I said. “This isn’t a proper wager. All the risk is on my part. What’s your stake?”

“No trade. As discussed.” He looked confused. Disappointed. Angry.

“No trade is what Keswick’s is offering. I’m risking my soul. What do you personally have to lose?”

“I . . .” He understood now. He began to gabble. “I have money. I can offer gold! My watch!”

“No. That’s not enough. You have to risk all, too.”

“Why?”

I leaned closer to him. Tried not to gag at the smell of burnt cinnamon and corruption on his breath.

“Because there is an asymmetry between us,” I said, softly. “Commerce breaks down when one side is significantly more powerful than the other. Commerce works best when both sides gain advantage from the trade.”

“That sounds like communist propaganda to me, Miss Scales.”

“The words spoken by a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

“Everything has a price,” said Mr. Black.

“Whatever. That’s the wager, Mr. Black. My soul against yours.”

“Demons don’t have souls.”

“But a demon can be owned. I would own you.”

“What would you do with me?”

“Lock you in a bottle, just like you’ve done with poor Dai Williams and Thomas Milkham’s souls. I’d keep you here on this shelf, between the tea and the flour.”

We both looked at the space indicated. He looked as if he were in physical pain, such was his temptation. His voice was strained.

“What would be the nature of our wager?”

This was it. I was offering him my soul. I was entering into a wager with a demon. I’d seen it done before, in France. I’d seen soldiers wager their souls on money, women, power. But mostly on the strength to get through the forthcoming battle. Almost invariably they lost. The demons were too cunning. If you were going to wager with a demon, you had to choose a bet that it was possible to win.

But that was easier said than done.

I took a deep breath.

“You’ve spoken of commerce, Mr. Black. You claim that everything has a price.”

“I do.”

“I’ve worked here for four years. I’ve dealt with Keswick’s for as long. I know their catalogue. How well do you know it?”

“Intimately.”

“Then this is bet. We take in turns to choose items from the shop. The challenge is to name the price of each item. Whoever fails to name a price, loses. Do you agree?”

He smiled. Of course he did.

“Agreed.”

He held out a hand. I shook my head.

“We’ll need a bottle to keep the losing soul in,” I said.

He understood immediately.

“You’re a sharp woman, Miss Scales. Thomas or Dai?”

“Both.”

He shook his head. “Don’t push your luck.”

“Then that one,” I said, pointing. I couldn’t remember which was which. I didn’t want to know.

He took the bottle. Opened it up. The soul escaped with a faint sighing. He placed the bottle between us. Held out his hand.

I felt numb as I reached out and shook it.

This was it.

“I’ll go first,” said Mr. Black. I opened my mouth to protest. Closed it. He wasn’t cheating; there had been nothing in the rules to say who went first.

He rummaged in his bag. Brought out a silver bottle.

He saw my expression, grinned at his own cleverness.

“That was in your bag,” I protested. “It’s not a shop item.”

“The bag is in the shop.”

I’d never seen the item before. Of course I hadn’t. Part of the new, darker stock. I felt sick. I’d been beaten before the game had even begun.

“Well, Miss Scales?”

I didn’t know where to begin.

“Shall I give you a clue? It contains lust. Just the thing for a man who’s passed his prime!”

He was taunting me. He’d outwitted me, right at the start. I felt so stupid. I felt the heat rising in my neck. Stupid, stupid! I looked around the shop. Thinking. Lust. What did people use to inflame lust? Oysters? I didn’t sell them. Asparagus? Chocolate? I knew the price of chocolate . . .

My eye on fell on the sheet on the counter. The order list. Mr. Black saw where I was looking and his hand shot out.

Too slow. I snatched the paper from beneath his grasp and stepped back from him, reading the list, scanning down, past sloth and gluttony, a pound of spite . . . There it was. Lust.

“Lust,” I said, triumphantly. “Four shillings and six pence.”

He swore. Certainly not a word I was accustomed to hearing in my shop.

“Don’t be a sore loser,” I said primly. “It’s my turn.”

My heart was pounding. I took hold of my locket. Took a deep breath. This was what I’d bet my soul upon. This was what I guessed a demon could never know.

“Can you put a price on the contents of this?” I said, holding out my locket. “Can you put a price on my soul?”

Mr. Black wasn’t fazed for a moment

“333,104 pounds, 5 shillings and twopence,” he said.

It was as if the floor had opened up beneath me. I felt my legs go weak.

“That’s the price you’d put on my soul?” I said, feebly.

“No,” he grinned. “That’s the price you put on it. That’s what it would cost us if you won the bet. That’s how much Keswick’s will lose if we don’t sell our products in the Bridleworth area.”

“No! That’s just the cost of the goods!” I felt myself rallying. “What price freedom, Mr. Black?”

“I don’t believe that’s for sale in this shop, Miss Scales. Bring me a bottle of it and we’ll argue the price!”

“But . . .!”

“My turn,” said Mr. Black.

“No!”

“My turn,” he repeated. And I was lost for words. That was it. My grand play had come to naught.

Mr. Black was looking around the shop, scanning the shelves. Looking for . . . what? His eyes roved the top shelves, the next set down. Was he floundering? Realising this task wasn’t maybe as easy as he’d first thought? I fanned my failing confidence.

“Come on, Mr. Black. If you can’t think of something, it will be my turn again.”

“Don’t rush me! There was no time limit mentioned.”

“It would do you no good if I died of old age in the meantime.”

That was it. Taunt him. Put him off.

“Here!”

He pointed to the jar of humbugs sitting on the counter.

“Easy,” I said. “A penny a quarter.”

Although that wasn’t strictly true. I’d often give away a humbug for free to a good child, waiting politely for his mother to finish shopping.

“Not the humbugs,” he said. “The jar itself.”

“The jar comes with the humbugs.”

“Not that one,” he said.

I looked closer, and I realised he was right. The jar had stood there for so long I’d almost forgotten its origin. Glass storage jars for the home. We’d bought three, many, many years ago. One had broken. One had sold. The other had just sat there, the glass too thick, the shape rather unattractive in an indefinable way. No one wanted it.

“How much, Miss Scales?”

The jar had been there when my grandfather had run the shop. I’d been a little girl. How much had it cost? I remembered the original display, three jars. I remembered being told to stand back whilst my grandmother swept up the shards of glass when one of them had fallen. How much? I tried not to look at that other dark bottle that sat on the counter, that hungry mouth open, waiting to swallow my soul.

“Five seconds, Miss Scales.”

“Don’t interrupt. Anyway, there’s no time limit.”

“I don’t want you dying of old age,” he taunted.

And then, suddenly, just like that, I had it.

“One shilling and threepence.”

He scowled. I was right.

I was right.

I was trembling all over now. Deep breaths. Calm.

“My turn again.”

I was ready for him. Whilst he’d been looking for an item in the shop, I’d been thinking, too. I pointed to the ham hanging from the ceiling.

“How much for that?”

“Ten shillings,” said Mr. Black.

“That’s for the whole ham. As you can see, I’ve already sliced a good part off.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Black. “Three shillings, four pence halfpenny’s worth. That makes the remainder worth seven shillings seven pence halfpenny.”

How did he know that? My stomach flipped.

It was Mr. Black’s turn again. He had no hesitation this time.

“This,” he said, spreading his arms to encompass the interior.

“You mean the shop itself?”

“No. I mean the fact you can see the shop itself.”

“The cost of the light?”

“Yes. How much does the sun cost, Miss Scales?”

I wasn’t worried. Hadn’t he taught me that game himself?

“The sun is free. I pay between three and four shillings a week for oil for the lamps. You’ll have to do better than that, Mr. Black.”

I should have taken more time in answering. It was my turn again, and now it was my turn to be stuck for an item. My eye roved the store, taking in the tins of biscuits, the medicines, the dark polish, the . . .

“The darkness,” I murmured. “How much do the shadows cost?”

“The cost of something that blocks the sun, Miss Scales.”

“No. That wasn’t my go. I was thinking aloud.”

He knew that wasn’t true. Even so, he humoured me. He was teasing me, I knew. Taunting me.

“You know,” he said, “When I own your soul, I think I will wear it in a bottle around my neck. I will taste it, every now and again. Perhaps I will share it with others. What do you say, Miss Scales?”

He was trying to distract me. Succeeding. I had been too rash. Soon he would own my soul.

My soul.

That was it.

“How much is your soul worth, Mr. Black?”

He pulled a regretful expression. As if he were disappointed in me.

“Demons don’t have souls, Miss Scales. You know that!” He wore thoughtful expression. “You know,” he mused, “I sometimes wonder if such a thing as a soul exists even in humans. Face it, we’ve interacted without me possessing such a thing. You could have had this conversation with any one of my brothers to the same result.”

“Of course you believe souls exist, Mr. Black. You seek to win mine.”

“Ah no, Miss Scales. I seek control of the shop by whatever means. If you acquiesce to my ownership in this manner, believing you have a soul, then so be it.”

“You have souls in those bottles there. You seek to sell them to me.”

“That’s what you call them. To me, they’re just a commodity like any other.”

“Then you’re wrong.”

“Really? Can you tell me how these ‘souls’ differ from the other commodities that you sell? How they differ from butter or soap? Can you tell me what a soul is?”

“Yes. A soul is the thing that makes me me and you you.”

He tilted his head, tasting the idea. Wondering at it.

“No. Every one is the same, no matter what they believe. My brothers and I were all created the same. Stamped out of the same mould.”

And there it was. I had him. My voice cracked as I spoke.

“You and your brothers may have been created the same, Mr. Black, but you are the same no longer. You diverge just a little, by the conversations you’ve had. The places you’ve visited. The things that you know that your brothers do not. You have a soul. The beginnings of one at least. It may be worth no more than a penny, but it’s there.”

He was frowning, tasting the idea. Looking for a way to refute it.

“And so I’ve named a price you didn’t know, Mr. Black. I believe I’ve won our bet. Won it by a penny.”

He yelled at me then. Shouted and screamed and cursed. But I’d heard worse in the past. I let him rave. And then I took his soul.

• • • •

But when it came to it, I couldn’t keep his soul in a jar. Almost worthless though it might be, it was still a soul. This is a good little town. Not perfect, but nothing is. Good enough. People work hard to keep it as it is.

Even Mr. Black. He works for me now. Delivering goods, polishing the bottles, sweeping the floor. He sleeps in the back yard, under a pile of rags. I can’t bear to have him under the same roof as me at night. But maybe that will change one day. It seems to me that I no longer find him as loathsome as I once did. Perhaps I’m getting used to him.

But I think there is more to it than that. He’s growing a little more of himself every day; I sometimes catch him looking at the shop with an expression almost of warmth. As if he is learning to appreciate this place.

I do believe that his penny soul may well be appreciating in value.

©2017 by Tony Ballantyne.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tony Ballantyne is the author of the acclaimed Penrose and Recursion series of novels as well as many short stories that have appeared in magazines and anthologies around the world. He has been nominated for the BSFA and Philip K Dick awards.

Dream Paris, a follow up to the critically acclaimed Dream London, was published in September 2015.

He is currently getting back to his SF roots by writing a space opera. Due to popular demand, he has also recently begun working on a series of short stories set in the Recursion universe.

He lives in Oldham, near Manchester. Find out more at tonyballantyne.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Shoggoths in Traffic

Tobias S. Buckell | 3890 words

We stole the cherry red 1984 Corvette at noon, when Random was inside the strip club for Tuesday’s Wings and Things and otherwise occupied. At one, we stopped behind a Denny’s to swap the plates, even though it felt dangerous to have paused knowing that Random would be standing in the badly maintained asphalt parking lot staring at where he’d left the ’vette and coming to certain conclusions.

“It’s okay,” Abony said as I held the license plate in place and she screwed it on. “Take deep breaths.”

“We stole a car from a fucking drug dealer,” I said, voice quavering.

Technically, we’d repossessed the damn car. Abony had jimmied the car door and popped the lock in a second. She’d worked a roadside assistance gig for five years and had gotten pretty damn quick at it on older model cars. I went in with the screwdriver and hammer to crack the ignition open and jumpstart it.

Not gonna lie: The adrenaline kicked in pretty hard when I swung out onto the road, rear tires smoking under the faded GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS sign.

By the time the letters in the mirror were too small to read, I wanted to throw up.

The goal was to get the car from Chicago down to Miami. Twenty hours, straight shot, each of us taking turns to drive. Bathroom stops only. Once there: turn the car over, collect our fee, then vanish for the West Coast.

“Random is going to kill us,” I said to Abony as she stood up.

“He doesn’t know it was us. As long as he doesn’t catch up to us.” Abony’s hair clips tinkled against each other as she turned back to me. “A hundred grand, Trent. We just have to get to Miami.”

As long as he doesn’t catch us, I thought.

• • • •

South of Gary and halfway down toward Indianapolis on I-65 we pulled over because I had the shakes. Abony took the wheel.

“I’m scared, too,” she said.

I couldn’t stop looking in the mirrors. We’d agreed to drive exactly two miles over the speed limit. Not exactly the limit, that was suspicious. Not just under it. Couldn’t risk being pulled over, as our plates and registration wouldn’t hold up under a computer check from the cops. We were rolling dice here.

Abony’s glasses glinted in sunlight as she looked over at me.

“A hundred grand.”

It was our mantra. Our guiding light.

She’d first named the sum while we were inches deep in mud alongside a freeway, the tow truck behind us stabbing the night with its yellow emergency lights, struggling to replace a blown out tire on some Iowa grandma’s 2016 Corolla.

The rain was seeping through my poncho, dropping long streams of ice-cold water down my back and ass crack. I slipped. Jammed my hand against the hubcap in the mud and sliced it open. I’d scattered the lug nuts in the puddles.

While we’d both swore and grubbed about in the mud looking for the bolts, she’d looked at me. “Man, I’m tired of this shit. I’ve been out here, inches away from being run over by these fucking idiots. I’m still living in my aunt’s spare room and I can’t hardly pay my student loans.”

I found four of the five nuts. I bled all over them as I threaded them back on to get the replacement tire in place.

“What would you do with a hundred grand?” Abony had asked me.

“I’d go live near the ocean. California.”

“That money won’t get you shit out there. That’s for rich folk.”

“I just want to live near the ocean for a bit. You know, like Venice Beach.” I dropped the old lady’s car back down.

“You’re gonna run out of money in weeks.”

“Spent most of my life in trailers on the edges of dead-ass towns,” I told her. “Even just a few weeks of beach would be worth it. You going in on lotto tickets with me?”

She’d shaken the water off her glasses. “Nah.”

We’d gotten coffee at a diner a few miles up the street to dry off and wait for another call from dispatch. After a while of watching something eating at her, she’d leaned forward. “I hear you did a few years for GTA, right?”

I stared at the coffee. “Left Pennsylvania to try and start over after I got out. It’s not good money. It was just part of the hustle.” Meth, cocaine, weed, hubcaps, radios, and then one day, whole cars. The older shit I stole barely ever made more than a few hundred a vehicle.

Abony and I had been driving the tow truck as a team ever since Olaf had been jumped and mugged when out by himself last year on a call. She must have come to think of me as reliable, because she leaned over the table. “I know where to get a hundred thou by repossessing a car.”

“Repossessing or stealing?”

“It’s complicated.”

Now I looked across at her, jaw clenched with determination. I’m sure a lot of folk assumed Abony would know how to steal a car, but she only knew how to jimmy a door because she’d worked roadside service. She’d started out answering the phones, the only job she had found after college. Then one night, Craig didn’t show up to ride and she offered to go out with me because miles out in the dark on the late shift paid better than phones.

Fifty thousand would let her pay off her loans. Let her help her aunt with the house in Chicago. The neighborhood was getting gentrified. The taxes were getting jacked up.

My cheap Android phone chirped. The GPS began giving us alternate directions, routing us off I-65.

“Think we should stay on?” I asked.

She glanced at the phone. “How long a delay?”

I had been looking up ahead at the highway, trying to see if there were stopped cars up ahead. Looking back down I read the screen. “It says we save half an hour if we get off the highway.”

I could see her doing the math. We were maybe an hour ahead of Random, who would likely be racing out along the most direct route to Miami. He knew where the car was headed. He would be breaking speed limits. We’d spent, what, five minutes changing the plates?

We couldn’t afford delays.

Abony took the exit, the Corvette happily hugging the curve of the off-ramp as we slowed and spiraled onto a two-lane county road.

She hit the brakes and slowed to a near stop. “What the hell is this?”

A burly man in a leather jacket, chaps, and the usual long beard waved at us from a row of red traffic cones in the middle of the road. I spotted a Harley off to the side of the road with a small trailer attached to the back.

“You need to go back!” The man shouted. “Back to the highway!”

I rolled down my window. “The phone says there’s an accident?”

“Ain’t no fucking accident, brother,” the man said, starting to wave at a semi coming along down the ramp after us. “Get back on the highway.”

“That’s no highway worker,” Abony said. “Something’s . . .”

The semi behind us didn’t slow, it swerved around us. Maybe the driver hadn’t been paying attention and didn’t realize we were stopped. Tires screamed, the trailer wobbled, and I instinctively pulled back against the chair and waited for the impact.

Metal and rubber whipped past my window, burned rubber floated into the Corvette, making us cough. The semi downshifted, roared, and then continued on down the road through the cones.

The biker lay on the side of the road, arms and legs outstretched.

• • • •

Abony was out of the car in an instant. “It clipped him!”

“Shit!” I crawled over her side of the car and out onto the side of the road.

The man groaned. There was blood all over his leather jacket, and dripping from his beard. He gurgled a bit and I wanted to throw up.

“Shit,” I said again. “What do we do? We call 911, right?”

“Uh . . .” Abony looked around. “We’re in a stolen car. You have a record.”

“Jesus.” I grabbed my head. “Jesus. But we gotta call 911.”

Abony suddenly looked cold and distant. “Even if they don’t think to run our details, you want to be standing here when Ransom and his crew get routed through by the same GPS? They got phones just like you, Trent.”

“Fuck. We can’t just leave him there. That ain’t right.”

She stood up. “No, we take him to the ER. Drop him off, and take off. We’re in the middle of fucking children of the corn territory, right? It’ll be faster to get him there ourselves than wait for an ambulance. This isn’t the city, there won’t be flashing lights here in five minutes.”

Relief flooded me.

Then I looked back at the car. “Abony, ain’t no back seats in that car.”

She was already walking back to it, though. She popped the hatchback and started throwing the extra food, water, and other shit for the twenty-hour drive out onto the shoulder, right by the $1,000 fine for littering sign.

“Help me lift him in,” she said.

The biker was short, heavy, and we hit his head twice getting him there. We had to curl him up, fetal position. I’d watched enough medical shows to know that if he had internal injuries, that wasn’t going to help him much.

It occurred to me that if he died back there, we’d have a dead guy in the hatchback trunk of a car, with a window and all.

“What about his bag?” I asked, pointing to a backpack that had been knocked clean off the man further down the road.

“Toss it in the back with him,” Abony said.

But we didn’t have the time to wait for an ambulance or police to ask us questions. Abony was right. Out of my breath, something in my back tweaked and screaming from the awkward angle of trying to shove the biker into the trunk, I asked the phone’s GPS for directions to the nearest ER.

It give us a route straight ahead.

The truck had already scattered the cones or crushed them. We drove past them onto the country road.

The biker groaned and stirred, his head right behind my headrest. I’d rested it against some bags of chips for cushioning. They crunched, releasing the smell of salt and vinegar into the air as one of the bags burst.

“It’s okay, we’re getting you to a hospital,” I said.

• • • •

“Check the phone again,” Abony ordered, voice tense. Ten minutes following the 3D map and we were way out on a flat plain of skeletal recently harvested cornfields. “I think we were closer to a town back at the off-ramp.”

I started fiddling with the phone, trying to zoom out of the map while it kept giving us instructions. “I hate it when the GPS does that.”

“Yeah. It feels like it’s taking us around the edge of the town,” Abony said. “We’re just making a big loop. It’s confused.”

Normally, it’d do my pride some harm to be taking orders so much. But Abony had the college degree. I may have constantly tried to mess with her, show her that some elite book smarts didn’t mean shit out here in the greasy real world. But after a year working as a team, I’d stopped giving her shit and started giving her my attention.

I’d driven hundreds of miles to run away from my past in Pennsylvania. I’d sworn to stay on the straight, even if I was always broke. Abony said I needed to learn some self-control.

Well, I hadn’t ended up in drugs and stealing cars because of my moderate nature.

But I’d turned it around. Cleaned up. Learned my lesson.

So I’d told Abony to fuck off the first time she told me about the car. Her cousin had done a job for Random and heard the story. That the car had been taken from a big drug dealer in Miami. It had been his dad’s car, and a project they’d both worked on. It was important to the man. And Random stole it after some falling out about a smuggling corridor coming up from Miami through Kentucky.

Random drove it around Chicago, through the salt in the winter, and potholes. He drove the damn Corvette everywhere until it looked like an old piece of shit, but kept it running. A trophy.

Javier, in Miami, offered a hundred thousand dollars to anyone who got it back to him.

A repossession to the rightful owner, Abony said.

She was supposed to be the smart, college-educated one. But a month of idly talking about the money and how we could get the car wormed its way into my brain. At first, it had been a running joke as we drove from stranded motorist to stranded motorist.

Then it became something we nervously laughed about.

And finally, I told her about the strip club and Random’s love of Tuesday’s Wings and Things. And blushed when she asked how I knew.

“This is taking us around the town,” Abony said, more confident as the GPS routing had us take another turn. “Look up the hospital on your phone.”

A bloody, hairy arm grabbed my shoulder just as I was raising the phone up. I screamed and dropped it, Abony swerved as she looked back. The biker, head crammed against the glass of the hatchback, pushed himself between us.

“That damn thing won’t ever take you to the hospital until it’s completed the symbol you’re driving,” the man said, blood misting the air inside the car as he spoke. “Once the summoning pattern is complete, you’ll be released. You have to stop the car, or everyone in this town will be in dire . . .”

He started coughing blood everywhere.

• • • •

We stopped by the side of the road again. Abony grabbed my phone and started hunting for the hospital as I unbuckled.

The biker was shifting around and had popped the hatch. Blood smeared the glass from his coughs.

“Man, you’re hurt, you need to stay here. Let us get you to the hospital,” I said.

“No, I’m okay,” the man said.

“Don’t let him out,” Abony shouted.

He tumbled out onto the grassy shoulder before I could get around the Corvette to stop him.

“Sir, you need to come with us. You can sit in my seat,” I offered.

He staggered and collapsed, sitting on a mound of mud and gravel. “It’s not too late to save people,” he told me, his voice calm. He had grabbed his bag. “How far are we from the bridge?”

“The bridge?”

“There’s a bridge over there. We can still stop the traffic from completing the summoning if we blow it.” He opened the bag between his legs and I jumped back. Those little foil-covered bricks, the wires. That was like, C4, or something.

This guy was some kind of biker terrorist.

“Abony . . .” I said, backing up.

“There’s a hospital just . . .” She saw the open bag from the car window. “Oh fuck.”

“No, no,” the biker waved his hands and coughed more blood down that crazy long beard. “I need to explain. I need you to help me blow that bridge.”

“I seen this,” I said out of the corner of my mouth to Abony. “It’s like, bath salts, right? Some crazy heavy shit he’s on. I mean, he’s hit by a truck and talking about blowing up a bridge.”

“Look,” the biker said. “I’m a wizard, got it?”

“You mean like the KKK?” I asked. “They had a biker crew like that the town over in—”

“No, not the fucking KKK,” the man said, visibly frustrated. “I’m a god damn magician. Like . . .” He started coughing blood again and folded forward. He pushed himself back up to sitting with visible effort.

“Get in the car, we gotta go,” Abony said. “This is some fucked up shit here and we gotta go. We can’t be involved in this.”

But the old biker reached into the grass and scratched out a circle with his finger, digging at the grass until his fingernail popped clean and began to bleed. He drew more symbols into the grass, then spat blood into the palm of his hand and pressed it into the dirt.

I was rooted in place, the madness of what I was seeing holding me in thrall. Abony was frozen as well.

The biker began to run his thumb along the pattern drawn in the mud and blood. He traced the whole thing once, then started it over and traced it again, compulsively.

He was mad.

But each time he pushed his thumb around the sigil, he sped up, energy flowing into him. Seven times, eight, he kept repeating the motions.

The pattern lit up with blue fire. Like when you poured grain alcohol out onto the table and lit it up for laughs.

But the fire didn’t fade out. It strengthened. Turned white hot. The ground burned but didn’t catch fire. And inside the complex swoops and swirls, something flickered in the dark.

For a brief moment, a tiny swirl of tentacles and otherness hung in the air over the road’s shoulder. It looked like something you’d see on a deep sea expedition special that ran after Shark Week.

The moment the creature appeared, the biker threw a handful of mud into the corner of the sigil. The lines broken, the fire that wasn’t fire guttered out. A tiny howl of frustration from inside the circle hung in the air between us all.

• • • •

We got the biker, the wizard, into my side of the Corvette. He put the C4 between his legs. I cleaned up the blood from the hatch and back of the car as best I could and curled up in a ball and let Abony shut the hatch down on me.

It was claustrophobic as hell.

“You see a lot of biker gangs rolling the highways,” the wizard wheezed. “But what you don’t know is that a lot of them are wizards. The long beards, their steed’s a bike, and the nomadic ways, it all works.”

The wizard’s name, he said, was Ozymandias. “Yeah, to answer the obvious question, I knew Shelley,” he said. But I didn’t know who Shelley was, though Abony nodded as if that meant something.

“What the fuck was that thing you made in the air?” I asked from behind them both.

“It was a summoning. A pattern. You know how you can draw a cube on paper, even though paper is flat? Two-dimensional? You can do the same with higher dimensions.”

“Like a pentagram?” I asked. I’d seen a lot of that stuff on some goth kids.

“Kind of. That’s an abstraction, not an actual higher dimensional summoning pattern.” He paused to wipe blood from his chin with a handkerchief. “You also need to charge it with motion to crack the space between worlds. In the past, you had to do that waving your arms and following the drawing. Took a lot of training. It took me almost a hundred years.”

“Oh, come on, you’re not that old,” I protested.

Our wizard, or insane biker, shrugged. “In the old days, it was hard to find the patterns and charge them up. But, as technology began to change and get better, folks started summoning things from behind the veil with machines. We do our best to hunt down and stop the worst. Occasionally, things get out. Zodiac Killer, Highway of Tears. Things that go bump in the night.”

Abony caught my eyes in the mirror. “Why were you stopping traffic?”

“GPS,” the wizard said, stroking his long beard.

“The alternate route?” Abony nodded.

“Wait, what?” I wasn’t following.

“It’s traffic, Trent. Think about the roads from above the air, like a clover leaf exit.”

I did that. Then thought about the pattern the wizard had drawn in the ground. Motion. Patterns. Summoning. “Holy. Shit.”

The wizard was breathing deeply. “We started noticing that apps, GPS, were creating patterns. Test routes, routine things. But someone is either hacking them, or the companies are in on it. Whatever the reason, we’re not sure about it yet, they’re charging summoning patterns using diverted automobile traffic.”

I thought about all the times a GPS would offer an alternate route and I’d take it without thinking.

“If I could summon something dangerous with just a foot-wide pattern, what do you think a fifteen mile wide pattern could do, in terms of breaches to another universe?” the wizard asked.

We were all silent.

“You were trying to stop it with those cones, turning traffic back?” I asked.

“A big pattern takes a lot of traffic to charge it. It’s not active yet. I tried to stop it with the cones. But I could also blow the bridge just another mile down the road. Look, I’m not asking you to help me. Taking me to a hospital won’t do me any good if the fabric of reality gets ripped apart while I’m there. Drop me off on the bridge. I can interrupt the pattern, stop it from being charged. Do that, and we can save an entire town from something monstrous.”

We drove on in silence.

It would take two minutes to get to the bridge.

