by Mike Ashley
“You almost sound,” I say, “like you’re sorry for me.”
“Oh, I am,” He says. “I pity you with a depth of understanding you could never begin to imagine. Like I said, we understand one another, just as we’re both misunderstood by all the rest of them. We could be—”
He’s squeezing my heart. Imagine you’re holding a ripe plum, and you crush it until the stone starts to dig into the web between your fingers. “Friends?” I say.
“Well, maybe not. But we could respect each other. Who is there on your side who’s ever respected you?”
“Screw you,” I say. “Just kill me and come on over.”
He sounds shocked. “But I don’t want to,” He says. “We’re not killers. We come in peace. Far better that you should understand.”
It occurs to me that all I’ve got to do is let go, and the pain will stop. It’d be the sensible thing to do. I’ve never had much to do with pain, I’m delighted to say, never been seriously ill or anything like that; so handling it isn’t one of my few skills. Giving up, though, I’ve always had a knack for.
“All right,” I say, and I gather a loop of the thread round my left hand. “Point taken. I give up.”
“You won’t regret it.” He sounds so kind. “Come through.”
“I can’t quite –”
“Here,” He says, “take my hand.”
“Got you!”
I pull; the line holds. I snap the box shut, jump up and sit on the lid. I can feel Him, His furious struggles as He pounds against the sides of the box, but I’m not going to budge; because I know that so long as I keep my bum on this lid He can’t get out. So blatant, really, so obvious; but for all Their strength, They’re simple creatures, and They fall for it every time. All you’ve got to do, once you’ve recognised Their strength and your weakness, and you’ve acknowledged your common ground, how you’re both lonely outcasts in a hostile world – it’s so easy, when you’ve forged that bond of common ground between you, to turn the tables: and next thing you know, He’s in the box and you’re sitting on the lid, laughing like a drain.
(I was hopeless at all that stuff at the Seminary – went over my head like geese going south for the winter – but I still passed. Borrowed a friend’s revision notes. Odd how some things stay with you, years later.)
Eventually, they come and take over; five men from the Warden’s office. They don’t look so mighty and proud now, not after a very long, hard day at the office. They look drawn and grey and bleached, and when they see me sitting on the lid of the box, grinning, you can see them slumping with relief. “You handled it all right, then?” they say. I nod.
“No bother,” I reply.
They come and put their seal on the box, concentrating hard on the job in hand (it’d be a disaster if He got out now, after all my hard work). Then they tie a rope round the box to carry it with, and they stop for a moment. “Thanks,” they say.
“You’re welcome,” I reply.
“It’s been a bitch of a day,” they tell me. “Nine of the bloody things, all at the same time. It’s a record. The most there’s ever been in one day was six, and that was 500 years ago.”
I shake my head. “Bad business,” I say.
“Bad business,” they agree. “Still, we coped.”
I smile. “That we did.”
They leave. I don’t. I’m not going anywhere. I still have 3,000 barrels of pickled herrings to peer into before I can go home, because I have work to do, and the boss pays me to keep 433/7c off his back, not save the world.
I get finished just in time; as I’m leaving, the foreman’s turning up with the loading crew. I yawn as I wish him good morning.
“You’re cutting it fine,” he says. “What happened? Fall asleep?”
He wouldn’t understand. “Something like that,” I say.
He grins. “Almost forgot,” he says. “Boss wants to see you. Something about pushing him over in the yard.”
“Oh yes,” I say. “That.”
His grin widens, like a breach in a sea wall. “Don’t suppose I’ll be seeing you round here again,” he says.
“Don’t suppose you will,” I reply. “Well, it’s all yours. Good hunting.”
I take my coat and head over to the boss’s office, to face a different sort of demon of pure evil, one I’m not going to be able to deal with quite so easily. At least I know my limitations.
(In case you were wondering, the answer to Etzel’s Ninth is entropy. Guessing the answer is dead easy. It’s proving it that drives wise men crazy.)
