Wizards: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy

by Gardner Dozois

  I looked at Winter. His face had gone slack, except for his mouth: he looked as though he were biting down on something hard.

  “He’s going to cut the other ones, too,” he said. He didn’t sound disbelieving or sad or even angry; more like he was saying something everyone knew was true, like It’ll snow soon or Tomorrow’s Sunday. “He’ll pay the twenty-thousand-dollar fine, just like he did down in Kennebunkport. He’ll wait and do it in the middle of the night when I’m not here. And the trees will be gone.”

  “No, he will not,” said Vala. Her voice was nearly as calm as Winter’s. There was a subdued roar as the motorboat’s engine turned over, and the Boston Whaler shot away from the dock, towards the Ice Queen.

  “No,” Vala said again, and she stooped and picked up a rock. A small gray rock, just big enough to fit inside her fist, one side of it encrusted with barnacles. She straightened and stared at the ocean, her eyes no longer sky-blue but the pure deep gray of a stone that’s been worn smooth by the sea, with no pupil in them; and shining like water in the sun.

  “Skammastu peî, Thomas Tierney. Farthu til fjandanns!” she cried, and threw the rock towards the water. “Farthu! Låttu peog hverfa!”

  I watched it fly through the air, then fall, hitting the beach a long way from the waterline with a small thud. I started to look at Vala, and stopped.

  From the water came a grinding sound, a deafening noise like thunder; only this was louder than a thunderclap and didn’t last so long, just a fraction of a second. I turned and shaded my eyes, staring out to where the Boston Whaler arrowed towards Tierney’s yacht. A sudden gust of wind stung my eyes with spray; I blinked, then blinked again in amazement.

  A few feet from the motorboat a black spike of stone shadowed the water. Not a big rock—it might have been a dolphin’s fin, or a shark’s, but it wasn’t moving.

  And it hadn’t been there just seconds before. It had never been there, I knew that. I heard a muffled shout, then the frantic whine of the motorboat’s engine being revved too fast—and too late.

  With a sickening crunch, the Boston Whaler ran onto the rock. Winter yelled in dismay as Alford’s orange-clad figure was thrown into the water. For a second Thomas Tierney remained upright, his arms flailing as he tried to grab at Alford. Then, as though a trapdoor had opened beneath him, he dropped through the bottom of the boat and disappeared.

  Winter raced towards the water. I ran after him.

  “Stay with Vala!” Winter grabbed my arm. Alford’s orange life vest gleamed from on top of the rock where he clung. On board the Ice Queen, someone yelled through a megaphone, and I could see another craft, a little inflated Zodiac, drop into the gray water. Winter shook me fiercely. “Justin! I said, stay with her—”

  He looked back towards the beach. So did I.

  Vala was nowhere to be seen. Winter dropped my arm, but before he could say anything there was a motion among the rocks.

  And there was Vala, coming into sight like gathering fog. Even from this distance I could see how her eyes glittered, blue-black like a winter sky; and I could tell she was smiling.

  THE crew of the Ice Queen rescued Alford quickly, long before the Coast Guard arrived. Winter and I stayed on the beach for several hours, while the search and rescue crews arrived and the Navy Falcons flew by overhead, in case Tierney came swimming to shore, or in case his body washed up.

  But it never did. That spar of rock had ripped a huge hole in the Boston Whaler, a bigger hole even than you’d think; but no one blamed Alford. All you had to do was take a look at the charts and see that there had never been a rock there, ever. Though it’s there now, I can tell you that. I see it every day when I look out from the windows at Winter’s house.

  I never asked Vala about what happened. Winter had a grim expression when we finally went back to his place late that afternoon. Thomas Tierney was a multimillionaire, remember, and even I knew there would be an investigation and interviews and TV people.

  But everyone on board the Ice Queen had witnessed what happened, and so had Al Alford; and while they’d all seen Winter arguing with Tierney, there’d been no exchange of blows, not even any pushing, and no threats on Winter’s part—Alford testified to that. The King’s Pine was gone, but two remained; and a bunch of people from the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club and places like that immediately filed a lawsuit against Tierney’s estate, to have all the property on the old Packard Farm turned into a nature preserve.