I had the hospital up on the map, but no directions to it. I could get us there.

Abony’s fingers gripped the steering wheel tightly and I looked up at the sun through the hatch’s glass I was curled up tightly under, grateful for my tiny, bony frame. Was it my imagination, or did the sun just waver slightly?

• • • •

Ten minutes later, we left the bridge as Abony revved the Corvette up and we risked breaking the speed limit to put craziness as far behind us as we could.

“Did we really see that . . . thing?” I asked.

Abony bit her lip and didn’t say a thing.

“We did the right thing, right?” My voice cracked slightly.

“I’m just thinking,” Abony said. “That the truck that hit him, it was one of those new automated ones. The self-driving trucks that they just started allowing on the roads.”

“Jesus.” If what happened was real, it could get way worse when the cars just drove themselves. Apocalyptic, even.

“And I’m also thinking,” Abony said, proving once again that she was the smart one, “that Random is only five to fifteen minutes behind us after all those stops. And his GPS will give him the same route as the one we took.”

In the mirror, there was a flash of light.

I didn’t know if it was a bridge exploding or another universe folding itself out over the small town we left behind us.

Either way, it was eighteen more hours to Miami.

©2017 by Tobias Buckell. Originally published in Patreon.com/tobiasbuckell. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling author born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, which influence much of his work.

His novels and over 50 stories have been translated into 18 different languages. His work has been nominated for awards like the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author.

He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of dogs. He can be found online at TobiasBuckell.com.

Near Zennor

Elizabeth Hand | 20100 words

He found the letters inside a round metal candy tin, at the bottom of a plastic storage box in the garage, alongside strings of outdoor Christmas lights and various oddments his wife had saved for the yard sale she’d never managed to organise in almost thirty years of marriage. She’d died suddenly, shockingly, of a brain aneurysm, while planting daffodil bulbs the previous September.

Now everything was going to Goodwill. The house in New Canaan had been listed with a realtor; despite the terrible market, she’d reassured Jeffrey that it should sell relatively quickly, and for something close to his asking price.

“It’s a beautiful house, Jeffrey,” she said, “not that I’m surprised.” Jeffrey was a noted architect: She glanced at him as she stepped carefully along a flagstone path in her Louboutin heels. “And these gardens are incredible.”

“That was all Anthea.” He paused beside a stone wall, surveying an emerald swathe of new grass, small exposed hillocks of black earth, piles of neatly-raked leaves left by the crew he’d hired to do the work that Anthea had always done on her own. In the distance, birch trees glowed spectral white against a leaden February sky that gave a twilit cast to midday. “She always said that if I’d had to pay her for all this, I wouldn’t have been able to afford her. She was right.”

He signed off on the final sheaf of contracts and returned them to the realtor. “You’re in Brooklyn now?” she asked, turning back toward the house.

“Yes. Green Park. A colleague of mine is in Singapore for a few months, he’s letting me stay there till I get my bearings.”

“Well, good luck. I’ll be in touch soon.” She opened the door of her Prius and hesitated. “I know how hard this is for you. I lost my father two years ago. Nothing helps, really.”

Jeffrey nodded. “Thanks. I know.”

He’d spent the last five months cycling through wordless, imageless night terrors from which he awoke gasping; dreams in which Anthea lay beside him, breathing softly then smiling as he touched her face; nightmares in which the neuroelectrical storm that had killed her raged inside his own head, a flaring nova that engulfed the world around him and left him floating in an endless black space, the stars expiring one by one as he drifted past them.

He knew that grief had no target demographic, that all around him versions of this cosmic reshuffling took place every day. He and Anthea had their own shared experience years before, when they had lost their first and only daughter to sudden infant death syndrome. They were both in their late thirties at the time. They never tried to have another child, on their own or through adoption. It was as though some psychic house fire had consumed them both: It was a year before Jeffrey could enter the room that had been Julia’s, and for months after her death neither he nor Anthea could bear to sit at the dining table and finish a meal together, or sleep in the same bed. The thought of being that close to another human being, of having one’s hand or foot graze another’s and wake however fleetingly to the realisation that this too could be lost—it left both of them with a terror that they had never been able to articulate, even to each other.

Now as then, he kept busy with work at his office in the city, and dutifully accepted invitations for lunch and dinner there and in New Canaan. Nights were a prolonged torment: He was haunted by the realisation that Anthea been extinguished, a spent match pinched between one’s fingers. He thought of Houdini, arch-rationalist of another century, who desired proof of a spirit world he desperately wanted to believe in. Jeffrey believed in nothing, yet if there had been a drug to twist his neurons into some synaptic impersonation of faith, he would have taken it.

For the past month he’d devoted most of his time to packing up the house, donating Anthea’s clothes to various charity shops, deciding what to store and what to sell, what to divvy up among nieces and nephews, Anthea’s sister, a few close friends. Throughout he experienced grief as a sort of low-grade flu, a persistent, inescapable ache that suffused not just his thoughts but his bones and tendons: a throbbing in his temples, black sparks that distorted his vision; an acrid chemical taste in the back of his throat, as though he’d bitten into one of the pills his doctor had given him to help him sleep.

He watched as the realtor drove off soundlessly, returned to the garage and transferred the plastic bin of Christmas lights into his own car, to drop off at a neighbour’s the following weekend. He put the tin box with the letters on the seat beside him. As he pulled out of the driveway, it began to snow.

• • • •

That night, he sat at the dining table in the Brooklyn loft and opened the candy tin. Inside were five letters, each bearing the same stamp: RETURN TO SENDER. At the bottom of the tin was a locket on a chain, cheap gold-coloured metal and chipped red enamel circled by tiny fake pearls. He opened it: It was empty. He examined it for an engraved inscription, initials, a name, but there was nothing. He set it aside and turned to the letters.

All were postmarked 1971—February, March, April, July, end of August—all addressed to the same person at the same address, carefully spelled out in Anthea’s swooping, schoolgirl’s hand.

Mr Robert Bennington,
Golovenna Farm,
Padwithiel,
Cornwall

Love letters? He didn’t recognise the name Robert Bennington. Anthea would have been thirteen in February; her birthday was in May. He moved the envelopes across the table, as though performing a card trick. His heart pounded, which was ridiculous. He and Anthea had told each other about everything—three-ways at university, coke-fuelled orgies during the 1980s, affairs and flirtations throughout their marriage.

None of that mattered now; little of it had mattered then. Still, his hands shook as he opened the first envelope. A single sheet of onionskin was inside. He unfolded it gingerly and smoothed it on the table.

His wife’s handwriting hadn’t changed much in forty years. The same cramped cursive, each i so heavily dotted in black ink that the pen had almost poked through the thin paper. Anthea had been English, born and raised in North London. They’d met at the University of London, where they were both studying, and moved to New Canaan after they’d married. It was an area that Anthea had often said reminded her of the English countryside, though Jeffrey had never ventured outside London, other than a few excursions to Kent and Brighton. Where was Padwithiel?

21 February, 1971
Dear Mr Bennington,

My name is Anthea Ryson . . .

And would a thirteen-year-old girl address her boyfriend as “Mr,” even forty years ago?

. . . I am thirteen-years-old and live in London. Last year my friend Evelyn let me read Still the Seasons for the first time and since then I have read it two more times, also Black Clouds Over Bragmoor and The Second Sun. They are my favourite books! I keep looking for more but the library here doesn’t have them. I have asked and they said I should try the shops but that is expensive. My teacher said that sometimes you come to schools and speak, I hope some day you’ll come to Islington Day School. Are you writing more books about Tisha and the great Battle? I hope so, please write back! My address is 42 Highbury Fields, London NW1 .

Very truly yours,

Anthea Ryson

Jeffrey set aside the letter and gazed at the remaining four envelopes. What a prick, he thought. He never even wrote her back. He turned to his laptop and googled Robert Bennington.

Robert Bennington (1932- ), British author of a popular series of children’s fantasy novels published during the 1960s known as “The Sun Battles.” Bennington’s books rode the literary tidal wave generated by J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, but his commercial and critical standing were irrevocably shaken in the late 1990s, when he became the centre of a drawn-out court case involving charges of paedophilia and sexual assault, with accusations lodged against him by several girl fans, now adults. One of the alleged victims later changed her account, and the case was eventually dismissed amidst much controversy by child advocates and women’s rights groups. Bennington’s reputation never recovered: School libraries refused to keep his books on their shelves. All of his novels are now out of print, although digital editions (illegal) can be found, along with used copies of the four books in the “Battles” sequence . . .

Jeffrey’s neck prickled. The court case didn’t ring a bell, but the books did. Anthea had thrust one upon him shortly after they first met.

“These were my favourites.” She rolled over in bed and pulled a yellowed paperback from a shelf crowded with textbooks and Penguin editions of the mystery novels she loved. “I must have read this twenty times.”

“Twenty?” Jeffrey raised an eyebrow.

“Well, maybe seven. A lot. Did you ever read them?”

“I never even heard of them.”

“You have to read it. Right now.” She nudged him with her bare foot. “You can’t leave here till you do.”

“Who says I want to leave?” He tried to kiss her but she pushed him away.

“Uh uh. Not till you read it. I’m serious!”

So he’d read it, staying up till 3:00 a.m., intermittently dozing off before waking with a start to pick up the book again.

“It gave me bad dreams,” he said as grey morning light leaked through the narrow window of Anthea’s flat. “I don’t like it.”

“I know.” Anthea laughed. “That’s what I liked about them—they always made me feel sort of sick.”

Jeffrey shook his head adamantly. “I don’t like it,” he repeated.

Anthea frowned, finally shrugged, picked up the book and dropped it onto the floor. “Well, nobody’s perfect,” she said, and rolled on top of him.

A year or so later, he did read Still the Seasons, when a virus kept him in bed for several days and Anthea was caught up with research at the British Library. The book unsettled him deeply. There were no monsters per se, no dragons or Nazgûl or witches. Just two sets of cousins, two boys and two girls, trapped in a portal between one of those grim post-war English cities, Manchester or Birmingham, and a magical land that wasn’t really magical at all but even bleaker and more threatening than the council flats where the children lived.

Jeffrey remembered unseen hands tapping at a window, and one of the boys fighting off something invisible that crawled under the bedcovers and attacked in a flapping wave of sheets and blankets. Worst of all was the last chapter, which he read late one night and could never recall clearly, save for the vague, enveloping dread it engendered, something he had never encountered before or since.

Anthea had been right—the book had a weirdly visceral power, more like the effect of a low-budget, black-and-white horror movie than a children’s fantasy novel. How many of those grown-up kids now knew their hero had been a paedophile?

Jeffrey spent a half-hour scanning articles on Bennington’s trial, none of them very informative. It had happened over a decade ago; since then there’d been a few dozen blog posts, pretty equally divided between Whatever happened to . . .? and excoriations by women who themselves had been sexually abused, though not by Bennington.

He couldn’t imagine that had happened to Anthea. She’d certainly never mentioned it, and she’d always been dismissive, even slightly callous, about friends who underwent counselling or psychotherapy for childhood traumas. As for the books themselves, he didn’t recall seeing them when he’d sorted through their shelves to pack everything up. Probably they’d been donated to a library book sale years ago, if they’d even made the crossing from London.

He picked up the second envelope. It was postmarked “March 18, 1971.” He opened it and withdrew a sheet of lined paper torn from a school notebook.

Dear Rob,

Well, we all got back on the train, Evelyn was in a lot of trouble for being out all night and of course we couldn’t tell her aunt why, her mother said she can’t talk to me on the phone but I see her at school anyway so it doesn’t matter. I still can’t believe it all happened. Evelyn’s mother said she was going to call my mother and Moira’s but so far she didn’t. Thank you so much for talking to us. You signed Evelyn’s book but you forgot to sign mine. Next time!!!

Yours sincerely your friend,

Anthea

Jeffrey felt a flash of cold through his chest. Dear Rob, I still can’t believe it all happened. He quickly opened the remaining envelopes, read first one then the next and finally the last.

12 April, 1971

Dear Rob,

Maybe I wrote down your address wrong because the last letter I sent was returned. But I asked Moira and she had the same address and she said her letter wasn’t returned. Evelyn didn’t write yet but says she will. It was such a really, really great time to see you! Thank you again for the books, I thanked you in the last letter but thank you again. I hope you’ll write back this time, we still want to come again on holiday in July! I can’t believe it was exactly one month ago we were there .

Your friend,

Anthea Ryson

July 20, 1971

Dear Rob,

Well I still haven’t heard from you so I guess you’re mad maybe or just forgot about me, ha ha. School is out now and I was wondering if you still wanted us to come and stay? Evelyn says we never could and her aunt would tell her mother but we could hitch-hike, also Evelyn’s brother Martin has a caravan and he and his girlfriend are going to Wales for a festival and we thought they might give us a ride partway, he said maybe they would. Then we could hitch-hike the rest. The big news is Moira ran away from home and they called the POLICE. Evelyn said she went without us to see you and she’s really mad. Moira’s boyfriend Peter is mad too .

If she is there with you is it okay if I come too? I could come alone without Evelyn, her mother is a BITCH .

Please please write!

Anthea (Ryson)

Dear Rob,

I hate you. I wrote FIVE LETTERS including this one and I know it is the RIGHT address. I think Moira went to your house without us. FUCK YOU Tell her I hate her too and so does Evelyn. We never told anyone if she says we did she is a LIAR.

FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU

Where a signature should have been, the page was ripped and blotched with blue ink—Anthea had scribbled something so many times the pen tore through the lined paper. Unlike the other four, this sheet was badly crumpled, as though she’d thrown it away then retrieved it. Jeffrey glanced at the envelope. The postmark read “August 28.” She’d gone back to school for the fall term, and presumably that had been the end of it.

Except, perhaps, for Moira, whoever she was. Evelyn would be Evelyn Thurlow, Anthea’s closest friend from her school days in Islington. Jeffrey had met her several times while at university, and Evelyn had stayed with them for a weekend in the early 1990s, when she was attending a conference in Manhattan. She was a flight-test engineer for a British defence contractor, living outside Cheltenham; she and Anthea would have hour-long conversations on their birthdays, planning a dream vacation together to someplace warm—Greece or Turkey or the Caribbean.

Jeffrey had emailed her about Anthea’s death, and they had spoken on the phone—Evelyn wanted to fly over for the funeral but was on deadline for a major government contract and couldn’t take the time off.

“I so wish I could be there,” she’d said, her voice breaking. “Everything’s just so crazed at the moment. I hope you understand . . .”

“It’s okay. She knew how much you loved her. She was always so happy to hear from you.”

“I know,” Evelyn choked. “I just wish—I just wish I’d been able to see her again.”

Now he sat and stared at the five letters. The sight made him feel lightheaded and slightly queasy: as though he’d opened his closet door and found himself at the edge of a precipice, gazing down some impossible distance to a world made tiny and unreal. Why had she never mentioned any of this? Had she hidden the letters for all these years, or simply forgotten she had them? He knew it wasn’t rational; knew his response derived from his compulsive sense of order, what Anthea had always called his architect’s left brain.

“Jeffrey would never even try to put a square peg into a round hole,” she’d said once at a dinner party. “He’d just design a new hole to fit it.”

He could think of no place he could fit the five letters written to Robert Bennington. After a few minutes, he replaced each in its proper envelope and stacked them atop each other. Then he turned back to his laptop, and wrote an email to Evelyn.

• • • •

He arrived in Cheltenham two weeks later. Evelyn picked him up at the train station early Monday afternoon. He’d told her he was in London on business, spent the preceding weekend at a hotel in Bloomsbury and wandered the city, walking past the building where he and Anthea had lived right after university, before they moved to the U.S.

It was a relief to board the train and stare out the window at an unfamiliar landscape, suburbs giving way to farms and the gently rolling outskirts of the Cotswolds.

Evelyn’s husband, Chris, worked for one of the high-tech corporations in Cheltenham; their house was a rambling, expensively renovated cottage twenty minutes from the congested city centre.

“Anthea would have loved these gardens,” Jeffrey said, surveying swathes of narcissus already in bloom, alongside yellow primroses and a carpet of bluebells beneath an ancient beech. “Everything at home is still brown. We had snow a few weeks ago.”

“It must be very hard, giving up the house.” Evelyn poured him a glass of Medoc and sat across from him in the slate-floored sunroom.

“Not as hard as staying would have been,” Jeffrey raised his glass. “To old friends and old times.”

“To Anthea,” said Evelyn.

They talked into the evening, polishing off the Medoc and starting on a second bottle long before Chris arrived home from work. Evelyn was florid and heavy-set, her unruly raven hair long as ever and braided into a single plait, thick and grey-streaked. She’d met her contract deadline just days ago, and her dark eyes still looked hollowed from lack of sleep. Chris prepared dinner, lamb with fresh mint and new peas; their children were both off at university, so Jeffrey and Chris and Evelyn lingered over the table until almost midnight.

“Leave the dishes,” Chris said, rising. “I’ll get them in the morning.” He bent to kiss the top of his wife’s head, then nodded at Jeffrey. “Good to see you, Jeffrey.”

“Come on.” Evelyn grabbed a bottle of Armagnac and headed for the sunroom. “Get those glasses, Jeffrey. I’m not going in till noon. Project’s done, and the mice will play.”

Jeffrey followed her, settling onto the worn sofa and placing two glasses on the side-table. Evelyn filled both, flopped into an armchair and smiled. “It is good to see you.”

“And you.”

He sipped his Armagnac. For several minutes they sat in silence, staring out the window at the garden, narcissus and primroses faint gleams in the darkness. Jeffrey finished his glass, poured another, and asked, “Do you remember someone named Robert Bennington?”

Evelyn cradled her glass against her chest. She gazed at Jeffrey for a long moment before answering. “The writer? Yes. I read his books when I was a girl. Both of us did—me and Anthea.”

“But—you knew him. You met him, when you were thirteen. On vacation or something.”

Evelyn turned, her profile silhouetted against the window. “We did,” she said at last, and turned back to him. “Why are you asking?”

“I found some letters that Anthea wrote to him. Back in 1971, after you and her and a girl named Moira saw him in Cornwall. Did you know he was a paedophile? He was arrested about fifteen years ago.”

“Yes, I read about that. It was a big scandal.” Evelyn finished her Armagnac and set her glass on the table. “Well, a medium-sized scandal. I don’t think many people even remembered who he was by then. He was a cult writer, really. The books were rather dark for children’s books.”

She hesitated. “Anthea wasn’t molested by him, if that’s what you’re asking about. None of us were. He invited us to tea—we invited ourselves, actually, he was very nice and let us come in and gave us Nutella sandwiches and tangerines.”

“Three little teenyboppers show up at his door, I bet he was very nice,” said Jeffrey. “What about Moira? What happened to her?”

“I don’t know.” Evelyn sighed. “No one ever knew. She ran away from home that summer. We never heard from her again.”

“Did they question him? Was he even taken into custody?”

“Of course they did!” Evelyn said, exasperated. “I mean, I don’t know for sure, but I’m certain they did. Moira had a difficult home life, her parents were Irish and the father drank. And a lot of kids ran away back then, you know that—all us little hippies. What did the letters say, Jeffrey?”

He removed then from his pocket and handed them to her. “You can read them. He never did—they all came back to Anthea. Where’s Padwithiel?”

“Near Zennor. My aunt and uncle lived there, we went and stayed with them during our school holidays one spring.” She sorted through the envelopes, pulled out one and opened it, unfolding the letter with care. “February twenty-first. This was right before we knew we’d be going there for the holidays. It was my idea. I remember when she wrote this—she got the address somehow, and that’s how we realised he lived near my uncle’s farm. Padwithiel.”

She leaned into the lamp and read the first letter, set it down and continued to read each of the others. When she was finished, she placed the last one on the table, sank back into her chair and gazed at Jeffrey.

“She never told you about what happened.”

“You just said that nothing happened.”

“I don’t mean with Robert. She called me every year on the anniversary. March twelfth.” She looked away. “Next week, that is. I never told Chris. It wasn’t a secret, we just—well, I’ll just tell you.

“We went to school together, the three of us, and after Anthea sent that letter to Robert Bennington, she and I cooked up the idea of going to see him. Moira never read his books—she wasn’t much of a reader. But she heard us talking about his books all the time, and we’d all play these games where we’d be the ones who fought the Sun Battles. She just did whatever we told her to, though for some reason she always wanted prisoners to be boiled in oil. She must’ve seen it in a movie.

“Even though we were older now, we still wanted to believe that magic could happen like in those books—probably we wanted to believe it even more. And all that New Agey, hippie stuff, Tarot cards and Biba and ‘Ride a White Swan’—it all just seemed like it could be real. My aunt and uncle had a farm near Zennor, my mother asked if we three could stay there for the holidays and Aunt Becca said that would be fine. My cousins are older, and they were already off at university. So we took the train and Aunt Becca got us in Penzance.

“They were turning one of the outbuildings into a pottery studio for her, and that’s where we stayed. There was no electricity yet, but we had a kerosene heater and we could stay up as late as we wanted. I think we got maybe five hours sleep the whole time we were there.” She laughed. “We’d be up all night, but then Uncle Ray would start in with the tractors at dawn. We’d end up going into the house and napping in one of my cousin’s beds for half the afternoon whenever we could. We were very grumpy houseguests.

“It rained the first few days we were there, just pissing down. Finally one morning we got up and the sun was shining. It was cold, but we didn’t care—we were just so happy we could get outside for a while. At first we just walked along the road, but it was so muddy from all the rain that we ended up heading across the moor. Technically it’s not really open moorland—there are old stone walls criss-crossing everything, ancient field systems. Some of them are thousands of years old, and farmers still keep them up and use them. These had not been kept up. The land was completely overgrown, though you could still see the walls and climb them. Which is what we did.

“We weren’t that far from the house—we could still see it, and I’m pretty sure we were still on my uncle’s land. We found a place where the walls were higher than elsewhere, more like proper hedgerows. There was no break in the wall like there usually is, no gate or old entryway. So we found a spot that was relatively untangled and we all climbed up and then jumped to the other side. The walls were completely overgrown with blackthorn and all these viney things. It was like Sleeping Beauty’s castle—the thorns hurt like shit. I remember I was wearing new boots and they got ruined, just scratched everywhere. And Moira tore her jacket and we knew she’d catch grief for that. But we thought there must be something wonderful on the other side—that was the game we were playing, that we’d find some amazing place. Do you know The Secret Garden? We thought it might be like that. At least I did.”

“And was it?”

Evelyn shook her head. “It wasn’t a garden. It was just this big overgrown field. Dead grass and stones. But it was rather beautiful in a bleak way. Ant laughed and started yelling ‘Heathcliff, Heathcliff!’ And it was warmer—the walls were high enough to keep out the wind, and there were some trees that had grown up on top of the walls as well. They weren’t in leaf yet, but they formed a bit of a windbreak.

“We ended up staying there all day. Completely lost track of the time. I thought only an hour had gone by, but Ant had a watch, at one point she said it was past three and I was shocked—I mean, really shocked. It was like we’d gone to sleep and woken up, only we weren’t asleep at all.”

“What were you doing?”

Evelyn shrugged. “Playing. The sort of let’s-pretend game we always did when we were younger and hadn’t done for a while. Moira had a boyfriend, Ant and I really wanted boyfriends—mostly that’s what we talked about whenever we got together. But for some reason, that day Ant said, ‘Let’s do Sun Battles,’ and we all agreed. So that’s what we did. Now of course I can see why—I’ve seen it with my own kids when they were that age, you’re on the cusp of everything, and you just want to hold on to being young for as long as you can.

“I don’t remember much of what we did that day, except how strange it all felt. As though something was about to happen. I felt like that a lot, it was all tied in with being a teenager; but this was different. It was like being high, or tripping, only none of us had ever done any drugs at that stage. And we were stone-cold sober. Really all we did was wander around the moor and clamber up and down the walls and hedgerows and among the trees, pretending we were in Gearnzath. That was the world in ‘The Sun Battles’—like Narnia, only much scarier. We were mostly just wandering around and making things up, until Ant told us it was after three o’clock.

“I think it was her idea that we should do some kind of ritual. I know it wouldn’t have been Moira’s, and I don’t think it was mine. But I knew there was going to be a full moon that night—I’d heard my uncle mention it—and so we decided that we would each sacrifice a sacred thing, and then retrieved them all before moonrise. We turned our pockets inside-out looking for what we could use. I had a comb, so that was mine—just a red plastic thing, I think it cost ten pence. Ant had a locket on a chain from Woolworths, cheap but the locket part opened.

“And Moira had a pencil. It said RAVENWOOD on the side, so we called the field Ravenwood. We climbed up on the wall and stood facing the sun, and made up some sort of chant. I don’t remember what we said. Then we tossed our things onto the moor. None of us threw them far, and Ant barely tossed hers—she didn’t want to lose the locket. I didn’t care about the comb, but it was so light it just fell a few yards from where we stood. Same with the pencil. We all marked where they fell—I remember mine very clearly, it came down right on top of this big flat stone.

“Then we left. It was getting late, and cold, and we were all starving—we’d had nothing to eat since breakfast. We went back to the house and hung out in the barn for a while, and then we had dinner. We didn’t talk much. Moira hid her jacket so they couldn’t see she’d torn it, and I took my boots off so no one would see how I’d got them all mauled by the thorns. I remember my aunt wondering if we were up to something, and my uncle saying what the hell could we possibly be up to in Zennor? After dinner we sat in the living room and waited for the sun to go down, and when we saw the moon start to rise above the hills, we went back outside.

“It was bright enough that we could find our way without a torch—a flashlight. I think that must have been one of the rules, that we had to retrieve our things by moonlight. It was cold out, and none of us had dressed very warmly, so we ran. It didn’t take long. We climbed back over the wall and then down onto the field, at the exact spot where we’d thrown our things.

“They weren’t there. I knew exactly where the rock was where my comb had landed—the rock was there, but not the comb. Ant’s locket had landed only a few feet past it, and it wasn’t there either. And Moira’s pencil was gone, too.”

“The wind could have moved them,” said Jeffrey. “Or an animal.”

“Maybe the wind,” said Evelyn. “Though the whole reason we’d stayed there all day was that there was no wind—it was protected, and warm.”

“Maybe a bird took it? Don’t some birds like shiny things?”

“What would a bird do with a pencil? Or a plastic comb?”

Jeffrey made a face. “Probably you just didn’t see where they fell. You thought you did, in daylight, but everything looks different at night. Especially in moonlight.”

“I knew where they were.” Evelyn shook her head and reached for the bottle of Armagnac. “Especially my comb. I have that engineer’s eye, I can look at things and keep a very precise picture in my mind. The comb wasn’t where it should have been. And there was no reason for it to be gone, unless . . .”

“Unless some other kids had seen you and found everything after you left,” said Jeffrey.

“No.” Evelyn sipped her drink. “We started looking. The moon was coming up—it rose above the hill, and it was very bright. Because it was so cold there was hoarfrost on the grass, and ice in places where the rain had frozen. So all that reflected the moonlight. Everything glittered. It was beautiful, but it was no longer fun—it was scary. None of us was even talking; we just split up and criss-crossed the field, looking for our things.

“And then Moira said, ‘There’s someone there,’ and pointed. I thought it was someone on the track that led back to the farmhouse—it’s not a proper road, just a rutted path that runs alongside one edge of that old field system. I looked up and yes, there were three people there—three torches, anyway. Flashlights. You couldn’t see who was carrying them, but they were walking slowly along the path. I thought maybe it was my uncle and two of the men who worked with him, coming to tell us it was time to go home. They were walking from the wrong direction, across the moor, but I thought maybe they’d gone out to work on something. So I ran to the left edge of the field and climbed up on the wall.”

