He and Bothwell searched each of the downstairs rooms, to be on the safe side. Then he made a pot of coffee. He decided not to wait for morning but to dive in, dismantle the thing, and get it out of the house. While the coffee brewed, he cleared the dining room table and took another look at the remains. Leaning against the archway that led to the living room, he told himself he’d just have to get his head around it. He went and poured a cup and came back and sat on the couch. The cat, Turtle, was at the other end. It struck Henry that she’d probably sat through the entire misadventure – the tree weaving, gasping, calling out for help, and then crashing to the floor. He remembered she was sitting there in the same position when he’d lumbered down the stairs. “Please, don’t get too worked up over anything,” he said to the cat. Turtle looked at him and then stood. At that moment, the TV came on. Henry lurched and grunted in surprise. The cat jumped down from the couch, and as soon as it left, he saw that it had been laying on the remote.
His hands found the needles sharper than when the tree was alive. He got the rubber gloves from beneath the kitchen sink and put them on. The work proved exhausting, all that bending and the often tedious exercise of untwining an ornament hanger from a branch. At times he had to wrestle the dead weight of the thing, rolling it to get to ornaments crushed beneath it, lifting it to open the sharp branches so he could reach in and rescue the angel from where she’d fallen into the belly of the beast. “Don’t forget the icicles,” he heard Mero say in his mind. Plastic icicles, thin as pipe cleaners, perfectly transparent. There were 6. After locating 4, he said, “Fuck it,” and gave up.
At sunrise of a bitter, overcast day, Henry dragged the tree through the dining room and kitchen, out the sliding door. The wind was howling fiercely, but he left his jacket inside and was dressed only in a T-shirt. He slid the corpse over the already fallen snow. It left a wake of brown needles. Depositing it next to the garden shed, he took a few steps back. He’d made sure earlier to slip on his boots. He charged forward and kicked the tree. His boot got under the trunk and lifted it into the air. His next move was a crushing stomp to the mid-section, but when he brought his foot down, the bad knee of his other leg went out. He slipped on the snow and fell.
After sweeping and vacuuming and moving the coffee table and chairs back in front of the window, he lay down on the couch and grabbed the remote. Not even ten AM and he found Jack Palance in black and white, The House of Numbers. He maneuvered the couch pillow under his head, and then closed his eyes and let the sound of the twins and prison plot lead him to sleep. He woke at 4:15 pm and looked to the window. The sky was dark gray. He heard the wind. Before he got up and looked, he knew it was snowing, big flakes angling down from the west.
He went to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee. Still dazed from sleep, he leaned against the kitchen sink, staring out the window. He watched the empty branches bend, and watched in the distance across the field as the world filled up with snow. “The new ice age,” he said to his reflection. His gaze shifted to the garden shed and looked and blinked and looked again. He leaned over the kitchen sink to get his glasses closer to the glass. For a moment, he went numb, even his knee stopped aching.
This time he put on his jacket and hat and mittens. He called for Bothwell and they went out the sliding door. The snow was on its way to becoming ice, and the wind was fierce. Covering his face with his arm, he made his way toward the garden shed. He believed the tree was there but covered by a small drift. When he reached the spot where he’d dumped it, he turned his back to the wind and looked down. There was a rise in the snow. He toed the white mound but felt nothing beneath it. A minute later, he’d cleared the spot, pushing the snow aside with his boots, and was staring at frozen ground.
“Where?” he said to Bothwell and although he laughed, a current of fear cut through the confusion. He looked up quickly and scanned the darkening yard to see if the thing had been blown away. The wind on the plains was strong enough. Over the summer it had lifted a glass topped table on the patio and flipped it, turning its top to jagged chips of ice. He didn’t see any sign of the corpse in the distance, so he started back into the orchard to check the shadows beneath the trees. He and the dog walked all around the property but found nothing, save that he’d at some point left the garage light on.
Entering the garage through the side door, he found instant relief from the snow. Bothwell followed him in. He looked out over the stacks of unopened boxes he’d never unpacked after moving two years earlier. It was all books, thousands of them. He smelled their damp molder, and had a memory flash of the warehouse scene at the end of Citizen Kane. A scrabbling sound followed fast by a desperate squeal came from far back in the hangar-sized structure. The dog barked. Henry flipped the light off and they headed back to the house.
