The Best of Talebones

by edited by Patrick Swenson

  “The True God of the Sky Lords grants mercy,” I began.

  The crowd stood silent.

  “The life of the prisoner tried today is to be spared, and, upon completion of four years penal servitude, he is to be freed to the great glory of the Sky Lords’ God.”

  “Praise the mercy of the Sky Lords’ God!” a voice shouted. All the crowd joined in.

  I translated for the Sky Lord.

  He held up his hands. The crowd quieted immediately. “Tell them, in the name of the True God, I thank them and bless them for their faith in His wondrous Love.”

  I translated again. When the crowd was quiet I went on.

  “Further, the Sky Lord proclaims, as the Sky Lords have proclaimed from the first, that all idolatrous practices must cease.”

  The crowd attended carefully. This decree affected them all. What activity that they had taken for granted all their lives as they had the rising and setting of the Sun would now be forbidden? I went on.

  “Specifically, the former Spring Ceremony is abolished.”

  There was a collective gasp.

  “There is to be no Ceremony of the Breaking of the Waters,” I said. “As well, no one is to practice any of the former rites of the Corn, of the Gates of Ez-Amarez-Coya, nor any of the practices associated with the former Birth of the Year, which is now utterly forbidden as Amarez no longer rules, and we must all accept the Sky Lords’ God Who is the True Source of Life.”

  The crowd remained silent briefly. Then a great cry arose, a keening, howling roar. So long and so loud did the crowd cry out that I began to fear them nearly as much as I had come to fear the Sky Lords’ True God. When, at last, the voices of the crowd had quieted enough for his words to be heard at all, the Sky Lord asked me to translate what they were saying.

  “They say,” I replied, “‘All worship to the Sky Lords’ God Whose terrible might is beyond comprehension.’”

  “A funny way to put it,” the Sky Lord said, “but I am pleased they are coming to understand the Love of the True God.”

  “Indeed, my Lord,” I replied. “Indeed they are.”

  Perhaps they do understand. I am not sure. I do not. I do not understand a God Who forbids us to give a little Corn to the Mother of Waters, Who abolishes the watchers in the mountains whose duty it has always been to inform us of the ice dam’s spring break-up.

  How will we know when to expect the River to surge? Winter and spring are very dry here on the plain. How will we know when to plant? It does not matter. The floodgates are sacred objects of the old faith we are now forbidden to employ.

  When we plant, if we do not open the floodgates for the River’s surge, the fields will receive no water. The corn will not sprout, and there will be nothing growing to receive the rains of summer, nor to ripen in the dry, clear days of fall.

  Perhaps the Sky Lords’ True God loves the Sky Lords. He is surely their God. He has overthrown our Amarez Who long brought us life. I do not understand the Love of the Sky Lords’ True God, nor, I think, do my people. I hope I may be forgiven for translating their cry incompletely to the Sky Lord. By next year, it will not matter. Ixtiu will be no more. The Sky Lords’ God must surely be the True God, for what other God has the power to do such terrible things? What the people really said was:

  “All worship to the Sky Lords’ God Whose terrible might brings death by starvation.”

  Jay Lake is a prolific, amazing writer and a phenomenal person. His only story for Talebones appeared in #25, and it was atmospheric and haunting, and one of my favorite Lake stories from anywhere. Keith Boulger did the interior illustration, but at World Fantasy one year, Jay and yours truly posed for Frank Wu, and he put us into the illustration for the collection Greetings From Lake Wu. Some of the story is autobiographical.

  TALL SPIRITS, BLOCKING THE NIGHT

  JAY LAKE

  Moke stumbled into the Rockne Road House as I was washing the bar mats, drunker than a prom queen after the party. I could have set fire to his breath.

  “Wrong way, Moke,” I said. “Go home.” I couldn’t serve him liquor, not in his condition. Moke was seventy-five if he was day, and would have had to work his way up to being called poor white trash. For the love of God, the man lived in a cracked septic tank that had fallen off a flatbed up on 535. Moke must have given up even more than I, to stay in this life.