She stopped, glancing out the window at the black garden, and finally turned back. “I could see the three lights from there,” she said. “But the angle was all wrong. They weren’t on the road at all—they were in the next field, up above Ravenwood. And they weren’t flashlights. They were high up in the air, like this—”

She set down her glass and got to her feet, a bit unsteadily, extended both her arms and mimed holding something in her hands. “Like someone was carrying a pole eight or ten feet high, and there was a light on top of it. Not a flame. Like a ball of light . . .”

She cupped her hands around an invisible globe the size of a soccer ball. “Like that. White light, sort of foggy. The lights bobbed as they were walking.”

“Did you see who it was?”

“No. We couldn’t see anything. And, this is the part that I can’t explain—it just felt bad. Like, horrible. Terrifying.”

“You thought you’d summoned up whatever it was you’d been playing at.” Jeffrey nodded sympathetically and finished his drink. “It was just marsh gas, Ev. You know that. Will o’ the wisp, or whatever you call it here. They must get it all the time out there in the country. Or fog. Or someone just out walking in the moonlight.”

Evelyn settled back into her armchair. “It wasn’t,” she said. “I’ve seen marsh gas. There was no fog. The moon was so bright you could see every single rock in that field. Whatever it was, we all saw it. And you couldn’t hear anything—there were no voices, no footsteps, nothing. They were just there, moving closer to us—slowly,” she repeated, and moved her hand up and down, as though calming a cranky child. “That was the creepiest thing, how slowly they just kept coming.”

“Why didn’t you just run?”

“Because we couldn’t. You know how kids will all know about something horrible, but they’ll never tell a grown-up? It was like that. We knew we had to find our things before we could go.

“I found my comb first. It was way over—maybe twenty feet from where I’d seen it fall. I grabbed it and began to run across the turf, looking for the locket and Moira’s pencil. The whole time the moon was rising, and that was horrible, too—it was a beautiful clear night, no clouds at all. And the moon was so beautiful, but it just terrified me. I can’t explain it.”

Jeffrey smiled wryly. “Yeah? How about this: three thirteen-year-old girls in the dark under a full moon, with a very active imagination?”

“Hush. A few minutes later, Moira yelled: She’d found her pencil. She turned and started running back toward the wall, I screamed after her that she had to help us find the locket. She wouldn’t come back. She didn’t go over the wall without us, but she wouldn’t help. I ran over to Ant but she yelled at me to keep searching where I was. I did, I even started heading for the far end of the field, toward the other wall—where the lights were.

“They were very close now, close to the far wall I mean. You could see how high up they were, taller than a person. I could hear Moira crying, I looked back and suddenly I saw Ant dive to the ground. She screamed ‘I found it!’ and I could see the chain shining in her hand.

“And we just turned and hightailed it. I’ve never run so fast in my life. I grabbed Ant’s arm, by the time we got to the wall Moira was already on top and jumping down the other side. I fell and Ant had to help me up, Moira grabbed her and we ran all the way back to the farm and locked the door when we got inside.

“We looked out the window and the lights were still there. They were there for hours. My uncle had a Border Collie, we cracked the door to see if she’d hear something and bark but she didn’t. She wouldn’t go outside—we tried to get her to look and she wouldn’t budge.”

“Did you tell your aunt and uncle?”

Evelyn shook her head. “No. We stayed in the house that night, in my cousin’s room. It overlooked the moor, so we could watch the lights. After about two hours, they began to move back the way they’d come—slowly, it was about another hour before they were gone completely. We went out next morning to see if there was anything there—we took the dog to protect us.”

“And?”

“There was nothing. The grass was all beat down, as though someone had been walking over it, but probably that was just us.”

She fell silent. “Well,” Jeffrey said after a long moment. “It’s certainly a good story.”

“It’s a true story. Here, wait.”

She stood and went into the other room, and Jeffrey heard her go upstairs. He crossed to the window and stared out into the night, the dark garden occluded by shadow and runnels of mist, blueish in the dim light cast from the solarium.

“Look. I still have it.”

He turned to see Evelyn holding a small round tin. She withdrew a small object and stared at it, placed it back inside and handed him the tin. “My comb. There’s some pictures here, too.”

“That tin.” He stared at the lid, blue enamel with the words ST. AUSTELL SWEETS: FUDGE FROM REAL CORNISH CREAM stamped in gold above the silhouette of what looked like a lighthouse beacon. “It’s just like the one I found, with Anthea’s letters in it.”

Evelyn nodded. “That’s right. Becca gave one to each of us the day we arrived. The fudge was supposed to last the entire two weeks, and I think we ate it all that first night.”

He opened the tin and gazed at a bright-red plastic comb sitting atop several snapshots; dug into his pocket and pulled out Anthea’s locket.

“There it is,” said Evelyn wonderingly. She took the locket and dangled it in front of her, clicked it open and shut then returned it to Jeffrey. “She never had anything in it that I knew. Here, look at these.”

She took back the tin. He sat, waiting as she sorted through the snapshots then passed him six small black-and-white photos, each time-stamped OCTOBER 1971.

“That was my camera. A Brownie.” Evelyn sank back into the armchair. “I didn’t finish shooting the roll till we went back to school.”

There were two girls in most of the photos. One was Anthea, apple-cheeked, her face still rounded with puppy fat and her brown hair longer than he’d ever seen it; eyebrows unplucked, wearing baggy bell-bottom jeans and a white peasant shirt. The other girl was taller, sturdy but long-limbed, with long straight blonde hair and a broad smooth forehead, elongated eyes, and a wide mouth bared in a grin.

“That’s Moira,” said Evelyn.

“She’s beautiful.”

“She was. We were the ugly ducklings, Ant and me. Fortunately I was taking most of the photos, so you don’t see me except in the ones Aunt Becca took.”

“You were adorable.” Jeffrey flipped to a photo of all three girls laughing and feeding each other something with their hands, Evelyn still in braces, her hair cut in a severe black bob. “You were all adorable. She’s just—”

He scrutinised a photo of Moira by herself, slightly out of focus so all you saw was a blurred wave of blonde hair and her smile, a flash of narrowed eyes. “She’s beautiful. Photogenic.”

Evelyn laughed. “Is that what you call it? No, Moira was very pretty, all the boys liked her. But she was a tomboy like us. Ant was the one who was boy-crazy. Me and Moira, not so much.”

“What about when you saw Robert Bennington? When was that?”

“The next day. Nothing happened—I mean, he was very nice, but there was nothing strange like that night. Nothing untoward,” she added, lips pursed. “My aunt knew who he was—she didn’t know him except to say hello to at the post office, and she’d never read his books. But she knew he was the children’s writer, and she knew which house was supposed to be his. We told her we were going to see him, she told us to be polite and not be a nuisance and not stay long.

“So we were polite and not nuisances, and we stayed for two hours. Maybe three. We trekked over to his house, and that took almost an hour. A big old stone house. There was a standing stone and an old barrow nearby, it looked like a hayrick. A fogou. He was very proud that there was a fogou on his land—like a cave, but man-made. He said it was three thousand years old. He took us out to see it, and then we walked back to his house and he made us Nutella sandwiches and tangerines and Orange Squash. We just walked up to his door and knocked—I knocked, Ant was too nervous and Moira was just embarrassed. Ant and I had our copies of The Second Sun, and he was very sweet and invited us in and said he’d sign them before we left.”

“Oh, sure—‘Come up and see my fogou, girls.’”

“No—he wanted us to see it because it gave him an idea for his book. It was like a portal, he said. He wasn’t a dirty old man, Jeffrey! He wasn’t even that old—maybe forty? He had long hair, longish, anyway—to his shoulders—and he had cool clothes, an embroidered shirt and corduroy flares. And pointy-toed boots—blue boot, bright sky-blue, very pointy toes. That was the only thing about him I thought was odd. I wondered how his toes fit into them—if he had long pointy toes to go along with the shoes.” She laughed. “Really, he was very charming, talked to us about the books but wouldn’t reveal any secrets—he said there would be another in the series but it never appeared. He signed our books—well, he signed mine, Moira didn’t have one and for some reason he forgot Ant’s. And eventually we left.”

“Did you tell him about the lights?”

“We did. He said he’d heard of things like that happening before. That part of Cornwall is ancient, there are all kinds of stone circles and menhirs, cromlechs, things like that.”

“What’s a cromlech?”

“You know—a dolmen.” At Jeffrey’s frown she picked up several of the snapshots and arranged them on the side table, a simple house of cards: three photos supporting a fourth laid atop them. “Like that. It’s a kind of prehistoric grave, made of big flat stones. Stonehenge, only small. The fogou was a bit like that. They’re all over West Penwith—that’s where Zennor is. Alaister Crowley lived there, and D.H. Lawrence and his wife. That was years before Robert’s time, but he said there were always stories about odd things happening. I don’t know what kind of things—it was always pretty boring when I visited as a girl, except for that one time.”

Jeffrey made a face. “He was out there with a flashlight, Ev, leading you girls on.”

“He didn’t even know we were there!” protested Evelyn, so vehemently that the makeshift house of photos collapsed. “He looked genuinely startled when we knocked on his door—I was afraid he’d yell at us to leave. Or, I don’t know, have us arrested. He said that field had a name. It was a funny word, Cornish. It meant something, though of course I don’t remember what.”

She stopped and leaned toward Jeffrey. “Why do you care about this, Jeffrey? Did Anthea say something?”

“No. I just found those letters, and . . .”

He lay his hands atop his knees, turned to stare past Evelyn into the darkness, so that she wouldn’t see his eyes welling. “I just wanted to know. And I can’t ask her.”

Evelyn sighed. “Well, there’s nothing to know, except what I told you. We went back once more—we took torches this time, and walking sticks and the dog. We stayed out till 3:00 a.m. Nothing happened except we caught hell from my aunt and uncle because they heard the dog barking and looked in the barn and we were gone.

“And that was the end of it. I still have the book he signed for me. Ant must have kept her copy—she was always mad he didn’t sign it.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I couldn’t find it. Your friend Moira, you’re not in touch with her?”

Evelyn shook her head. “I told you, she disappeared—she ran away that summer. There were problems at home, the father was a drunk and maybe the mother, too. We never went over there—it wasn’t a welcoming place. She had an older sister but I never knew her. Look, if you’re thinking Robert Bennington killed her, that’s ridiculous. I’m sure her name came up during the trial, if anything had happened we would have heard about it. An investigation.”

“Did you tell them about Moira?”

“Of course not. Look, Jeffrey—I think you should forget about all that. It’s nothing to do with you, and it was all a long time ago. Ant never cared about it—I told her about the trial, I’d read about it in The Guardian, but she was even less curious about it than I was. I don’t even know if Robert Bennington is still alive. He’d be an old man now.”

She leaned over to take his hand. “I can see you’re tired, Jeffrey. This has all been so awful for you, you must be totally exhausted. Do you want to just stay here for a few days? Or come back after your meeting in London?”

“No—I mean, probably not. Probably I need to get back to Brooklyn. I have some projects I backburnered, I need to get to them in the next few weeks. I’m sorry, Ev.”

He rubbed his eyes and stood. “I didn’t mean to hammer you about this stuff. You’re right—I’m just beat. All this—” He sorted the snapshots into a small stack, and asked, “Could I have one of these? It doesn’t matter which one.”

“Of course. Whichever, take your pick.”

He chose a photo of the three girls, Moira and Evelyn doubled over laughing as Anthea stared at them, smiling and slightly puzzled.

“Thank you, Ev,” he said. He replaced each of Anthea’s letters into its envelope, slid the photo into the last one, then stared at the sheaf in his hand, as though wondering how it got there. “It’s just, I dunno. Meaningless, I guess; but I want it to mean something. I want something to mean something.”

“Anthea meant something.” Evelyn stood and put her arms around him. “Your life together meant something. And your life now means something.”

“I know.” He kissed the top of her head. “I keep telling myself that.”

• • • •

Evelyn dropped him off at the station next morning. He felt guilty, lying that he had meetings back in London, but he sensed both her relief and regret that he was leaving.

“I’m sorry about last night,” he said as Evelyn turned into the parking lot. “I feel like the Bad Fairy at the christening, bringing up all that stuff.”

“No, it was interesting.” Evelyn squinted into the sun. “I hadn’t thought about any of that for awhile. Not since Ant called me last March.”

Jeffrey hesitated, then asked, “What do you think happened? I mean, you’re the one with the advanced degree in structural engineering.”

Evelyn laughed. “Yeah. And see where it’s got me. I have no idea, Jeffrey. If you ask me, logically, what do I think? Well, I think it’s just one of those things that we’ll never know what happened. Maybe two different dimensions overlapped—in superstring theory, something like that is theoretically possible, a sort of duality.”

She shook her head. “I know it’s crazy. Probably it’s just one of those things that don’t make any sense and never will. Like how did Bush stay in office for so long?”

“That I could explain.” Jeffrey smiled. “But it’s depressing and would take too long. Thanks again, Ev.”

They hopped out of the car and hugged on the curb. “You should come back soon,” said Ev, wiping her eyes. “This is stupid, that it took so long for us all to get together again.”

“I know. I will—soon, I promise. And you and Chris, come to New York. Once I have a place, it would be great.”

He watched her drive off, waving as she turned back onto the main road; went into the station and walked to a ticket window.

“Can I get to Penzance from here?”

“What time?”

“Now.”

The station agent looked at her computer. “There’s a train in about half an hour. Change trains in Plymouth, arrive at Penzance a little before four.”

He bought a first-class, one-way ticket to Penzance, found a seat in the waiting area, took out his phone and looked online for a place to stay near Zennor. There wasn’t much—a few farmhouses designed for summer rentals, all still closed for the winter. An inn that had in recent years been turned into a popular gastropub was open; but even now, the first week of March, they were fully booked. Finally he came upon a B&B called Cliff Cottage. There were only two rooms, and the official opening date was not until the following weekend, but he called anyway.

“A room?” The woman who answered sounded tired but friendly. “We’re not really ready yet, we’ve been doing some renovations and—”

“All I need is a bed,” Jeffrey broke in. He took a deep breath. “The truth is, my wife died recently. I just need some time to be away from the rest of the world and . . .”

His voice trailed off. He felt a pang of self-loathing, playing the pity card; listened to a long silence on the line before the woman said, “Oh, dear, I’m so sorry. Well, yes, if you don’t mind that we’re really not up and running. The grout’s not even dry yet in the new bath. Do you have a good head for heights?”

“Heights?”

“Yes. Vertigo? Some people have a very hard time with the driveway. There’s a two night minimum for a stay.”

Jeffrey assured her he’d never had any issues with vertigo. He gave her his credit card info, rang off, and called to reserve a car in Penzance.

He slept most of the way to Plymouth, exhausted and faintly hungover. The train from Plymouth to Penzance was nearly empty. He bought a beer and a sandwich in the buffet car, and went to his seat. He’d bought a novel in London at Waterstones, but instead of reading gazed out at a landscape that was a dream of books he’d read as a child—granite farmhouses, woolly-coated ponies in stone paddocks; fields improbably green against lowering grey sky, graphite clouds broken by blades of golden sun, a rainbow that pierced a thunderhead then faded as though erased by some unseen hand. Ringnecked pheasants, a running fox. More fields planted with something that shone a startling goldfinch-yellow. A silvery coastline hemmed by arches of russet stone. Children wrestling in the middle of an empty road. A woman walking with head bowed against the wind, hands extended before her like a diviner.

Abandoned mineshafts and slagheaps; ruins glimpsed in an eyeflash before the train dove into a tunnel; black birds wheeling above a dun-coloured tor surrounded by scorched heath.

And, again and again, groves of gnarled oaks that underscored the absence of great forests in a landscape that had been scoured of trees thousands of years ago. It was beautiful yet also slightly disturbing, like watching an underpopulated, narratively fractured silent movie that played across the train window.

The trees were what most unsettled Jeffrey: the thought that men had so thoroughly occupied this countryside for so long that they had flensed it of everything—rocks, trees, shrubs all put to some human use so that only the abraded land remained. He felt relieved when the train at last reached Penzance, with the beachfront promenade to one side, glassy waves breaking on the sand and the dark towers of St. Michael’s Mount suspended between aquamarine water and pearly sky.

He grabbed his bag and walked through the station, outside to where people waited on the curb with luggage or headed to the parking lot. The clouds had lifted: A chill steady wind blew from off the water, bringing the smell of salt and sea wrack. He shivered and pulled on his wool overcoat, looking around for the vehicle from the rental car company that was supposed to meet him.

He finally spotted it, a small white sedan parked along the sidewalk. A man in a dark blazer leaned against the car, smoking and talking to a teenage boy with dreadlocks and rainbow-knit cap and a woman with matted dark-blonde hair.

“You my ride?” Jeffrey said, smiling.

The man took a drag from his cigarette and passed it to the woman. She was older than Jeffrey had first thought, in her early thirties, face seamed and sun-weathered and her eyes bloodshot. She wore tight flared jeans and a fuzzy sky-blue sweater beneath a stained Arsenal windbreaker.

“Spare anything?” she said as he stopped alongside the car. She reeked of sweat and marijuana smoke.

“Go on now, Erthy,” the man said, scowling. He turned to Jeffrey. “Mr. Kearin?”

“That’s me,” said Jeffrey.

“Gotta ’nother rollie, Evan?” the woman prodded.

“Come on, Erthy,” said the rainbow-hatted boy. He spun and began walking toward the station. “Peace, Evan.”

“I apologise for that,” Evan said as he opened the passenger door for Jeffrey. “I know the boy, his family’s neighbours of my sister’s.”

“Bit old for him, isn’t she?” Jeffrey glanced to where the two huddled against the station wall, smoke welling from their cupped hands.

“Yeah, Erthy’s a tough nut. She used to sleep rough by the St. Erth train station. Only this last winter she’s taken up in Penzance. Every summer we get the smackhead hippies here, there’s always some poor souls who stay and take up on the street. Not that you want to hear about that,” he added, laughing as he swung into the driver’s seat. “On vacation?”

Jeffrey nodded. “Just a few days.”

“Staying here in Penzance?”

“Cardu. Near Zennor.”

“Might see some sun, but probably not till the weekend.”

• • • •

He ended up with the same small white sedan. “Only one we have, this last minute,” Evan said, tapping at the computer in the rental office. “But it’s better really for driving out there in the countryside. Roads are extremely narrow. Have you driven around here before? No? I would strongly recommend the extra damages policy . . .”

It had been decades since Jeffrey had been behind the wheel of a car in the U.K. He began to sweat as soon as he left the rental car lot, eyes darting between the map Evan had given him and the GPS on his iPhone. In minutes the busy roundabout was behind him; the car crept up a narrow, winding hillside, with high stone walls to either side that swiftly gave way to hedgerows bordering open farmland. A brilliant yellow field proved to be planted with daffodils, their constricted yellow throats not yet in bloom. After several more minutes, he came to a crossroads.

Almost immediately he got lost. The distances between villages and roads were deceptive: what appeared on the map to be a mile or more instead contracted into a few hundred yards, or else expanded into a series of zigzags and switchbacks that appeared to point him back toward Penzance. The GPS directions made no sense, advising him to turn directly into stone walls or gated driveways or fields where cows grazed on young spring grass. The roads were only wide enough for one car to pass, with tiny turnouts every fifty feet or so where one could pull over, but the high hedgerows and labyrinthine turns made it difficult to spot oncoming vehicles.

His destination, a village called Cardu, was roughly seven miles from Penzance; after half an hour, the odometer registered that he’d gone fifteen miles, and he had no idea where he was. There was no cell phone reception. The sun dangled a hand’s-span above the western horizon, staining ragged stone outcroppings and a bleak expanse of moor an ominous reddish-bronze, and throwing the black fretwork of stone walls into stark relief. He finally parked in one of the narrow turnouts, sat for a few minutes staring into the sullen blood-red eye of the sun, and at last got out.

The hedgerows offered little protection from the harsh wind that raked across the moor. Jeffrey pulled at the collar of his wool coat, turning his back to the wind, and noticed a small sign that read PUBLIC FOOTPATH. He walked over and saw a narrow gap in the hedgerow, three steps formed of wide flat stones. He took the three in one long stride and found himself at the edge of an overgrown field, similar to what Evelyn had described in her account of the lights near Zennor. An ancient-looking stone wall bounded the far edge of the field, with a wider gap that opened to the next field and what looked like another sign. He squinted, but couldn’t make out what it read, and began to pick his way across the turf.

It was treacherous going—the countless hummocks hid deep holes, and more than once he barely kept himself from wrenching his ankle. The air smelled strongly of raw earth and cow manure. As the sun dipped lower, a wedge of shadow was driven between him and the swiftly darkening sky, making it still more difficult to see his way. But after a few minutes he reached the far wall, and bent to read the sign beside the gap into the next field.

CAS CIRCLE

He glanced back, saw a glint of white where the rental car was parked, straightened and walked on.

There was a footpath here. Hardly a path, really; just a trail where turf and bracken had been flattened by the passage of not-many feet. He followed it, stopping when he came to a large upright stone that came up his waist. He looked to one side then the other and saw more stones, forming a group more ovoid than circular, perhaps thirty feet in diameter. He ran his hand across the first stone—rough granite, ridged with lichen and friable bits of moss that crumbled at his touch.

The reek of manure was fainter here: He could smell something fresh and sweet, like rain, and when he looked down saw a silvery gleam at the base of the rock. He crouched and dipped his fingers into a tiny pool, no bigger than his shoe. The water was icy cold, and even after he withdrew his hand, the surface trembled.

A spring. He dipped his cupped palm into it and sniffed warily, expecting a foetid whiff of cow muck.

But the water smelled clean, of rock and rain. Without thinking he drew his hand to his mouth and sipped, immediately flicked his fingers to send glinting droplets into the night.

That was stupid, he thought, hastily wiping his hand on his trousers. Now I’ll get dysentery. Or whatever one gets from cows.

He stood there for another minute, then turned and retraced his steps to the rental car. He saw a pair of headlights approaching and flagged down a white delivery van.

“I’m lost,” he said, and showed the driver the map that Evan had given him.

“Not too lost.” The driver perused the map, then gave him directions. “Once you see the inn you’re almost there.”

Jeffrey thanked him, got back into the car and started to drive. In ten minutes he reached the inn, a rambling stucco structure with a half-dozen cars out front. There was no sign identifying Cardu, and no indication that there was anything more to the village than the inn and a deeply rutted road flanked by a handful of granite cottages in varying states of disrepair. He eased the rental car by the mottled grey buildings, to where what passed for a road ended; bore right and headed down a cobblestoned, hairpin drive that zigzagged along the cliff-edge.

He could hear but could not see the ocean, waves crashing against rocks hundreds of feet below. Now and then he got a skin-crawling glimpse of immense cliffs like congealed flames—ruddy stone, apricot-yellow gorse, lurid flares of orange lichen all burned to ash as afterglow faded from the western sky.

He wrenched his gaze back to the narrow strip of road immediately in front of him. Gorse and brambles tore at the doors; once he bottomed out, then nosed the car across a water-filled gulley that widened into a stream that cascaded down the cliff to the sea below.

“Holy fucking Christ,” he said, and kept the car in first gear. In another five minutes he was safely parked beside the cottage, alongside a small sedan.

“We thought maybe you weren’t coming,” someone called as Jeffrey stepped shakily out onto a cobblestone drive. Straggly rosebushes grew between a row of granite slabs that resembled headstones. These were presumably to keep cars from veering down an incline that led to a ruined outbuilding, a few faint stars already framed in its gaping windows. “Some people, they start down here and just give up and turn back.”

Jeffrey looked around, finally spotted a slight man in his early sixties standing in the doorway of a grey stone cottage tucked into the lee of the cliff. “Oh, hi. No, I made it.”

Jeffrey ducked back into the car, grabbed his bag and headed for the cottage.

“Harry,” the man said, and held the door for him.

“Jeffrey. I spoke to your wife this afternoon.”

The man’s brow furrowed. “Wife?” He was a head shorter than Jeffrey, clean-shaven, with a sun-weathered face and sleek grey-flecked dark brown hair to his shoulders. A ropey old cable knit sweater hung from his lank frame.

“Well, someone. A woman.”

“Oh. That was Thomsa. My sister.” The man nodded, as though this confusion had never occurred before. “We’re still trying to get unpacked. We don’t really open till this weekend, but . . .”

He held the door so Jeffrey could pass inside. “Thomsa told me of your loss. My condolences.”

Inside was a small room with slate floors and plastered walls, sparely furnished with a plain deal table and four chairs intricately carved with Celtic knots; a sideboard holding books and maps and artfully mismatched crockery; large gas cooking stove and a side table covered with notepads and pens, unopened bills, and a laptop. A modern cast-iron wood-stove had been fitted into a wide, old-fashioned hearth. The stove radiated warmth and an acrid, not unpleasant scent, redolent of coal-smoke and burning sage. Peat, Jeffrey realised with surprise. There was a closed door on the other side of the room, and from behind this came the sound of a television. Harry looked at Jeffrey, cocking an eyebrow.

“It’s beautiful,” said Jeffrey.

Harry nodded. “I’ll take you to your room,” he said.

Jeffrey followed him up a narrow stair beneath the eaves, into a short hallway flanked by two doors. “Your room’s here. Bath’s down there, you’ll have it all to yourself. What time would you like breakfast?”

“Seven, maybe?”

“How about seven-thirty?”

Jeffrey smiled wanly. “Sure.”

The room was small, white plaster walls and a window-seat overlooking the sea, a big bed heaped with a white duvet and myriad pillows, corner wardrobe carved with the same Celtic knots as the chairs below. No TV or radio or telephone, not even a clock. Jeffrey unpacked his bag and checked his phone for service: none.

He closed the wardrobe, looked in his backpack and swore. He’d left his book on the train. He ran a hand through his hair, stepped to the window-seat and stared out.

It was too dark now to see much, though light from windows on the floor below illuminated a small, winding patch of garden, bound at the cliff-side by a stone wall. Beyond that there was only rock and, far below, the sea. Waves thundered against the unseen shore, a muted roar like a jet turbine. He could feel the house around him shake.

And not just the house, he thought; it felt as though the ground and everything around him trembled without ceasing. He paced to the other window, overlooking the drive, and stared at his rental car and the sedan beside it through a frieze of branches, a tree so contorted by wind and salt that its limbs only grew in one direction. He turned off the room’s single light, waited for his eyes to adjust; stared back out through one window, and then the other.

For as far as he could see, there was only night. Ghostly light seeped from a room downstairs onto the sliver of lawn. Starlight touched on the endless sweep of moor, like another sea unrolling from the line of cliffs brooding above black waves and distant headlands. There was no sign of human habitation: no distant lights, no street-lamps, no cars, no ships or lighthouse beacons: nothing.

He sank onto the window seat, dread knotting his chest. He had never seen anything like this—even hiking in the Mojave Desert with Anthea ten years earlier, there had been a scattering of lights sifted across the horizon and satellites moving slowly through the constellations. He grabbed his phone, fighting a cold black solitary horror. There was still no reception.

He put the phone aside and stared at a framed sepia-tinted photograph on the wall: a three-masted schooner wrecked on the rocks beneath a cliff he suspected was the same one where the cottage stood. Why was he even here? He felt as he had once in college, waking in a strange room after a night of heavy drinking, surrounded by people he didn’t know in a squalid flat used as a shooting gallery. The same sense that he’d been engaged in some kind of psychic somnambulism, walking perilously close to a precipice.

Here, of course, he actually was perched on the edge of a precipice. He stood and went into the hall, switching on the light; walked into the bathroom and turned on all the lights there as well.

It was almost as large as his bedroom, cheerfully appointed with yellow and blue towels piled atop a wooden chair, a massive porcelain tub, hand-woven yellow rugs and a fistful of daffodils in a cobalt glass vase on a wide windowsill. He moved the towels and sat on the chair for a few minutes, then crossed to pick up the vase and drew it to his face.

The daffodils smelled sweetly, of overturned earth warming in the sunlight. Anthea had loved daffodils, planting a hundred new bulbs every autumn; daffodils and jonquil and narcissus and crocuses, all the harbingers of spring. He inhaled again, deeply, and replaced the flowers on the sill. He left a light on beside the sink, returned to his room, and went to bed.

