Slow Dancing Through Time

by Gardner R. Dozois

  He imagined the clowns moving all around him in the darkness, swirling silently around him in some ghostly and enigmatic dance, unseen, their fingers not quite touching him as they brushed by like moth wings in the dark . . . the bushy fright wigs puffed out around their heads like sinister nimbi . . . the ghostly white faces, the dead-black costumes, the gleaming-white gloves reaching out through the darkness.

  He forced himself to keep going, fumbling his way down one more step, then another. He was clutching the silver knife so hard that his hand hurt, holding it up high near his chest, ready to strike out with it.

  The darkness seemed to open up before him. The second-floor landing. He felt his way out onto it, sliding his feet flat along the floor, like an ice skater. His parents’ room was only a few steps away now. Was that a noise from the floor below, the faintest of sounds, as if someone or something were slowly climbing up the stairs?

  His fingers touched wood. The door to his parents’ room. Trying not to make even the slightest sound, he opened the door, eased inside, closed the door behind him and slowly threw the bolt.

  He turned around. The room was dark, except for the hazy moonlight coming in the window through the half-opened curtains; but after the deeper darkness of the hall outside, that was light enough for him to be able to see. He could make out bulky shapes under the night-gray sheets, and, and as he watched, one of the shapes moved slightly, changing positions.

  They were there! He felt hope open hot and molten inside him, and he choked back a sob. He would crawl into bed between them as he had when he was a very little boy, awakened by nightmares . . . he would nestle warmly between them . . . he would be safe.

  “Mom?” he said softly. “Dad?” He crossed the room to stand beside the bed. “Mom?” he whispered. Silence. He reached out hesitantly, feeling a flicker of dread even as he moved, and slowly pulled the sheet down on one side—

  And there was the clown, staring up at him with those terrible, opaque, expressionless blue eyes, smiling his unchanging painted smile.

  David plunged the knife down, feeling it bite into the spongy resistance of muscle and flesh. Yet even as the blow struck home, he felt cold, strong hands, white-gloved hands, close over his shoulders from behind.

  AFTERWORD TO THE CLOWNS

  I became involved in this particular collaboration in self-defense. For years, I’d been carrying around in my head the memory of talking to an acquaintance in the West Village in New York City sometime in 1970 or early 1971, and the weird story that he had told me—with total conviction—about how he was being followed everywhere by sinisterly smiling-clowns that were invisible to everybody else; about how he had been alone in his apartment, and had gone into the bathroom, and found a clown in there, sitting on the toilet and silently grinning at him; about how he had been riding on his motorcycle, and felt cold arms close around his middle, and looked behind him, and a clown was there, riding behind him on the motorcycle, clutching him around the waist, grinning at him. As I said, the guy told me all this earnestly, matter-of-factly, with a kind of weird tranced calm, and I felt the hairs rise up on the back of my neck as I listened to him; he was heavily into drugs, his eyes had become opaque and shiny, the smell of Bad Karma was on him, and he was clearly doomed—in fact, I never saw him again after that.

  At any rate, Jack was down for a visit one weekend, I think it was the weekend of November 11-13, 1983, and one evening he and Susan and I were sitting around talking about Weird Stuff, the sort of conversation where someone is likely to start humming the old Twilight Zone theme (“doduedoduedoduedodue . . .”), and at one point I related the clown anecdote.

  Jack’s eyes bugged out, “Wow!” he said. “What a great idea for a story!” And before I knew what was happening, Jack and Susan were eagerly discussing a plot, and then they were off in the living room, pounding out a rough draft of the first couple of pages on my typewriter.

  I was somewhat miffed. They were writing my story, on my typewriter, and they hadn’t even invited me to join them in the collaboration! I sulked about this for a day or so, while Jack and Susan became more enthusiastic and it became more and more obvious that they actually were going to write this thing, and it became more and more clear to me that if I was going to get any mileage at all out of this material that I’d carried around in my head for so long, I’d better put my oar in fast. So I dealt myself into the collaboration, and, after I picked up the tab for Hot Fudge Sundaes at More Than Just Ice Cream, Susan and Jack acquiesced.