Later, in his office, sipping coffee, sitting in front of his computer, he leaned back and took a break from the irritation of his writing. His thoughts wandered and then he pictured the Christmas tree miles away in the dark, slouching through drifts to the edge of route 70 and sticking out a branch. “Cali or the North Pole?” Henry considered the desiccated pine’s journey west – the truckers, the rest stops, the mountain vistas until that reverie was interrupted by a horrendous clank that shuddered through the house from somewhere below. Bothwell leaped up from where he lay near the door, his ears at attention.
Henry wished he’d brought the baton upstairs. Still, the noise didn’t sound like someone forcing a door or window. It had that unmistakable sense of finality to it, like the God of trouble had smote some major appliance once and for all. “Burst pipe? Water heater? Something electric?” He went through a list as he limped down stairs, the dog leading the way. The lights in the hallway, the living room, dining room, kitchen all came on when he flipped their switches, and he was grateful for that. He looked around to see if Turtle had knocked over a vase or picture frame, slid a glass off the counter in the bathroom, but for once the cat was innocent. The porch door and sliding door in the back were both locked. He ran the water to check for a lack of pressure, but the flow was steady and strong.
The dog followed him around the kitchen as he searched for the flashlight. “This is unparalleled bullshit,” he said to Bothwell, who seemed sympathetic yet could barely hide his excitement over the promise of action at such a late hour. It took Henry twenty minutes, going through the various kitchen junk drawers, checking each at least twice, before finding the flashlight. It took him another ten minutes to find batteries. The beam it emitted when finally operational was a vague pretense of light. He found the baton where he’d left it in the living room and then went into the hallway, to the basement door. He opened it. “Forsake all hope,” he said to the dog.
Standing at the top of those worn steps leading into darkness an image of the tree returned to him, and this time it wasn’t headed west. This time, it had never left. A reek of dampness and subtle mildew rolled up and engulfed him. He thought of the basement cliché of horror movies as he flipped on the light switch and took his first step. Turtle appeared out of nowhere and brushed past him, a black blur diving down the stairs. “No,” he yelled after the cat, but that was pointless.
The house was over a hundred years old, and he’d never heard of a ‘wet basement’ before they’d bought it. Back in Jersey, where they’d come from, the words – wet basement – were a deal breaker. Old farmhouses weren’t built with rec rooms or indoor ping pong tables in mind, though. The basement was basically a foundational necessity, a place to store things raised up on pallets. Water was expected at certain times of the year. Henry had to duck as he stepped beneath the lintel. There was one dim lightbulb hanging from a chain in the middle of the main part of a concrete chamber.
He used the baton to rip down a prodigious cobweb, and made his way from one appliance to the next, laying his hand lightly on it to see if it trembled with life. The water heater was fine, the dehumidifier showed signs of life, and then he touched the furnace. It was silent, no v
ibration and stone cold. “That ain’t good,” he said. The dog sat on the bottom step, as if reluctant to put a paw down and commit to the underground. Henry flipped on the flashlight and moved to the dark back of the cellar and the adjoining concrete closet without a door, a narrow space where the fuse box hung.
Often, during spring, the water rose in that niche as high as 4 or 5 inches, and he’d once seen a toad hop out of it into the greater basement. Luckily the ground outside was frozen and the floor dry. He ran the beam of the flashlight over the different fuses to see if one had popped, but they were all unmarked and he really had no idea what he was looking for. Mero was the one who always dealt with the fuses.
“We’re gonna freeze our asses off tonight,” he said. When he stepped back into the basement, he noticed Bothwell retreating up the stairs. “Traitor,” he shouted, and meant to follow as quickly as possible. As he made his way for the steps, though, he realized he had no idea where Turtle had gotten to. He aimed the tepid beam into dark corners and made the psss psss psss noise Mero always used to summon the cat. After two dozen psss’s, he called out, “You can stay down here all winter.” As he made for the steps, he heard a meow. He turned and aimed the beam at a spot on the wall next to the water heater.
