by Ellen Datlow
* * *
Andy sleeps. He sleeps long and wakes, again, before his laptop. Has he written what he reads there, or has someone else? Well. Bears can’t type. It’s morning and there is no one in the house but Andy. There’s a pile of bear shit beside the farmhouse table, cold but still fragrant. The puzzle is back in its box.
* * *
And now the story is almost over. Andy continued to work in a desultory and haphazard way on his dissertation. No one else came to the kitchen door while he stayed in Skinder’s house, but one night the bell woke him again. He went first to the kitchen, thinking he might see one Rose or the other, but truly this time there was no one there. It came to him that the bell he still heard ringing was not the same bell as before. He went, therefore, to the door at the front of the house, and there, on the porch, stood Skinder with his dog.
How did Andy know it was Skinder? Well, it was as Hannah had said. You would know Skinder, whether or not the dog—small, black, regarding Andy with a curious intensity—had been beside him. What did Skinder look like? He looked exactly like Andy. It was as if Andy stood inside the house, looking out at another, identical Andy, who was also Skinder and who must not be allowed inside.
There was a car in the driveway. A black Prius. There was a chain on the front door, and Andy kept it on when he opened the door a crack. Enough to speak to Skinder, but not enough for Skinder to come in, or his dog. “What do you want?” Andy said.
“To come into my house,” Skinder said. He had Andy’s voice as well. “My bags are in the car. Will you help me carry them in?”
“No,” Andy said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t let you in.”
The black dog showed its teeth at this. Skinder, too, seemed disappointed. Andy recognized the look on his face, though it was a look that he knew the feel of, more than the look. “Are you sure you won’t let me in?” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Andy said again. “But I’m not allowed to do that.”
Skinder said, “I understand. Come along.” This to the dog. Andy in the house watched Skinder go down the steps and down the gravel driveway to the car. He opened the door and the dog jumped up onto the seat. Skinder got in the car at last too, and Andy watched as the car went down the driveway, the little white stones crunching under the tires, the car silent and the headlights never turned on. The car disappeared under the low, dragging hem of leaves and Andy went back upstairs. He didn’t attempt to sleep again. Instead, he sat in the red and white bedroom, in a chair in front of the window, watching in case Skinder returned.
* * *
Hannah came back two days later. She sent a text before her overnight flight: Margot’s still in a cast, but we’ve agreed it’s better if I go. No
one happy and house is too small. Neighbor going to help out. See you tomorrow afternoon!
He hadn’t finished his dissertation, but Andy felt he was well on the way now. And he was going to see Hannah again. They’d catch up, he’d tell her a modified history of his time in the house, and maybe she’d ask him to stay. There were plenty of bedrooms, after all. She could even take a look at what he had so far, give him some feedback.
But when she arrived, it was clear that he wasn’t welcome to stay, even to Andy, who wasn’t always the quickest to pick up on cues. “I’m so grateful,” she kept saying. Her hair was blue now, a deep rich sky-blue. “You were such a lifesaver to do this.”
“I was happy to do it,” Andy said. “It was fun, mostly. Weird, but fun. But I wanted to ask you about some aspects. Skinder, for example.”
“You saw him?” Hannah said. All of her attention was on Andy, suddenly.
“No, it’s fine,” Andy said. “I didn’t let him in. I did what you told me to do. But, when you saw him, I wanted to ask. Did he look familiar?”
“What do you mean, exactly?” Hannah said.
“I mean, did you think he looked like me at all?” Andy said.
Hannah shrugged. She looked away, then back at Andy. “No,” she said. “Not really. Okay, so I’ve already paid the fare back on the Uber. It’ll take you to Burlington and you can catch a Greyhound there back to Philly. But you have to go now, or you’ll miss the last bus. I already checked the schedule—there’s nothing if you miss that one until tomorrow morning. Don’t worry about cleaning anything up or changing the sheets. I’ll take care of it.”
“I guess if you’re sure,” Andy said. “If you don’t need me to stay.”
She gave him an incredulous look at that. “Oh, Andy,” she said. “That’s so sweet. But no, I’ll be fine. Come here.”
She gave him a big hug. “Now go get your stuff. Do you need a hand?”
He left the ream of paper behind. He hadn’t really needed to print out anything. That got rid of one of the canvas bags, and he lugged everything else out to the Uber. Hannah came down the steps to give him a sandwich. She took a look at his Klean Kanteen and said, “Is that tap water?”
“Yes,” Andy said. “Why?”
“Ugh,” Hannah said. She took the canteen from him and opened it, pouring the water out. “Here. Take this.” This was bottled water. “It’s from the fridge, so it’ll be nice and cold. Bye, Andy. Text me when you get home so I know you’re there.”
She hugged him again. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. The way she smelled, the feeling of her hair on his cheek. “It’s really nice to see you again,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I know. It’s been such a long time. Isn’t it weird, how time just keeps passing?”
And that was that. He turned to get one last look at the yellow house and at Hannah as the car went up the driveway, but she had already gone inside.
