by Ellen Datlow
“Plus, you did a good thing for your friend. I admire that. I could help you, so I did. You get a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card. Why not, right?”
“No argument here,” Carl said. “One last thing?”
“Yes?”
“If you happen to see my friend—Hunter—tell him I’m glad he made it.”
“Should I see him, I will.”
“Thanks.”
“Go home,” Wayne said.
Carl did.
XVIII
More like ten minutes after he departed Wayne, Carl noticed the mist thinning, disclosing the trunks of trees around him. The snow had not let up; indeed, it had gained in intensity, accompanied by a wind that sliced through him to the bone. Carl advanced to one of the trees, saw that it was a red pine, and his heart lifted in his chest. Moving from evergreen to evergreen, he continued forward. The wind whipped away the last of the mist. He was walking through the woods lining the driveway to Hunter’s house; through the blowing snow and the trees, he could see his Subaru, and beyond it, the steps climbing the slope to the house’s front door.
A tremendous wave of emotion rose in Carl, sent tears flooding his cheeks. The snow, the trees, the car, glowed in his sight, suffused with beauty. The wave broke, became joy and relief and a fierce love for the world and everyone in it. The snowflakes were a miracle, the trees astonishing, the car a work of art. He could not contain himself: He broke into a run toward the house, where his old friend’s body lay on the bed in the master bedroom, an unreadable expression on its cooling face.
Epilogue
The surgery to repair Carl’s hand took place at the UVM Medical Center. He had blamed his injuries on an attack by a stray dog he’d encountered when he went outside to practice his kata. The explanation was simple enough to repeat to the police convincingly; although it necessitated a series of rabies shots he couldn’t refuse and maintain the illusion. The doctor who treated him at the ER strongly recommended operating as soon as possible, which opinion the surgeon on call endorsed. Already on her way up, Melanie met him at the hospital, where a slot had opened early the following morning. “Holy crap,” she said when she saw the bandages wrapping his hand. “A dog did this?”
Although he hated lying to her, Carl said, “Yeah. It was the craziest thing.” Which was perhaps not as much a lie as he had thought.
After the surgery, while he was in the recovery area, surrounded by tall green curtains through which various nurses came to check his vitals, Hunter appeared to him. Melanie had ducked out to run to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and a snack. Carl was lying with his eyes shut, riding in and out of consciousness. He heard the curtain rings jingle, felt someone sit on the end of the bed. He assumed it was Melanie, but when he opened his eyes, saw Hunter. Still unclothed, his skin still a canvas for the red figures, Hunter was wearing Natalie’s cardboard crown, perched unsteadily atop his larger head. On the floor beside him, a Hungry Dog sat awkwardly, its head an elongated wedge.
Carl was aware that he should be terrified, but whatever drugs were coursing through his system dulled the emotion to a mild concern. He said, “You’re still naked.”
“Yeah,” Hunter said.
“I take it this means the plan failed.”
“No,” Hunter said, “it didn’t.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I couldn’t do it.” Hunter looked down. “I made it. We made it; Natalie chased me all the way there. We must’ve made some sight, me running bare-assed down the middle of this cobbled street, her hot on my heels, screaming her head off. She finally brought me down, started punching and kicking me. I wouldn’t let go of this, though.” He pointed to the crown.
“Wait,” Carl said. “Heaven has cobbled streets?”
“This part does. You know what it reminded me of? Have you ever been to St. Andrew’s, in Scotland?”
“Heaven is like Scotland?”
“I’m sure the Scots would agree with that. It’s not important. Anyway, there we are, me on the cobblestones, Natalie beating the shit out of me, and the next thing, there are people in the street. I want to say they were there all along, it just took us a minute to see them. I don’t know what the hell that means, either. Their clothes were these incredible colors . . . I can’t say exactly how, but they separate the two of us, form a circle around Natalie. She’s furious; she’s shouting at the crowd, running up to and pushing them, punching a couple. They don’t react. Or, they don’t react the way you would expect. They talk to her, reassure her, tell her it’s okay, everything’s all right. As they do, they’re doing this thing with their hands.” Hunter mimed moving his back and forth, as if he were playing tug of war and drawing the rope to him. “I’m thinking I should run, escape my sister while I have the opportunity, but I can’t stop watching. I swear, I can almost see these people drawing something out of Natalie, like long, silvery webs. Eventually, she goes from running around inside the circle, to standing still, to sitting, then she lies down and falls asleep right there in the middle of the street. Some members of the group leave, others keep on with the hand stuff.
“I was so relieved; I can’t tell you. A woman approached me, said we should see about getting me settled. ‘What about my sister?’ I said. ‘Oh, her, too,’ she said. Just like that. As if Nat hadn’t been this raging monster.