• • • •

He woke before 7:00. Thin sunlight filtered through the white curtains he’d drawn the night before, and for several minutes he lay in bed, listening to the rhythmic boom of surf on the rocks. He finally got up, pulled aside the curtain and looked out.

A line of clouds hung above the western horizon, but over the headland the sky was pale blue, shot with gold where the sun rose above the moor. Hundreds of feet below Jeffrey’s bedroom, aquamarine swells crashed against the base of the cliffs and swirled around ragged granite pinnacles that rose from the sea, surrounded by clouds of white seabirds. There was a crescent of white sand, and a black cavern-mouth gouged into one of the cliffs where a vortex rose and subsided with the waves.

The memory of last night’s horror faded: sunlight and wheeling birds, the vast expanse of air and sea and all but treeless moor made him feel exhilarated. For the first time since Anthea’s death, he had a premonition not of dread but of the sort of exultation he felt as a teenager, waking in his boyhood room in early spring.

He dressed and shaved—there was no shower, only that dinghy-sized tub, so he’d forgo bathing till later. He waited until he was certain he heard movement in the kitchen, and went downstairs.

“Good morning.” A woman who might have been Harry’s twin leaned against the slate sink. Slender, small-boned, with straight dark hair held back with two combs from a narrow face, brown-eyed and weathered as her brother’s. “I’m Thomsa.”

He shook her hand, glanced around for signs of coffee then peered out the window. “This is an amazing place.”

“Yes, it is,” Thomsa said evenly. She spooned coffee into a glass cafetière, picked up a steaming kettle, and poured hot water over the grounds. “Coffee, right? I have tea if you prefer. Would you like eggs? Some people have all sorts of food allergies. Vegans, how do you feed them?” She stared at him in consternation, turned back to the sink, glancing at a bowl of eggs. “How many?”

The cottage was silent, save for the drone of a television behind the closed door and the thunder of waves beating against the cliffs. Jeffrey sat at a table set for one, poured himself coffee, and stared out to where the moor rose behind them. “Does the sound of the ocean ever bother you?” he asked.

Thomsa laughed. “No. We’ve been here thirty-five years, we’re used to that. But we’re building a house in Greece, in Hydra, that’s where we just returned from. There’s a church in the village and every afternoon the bells ring, I don’t know why. At first I thought, isn’t that lovely, church bells! Now I’m sick of them and just wish they’d just shut up.”

She set a plate of fried eggs and thick-cut bacon in front of him, along with slabs of toasted brown bread and glass bowls of preserves, picked up a mug, and settled at the table. “So are you here on holiday?”

“Mmm, yes.” Jeffrey nodded, his mouth full. “My wife died last fall. I just needed to get away for a bit.”

“Yes, of course. I’m very sorry.”

“She visited here once when she was a girl—not here, but at a farm nearby, in Zennor. I don’t know the last name of the family, but the woman was named Becca.”

“Becca? Mmmm, no, I don’t think so. Maybe Harry will know.”

“This would have been 1971.”

“Ah—no, we didn’t move here till ’75. Summer, us and all the other hippie types from back then.” She sipped her tea. “No tourists around this time of year. Usually we don’t open till the second week in March. But we don’t have anyone scheduled yet, so.” She shrugged, pushing back a wisp of dark hair. “It’s quiet this time of year. No German tour buses. Do you paint?”

“Paint?” Jeffrey blinked. “No. I’m an architect, so I draw, but mostly just for work. I sketch sometimes.”

“We get a lot of artists. There’s the Tate in St. Ives, if you like modern architecture. And of course there are all the prehistoric ruins—standing stones, and Zennor Quoit. There are all sorts of legends about them, fairy tales. People disappearing. They’re very interesting if you don’t mind the walk.”

“Are there places to eat?”

“The inn here, though you might want to stop in and make a booking. There’s the pub in Zennor, and St. Ives, of course, though it can be hard to park. And Penzance.”

Jeffrey winced. “Not sure I want to get back on the road again immediately.”

“Yes, the drive here’s a bit tricky, isn’t it? But Zennor’s only two miles, if you don’t mind walking—lots of people do, we get hikers from all over on the coastal footpath. And Harry might be going out later, he could drop you off in Zennor, if you like.”

“Thanks. Not sure what I’ll do yet. But thank you.”

He ate his breakfast, making small talk with Thomsa and nodding at Harry when he emerged and darted through the kitchen, raising a hand as he slipped outside. Minutes later, Jeffrey glimpsed him pushing a wheelbarrow full of gardening equipment.

“I think the rain’s supposed to hold off,” Thomsa said, staring out the window. “I hope so. We want to finish that wall. Would you like me to make more coffee?”

“If you don’t mind.”

Jeffrey dabbed a crust into the blackcurrant preserves. He wanted to ask if Thomsa or her brother knew Robert Bennington, but was afraid he might be stirring up memories of some local scandal, or that he’d be taken for a journalist or some other busybody. He finished the toast, thanked Thomsa when she poured him more coffee, then reached for one of the brochures on the sideboard.

“So does this show where those ruins are?”

“Yes. You’ll want the ordnance map. Here—”

She cleared the dishes, gathered a map, and unfolded it. She tapped the outline of a tiny cove between two spurs of land. “We’re here.”

She traced one of the spurs, lifted her head to stare out the window to a grey-green spine of rock stretching directly to the south. “That’s Gurnard’s Head. And there’s Zennor Head—”

She turned and pointed in the opposite direction, to a looming promontory a few miles distant, and looked back down at the map. “You can see where everything’s marked.”

Jeffrey squinted to make out words printed in a tiny, Gothic font. TUMULI, STANDING STONE, HUT CIRCLE, CAIRN. “Is there a fogou around here?”

“A fogou?” She frowned slightly. “Yes, there is—out toward Zennor, across the moor. It’s a bit of a walk.”

“Could you give me directions? Just sort of point the way? I might try and find it—give me something to do.”

Thomsa stepped to the window. “The coastal path is there—see? If you follow it up to the ridge, you’ll see a trail veer off. There’s an old road there, the farmers use it sometimes. All those old fields run alongside it. The fogou’s on the Golovenna Farm, I don’t know how many fields back that is. It would be faster if you drove toward Zennor then hiked over the moor, but you could probably do it from here. You’ll have to find an opening in the stone walls or climb over—do you have hiking shoes?” She looked dubiously at his sneakers. “Well, they’ll probably be all right.”

“I’ll give it a shot. Can I take that map?”

“Yes, of course. It’s not the best map—the Ordnance Survey has a more detailed one, I think.”

He thanked her and downed the rest of his coffee, went upstairs and pulled a heavy woollen sweater over his flannel shirt, grabbed his cell phone and returned downstairs. He retrieved the map and stuck it in his coat pocket, said goodbye to Thomsa rinsing dishes in the sink, and walked outside.

The air was warmer, almost balmy despite a stiff wind that had torn the line of clouds into grey shreds. Harry knelt beside a stone wall, poking at the ground with a small spade. Jeffrey paused to watch him, then turned to survey clusters of daffodils and jonquils, scores of them scattered across the terraced slopes among rocks and apple trees. The flowers were not yet in bloom, but he could glimpse sunlit yellow and orange and saffron petals swelling within the green buds atop each slender stalk.

“Going out?” Harry called.

“Yes.” Jeffrey stooped to brush his fingers across one of the flowers. “My wife loved daffodils. She must have planted thousands of them.”

Harry nodded. “Should open in the next few days. If we get some sun.”

Jeffrey waved farewell and turned to walk up the drive.

In a few minutes, the cottage was lost to sight. The cobblestones briefly gave way to cracked concrete, then a deep rut that marked a makeshift path that led uphill, toward the half-dozen buildings that made up the village. He stayed on the driveway, and after another hundred feet reached a spot where a narrow footpath meandered off to the left, marked by a sign. This would be the path that Thomsa had pointed out.

He shaded his eyes and looked back. He could just make out Cliff Cottage, its windows a flare of gold in the sun. He stepped onto the trail, walking with care across loose stones and channels where water raced downhill, fed by the early spring rains. To one side, the land sheared away to cliffs and crashing waves; he could see where the coastal path wound along the headland, fading into the emerald crown of Zennor Head. Above him, the ground rose steeply, overgrown with coiled ferns, newly-sprung grass, thickets of gorse in brilliant sun-yellow bloom where bees and tiny orange butterflies fed. At the top of the incline, he could see the dark rim of a line of stone walls. He stayed on the footpath until it began to bear toward the cliffs, then looked for a place where he could break away and make for the ancient fields. He saw what looked like a path left by some kind of animal and scrambled up, dodging gorse, his sneakers sliding on loose scree, until he reached the top of the headland.

The wind here was so strong he nearly lost his balance as he hopped down into a grassy lane. The lane ran parallel to a long ridge of stone walls perhaps four feet high, braided with strands of rusted barbed wire. On the other side, endless intersections of yet more walls divided the moor into a dizzyingly ragged patchwork: jade-green, beryl, creamy yellow; ochre and golden amber. Here and there, twisted trees grew within sheltered corners, or rose from atop the walls themselves, gnarled branches scraping at the sky. High overhead, a bird arrowed toward the sea, and its plaintive cry rose above the roar of wind in his ears.

He pulled out the map, struggling to open it in the wind, finally gave up and shoved it back into his pocket. He tried to count back four fields, but it was hopeless—he couldn’t make out where one field ended and another began.

And he had no idea what field to start with. He walked alongside the lane, away from the cottage and the village of Cardu, hoping he might find a gate or opening. He finally settled on a spot where the barbed wire had become engulfed by a protective thatch of dead vegetation. He clambered over the rocks, clutching desperately at dried leaves as the wall gave way beneath his feet and nearly falling onto a lethal-looking knot of barbed wire. Gasping, he reached the top of the wall, flailed as wind buffeted him, then crouched until he could catch his breath.

The top of the wall was covered with vines, grey and leafless, as thick as his fingers and unpleasantly reminiscent of veins and arteries. This serpentine mass seemed to hold the stones together, though when he tried to step down the other side, the rocks once again gave way and he fell into a patch of whip-like vines studded with thorns the length of his thumbnail. Cursing, he extricated himself, his chinos torn and hands gouged and bloody, and staggered into the field.

Here at least there was some protection from the wind. The field sloped slightly uphill, to the next wall. There was so sign of a gate or breach. He shoved his hands into his pockets and strode through knee-high grass, pale green and starred with minute yellow flowers. He reached the wall and walked alongside it. In one corner several large rocks had fallen. He hoisted himself up until he could see into the next field. It was no different from the one he’d just traversed, save for a single massive evergreen in its centre.

Other than the tree, the field seemed devoid of any vegetation larger than a tussock. He tried to peer into the field beyond, and the ones after that, but the countryside dissolved into a glitter of green and topaz beneath the morning sun, with a few stone pinnacles stark against the horizon where moor gave way to sky.

He turned and walked back, head down against the wind; climbed into the first field and crossed it, searching until he spied what looked like a safe place to gain access to the lane once more. Another tangle of blackthorn snagged him as he jumped down and landed hard, grimacing as a thorn tore at his neck. He glared at the wall, then headed back to the cottage, picking thorns from his overcoat and jeans.

He was starving by the time he arrived at the cottage, also filthy. It had grown too warm for his coat; he slung it over his shoulder, wiping sweat from his cheeks. Thomsa was outside, removing a shovel from the trunk of the sedan.

“Oh, hello! You’re back quickly!”

He stopped, grateful for the wind on his overheated face. “Quickly?”

“I thought you’d be off till lunchtime. A few hours, anyway?”

“I thought it was lunchtime.” He looked at his watch and frowned. “That can’t be right. It’s not even ten.”

Thomsa nodded, setting the shovel beside the car. “I thought maybe you forgot something.” She glanced at him, startled. “Oh my. You’re bleeding—did you fall?”

He shook his head. “No, well, yes,” he said sheepishly. “I tried to find that fogou. Didn’t get very far. Are you sure it’s just ten? I thought I was out there for hours—I figured it must be noon, at least. What time did I leave?”

“Half-past nine, I think.”

He started to argue, instead shrugged. “I might try again. You said there’s a better map from the Ordnance Survey? Something with more details?”

“Yes. You could probably get it in Penzance—call the bookstore there if you like, phone book’s on the table.”

He found the phone book in the kitchen and rang the bookshop. They had a copy of the Ordnance map and would hold it for him. He rummaged on the table for a brochure with a map of Penzance, went upstairs to spend a few minutes washing up from his trek, and hurried outside. Thomsa and Harry were lugging stones across the grass to repair the wall. Jeffrey waved, ducked into the rental car, and crept back up the drive toward Cardu.

In broad daylight it still took almost ten minutes. He glanced out to where the coastal footpath wound across the top of the cliffs, could barely discern a darker trail leading to the old field systems, and, beyond that, the erratic cross-stitch of stone walls fading into the eastern sky. Even if he’d only gone as far as the second field, it seemed impossible that he could have hiked all the way there and back to the cottage in half an hour.

The drive to Penzance took less time than that; barely long enough for Jeffrey to reflect how unusual it was for him to act like this, impulsively, without a plan. Everything an architect did was according to plan. Out on the moor and gorse-grown cliffs, the strangeness of the immense, dour landscape had temporarily banished the near-constant presence of his dead wife. Now, in the confines of the cramped rental car, images of other vehicles and other trips returned, all with Anthea beside him. He pushed them away, tried to focus on the fact that here at last was a place where he’d managed to escape her; and remembered that was not true at all.

Anthea had been here, too. Not the Anthea he had loved but her mayfly self, the girl he’d never known; the Anthea who’d contained an entire secret world he’d never known existed. It seemed absurd, but he desperately wished she had confided in him about her visit to Bennington’s house, and the strange night that had preceded it. Evelyn’s talk of superstring theory was silly—he found himself sympathising with Moira, content to let someone else read the creepy books and tell her what to do. He believed in none of it, of course. Yet it didn’t matter what he believed, but whether Anthea had, and why.

Penzance was surprisingly crowded for a weekday morning in early March. He circled the town’s winding streets twice before he found a parking space, several blocks from the bookstore. He walked past shops and restaurants featuring variations on themes involving pirates, fish, pixies, sailing ships. As he passed a tattoo parlour, he glanced into the adjoining alley and saw the same rainbow-hatted boy from the train station, holding a skateboard and standing with several other teenagers who were passing around a joint. The boy looked up, saw Jeffrey, and smiled. Jeffrey lifted his hand and smiled back. The boy called out to him, his words garbled by the wind, put down his skateboard, and did a headstand alongside it. Jeffrey laughed and kept going.

There was only one other customer in the shop when he arrived, a man in a business suit talking to two women behind the register.

“Can I help you?” The older of the two women smiled. She had close-cropped red hair and fashionable eyeglasses, and set aside an iPad as Jeffrey approached.

“I called about an Ordnance map?”

“Yes. It’s right here.”

She handed it to him, and he unfolded it enough to see that it showed the same area of West Penwith as the other map, enlarged and far more detailed.

The woman with the glasses cocked her head. “Shall I ring that up?”

Jeffrey closed the map and set it onto the counter. “Sure, in a minute. I’m going to look around a bit first.”

She returned to chatting. Jeffrey wandered the shop. It was small but crowded with neatly-stacked shelves and tables, racks of maps and postcards, with an extensive section of books about Cornwall—guidebooks, tributes to Daphne du Maurier and Barbara Hepworth, DVDs of The Pirates of Penzance and Rebecca, histories of the mines and glossy photo volumes about surfing Newquay. He spent a few minutes flipping through one of these, and continued to the back of the store. There was an entire wall of children’s books, picture books near the floor, chapter books for older children arranged alphabetically above them. He scanned the Bs, and looked aside as the younger woman approached, carrying an armful of calendars.

“Are you looking for something in particular?”

He glanced back at the shelves. “Do you have anything by Robert Bennington?”

The young woman set the calendars down, ran a hand along the shelf housing the Bs; frowned and looked back to the counter. “Rose, do we have anything by Robert Bennington? It rings a bell but I don’t see anything here. Children’s writer, is he?” she added, turning to Jeffrey.

“Yes. The Sun Battles, I think that’s one of them.”

The other customer nodded goodbye as Rose joined the others in the back.

“Robert Bennington?” She halted, straightening a stack of coffee table books, tapped her lower lip then quickly nodded. “Oh yes! The fantasy writer. We did have his books—he’s fallen out of favour.” She cast a knowing look at the younger clerk. “He was the child molester.”

“Oh, right.” The younger woman made a face. “I don’t think his books are even in print now, are they?”

“I don’t think so,” said Rose. “I’ll check. We could order something for you, if they are.”

“That’s okay—I’m only here for a few days.”

Jeffrey followed her to the counter and waited as she searched online.

“No, nothing’s available.” Rose shook her head. “Sad bit of business, wasn’t it? I heard something recently, he had a stroke I think. He might even have died, I can’t recall now who told me. He must be quite elderly, if he’s still alive.”

“He lived around here, didn’t he?” said Jeffrey.

“Out near Zennor, I think. He bought the old Golovenna Farm, years ago. We used to sell quite a lot of his books—he was very popular. Like the Harry Potter books now. Well, not that popular.” She smiled. “But he did very well. He came in here once or twice, it must be twenty years at least. A very handsome man. Theatrical. He wore a long scarf, like Doctor Who. I’m sure you could find used copies online, or there’s a second-hand bookstore just round the corner—they might well have something.”

“That’s all right. But thank you for checking.”

He paid for the map and went back out onto the sidewalk. It was getting on to noon. He wandered the streets for several minutes looking for a place to eat, settled on a small, airy Italian restaurant where he had grilled sardines and spaghetti and a glass of wine. Not very Cornish, perhaps, but he promised himself to check on the pub in Zennor later.

The Ordnance map was too large and unwieldy to open at his little table, so he stared out the window, watching tourists and women with small children in tow as they popped in and out of the shops across the street. The rainbow-hatted boy and his cronies loped by, skateboards in hand. Dropouts or burnouts, Jeffrey thought; the local constabulary must spend half its time chasing them from place to place. He finished his wine and ordered a cup of coffee, gulped it down, paid the check, and left.

A few high white clouds scudded high overhead, borne on a steady wind that sent up flurries of grit and petals blown from ornamental cherry trees. Here in the heart of Penzance, the midday sun was almost hot: Jeffrey hooked his coat over his shoulder and ambled back to his car. He paused to glance at postcards and souvenirs in a shop window, but could think of no one to send a card to. Evelyn? She’d rather have something from Zennor, another reason to visit the pub.

He turned the corner, had almost reached the tattoo parlour when a plaintive cry rang out.

“Have you seen him?”

Jeffrey halted. In the same alley where he’d glimpsed the boys earlier, a forlorn figure sat on the broken asphalt, twitchy fingers toying with an unlit cigarette. Erthy, the thirty-ish woman who’d been at the station the day before. As Jeffrey hesitated she lifted her head, swiped a fringe of dirty hair from her eyes and stumbled to her feet. His heart sank as she hurried toward him, but before he could flee she was already in his face, her breath warm and beery. “Gotta light?”

“No, sorry,” he said, and began to step away.

“Wait—you’re London, right?”

“No, I’m just visiting.”

“No—I saw you.”

He paused, thrown off-balance by a ridiculous jolt of unease. Her eyes were bloodshot, the irises a peculiar marbled blue like flawed bottle-glass, and there was a vivid crimson splotch in one eye, as though a capillary had burst. It made it seem as though she looked at him sideways, even though she was staring at him straight on.

“You’re on the London train!” She nodded in excitement. “I need to get back.”

“I’m sorry.” He spun and walked off as quickly as he could without breaking into a run. Behind him he heard footsteps, and again the same wrenching cry.

“Have you seen him?”

He did run then, as the woman screamed expletives and a shower of gravel pelted his back.

He reached his rental car, his heart pounding. He looked over his shoulder, jumped inside, and locked the doors before pulling out into the street. As he drove off, he caught a flash in the rear-view mirror of the woman sidling in the other direction, unlit cigarette still twitching between her fingers.

• • • •

When he arrived back at the cottage, he found Thomsa and Harry sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by the remains of lunch, sandwich crusts and apple cores.

“Oh, hello.” Thomsa looked up, smiling, and patted the chair beside her. “Did you go to The Tinners for lunch?”

“Penzance.” Jeffrey sat and dropped his map onto the table. “I think I’ll head out again, then maybe have dinner at the pub.”

“He wants to see the fogou,” said Thomsa. “He went earlier but couldn’t find it. There is a fogou, isn’t there, Harry? Out by Zennor Hill?”

Jeffrey hesitated, then said, “A friend of mine told me about it—she and my wife saw it when they were girls.”

“Yes,” said Harry after a moment. “Where the children’s writer lived. Some sort of ruins there, anyway.”

Jeffrey kept his tone casual. “A writer?”

“I believe so,” said Thomsa. “We didn’t know him. Someone who stayed here once went looking for him, but he wasn’t home—this was years ago. The old Golovenna Farm.”

Jeffrey pointed to the seemingly random network of lines that covered the map, like crazing on a piece of old pottery. “What’s all this mean?”

Harry pulled his chair closer and traced the boundaries of Cardu with a dirt-stained finger. “Those are the field systems—the stone walls.”

“You’re kidding.” Jeffrey laughed. “That must’ve driven someone nuts, getting all that down.”

“Oh, it’s all GPS and satellite photos now,” said Thomsa. “I’m sorry I didn’t have this map earlier, before you went for your walk. ”

“It’ll be on this survey.” Harry angled the map so the sunlight illuminated the area surrounding Cardu. “This is our cove, here . . .”

They pored over the ordnance survey. Jeffrey pointed at markers for hut circles and cairns, standing stones and tumuli, all within a hand’s-span of Cardu, as Harry continued to shake his head.

“It’s this one, I think,” Harry said at last, and glanced at his sister. He scored a square half-inch of the page with a blackened fingernail, minute Gothic letters trapped within the web of field systems.

CHAMBERED CAIRN

“That looks right,” said Thomsa. “But it’s a ways off the road. I’m not certain where the house is—the woman who went looking for it said she roamed the moor for hours before she came on it.”

Jeffrey ran his finger along the line marking the main road. “It looks like I can drive to here. If there’s a place to park, I can just hike in. It doesn’t look that far. As long as I don’t get towed.”

“You shouldn’t get towed,” said Thomsa. “All that land’s part of Golovenna, and no one’s there. He never farmed it, just let it all go back to the moor. You’d only be a mile or so from Zennor, if you left your car. They have musicians on Thursday nights, some of the locals come in and play after dinner.”

Jeffrey refolded the map. When he looked up, Harry was gone. Thomsa handed him an apple.

“Watch for the bogs,” she said. “Marsh grass, it looks sturdy but when you put your foot down it gives way and you can sink under. Like quicksand. They found a girl’s body ten years back. Horses and sheep, too.” Jeffrey grimaced and she laughed. “You’ll be all right—just stay on the footpaths.”

He thanked her, went upstairs to exchange his overcoat for a windbreaker, and returned to his car. The clouds were gone: The sun shone high in a sky the summer blue of gentians. He felt the same surge of exultation he’d experienced that morning, the sea-fresh wind tangling the stems of daffodils and iris, white gulls crying overhead. He kept the window down as he drove up the twisting way to Cardu, and the honeyed scent of gorse filled the car.

The road to Zennor coiled between hedgerows misted green with new growth and emerald fields where brown-and-white cattle grazed. In the distance, a single tractor moved so slowly across a black furrow that Jeffrey could track its progress only by the skein of crows that followed it, the birds dipping then rising like a black thread drawn through blue cloth.

Twice he pulled over to consult the map. His phone didn’t work here—he couldn’t even get the time, let alone directions. The car’s clock read 14:21. He saw no other roads, only deeply-rutted tracks protected by stiles, some metal, most of weathered wood. He tried counting stone walls to determine which marked the fields Harry had said belonged to Golovenna Farm, and stopped a third time before deciding the map was all but useless. He drove another hundred feet, until he found a swathe of gravel between two tumbledown stone walls, a rusted gate sagging between them. Beyond it stretched an overgrown field bisected by a stone-strewn path.

He was less than a mile from Zennor. He folded the map and jammed it into his windbreaker pocket along with the apple, and stepped out of the car.

The dark height before him would be Zennor Hill. Golovenna Farm was somewhere between there and where he stood. He turned slowly, scanning everything around him to fix it in his memory: the winding road, intermittently visible between walls and hedgerows; the ridge of cliffs falling down to the sea, book-ended by the dark bulk of Gurnards Head in the south-west and Zennor Head to the north-east. On the horizon were scattered outcroppings that might have been tors or ruins or even buildings. He locked the car, checked that he had his phone, climbed over the metal gate, and began to walk.

The afternoon sun beat down fiercely. He wished he’d brought a hat, or sunglasses. He crossed the first field in a few minutes, and was relieved to find a break in the next wall, an opening formed by a pair of tall, broad stones. The path narrowed here, but was still clearly discernible where it bore straight in front of him, an arrow of new green grass flashing through ankle-high turf overgrown with daisies and fronds of young bracken.

The ground felt springy beneath his feet. He remembered Thomsa’s warning about the bogs, and glanced around for something he might use as a walking stick. There were no trees in sight, only wicked-looking thickets of blackthorn clustered along the perimeter of the field.

He found another gap in the next wall, guarded like the first by two broad stones nearly as tall as he was. He clambered onto the wall, fighting to open his map in the brisk wind, and examined the survey, trying to find some affinity between the fields around him and the crazed pattern on the page. At last he shoved the map back into his pocket, set his back to the wind and shaded his eyes with his hand.

It was hard to see—he was staring due west, into the sun—but he thought he glimpsed a black bulge some three or four fields off, a dark blister within the haze of green and yellow. It might be a ruin, or just as likely a farm or outbuildings. He clambered down into the next field, crushing dead bracken and shoots of heather; picked his way through a breach where stones had fallen and hurried until he reached yet another wall.

There were the remnants of a gate here, a rusted latch and iron pins protruding from the granite. Jeffrey crouched beside the wall to catch his breath. After a few minutes he scrambled to his feet and walked through the gap, letting one hand rest for an instant upon the stone. Despite the hot afternoon sun, it felt cold beneath his palm, more like metal than granite. He glanced aside to make sure he hadn’t touched a bit of rusted hardware, but saw only a boulder seamed with moss.

The fields he’d already passed through had seemed rank and overgrown, as though claimed by the wilderness decades ago. Yet there was no mistaking what stretched before him as anything but open moor. Clumps of gorse sprang everywhere, starbursts of yellow blossom shadowing pale-green ferns and tufts of dogtooth violets. He walked cautiously—he couldn’t see the earth underfoot for all the new growth—but the ground felt solid beneath mats of dead bracken that gave off a spicy October scent. He was so intent on watching his step that he nearly walked into a standing stone.

He sucked his breath in sharply and stumbled backward. For a fraction of a second he’d perceived a figure there, but it was only a stone, twice his height and leaning at a forty-five degree angle, so that it pointed toward the sea. He circled it, then ran his hand across its granite flank, sun-warmed and furred with lichen and dried moss. He kicked at the thatch of ferns and ivy that surrounded its base, stooped and dug his hand through the vegetation, until his fingers dug into raw earth.

He withdrew his hand and backed away, staring at the ancient monument, at once minatory and banal. He could recall no indication of a standing stone between Cardu and Zennor, and when he checked the map he saw nothing there.

But something else loomed up from the moor a short distance away—a house. He headed toward it, slowing his steps in case someone saw him, so that they might have time to come outside.

No one appeared. After five minutes he stood in a rutted drive beside a long, one-storey building of grey stone similar to those he’d passed on the main road; slate-roofed, with deep small windows and a wizened tree beside the door, its branches rattling in the wind. A worn hand-lettered sign hung beneath the low eaves: GOLOVENNA FARM.