* * *
When he was at last back at the apartment in Philly, it was morning again. Andy was tired—he had not slept at all on the bus, or in any of the stations in between transfers—and he could not shake the idea that when he opened the door, Skinder would be waiting for him. But instead here was Lester on the futon couch in his boxer shorts, looking at his phone and slurping coffee. It was much hotter in Philly. The apartment had a smell, like something had gone off.
“You’re home,” Lester said without much enthusiasm. “How was Vermont?”
“Nice,” Andy said. “Really, really nice.” He didn’t think he’d be able to explain what it had been like to Lester. “Where’s Bronwen?”
Lester looked down at his phone again. “Not here,” he said. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”
From this, Andy gathered they had broken up. It was a shame: he felt Bronwen might have been a good person to talk to about Vermont. “Sorry,” he said to Lester.
“Not your fault, dude,” Lester said. “She was not the most normal girl I’ve ever been with.”
Occasionally over the next week Andy noticed how Lester sometimes looked as if he were listening for something, as if he were waiting for something. And after a while, Andy began to feel as if he were listening too. And then, sometimes, he thought that he could almost see something in the apartment when Lester was there. It crept after Lester, waited patiently, crouched on the floor beside him when he sat at the table. It was mostly formless, but it had a mouth and eyes. It reminded Andy of Skinder’s dog. Sometimes he thought it saw him looking. He felt it looking back. But Lester, he thought, could not see it at all.
It wasn’t entirely bad to have it in the house. It meant Andy worked, at last, very hard to finish his dissertation. Or perhaps it had been Vermont that had gotten him over the hump. All that had really been needed was for him to get out of his own way. When he was nearly done, Andy began looking for higher ed listings, and then, very soon, he was defending, and he was done, and he had graduated at last and had his first interview. He was very ready to leave the apartment, and Philly, and Lester, and Lester’s ghost, behind.
The job interview did not go as well as he’d hoped. There were other candidates, and he was quite surprised when, in the end, the job was offered to him. But he took it
gladly. Here was the path which led toward tenure and a career and all the rest of his future. Years later, one of the older faculty members who had been on the hiring committee got very drunk at a bar they all frequented, and told Andy that he had almost not gotten the offer, in fact. “The night before we met to discuss, Andy, I had the most peculiar dream. In the dream I was in the woods at night and lost, and there was a bear. I couldn’t move I was so scared. The bear came right up and I knew that it was going to eat me, but instead it said, ‘You should hire Andy. You’ll be glad if you do and you’ll regret it if you don’t. Do you understand?’ I said I did and then I woke up. And then at the meeting no one wanted to say much; there was a very weird feeling, and then someone, Dr. Carmichael, said, ‘I had a dream last night that we should hire Andy Sims.’ And then someone else said, ‘I had the same dream. There was a bear and it said exactly that. That we should hire Andy Sims.’ And it turned out we had all had the dream. So, we hired you! And, in the end, it turned out for the best, just like the bear said.”
Andy said that this was extremely peculiar, but yes, it had all turned out all right. When, later, he went up for tenure and got it, he wondered if the committee had been given another dream. In any case, he was content to have what he had been given. He caught himself, once, at the end of a lecture, saying, “Much to think about.” But there wasn’t, really. His students gave him adequate ratings. It seemed to some of them that Professor Sims really looked at them, that he seemed to see something in them (or perhaps near them), none of their other teachers did. What exactly Professor Sims saw, though, he kept to himself. It was, no doubt, an unfortunate after-effect of the water he’d drunk so much of one summer.
There was this, too: although his children asked him over and over why they could not have a dog, Andy could not bear this idea. Instead, he got them guinea pigs, and then a rabbit.
As for Hannah, he ran into her once or twice at conferences. He went to both of her presentations and took notes so he could send her an email afterward with his thoughts. They had drinks with some of their colleagues, but he didn’t ask her if she still housesat in the summer in Vermont. All of that seemed of another life, one that didn’t belong to him.
Lester had dropped out of the program. He went and worked for a think tank in Indonesia. Andy didn’t know if anyone had followed him there.
And then, years later, Andy found himself at a conference in Montpelier, Vermont. It was fall and very beautiful. He found trees quite restful, actually, now that he’d lived on the East Coast for so long. The last day of the conference, he began to think about the parts of his life that he hardly thought about at all, now. He’d given his panel, had heard the gossip, talked up his small college to fledgling Ph.D. candidates. Back in his hotel room, he looked at maps and car rentals and realized it would not be unrealistic to drive home instead of flying. It would be a very pretty drive. And so he canceled his plane ticket and picked up a rental car instead. He thought perhaps he might try to find the yellow house in the woods again, and see who lived there now.
But he didn’t remember, as it turned out, exactly which highway the house had been on. He drove down little highway after little highway, all of them lovely but none the road he had meant to find. And, toward dusk, when a deer came onto the road, he swerved to miss it and went quite far down the embankment into a copse of trees.