THE WITCH’S BICYCLE
Tim Pratt
Tim Pratt (b. 1976) is a poet, author and reviewer who hails from Oakland, California. He currently works as an associate editor at Locus, the news magazine of the science-fiction field, and co-edits the little magazine Flytrap. Although still quite new to the game his work is being noticed. The title story of his first collection, Little Gods (2003), was nominated for the Nebula Award presented by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, and he’s been shortlisted for the Campbell Award for best new writer.
The title of the following story, which is also in Little Gods, may conjure up an image of the wonderful Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West at the start of the 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz, but no matter how nasty you thought she was, the witch in the following story is a thousand times more evil.
EVEN HER BICYCLE WAS evil.
A heavy black chain wrapped around the frame and front tire secured the bicycle to an iron lamppost in front of Antiquities and Tangibles, a cramped and jumbled antique store downtown. The bicycle seemed to strain against the chain like a half-starved greyhound, skeletal and ferocious. It was a heavy bike with wheelguards that had been new in the 1950s. The frame was a dusky red, the color of rubies from a long-forgotten treasure trove. The handlebars curled like ram’s horns. A headlamp on the front glittered in the afternoon sunlight, throwing bright flashes. The seat was pitted black leather, and the spokes were bright, shiny chrome. The pedals were spiked to grip the soles of shoes, and cut anyone foolish enough to try and pedal the bicycle barefooted.
The bicycle’s owner emerged from the antique store. Her hair and her dress were the same red as the bike frame, like faded silk roses, her black leather beret matched the seat, and chrome rings flashed on her fingers. Her eyes, before she put on her sunglasses, were as bright and reflective as her bicycle’s headlamp. She carried a plastic bag with a real drawstring, and something inside the bag rattled and clattered. Something old and obscure, surely, as it had come from Antiquities and Tangibles, the Sargasso Sea of the antiques trade, the place where only the most marginalized and unappreciated remnants of the past fetched up.
She unlocked the chain and wrapped it around her waist like a belt, then fastened it, spinning the combination lock into non-sense numbers. She dropped her bag in the chrome basket behind the seat and mounted the bicycle. Her boots were leather, with chrome buckles. She cooed to her bicycle, and it seemed almost to steady itself, as if some gyroscopic mechanism kept it upright. As she pedaled away down the sidewalk, she sang, and the hum of the smoothly oiled bicycle chain and the rasp of the fat tires on the pavement seemed to sing with her.
She sang “What Is This Thing Called Love?”
Behind her, in the basket, the bag’s contents shifted and clattered, not at all in time with the song.
Cory sat out behind the high school, throwing rocks at a sewer grate, waiting for the bus to come back. Because his school was overcrowded, there were two separate bus schedules. First load left right after school, and went fully-loaded. The second load made it back about forty minutes later, each bus picking up a dozen or so leftover students. For some reason Cory’s subdivision had drawn second-load status, and now he had to suffer through this empty after-school time. He had to get a car next year, or at least make friends with someone who drove. The other people who rode his bus were out behind the gym smoking pot, probably. Even they didn�
��t want to have anything to do with him. At least they weren’t violent – just stupid. Unlike some –
“Look who’s here,” a smooth voice said from his left. Cory hunched his shoulders. School had only been in session for three weeks, and he’d already grown to hate that voice. He didn’t even know the kid’s name, the leader of the vicious little trio. He didn’t have any classes with him, and in a high school of 2,000 students it wasn’t surprising that he never saw him during the day. But this kid – Cory thought of him as “Rocko” because he looked like a young and pugnacious version of Edward G. Robinson, though his voice was surprisingly pleasant – this kid rode second load on one of the other buses, and apparently had nothing better to do in these forty dead minutes after school than look for people to torment. His little trio – the other two Cory had dubbed “Angel” and “Curly,” after Rocko’s henchman from the movie Key Largo – usually hung around by the vending machines, harassing the freshmen who emerged from after-school band practice to get sodas or chips. Cory had run afoul of them once and gotten away with no worse than a shoving, and since then he’d spent his time reading outside or in odd corners of the school, occasionally slipping away when he heard them approaching. It could be worse, he supposed – in lots of schools there were stabbings and shootings, but as his mom reminded him, this was a good school in a good area. Which meant only the risk of being beaten up by three guys – he wasn’t likely to die.
