God and Jesus and angels and a day of judgment of wicked men, they all live and breathe inside the Reverend Swales’s black book, and in the songs we sing on Sundays. Many other gods and devils live in other holy books. But on the bridge that day, there was no god. In my dreams, there is no god. And I don’t pray anymore. I don’t think much of those who do.
You’re saying, Now that’s not what happened, Cody. I can hear you, Max. I can hear you grumbling, plain as day, “Cody Marlene Hernandez, you’re mixing it all up, and you’re doing it on purpose. That wasn’t the deal, you welcher.”
Fine, you win.
I scrounged about and found a couple of other things inside the cardboard box. I hardly looked at them, just stuffed them into my pack. Carrying the dead baby in her blanket, I walked back across the bridge, quickly as I could, quicker than I’d come. It was a lot harder getting over the fence with her in my arms, but I managed. I didn’t drop her. I’d have fallen before I ever dropped her.
I spent a week in quarantine, just in case. Five men went out onto the bridge and brought back the plastic woman and the girl and buried them in the cemetery. They buried the baby there, too, after Doc Lehman did his autopsy. No one ever scolded me or yelled or revoked privileges for going out there. I didn’t have to ask why. You get punished, you don’t have to get punished all over again.
What I’m Writing Down Later
Me and Max sat between the crimson river and the NOW|HERE wall, and I let him read what I wrote on the back of the torn-out encyclopedia pages. He got pissed near the end, and just like I thought he would, called me a welcher.
“The baby always dies in my dreams,” I told him, when he finally shut up and let me talk again.
“I didn’t say, ‘Write what’s in your dreams.’ I said, ‘Write what happened.’ ”
“It seemed more important,” I told him, and tossed a piece of gravel at the river. “What haunts me when I sleep, how it might have gone that day, but didn’t. How it probably should have gone, but didn’t.”
“Yeah, but you went and killed that baby.”
“No I didn’t. My nightmares kill the baby, not me. Almost every time I sleep, the nightmares kill the baby.”
He chewed his lip the frustrated way he does sometimes.
“Cody, I just ain’t never gonna understand that. You saved the baby, but you go and have bad dreams about the baby dyin’. That’s stupid. You waste all this energy gettin’ freaked out about something didn’t even happen except in a dream, and dreams ain’t real. I thought writin’ the truth, that would make you better. Not writing down lies. That’s what I don’t understand.”
“You weren’t there. You didn’t hold her, and her so hot, and you so sure she was already dead or would be dead any second.”
“I just won’t ever understand it,” he said again.
“Okay, Max. Then you won’t ever understand it. That’s fair.
There’s a lot about myself I don’t understand sometimes. Doesn’t matter the dreams don’t make sense. Only matters it happens to me. It’s all too complicated. Never black-and-white, not like SWITCH ON and SWITCH OFF, not like THE BEFORE and THE AFTER. I fall asleep, and she dies in my arms, even though she didn’t.”
He glared at the pages, chewing his lips and looking disgusted, then handed them back to me.
“Well, you don’t win,” he said. “You don’t get any more than kisses ’cause you didn’t even talk about the map or the book, and because you killed the baby.”
“I don’t care,” I replied, which was true.
“I was just trying to help you.”
“I know that, Max. Don’t you think I know that?” He didn’t answer my question. Instead, he said, “I’m going home, Cody. I got chores. So do you, welcher.” I told him I’d be along soon. I told him I needed to be alone for a while (which is when I’m writing this part down). So I’m sitting here throwing gravel at the sludgy crimson river people used to call the St. Johns River.
What Really Happened
(For Max)
Outside my dreams, the baby didn’t die. The olders figured the car had only driven through Arlington and out onto the bridge the night before I found it. They guessed the girl and the woman got sick a couple of days before that, probably before they even got to Florida. They figured, too, the baby would have died of heat prostration and thirst if I hadn’t found it when I did. “You did right,” Ma’am Shen whispered in my ear when no one was watching or listening in. “Even if that wasn’t your intent, you did right.” We never found out the baby’s name, so they named it Cody, after me.