  Jack took the first crack at the story, and we received a partial draft from him, consisting mostly of the opening and the middle sequences, on December 12, 1983. Susan then did a draft, adding most of the scenes with David’s parents, and adding early versions of the pushing-in-front-of-the-truck scene and the second swimming-pool scene. They may have passed the story back and forth between them a few more times, too; I’m not sure. At any rate, my calendar shows that I started work on the story myself on March 11, 1984. I fleshed out the opening section, the initial pool section, and the truck section, and then Susan and I worked at hammering out an ending, going back and forth between ourselves with several drafts; that took most of March. Then, during the end of August and the first half of September (I was working on other projects in the meantime), I did my usual unifying draft, adding a few new scenes and adding things interstitially throughout. The second swimming-pool scene and the ending were redrafted again several times, with some more input from Susan and Jack. The story was finished on September 24, 1984, and later that year, on December 27, I did a fairly extensive cutting job on the story, at the prompting of Alice K. Turner of Playboy.

  My major contribution to the story, I think, was in altering its pacing. I reworked the pacing of several scenes—notably the skinned-knee scene, the truck scene, the second swimming pool scene, and the ending sequence—in an effort to inject more suspense into the story, crank the tension and suspense up to the maximum by using the same kind of techniques that you’d use in a suspense film, a Hitchcock movie, say . . . and, in this, I think that I was moderately successful.

  “The Clowns” appeared in Playboy in 1985.

  GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN

  GARDNER DOZOIS, JACK DANN, & MICHAEL SWANWICK

  Few of the folk in Faërie would have anything to do with the computer salesman. He worked himself up and down one narrow, twisting street after another, until his feet throbbed and his arms ached from lugging the sample cases, and it seemed like days had passed rather than hours, and still he had not made a single sale. Barry Levingston considered himself a first-class salesman, one of the best, and he wasn’t used to this kind of failure. It discouraged and frustrated him, and as the afternoon wore endlessly on—there was something funny about the way time passed here in Faërie; the hazy, bronze-colored Fairyland sun had hardly moved at all across the smoky amber sky since he’d arrived, although it should certainly be evening by now—he could feel himself beginning to lose that easy confidence and unshakable self-esteem that are the successful salesman’s most essential stock-in-trade. He tried to tell himself that it wasn’t really his fault. He was working under severe restrictions, after all. The product was new and unfamiliar to this particular market, and he was going “cold sell.” There had been no telephone solicitation programs to develop leads, no ad campaigns, not so much as a demographic study of the market potential. Still, his total lack of success was depressing.

  The village that he’d been trudging through all day was built on and around three steep, hivelike hills, with one street rising from the roofs of the street below. The houses were piled chockablock atop each other, like clusters of grapes, making it almost impossible to even find—much less get to—many of the upper-story doorways. Sometimes the eaves grew out over the street, turning them into long, dark tunnels. And sometimes the streets ran up sloping house-sides and across rooftops, only to come to a sudden and frightening stop at a sheer drop of five or six stories, the street beginning again
as abruptly on the far side of the gap. From the highest streets and stairs you could see a vista of the surrounding countryside: a hazy golden-brown expanse of orchards and forests and fields, and, on the far horizon, blue with distance, the jagged, snow-capped peaks of a mighty mountain range—except that the mountains didn’t always seem to be in the same direction from one moment to the next; sometimes they were to the west, then to the north, or east, or south; sometimes they seemed much closer or further away; sometimes they weren’t there at all.

  Barry found all this unsettling. In fact, he found the whole place unsettling. Why go on with this, then? he asked himself. He certainly wasn’t making any headway. Maybe it was because he towered over most of the fairyfolk—maybe they were sensitive about being so short, and so tall people annoyed them. Maybe they just didn’t like humans; humans smelled bad to them, or something. Whatever it was, he hadn’t gotten more than three words of his spiel out of his mouth all day. Some of them had even slammed doors in his face—something he had almost forgotten could happen to a salesman.

  Throw in the towel, then, he thought. But . . . no, he couldn’t give up. Not yet. Barry sighed, and massaged his stomach, feeling the acid twinges in his gut that he knew presaged a savage attack of indigestion later on. This was virgin territory, a literally untouched route. Gold waiting to be mined. And the Fairy Queen had given this territory to him . . .

