Billy Tumult has those stones. He surely does.
* * *
Half-naked Grendel comes on like blinking, like he doesn’t really understand physical spaces. Which he don’t, but all the same he’s fast and he’s focused, he sees Billy the way they mostly can’t, sees him as an external object rather than part of the diorama. Not your common or garden mommy issue, this fucker, but a real nasty customer, maybe even a kink in the standing wave. Blink! Walking outside the smithy. Blink! Hat shop, dressmaker. Blink! By the trees outside the mayor’s place. Blink! Right there, dead on his mark where he should be for the showdown, except it’s too soon. Can’t draw down on him, not yet, the patient’s mind will fracture him away. It’s not the right time. Got to earn your conclusions. This is the chitchat segment, bad guy banter.
Heard you might be in town, Billy says, figured I’d come and see if you were that stupid.
White teeth under thin lips. Patient presents with anhedonia: can’t feel joy, can’t even feel pleasure, just nothing. Only pain and less pain, sadness and more sadness. Whole top half of his spectrum is missing. Grendel is stealing all the best stuff like a leech, keeping it in that room back there above the store.
Figured you’d stay out in the wilderness, Billy suggests, figured you had maybe a cave out there, livin’ on human arms and all, figured you’d feel safe being a wild beast. No place for you in here, you have to know that. It’s time to give it up. I’ll go easy on you. Like hell he will. Ugliest fucker Billy’s ever seen, standing there without moving his eyes, turning his head like a goddam owl. The weird face twists and tilts, and off somewhere behind there’s a laugh, an old woman cackle. Billy looks for her, can’t find her. Always check your corners.
Patient says he’s being watched, all the time, can’t shake the feeling, paranoia with all the trimmings.
There is no patient, Grendel whispers—Billy can hear it like he’s right there behind him, and then he is, actually is right there, cold breath on Billy’s neck—there’s just us.
Oh, shit, Billy Tumult thinks, like a lightbulb just before it pops.
* * *
This is the cave where Grendel lives. Right now it’s in a room over the hardware store, but it could be anywhere because it’s basically a state of mind. It’s a cave because Grendel lives in it. If you went in—well, if you went in you’d probably die, but if you went in without dying—you’d see it as a great dripping space full of twisting faces drawn in black on shadow, lit by the glimmer of a solitary camp fire and the reflected sheen of bullion. By the fire you’d see Grendel, crouched in his long coat, roasting fish for his mother for her dinner. On a stout stick you’d see a head that looks a lot like Billy Tumult’s. It would be unclear if it’s a trophy or a dessert.
What Grendel sees, if Grendel sees or even thinks at all, we do not know.
* * *
Billy Tumult, on his stick, takes a moment to contemplate the forgotten virtue of humility.
Goddammit.
He was operating on his own self. How did he ever get that stupid? And why can’t he remember? Well, he can think of reasons, reasons for both. Can’t be much of a psychic surgeon if you’ve got your own crippling issues, can’t exactly trust the competition much, can’t be seen to go to a therapist. How’d that play on cable? Not well.
And as to forgetting, well, that could be a mistake or a choice he’s made, maybe the stakes are high and he doesn’t want to cramp his decision making. Maybe he wanted to be sure he’d do what it took, deliver a cure even if some of the loss was painful. Maybe Grendel’s got roots in something Billy’d ideally like to hang onto, good memories from the old days, whatever. But clear enough: this fucker needs to be got, because he is one terrifying sumbitch.
Which is going to be hard to arrange from the top of a goddam stick in a goddam cave.
