The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten

by Jonathan Strahan

  The kitchen was large and warm, and there was a sofa, half-covered with magazines, against one wall. There were low beams in the kitchen, and Shadow needed to duck his head. Shadow removed Oliver’s raincoat and dropped it. It puddled on the wooden floor. Then he put the man down on the sofa.

  Moira filled the kettle.

  “Do we call an ambulance?”

  She shook her head.

  “This is just something that happens? He falls down and passes out?”

  Moira busied herself getting mugs from a shelf. “It’s happened before. Just not for a long time. He’s narcoleptic, and if something surprises or scares him he can just go down like that. He’ll come round soon. He’ll want tea. No whisky mac tonight, not for him. Sometimes he’s a bit dazed and doesn’t know where he is, sometimes he’s been following everything that happened while he was out. And he hates it if you make a fuss. Put your backpack down by the Aga.”

  The kettle boiled. Moira poured the steaming water into a teapot. “He’ll have a cup of real tea. I’ll have chamomile, I think, or I won’t sleep tonight. Calm my nerves. You?”

  “I’ll drink tea, sure,” said Shadow. He had walked more than twenty miles that day, and sleep would be easy in the finding. He wondered at Moira. She appeared perfectly self-possessed in the face of her partner’s incapacity, and he wondered how much of it was not wanting to show weakness in front of a stranger. He admired her, although he found it peculiar. The English were strange. But he understood hating ‘making a fuss.’ Yes.

  Oliver stirred on the couch. Moira was at his side with a cup of tea, helped him into a sitting position. He sipped the tea, in a slightly dazed fashion.

  “It followed me home,” he said, conversationally.

  “What followed you, Ollie, darling?” Her voice was steady, but there was concern in it.

  “The dog,” said the man on the sofa, and he took another sip of his tea. “The black dog.”

  III

  The Cuts

  THESE WERE THE things Shadow learned that night, sitting around the kitchen table with Moira and Oliver:

  He learned that Oliver had not been happy or fulfilled in his London advertising agency job. He had moved up to the village and taken an extremely early medical retirement. Now, initially for recreation and increasingly for money, he repaired and rebuilt drystone walls. There was, he explained, an art and a skill to wall building, it was excellent exercise, and, when done correctly, a meditative practice.

  “There used to be hundreds of drystone wall people around here. Now there’s barely a dozen who know what they’re doing. You see walls repaired with concrete, or with breeze blocks. It’s a dying art. I’d love to show you how I do it. Useful skill to have. Picking the rock, sometimes, you have to let the rock tell you where it goes. And then it’s immovable. You couldn’t knock it down with a tank. Remarkable.”

  He learned that Oliver had been very depressed several years earlier, shortly after Moira and he got together, but that for the last few years he had been doing very well. Or, he amended, relatively well.

  He learned that Moira was independently wealthy, that her family trust fund had meant that she and her sisters had not needed to work, but that, in her late twenties, she had gone for teacher training. That she no longer taught, but that she was extremely active in local affairs, and had campaigned successfully to keep the local bus routes in service.

  Shadow learned, from what Oliver didn’t say, that Oliver was scared of something, very scared, and that when Oliver was asked what had frightened him so badly, and what he had meant by saying that the black dog had followed him home, his response was to stammer and to sway. He learned not to ask Oliver any more questions.

  This is what Oliver and Moira had learned about Shadow sitting around that kitchen table:

  Nothing much.

  Shadow liked them. He was not a stupid man; he had trusted people in the past who had betrayed him, but he liked this couple, and he liked the way their home smelled – like bread-making and jam and walnut woodpolish – and he went to sleep that night in his box-room bedroom worrying about the little man with the muttonchop beard. What if the thing Shadow had glimpsed in the field had not been a donkey? What if it had been an enormous dog? What then?

  The rain had stopped when Shadow woke. He made himself toast in the empty kitchen. Moira came in from the garden, letting a gust of chilly air in through the kitchen door. “Sleep well?” she asked.