The olders found something in the baby’s blood. It’s like SWITCH OFF, they say, but it’s different. It’s like SWITCH OFF, but it works better. You breathe it out, and it shuts off the nano-assemblers all around you. Maybe, they say, that’s why the car didn’t change, and why the woman and the girl’s clothes and jewelry wasn’t converted, too. But these new bots, they can’t turn stuff back the way it was before.
And yeah, there was a map. A map of the United States and Mexico and Canada. Most of the cries had big red X’s drawn on them. Montreal, up in Canada, had a blue circle, and so did San Francisco and a few little towns here and there. A red line was drawn from Birmingham, Alabama all the way to Pensacola. Both those cities had red X’s of their own. I found the red pencil in the box with the baby. And I found pages and pages of notes. In the margins of the map, there was a list of countries. Some in red, some in blue.
Turns out the woman was a microbiologist, and she’d been studying when the sanctuary in Birmingham was breached. That’s what she’d written in her notes. They read us that part in class.
“The containment has been breached.” I also know the notes talk about the nanites evolving, and about new strains the SWITCH OFF doesn’t work on, and new strains of SWITCH OFF that shut down THE GOO better than before, like what kept the baby alive. They know the scientist also wrote about how THE EVENT isn’t over because the bots are all evolving and doing things they weren’t designed to do.
Of course, they also weren’t designed to eat up the whole world, but they did.
Saul Benedict still frowns and asks his questions, and he says everything’s even more uncertain than it was before I found the car.
But me, I look at that baby, who’s growing up fine and healthy and breathing those new bots out with every breath, and sometimes I think about going out onto the bridge again with a can of spray paint and writing HOPE HERE in great big letters on the side of the car. So if maybe someone else ever comes along, someone who isn’t sick, they’ll see, and drive all the way across the bridge.
The New York Times recently hailed Caitlín R. Kiernan as “one of our essential writers of dark fiction.” Her novels include The Red Tree (nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards) and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, nominated for the Nebula, Locus, Shirley Jackson, Mythopoeic, and Bram Stoker awards). To date, her short fiction has been collected in thirteen volumes, most recently Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One), and The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories. Currently, she’s writing the graphic novel series Alabaster for Dark Horse Comics and working on her next novel, Red Delicious.
He looked out his side window and down and saw the creature running alongside, the movement of its four legs a blur, its face perfectly human.
A NATURAL HISTORY OF AUTUMN
Jeffrey Ford
A blue afternoon in autumn, Riku and Michi drove south from Numazu in his silver convertible along the coast of the Izu Peninsula.
The temperature was mild for the end of October, and the air was clear, the sun glinting off Suruga Bay. She wore sunglasses and, to protect her hair, a yellow scarf with a design of orange butterflies. He wore driving gloves, a black dress shirt, a loosened white tie. The car, the open road, the rush of the wind made it impossible to converse, and so for miles she watched the ba
y to their right and he the rising slopes of maple and pine to their left. Just outside the town of Dogashima, a song came on the radio, “Just You, Just Me,” and they turned to look at each other. She waited for him to smile. He did. She smiled back, and then he headed inland to search for the hidden onsen, Inugami.
They’d met the previous night at The Limit, an upscale hostess bar. Riku’s employer had a tab there and he was free to use it when in Numazu. He’d been once before, drunk and spent time with a hostess. Her conversation had sounded rote, like a script; her flattery grotesquely opulent and therefore flat. The instant he saw Michi, though, in her short black dress with a look of uncertainty in her eyes, he knew it would be a different experience. He ordered a bottle of Nikka Yoichi and two glasses. She introduced herself. He stood and bowed. They were in a private room at a polished table of blond wood. The chairs were high-backed and upholstered like thrones. To their right was an open-air view of pines and the coast. She waited for him to smile and eventually he did. She smiled back and told him, “I’m writing a book.”