Jeffrey looked around. He saw no car, only a large plastic trash bin that had blown over. He rapped at the door, waited then knocked again, calling out a greeting. When no one answered he tried the knob, but the door was locked.

He stepped away to peer in through the window. There were no curtains. Inside looked dark and empty, no furniture or signs that someone lived here, or indeed if anyone had for years. He walked round the house, stopping to look inside each window and half-heartedly trying to open them, without success. When he’d completed this circuit, he wandered over to the trash bin and looked inside. It too was empty.

He righted it, then stood and surveyed the land around him. The rutted path joined a narrow, rock-strewn drive that led off into the moor to the west. He saw what looked like another structure not far from where the two tracks joined, a collapsed building of some sort.

He headed towards it. A flock of little birds flittered from a gorse bush, making a sweet high-pitched song as they soared past him, close enough that he could see their rosy breasts and hear their wings beat against the wind. They settled on the ruined building, twittering companionably as he approached, then took flight once more.

It wasn’t a building but a mound. Roughly rectangular but with rounded corners, maybe twenty feet long and half again as wide; as tall as he was, and so overgrown with ferns and blackthorn that he might have mistaken it for a hillock. He kicked through brambles and clinging thorns until he reached one end, where the mound’s curve had been sheared off.

Erosion, he thought at first; then realised that he was gazing into an entryway. He glanced behind him before drawing closer, until he stood knee-deep in dried bracken and whip-like blackthorn.

In front of him was a simple doorway of upright stones, man-high, with a larger stone laid across the tops to form a lintel. Three more stones were set into the ground as steps, descending to a passage choked with young ferns and ivy mottled black and green as malachite.

Jeffrey ducked his head beneath the lintel and peered down into the tunnel. He could see nothing but vague outlines of more stones and straggling vines. He reached to thump the ceiling to see if anything moved.

Nothing did. He checked his phone—still no signal—turned to stare up into the sky, trying to guess what time it was. He’d left the car around 2:30, and he couldn’t have been walking for more than an hour. Say it was four o’clock, to be safe. He still had a good hour and a half to get back to the road before dark.

He took out the apple Thomsa had given him and ate it, dropped the core beside the top step; zipped his windbreaker and descended into the passage.

He couldn’t see how long it was, but he counted thirty paces, pausing every few steps to look back at the entrance, before the light faded enough that he needed to use his cell phone for illumination. The walls glittered faintly where broken crystals were embedded in the granite, and there was a moist, earthy smell, like a damp cellar. He could stand upright with his arms outstretched, his fingertips grazing the walls to either side. The vegetation disappeared after the first ten paces, except for moss, and after a few more steps there was nothing beneath his feet but bare earth. The walls were of stone, dirt packed between them and hardened by the centuries so that it was almost indistinguishable from the granite.

He kept going, glancing back as the entryway diminished to a bright mouth, then a glowing eye, and finally a hole no larger than that left by a finger thrust through a piece of black cloth.

A few steps more and even that was gone. He stopped, his breath coming faster, then walked another five paces, the glow from his cell phone a blue moth flickering in his hand. Once again he stopped to look back.

He could see nothing behind him. He shut off the cell phone’s light, experimentally moved his hand swiftly up and down before his face; closed his eyes then opened them. There was no difference.

His mouth went dry. He turned his phone on, took a few more steps deeper into the passage before halting again. The phone’s periwinkle glow was insubstantial as a breath of vapour: He could see neither the ground beneath him nor the walls to either side. He raised his arms and extended them, expecting to feel cold stone beneath his fingertips.

The walls were gone. He stepped backward, counting five paces, and again extended his arms. Still nothing. He dropped his hands and began to walk forward, counting each step—five, six, seven, ten, thirteen—stopped and slowly turned in a circle, holding the phone at arm’s-length as he strove to discern some feature in the encroaching darkness. The pallid blue gleam flared then went out.

He swore furiously, fighting panic. He turned the phone on and off, to no avail; finally shoved it into his pocket and stood, trying to calm himself.

It was impossible that he could be lost. The mound above him wasn’t that large, and even if the fogou’s passage continued for some distance underground, he would eventually reach the end, at which point he could turn around and painstakingly wend his way back out again. He tried to recall something he’d read once, about navigating the maze at Hampton Court—always keep your hand on the left-hand side of the hedge. All he had to do was locate a wall, and walk back into daylight.

He was fairly certain that he was still facing the same way as when he had first entered. He turned, so that he was now facing where the doorway should be, and walked, counting aloud as he did. When he reached one hundred he stopped.

There was no way he had walked more than a hundred paces into the tunnel. Somehow, he had gotten turned around. He wiped his face, slick and chill with sweat, and breathed deeply, trying to slow his racing heart. He heard nothing, saw nothing save that impenetrable darkness. Everything he had ever read about getting lost advised staying put and waiting for help; but that involved being lost above ground, where someone would eventually find you. At some point Thomsa and Harry would notice he hadn’t returned, but that might not be till morning.

And who knew how long it might be before they located him? The thought of spending another twelve hours or more here, motionless, unable to see or hear, or touch anything save the ground beneath his feet, filled Jeffrey with such overwhelming horror that he felt dizzy.

And that was worst of all: If he fell, would he even touch the ground? He crouched, felt an absurd wash of relief as he pressed his palms against the floor. He straightened, took another deep breath and began to walk.

He tried counting his steps, as a means to keep track of time, but before long a preternatural stillness came over him, a sense that he was no longer awake but dreaming. He pinched the back of his hand, hard enough that he gasped. Yet still the feeling remained, that he’d somehow fallen into a recurring dream, the horror deadened somewhat by a strange familiarity. As though he’d stepped into an icy pool, he stopped, shivering, and realised the source of his apprehension.

It had been in the last chapter of Robert Bennington’s book, Still the Seasons; the chapter that he’d never been able to recall clearly. Even now, it was like remembering something that had happened to him, not something he’d read: the last of the novel’s four children passing through a portal between one world and another, surrounded by utter darkness and the growing realisation that with each step the world around her was disintegrating and that she herself was disintegrating as well, until the book ended with her isolated consciousness fragmented into incalculable motes within an endless, starless void.

The terror of that memory jarred him. He jammed his hands into his pockets and felt his cell phone and the map, his car keys, some change. He walked more quickly, gazing straight ahead, focused on finding the spark within the passage that would resolve into the entrance.

After some time, his heart jumped—it was there, so small he might have imagined it, a wink of light faint as a clouded star.

But when he ran a few paces he realised it was his mind playing tricks on him. A phantom light floated in the air, like the luminous blobs behind one’s knuckled eyelids. He blinked and rubbed his eyes: the light remained.

“Hello?” he called, hesitating. There was no reply.

He started to walk, but slowly, calling out several times into the silence. The light gradually grew brighter. A few more minutes and a second light appeared, and then a third. They cast no glow upon the tunnel, nor shadows: He could see neither walls nor ceiling, nor any sign of those who carried the lights. All three seemed suspended in the air, perhaps ten feet above the floor, and all bobbed slowly up and down, as though each was borne upon a pole.

Jeffrey froze. The lights were closer now, perhaps thirty feet from where he stood.

“Who is it?” he whispered.

He heard the slightest of sounds, a susurrus as of escaping air. With a cry, he turned and fled, his footsteps echoing through the passage. He heard no sounds of pursuit, but when he looked back, the lights were still there, moving slowly toward him. With a gasp he ran harder, his chest aching, until one foot skidded on something and he fell. As he scrambled back up, his hand touched a flat smooth object; he grabbed it and without thinking jammed it into his pocket, and raced on down the tunnel.

And now, impossibly, in the vast darkness before him, he saw a jot of light that might have been reflected from a spider’s eye. He kept going. Whenever he glanced back, he saw the trio of lights behind him.

They seemed to be more distant now. And there was no doubt that the light in front of him spilled from the fogou’s entrance—he could see the outlines of the doorway, and the dim glister of quartz and mica in the walls to either side. With a gasp he reached the steps, stumbled up them and back out into the blinding light of afternoon. He stopped, coughing and covering his eyes until he could see, then staggered back across first one field and then the next, hoisting himself over rocks heedless of blackthorns tearing his palms and clothing, until at last he reached the final overgrown tract of heather and bracken, and saw the white roof of his rental car shining in the sun.

He ran up to it, jammed the key into the lock and with a gasp fell into the driver’s seat. He locked the doors, flinching as another car drove past, and finally looked out the window.

To one side was the gate he’d scaled, with field after field beyond; to the other side the silhouettes of Gurnard’s Head and its sister promontory. Beyond the fields, the sun hung well above the lowering mass of Zennor Hill. The car’s clock read 15:23.

He shook his head in disbelief: It was impossible he’d been gone for scarcely an hour. He reached for his cell phone and felt something in the pocket beside it—the object he’d skidded on inside the fogou.

He pulled it out. A blue metal disc, slightly flattened where he’d stepped on it, with gold-stamped words above a beacon.

ST. AUSTELL SWEETS: FUDGE FROM REAL CORNISH CREAM

He turned it over in his hands and ran a finger across the raised lettering.

Becca gave one to each of us the day we arrived. The fudge was supposed to last the entire two weeks, and I think we ate it all that first night.

The same kind of candy tin where Evelyn had kept her comb and Anthea her locket and chain. He stared at it, the tin bright and enamel glossy-blue as though it had been painted yesterday. Anyone could have a candy tin, especially one from a local company that catered to tourists.

After a minute he set it down, took out his wallet, and removed the photo Evelyn had given him: Evelyn and Moira doubled-up with laughter as Anthea stared at them, slightly puzzled, a half-smile on her face as though trying to determine if they were laughing at her.

He gazed at the photo for a long time, returned it to his wallet, then slid the candy lid back into his pocket. He still had no service on his phone.

• • • •

He drove very slowly back to Cardu, nauseated from sunstroke and his terror at being underground. He knew he’d never been seriously lost—a backwards glance as he fled the mound reassured him that it hadn’t been large enough for that.

Yet he was profoundly unnerved by his reaction to the darkness, the way his sight had betrayed him and his imagination reflexively dredged up the images from Evelyn’s story. He was purged of any desire to remain another night at the cottage, or even in England, and considered checking to see if there was an evening train back to London.

But by the time he edged the car down the long drive to the cottage, his disquiet had ebbed somewhat. Thomsa and Harry’s car was gone. A stretch of wall had been newly repaired, and many more daffodils and narcissus had opened, their sweet fragrance following him as he trudged to the front door.

Inside he found a plate with a loaf of freshly-baked bread and some local blue cheese, beside it several pamphlets with a yellow Sticky note.

Jeffrey —

Gone to see a play in Penzance. Please turn off lights downstairs. I found these books today and thought you might be interested in them .

Thomsa

He glanced at the pamphlets—another map, a flyer about a music night at the pub in Zennor, a small paperback with a green cover—crossed to the refrigerator and foraged until he found two bottles of ale. Probably not proper B&B etiquette, but he’d apologise in the morning.

He grabbed the plate and book and went upstairs to his room. He kicked off his shoes, groaning with exhaustion, removed his torn windbreaker, and regarded himself in the mirror, his face scratched and flecked with bits of greenery.

“What a mess,” he murmured, and collapsed onto the bed.

He downed one of the bottles of ale and most of the bread and cheese. Outside, light leaked from a sky deepening to ultramarine. He heard the boom and sigh of waves, and for a long while he reclined in the window-seat and stared out at the cliffs, watching as shadows slipped down them like black paint. At last he stood and got some clean clothes from his bag. He hooked a finger around the remaining bottle of ale, picked up the book Thomsa had left for him, and retired to the bathroom.

The immense tub took ages to fill, but there seemed to be unlimited hot water. He put all the lights on and undressed, sank into the tub and gave himself over to the mindless luxury of hot water and steam and the scent of daffodils on the windowsill.

Finally he turned the water off. He reached for the bottle he’d set on the floor and opened it, dried his hands, and picked up the book. A worn paperback, its creased cover showing a sweep of green hills topped by a massive tor, with a glimpse of sea in the distance.

OLD TALES FOR NEW DAYS

BY ROBERT BENNINGTON

Jeffrey whistled softly, took a long swallow of ale and opened the book. It was not a novel but a collection of stories, published in 1970—Cornish folktales, according to a brief preface, “told anew for today’s generation.” He scanned the table of contents—“Pisky-Led,” “Tregeagle and the Devil,” “Jack the Giant Killer”—then sat up quickly in the tub, spilling water as he gazed at a title underlined with red ink: “Cherry of Zennor.” He flipped through the pages until he found it.

• • • •

Sixteen-year-old Cherry was the prettiest girl in Zennor, not that she knew it. One day while walking on the moor, she met a young man as handsome as she was lovely.

“Will you come with me?” he asked, and held out a beautiful lace handkerchief to entice her. “I’m a widower with an infant son who needs tending. I’ll pay you better wages than any man or woman earns from here to Kenidjack Castle, and give your dresses that will be the envy of every girl at Morvah Fair.”

Now, Cherry had never had a penny in her pocket in her entire young life, so she let the young man take her arm and lead her across the moor . . .

• • • •

There were no echoes here of The Sun Battles, no vertiginous terrors of darkness and the abyss; just a folk tale that reminded Jeffrey a bit of “Rip Van Winkle,” with Cherry caring for the young son and, as the weeks passed, falling in love with the mysterious man.

Each day she put ointment on the boy’s eyes, warned by his father never to let a drop fall upon her own. Until of course one day she couldn’t resist doing so, and saw an entire host of gorgeously-dressed men and women moving through the house around her, including her mysterious employer and a beautiful woman who was obviously his wife. Betrayed and betrayed, Cherry fled; her lover caught up with her on the moor and pressed some coins into her hand.

• • • •

“You must go now and forget what you have seen,” he said sadly, and touched the corner of her eye. When she returned home she found her parents dead and gone, along with everyone she knew, and her cottage a ruin open to the sky. Some say it is still a good idea to avoid the moors near Zennor.

• • • •

Jeffrey closed the book and dropped it on the floor beside the tub. When he at last headed back down the corridor, he heard voices from the kitchen, and Thomsa’s voice raised in laughter. He didn’t go downstairs; only returned to his room and locked the door behind him.

• • • •

He left early the next morning, after sharing breakfast with Thomsa at the kitchen table.

“Harry’s had to go to St. Ives to pick up some tools he had repaired.” She poured Jeffrey more coffee and pushed the cream across the table toward him. “Did you have a nice ramble yesterday and go to the Tinners?”

Jeffrey smiled but said nothing. He was halfway up the winding driveway back to Cardu before he realised he’d forgotten to mention the two bottles of ale.

He returned the rental car, then got a ride to the station from Evan, the same man who’d picked him up two days earlier.

“Have a good time in Zennor?”

“Very nice,” said Jeffrey.

“Quiet this time of year.” Evan pulled the car to the curb. “Looks like your train’s here already.”

Jeffrey got out, slung his bag over his shoulder and started for the station entrance. His heart sank when he saw two figures arguing on the sidewalk a few yards away, one a policeman.

“Come on now, Erthy,” he said, glancing as Jeffrey drew closer. “You know better than this.”

“Fuck you!” she shouted, and kicked at him. “Not my fucking name!”

“That’s it.”

The policeman grabbed her wrist and bent his head to speak into a walkie-talkie. Jeffrey began to hurry past. The woman screamed after him, shaking her clenched fist. Her eye with its bloody starburst glowed crimson in the morning sun.

“London!” Her voice rose desperately as she fought to pull away from the cop. “London, please, take me—”

Jeffrey shook his head. As he did, the woman raised her fist and flung something at him. He gasped as it stung his cheek, clapping a hand to his face as the policeman shouted and began to drag the woman away from the station.

“London! London!”

As her shrieks echoed across the plaza, Jeffrey stared at a speck of blood on his finger. Then he stooped to pick up what she’d thrown at him: a yellow pencil worn with toothmarks, its graphite tip blunted but the tiny, embossed black letters still clearly readable above the ferrule.

RAVENWOOD.

© 2011 by Elizabeth Hand. Originally published in A Book of Horrors, edited by Stephen Jones. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elizabeth Hand (b. 1957) is an award-winning author whose science fiction and fantasy novels include the Winterlong series, Waking the Moon, Last Summer at Mars Hill, and Glimmering. Her novels and short stories have won the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Shirley Jackson Awards, among others. Hand was born in California and raised in Yonkers and Pound Ridge, New York; she now divides her time between London and the coast of Maine. Over the years she has been a regular contributor to the Washington Post, the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, among many others.

EXCERPT: Autonomous (Tor Books)

Annalee Newitz | 2733 words

Earth, 2144. Jack is an anti-patent scientist turned drug pirate, traversing the world in a submarine as a pharmaceutical Robin Hood, fabricating cheap scrips for poor people who can’t otherwise afford them. But her latest drug hack has left a trail of lethal overdoses as people become addicted to their work, doing repetitive tasks until they become unsafe or insane.

Hot on her trail, an unlikely pair: Eliasz, a brooding military agent, and his robotic partner, Paladin. As they race to stop information about the sinister origins of Jack’s drug from getting out, they begin to form an uncommonly close bond that neither of them fully understand.

And underlying it all is one fundamental question: Is freedom possible in a culture where everything, even people, can be owned?

Forthcoming September 19 from Tor Books

Booting
July 2, 2144

Sand had worked its way under Paladin’s carapace, and his actuators ached. It was the first training exercise, or maybe the fortieth. During the formatting period, it was hard to maintain linear time; memories sometimes doubled or tripled before settling down into the straight line that he hoped would one day stretch out behind him like the crisp, four-toed footprints that followed his course through the dunes.

Paladin used millions of lines of code to keep his balance as he slid-walked up a slope of fine grains molded into ripples by wind. Each step punched a hole in the dune, forced him to bend at the waist to keep steady. Sand trickled down his body, creating tiny scars in the dark carbon alloy of his carapace. Lee, his botadmin, had thrown him out of the jet at 1500 hours, somewhere far north in African Federation space. Coming down was easy. He remembered doing it before, angling his body in a configuration that kept him from overheating, unfurling the shields on his back until they cupped the wind, then landing with a jolt to his shocks.

But this wasn’t just another repeat of the same old obstacle course. It was a test mission.

Lee had told Paladin that a smuggler’s stash was hidden somewhere in the dunes. His job was to approach from the south, map the space, try to find the stash, and come back with all the data he could. The botadmin grinned as he delivered these instructions, gripping Paladin’s shoulder. “I tweaked some of your drivers just for this test. You’re going to float up those dunes like a goddamn butterfly.”

Now it was an hour until sundown, and Paladin’s carapace bent the light until it slid below the visible spectrum. To human eyes, his dark body on the dune’s summit would look like a shimmer of heat in the air, especially from a distance. That’s what he was counting on, anyway. He needed to get a sense of the area, its hiding places, before anyone figured out a bot was prowling.

Pale, reddish swells softened the landscape in every direction. The sand was totally undisturbed—if anyone had been walking around here, the wind had blown their tracks away. The stash had to be underground, if it was even here at all. Paladin stood still, lenses zooming and panning, searching for a glint of antennas or other signs of habitation. He cached everything in memory for analysis later.

There it was: a crescent of chrome unburied by wind. He scrambled down the dune, making hundreds of small adjustments to avoid falling on the slithering ground, getting a precise location on a portal that probably led to a buried structure below. He would yank it open and get back to the lab. Lee would clean the sand from his muscles, and there would be no more of this grinding discomfort.

As Paladin reached out, ready to pull or torque the lock mechanism, a hidden sniper tore his right arm off at the shoulder. It was the first true agony of his life. He felt the wound explode across his whole torso, followed by a prickling sear of unraveled molecular bonds along the burned fringes of his stump. Out of this pain bloomed a memory of booting up his operating system, each program calling the next out of nothing. He wanted to go back into that nothing. Anything to escape this scalding horror, which seemed to pour through his body and beyond it. Paladin’s sensorium still included his severed arm, which was broadcasting its status to the bot with a short-range signal. He’d have to kill his perimeter network to make the arm go silent. But without a perimeter he was practically defenseless, so he was stuck feeling a torment that echoed between the inside and outside of his body. Throwing himself down into the sand, Paladin used his wing shields to protect his remaining circuitry—especially his single biological part, nested deep inside the place where humans might carry a fetus.

He scrabbled with his remaining hand at the portal and it opened with a gasp, the air pressure differential seeming to inhale him. Another bolt smashed into the sand next to his head, puddling grains into liquefied glass where it hit. Hurling himself inside, Paladin caught one last glimpse of his arm. The fingers were still flexing, reaching for something, following their software commands even in death. As the door closed, his pain eased; a shield had blocked the arm’s hopeless data stream.

Paladin found himself in a lift whose dim, ultraviolet lighting marked the building as a bot facility—or, at least, a bot entrance to the facility. Humans would see nothing but darkness. Clutching his jagged stump, Paladin slumped to the floor in a jumble of disorganized feelings. With some effort, he distracted himself by watching a tiny display that showed how deep the lift was going. Forty meters, sixty meters, eighty meters. They stopped at one hundred, but from the faint echoes in the machinery, Paladin knew they could have gone a lot deeper.

The door slid back to reveal Lee flanked by two bots, one hovering in a blur of wings and one a tanklike quadruped with folded mantis arms. Paladin wondered if any of them had been responsible for blowing off his arm during a training mission that was supposed to be noncombat. He wouldn’t put it past them. Now Lee was grinning, and the bots weren’t saying anything. Paladin stood in a way that he hoped was dignified and ignored the physical anguish that flared through his body as he took in the scene.

“That was some seriously awesome combat shit,” Lee enthused before Paladin even stepped into the wide, foam-and-alloy tunnel. “See how that new climbing algorithm worked?” He slapped Paladin’s unwounded arm. “Sorry about your arm, though. I’ll fix that right up.”

The bots were still silent. Paladin followed the group as they walked down the tunnel, passing several doors marked in paint that reflected nothing but ultraviolet light. Visible to bot eyes only. Maybe this was some kind of bot training station? Was he about to be integrated into a fighting unit?

Down another tunnel they found what was obviously a mixed area, with paint reflecting in the visible spectrum, and several doorways too narrow to admit an armored bot like himself or the mantis. They stopped at an engineering station, where Lee printed a new arm and Paladin cleaned his joints with compressed air and lubricant.

The mantis beamed Paladin a hail. Hello. Let’s establish a secure session using the AF protocol.

Hello. I can use AF version 7.6, Paladin replied.

Let’s do it. I’m Fang. We’ll call this session 4788923. Here are my identification credentials. Here comes my data. Join us at 2000.

Fang’s request came with a public key for authentication and a compressed file that bloomed into a 3-D map of the facility. A tiny red tag hovered over a conference room forty meters below them. Judging by the map’s metadata, they were in a large military base operated by the African Federation government. It seemed that the bots here did the kind of work he’d been training for: reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, and combat. Paladin had just been invited to his first briefing. It was time to authenticate himself properly to his new comrade.

I’m Paladin. Here are my identification credentials. Here comes my data. See you there.

Lee finished the arm and tested Paladin’s stump with a voltmeter. The bot stood on a charging pad, drawing power for the batteries that tunneled through his body like a cardiovascular system. Generally he relied on the solar patches woven into his carapace, but pads were faster.

“No problem, no problem,” the botadmin mumbled. It was his favorite phrase, and was in fact the first string of natural language that Paladin had ever heard, in the seconds after booting up for the first time three months ago. The arm was bonding to his stump now, and the torture of his injury became a tingle. Lee used a molecule regulator to knit the arm’s atomic structure into an integrated body network, and as it connected Paladin could feel his new hand. He made a fist. The right side of his body felt weightless, as if the pain had added additional mass to his frame. Giddy, he savored the sensation.

“Gotta go, Paladin—I’ve got a bunch of other shit to do.” Lee’s dark hair fell across one of his eyes. “Sorry I had to shoot you there, but it’s part of training. I didn’t think your whole arm would come off!”

How many times had Paladin looked into this human face, its features animated by neurological impulse alone? He did not know. Even if he were to sort through his video memories and count them up one by one, he still didn’t think he would have the right answer. But after today’s mission, human faces would always look different to him. They would remind him what it felt like to suffer, and to be relieved of suffering.

When Paladin arrived at the meeting location, two humans were sitting in chairs, while Fang and the hovering bot remained at attention. Paladin announced his presence with a beamed hail to the bots and a vocalized greeting to the humans, though protocol kept the rest of his communication in human range. He took up a position next to Fang, bending his legs until he was at eye level with the humans. In this position, knee joints jutting out behind him and dorsal shields folded flat against his shoulders, Paladin looked something like an enormous, humanoid bird.

“Welcome to Camp Tunisia, Paladin,” one of the humans said. He had a tiny red button on his collar bearing the letters “ipc” in gold—it marked him as a high-ranking liaison from the Federation office of the International Property Coalition. “This will be your base for the next few days while we brief you and your partner Eliasz on your mission.” He gestured to the other human, a slim man with pale skin, curly dark hair, and wide brown eyes, wearing Federation combat fatigues. Paladin noticed that Eliasz’ right hand was balled into a fist very much like his own. Maybe Eliasz was also remembering something painful.

The liaison projected some unopened files into the air over the table. “We’ve got a serious pharma infringement situation, and we need it stopped fast and smart,” he said. One of the files dissolved into the corporate logo for Zaxy, and then into a tiny box of pills labeled Zacuity.

“I assume you’ve heard of Zacuity.”

“It’s a worker drug,” Eliasz replied, his face neutral. “Some of the big companies are licensing it as a perk for their employees. I’ve heard it feels really good. Never tried it myself.”

The liaison seemed offended by Eliasz’ description. “It’s a productivity enhancer.”

Fang broke in. “We’ve got reports of people buying pirated Zacuity in some of the northern cities in the Free Trade Zone. Some recon bots found about twenty doses in a First Nations special economic holding near Iqaluit. Nobody can prosecute there—it’s totally outside IPC jurisdiction—so there have been no arrests yet.”

The liaison brought up video of a hospital room, packed with humans strapped to beds, twitching. He continued. “Zaxy will take legal action later. But right now, we need an intervention. This drug is driving people nuts, and some are dying. If it gets out that this is Zacuity, it could be a major financial loss for Zaxy. Major.”

The liaison looked at Eliasz, who stared straight at the projection of the hospital, watching the tiny, struggling figures loop through the same tiny struggles again.

“Zaxy’s analysts think the Zacuity is being pirated here in the Federation, in a black-market lab. Obviously, this situation could seriously endanger the Federation’s business partnerships with the Free Trade Zone. We need to find out for sure one way or the other, and that’s why we need you.” The delegate looked at Paladin. “You’ve both been authorized by the IPC to track the pirated drug to its source, and stop it. We’ve got a few leads in Iqaluit, and they all point to one person.”

The afflicted Zacuity eaters dissolved into an enhanced headshot of a woman, obviously constructed from several low-quality captures. Her cropped black hair had a glint of gray, and a fat scar that started on her neck snaked into the collar of her coveralls.

“This is Judith Chen—she goes by the name Jack. We suspect she’s working with one of the biggest pharma pirating operations in the Federation. We know she’s connected with some pretty shady manufacturers in Casablanca, but she’s got a legit shipping fleet. She ferries for spice and herb companies to the Zone—lots of stinky little boxes. Perfect cover. We think she might be the one who’s smuggling the drugs from here across the Arctic.”

Fang vocalized, “We’ve been watching her for years. Never been able to catch her red-handed, but we know she’s got connections with people in the Trade Zone who are suspected dealers. Plus, she’s a trained synthetic biologist. It all fits together. If we can get to her, I think we can shut down these pirate shipments.”

“She’s also an anti-patent terrorist,” Eliasz added quietly. “Spent several years in jail.”

“The official charge was not terrorism. It was conspiracy to commit property damage,” said Fang. “She was only in jail for a few months, and then she fled from Saskatoon to Casablanca. We think that’s how she made the connections that she’s using for her pirating operation.”