Apparently the band kids had grown wary, and the trio had gotten bored and gone searching for new meat, because here they were. Cory had been so engrossed in stone-tossing that he hadn’t heard them coming.
Rocko sat down beside him and slung an arm over his shoulder. Cory shrugged him off, and Rocko laughed, that pleasant, easy laugh. “You like throwing rocks, huh? You want to have a little rock-throwing contest?”
Cory started to stand up. Rocko grabbed the arm of his jacket and pulled him back down. Cory tried to jerk his arm away, but Rocko held him tight, not even moving from his place on the curb. “Just a friendly game,” he said.
Cory glanced at Rocko’s buddies. Angel and Curly lounged against a science classroom, watching him, sneering. Angel was black and Curly was Hispanic. Say what you would about Rocko, he wasn’t a racist. As long as you were mean-spirited and servile, there was a place for you in his gang.
“No, thanks,” Cory said. “I don’t feel like playing a game.”
Rocko ignored him. “The way I figure it, there’s nothing too hard about throwing rocks into a grate. That’s not any kind of a challenge, you know? Now, if you were aiming rocks at a person, and that person was trying to get away – that’d be challenging. Don’t you think?”
Cory couldn’t believe he was hearing this.
“We’d need bigger rocks, though,” Rocko said thoughtfully.
Cory jerked his arm away again, and this time broke free.
“Ready to start running?” Rocko asked.
“What makes you be like this?” Cory asked, frowning at Rocko’s froglike, smiling face. “Why do you do this?”
“I look at it like dogshit,” Rocko said. “There’s dogshit on your shoe, you scrape it off, right? I look at you, and I see dogshit, but I can’t get rid of you, you just keep . . . hanging around. If I can’t get rid of you, I can at least let you know you’re dogshit, right? Make sure you don’t forget it.”
Cory just stared at him. He’d dealt with bullies in the past, and small-scale violence, but those had always been brutally stupid people, strutting for their friends. Rocko sounded so . . . reasonable.
“There’s just this look about you,” Rocko went on. “The way you walk around, all hunched up, the way you always look like you smell something bad. I see you in the halls and it disgusts me.” He shrugged. “So I guess that’s why I do this. Plus, my psychiatrist says I’m in a really explorative stage, that I’m testing my boundaries and trying to define myself.”
Cory took a step backwards. Where could he possibly go? The school wasn’t that big, and he had to come back here to catch the bus anyway. He couldn’t outrun them if they decided to chase him.
“Anyway,” Rocko said. “The place where I used to live, before I moved here, they had security guards everywhere, they had metal detectors, they had to lock down the classrooms a couple of times because of riots in the halls. Then I come to this place and there’s no cops or anything. I can’t believe it, I mean, I know it’s the stricks, but really. So yeah, I guess I’m just . . . testing the boundaries.” He stood up. Angel and Curly stood a little straighter when Rocko rose, like well-trained dogs. “I’m not going to kill you or anything,” Rocko said. “But . . . you know . . . it’s a long year. No telling what could happen.” He glanced at Angel. “How long ’til the bus comes?”
“Fifteen minutes,” Angel said. He did not have Rocko’s orator’s voice. His voice sounded like someone falling down a flight of stairs.
“I gotta get a sodding car,” Rocko said, shaking his head. “This is just ridiculous. Another year until I turn sixteen, can you believe that?”
“You could always get a bicycle,” Cory said. He wasn’t sure why – it just popped out.
“What am I, ten years old?” Rocko said.
“Let’s beat his ass,” Curly said. “This talking’s bullshit.”