He wasn’t badly hurt, and the car didn’t look too bad, either. But he thought it would require a tow truck to get it back up again, and his cell phone had no reception here. He went up to the road and waited some time, but no car ever came past and so he went back down to his rental, to see what he had to eat or drink. He saw, close to where the car had ended up, there was quite a well-trodden trail. Andy decided he would follow it in the direction he felt was the one most likely to lead toward St. Albans.
The trail meandered and grew more narrow. The light began to fade and he thought of turning back, but now the trail led him out to a place he recognized. Here was the patio and here was the Adirondack chair, grown even more decrepit and weatherworn. Here was the comfortable yellow house with all the lights on inside.
He went around to the front door. Well, why not? He wasn’t a bear. He knocked and waited, and eventually someone came to the door and opened it.
The other Andy stood in the doorway and looked at him. Where was the little dog? Surely it was dead. But no, there it was in the hallway.
“Can I come in?” Andy said.
“No,” Skinder said and shut the door. Andy waited a little longer, but all that happened was that the lights in the house went off. It was dark outside now and the wind was rattling all the leaves in the trees. There wasn’t much he could think of to do, so after a while Andy went back to find the path again.
Acknowledgments
I’D like to thank Laurence Hyman for graciously giving his blessing when I approached him about my anthology in tribute to his mother.
Also, thanks to Elizabeth Hand, Merrilee Heifetz, and Shawna McCarthy; and George Sandison, Lydia Gittins, and the rest of the Titan crew for their support.
About the Authors
LAIRD BARRON spent his early years in Alaska. He is the author of several books, including The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, Swift to Chase, and Worse Angels. His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Barron currently resides in the Rondout Valley writing stories about the evil that men do.
GEMMA FILES was born in England and raised in Toronto, Canada, and has been a journalist, teacher, film critic and an award-winning horror author for almost thirty years. She has published four novels, a story-cycle, three collections of short fiction, and three collections of speculative poetry; her most recent novel, Experimental Film, won both the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst Award for Best Novel (Adult Category). She is currently working on her next book.
JEFFREY FORD is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, The Shadow Year, Ahab’s Return. His short story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, A Natural History of Hell, The Best of Jeffrey Ford, and a new collection out in July 2021, Big Dark Hole from Small Beer Press.
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES is the author of twenty-five or so novels and collections, and there’s some novellas and comic books in there as well. Most recent are The Only Good Indians and Night of the Mannequins. Next is My Heart is a Chainsaw. Stephen lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.
ELIZABETH HAND is the author of sixteen multiple-award-winning novels and collections of short fiction including Curious Toys, Wylding Hall, Generation Loss, and The Book of Lamps and Banners, her fourth noir featuring punk provocateur and photographer Cass Neary. Her stand-alone thriller, Under the Big Black Sun, will be out in 2022. Under non-pandemic conditions, she divides her time between the Maine coast and North London.
KAREN HEULER’S stories have appeared in over one hundred literary and speculative magazines and anthologies, from Conjunctions to Clarkesworld to Weird Tales, as well as in a number of Best Of anthologies. She has received an O. Henry Award, been a finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Bellwether Award, the Shirley Jackson Award for short fiction, and others. She has published four novels, four collections, and a novella.
RICHARD KADREY is the New York Times bestselling author of the Sandman Slim supernatural noir series. Sandman Slim was included in Amazon’s “100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime,” and is in production as a feature film. Some of Kadrey’s other books include The Grand Dark, The Everything Box, Hollywood Dead, and Butcher Bird. He’s also written for Heavy Metal Magazine, and the comics Lucifer and Hellblazer.
CASSANDRA KHAW is an award-winning game writer, and former scriptwriter at Ubisoft Montreal. Her work can be found in places like The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Tor.com. Her f
irst original novella, Hammers on Bone, was a finalist for the British Fantasy Award and the Locus Award, and her forthcoming novella, Nothing But Blackened Teeth, will be published by Nightfire in September 2021.
JOHN LANGAN is the author of two novels and four collections of stories. For his work, he has received the Bram Stoker and This Is Horror awards. He is one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards and continues to serve on its Board of Directors. He lives in New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley with his wife, younger son, and certainly not too many books.
KELLY LINK is a MacArthur recipient and the author of four collections, most recently Get in Trouble. She is the owner of the bookstore Book Moon in Easthampton, Massachusetts, and the cofounder, with her husband Gavin J. Grant, of Small Beer Press. Together they publish the zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. You can find her on Twitter at @haszombiesinit.
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO is the author of the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, the memoir In the Dream House, and the story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, and many others. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and elsewhere. She lives in Philadelphia.
JOSH MALERMAN is the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box, Malorie, and Unbury Carol. He’s also one of two singer-songwriters for the Detroit band the High Strung, whose song “The Luck You Got” can be heard as the theme song to the Showtime series Shameless. He lives in Michigan with the artist/musician Allison Laakko.