  Which I thought was good, but it still won’t bring the other tree back.

  One day after school, a few weeks after the boat sank, I was helping to put the finishing touches on Winter’s house. Just about everything was done, except for the fireplace—there were still piles of rocks everywhere and plastic buckets full of mortar and flat stones for the hearth.

  “Justin.” Vala appeared behind me so suddenly I jumped. “Will you come with me, please?”

  I stood and nodded. She looked really pregnant now, and serious.

  But happy, too. In the next room we could hear Winter working with a sander. Vala looked at me and smiled, put a finger to her lips then touched her finger to my chin. This time, it didn’t ache with cold.

  “Come,” she said.

  Outside it was cold and gray, the middle of October, but already most of the trees were bare, their leaves torn away by a storm a few nights earlier. We headed for the woods behind the house, past the quince bush, its branches stripped of leaves and all the hummingbirds long gone to warmer places. Vala wore her same bright blue rubber shoes and Winter’s rolled-up jeans.

  But even his big sweatshirt was too small now to cover her belly, so my mother had knit her a nice big sweater and given her a warm plaid coat that made Vala look even more like a kid, except for her eyes and that way she would look at me sometimes and smile, as though we both knew a secret. I followed her to where the path snaked down to the beach and tried not to glance over at the base of the cliff. The King’s Pine had finally fallen and wedged between the crack in the huge rocks there, so that now seaweed was tangled in its dead branches, and all the rocks were covered with yellow pine needles.

  “Winter has to go into town for a few hours,” Vala said, as though answering a question. “I need you to help me with something.”

  We reached the bottom of the path and picked our way across the rocks until we reached the edge of the shore. A few gulls flew overhead, screaming, and the wind blew hard against my face and bare hands. I’d followed Vala outside without my coat. When I looked down, I saw that my fingers were bright red. But I didn’t feel cold at all.

  “Here,” murmured Vala.

  She walked, slowly, to where a gray rock protruded from the gravel beach. It was roughly the shape and size of an arm

  Then I drew up beside Vala and saw that it really was an arm—part of one, anyway, made of smooth gray stone, like marble only darker, but with no hand and broken just above the elbow. Vala stood and looked at it, her lips pursed; then stooped to pick it up.

  “Will you carry this, please?” she said.

  I didn’t say anything, just held out my arms, as though she were going to fill them with firewood. When she set the stone down I flinched—not because it was heavy, though it was, but because it looked exactly like a real arm. I could even see where the veins had been, in the crook of the elbow, and the wrinkled skin where the arm had bent.

  “Justin,” Vala said. I looked up to see her blue-black eyes fixed on me. “Come on. It will get dark soon.”

  I followed her as she walked slowly along the beach, like someone looking for sea glass or sand dollars. Every few feet she would stop and pick something up—a hand, a foot, a long piece of stone that was most of a leg—then turn and set it carefully into my arms. When I couldn’t carry any more, she picked up one last small rock—a clenched fist—and made her way slowly back to the trail.

  We made several more trips that day, and for several days after that. Each time, we would return to the house and Va
la would fit the stones into the unfinished fireplace, covering them with other rocks so that no one could see them. Or if you did see one, you’d think maybe it was just part of a broken statue, or a rock that happened to look like a foot, or a shoulder blade, or the cracked round back of a head.

  I couldn’t bring myself to ask Vala about it. But I remembered how the Boston Whaler had looked when the Coast Guard dragged it onshore, with a small ragged gash in its bow, and a much, much bigger hole in the bottom, as though something huge and heavy had crashed through it. Like a meteor, maybe. Or a really big rock, or like if someone had dropped a granite statue of a man into the boat.

  Not that anyone had seen that happen. I told myself that maybe it really was a statue—maybe a statue had fallen off a ship or been pushed off a cliff or something.

  But then one day we went down to the beach, the last day actually, and Vala made me wade into the shallow water. She pointed at something just below the surface, something round and white, like a deflated soccer ball.

  Only it wasn’t a soccer ball. It was Thomas Tierney’s head: the front of it, anyway, the one part Vala hadn’t already found and built into the fireplace.

  His face.