Riku said, “Aren’t you supposed to tell me how handsome I am?”
“Your hair is perfect,” she said.
He laughed. “I see.”
“I’m writing a book,” she said again. “I decided to make a study of something.”
“You’re a scientist?” he said.
“We’re all scientists,” she said. “We watch and listen, take in information, process it. We spin theories by which we live.”
“What if they’re false?”
“What if they’re not?” she said.
He shook his head and took a drink.
They sat in silence for a time. She stared out past the pines, sipping her whisky. He stared at her.
“Tell me about your family,” said Riku.
She told him about her dead father, her ill mother, her younger sister and brother, but when she inquired about his parents, he said, “Okay, tell me about your book.”
“I decided to study a season, and since autumn is the season I’m in, it would be autumn. It’s a natural history of autumn.”
“You’ve obviously been to the university,” he said.
She shook her head. “No, I read a lot to pass the time between clients.”
“How much have you written?”
“Nothing yet. I’m researching now, taking notes.”
“Do you go out to Thousand Tree Beach and stare at Fuji in the morning?”
“Your sarcasm is intoxicating,” she said.
He filled her glass
“No, I do my research here. I ask each client what autumn means to him.”
“And they tell you?”
She nodded. “Some just want me to say how big their biceps are but most sit back and really think about it. The thought of it makes all the white-haired ojiisans smile, the businessmen cry, the young men a little scared. A lot of it is the same. Just images—the colorful leaves, the clear cold mornings by the Bay, a certain pet dog, a childhood friend, a drunken night. But sometimes they tell me whole stories.”
“What kind of stories?”
“A very powerful businessman—one of the other hostesses swore he was a master of the five elements—once told me his own love story, about a young woman he had an affair with. It began on the final day of summer, lasted only as long as the following season, and ended in the snow.”
“What did you learn from that story? What did you put in your notes?”
“I recorded his story as he’d told it, and afterward wrote, ‘The Story
of a Ghost.’”
“Why a ghost?” he asked.
“I forget,” she said. “And I lied—I attended Waseda University for two years before my father died.”
“You didn’t have to tell me,” he said. “I knew when you told me you called the businessman’s story, ‘The Story of a Ghost.’ ”
“Pretentious?” she asked. He shrugged.
“Maybe . . . ” she said and smiled.
“Forget about that,” said Riku. “I will top that make-inu businessman’s exquisite melancholy by proposing a field trip.” He sat forward in his chair and touched the tabletop with his index finger. “My employer recently rewarded me for a job well done and suggested I use, whenever I like, a private onsen he has an arrangement with down in Izu. I need only call a few hours in advance.”
“A field trip?” she said. “What will we be researching?”
“Autumn. The red and yellow leaves. The place is out in the woods on a mountainside, hidden and very old-fashioned, no frills. I propose a dohan, an overnight journey to the onsen, Inugami.”
“A date,” she said. “And our attentions will only be on autumn, nothing else?”
“You can trust me when I say, that is entirely up to you.”
“Your hair inspires confidence,” she said. “You can arrange things with the house on the way out.”
“I intend to be in your book,” he said and prevented himself from smiling.
After hours of winding along the rims of steep cliffs and bumping down tight dirt paths through the woods, the silver car pulled to a stop in a clearing, in front of a large, slightly sagging farmhouse—minka style, built of logs with a thatched roof. Twenty yards to the left of the place there was a sizeable garden filled with dying sunflowers, ten-foot stalks, their heads bowed. To the right of the house there was a slate path that led away into the pines. The golden late-afternoon light slanted down on the clearing, shadows beginning to form at the tree line.
“We’re losing the day,” said Riku. “We’ll have to hurry.”
Michi got out of the car and stretched. She removed her sunglasses and stood still for a moment, taking in the cool air.
“I have your bag,” said Riku and shut the trunk.