“Once we’ve got her, we just can hand her over to the Trade Zone on a plate,” added the liaison. “Piracy stopped. Justice done. Everybody’s happy.”

“It still sounds like terrorism to me,” Eliasz said, looking directly at Paladin. “Don’t you agree?”

Nobody had ever looked at him quite like that, as if he could have an opinion about anything beyond how his network was functioning. The bot’s mind spiraled through what he’d been taught about terrorism, quickly compiling an index of images and data that required nothing but a crude algorithm to reveal a pattern: pain and its echo, across millions of bodies over time. Paladin did not have access to the nuance of political context, nor did he have the urge to seek it out. He had only this man’s face, his dark eyes sending an unreadable message that Paladin wanted desperately to decrypt.

How could he look at Eliasz and say no?

“It does sound like terrorism,” Paladin agreed. When Eliasz smiled, the planes of his face were asymmetrical.

Fang broke protocol for an instant, beaming to his hovering companion in an off-the-record session. Words of wisdom from the newbie, who has never seen terrorism in his life. :(

Copyright © 2017 by Annalee Newitz. Excerpted from Autonomous by Annalee Newitz. Published by permission of the author and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Annalee Newitz writes about science, pop culture, and the future. She’s the editor in chief of io9.com, a publication that covers science and science fiction, and has over ten million readers every month. She’s the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (Doubleday and Anchor), which was nominated for a 2013 LA Times book prize. She’s also published in Wired, The Smithsonian Magazine, The Washington Post, 2600, New Scientist, Technology Review, Popular Science, Discover and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. She’s co-editor of the essay collection She’s Such A Geek (Seal Press), and author of Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Duke University Press). Formerly, she was a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a lecturer in American Studies at UC Berkeley. She was the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, and has a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley.

Book Reviews: September 2017

Amal El-Mohtar | 1302 words

Monstrous Women in Refrigerators

Lately I’ve discovered that my soul-deep craving for books in which women talk to each other is not easily sated, as every instance I find only makes me hungrier for more of the same, and less inclined to tolerate its absence.

Luckily for me, Saga Press released two books in June that play two ends to an ideal middle where my taste is concerned: Theodora Goss’ The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter and Catherynne Valente’s The Refrigerator Monologues. Both take as their premise a group of women—dead, transformed, poisonous, powerful—telling each other their painful origins and writing back, throwing the stories of their subjugation into the teeth of the world that decided their place.

The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter
Theodora Goss
Hardcover / Paperback / Ebook
ISBN 978-1481466509
Saga Press, June 2017 416 pages

After her mother’s death, Mary Jekyll faces down the reality of her sudden poverty: Orphaned, she is mistress of an empty house she can’t sell, without any income or the means to obtain one. But in the course of sorting her mother’s papers, Mary finds a strange account: Her mother had been making regular payments over the course her life to someone named Hyde. Recalling a hundred-pound reward for information leading to the whereabouts of Mr. Hyde, murderer-at-large, Mary enlists Sherlock Holmes’ help in unravelling the mystery—one that leads her to the daughters of other unscrupulous, scientifically minded men. Together they set about solving the Whitechapel murders—and room by room, Mary’s empty house fills up.

The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter is told as a nineteenth-century thriller written by Catherine Moreau, intercut with commentary from the women it’s about. Literally from the epigraph we know that this is going to be a narrative destabilised by several voices, even as the novel itself challenges the familiar stories of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Rappaccini’s Daughter. As a device, this took some getting used to—the real-time nature of the interruptions gave me pause and seemed overly precious until Catherine writes in her justification for them, absorbing them into the structure of the novel. But once I’d accepted it, I deeply appreciated the flexibility it allows the characters and their stories, not to mention the flexibility it allows Goss to challenge various commonly accepted tropes of nineteenth-century novels. Diana Hyde and Mary Jekyll, for instance, interrogate and debate respectability and class rigidity; Justine Moritz and Catherine interrogate and debate Christian morality; Mary and Catherine interrogate and debate the very notion of monstrosity; all of them have varying opinions on femininity and gender performance. As much as these women dismantle the received stories about themselves, they also passionately disagree with each other—which makes their fierce support for each other against an oppressive world all the more powerful and moving.

That said, I did find myself wishing some of those received attitudes were more challenged, given the power and dexterity of the corrective framework Goss has built: As much as these Western European women disagree with each other about foundational elements of Western European society and literature, and as much as they’re sensitive to the use of the term “monster” where they themselves are concerned, they all seem perfectly at ease with talking about “savages” in reference to the indigenous people of Africa and North America. I kept waiting for this, too, to be challenged, and was frustrated to find it wasn’t—but knowing that there’s at least one sequel in the works, I live in hope that it will be, especially if the Athena Club’s members begin travelling abroad, as this book hints.

Overwhelmingly, though, I loved this book, which delighted and nourished me with the introduction of every new voice. I loved how different all these women are and how those differences build into strengths that bind them closer to each other, and how the end-point of this book is the formation of an unusual family. It’s a book of powerful conversations circling an engaging, well-paced plot, and left me feeling happy and satisfied and enthusiastically recommending it to all.

The Refrigerator Monologues
Catherynne M. Valente
Hardcover
ISBN 978-1481459341
Saga Press, June 2017, 160 pages

Inspired by and dedicated to Gail Simone—originator of the now ubiquitous term “Women in Refrigerators”—Catherynne Valente builds a stage on which the murdered girlfriends and wives of superheroes tell their stories, gorgeously illustrated by Annie Wu.

Paige Embry is dead, but alive in Deadtown—an underworld mirror of New York City. She’s the president of the Hell Hath Club, a group of women who meet once a week in the Lethe Café to talk about their lives, to show themselves as more than their deaths. There, listening to gargoyle bands and drinking from empty glasses, Valente’s analogues of Gwen Stacy, Jean Grey, Harley Quinn, Mera, Karen Page, and Alexandra DeWitt tell familiar superhero stories slanted, from the perspective of the women who supported them, endured them, or invented the source of their super powers. It’s a passionate collection of anger, humour, and tenderness, told in a smooth, whip-cracking voice that’s equal parts wry stand-up and heart-breaking soliloquy.

It’s possible that voice might be startling to readers familiar with Valente’s more lyrical work, or her Fairyland series. But she’s always written vinegar as well as honey, especially in her short fiction and essays; I’ll always remember her stating, years ago, at the beginning of a foray into webcomics, “There comes a time in every ballerina’s life when she wants to play basketball.” By that token, The Refrigerator Monologues is kickboxing in high heels.

Spotting the analogues is fun if you’re familiar with comics, but that familiarity is by no means necessary to enjoying the monologues; each of these women is breathtakingly real, even the extra-dimensional Atlantean, and their lives and problems are hashtag relatable. The connective tissue between the stories—pulling back to the Lethe Café, to Paige Embry’s narration—offers up bitter, wistful, beautiful glimpses of Deadtown, and how each woman fits into it.

While every story is a moving, dazzling punch to the heart, the stand-out for me was Julia Ash, the Jean Grey analogue, that I loved best for its perfect folding of our-world comics meta into the story’s soft tissue. You’d be forgiven for thinking the concept of Not-Jean battling a villain called Retcon would be played for smug laughs—but it’s absolutely not, and left me stunned and shaken.

Towards the end of the book, I found the monologues lost the individuality of the character voices; where Paige, Julia, and Pauline were all remarkably different, starting with Bayou I found the monologue-voice didn’t match up with the preface-voice. But that monologue-voice is so flexible and dexterous, I can’t really fault it for being more itself than any one character—the effect overall was one of women’s rage pooling, taking on its own life, lending volume and texture to an open-throated scream until it becomes a song.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amal El-Mohtar’s essays have appeared in Chicks Unravel Time, Queers Dig Time Lords, Science Fiction Film & Television, Apex, Stone Telling, The Outpost, Cascadia Subduction Zone, and Tor.com. She reviews books for NPR, edits and publishes the poetry in Goblin Fruit, is a Nebula-nominated author and founding member of the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours, and has been known to deadlift other genre professionals. Find her on Twitter @tithenai.

Media Reviews: September 2017

Joseph Allen Hill | 2394 words

Odd Couples in Space

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
Directed by Luc Besson
EuropaCorp, Fundamental Films, July 2017

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets opens with a shot of the Earth from space set to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” I immediately rolled my eyes, and if I hadn’t been in a theater, I would’ve audibly groaned. Could anything be more aggressively cliché, more painfully on the nose? The subsequent montage charts humanity’s journey into space, beginning with footage of the Apollo-Soyuz Project, the first joint U.S.-Soviet space mission, then jumping into the future to show us the nations of Earth and a variety of alien species all coming together in peace on one increasingly gigantic space station. As the song reached its climax and the space station, Alpha, was released from the Earth’s gravity to find its place in the stars, a tear had welled in my eye, and I felt genuinely moved.

This reaction sums up my experience of the film as a whole. It is often cliché and very dumb, but still, it sucks you in. I could easily write a long list of all the things that didn’t work about the film, and it would probably be longer than the list of things that did, but it was still about the most fun I’ve had this year at the cinema. It’s certainly not the best movie, or even a good movie by most metrics, but it is a lot of fun. The film generated so much goodwill from me, I found myself wanting to cheer it on even when it failed. Nice try, buddy. You’ll get ’em next time. Good job. You did your best. Save for some dodgy racial and gender politics, which will be discussed a bit below, the film’s flaws never get in the way of having a good time.

The film is based on Valérian and Laureline, a long-running Franco-Belgian comic by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières which follows the spacefaring, time-jumping adventures of the titular agents. Like most American viewers, I didn’t have much awareness of the franchise before seeing the film, knowing of it mainly as the comic that The Fifth Element was sort of based on. I cannot speak to the differences between the original and the adaptation, but the film clearly draws deeply from its source material to create depth in its world, which features a multitude of strange and wondrous aliens inhabiting a more politically complex universe than we might expect at first.

Yet even as an adaptation, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is very much a Luc Besson movie, and the specter of The Fifth Element looms large. This film shares a lot with the ’90s cult classic, both in its strengths and weaknesses. Both make their mark with stunning visuals and amazing action sequences along with rich, densely imagined SF worlds. Dane DeHaan’s Valerian almost plays as a younger, more idealistic version of Bruce Willis’s Korben Dallas, though DeHaan is unable to summon up the same rakish charm. And like The Fifth Element, the plot of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets barely makes any sense at all.

The film revolves around Laureline, played by Cara Delevingne, and Valerian on a mission to secure a macguffin and save the Alpha space station from some bad stuff that is happening. It doesn’t really matter. Like many action movies, the plot largely functions as a way to set up the action. Movies like these depend more on the relationships between the characters than the machinations of the plot to maintain interest. Unfortunately, the film largely fizzles here as well.

The two stars don’t have much chemistry with one another, and the film never gives us much of a reason to root for the romance. At the start of the film, their relationship is established but on the rocks, and the in media res approach just makes it harder to connect with, giving us no reason these two might like each other. As I said, DeHaan does not bring much charm to the role, and while Delevinge is a bit better, neither is able to create any sense of a strong connection. The movie just assumes that because these attractive young people are near each other, they should be together in the end, not just dating but planning to get married.

Indeed, the fact that this story set hundreds of years in the future gets so invested in marriage between two heterosexual white people points towards my biggest issue with the movie: its provinciality. The movie often shows the age of its source materials, or perhaps just its creators. There’s a bit in the opening sequence where a group of Asian astronauts bow instead of shaking hands, momentarily confusing the white astronauts in charge of the station. It felt to me like a joke from another era. Look at these weird people and their customs that aren’t like our customs, which everyone agrees are universal. It was a little moment, and I might’ve forgotten it entirely if it hadn’t been so representative. While the movie’s visions of aliens are imaginative and full of wonder, its vision of future humans is tediously tied to white, heteronormative Western culture.

This is likewise embodied by Rihanna’s shapechanging alien, Bubble. Like Chris Tucker’s Ruby Rhod in The Fifth Element, she is both fairly problematic and also the best character in the movie. The sequence of her burlesque striptease is one of the film’s most interesting and imaginative, and the character is paradoxically the most human, an alien who wishes to perform Shakespeare but can only get by as a dancer, though she still manages to slip some poetry into her performances. Rihanna is the most charming and capable actor in the film, and she lights up the screen when she is on it. At the same time, the idea of a squid alien wearing the skin of a black woman as an erotic costume is at the very least problematic, if not just racist, and the fact that European culture is held up as the aesthetic summit feels, again, provincial.

I imagine that most people’s reaction to Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets will depend on their affection for its genre, as its execution is unlikely to draw in any skeptics. The films feels like a big budget, post-Avatar version of the sort of things I loved as a kid: the schlocky space operas trying and failing to be the next Star Wars, the low-budget Canadian kids shows about traveling time and space in a cardboard box, the paperback novels and the independent comics. Perhaps the film’s biggest strength is its outlook. I can’t remember the last time I saw a science fiction film that presented the future as a fundamentally good place, barring a few bad apples. It presents a hopeful view not only of humanity’s future, but of science fiction cinema itself, a vision not predicated on the spectacle of ultraviolence. Alpha exists as a place of ideas, not as a backdrop to get blown up in the third act. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets feels like a cult classic waiting to happen. It’s really not for everyone, but it is a treat for a viewer looking for lush visuals and cool ideas and not necessarily much else.

Pilgrims
Written by Claire Kerchek, Directed by Jessica Thebus and Michael Patrick Thornton
Performed at the Gift Theatre, June 2017

In many ways, the central themes in Claire Kerchel’s new play, Pilgrims, are echoed by the ambiguities of its title. The main characters, a bubbly yet mysterious teenage girl and a former soldier struggling to keep it together, are on a life-changing voyage to a faraway planet. Are they lower-case pilgrims, travelers on spiritual journey? Or are they the Pilgrims, colonizers making their way to a new world, buying new lives for themselves with the blood of the indigenous people? The play invokes the latter explicitly, while the former goes largely unsaid. Still, the spiritual implications of the journey remain thematically at the forefront: At its core, this is a play about salvation, about being saved from one’s own past.

The soldier (Ed Flynn) and the girl (Janelle Villas) are traveling together onboard the Destiny, a huge starship transporting colonists to the moon. They are matched by chance, and the soldier is particularly upset by the arrangement, having requested a single room due to his unnamed but obvious PTSD, which is marked by an inability to sleep without night terrors and waking nightmares, along with a generally nervous, angry demeanor. The girl is kind and playful, though her behavior seems both immature and precocious for her stated age of sixteen. She engages the soldier in a series of imagination games, the only thing they can really do to entertain themselves other than drinking and arguing. The cast is rounded out by Jasmine (Brittany Burch), a robot with the affect and dress of a 60s stewardess assigned to cater to their every need onboard (and she does mean every need). Things grow increasingly tense as the days pass and a quarantine forces the characters to remain locked in their room together, leading to conflict, revelations, and a surprising amount of surreal horror.

The show has a hazy, indistinct quality that I enjoyed but which many viewers might find frustrating. While some of the story’s mysteries are unraveled by the end, particularly those involving the soldier’s backstory, many are not. Is the quarantine real or an attempt to force the pair together as part of some strange breeding program? How sapient is Jasmine? How much of what we see is real, and how much only exists inside the soldier’s head? Likewise, the direction by Jessica Thebus and Michael Patrick Thornton seems designed to keep the audience off-balance and uneasy. Even the performances have a vague quality to them, as each character desires to only show their surface self to the other. I appreciate a degree of ambiguity in art, and I found the mysteries compelling. Still, even I found the play too withholding of some of its mysteries, particularly the girl’s backstory, which is never fully elaborated upon, and what few details we do get are mundane and entirely overshadowed by the operatic science fiction in the soldier’s story.

Plays are, in my opinion, an underrated and underutilized medium for science fiction and fantasy. All plays rely on an act of imaginative labor on the part of the audience, and I would argue it’s as easy to imagine a drama taking place on a futuristic moon base as a nineteenth-century English manor house. The science fiction setting here enlivens what might otherwise be a theatrical cliché, two wounded weirdos trapped in a claustrophobic space for an act or two, slowly revealing their sad backstories to one another and the audience. In the beginning, I wondered if this might be as far as the SF elements went, an interesting backdrop for the drama. Fairly quickly, it is revealed that this is not the case. The aliens are truly alien, not just the metaphor, and the planet they live on is described as strange and unique.

I was particularly engaged by the pretend games that the soldier and the girl play with one another. I am a sucker for metafictions, and their little stories are like short, improvised plays within the play. While pretending to be other people, the pair are more honest with one another than they can allow themselves to be as themselves. However, honesty built on lies is pretty precarious, and the play develops this theme in very interesting ways as it develops.

The play is not without its issues. The setup is compelling, but the story stumbles as it tries to progress the main characters’ relationship past that setup. As it went on, I began to feel the play was repeating itself, at least until it was time to race to the ending. Additionally, while Jasmine is ably played, her role is largely confined to comic relief, notwithstanding a moment or two of possibly real, possibly imagined horror. Pilgrims gestures at the idea that there is more going on with her than funny sex robot, but she doesn’t do much beyond driving the plot, and she disappears entirely just before the play’s climax and does not reappear. Speaking of which, my most serious issue with the play was its climax. It goes to a very dark place, and the fallout resulting from it felt very unearned to me. While I don’t have a problem with art dealing with adult subjects, it felt to me like the play was creating the most intense moment possible, then retreating from it in order to get the characters where they needed to be for the ending. As the play finally delves into what is driving the soldier’s behavior, this very serious incident is almost forgotten, making it seem unearned and tonally dubious. I would imagine this is, at least in part, the playwright’s intent, but it seemed to me that the same effect could’ve been achieved without going to into such fraught territory.

Pilgrims is one of the best plays I have seen in Chicago. It is well-acted, well-written, and compellingly directed. The science fiction themes are refreshing and allow the material to stand out. It is an interesting meditation on how people construct identity and reckon with the past, although it does somewhat lose sight of the moral implications of its characters’ actions in pursuit of these themes. I look forward to future work by the writer and directors.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joseph Allen Hill is a Chicago-based writer and bon vivant. He has also spent time in Georgia and New Jersey. He has a marginally useful degree in Classics and enjoys making music in his spare time. He can be reached on Twitter @joehillofearth2.

Interview: Theodora Goss

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 11606 words

Theodora Goss’s story “Singing of Mount Abora” won the 2008 World Fantasy Award for short fiction, and her work has also been nominated for many other major awards, including the 2007 Nebula Award for “Pip and the Fairies.” She’s also the author of Octavia is Lost in the Hall of Masks, which won the 2004 Riesling Award for Best Long Poem, as well as the novel The Thorn and the Blossom, A Two-Sided Love Story, and the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting. We’ll be speaking with her today about her new novel The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter.

This interview first appeared on July 2017 on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley and produced by John Joseph Adams. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the interview or other episodes.

Your new book is called The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, and it was inspired by some of the research that you did for your PhD. Tell us about that.

 I was doing this PhD, which is a crazy thing to do anyway. It just about killed me. I wrote this four hundred-page doctoral dissertation, and it was on Victorian Gothic fiction and anthropology. But it was really about monsters. I was asking a central question: How come these really great monster texts, the ones that we love so much, like Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, all of these, how come they were written between 1870 to 1910? That’s the great age of the modern monster. I thought, Why is that—what was going on at that time? I gave this complicated scholarly answer that had to do with the rise of evolutionary thinking after Darwin, but specifically the rise of anthropology. Anyway, those were all scholarly steps. I wrote this dissertation on all of these monster stories.

But there was something I realized that didn’t really make it into the dissertation that fascinated me, which was that so many of these mad scientists—the mad scientist becomes a really important figure around this time because there are a lot of scientists around—somewhere along their trajectory create female monsters. Like in The Island of Dr. Moreau, Dr. Moreau creates a woman out of a puma. She never even says anything, but she’s actually really important to the action of the text because she kills Moreau. She is the one who drives the action of The Island of Dr. Moreau. She’s fascinating.

Then there were others in texts that people don’t really know about, or know very much about, like in a Victorian-era novella called The Great God Pan, there’s a Dr. Raymond who creates this woman named Helen. Helen has this power to communicate with the great god Pan, who is this power behind everything, and she can bring the classical world back into modernity. So she’s got these really weird powers that have to do with brain surgery—a surgery that he actually did on her mother. Classic mad scientist stuff: turning animals into human beings, or splitting people’s brains in two to give them extraordinary powers.

And then, of course, we have the classic story of Frankenstein. Frankenstein almost creates a female monster. He thinks a lot about it because the creature he has created is like, “Give me a bride. Nobody loves me. I need a girlfriend.”

Those are just a few. There are a bunch more. There are these really important, interesting female monster figures, and they die, or . . . actually, I think they all die. There’s one exception, which I can talk about, but other than that, they all die. And they usually don’t get to say a whole lot. Sometimes we get little bits and pieces of their stories, but we don’t get a whole lot. I thought, You know what? That’s fascinating. Why is that? There are some explanations that have to do specifically with the period, but what I really wanted to do was not write another academic paper, or write another doctoral dissertation, but I wanted to actually tell their stories. Instead of turning my doctoral dissertation into a book, I wrote a novel, which is another four hundred pages, which almost killed me to, but that’s okay. It was also so much fun. The novel is about five of these female figures, three of whom come from literature, and two of whom I created. It’s about them, their stories, and how they tell those stories. It’s giving voices to these female monsters that come from the literature that didn’t get to speak in the original texts. Do you want me to describe the book?

Actually, I wanted to ask you first about the short story, “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter,” and then we’ll move into the book. So that we can talk about how you first started putting this into prose form.

 I think what happened was I was really bothered by this. Not bothered like, “I’m so bothered by this I have to do something,” but it was like when a mosquito bites you, and it’s irritating, and you just keep scratching at it even though you probably shouldn’t. This idea of female monsters who didn’t get to tell their stories bothered me, and the first one that really bothered me was the puma woman from The Island of Dr. Moreau. Even before I wrote “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter,” I wrote another short story called “The Puma.” That’s her story that I told in a slightly different way, my first stab at it.

But then I thought: What about the other female monsters? That’s when I wrote “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter,” which is a stronger story. As a writer, you kind of know that you’ve got some okay stories, and you’ve got some really good ones, and I think, hopefully, “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter” is one of the good ones. Also, this is when I was really starting to experiment with the ways of telling story. The format is experimental, and it’s the story of the five girls. We’ve got: Mary Jekyll, who is the daughter of Dr. Jekyll, the respectable scientist. Diana Hyde, who is the daughter of the notorious Mr. Hyde, murderer and laboratory assistant. Catherine Moreau, who is the puma woman created by Moreau on his terrible island of beast-men.

And then we’ve got Beatrice Rappaccini, who comes from one of my favorite short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It’s the story of a woman whose father, Dr. Rappaccini, a great botanist, makes her poisonous. He has a garden of poisonous plants from which he makes medicines, and he has raised Beatrice to take care of his plants, so she becomes imbued with all of these poisons. It’s told from the perspective of a young man named Giovani who sees this stunningly beautiful woman in the garden of the house next door. He falls desperately in love with her, and he goes and visits her. One day, he realizes not only that she’s poisonous, but that he’s starting to become poisonous. I recommend everyone read the story. I’m not going to go over the whole plot, but in the end, guess what, she dies. So, sorry, spoiler, but it was written in the 1830s. I don’t think I need to keep that secret.

That’s Beatrice Rappaccini. She’s poisonous.

And the last one is Justine Frankenstein, and Justine Frankenstein is the female monster that Frankenstein never creates in the actual story. In my version, what’s happened is that she was one of the family maids, whose name was Justine. She actually is in the original novel Frankenstein—Justine Moritz was a maid, and she was actually accused of murdering one of the Frankenstein children. (Again, not a spoiler because this was written a really long time ago!) Justine is accused of murdering little William, Frankenstein’s youngest brother, and actually it’s the monster who has murdered William. But Justine is hanged for that murder.

In my version, I didn’t want Justine to just die. Nothing was her fault. It was all Frankenstein’s fault, really. So, in my version, he takes her body, and he turns her into a mate for his monster, which doesn’t work out very well because she’s like, “I don’t actually want to do this. I’m not anybody’s mate.”

The short story was really all of them talking to each other, and in a short story you don’t really have a lot of space. So, it’s experimental. It’s their voices. It’s them saying things about their lives. It’s funny. But there’s no real plot. That’s where I started.

Did you mention Helen Raymond? Because she’s in the short story as well.

Someone asked me on Reddit recently, “What happened to Helen?” because she doesn’t appear in the novel. And I said, “Actually, she does. But it’s kind of a secret.” If you know the story, you can figure it out. Helen Raymond does appear, and she’s the one who is from The Great God Pan. She appears in the short story as one of the girls who have banded together to form a club in London. So all of these girl monsters have found each other, and they’ve formed a club, and they live together in London. That’s the premise of the short story.

Right, and you said that when it appeared on Strange Horizons that it got a really strong response from readers. Could you talk about that response?

I was so happy about that. I think it was actually voted the favorite story for the year, which was awesome. And, you know, it was a finalist for a Locus Award, but it didn’t win because there was some other guy . . . I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a Neil Gaiman? He won, and I was second behind him, so I was like, “Yes, I’m second behind Neil Gaiman. This is awesome.”

That must have really encouraged you to go ahead with turning it into a novel.

It did. That encouraged me, and also, I felt like I hadn’t told the entire story. What I did in the story was say, Okay, all of these girls have found each other. They’re in London. They’re living together. But how do they get there? So the novel, in a way, is really the prequel to the short story.

You also include another well-known fictional character: Sherlock Holmes. At what stage did you decide to include him?

I think as soon as I realized that this was going to be a mystery, you’ve got to have Sherlock Holmes. Really, what I did with this novel is I put in all the stuff that I want in a novel. I want Sherlock Holmes, because I’ve been in love with Mr. Holmes since I was a teenager, because he’s awesome. As soon as I knew this was a mystery, I knew the first thing that was going to happen was that Mary was going to go visit Sherlock Holmes.

Actually, I just realized where that idea came from. It came from looking at a map. I’m a teacher at a university, and I teach a lot of these texts, and one of the things I always have students do is look at the map at the beginning of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I say, “Look, this is how realistic this novel is—you can actually map out where the characters are going.” What I realized was that the place where Jekyll lives, presumably, because we’re never given an address for him, is right near Regent’s Park, and Baker Street runs right down the other side of Regent’s Park. So I was like, Wait a minute, if Dr. Jekyll was around in the 1880s around the time that that novel was published, he would have run into Sherlock Holmes, because the Sherlock Holmes stories were being published right around the same time, and they actually live pretty close to each other.

Did you ever worry that putting Sherlock Holmes in the story would overshadow the female heroes?

I did. I just went for it. It wasn’t so much that he would overshadow them, because I knew that it was basically their story. I think what I was more worried about, or at least conscience of, is that a lot of people have written about Sherlock Holmes. This is not my new take on Sherlock Holmes. What I did when I created this Sherlock was I really didn’t create him. I went back, and I read the old Holmes stories, and I thought, Who do I think this guy is?

I really wanted to go back to the original, partly because I think a lot of people misinterpret Holmes. There’s this sense in which people say, “Oh, he’s kind of a sociopath. He doesn’t feel anything. He has no emotions. He doesn’t even pay attention to whether the Earth goes around the sun or the other way around.” I think some of this is just misunderstanding things Holmes says to Watson to tease him, because Holmes has a sense of humor. It’s this really dry, understated sense of humor, but if you’ve read all of the Holmes stories—and I’ve actually read all of the Holmes stories—you get a sense for the fact that he’s a really nice, decent guy. He’s got his quirks, and life is difficult for him in some ways. He doesn’t fit very well into society. Someone like Holmes really wouldn’t. But he is deeply humane. That Holmes was the Holmes that I took.