* * *
Top of the morning to you, Missus Roth, Marshall William says, tips his hat. And to you, twinkles the merry widow on her horse, thirty five years of age at most, sure in the saddle and a fine figure of a woman. William wishes she’d stop and pass the time a little but she never does. I hear there was some excitement earlier, she tells him, I hear it was quite unsettling. Oh, well, yes, there was some excitement, William says, but it’s all done now. A man come to town lookin’ for a fugitive, your Mister Grendel as it happens, but it was all a misunderstanding if you can believe it, and the fella’s gone on his way and no harm done. Is that right, says Evangeline Roth, is that right, indeed? And Marshall William assures her that it is, misses the flicker in her eyes, the hardness that says he’s just fallen in her estimation, fallen a good long way and may now never resurface. That’s fine, she says then, for Mister Grendel is a gentleman I’m sure. And she goes on her way to market. That’s a fine figure of a woman, William murmurs, and bold for a respectable widow to wear a vermillion chapeau to go out riding, bold and quite suitable on her to be sure.
Evangeline Roth married a young preacher in Spokane, Missouri, when she was only twenty, loved him more than life, saw him die on the way out west of a snake bite. The thing had lunged for her and he put out his hand to take the strike, the wound festered and that was that. They had no children: they were waiting for the right time. She learned to shoot from a carnival girl, learned to sit a horse the same way, has no intention of being a second class anything, not here or in any other town. Owns the hardware store in her own name and takes in lodgers when it suits her, knows fine well there’s a darkness in her house now, a bad place that needs dealing with the way you’d bag a hornet’s nest and put it in the river. Looks back over her sharp shoulder at Marshall William and growls. Useless.
But speaking of the river—she taps her heels to the flanks of the horse—well, now, wasn’t there a place once? A wide strand where all manner of things wash up, jetsam and littoral peculiars. Yes, indeed, some distance out of town, a half day’s riding and a little more. Widow Roth, with a few necessaries in her saddlebags, makes her way along the old mule trail and past the abandoned mines, across the yucca plain to the very spot, where the wide blue water winds about the sand, and removes her clothes to work magic. She has no idea if nudity is requisite, but likewise no intention of making a mess of things for the sake of crinolines and stays.
That night on the white sand she draws all manner of significant ideograms, according to her strongly-held opinions. She dances—furtively at first, for it is one thing to be discovered nude by a river where after all anyone might reasonably bathe, but quite another to be seen cavorting—but eventually she stretches out her hands to the world and spins and leaps with her whole remarkable self. She invokes angels and local gods she has heard about from local people, performs whatever syncretist rituals are in line with her understanding of divinity. Overall, indeed, she does the best she can with what she has, promising a small sheep if such is required, or good strong whisky and tobacco, or a life of virtue and contemplation on the other hand, and heartfelt apologies for this behavior. The point is, this thing must be done, she repeats over and over to the wind. It must be done.
The night seems not to care. In the end, she lies exhausted and dusty on her back and just shrieks at the sky, conscious that here at last she has perhaps finally come to an understanding of what magic and religion truly are. And at dawn, through gummed eyes, she sees the result of her exhortations and exertions washed to shore by the breeze: a strange contraption like a sword or flintlock, to be worn as near as she can tell in the small of the back. Inscribed upon the hilt are occult symbols: Combine Medical Industries: NIS 3.1.a.
This is a river in a dream, and as such washes through all caves and all valleys, and will in good conscience respond to such desperation as it can.
* * *
Grendel springs from his sleep, from his golden bed, jointless neck twisting. Snatches up his coat. Pauses to strike at Billy Tumult’s living head. Ow, Billy Tumult says in the empty cave, and hears Grendel’s mother chortle from the dark. She must be able to fly, thinks B
illy Tumult on his stick. That must be it. She’s never where she should be and always where you don’t want her.
No time for that now: through the shadows skitters spidery Grendel, owl eyes bright and fingers grasping. Blink blink here and blink blink there, but he has no idea what to look for, knows only that something is wrong. Peers in through the high windows of the saloon, looking for another lawman. Perhaps Marshall William’s found his steel? But no. There he is, stuffed shirt presiding over a poker tournament, the Yupik winning, yes, of course. Where away?