  “Yes. Very well.” He had dreamed of being at the zoo. He had been surrounded by animals he could not see, which snuffled and snorted in their pens. He was a child, walking with his mother, and he was safe and he was loved. He had stopped in front of a lion’s cage, but what had been in the cage was a sphinx, half lion and half woman, her tail swishing. She had smiled at him, and her smile had been his mother’s smile. He heard her voice, accented and warm and feline.

  It said, Know thyself.

  I know who I am, said Shadow in his dream, holding the bars of the cage. Behind the bars was the desert. He could see pyramids. He could see shadows on the sand.

  Then who are you, Shadow? What are you running from? Where are you running to?

  Who are you?

  And he had woken, wondering why he was asking himself that question, and missing his mother, who had died twenty years before, when he was a teenager. He still felt oddly comforted, remembering the feel of his hand in his mother’s hand.

  “I’m afraid Ollie’s a bit under the weather this morning.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Yes. Well, can’t be helped.”

  “I’m really grateful for the room. I guess I’ll be on my way.”

  Moira said, “Will you look at something for me?”

  Shadow nodded, then followed her outside, and round the side of the house. She pointed to the rose bed. “What does that look like to you?”

  Shadow bent down. “The footprint of an enormous hound,” he said. “To quote Dr. Watson.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It really does.”

  “If there’s a spectral ghost-hound out there,” said Shadow, “it shouldn’t leave footprints. Should it?”

  “I’m not actually an authority on these matters,” said Moira. “I had a friend once who could have told us all about it. But she...” She trailed off. Then, more brightly, “You know, Mrs. Camberley two doors down has a Doberman Pinscher. Ridiculous thing.” Shadow was not certain whether the ridiculous thing was Mrs. Camberley or her dog.

  He found the events of the previous night less troubling and odd, more explicable. What did it matter if a strange dog had followed them home? Oliver had been frightened or startled, and had collapsed, from narcolepsy, from shock.

  “Well, I’ll pack you some lunch before you go,” said Moira. “Boiled eggs. That sort of thing. You’ll be glad of them on the way.”

  They went into the house. Moira went to put something away, and returned looking shaken.

  “Oliver’s locked himself in the bathroom,” she said.

  Shadow was not certain what to say.

  “You know what I wish?” she continued.

  “I don’t.”

  “I wish you would talk to him. I wish he would open the door. I wish he’d talk to me. I can hear him in there. I can hear him.”

  And then, “I hope he isn’t cutting himself again.”

  Shadow walked back into the hall, stood by the bathroom door, called Oliver’s name. “Can you hear me? Are you okay?”

  Nothing. No sound from inside.

  Shadow looked at the door. It was solid wood. The house was old, and they built them strong and well back then. When Shadow had used the bathroom that morning he’d learned the lock was a hook and eye. He leaned on the handle of the door, pushing it down, then rammed his shoulder against the door. It opened with a noise of splintering wood.

  He had watched a man die in prison, stabbed in a pointless argument. He remembered the way that the blood had puddled about the man’
s body, lying in the back corner of the exercise yard. The sight had troubled Shadow, but he had forced himself to look, and to keep looking. To look away would somehow have felt disrespectful.

  Oliver was naked on the floor of the bathroom. His body was pale, and his chest and groin were covered with thick, dark hair. He held the blade from an ancient safety razor in his hands. He had sliced his arms with it, his chest above the nipples, his inner thighs and his penis. Blood was smeared on his body, on the black and white linoleum floor, on the white enamel of the bathtub. Oliver’s eyes were round and wide, like the eyes of a bird. He was looking directly at Shadow, but Shadow was not certain that he was being seen.

  “Ollie?” said Moira’s voice, from the hall. Shadow realized that he was blocking the doorway and he hesitated, unsure whether to let her see what was on the floor or not.

  Shadow took a pink towel from the towel rail and wrapped it around Oliver. That got the little man’s attention. He blinked, as if seeing Shadow for the first time, and said, “The dog. It’s for the dog. It must be fed, you see. We’re making friends.”