He’d forgotten it was there, a roughly foot and a half by one foot hole in the concrete of the wall that led into the foundation. Why it was there, he had no idea. He wondered if perhaps a pipe had been shoved through there from outside at some point. Maybe a poorly covered over coal chute? He stepped up to it and shone the light inside. Turtle’s green eyes caught the weak glow and made the most of it. She was about 4 feet into the tunnel. He gave it a Psss, psss, psss. A meow answered. “Come on, Turtle,” he said. “Come on.” Every time he made the psss noise the cat meowed but stayed where it was. “I hate you,” he said to it. The bright green eyes blinked.
When the cat moved, she moved slowly. She appeared at the opening and leaped down onto the floor. That’s when he distinctly heard the porch door open with a bang, heard the whoosh of the storm enter the kitchen above. He was sure of it. He could feel the burst of adrenalin shoot through him, yet he was stiff with fear. There was no spit to swallow. The harder he gripped the baton, the less he believed he would be able to wield it if he had to. Bothwell backed down the stairs into view. His hackles were up and he was growling. Henry heard footsteps and dropped the flashlight. He managed to creep to the bottom of the steps. “If you leave now, I won’t shoot you,” he shouted. “The police are on the way.”
There was more movement above, but he couldn’t track it. Just one slow clomping footstep after another. Out of some perverted impulse, he made his move. Gripping the baton, he reared it over his head and lurched up the stairs on his bad knee in a woefully executed surprise attack. Using his elbows on the door jambs, he propelled himself in a stumble down the hall and into the kitchen, Bothwell barking at his side. “Swing for the fence,” Henry whispered.
The door was wide open and the cold air swept in around him. He went to it immediately and shut it. Only one step ahead of paralyzing fear, he knew he couldn’t rest, but plunged into room after room, expecting the intruder in every one. In the downstairs bedroom, he instructed Bothwell to look under the bed. They checked all the closets. When Turtle jumped out from behind the shower curtain, Henry flailed with the baton and destroyed a towel rack.
Upstairs, out of breath, his knee screaming, he made the rounds of all the rooms but found no one. Half relieved, he said, “What a night,” to the dog as they made their way down from the second floor. Back in the kitchen, he looked for his phone and found it on the counter. Without putting the baton down, he dialed the police. There was a long span of silence and then the line sparked with static. He tried to get through twice more and gave up. “Here’s another forklift full of shit,” he told Bothwell, tossing the phone on the counter. The dog’s expression as much as said, “You’re getting a little dramatic now.” Henry nodded in agreement and paused to think it through. That’s when he noticed something he’d missed earlier. The kitchen floor was littered with brown needles. He’d been so intent on attack, he’d trod right through them, never looking down.
He gripped the baton and Bothwell tensed. The trail of brown needles led off into the dining room. Man and dog moved slowly, quietly toward the darkened entrance. He could have sworn he’d left all the lights on downstairs. He stopped and listened. Just the wind. Lifting the baton, he flipped on the switch. Instinctively crouching, he tensed against an assault if only from the sudden light. When Bothwell didn’t bark, Henry knew there was no one there. The house was perfectly still.
“Nothing,” he said to the dog, and decided to make a pot of coffee. Before he could move, though, some speck of brightness caught his eye, and he looked down at the dining room table. The dark green cloth appeared a miniature landscape what with the ornaments trapped beneath it. He stepped closer. There were brown needles scattered amid the rolling hills, and in one of the more prominent valleys lay, side by side, the two missing icicles he’d abandoned on the tree. He reached out but didn’t touch them.
“Come on, now,” he said to the ceiling.
He muttered through two glasses of wine; his breath, vapor. The kitchen was especially freezing, and the cold finally drove him to forsake the bottle. He wrapped up in three blankets and propped himself in a corner of the couch with the lights out. The baton lay only inches away on the coffee table. Bothwell was next to him curled in a ball, and Turtle stretched out along the rim of the pillow he rested his head on. After quite a while, his eyes adjusted and he could see past the window, the snow coming down. At some point he heard the heater kick back on and the dog gave a whimper of appreciation. When he shut his eyes to better hear the voices in the wind, sleep took him like an avalanche, and he wound up in the back seat of a cab, streaking along the main street of Shanghai, going to meet Mero for lunch.