So very close, did he but know. Evangeline Roth stands in her boudoir, scant yards from the door she rents to Grendel, the entrance to the cave. A sensible jacket and good trousers are important in such moments. She doesn’t bother to put the scalpel in its holster, doesn’t propose for one moment to let it out of her hand until she’s done with her task. No idle oath, this, but pure practical terror, which she feels sure is a better guide to questing behavior than any bold pledge or pretty couplet.
Amazing, she considers, how impossibly hard it is, in a nightmare, to open the doors of one’s own house.
But she does.
On the roof of the mayor’s mansion, Grendel gives a shriek and spins in the moonlight, spins for home like a compass needle. Scrabbles across the tiles and leaps. Never touches the sandy street, just folds away. In a real hurry now, is Grendel.
* * *
Evangeline Roth takes in the cave, the cackling dark, and the head of Billy Tumult on a stick—and all this existing somehow inside the confines of her guest room, for the rental of which she charges a few dollars, including soap and hot water for washing. Two seats by the fire, she notes, laid in front of all that lustrous gold, but only one shows any sign of occupation. Before the other, decaying and uneaten baked fish, peppered with flies.
This all is, she acknowledges, more odd than she was prepared to contemplate before stepping through the door she painted last summer in duck egg blue. All in all, though, she would handle it very well if only the dismembered head would stop giving her instructions. Just like a man, she considers, to die absolutely and then hang around to offer his useless experience to a female person who is so far still alive.
Charity, she thinks firmly, putting the head in her bag. Charity begins at home.
Billy Tumult stares up at the interior space of the handbag and considers this a new low. Rescued by a merry widow from a monster’s cave, dumped into a perfumed clutch filled with the unmentionable secrets of females. No, he promises more loudly, he will be quiet, there is no need to stuff that—somewhat used—monogrammed lace hanky in his mouth for hush. But how hard is this for the bold adventurer? Quite hard, indeed, and that must be his very own scalpel in her other hand, prudently unholstered and charged. If Billy still had that—and arms and legs and so forth for its deployment—this story would run differently, that’s for sure. But here, this is the way things are, and he’s reduced to … what? Baggage? At least, surely, early warning system, canary in the mine. And yes: warning, indeed! Scuffle and titter in the dark, rat-roach rustle. Christ, Billy says, it’s the mother! Look out behind you!
This being his advice, and he being in his present place—and having resolved in her mind the curious clue of the undevoured fish repast—Evangeline sweeps up the scalpel directly in front of her and thumbs the trigger. No monster takes her between the shoulders, no great vasty mother sups upon her spine. The tittering and cackling carries on regardless as the blue white stream emerging from the scalpel licks just in front of crabwise Grendel, cloaked in shadows, and brings him scritching to a halt. There is no mother, Evangeline has reckoned, not really, just a chittering landscape. There’s Grendel, and he must have his sound effects, but in the end—just as she is—he must be alone.
So there they stand: widow and monster, each paradoxically in their own place of power. His cave, her house. A darkness walking meeting a patchwork saint of practical technology and improvised magic in this altogether unanticipated explosion of Billy’s Wild West operating table, on which apparently he is himself presently anaesthetized.
High noon, she realises, as somewhere a church bell begins to ring. Grendel drops his hands to his sides and waits for the twelfth chime. She can feel the shadows smirking. A ridiculous mismatch. After all, he can step behind her on the strike. Take her, just as he took Billy Tumult. It wants only the right moment.
She shrugs, and uses the scalpel to remove his head. Watches the body fall. Listens to the chimes run out: bong bong bong bong. The right moment, Evangeline the widow remarks to her spare bed and washing china, now returned from whatever reality they occupied while the cave was in residence in this space, is when I bloody say it is.
She puts the head in the bag and, on a whim, attaches Billy Tumult to the fallen corpse. The body rises. Job done. I’m alive, alive, shouts the resulting personage. Well, yes, Evangeline replies, judicious, but best you wear some sort of neckerchief until the scar is properly healed. And for God’s sake put on a shirt.