  Moira said, “Oh my dear sweet god.”

  “I’ll call the emergency services.”

  “Please don’t,” she said. “He’ll be fine at home with me. I don’t know what I’ll... please?”

  Shadow picked up Oliver, swaddled in the towel, carried him into the bedroom as if he were a child, and then placed him on the bed. Moira followed. She picked up an iPad by the bed, touched the screen, and music began to play. “Breathe, Ollie,” she said. “Remember. Breathe. It’s going to be fine. You’re going to be fine.”

  “I can’t really breathe,” said Oliver, in a small voice. “Not really. I can feel my heart, though. I can feel my heart beating.”

  Moira squeezed his hand and sat down on the bed, and Shadow left them alone.

  When Moira entered the kitchen, her sleeves rolled up, and her hands smelling of antiseptic cream, Shadow was sitting on the sofa, reading a guide to local walks.

  “How’s he doing?”

  She shrugged.

  “You have to get him help.”

  “Yes.” She stood in the middle of the kitchen and looked about her, as if unable to decide which way to turn. “Do you... I mean, do you have to leave today? Are you on a schedule?”

  “Nobody’s waiting for me. Anywhere.”

  She looked at him with a face that had grown haggard in an hour. “When this happened before, it took a few days, but then he was right as rain. The depression doesn’t stay long. So, just wondering, would you just, well, stick around? I phoned my sister but she’s in the middle of moving. And I can’t cope on my own. I really can’t. Not again. But I can’t ask you to stay, not if anyone is waiting for you.”

  “Nobody’s waiting,” repeated Shadow. “And I’ll stick around. But I think Oliver needs specialist help.”

  “Yes,” agreed Moira. “He does.”

  Dr. Scathelocke came over late that afternoon. He was a friend of Oliver and Moira’s. Shadow was not entirely certain whether rural British doctors still made house calls, or whether this was a socially justified visit. The doctor went into the bedroom, and came out twenty minutes later.

  He sat at the kitchen table with Moira, and he said, “It’s all very shallow. Cry-for-help stuff. Honestly, there’s not a lot we can do for him in hospital that you can’t do for him here, what with the cuts. We used to have a dozen nurses in that wing. Now they are trying to close it down completely. Get it all back to the community.”

  Dr. Scathelocke had sandy hair, was as tall as Shadow but lankier. He reminded Shadow of the landlord in the pub, and he wondered idly if the two men were related. The doctor scribbled several prescriptions, and Moira handed them to Shadow, along with the keys to an old white Range Rover.

  Shadow drove to the next village, found the little chemists’ and waited for the prescriptions to be filled. He stood awkwardly in the overlit aisle, staring at a display of suntan lotions and creams, sadly redundant in this cold wet summer.

  “You’re Mr. American,” said a woman’s voice from behind him. He turned. She had short dark hair and was wearing the same olive-green sweater she had been wearing in the pub.

  “I guess I am,” he said.

  “Local gossip says that you are helping out while Ollie’s under the weather.”

  “That was fast.”

  “Local gossip travels faster than light. I’m Cassie Burglass.”

  “Shadow Moon.”

  “Good name,” she said. “Gives me chills.” She smiled. “If you’re still rambling while you’re here, I suggest you check out the hill just past the village. Follow the track up until it forks, and then go left. It takes you up Wod’s Hill. Spectacular views. Public right of way. Just keep going left and up, you can’t miss it.”

  She smiled at him. Perhaps she was just being friendly to a stranger.

  “I’m not surprised you’re still here though,” Cassie continued. “It’s hard to leave this place once it gets its claws into you.” She smiled again, a warm smile, and she looked directly into his eyes, as if trying to make up her mind. “I think Mrs. Patel has your prescriptions ready. Nice talking to you, Mr. American.”