As they headed for the house, two figures appeared on the porch. One was a small old woman with white hair, wearing monpe pants and an indigo Katazome jacket with a design of white flames. Next to her stood what Michi at first mistook for a pony. The sight of the animal surprised her and she stopped walking. Riku went on ahead. “Grandmother Chinatsu,” he said and bowed.
“Your employer has arranged everything with me. Welcome,” she said. A small, wrinkled hand with dirty nails appeared from within the sleeve of the jacket. She beckoned to Michi. “Come, my dear, don’t be afraid of my pet, Ono. He doesn’t bite.” She smiled and waved her arm.
As Michi approached, she bowed to Grandmother Chinatsu, who only offered a nod. The instant the young woman’s foot touched the first step of the porch, the dog gave a low growl. The old lady wagged a finger at the creature and snapped, “Yemeti!” Then she laughed, low and gruff, the sound at odds with her diminutive size. She extended her hand and helped Michi up onto the porch. “Come in,” she said and led them into the farmhouse.
Michi was last in line. She turned to look at the dog. Its coat was more like curly human hair than fur. She winced in disgust. A large flattened pug face, no snout to speak of, black eyes, sharp ears, and a thick bottom lip bubbling with drool. “Ono,” she said and bowed slightly in passing. As she stepped into the shadow beyond the doorway, she felt the dog’s nose press momentarily against the back of her dress.
In the main room there was a rock fireplace within which a low flame licked two maple logs. Above hung a large paper lantern, orange with white blossoms, shedding a soft light in the center of the room. The place was rustic, wonderfully simple. All was wood: the walls, the ceiling, the floor. There were three ancient carved wooden chairs gathered around a low table off in an alcove at one side of the room. Grandmother led them down a hallway to the back of the place. They passed a room on the left, its screen shut. At the next room, the old lady slid open the panel and said, “The toilet.” Further on, they came to two rooms, one on either side of the hallway. She let them know who was to occupy which by mere nods of her head. “The bath is at the end of the hall,” she said.
Their rooms were tatami style, straw mats and a
platform bed with a futon mattress in the far corner. Each of them, in turn, quickly cleansed themselves in the bath, and then, putting on robes and sandals, met in the hallway. As they passed through the main room of the house, Ono stirred from his spot by the fireplace, looked up at them, and snorted.
“Easy, easy,” said Riku to the creature. He stepped aside and let Michi get in front of him. Once out on the porch, she said, “Ono is a little scary.”
“Only a little?” he asked.
Grandmother appeared from within the plot of dying sunflowers and called that there were towels in the shed out by the spring. Riku waved to her as he and Michi took the slate path into the pines. Shadows were rising beneath the trees and the sky was losing its last blue to an orange glow. Leaves littered the path and the temperature had dropped. The scent of pine was everywhere. Curlews whistled from the branches above.
“Are you taking notes?” he called ahead to her.
She stopped and waited for him. “Which do you think is more autumnal—the leaves, the dying sunflowers, or Grandmother Chinatsu?”
“Too early to tell,” he said. “I’m withholding judgment.”
Another hundred yards down the winding path they came upon the spring, nearly surrounded by pines except for one spot with a view of a small meadow beyond. Steam rose from the natural pool, curling up in the air, reminding Michi of the white flames on the old lady’s jacket. At the edge of the water, closest to the slate path, there was ancient stonework, a crude bench, a stacked rock wall covered with moss, six foot by four, from which a thin waterfall splashed down into the rising heat of the onsen.
“Lovely,” said Michi. Riku nodded.
She left him and moved down along the side of the spring. He looked away as she stepped out of her sandals and removed her robe, which she hung on a nearby branch. He heard her sigh as she entered the water. When he removed his robe, her face was turned away, as if she were taking in the last light on the meadow. Meanwhile, Riku was taking Michi in, her slender neck, her long black hair and how it lay on the curve of her shoulder, her breasts.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition Page 5