“And it hits me, what about the Hungry Dogs? I’m thinking about Sam, about what we saw happen to him. I’m thinking about I don’t know how many of these creatures, these kids, there without their queen. I’m thinking about what I’ve witnessed with Natalie. If there’s a way to, I don’t know, get her back from whatever she had transformed into, then shouldn’t there be a way to reclaim them, too? But who’s gonna do that? I can’t bring Natalie out there, and I can’t ask any of these people I don’t know. I can’t say it isn’t my problem, because . . . well, I can’t. How could I enjoy this place knowing this pack of kids was wandering around the box fort, wondering what happened? I asked the woman I was talking to if she could help my sister, could connect her with our parents. She said she would, so I put the crown on my head and set off the way we’d come.
“It wasn’t hard to find the path back to Natalie’s kingdom. Once I arrived, most of the dogs avoided me. I could see they recognized the crown, but had no idea what it meant for me to be wearing it. A few approached me, but this guy,” Hunter nodded at the dog at his feet, “was the only one to stay. So far. I can’t say why, but I think his name is Rudy.”
“Hi, Rudy,” Carl said.
The dog stared at him blankly.
“Although I could be wrong,” Hunter said.
“How are you planning to retrieve them?” Carl said. “Who they were?”
“I have no idea,” Hunter said. “If Natalie could transform them into these things, then I figure there’s a way to return them to who they used to be. I just have to find it.”
“Sounds like it could take some time.”
“It’s not as if I’m doing anything else.” The bed creaked as Hunter stood. So did the Hungry Dog (Rudy?). “Okay, I just wanted to drop by, check on you. I don’t foresee myself having a lot of adult conversations in the immediate future.” He moved toward the green curtain.
“Be careful,” Carl said.
“I’m already dead.”
“And for God’s sake, get some pants, Your Majesty.”
“Kiss my ass, peasant.”
The curtain rings sang, the dog’s claws clicked on the floor, and Carl was alone. When Melanie returned, she saw her husband wiping his eyes with the back of his unbandaged hand, but she did not ask him about it, not then.
“And if he were wrong, well, what would be the harm in that? Better to be wrong forever than to live without hope.”—Lucius Shepard, “Limbo”
For Fiona
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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
A winner of both the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award, Dale Bailey is the author of In the Night Wood, as well as The End of the End of Everything, The Subterranean Season, and five other books. His work has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award and once for the Bram Stoker Award, and has been adapted for Showtime Television. He lives in North Carolina with his family.
Nathan Ballingrud is the author of North American Lake Monsters: Stories, The Visible Filth, and the forthcoming collection Wounds. His novella, The Visible Filth, is currently being made into a film, due in early 2019. He has twice won the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in Asheville, NC, with his daughter.
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories that have garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award, and two British Science Fiction Association Awards. Her space operas include The Citadel of Weeping Pearls, set in the same universe as her Vietnamese science fiction novella On a Red Station, Drifting. Recent works include the Dominion of the Fallen series (set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war), which is comprised of The House of Shattered Wings, its stand-alone sequel The House of Binding Thorns, and the novella The Tea-Master and the Detective.
Richard Bowes has published six novels, four story collections, and eighty short stories. He has won two World Fantasy Awards and a Lambda Award, among other things. His classic 9/11 story “There’s a Hole in the City” got a fine review in The New Yorker and is online at Nightmare magazine.
He’s recently had stories in Black Feathers, the Wonderland-themed Mad Hatters and March Hares, and Welcome to Dystopia. His F&SF story “Dirty Old Town” will be a chapter of a book he’s writing about a gay kid with magic in 1950s Boston.
Next year Bowes will have, among other things, stories in Welcome to Dystopia and The Salon of Dorian Gray.
Pat Cadigan sold her first professional science fiction story in 1980 and became a full-time writer in 1987. She is the author of fifteen books, including two nonfiction books on the making of Lost in Space and The Mummy, one young adult novel, and the two Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning novels Synners and Fools. She has also won the Locus Award three times, and the Hugo Award for her novelette “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi,” which also won the Seiun Award in Japan.
She can be found on Facebook and Pinterest, Tweets as @Cadigan, and lives in North London with her husband, the original Chris Fowler, where she is stomping the hell out of terminal cancer. Most of her books are available electronically via SF Gateway, the ambitious electronic publishing program from Gollancz.
Siobhan Carroll is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware, where she studies the relationship between the history of exploration and science fiction. A writer as well as a critic of speculative fiction, she contributes genre-blurring stories to magazines like Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Lightspeed and to anthologies like Children of Lovecraft and Fearful Symmetries. She has lived in the United States since 2002, during which time she’s been acquainted with the hard work performed by immigration lawyers, officials, and activists. For more of Siobhan Carroll’s fiction, go to http://voncarr-siobhan-carroll.blogspot.com.