I thought, I’m not making this guy up, this is just the way I see Conan Doyle’s Holmes. I love Conan Doyle. I’ve read a lot of Conan Doyle, including his poetry. Nobody knows he wrote poetry, but he did.

I was a little worried about including Holmes, because he’s such a traditional figure. The thing I was even more worried about was getting details wrong. There are little details, like what kind of gun he uses, or the Baker Street Boys. Issues of timing. I had to create a timeline for this novel, and try to make sure that I was matching up different things correctly, so that was more of a worry, because there are so many people out there who love Sherlock Holmes, and they know all the details. They’ve read all of the stories, too, and if I get something wrong, they’re going to know. It’s inevitable that I’ve gotten something wrong, so to all the Holmes fans out there, the true fanatics, I have so much respect for you, and I apologize in advance.

You had to be sure that you got his toilet right, right?

Well, I sort of saw his toilet. I mentioned that somewhere, and I guess you read it. One of the things I did was a lot of research in London. I went to London twice over two summers, and I walked around a lot. I went to the Sherlock Holmes museum, which is not at 221B Baker Street, but it’s really useful because it gives you a sense of what the buildings looked like generally on Baker Street. They’re built in a very specific fashion that belongs to the time period. You can see how big the rooms were, like how many strides it would take to get across a room. You can imagine how full of stuff Holmes’ parlor would have been.

One funny thing I noticed was that the loo for the Brits was at the top of the house, which I suspect has to do with plumbing, and water pressure, and also smells. But I noticed that the toilet was a Victorian-era toilet, and it was beautiful. It had all of these designs on it in blue transferware. It was this really ornate, gorgeous toilet. I thought, you know what, in the Victorian era, when not a lot of people have indoor toilets, that they must have been, “We’ve got a toilet. This is a beautiful toilet. We’re going to make it look so great.”

Where else in London did you go for research?

I went to Whitechapel. A friend of mine who lives in London gave me a tour of Whitechapel, and it’s very modern now, obviously, but you could see some of the old twisty streets. He did give me a tour of where the Jack the Ripper murders happened, and my nineteenth-century London is not real nineteenth-century London. It’s imaginary nineteenth-century London. It comes straight out of the pages of Jekyll and Hyde, out of Sherlock Holmes, and actually there are things that those authors leave out. For example, someone asked me at one point, someone who was a scholar, “Do you have any idea why Holmes never rides the subway?” There was a subway around at that time. Part of the subway system had already been built. Holmes never even thinks about taking the subway. She said, “It may have something to do with the class system that Mr. Holmes would not take the subway. He’s always taking cabs.”

But there are things about real London that those books leave out. So in my London, there weren’t Jack the Ripper murders, instead there were these horrific Whitechapel murders. It’s kind of like alternate history, but it’s alternative literary history. I walked along the embankment of the Thames to get a sense of what it’s like close to the river. I went to the South Bank, where some things happened. I spent a lot of time walking around Hyde Park and Regent’s Park. Some of what I did was to actually time how long it takes to get between things. Central London is not as big as you would think. You can walk—it’s a long walk—but you can walk between the British Museum, for example, and where Mary’s house is located, which is 11 Park Terrace, (which doesn’t really exist, but it’s based on some houses close to Regent’s Park).

The place I went that was actually my favorite was Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Right next to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, there’s the Royal College of Surgeons, and that has the Hunterian Museum, which has anatomical specimens from the nineteenth century, which is fascinating and creepy. There were scenes that have to do with Beatrice that take place there, and I went and saw the layout of the building. I looked at some pictures of what it looked like in the nineteenth century, because the interior has all been changed.

Actually, one of my favorite parts of writing the novel happened when I walked around that neighborhood: There’s a row of houses across Lincoln’s Inn Field from the Royal College of Surgeons, and I went behind those houses because I wanted to see what the alleyway looked like. There’s a scene that takes place in that alleyway, and I was trying to figure out how in the world to write that scene. I saw a drainpipe, and I thought, Oh, right, exactly, external drainpipes. Because the houses were built one hundred years before, and so all of the plumbing actually ends up being external, or a lot of the plumbing. I thought, okay, that’s the drainpipe; that’s the way that this particular scene is going to happen. I was so excited.

Do they really have Charles Babbage’s brain in a jar?

Yeah. They do. And The Irish Giant. I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten his name, but this was someone who had a genetic condition that made him grow very tall. He was known as The Irish Giant, and they have his skeleton. All of the details like that, those are real. And street names. There are a couple I made up because I don’t want anyone actually going to Mary Jekyll’s address and bothering somebody there. I want that to be imaginary. There are real street names, but what I had to make sure of was that the street existed in the nineteenth century. One of the funny things about writing this book was that there were days where I would be crawling around the floor on maps, and I would have a map of modern London and a map of London at different times.

I have maps from different time periods. I have street names from different time periods. I have eighteenth-century London, nineteenth-century London, and then I was working off of a contemporary map, and seeing how things changed was really, really helpful.

I was wondering if this is historical. You talk about this high-class brothel where the women were instructed to read The Times and the Financial Times and things so that they would be more interesting to talk to.

Those specific details I made up, but there were different levels of brothels. Some of the information we have is from guidebooks, guides for gentlemen who were going to London for the weekend, and they would list brothels. They would list prostitutes who worked out of their own spaces or their own homes. They would give you details. It is one of those really weird glimpses into the past where you think, Gosh, the nineteenth century kind of sucked, because there was a huge problem with prostitution. There was a huge problem with venereal disease. I left that stuff in the corners of the novel because the Victorian era was gritty. I mean, our era is gritty, right? We have all sorts of social problems. Well, the Victorian era did, too. They had different kinds of social problems than we do. Some of our problems they didn’t have, but it was dirty, it was gritty, it was lively, it was interesting, it was diverse, and I wanted to make sure that all of that came in, and so you see it in these little glimpses.

This paragraph kind of jumped out at me, one of the characters says, “We let Beatrice decorate and try to talk us into supporting the labor movement, aestheticism, and rational dress. Mary retorted that we were conspicuous enough without dressing differently from everyone else, but she had bought a bicycle. Mrs. Poole was scandalized.” Could you just unpack some of that stuff? The bicycle and rational dress? What was it like at that time?

Okay, so the novel takes place in the imaginary 1890s, but the imaginary 1890s are based on the real 1890s, and there was a lot going on in the 1890s. We have this false idea of the Victorian era. That it was kind of static, and that people dressed in nice clothes, and they socialized and drank tea.

That’s not what it was like. The amount of change that happened between 1970 and 2000, that’s about the amount of change that was happening between 1870 and 1900. It was enormous. There were social movements, but there was a lot of labor unrest. There was a depression during that time. People were out of work. There was a lot of poverty. There were all sorts of problems with working in factories, but there was a labor movement trying to address those problems.

So, rational dress: There was a suffrage movement, which was a movement for votes for women. But there was also a more general movement for women’s rights, and there was something called a “new woman.” The new woman was actually a term that was used to mock these types of women. These were unnatural women who wanted such terrible things as the right to vote, and to go to college, and they wanted to be able to walk out without a chaperone.

All of this was pretty scandalous at the time. That women would want to do these things like become educated was seen as dangerous. It was seen as something that would threaten the social order.

Rational dress was a movement to first get rid of the corset, because the corset, which women had worn in one form or another for a very long time, basically most of the century, really did affect your ability to do a lot of things. I mean, a Victorian woman wearing a corset is very different from a modern woman wearing a corset, because a Victorian woman would have been wearing it from a very young age, so it would have been much more comfortable for her. The rationale for a corset at the time was not just a fashion rationale. It was thought that women’s bodies were weak, and they needed support. The corset would actually give you support. It would help you. Nowadays we get that support from, you know, having muscles. But, actually, if you’d worn a corset all of your life, you wouldn’t necessarily have developed some of those muscles, the abdominal muscles that we really focus on in our Pilates classes, for example.

The idea behind rational dress was partly that the emphasis, and also the pressure, would be taken off the waist, and the emphasis would be more on the shoulders. The dress would hang from the shoulders, and it was not tight on the waist, so the hang, the design of the dress, changed. This was widely mocked, by the way. The people who wore rational dress were, like, Pre-Raphaelites and people who hung out with Oscar Wilde. They were kind of the radical fringe. The funny thing is, if you look back at some of these dresses that women were wearing, some of them look a little silly because they’re based on medieval dresses. We wouldn’t wear them except to a costume party, but Victorian-era rational dress is actually what gives us the structure of modern clothes. So you look at, like, Coco Chanel, and you can see the line from rational dress to the innovations of Chanel much later. It was a real controversy at the time, and there were fairly conservative magazines like Punch that would really mock women wearing rational dress in cartoons. They were seen as ugly because they didn’t have that beautiful little waist.

Bicycles were kind of a controversy. Bicycles were amazing. First of all, if you’re an upper-middle-class young lady, you’re not supposed to be walking out by yourself at all. You’ve got to wait for someone to go with you. It’s going to be a maid, or if you don’t have a maid, it might be a female relative. It might be an older sister, it might be your mom, but you need to have a chaperone.

One of the problems is that London is an urban space. You could be accosted. There was this idea that it was dangerous. A bicycle changes that equation, because if you get on a bicycle, if someone bothers you, you can actually get away from them, plus you can move around quickly without having to get a carriage or pay for a cab. A proper young woman would not ride in a cab by herself, or get on an omnibus and just jostle with all the other people on an omnibus.

A bicycle gave you a lot of freedom. There was a bicycle craze at the time, but it was also seen as kind of controversial at the time. For one thing, you can’t ride a bicycle sidesaddle. You have to ride astride. And that was seen as a little masculine. Sometimes women wore split skirts, and that was close to trousers, and trousers were a big no-no for women because it took away your grace and femininity. Bicycles were controversial, so someone a little old-fashioned, like Mrs. Poole, would be a little concerned about a proper young lady like Mary Jekyll riding a bicycle. But she does it anyway.

Given all those social conventions, is it challenging at all, then, writing a mystery adventure story, given all those restrictions on what women are supposed to be doing?

There’s this scene in the book—this is spoiler-free, but I’ll tell you about the scene—what happens is that Mary wants to go solve something with Sherlock Holmes, and Mrs. Poole is like, “You’re not getting in a train alone with a man. I don’t think so. I’m coming with you.” Mary wants to go solve a mystery, but she’s got to bring her housekeeper along, right? And then, they go to this place in this small town, and he’s like, “I’m going to get information, so I’m going to go into the pub.” And Mrs. Poole is like, “You’re not going into the pub with Mary.” And Mary can’t go in. She has to wait outside for Sherlock Holmes to get information.

Part of the movement of the novel is Mrs. Poole changing a little bit, Mary changing a little bit, everybody sort of giving and taking, and all of the characters moving more toward modernity.

I have to say, these characters, they have different experiences, and they come from different eras, so Mary has been raised as an English lady. Catherine Moreau is a puma. She hasn’t been raised as an English lady, so her preconceptions are totally different. Beatrice has also been raised in a different way because she is from Italy. She knows many of these conventions. She has a slightly different attitude from them.

Then there’s Justine Frankenstein, and actually Justine is not modern. Justine was created a hundred years ago, and the conventions that she knows are from a different time period. Interestingly enough, I didn’t really discuss this in the novel, but a funny thing happened in the nineteenth century, which is that at the beginning of the century, the restrictions on women were lighter than they became later on. There’s a dip, right? It was a little bit easier for women at one point, and then it got a little harder and more restrictive, because around the middle of the century you get this idea of the separate spheres, and the idea that the women should really be in the home, and then it changes again, and toward the end of the century, women have a little bit more freedom.

It was interesting, I heard you say in an interview that there were no travel restrictions crossing borders in Europe for a time, and then the restrictions came in, and then with the EU, they went out again, and that it’s a sort of cycle.

Yes, that’s for the second book. For the second book, the research was even more difficult. There is a second book, so the first book everyone can go read now. The second one will be coming out next summer.

In the second book, these characters, these female monsters of mine, have to go solve a mystery in Europe, so they have to cross the British channel and venture into the Austro-Hungarian empire, which meant that I had to do a whole ’nother big lot of research, which had to do with the Austro-Hungarian empire at the end of the nineteenth century. Which was fun because I went to Vienna. I walked around Vienna. I did the exact same thing that I had done in London.

One of the things that I found was that I thought it would be difficult. I thought, Oh my gosh, they’re going to need passports. They’re going to need visas. Because I made assumptions about what the time period was like. They didn’t. There had been more passport restrictions earlier in the 1800s, and then they were actually taken away. It was really easy to travel around Europe right around the end of the 1800s. You didn’t necessarily need a passport. You didn’t need visas. Travel was really easy. And then you get World War I, and World War I is part of the reason that the borders start closing. It gets much, much harder to travel. Where we are now with the EU, that’s actually where we were a hundred years ago, which is ironic.

You actually grew up in Hungary, right? Was that motivating you at all to set the story there?

Yes. I grew up there a little bit. I lived in Hungary until I was five years old because my family is Hungarian. People sometimes ask me, because I’ve travelled a lot, and I’ve moved around a lot, “Oh, are you part of a military family?” Because I sound American, right? I say, “No, I’m actually Hungarian.”

I was born in Budapest. My mother left with me and my younger brother when I was five years old. We lived in Brussels for a little while, and then we came to the US when I was seven. So I’ve been speaking American English since I was seven. But I’ve been back to Hungary. I went back for the first time when I was a teenager when it was still communist, and also when there were still lots of border restrictions, at least behind the Iron Curtain. For a while, I was going back every couple of years. Now, I try to go back every year, because it’s my hometown.

Budapest is my hometown. It’s a city I know really well. My love for Budapest, which I think is the most wonderful, magical city in the world, was part of the reason that I set the story there. But also my characters are up against a secret society. (You see this in the first novel, and it’s in the blurb, so again, I’m not giving anything away.) But they’re up against a secret society of scientists who are practicing alchemy. I thought, Okay, where in Europe would their headquarters be?

It had to be Budapest, because even at the time, Budapest had a kind of mystique. It was a city that was associated with the exotic, with the strange. It was seen as kind of the edge of Europe. Also, if you read Dracula, which is one of the novels that I wrote about in my dissertation, there’s a certain attitude toward Hungary. Because, of course, Dracula is Hungarian. Actually, Dracula is Székely, which is a tribe that settled in a certain part of Transylvania. At least, this is what Bram Stoker tells us—I don’t think Vlad Dracula, the historical figure that he sort of based him on, I don’t think he was. My grandmother came from that particular tribe. My family actually comes, historically, from that part of Transylvania. The reference to Hungary is as this very exotic place and a place of monsters. That part of the world in general, Hungary, Transylvania, etc., that’s already in the literature. So, even though I personally love Budapest, it comes from the original books, that this was the exotic location where monsters ultimately come from.

Are there any additional literary sources that you’re drawing on in the second book that weren’t in the first one?

Yes.

Is it a spoiler to talk about them?

Let me think. I don’t want to give too much away. I’ll give you the really obvious one because it’s set up in the first novel. I’m going to be drawing on Dracula. There are some others. I’m not going to tell you about those yet, though. But I will tell you that we are going into Dracula territory in the second novel, which makes sense, right? Because we’re going to Vienna, and we’re going to be going to Budapest.

I want to bring up, too, the format of the novel, because it’s written in this really interesting, unique style. Could you talk about how you came up with the form of the book?

I took a risk. The novel is about women’s voices, right? Women speaking. I wanted to have their voices in there, and in a way I wanted it to be a little bit of a cacophony. I didn’t want there to be this one controlling authorial voice, because that’s not what the novel is about. That’s one thing that went into the voice. I wanted to hear the characters’ voices. I wanted to hear them talking.

The other thing that went into it is that if you look at these monstrous texts from the Victorian era, the monstrosity isn’t just that there are monstrous characters, the texts themselves are monstrous. For example, Dracula is a Frankenstein’s monster of a text because it is stitched together out of diary entries, and recordings, and newspaper articles, so the form of the text itself is a monster.

When I say monster, there’s a technical definition of a monster that comes from a book called On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, written by a wonderful scholar named Stephen Asma. He says that monsters are creatures that embody a kind of categorical mismatch—meaning that the different parts don’t fit together. We think something is monstrous when the parts don’t fit.

Different texts are monstrous in different ways. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is monstrous in that it’s a frame narrative, but the frame doesn’t end. There’s no closing frame. If you look at the forms of these original novels, they’re all playing with form. So I had to, too.

I wasn’t sure how to do it. I knew I wanted extra information in there, and one way of doing that happens in one of my favorite novels in the entire world, which is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and one thing Susanna Clarke does in that novel is to have footnotes. I love the footnotes. I don’t find things like that annoying, I guess because I’m a scholar, and I love reading footnotes. But she has different histories going on, and different stories going on in the footnotes.

I didn’t want footnotes. I wanted the voices of the girls speaking. That’s what I had done in the short story. When I first started writing this novel, I actually tried writing it as a traditional narrative, and it just laid there on the page. I thought, This isn’t coming alive for me. And if it’s not coming alive for me, then I don’t think it’s going to come alive for other people.

What happens is that the narrative itself is actually written by Catherine, who is a writer. She didn’t just write this book—she writes other books. She writes short stories. She tries to make money from her writing. She’s kind of a pulp fiction writer, so she’s writing this book to make money, but the other girls are in the room with her, or they come and go as she’s writing this book. They look over her shoulder, and they comment on it, so sometimes the narrative is interrupted by two of the characters having an argument in the middle of a scene. Then Catherine says, “Why are you interrupting my narrative?” It’s almost like a novel that’s interrupted by little bits of script.

I knew I was taking a chance, because I knew that some readers would go, “Wow, this is annoying. Someone keeps interrupting this dream of a story.” Because that’s what a story is. It’s like a dream that’s going on in your head, or a movie that’s playing where your head is the movie theater. I wanted to take that risk, because I thought it worked. I thought it fit. I knew some people would like it, and in the end, the kind of annoyance that you feel at being interrupted is also the annoyance that Catherine feels at being interrupted in the story that she’s writing.

There’s one other point I wanted to make about this. This is where my kind of professor hat, my literary critic hat, goes on. There’s a term that comes from a critic named Bakhtin, and he talks about the “carnivalesque.” A novel is carnivalesque when it allows multiple voices, and sometimes those voices are contradicting each other. The carnivalesque is not necessarily a new form, but I think of it as something that modern writers do a lot so that they don’t have that kind of controlling voice as much. That’s the Jane Austen voice. Jane Austen was the absolute mistress of this voice, which is the voice of the narrator that leads you through the story and makes the judgments for you. She does it very well. You don’t want to compete with Jane Austen. But what modern literature does is try to break up that omniscient voice. I was playing with form as much as I was playing with content.

It’s really interesting because there are parts where Catherine will say, “Well, I wasn’t here for this, so Diana will have to write this part, and then I’ll go back and kind of fix it up with my pretty writing and make it sound like the rest of the story.” And then people will say, “Oh, I like the writing style here.” Things like that. It’s really interesting.

There’s actually a part I wrote in the second book—again, no spoilers—where Mary is in a garden, and she mentions the flowers that are growing in that garden, and someone interrupts and says, “Mary doesn’t know the names of those flowers.” Mary says, “No, I don’t know the names of those flowers.” And Catherine says, “Yeah, but I’m in Mary’s point of view, so I can’t just jump to somebody else’s point of view to name the flowers.”

In a way, I was struggling to write a novel. Writing a novel is really hard. The struggles that I had writing a novel are the struggles that Catherine has. What I’ve done that’s different is that I haven’t written over those. I haven’t papered over them. I’m explicit, right? It is, in fact, hard when you want to describe something, but you’re in a certain character’s head, and that character wouldn’t notice that then. What do you do? Actually, you could pull a Tolkien. There’s a moment in, I think it’s the first Lord of the Rings book where he quickly jumps into the head of a fox, and then jumps out again, and you’re like, Wait, what? All of a sudden, we’re seeing the hobbits from the fox’s point of view, and then the fox goes off like he had nothing do with the narrative.

The characters are kind of genre-aware, too, because right at the beginning Catherine is looking in the mirror and thinking about how she looks like a monster, and then the characters say something like, “I don’t believe you really looked in the mirror and thought that.” And she’s like, “No, but in this kind of story, the monster always has to look in the mirror and remark on its monstrous appearance.”

Catherine is talking about how to write a book about monsters, right? There are some things in here that are kind of little jokes that nobody is going to get. I don’t even know why I do this, but I do. For example, that’s one. The name of the book, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, there are people who complain about so many books about so-and-so’s daughter, and I was like, yeah, but this is almost like a joke on that. In a way, it’s a book about being a daughter, and the daughter of a mad alchemist or scientist, but I wanted to play with the fact that that is a bit of a cliché.

Also, one of things that you’re told never, ever, ever to do as a writer is have a character describe themselves by looking in a mirror. I’m like, I’m going to start with that and get it out of the way. My character looks in the mirror, and she’s a monster, and then Catherine justifies it. The level this goes to, just so you know, nobody is going to care about this, but there’s a point at which Mrs. Poole complains about having to pay butcher’s bills. She talks about Mr. Biles the Butcher, and actually that comes from a letter written by Stevenson himself. He was talking about how he really needed to get more writing done because Biles the Butcher needs to be paid, and his bills are piling up. It was either Stevenson’s actual butcher, or he was making a joke, too, I don’t know.

What do you think about other books and shows and things that have dealt with these kind of Victorian monsters, like Penny Dreadful, or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or the Roger Zelazny novel A Night in the Lonesome October? Do you have any thoughts about any of those?

I love The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I thought that was so much fun. I haven’t read all of them, but I love the way it was done. There weren’t enough women, which is one of the reasons I wrote my book.

For the most part, I really love them. There are some where I feel as though, naming no names, but there are some where I feel as though people aren’t really engaging with the original material, and if you love the original material, and you respect the original material, you kind of owe it to that material to really be in conversation with it. You don’t just want to take something. If you’ve got a friend, you don’t just want to take stuff from that friend. You want to say, “Hey, can I borrow this from you, and I’ll give you something back, too?”

It’s also true of fairy tales, which is another thing I really love. The modern retellings of fairy tales that are really good are the ones that are actually kind of in a conversation with The Brothers Grimm or in a conversation with Charles Perrault, and sort of talking to the originals. When books or shows don’t do that—I think it happens more with shows to be honest, and with big budget movies where the director decides Oh, I’m going to do this. Isn’t Frankenstein cool?, but then doesn’t really engage with what’s really going on in Frankenstein at a deeper level.

There’s an interesting line toward the end of the book where one of the characters is imagining what Mary Shelley might think if she were to read this book, your book, and she says, “I think she would have excused its defects and praised it as an accurate portrayal of a group of women trying to get along in the world as best they can.” I was wondering if you could talk about in what way you think that having a group of women, as opposed to a group of men, affects the way the story goes or the way it’s told.

That’s interesting.

My observation is that the characters seem to be a lot more supportive of each other than a group of men would be. I feel like a group of men would be giving each other crap all the time and mocking each other and constantly vying to see who’s top dog. There’s just a different dynamic with at least this group of women.

Most of the men that I can think of are loners. Especially mad scientist stories tend to be about men who are very much alone. Like, Dr. Jekyll is radically alone. He even rejects his friends. Frankenstein is very much alone. They’re stories about men keeping secrets and not being able to talk to anybody else, which seems to be actually a very masculine narrative. I don’t know if you, as a guy, feel this, but it seems to me that the way we’re socialized in Western society, a lot of guys don’t talk about things, so it makes sense that they’d be off by their lonesome. In Dracula, that’s different, because the men do band together. They don’t talk, though. That’s the thing. Jonathan Harker, and Holmwood, and Seward don’t sit around going, “Hey, did you see what Van Helsing was wearing the other day? Do you think that looks good on him? I don’t think that looks really good on him.” You’re right. You don’t find that kind of camaraderie. They also don’t really have money problems, because Holmwood is rich.

So these girls, first of all, they don’t have money. They need to make money, and they need to make money in a society where it’s difficult for women to work. They need to find a way to support themselves, and also, they chatter, and they gossip, and they get into fights. It’s like living with your four sisters. I didn’t grow up with my sister, but I know women’s relationships, especially with sisters, they can be pretty fraught.

Is that going to come up in book two? The more fraught aspects of female relationships?

Yes. They disagree about things, and sometimes they disagree about really important things. What I like about these characters is there’s a sense in which I wrote them, and there’s a sense in which they wrote and write themselves. They seem to really get along pretty well. Catherine is a bit of a lone puma, so she tends to go off by herself and make decisions and not necessarily listen to the others all the time. Diana is her own thing. She’s constantly getting into trouble. She’s constantly getting the others mad. A lot of the conflict has to do with Diana, and a lot of Mary’s conflict has to do with Diana because on the one hand she gets very fond of Diana, on the other hand, Diana is constantly annoying. It’s like a little brother or a little sister who is constantly . . . you’re supposed to watch your little sibling, and your little sibling is continually getting into really bad trouble: That’s the situation. For me, I don’t know if other people will read it this way, but for me, this is really a book about sisterhood.

One thing that came through very clearly is how much you like these characters. There is this amazing mystery-action plot in the book, but I feel like you would just be happy just hanging out with these characters, just sitting around, having them drink tea, and talk. That you have that sort of rapport with the characters.

I like them. They’re awesome. I’d love to go visit them and stay with Mary for a while at the Athena Club. The funny thing is that some comments that I’ve seen—I try not to pay too much attention to the things people say, but I have seen one comment that I’m not going to take to heart, and the comment is, “Oh well, after the action ends there is this period where the girls are sitting around and having tea.”

Again, not a spoiler, because they sit around and have tea. That’s the most important part. Yeah, you go on adventures, but then for me, the most important moments aren’t actually the moments where you’re having the big adventure scenes, it’s the moments when you have characters that are sitting around, and they’re talking, and they’re getting to know each other. In a way, what I did was use two different ways of writing and thinking about writing. One is this kind of pulp sensibility, which is like, yes, go off and have adventures, and defeat monsters, or be monsters. And then the other was a realistic novel about women living in the nineteenth century and getting along and trying to get along while they’re all working together getting to know each other and the tension. That could be a realistic book. It’s wedded to the pulp stuff. I hope I put them together reasonably well, but there’s going to be a tension there, and I’m sure some readers are going to feel it.

One thing I wanted to ask you is you mentioned that a lot of these classic monsters all sort of arose around the same couple of decades, but actually, Frankenstein and John Polidori’s The Vampyre, the first modern vampire, the first big one, was like literally at the same party. There was definitely something going on at this time.

Yes, which was much earlier, right? Frankenstein was published in 1818. I don’t remember the publication date of The Vampyre, but yeah, you had this party where Lord Byron was sitting around with Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Claire Clairmont, John Polidori, and you have these two iconic texts, The Vampyre and Frankenstein, coming out of it. It partly, I think, has to do with the fact that beginnings and ends of centuries are these moments of transition, and so you have those two texts coming out of a transitional period at the end of one century and the beginning of the next. Then another hundred years passes, and you have these other iconic novels coming again in that liminal period. Technically, it’s called a fin de siècle, which is the end of the century. But it’s that transitional period, that liminal period, when it feels to us as though everything is changing.

And, notice, by the way, that we’re in a transitional and liminal period, and there are so many monster stories. We’re in another one of those periods where it feels appropriate to write monster stories.

I took a class in college on Frankenstein, and I would really encourage people to read the novel. It’s really, really good. One thing is that you should read, according to my professor, who was a Mary Shelley scholar, you should read the 1818 text, which is the one we read, because apparently then Percy Shelley rewrote it subsequently. This professor, at least, felt that he had kind of messed it up.