* * *
Marry me, Billy Tumult says, opening his eyes on the operating table to the first pleasurable feelings he has known in half a decade, Jesus Mary and Joseph I’m cured and I thought I was screwed. Marry me, Evangeline, I swear to God!
The object of this proposal is a fine figure of a woman, a temporary hire in the practice, recently arrived in town and filling time while she looks for an apartment. Hell, no, replies Evangeline Roth, I don’t even like you and frankly going by this one observation your specialism’s a crock. That in mind and with some reservations regarding your ability to understand the literal truth of what I’m about to say, you can buy me a platonic drink while we discuss my bonus.
And with this offer, Billy Tumult has to be content.
Hello, Hello; Can You Hear Me, Hello
SEANAN McGUIRE
Saying “Hello” back when someone says “Hello” to you is an important thing, of course—but sometimes it’s a vital one, one that could change your entire perception of the world.…
New York Times bestselling author Seanan McGuire has enjoyed critical and commercial success both under her own name and the pseudonym Mira Grant. Heralded right out of the gate with 2010’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, McGuire also holds the unique honor of appearing five times on the same Hugo Awards ballot (with three nominations for McGuire and two for Grant). Prolific in both novels and short work, she is lauded for her detailed world-building in her October Daye urban fantasy series—currently planned out to at least thirteen entries that appear every September—and the InCryptid series, which kicked off with 2012’s Discount Armageddon. As Grant, she writes the Newsflesh trilogy. Its first volume, Feed, was one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2010, and earned nominations for both the Shirley Jackson Award and the Hugo Award for Best Novel.
Tasha’s avatar smiled from the screen, a little too perfect to be true. That was a choice, just like everything else about it: when we’d installed my sister’s new home system, we had instructed it to generate avatars that looked like they had escaped the uncanny valley by the skins of their teeth. It was creepy, but the alternative was even creepier. Tasha didn’t talk. Her avatar did. Having them match each other perfectly would have been … wrong.
“So I’ll see you next week?” she asked. Her voice was perfectly neutral, with a newscaster’s smooth, practiced inflections. Angie had picked it from the database of publicly available voices; like the avatar, it had been generated in a lab. Unlike the avatar, it was flawless. No one who heard Tasha “talk” would realize that they were really hearing a collection of sounds programmed by a computer, translated from the silent motion of her hands.
That was the point. Setting up the system for her had removed all barriers to conversation, and when she was talking to clients who didn’t know that she was deaf, she didn’t want them to realize anything was happening behind the scenes. Hence the avatar, rather than the slight delay that came with the face-time translation programs
. It felt wrong to me, like we were trying to hide something essential about my sister, but it was her choice and her system; I was just the one who upgraded her software and made sure that nothing broke down. If anyone was equipped for the job, it was me, the professional Computational Linguist. It’s a living.
“We’ll be there right on time,” I said, knowing that on her end, my avatar would be smiling and silent, moving her hands in the appropriate words. I could speak ASL to the screen, but with the way her software was set up, speaking ASL while the translator settings were active could result in some vicious glitches. After the time the computer had decided my hand gestures were a form of complicated profanity, and translated the chugging of the air conditioner into words while spewing invective at my sister, I had learnt to keep my hands still while the translator was on. “I’m bringing Angie and the kids, so be ready.”
Tasha laughed. “I’ll tell the birds to be on their best behavior.” A light flashed behind her avatar, and her expression changed, becoming faintly regretful. “Speaking of the birds, that’s my cue. Talk tomorrow?”
“Talk tomorrow,” I said. “Love you lots.”
“I love you too,” she said, and ended the call, leaving me staring at my own reflection on the suddenly black screen. My face, so much like her computer generated one, but slightly rougher; slightly less perfect. Humanity will do that to a girl.
Finally, I stood and went to tell my wife we had plans for the next weekend. She liked my sister, and Greg and Billie liked the birds. It would be good for us.
The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection Page 85