“Talking’s not bullshit,” Rocko said. “But there does come a time for talk to end. You’ve got ten minutes, guys. Have fun.”
“We’re not like him,” Curly said, approaching. “We’re not testing boundaries or anything.”
“Nah,” Angel agreed.
Rocko sat on the curb, seemingly oblivious to the impending violence picking up rocks and examining them.
Cory couldn’t do much but run. Probably a couple of teachers were still hanging around the office, and if he got really desperate he could burst into the band classroom and take refuge there until the bus came. Everyone would think he was a pussy, but he’d rather be mocked than beaten. He backed up, trying to gauge the right time to dash. He could head for the dark covered area between the gym and the science buildings, the place everybody called “the Tunnel,” and then break across the courtyard and get into the main building. Maybe they wouldn’t catch him.
“What’s up, guys?” a girl’s voice said from the direction of the Tunnel. Angel, Curly, and Cory all looked.
The girl was tall and brunette, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. She wore a striped field-hockey uniform, and there were bits of grass stuck to her knees. She held a hockey stick, resting it across her shoulder, and for a moment Cory thought she looked like a particularly athletic incarnation of Death, armed with some kind of wooden practice scythe. “You guys waiting for the bus?” she asked, all innocence.
“We were just waiting for you, baby,” Curly said, smiling widely and stepping toward her.
Cory, relieved to no longer be the focus of attention, relaxed, then immediately felt ashamed. Now they were going to give this girl shit, and he couldn’t do anything about it – why should he feel better at her expense?
“I heard all you field hockey chicks are lesbians,” Curly said, still smiling. “Wanna prove me wrong?”
She flipped her ponytail. “Oh,” she said, in a bored voice. “I didn’t realize you were assholes, or I wouldn’t have bothered you.”
Angel laughed.
She looked at him. “That was an inclusive comment.”
“Bitch,” Curly said. “I know—”
“Now, now,” Rocko said, rising from his place on the sidewalk. “That’s no way to talk to a lady.”
“She shouldn’t talk to me like she did,” Curly said. “Nobody talks to me that way.”
“Sticks and stones may break your bones,” Rocko said. “And, as you might have noticed, she does have a stick, and you do have bones.”
Curly snorted. “Shit. What’s she going to do with that?”
The girl smiled at him. She had braces, but Cory still thought it was a beautiful smile, if a little
nasty and malicious. She didn’t move the stick, didn’t thump it into her palm, nothing – just stood there, smiling.
“Shit,” Curly said again. “Ugly bitch ain’t worth the trouble.” He turned his back and slouched away. Angel glanced at Rocko, then went with Curly, back toward the band practice rooms.
The girl glanced at Cory. “You’re not saying much. Are you the ringmaster of this circus?”
“No,” Rocko said. “That would be me. But I wish you wouldn’t judge me by the company I keep. Good help’s hard to find.”
“So what are you doing here, then?” she asked Cory, ignoring Rocko.
“Just . . . waiting for the bus,” he said.
She nodded. “Me, too. First time I’ve had to ride it. I used to ride home with a friend, but now practice has started . . .” She shrugged.
Cory was never good at talking to people, especially not to girls, especially not in front of Rocko.
“He’s really not worth talking to,” Rocko said. “He just asks a lot of stupid—”
“I think your friends are waiting for you,” she said, glancing at Rocko. “Maybe you should go check on them, make sure they don’t get lost or something.”
Rocko frowned, then smoothed back his dark hair. “Which bus do you ride?”
“None of your fucking business,” she said.
Rocko narrowed his eyes. “Just wondered if you were on mine.”
She simply looked at him.
“Fine,” Rocko said. “See you around.” He glanced at Cory. “And you – I’ll definitely see you around.” He sauntered off.
“He’s a little shit, isn’t he?” the girl said, watching him go. She glanced at Cory. “I’m Heather.”
“Cory.”
“Those guys bother you a lot?”