I actually disagree with that, but that’s okay. Not to disagree with your college professor, but one of the things I wanted to make sure and do in this novel is kind of make clear how much I owe to Mary Shelley. Because Mary Shelley is one of my idols, so it was sort of like, if Catherine bows down to Mary Shelley, it’s because I’m bowing down to Mary Shelley. Catherine is deeply influenced by Shelley because Shelley is one of our most important women writers. Especially for those of us who write fantasy and science fiction.

I wanted to make sure that we gave Mary Shelley her due. She’s deeply influential on Catherine herself, and I would say, yes, absolutely read Frankenstein. Frankenstein, the book, is so much more complicated than any movie adaptation could possibly be. It’s so smart. It’s so interesting. Frankenstein’s monster is such an interesting character. The edition issue: I would say there’s controversy over how much Percy had to do with the 1832 edition, so I don’t know how much he actually changed. I’ve seen people make the argument that actually it really was Mary Shelley’s creation. My take on it is I actually prefer the ’32 edition because it fleshes some things out a lot more. There are some things in there that we know Mary put in, and we know the reason she put them in. There are topical references to political things that happened at the time. At the same time, yeah, read the 1818 edition and see what she wrote. She was a teenager when she wrote this, and when I teach it, I tell my students, “This was a girl who was not much older than you are, and she wrote this absolutely brilliant novel.”

The way I remember it was that the 1818 version came out, and people had said that it was grotesque, and that it was not sufficiently pious and stuff like that, and it had been rewritten in some ways to emphasize that Dr. Frankenstein had transgressed against God, which was not really such a huge point of the original text.

There was a more religious message. The other thing is that technically the relationship between Frankenstein and Elizabeth, the woman he’s in love with, changed because they were—I’m doing this from memory, so I hope I’m not wrong about this—they were something like cousins in the 1818 edition, and kind of the perception of what was too close as a relative changed over time, and they were made kind of adoptive brother and sister, but not actually related in any way. I think I remember that that was the case. There were parts of it that were definitely responding to criticisms and things that were happening at the time. Read both. I’m sure everyone has their favorite version, and they’re both fascinating.

Do you have any other tips or things people should keep in mind if they go back and read Dracula or Jekyll and Hyde, or any of these kinds of books?

The main thing I would say is go back and read them, because you’re going to be surprised. We have a cultural construct of what these texts are about that doesn’t match what’s actually in the texts. I would say, if you can, read some books about them after you’ve read them, or maybe take a class on them, because there’s so much fascinating stuff there in terms of how they fit in with history and historical ideas. It really helps to understand Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde if you understand something about the controversy over Darwinian evolutionary theory, for example. My tip is to read them, and also to try and get a sense of their historical context.

When you talk about reading books about them, I read a book years ago called Bram Stoker and the Man Who was Dracula, and the premise of it was that Bram Stoker had based the character of Dracula on Henry Irving, I think was his name, who was the most famous actor of his day.

He was a good friend of Bram Stoker’s, but he was also Stoker’s boss. Stoker lived in London, and he was actually the manager of Henry Irving’s theater for many, many years. I totally buy that, and the reason I totally buy it is that one of the first things he did after the book was published was try to get Irving to do a play version, and he really wanted Irving to play Dracula.

It’s just so interesting for me, because I’ve said before that I think that you imagine Bram Stoker, the guy who wrote Dracula, I just imagine him as this sort of goth guy in a castle somewhere. It’s like, no, he was this redheaded Irish guy who ran a theater company, and they performed for the queen. It’s just not the stereotypical thing you picture.

No, he was really big and athletic, actually. The funny thing is some people think Bram Stoker only did Dracula. His other literature is extremely interesting. He wrote some very realistic novels, and then he wrote some gothic fiction because that was really popular at the time. There’s The Queen of Seven Stars, which actually is one of my favorites, about these archaeologists who find an Egyptian queen who’s been mummified called Queen Tera, and they’re like, “Oh, let’s revive Queen Tera,” so this is an early mummy story.

Then there’s The Lair of the White Worm, which is this crazy gothic novel that I think never even reached its finished form. I think he was writing it while he was already ill, and it never quite got finished. But that’s really strange.

And then he wrote some short stories. His short stories are really weird. I think they’re now published in a volume called Dracula’s Guest and Other Stories. What’s usually placed as the first story is “Dracula’s Guest,” and it’s a short story that was meant to be the first chapter of Dracula. It was actually taken out of the book because he felt like it didn’t fit.

That’s really interesting. You mentioned one piece of feedback that you got that you’re going to ignore, but have there been other pieces of feedback you’ve gotten on this book so far that have stood out for you?

It’s not so much feedback. It’s hearing the chatter, and what people are writing, and reviews. When you’re a writer, you can’t pay too much attention to reviews, because sometimes people hate the book, and then you’re like, Wow, I must suck. There are things where people have said, “Oh, this is about young women coming together and forming a found family.” I’ve been like, “Yes! You got it. Yeah, that’s it. Yay, I did it,” or, “You got it. And hopefully I put something in there that made you get that out of it.” That’s been really helpful. There are things like, “Oh, the girls talking during the writing of the novel is a little annoying.” Whereas, I’m like, “Yeah, I know. Catherine said so, too. I know it’s annoying. I’m sorry. But, they did it, so I don’t know what to do about that.” It’s like when you’re trying to tell a story and people are chiming in. That is annoying. I haven’t read anything yet that makes me go, “Oh, yeah, I need to do something differently.”

What I am getting that’s very helpful is I’m working on a revision of the second novel, and I got comments from my editor. My editor is brilliant, and so the things she’s said where I’ve gone, “Oh, yeah, you know, I don’t want to do the exact thing that you told me to do, but I understand why you told me to do it if it means that I get to keep this thing that I wanted to do well enough.” The things she’s said that made me go, “Oh, that’s how it goes. Okay, now I understand.” Because you get someone who is a really good editor, and they make you look at your work differently, and so when you think about how I wrote this novel, people think, Oh, the writer sits down and starts typing, and the novel comes out. It’s like, no, I’m in conversation with a drainpipe in London. I mean, that drainpipe gave me an idea. And I’m in conversation with my editor, and she gave me an idea.

And Navah Wolfe was the editor on the book?

Navah Wolfe, who is amazing, from Saga Press is the editor. And I’m so, so glad that she liked this book and was enthusiastic about it. The best thing about it was when she bought it, she didn’t say, “Oh, well, we think this is commercial and it will sell.” She said, “I get these women. I totally understand what they’re doing.” She called it, I’m trying to remember her words, she called it a “lady-bro novel.” She said, “I’ve been looking for a team of women like this. This is what I want to publish.” I was like, “Yes, not only do you like it, but you like it for the exact same reason that I wrote it, because I want to see a team of women be monsters, but also do things.”

Have you had any interest yet from film or TV people?

I will say that, yes, we’ve actually had interest, which has been wonderful. I would love it if this were made into something like a TV series. It’s not because I wrote it. It’s because if you think about what it would look like visually: It would be set in the late nineteenth century. You could do so much in terms of costumes and settings. It could be gorgeous. Even apart from the plotline.

The other thing is people talk about how there aren’t as many good roles for women as there should be. You know, there are a lot of female characters in this book. Seeing some really amazing actresses get to be a puma woman or a gentle, melancholy giantess, or the very proper Mrs. Poole: that would be amazing. I think they would be good acting roles for women, and that would be a lovely thing to see. To see more women on screen.

That would be great. I really hope that happens.

Oh, and none of them is the love interest of anybody else. Actually, in a way, if you think about it, the male characters in this novel are seen from a female gaze. I didn’t write it that way. I can’t help it. I have a female gaze. The Sherlock Holmes character here is the Sherlock Holmes I had a crush on. He’s definitely seen from a female perspective.

We’re pretty much out of time, so do you have any final thoughts you want to say, or any projects you want to mention, or anything like that?

The big project right now is writing the second book. I will say that hopefully people will buy the first book, and read it, and like it, or get it from the library. I am so one hundred percent behind libraries. Libraries saved me when I was a kid, and I know they do that for a lot of other people. Go to your library. Ask for a copy. Or go to your bookstore. They should have it, too. Then the second book will be the next big project. Those are the two things I’m really focused on right now.

Great. This book, once again, is called The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter. We’ve been talking to Theodora Goss, the author. Dora, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much, David. This has been lovely.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by: David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York.

Author Spotlight: Jaymee Goh

Jason Ridler | 1465 words

I enjoyed how the fantastical and everyday elements bled into each other with very little explanation. Indeed, one of the explanations was so casual it made me smile because it reminded me it was a fantasy story and not to worry about complex rule sets when it comes to the fantastic. Why chose this approach vs. more conventional models?

 “Show, don’t tell” seems to be a very basic and conventional approach in storytelling, which is what I went with. I didn’t bother explaining much because it is a fantasy story—the pleasure of reading a SFF story, as Nalo Hopkinson reminds us in our MFA SF reading group, lies in being able to figure out the details and rules without handholding. A story set in our world doesn’t stop to give you details because the story assumes you’ll pick it up along the way. The reader only needs to be told a few things. If I had set this in a secondary world, I might have given more explanations, but this is, as you say, everyday: Death is an everyday thing; considerations of the afterlife are mundane, as far as humans go; your mother making an unwelcome visit is probably also pretty quotidian, as far as I am concerned. Cheng Beng and the Hungry Ghost Festival are annual occurrences, and my intended audience knows what they are. (And if you didn’t know, well, now ya know.)

Since the setting and most of the elements are everyday for me, even what might be called the fantastical—I don’t think I’m the only person who has considered the metaphysical logistics of the religion they were raised in—I didn’t see it as necessary to worry about how to approach the telling of the story. It’s set in our world with very commonplace relations, and the story hinges on those relations.

The presence and importance of family after death is something that many stories play for horror or laughs in genre fiction, but in Chinese culture there is a strong tradition of ancestor worship as a positive and normal part of “living” existence. What did that provide you in terms of techniques to tell this story?

 “Technique” implies a complexity of thought in laying out the story, when I wrote it within four days of arriving at Clarion 2016 (and edited a few months later with feedback from my classmates and Kelly Link). I started with a premise—“Singaporean matriarch gets a fish spa coupon in the afterlife”—and worked from there, which was me mostly answering a series of basic character biography questions. Ancestor worship (which feels like such a misnomer; caring about the comfort and opinions of your family members after death isn’t really worshiping them, and not all ancestors get deified) is not necessarily a positive thing, it’s just a thing you do, like celebrating Christmas even if you don’t believe in Jesus Christ being born in December. (There’s probably a bit of Pascal’s wager involved, too.) Writing about Cheng Beng provides me no more technique than writing about Halloween would provide some technique to the average American.

Just because we have this tradition doesn’t mean we don’t play the concepts associated with them for horror or comedy, though. I’ve seen horror stories set around Hungry Ghost Festival, and comedy stories, too. While cemeteries can be creepy places, cemeteries by themselves are not intrinsically sites of horror, and going to clean cemeteries doesn’t always have comedic value. I’ve not read as many Cheng Beng stories, which is probably me not paying attention, but it’s the festival when we tend to the comfort of dead family so they won’t fuck with us, as opposed to the Hungry Ghost Festival in which we entertain and feed dead strangers so they won’t fuck with us. Either way, there are a lot of really great Hong Kong movies with dead ancestors. (My favorite is Wu Yen, about the historical bandit queen who marries an actual king. The iconic Anita Mui plays the hopeless king and his eight-generations-dead ancestor whose rest is disturbed by the presence of a mischievous gender-bending spirit in his great-great-great-great-great grandson’s home.)

Anyway, I really thought this story was going to be funnier than it actually turned out to be. But the story I ended up wanting to tell wasn’t one to play for horror or laughs.

The story demonstrates that the worries of living days carry on into Underworld, and that even in death reconciliation of a kind is possible. Why end on this note?

 That would be asking me to commit to an interpretation of the story for the reader. I look forward to seeing how people read this story.

Reconciliation, to me, in its meaning of “to bring back together,” implies that all parties have openly communicated with each other to restore relations. It implies a kind of forgiveness, and releasing each other from the past. I imagine some people will see a relationship between mother and daughter worth salvaging. I do not subscribe to the notion that it is necessary, or even desirable, to tidy up one’s relationship to one’s parents according to common wisdom of what that relationship should be. People get to have complicated relationships with their families, and leave it at that. As in life, so too in death.

I finished on the note I did because it was the end that I felt to be most satisfying and realistic for the story I wanted to tell. There’s a bit of wish fulfillment and there’s a lack thereof, there’s a bit of tragedy, there’s a bit of bittersweetness, and there’s a bit of acceptance. I had to come to a logical conclusion for a relationship between a dead parent who lacked the self-awareness to understand how she was damaging her child in life and the living child who has to live with that damage, from the perspective of the parent. This was the only ending I could think of (in the four days I had to write this before my turn to workshop) that wasn’t twee and allowed for some protagonist growth.

The symbolism of change and constants (the shifting nature of hell, the creation of a roller coaster) is bridged by a mother’s love for her daughter. Did you start with a theme and build out? How was the story initiated and were there other thematic drivers for it?

 Well, you are certainly getting more out of specific things in the story than I put in. (I put the roller coaster in there because I thought to myself, “if I was dead in the Underworld with nothing on my schedule to keep myself alive in a sick capitalist system, what would I like the living to send to me to occupy my now-copious spare time?” and wouldn’t it be fun if part of the answer was roller coasters.)

Imagine two writers—me and Singaporean urban fantasy writer Joyce Chng—at the Doctor Fish spa on the second floor of the Singapore Flyer, talking about writing stories set specifically in our context. (A visit to the fish spa is our tradition for when I visit Singapore.) And we decide, apropos of nothing, or perhaps in the grand tradition of Mary Shelley and her fellow nerds, that we shall each write a story featuring a fish spa. (Joyce recently published her fish spa story at Rambutan Literary!) I knew I wanted to set it in the afterlife, but I didn’t have a character: Who should she be? Why is she getting a fish spa experience in the afterlife? Why is she dead? etc., etc., etc.

Later, at an ICFA two years ago, I did a reading with the inimitable Nisi Shawl and Sam J. Miller, wherein the latter read his Clarkesworld Nebula-nominated story “When Your Child Strays From God.” He mentioned choosing to write from the perspective of people he didn’t really like, which fascinated me. So I picked a kind of person I like very little: the figure of the parent who is absolutely sure of how their children’s lives should be like, whose self-worth is tied to how they are perceived by the society of their status, and who thinks that their children are extensions and reflections of themselves, which leads to conflict with their children. I grew up with such a parent, and I have so many angry, sad questions about them. This story tries to answer a question, or two, in one way.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Jason S. Ridler is a writer, improv actor, and historian. He is the author of A Triumph for Sakura, Blood and Sawdust, the Spar Battersea thrillers and has published more than sixty stories in such magazines and anthologies as The Big Click, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Out of the Gutter, and more. He also writes the column FXXK WRITING! for Flash Fiction Online. A former punk rock musician and cemetery groundskeeper, Mr. Ridler holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada. He lives in Richmond, CA.

Author Spotlight: Timothy Mudie

Alex Puncekar | 689 words

If you joined up with the Merchant Force, what planet/moon/race would be your favorite one visited on your first tour?

 I’m the last person who would sign up for something like the Merchant Force. I’d be perfectly happy just watching videos of other planets, aliens, etc. Seeing giant ambulatory plants would be really cool from a distance, but I wouldn’t want to get up close and personal!

This story has love, time dilation, poetry, and plant monsters in it. What was the inspiration behind “An Ever-Expanding Flash of Light”?

 The genesis of this story goes back a good seven or eight years, but it has changed a lot since its initial conception. The basic idea of a couple being held apart due to time dilation/cryogenic stasis remained, but that’s about it. I only wrote the opening and closing scenes of the original version, but Irina was barely a character and it had a much sadder ending. My understanding of the science behind time dilation, light cones, and so forth is more in line with Tone’s than Irina’s, so I knew that I couldn’t focus too much on the science, but had to make the story about the characters. This version is much more of a love story, and I like it a lot more for that.

The plant monsters are actually from an unpublished story I wrote around the same time I came up with this idea. No one wanted to publish it, so it has since been trunked until I can come up with a good way to rewrite it, but I still really liked the plants, so I was very happy when I realized I could include them here.

I also remember that The Sun Also Rises was somehow a big part of the inspiration, but for the life of me can’t remember/figure out how . . .

Tone, at one point, says “Buying time . . . what a turn of phrase. Something’s almost poetic about it.” I’m interested in time in your story, because, with time dilation, so much of it can be bought with so little. Do you think that people in this world, specifically the merchant-soldiers like Sarge, don’t see time as a resource anymore?

 This is an interesting question, and I don’t think there’s really one definitive answer. Certainly with time dilation, people would view time-as-a-resource differently. Merchant-soldier lifers like Sarge probably don’t see time as a resource anymore, but they are effectively cut off from society at large due to their profession. For Tone and Irina, meanwhile, time is very much a resource, one that they’re trying hard to take advantage of. In fact, to keep Irina in stasis, they need to literally pay for time. I think your average citizen would still see time pretty much the same, though.

Is there anything about this story you’d like your readers to know?

 I think this is probably the closest to “hard” science fiction of any story I’ve written. As I said above, my understanding of the physics here is pretty spotty, so my apologies to any scientists who spot something wrong! And a fun personal fact that made it into this story: my deep and hopefully irrational fear of losing my wedding ring.

What’s next for you? What other projects are you working on?

 This is my first “pro” sale, so hopefully what’s next will be more like it! I’m always working on short stories, but I’m also working on a novel now. I finished the first draft a while ago, so now I’m working on revisions, which is always the toughest part for me. With luck, everything will click soon and I’ll be able to send it out for consideration. Thanks to everyone for reading, and to John Joseph Adams and everyone else at Lightspeed for helping me get this story out into the world!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alex Puncekar lives in Ohio and is finishing up his MFA at Youngstown State University. You can find his published work in Aphelion: The Webzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and Jenny Magazine, or you can find him on Twitter @AlexPuncekar.

Author Spotlight: Tony Ballantyne

Arley Sorg | 989 words

This is an interesting take on the classic trope of outwitting the devil, cleverly set in a captivating secondary world. At first glance, it reads as a straightforward updated folk tale. But I feel like there are layers here. For example, there’s a metaphor for the growth of industrialization and the struggle to survive, with Mr. Black as an anthropomorphic expression of the shift in technology and economic structure. Are these deliberate notions—are they important themes to your work in general?

Yes!

These have been themes throughout my work, although I think to be an SF writer in the twenty-first century you either have to acknowledge and embrace these themes or deliberately ignore them. It’s only in the past few years, however, these themes have encroached on my fantasy writing, (in fact they were the stimulus for Dream London.)

There’s also the choice of protagonist. These stories often portray a man defeating the devil (or demon), whether it be through wits or a performance of some kind. Having a female protagonist who went to war and came back the only survivor, in defiance of the odds and societal laws, sets up Miss Scales as an amazing sort of hero. Was there purpose behind casting Miss Scales as the star, rather than a Mr. Scales?

I’m not sure that I had any choice in the protagonist. I had an image of a woman working a shop, I had the name Miss Scales, and that was it. Miss Scales wrote herself into the story. I think a big part of being a writer is listening to your characters and letting them be themselves. I had the background to the war from another story, I knew that Miss Scales’s brothers would have fought there; after that, it seemed obvious that someone with her temperament would have gone off and fought with them. I think writers should follow their characters, not direct them. I’ve written more about that here: bit.ly/2uHC4qg

I feel like this piece is really about redemption. Scales, who has survived her fair share of horrors, stands up to Mr. Black and his bullying, rallies against attempts to toy with her ego, and resists the more subtle seductions of power. She has fought for the idea of her town and its specific kind of peace, and despite the terror facing her, she rises to this latest fight. Moreover, Mr. Black demonstrates the possibility of even greater redemption, brought about in the shift at the story’s resolve. Did you consider taking the narrative in other directions, or was a message of hopefulness an important element all along? Especially against the glances of a very gritty backdrop. Are positive endings lacking (and sorely needed) in contemporary genre stories?

I think positive endings are harder to write. Thinking of a way for your hero to outwit the villain is a lot harder than just letting them be killed. There seems to be something in literary criticism that prefers the downbeat ending—the same exists in music, too, a preference for pieces in minor keys. People mistakenly believe that positive or light-hearted fiction is easier to write, it’s somehow inferior to expressions of existential angst. I’ve read many comedy writers bemoaning the fact that their work is always taken less seriously than “straight” fiction, and I think they have a point. I’m usually more impressed by a writer who can pull off a positive ending . . .

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about this story?

It was partly inspired by The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett. Miss Scales quotes Bennett in the story. Bridleworth is loosely based on the area in which I live.

Obviously your work covers a lot of ground, from strange to surreal, fantasy to hard science fiction. While rooted in the fantastic, aspects of this piece feel reminiscent, almost like it’s an alternate vision of the Great War. Are there certain settings, places or times, that you are especially drawn to?

I’m drawn to people more than places. I don’t have a story until I have the characters. Saying that, I’m drawn to back alleys rather than grand façades, I’m more at home in the engine room than on the bridge. I’m interested in everyday settings far more than worlds of rainbows and unicorns. I don’t like heroes or visionary leaders; I prefer stories about ordinary people who rise to the occasion. Evil villains don’t interest me as much as accountants: Outwardly pleasant and polite, they destroy lives in such a boring way nobody is interested in them. But they should be.

When I was travelling into a library in Manchester researching the Napoleonic Wars for Dream Paris, it occurred to me that I was living on the edge of a city that had gone through these changes in the nineteenth century and I’d not been writing about it. Since then, it seems like I’ve walked the length and breadth of the city’s streets thinking about fantasy stories. I’ve filled Evernote with notes and pictures. Now I just need the characters to populate those backdrops . . .

Your novel Dream Paris, the sequel to Dream London, came out from Solaris in 2015. What are you working on now that readers can look forward to?

I’ve recently completed a space opera: Fans of my Penrose series of books may be interested in this. As I mentioned earlier, I’m also working on a series of fantasy stories based in and around nineteenth-century Manchester.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Arley Sorg grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado. He studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and usually writes in local coffee shops. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he is an assistant editor at Locus Magazine. He’s soldering together a novel, has thrown a few short stories into orbit, and hopes to launch more.

Author Spotlight: Giovanni De Feo

Setsu Uzumé | 1148 words

How is this story a response to other tales about time travel, either through homage or subversion?

Well, no, this story sort of happened and was not planned at all. I’ve always thought that remembering is not a one-way phenomenon. In essence, what if, while being remembered, you could actually feel the future you were remembering? This is the kind of reasoning this short story is based on. I’m not that literate on time travelling besides the usual Back to the Future and H. G. Wells stuff, maybe the occasional Bradbury-esque take on the topic. Let’s say I was not interested in the technological aspect of it, but about its intimate aspect, the way subjectivity perceives time as a whole.

Back in college I came across an idea—can’t recall the origin—that God experiences all time simultaneously, rather than in the linear form that humans do. The counter-argument is that God exists outside of time entirely because God is unchanging. Which idea more closely aligns with Leaping in this story? Or is it something different entirely?

Let me digress a bit to answer this one. When I was a kid, I remember thinking there was no way for me to know if the world existed billions of years before me, or if it came into being the day I was born, and all the rest was just a very old scenography, with all the people coming along with it, complete with fake memories. That was my first taste of solipsism, and a part of me still thinks I was not far off. As a matter of fact . . . what is the difference between the two? From my point of view, the world’s past exists only if I exist. So, in a way, it didn’t exist before I was born.

Of course, this is the way a child thinks, or the childish part of an adult, when all is centered about oneself. Now, let’s talk about God. What is God? To me—an agnostic, by the way—God is the otherness that exists outside and inside of ourselves. Why am I saying this? I guess it’s because the idea of time travelling exposes us to what is unchanging and what is fixed, in us and outside of us. Ugo is an intimate, subjective take on an objective theme, as it questions what stays and what doesn’t, not in the universe, but in our lives. So, back to God . . . if a part of God is in us, is that part the one that flows, or the one that is unchanging? And what about the part that is not God? Is the part of us that is most “us” the stable one or the in-flux one? No answers of course, just questions.

How closely did this story match what you had originally envisioned? Are there elements you think you’ll refine or return to in future stories?

As I said, this story just sort of happened. Usually I plan my stories very accurately, especially the ones I write in English. With this one, I just had this ludicrous idea of the “time-jumps,” which were supposed to be like time-sneezes. So what I had in mind was something quite light and funny. And yet when I began . . . I usually don’t talk about the mystique of writing, but this time I did really go into a sort of trance.

I guess what happened is that I’ve been thinking about this topic for such a long while, since I was a kid, so the different pieces kind of came together almost effortlessly. I’m talking about the first draft, of course; to get the right tone (and the language) took me a lot more. For this I want to thank Anne Woodall, who translated some of my stuff and helps me with the language, and all my Clarion friends, who were of immense support. I have to thank them and our workshop leader, Ted Chiang, if I worked on this story some more and didn’t throw it to the dogs, as I was about to.

Elements I’d return to? Probably memory and regret. We human beings are the only animals in the universe that can suffer out of impossibilities, that is, possibilities that never came into being. That is the price we pay for having imagination, to feel nostalgia for what it never will be. There is a painful beauty in there, terrible in real life, but bittersweet to taste in fiction.

Tell me about your mask collection. How did it begin? Do you have a favorite one?

Oh well, I’ve been a Commedia dell’arte fan almost as long I can remember! I saw Strehler’s Harlequin Servants of Two Masters when I was twelve and that sense of wonder never completely wore off. I mean, people who are masks, how cool is that? Also, you have to imagine that in the traditional Italian carnival, kids put on the Commedia masks. When I was a child we dressed up as Harlequin, The Magnifico, Mr. Punch, et cetera. Then in college, I got my history of theatre minor and I started collecting masks. Some are in leather, some in cardboard, some in feathers.

They are all amazing, but probably the first one, which an artisan did especially for me, is my favourite, as it is a blend of Il Capitano and of the Magnifico. Since we are at it, I have a Commedia family saga in my mind I am beginning to tackle, after years of deep rumination, so the masks are also there to remind me of my life-long project and all its characters . . .

What can we look forward to next from you?

In late July, I will publish my first novella for children in Embers: a Journal of Luminous Things. It is called “The Girl Who Waited for The Fish Storm” and will be illustrated by the wonderfully talented Casey Robin.

I am also in the last stages of finalising a novel called The Secret Marked of the Dead. The story is about an eighteenth-century Italian girl who wants nothing more than to become a blacksmith, a fate that is reserved for her twin brother. Until she turns to the Nocturnals, inhabitants of the Second Night, a realm of living dreams and unquiet dead . . . The novel stems from my interests in southern Italy’s history, local folklore (the same that forms much of Basile’s The Tale of Tales), and the contrast between Romanticism and Enlightenment, covering similar grounds as Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, hopefully in a unique, surreal, Italian way.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Setsu grew up in New York, and spent her formative years in and out of dojos. She likes swords, raspberries, justice, the smell of pine forests after rain, and shooting arrows from horseback. She does not like peanut butter and chocolate in the same bite. Her work has appeared in Podcastle and Grimdark Magazine. Find her on Twitter @KatanaPen.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 166 words

Coming up in October, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by A. Merc Rustad (“Longing for Stars Once Lost”) and Adam-Troy Castro (“What I Told My Little Girl About The Aliens Preparing to Grind Us Into Hamburgers”), along with SF reprints by Hugh Howey (“The Walk Up Nameless Ridge”) and Aliette de Bodard (“Crossing the Midday Gate”).

We’re trying something new and exciting in our fantasy department as we serialize an original novella from Jeremiah Tolbert (“The Dragon of Dread Peak, Parts One and Two”). We’ll also have fantasy reprints by Sofia Samatar (“The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle”) and Rachel Swirksy (“Becoming”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns, and a feature interview.

For our ebook readers, we also have our usual ebook-exclusive novella reprint and a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

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Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

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THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu) [forthcoming Oct. 2017]

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Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.