BOTANICA VENERIS: THIRTEEN PAPERCUTS BY IDA COUNTESS RATHANGAN
Ian McDonald
IAN MCDONALD (@IANMCDONALD) lives in Northern Ireland, just outside Belfast. He sold his first story in 1983 and bought a guitar with the proceeds, perhaps the only rock ’n’ roll thing he ever did. Since then he’s written sixteen novels, including River of Gods, Brasyl, and The Dervish House, three story collections and diverse other pieces, and has been nominated for every major science fiction/ fantasy award – and even won a couple. His current novel is Luna: New Moon. The middle volume of the trilogy, Luna: Wolf Moon, is due later in 2016.
Introduction by Maureen N. Gellard
MY MOTHER HAD firm instructions that, in case of a house-fire, two things required saving: the family photograph album, and the Granville-Hydes. I grew up beneath five original floral papercuts, utterly heedless of their history or their value. It was only in maturity that I came to appreciate, like so many on this and other worlds, my Great-Aunt’s unique art.
Collectors avidly seek original Granville-Hydes on those rare occasions when they turn up at auction. Originals sell for tens of thousands of pounds (this would have amused Ida); two years ago an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum was sold out months in advance. Dozens of anthologies of prints are still in print: the Botanica Veneris, in particular, is in 15 editions in twenty-three languages, some of them non-Terrene.
The last thing the world needs, it would seem, is another Botanica Veneris. Yet the mystery of her final (and only) visit to Venus still intrigues half a century since her disappearance. When the collected diaries, sketch books and field notes came to me after fifty years in the possession of the Dukes of Yoo I realised I had a precious opportunity to tell the true story of my GreatAunt’s expedition – and of a forgotten chapter in my family’s history. The books were in very poor condition, mildewed and blighted in Venus’s humid, hot climate. Large parts were illegible or simply missing. The narrative was frustratingly incomplete. I have resisted the urge to fill in those blank spaces. It would have been easy to dramatise, fictionalis
e, even sensationalise. Instead I have let Ida Granville-Hyde speak. Hers is a strong, characterful, attractive voice, of a different class, age and sensibility from ours, but it is authentic, and it is a true voice.
The papercuts, of course, speak for themselves.
PLATE 1: V strutio ambulans: the Ducrot’s Peripatetic Wort, known locally as Daytime Walker (Thent) or Wanderflower (Thekh).
Cut paper, ink and card.
SUCH A SHOW!
At lunch Het Oi-Kranh mentioned that a space-crosser – the Quest for the Harvest of the Stars, a Marsman – was due splash down in the lagoon. I said I should like to see that – apparently I slept through it when I arrived on this world. It meant forgoing the sorbet course, but one does not come to the Inner Worlds for sorbet! Het Oi-Kranh put his spider-car at our disposal. Within moments the Princess Latufui and I were swaying in the richly upholstered bubble beneath the six strong mechanical legs. Upwards it carried us, up the vertiginous lanes and winding staircases, over the walls and balcony gardens, along the buttresses and roof-walks and up the ancient iron ladder-ways of Ledekh-Olkoi. The islands of the archipelago are small, their populations vast and the only way for them to build is upwards. Ledekh-Olkoi resembles Mont St Michel vastly enlarged and coarsened. Streets have been bridged and built over into a web of tunnels quite impenetrable to non Ledekhers. The Hets simply clamber over the homes and lives of the inferior classes in their nimble spider-cars.
We came to the belvedere atop the Starostry, the ancient pharos of Ledekh-Olkoi that once guided mariners past the reefs and atolls of the Tol Archipelago. There we clung – my companion the Princess Latufui was queasy – vertigo, she claimed, though it may have been the proximity of lunch – the whole of Ledekh-Olkoi beneath us in myriad levels and layers, like the folded petals of a rose.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten Page 44