In writing “The Air, the Ocean, the Earth, the Deep,” she benefitted enormously from her conversations with Amelia Wilson at the U.S. Department of Justice and from the public-facing work of volunteer organizations like the Sojourners Immigration Detention Center Visitor Program and First Friends. What errors the story contains are all her own. For more on detention centers, or to volunteer as a visitor, go to http://sojournersvisitorprogram.blogspot.com and https://firstfriendsnjny.org/volunteer-2.
F(rancis) Marion Crawford (1854–1909) was an American writer who lived most of his life as an expatriate in Italy and who was best known in his lifetime for his historical novels. His posthumously published short-fiction collection, Wandering Ghosts, features most of the tales that constitute his weird fiction legacy.
“The Upper Berth,” now considered a classic, was first published in The Broken Shaft: Unwin’s Annual for 1886.
Indrapramit Das (aka Indra Das) is an Indian author from Kolkata, West Bengal. His debut novel, The Devourers (Del Rey / Penguin India) was the winner of the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ SF/F/Horror, and shortlisted for the 2016 Crawford Award. His short fiction has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award and has appeared in several publications and anthologies, including Clarkesworld, Tor.com, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. He is an Octavia E. Butler scholar and a grateful graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and received his MFA from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He has worn many hats, including editor, dog hotel night shift attendant, TV background performer, minor film critic, occasional illustrator, environmental news writer, pretend patient for med school students, and video game tester.
Terry Dowling is one of Australia’s most respected and internationally acclaimed writers of science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror, and the author of the multi-award-winning Tom Rynosseros saga. He has been called “Australia’s finest writer of horror” by Locus magazine. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series featured more horror stories by Dowling in its twenty-one-year run than by any other writer.
Dowling’s horror collections are Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear (2007 International Horror Guild Award winner for Best Collection), An Intimate Knowledge of the Night (Aurealis Award winner), and Blackwater Days (nominated for the World Fantasy Award). His recent publications include Amberjack: Tales of Fear & Wonder and his debut novel, Clowns at Midnight, which London’s Guardian called “an exceptional work that bears comparison to John Fowles’s The Magus.” His latest collection, The Night Shop: Tales for the Lonely Hours, was published in 2017. His homepage can be found at terrydowling.com.
Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection A Collapse of Horses, which was a finalist for the Wonderland Book Award, and the novella The Warren, which was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. He has also recently published Windeye and Immobility, both finalists for the Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. Other books include The Wavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection), Dark Property, and Altmann’s Tongue. A new collection of his stories will be appearing from Coffee House Press in 2019. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CalArts.
Gemma Files has been a film critic, journalist, screenwriter, and teacher, and has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She has published two collections of short work (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart), two chapbooks of speculative poetry, a Weird Western trilogy (the Hexslinger series: A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns, and A Tree of Bones), a story cycle (We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven), and a stand-alone novel (Experimental Film, which won the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst Award for Adult Fiction). She has two upcoming story collections from Trepidatio Publishing (Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up From Deep Places), and one from Cemetery Dance (Dark Is Better).
Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939) was a British writer who based his Parade’s End tetralogy of novels, written between 1924 and 1928, on his service as a propagandist and soldier during World War I. Although he wrote short stories in addition to novels, criticism, travel essays, and poetry, it is his critically acclaimed novel The Good Soldier, regarded as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, for which he is remembered.
“The Medium’s End” is one o
f his few pieces of supernatural fiction.
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, The Twilight Pariah, and Ahab’s Return.
Ford’s short fiction has appeared in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies, and has been collected in The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, and A Natural History of Hell.
He lives in Ohio in a 100-plus-year-old farmhouse surrounded by corn and soybean fields and teaches part time at Ohio Wesleyan University.
Alice Hoffman is the New York Times bestselling author of Faithful; The Marriage of Opposites; The Dovekeepers; and The Rules of Magic, the prequel to her cult classic Practical Magic, selected as a LibraryReads, Indie Next, and Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick. Hoffman’s most recent novel is The World We Knew, published by Simon & Schuster, September 2019.
British Fantasy Award–winning Carole Johnstone is a Scottish writer, currently enjoying splendid isolation on the Atlantic coast of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Her short fiction has been published widely, and has been reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year and Salt Publishing’s Best British Fantasy collections. Her debut short story collection, The Bright Day Is Done, and her novella Cold Turkey were both shortlisted for a 2015 British Fantasy Award.
The story of HMS Torque/Trigon is based on the true fate of HMS Thetis, a T-class sub that sank during sea trials in Liverpool Bay on June 1, 1939, with the loss of ninety-nine men. There were only four survivors. After being salvaged and repaired, it was recommissioned as HMS Thunderbolt in 1940. It was sunk by an Italian warship off the coast of Sicily on March 14, 1943. All hands were lost, and HMS Thunderbolt was never recovered.