  I pulled it from the water and stared at it. A green scum of algae covered his eyes, which were wide and staring. His mouth was open so you could see where his tongue had been before it broke off, leaving a jagged edge in the hole of his screaming mouth.

  “Loksins,” said Vala. She took it from me easily, even though it was so heavy I could barely hold it. “At last…”

  She turned and walked back up to the house.

  THAT was three months ago. Winter’s house is finished now, and Winter lives in it, along with Winter’s wife.

  And their baby. The fireplace is done, and you can hardly see where there is a round broken stone at the very top, which if you squint and look at it in just the right light, like at night when only the fire is going, looks kind of like a face. Winter is happier than I’ve ever seen him, and my mom and I go over a lot, to visit him and Vala and the baby, who is just a few weeks old now and so cute you wouldn’t believe it, and tiny, so tiny I was afraid to hold her at first but Vala says not to worry—I may be like her big brother now, but someday, when the baby grows up, she will be the one to always watch out for me. They named her Gerda, which means Protector; and for a baby she is incredibly strong.

  A Diorama of the Infernal Regions, or The Devil’s Ninth Question

  ANDY DUNCAN

  Here’s as vivid an adventure as you’re ever likely to meet, funny, folksy, scary, and wise, about a girl who runs from magic of one sort only to run headlong into sinister magic of another kind, make friends with ghosts, live in a house of mystery, and compete with the Devil Himself…

  Andy Duncan made his first sale, to Asimov’s Science Fiction, in 1995, and quickly made others, to Starlight, Sci Fiction, Dying For It, Realms of Fantasy, and Weird Tales, as well as several more sales to Asimov’s. By the beginning of the new century, he was widely recognized as one of the most individual, quirky, and flavorful new voices on the scene today. In 2001 he won two World Fantasy Awards, one for his story “The Pottawatomie Giant,” and one for his landmark first collection, Beluthahatchie and Other Stories; in 2002 his story “The Chief Designer” won a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His most recent books are a fiction anthology coedited with F. Brett Cox, Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic; and a non-fiction book, Alabama Curiosities. A graduate of the Clarion West writers’ workshop in Seattle, he was raised in Batesburg, South Carolina, and now lives in Frostburg, Maryland, with his wife, Sydney, where he edits Overdrive magazine, “The Voice of the American Trucker.”

  MY name is Pearleen Sunday, though I was always called Pearl, and this is the story of how I met the widow of Flatland House and her 473 dead friends and sang a duet with the Devil’s son-in-law and earned a wizard’s anger by setting that wizard free.

  At the time I did these things, I was neither child nor woman, neither hay nor grass. I was like a cat with the door disease. She scratches to be let in or scratches to be let out, but when you open the door she only stands halfway and cocks her head and thinks deep cat thoughts till you could drown her. Had I been on either side of the door that summer, things might have turned out differently, but I could not decide, and so the door stood open to cold winds and marvels.

  I grew up in Chattanooga in Professor Van Der Ast’s Mammoth Cosmopolitan Musée and Pavilion of Science and Art. Musée is the French word for museum, and cosmopolitan means citified, and Professor Van Der Ast was born Hasil Bowersox in Rising Fawn, Georgia. Whether his were the quality Bowersoxes, who pronounce “Bower” to rhyme with “lower,” or the common Bowersoxes, who pronounce “Bower” to rhyme with “scour,” I cannot say, for Professor Van Der Ast never answered to either. The rest of the name of Professor Van Der Ast’s Mammoth Cosmopolitan Musée and Pavilion of Science and Art is self-explanatory, although the nature of science and art is subject to debate, and it was not a pavilion but a three-story brickfront, and I would not call it mammoth either, though it did hold a right smart of things.

  You would not find the museum if you looked today. It sat in the shadow of the downtown end of the new Walnut Street Bridge across the Tennessee River. Years before, General Sherman had built a bridge there that did not last any time before God washed it away, but He seemed to be tolerating the new one for now.