  “Tall spirits,” Moke gasped. That was when I realized that he was at least as scared as he was drunk. “Tall spirits, blocking the night.”

  “Christ, Moke, you got the D.T.s now?” I stepped around and helped him get propped on a stool where the bar met the wall. “Coffee’s on the house. What happened?”

  Moke winked at me. “I was at Chosin.” He laid his head on the bar.

  “I know.” Sometimes the story was Da Nang, sometimes it was Anzio. For a while he’d even said Kuwait City. After setting the coffee down next to him — not that I could afford to give anything away on my margins — I went to lock up. It was near closing, and there was only me, Moke and the radio. Not a lot of traffic in Rockne, Texas this late in the evening.

  “Captured,” Moke said. “They did things to me I wouldn’t do to a nig —”

  “Moke,” I said. “Not in my bar.” Moke was old, old South, like my grandfather, except Grandpappy had been safely dead for a decade and white America had moved on. Mostly.

  “Scars,” he whispered. “I got scars, Marvin.”

  That was a new twist to the story. “Don’t show ’em to me, okay?”

  “They’re out there.” He grabbed my wrist. “You can’t go home, Marvin. Stay in ’til dawn.”

  “Moke, man . . .” I pried his fingers loose. “I’ll give you a ride.”

  As suddenly as that, he snored on the bar top, cheek down next to his steaming cup of coffee.

  “Well, hell,” I said. Couldn’t leave him in here alone — God knew what he’d do if he woke up in front of all those bottles. I didn’t feel like carrying him out to my pick-up.

  I postponed the moment of decision by going out to sweep the front porch. What else was I going to do at one-fifteen in the morning?

  Outside I realized that maybe Moke wasn’t crazy-drunk. Just standing in front of my place, I could feel that there was something wrong with the night. Like blood staining a bathtub full of warm water.

  Even though there wasn’t a breeze, trees swayed in the distance. Booms echoed in the night, as if someone was blasting. I looked up at the moonlit cirrus clouds like ash etched with silver. Rippling darkness passed across those silver edges.

  Something on the ground was casting shadows up into the night sky, sucking the moonlight away.

  “Oh, Christ, Moke,” I whispered. “What the hell have you done?” How had he done it, whatever it was?

  Indians died in the hills here under white guns. Slaves died in the cotton fields here under white whips. Generations of dirt farmers had laid their wives and kids into the ground. God only knew how many ancient grudges could be coming back to haunt us all. Well, maybe God didn’t, but I’d guess Moke knew.

  Broom in hand, I was ready to run back inside, lock the door, turn on all the lights, and take my first drink in the decade since Leah died in her warm, red-stained tub. But I couldn’t do it.

  I stood with my forehead pressed against the silvered wood of the screen door, fingers on the corroded aluminum Butter-Krust sign that served as the handle. The gritty scent of the rusted hardware cloth filled my nostrils, along with the earthy odors of night and damp. Around my feet, dust jumped as whatever they were moved behind me. “Tall spirits,” Moke had said, “blocking the night.” So tall their shadows touched the clouds.

  I tried to lift away my head and pull open the door. It was like trying to move a boulder with my fingertips. I tried to step away. It was as if I were the boulder. Then the breeze came up.

  This was no moldy scent of night. Rather, it was a stench of road kill, of stale blood, of rotten vegetables and damp wounds. I retched, fig
hting the urge to vomit on my feet, on the porch of my bar. Then the pain started.

  My head was pressed between two millstones. My chest was crushed beneath the dirt of a grave. My heart was torn by the twinned tragedies of love and death. I exhaled, closed my eyes, and let that stench of death wash over me.

  “Leah,” I begged. “Help me now.”

  She had left, in a storm of anger and sigh of depression, gotten the last word with the help of a straight razor and fifth of bourbon. The warm, red water was her grave and final accusation. She insisted that I had never understood — what it meant to be a black woman in a white man’s world, what it meant to be lonely even in the arms of her beloved. Beneath it all, the flashing rage and the Prozac and the booze, she had loved me. I knew she had loved me.