  IV

  The Kiss

  SHADOW HELPED MOIRA. He walked down to the village shop and bought the items on her shopping list while she stayed in the house, writing at the kitchen table or hovering in the hallway outside the bedroom door. Moira barely talked. He ran errands in the white Range Rover, and saw Oliver mostly in the hall, shuffling to the bathroom and back. The man did not speak to him.

  Everything was quiet in the house: Shadow imagined the black dog squatting on the roof, cutting out all sunlight, all emotion, all feeling and truth. Something had turned down the volume in that house, pushed all the colors into black and white. He wished he was somewhere else, but could not run out on them. He sat on his bed, and stared out of the window at the rain puddling its way down the windowpane, and felt the seconds of his life counting off, never to come back.

  It had been wet and cold, but on the third day the sun came out. The world did not warm up, but Shadow tried to pull himself out of the gray haze, and decided to see some of the local sights. He walked to the next village, through fields, up paths and along the side of a long drystone wall. There was a bridge over a narrow stream that was little more than a plank, and Shadow jumped the water in one easy bound. Up the hill: there were trees, oak and hawthorn, sycamore and beech at the bottom of the hill, and then the trees became sparser. He followed the winding trail, sometimes obvious, sometimes not, until he reached a natural resting place, like a tiny meadow, high on the hill, and there he turned away from the hill and saw the valleys and the peaks arranged all about him in greens and grays like illustrations from a children’s book.

  He was not alone up there. A woman with short dark hair was sitting and sketching on the hill’s side, perched comfortably on a gray boulder. There was a tree behind her, which acted as a windbreak. She wore a green sweater and blue jeans, and he recognized Cassie Burglass before he saw her face.

  As he got close, she turned. “What do you think?” she asked, holding her sketchbook up for his inspection. It was an assured pencil drawing of the hillside.

  “You’re very good. Are you a professional artist?”

  “I dabble,” she said.

  Shadow had spent enough time talking to the English to know that this meant either that she dabbled, or that her work was regularly hung in the National Gallery or the Tate Modern.

  “You must be cold,” he said. “You’re only wearing a sweater.”

  “I’m cold,” she said. “But, up here, I’m used to it. It doesn’t really bother me. How’s Ollie doing?”

  “He’s still under the weather,” Shadow told her.

  “Poor old sod,” she said, looking from her paper to the hillside and back.

  “It’s hard for me to feel properly sorry for him, though.”

  “Wh
y’s that? Did he bore you to death with interesting facts?” She laughed, a small huff of air at the back of her throat. “You really ought to listen to more village gossip. When Ollie and Moira met, they were both with other people.”

  “I know that. They told me that.” Shadow thought a moment. “So he was with you first?”

  “No. She was. We’d been together since college.” There was a pause. She shaded something, her pencil scraping the paper. “Are you going to try and kiss me?” she asked.

  “I, uh. I, um,” he said. Then, honestly, “It hadn’t occurred to me.”

  “Well,” she said, turning to smile at him, “it bloody well should. I mean, I asked you up here, and you came, up to Wod’s Hill, just to see me.” She went back to the paper and the drawing of the hill. “They say there’s dark doings been done on this hill. Dirty dark doings. And I was thinking of doing something dirty myself. To Moira’s lodger.”

  “Is this some kind of revenge plot?”

  “It’s not an anything plot. I just like you. And there’s no one around here who wants me any longer. Not as a woman.”

  The last woman that Shadow had kissed had been in Scotland. He thought of her, and what she had become, in the end. “You are real, aren’t you?” he asked. “I mean... you’re a real person. I mean...”

  She put the pad of paper down on the boulder and she stood up. “Kiss me and find out,” she said.

  He hesitated. She sighed, and she kissed him.

  It was cold on that hillside, and Cassie’s lips were cold. Her mouth was very soft. As her tongue touched his, Shadow pulled back.

  “I don’t actually know you,” Shadow said.

  She leaned away from him, looked up into his face. “You know,” she said, “all I dream of these days is somebody who will look my way and see the real me. I had given up until you came along, Mr. American, with your funny name. But you looked at me, and I knew you saw me. And that’s all that matters.”