  I was told my parents left me in a hatbox in the alley between the museum and the tobacco warehouse. Two Fiji cannibals on their smoke break took pity and took me inside to the Professor, who made me a paying attraction before I was two years of age. The sign, I was told, read TRANSPARENT HUMAN HEAD! ALL LIVE AND ON THE INSIDE! What was inside was me, sucking a sugar tit with a bright lamp behind my head so my little brain and blood vessels could be seen. Every word on the sign was true.

  A young girl like myself with no mother, father, or schooling could do worse in those days than work in an educational museum, which offered many career opportunities even for girls with no tattoos or beards and all their limbs. Jobs for girls at Professor Van Der Ast’s included Neptuna the Living Mermaid, who combed her hair and switched her tail in a pool all day, and the Invisible Girl, who hid behind a sheet and spoke fortunes into a trumpet, and Zalumma Agra the Circassian Princess, Purest Example of the White Race, who when snatched from the slave traders of Constantinople had left behind most of her clothes, though not enough to shut us down. Our Purest Example of the White Race in summer 1895 was my friend Sally Ann Rummage of Mobile, Alabama, whose mother had been a slave, though not in Constantinople. Sally Ann was ashamed of the museum and wrote her parents that she had become a teacher, which I suppose she had.

  I had none of those jobs that summer because I was in that in-between age, and the Circassian Princess in particular was no in-between sort of job. No, I was so out of sorts with myself and the world that Professor Van Der Ast cast me entirely from the sight of the paying public, behind our Diorama of the Infernal Regions.

  Now a diorama in those days was only a painting, but a painting so immense that no one ever would see it all at once. It was painted on a long strip of canvas ten feet high, and to see it, you rolled it out of a great spool, like a bolt of cloth in a dressmaker’s shop for giants, and as it rolled out of the first spool it rolled back up in a second spool about twenty feet away. In between the spools the customers stood shoulder to shoulder and admired the sights that trundled past.

  The spools were turned by an engine, but someone in the back had to keep the engine running and make sure the canvas threaded smooth, without snagging and tearing—for your town may have had a fine new Hell, but Chattanooga’s was as ragged and patched as a family Bible. That someone in the back was me. I also had to work the effects. As the diorama moved past, and as Professor Van Der Ast stood on the public side and narrated the spiel, I opened and closed a bank of lanterns that beamed light through parts of the canvas—to make
the flames of Hell flicker, and bats wheel through the air, and imps and satyrs wink in and out of existence like my evil thoughts as I sweated and strained like a fireman in a furnace room. Every day in the spotty mirror over my washstand upstairs, I rubbed my arms and shoulders and wondered what man would ever want a woman with muscles, and what man she might want in return.

  Ours was the only diorama I ever saw, but Professor Van Der Ast said that one famous diorama in New York City was a view of the riverbank along the entire length of the Mississippi, from Minnesota to New Orleans. Park Avenue swells in boater hats could lounge in air-cooled comfort and watch it all slide past: eagle-haunted bluffs, woodlands a-creep with Indians, spindly piers that stopped at the overalled butts of barefoot younguns, brawling river towns that bled filth for miles downstream. Professor Van Der Ast himself had been no farther north than Cleveland, Tennessee, but he described New York’s Mississippi just as well as he described Chattanooga’s Infernal Regions. You felt like you were there.

  “Observe, my friends, from your safe vantage point this side of the veil, the ghastly wonders of the Infernal as they pass before you. I say, as they pass before you!” (The machinery was old and froze up sometimes.) “First on this ancient scroll, bequeathed us by the Chaldean martyrs, witness the sulfurous vapors of Lake Avernus, over which no sane bird will fly. Here is Briareus with his hundred arms, laboring to drag a chain the width of a stout man’s waist, and at the end of that mighty leash snaps the hound Cerberus, with his fifty heads, each of his fifty necks a-coil with snakes. Here is the stern ferryman who turns away all wretches who die without Christian burial. Next are the weeping lovers wringing their hands in groves of myrtle, never to be reunited with their soul mates. Madame, my handkerchief. Your pity does you honor. Next is the whip of scorpions that flays those who believed their sins concealed in life. Here is the nine-acre giant Tityus, chained at the bottom of the abyssal gulf. Here are sufferers chin deep in water they are doomed never to drink, while others are doomed to bail the water with sieves.”