  Deep inside my scarred heart, Leah whispered that love was the only defense against the tall spirits, even such a broken love as ours. So as the tall spirit crushed me smaller and smaller, I squeezed my love for Leah out between my clenched eyelids. The saltwater benediction tumbled to the distant, dusty porch, sizzling like water dropped in a deep fryer.

  That was when I understood Moke’s pain, his scars, his stories. The tall spirit rifled through my mind and through my body like a careless toddler in Momma’s sewing chest. Needles scraped across my bone, hooks pulled muscles free from their anchors, coals burned in my skull, agony and ecstasy flooded my brain.

  “Help me, Moke!” I screamed. “Leah!”

  Then there was nothing. I lay on the porch, splinters from the ancient wood in my cheek, the pole of my broom shoved painfully deep into my armpit. I had shit my pants, and piss ran down my left thigh. Mucus poured from my nose, and my ears itched with a flood of wax. Every waste I had fled my body.

  Using the broom as a crutch, I stood. The sky was clear of shadows, but in the distance I saw them striding away. Moke had been right — they were tall spirits, stepping across power lines as if they were toys. Shaped like men, thin as walking sticks, long black cloaks flapping, dragging their shadows, the tall spirits vanished over the horizon.

  I pulled open the screen door and stepped back into my bar. I needed to strip off my filthy clothes and sponge myself clean. I needed that drink.

  The place was empty.

  “Moke!” I yelled. Wincing, I stumbled to his stool. The coffee still steamed — had so little time passed? His clothes lay in a heap where he had been sitting.

  I picked up his pair of blue work pants, then turned toward the back door. That was when I saw the eye peering in the window. The pupil was bigger than a trash can lid, the iris wider than the six-foot window frame. With a slick squelch, the lid dropped once, a giant wink, before the eye withdrew.

  I limped over there to look out. The ground shook and the trees swayed as one last shadow crossed the bottom of the moonlit clouds. Moke.

  I sponged myself down and changed into sweats from my gym bag under the prep counter. Then I put the filthy clothes — both Moke’s and mine — in the burn barrel out back. I opened the old padlock on the stairwell and climbed to the apartment where I had lived years before. I bent to finally clean the brown-stained tub. The first task was to pry the razor from her bony, cobwebbed fingers.

  Somewhere out there, tall spirits blocked the night. I hoped Moke had found peace in their mysterious company.

  William’s story is a nod to both hard-boiled private eye fiction and Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci. In Twilight, a town just outside of Faerie, Murdoch investigates a new case related to the disappearance of his partner, Keats. I saw the actual painting for the #26 cover by Fiona McAuliffe at the art show at a convention in Portland, Oregon. It wasn’t long before I was asking her about using it for an upcoming issue.

  FROM SUNSET TO THE WHITE SEA

  WILLIAM MINGIN

  It was evening in the city called Sunset, at the edge of the fields we know — or at the edge of the slums we know, anyway. Across the River Fée lay the city of Twilight, the beginning of Faerie.

  Maybe because Twilight’s so close to our world, it’s as ugly, in places, as Sunset. I should know; I’ve worked both sides of the river, had clients mortal and elfin. Whichever they were, they came to Murdoch Investigations afraid, with a beef, in some desperate need.

  My window faced west. Across the steely-dark river, red light silhouetted the chimneys and spires, like the skeletons of odd beasts, atop the tall buildings on the Twilight side of the Fée. Built of grayed blue or purple stone, they stood black and forbidding as a row of prisons against the sky.

  I was thinking about Keats, my lost partner, when there was a tap at the door. “Come in,” I said.

  She came in. Danced, if you could dance without touching the ground, and make it look natural. Wafted.

  Maybe you don’t like tall slim ripe women with a thick fall of indigo-raven hair, skin the light blue tint of shadows under a bright moon, and big, lustrous, midnight eyes, wild as untamed ponies. If so, you have my sympathy — or maybe I should have yours.

  She was human size, about 5’8”. She wore leather sandals; their straps wound from the ankle almost to the knee, in a way that drew the eye upward and tempted it to keep on going. Her frock, the color of moonlight on silver, clung about her like an adoring spirit. Her only ornaments were a ring on her left hand and a comb that held the blue-black cloud of her hair away from her face. Both were of white gold.