  Doggedly, he plodded up to the next house, which looked something like a gigantic acorn, complete with a thatched cap and a crazily twisted chimney for the stem. He knocked on a round wooden door.

  A plump, freckled fairy woman answered. She was about the size of an earthly two-year-old, but a transparent gown seemingly woven of spidersilk made it plain that she was no child. She hovered a few inches above the doorsill on rapidly beating hummingbird wings.

  “Aye?” she said sweetly, smiling at him, and Barry immediately felt his old confidence return. But he didn’t permit himself to become excited. That was the quickest way to lose a sale.

  “Hello,” he said smoothly. “I’m from Newtech Computer Systems, and we’ve been authorized by Queen Titania, the Fairy Queen herself, to offer a free installation of our new home computer system—”

  “That wot I not of,” the fairy said.

  “Don’t you even know what a computer is?” Barry asked, dismayed, breaking off his spiel.

  “Aye, I fear me, ‘tis even so,” she replied, frowning prettily. “In sooth, I know not. Belike you’ll tell me oft, fair sir.”

  Barry began talking feverishly, meanwhile unsnapping his sample case and letting it fall open to display the computer within. “—balance your household accounts,” he babbled. “Lets you organize your recipes, keep in touch with the stock market. You can generate full-color graphics, charts, graphs . . .”

  The fairy frowned again, less sympathetically. She reached her hand toward the computer, but didn’t quite touch it. “Has the smell of metal on’t,” she murmured. “Most chill and adamant.” She shook her head. “Nay, sirrah, ‘twill not serve. ‘Tis a thing mechanical, a clockwork, meet for carillons and orreries. Those of us born within the Ring need not your engines philosophic, nor need we toil and swink as mortals do at such petty tasks an you have named. Then wherefore should I buy, who neither strive nor moil?”

  “But you can play games on it!” Barry said desperately, knowing that he was losing her. “You can play Donkey Kong! You can play Pac-Man! Everybody likes to play Pac-Man—”

  She smiled slowly at him sidelong. “I’d liefer more delightsome games,” she said.

  Before he could think of anything to say, a long, long, long green-gray arm came slithering out across the floor from the hidden interior of the house. The arm ended in a knobby hand equipped with six grotesquely long, tapering fingers, now spreading wide as the hand reached out toward the fairy . . .

  Barry opened his mouth to shout a warning, but before he could, the long arm had wrapped bonelessly around her ankle, not once but four times around, and the hand with its scrabbling spider fingers had closed over her thigh. The arm yanked back, and she tumbled forward in the air, laughing. “Ah, loveling, can you not wait?” she said with mock severity. The arm tugged at her. She giggled. “Certes, meseems you cannot!”

  As the arm pulled her, still floating, back into the house, the fairy woman seized the door to slam it shut. Her face was flushed and preoccupied now, but she still found a moment to smile at Barry. “Farewell, sweet mortal!” she cried, and winked. “Next time, mayhap?”

  The door shut. There was a muffled burst of giggling within. Then silence.

  The salesman glumly shook his head. This was a goddam tank town, was what it was, he thought. Here there were no knickknacks and bric-a-brac lining the windows, no cast-iron flamingos and eave-climbing plaster kitty cats, no mailboxes with fake Olde English calligraphy on them—but in spite of that it was still a tank town. Just another goddamn middle-class neighborhood with money a little tight and the people running scared. Place like this, you couldn’t even give the stuff away, much less make a sale. He stepped back out into the street. A fairy knight was coming down the road toward him, dressed in green jade armor cunningly shaped like leaves, and riding an enormous frog. Well, why not? Barry thought. He wasn’t having a lot of luck door-to-door.

  “Excuse me, sir!” Barry cried, stepping into the knight’s way. “May I have a moment of your—”

  The knight glared at him, and pulled back suddenly on his reins. The enormous frog reared up, and leaped straight into the air. Gigantic, leathery, batlike wings spread, caught the thermals, carried mount and rider away.

  Barry sighed and trudged doggedly up the cobblestone road toward the next house. No matter what happened, he wasn’t going to quit until he’d finished the street. That was a compulsion of his . . . and the reason he was one of the top cold-sell agents in the company. He remembered a night when he’d spent five hours knocking on doors without a single sale, or even so much as a kind word, and then suddenly he’d sold $30,000 worth of merchandise in an hour . . . suddenly he’d been golden, and they couldn’t say no to him. Maybe that would happen today, too. Maybe the next house would be the beginning of a run of good luck. . . .

  The next house was shaped like a gigantic ogre’s face, its dark wood forming a yawning mouth and heavy-lidded eyes. The face was made up of a host of smaller faces, and each of those contained other, even smaller faces. He looked away dizzily, then resolutely climbed to a glowering, thick-nosed door and knocked right between the eyes—eyes which, he noted uneasily, seemed to be studying him with interest.

  A fairy woman opened the door—below where he was standing. Belatedly, he realized that he had been knocking on a dormer; the top of the door was a foot below him.

  This fairy woman had stubby, ugly wings. She was lumpy and gnarled, and her skin was the texture of old bark. Her hair stood straight out on end all around her head, in a puffy nimbus, like the Bride of Frankenstein. She stared imperiously up at him, somehow managing to seem to be staring down her nose at him at the same time. It was quite a nose, too. It was longer than his hand, and sharply pointed.

  “A great ugly lump of a mortal, an I mistake not!” she snapped. Her eyes were flinty and hard. “What’s toward?”

  “I’m from Newtech Computer Systems,” Barry said, biting back his resentment at her initial slur, “and I’m selling home computers, by special commission of the Queen—”

  “Go to!” she snarled. “Seek you to cozen me? I wot not what abnormous beast that be, but I have no need of mortal kine, nor aught else from your loathly world! Get you gone!” She slammed the door under his feet. Which somehow was every bit as bad as slamming it in his face.

  “Sonofabitch!” Barry raged, making an obscene gesture at the door, losing his temper at last. “You goddamn flying fat pig!”

  He didn’t realize that the fairy woman could hear him until a round crystal window above his head flew open, and she poked her head out of it, nose fir
st, buzzing like a jarful of hornets. “Wittold!” she shrieked. “Caitiff rogue!”

  “Screw off, lady,” Barry snarled. It had been a long, hard day, and he could feel the last shreds of self-control slipping away. “Get back in your goddamn hive, you goddamn Pinocchio-nosed mosquito!”

  The fairy woman spluttered incoherently with rage, then became dangerously silent. “So!” she said in cold passion. “Noses, is’t? Would vilify my nose, knave, whilst your own be uncommon squat and vile? A tweak or two will remedy that, I trow, and exchange the worse for the better!”

  So saying, she came buzzing out of her house like an outraged wasp, streaking straight at the salesman.

  Barry flinched back, but she seized hold of his nose with both hands and tweaked it savagely. Barry yelped in pain. She shrieked out a high-pitched syllable in some unknown language and began flying backward, her wings beating furiously, tugging at his nose.

  He felt the pressure in his ears change with a sudden pop, and then, horrifyingly, he felt his face beginning to move in a strangely fluid way, flowing like water, swelling out and out and out in front of him.

  The fairy woman released his nose and darted away, cackling gleefully.

  Dismayed, Barry clapped his hands to his face. He hadn’t realized that these little buggers could all cast spells—he’d thought that kind of magic stuff was reserved for the Queen and her court. Like cavorting in hot tubs with naked starlets and handfuls of cocaine, out in Hollywood—a prerogative reserved only for the Elite. But when his hands reached his nose, they almost couldn’t close around it. It was too large. His nose was now nearly two feet long, as big around as a Polish sausage, and covered with bumpy warts.

  He screamed in rage. “Goddammit, lady, come back here and fix this!”

  The fairy woman was perching half-in and half-out of the round window, lazily swinging one leg. She smiled mockingly at him. “There!” she said, with malicious satisfaction. “Art much improved, methinks! Nay, thank me not!” And, laughing joyously, she tumbled back into the house and slammed the crystal window closed behind her.