  What I need to know about clothes is what they say about class and money. The dress said high class, or a lot of money, or both. I’d have perked up just for the clothes, without her in them. And — I admit it — vice versa.

  “Won’t you have a seat?” I said.

  “Thank you. You are Mr. Murdoch.”

  “Yes. Mr. Keats is no longer with the firm.”

  “I know. I mean — I had heard. I was a little surprised to see his name still on your door.”

  “I’ve left it that way, for now.” Because I’m going to find him, I thought. “And you’re Miss —”

  “O’Shea. Maeve O’Shea.”

  “Well, Miss O’Shea, it seems you’ve already looked into our firm. What is it I can do for you?”

  She turned those big eyes down on her tiny Faerie purse. I expected it to whine up at her like a lapdog. When she looked back at me, her eyes were glistening. I wanted to whine like a lapdog. But something cold in the back of my brain said, She’s good.

  “I’m in trouble, Mr. Murdoch,” she said, just the tiniest oboe quiver in her voice. “Bad trouble.”

  I smiled my encourage-the-client-smile and said, “Trouble is my business, Miss O’Shea.”

  We went on for a while with her hemming and hawing and looking down at her lap, then up at me, appealingly, me smiling and encouraging and “Now, nowing” and “Nothing is as bad as it seems” and such.

  She said she sang in a nightspot near the border, the Club Tir na Nog, which I knew catered to the rougher elements of both realms. She’d gotten mixed up in a badger game, luring men high on fairy dust or drunk on moonshine to a back room with promises she would never keep; I’d heard that a lot of “luring” went on there behind the scenes. Then in would come her “husband,” the owner of the place, O’Barron, an elf who, from her description, looked more like a nightmare in red and sable than like someone who’d cobble your shoes. The poor mortal gink would empty his pockets just to get out.

  “I’m sick of it,” she said. She turned those big, deep eyes directly on me. “I’m ashamed.”

  And now she’d found out that O’Barron was running wands, amulets, enchanted swords, rings of power, and other magical matériel from Twilight to a rebel group deep inside Faerie. She was afraid; absolute monarchies don’t change easily or without bloodshed, especially when the monarchs are immortal. On top of all that, he was starting to act like an abusive husband — possessive, demanding.

  “He’s a fearsome brute,” she said. “I feel guilty drawing you into this. But I’m afraid, Mr. Murdoch. I’m a coward, I always have been. If he should
ever take a hand to me, or force me —” she looked up, her eyes bleak with fear — “I don’t know if I could stand it.”

  She took a gold-embroidered handkerchief out of her purse and daubed at her eyes. It looked nearly too big for the purse, but of course, Faerie purses are deceptive. I’d once seen a fairy in a human nightclub take some mace out of a purse smaller than Miss O’Shea’s to drive off a drunken and insulting troll. It was some mace, all right, about a foot long with an eight-pound ball. She’d knocked a dent in his rocky head, wiped the dust off on his tunic, and put the mace back in her bag, which she held in one hand like a pack of cards. That’s a Faerie purse for you.

  Miss O’Shea’s bag held other things. She took out a small piece of crumpled paper, smoothed it, and handed it to me, saying, “I found this in O’Barron’s papers.”

  It was in Keats’s hand:

  O what can ail thee, Knight at arms,

  Alone and palely loitering;

  The sedge is withered from the lake,

  And no birds sing.

  “Any idea where O’Barron got this?”

  “No. He has contacts deep in Faerie; I assumed it came from there. But I didn’t dare ask him. I brought it because I — I thought it might help you. I heard you’ve been looking for Mr. Keats. I thought if I could do something for you — you might do something for me.”

  I let that hang in the air for a moment, searching her face to see just what she did and didn’t mean. Her face was alive, proud, without shame. It seemed she meant everything those words could mean.

  “A quid pro quo,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  She looked away again. “You’re brave,” she said. “If you could help me get evidence of the wand-running, it would make him leave me alone.”