The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine

by Jonathan Strahan

  Mom’s sobs again. I Killed Myself For Love. I Killed Myself For You, she said. I Came Back For Girls Who Wanted Parents But You Already Had Parents.

  “Mini, listen to me,” said Ronnie. “I said it because it seemed like a thing to say, and it would have been nice to have, but there is no way to reverse the spell, is there?”

  “We can try it. We can go back to the parking lot and do everything, but backward.”

  “We can change the words. We have to try,” Caroline said.

  “Mom,” said Ronnie, “if you’re still here, I want to tell you that I want you. I’m the one who needs a mother. You saw.”

  “Ronnie,” said Caroline, “what are you talking about?”

  From Mini, Mom said, You Girls Lie To One Another. All The Things You Don’t Tell Your Friends. Ronnie thought she already sounded less angry. Just sad and a little petulant. Maybe showing all of them their deaths by car crash had gotten it out of her system.

  “The thing I’m doing,” said Ronnie, “that’s a thing they would kick me out of the family for doing. I need my real family. I need you.” She didn’t want to say the rest out loud, so she waited. She felt Mom open up her head, take one cautious step inside with one foot and then the other. Ronnie knew that she didn’t want to be this way or do those things anymore. Ronnie knew that she couldn’t find a way to stop or escape Alex’s gaze from across the room when everyone else was watching TV. Stop looking at me. If you could stop looking at me for just one second, then I could stop too.

  Mom, while we’re speaking honestly, I don’t think you’re any of our mothers. I don’t think you’re Korean. I don’t even think you come from any country on this planet.

  (Don’t tell me either way.) But I don’t care. I need your help, Mom. Please, are you still there? I’ll be your daughter. I love your strength. I’m not scared anymore. You can sleep inside my bone marrow, and you can eat my thoughts for dinner, and I promise, I promise I’ll always listen to you. Just make me good.

  They didn’t see Ronnie for a few months. Mini did see Alex at a concert pretty soon after everything that happened. He had a black eye and his arm in a sling. She hid behind a pillar until he passed out of sight. Mini, at least, had sort of figured it out. First she wondered why Ronnie had never told them, but then, immediately, she wondered how Ronnie could do such a thing. She wondered how Alex could do such a thing. Her thoughts shuttled back and forth between both of those stations and would not rest on one, so she made herself stop thinking about it.

  As for Mini and Caroline, their hair grew out or they got haircuts, and everything was different, and Caroline’s parents had allowed her to quit ballet and Mini’s parents were still leaving her alone too much but she grew to like it. And when they were around, they weren’t so bad. These days they could even be in the same room without screaming at each other.

  There was another meet-up for Korean adoptees. They decided to go. School had started up again, and Mini and Caroline were on the wane. Mini and Caroline thought that maybe bringing it all back full circle would help. But they knew it wouldn’t be the same without Ronnie.

  Mini and Caroline saw us first before we saw them. They saw us emerge from a crowd of people, people that even Caroline hadn’t befriended already. They saw our skin and hair, skin and eyes, hair and teeth. The way we seemed to exist in more dimensions than other people did. How something was going on with us – something was shakin’ it – on the fourth, fifth, and possibly sixth dimensions. Space and time and space-time and skin and hair and teeth. You can’t say “pretty” to describe us. You can’t say “beautiful.” You can, however, look upon us and know true terror. The Halversons know. All of our friends and admirers know.

  Who are we? We are Ronnie and someone standing behind her, with hands on her shoulders, a voice in her ear, and sometimes we are someone standing inside her, with feet in her shoes, moving her around. We are Ronnie and we are her mom and we are every magazine clipping on how to charm and beautify, the tickle of a mascara wand on a tear duct, the burn of a waxed armpit.

  We watched Mini and Caroline, observed how shocked they were. Afraid, too. Ronnie could tell that they would not come up to her first. No? she said to her mother. No, we said. For a moment Ronnie considered rebellion. She rejected the idea. Those girls were from the bad old days. Look at her now. She would never go back. Mom was pushing us away from them. She was telling Ronnie to let them go.

  Ronnie watched Mini and Caroline recede. The tables, the tables of food and the chairs on either side of them, rushed toward us as their two skinny figures pinned and blurred. We both felt a moment of regret. She once loved them too, you know. Then her mother turned our head and we walked away.

  SHAY CORSHAM WORSTED

  Garth Nix

  Garth Nix (www.garthnix.com) grew up in Canberra, Australia. When he turned nineteen, he left to drive around the United Kingdom in a beat-up Austin with a boot full of books and a Silver-Reed typewriter. Despite a wheel literally falling off the car, he survived to return to Australia and study at the University of Canberra. He has since worked in a bookshop, as a book publicist, a publisher’s sales representative, an editor, as a literary agent, and as a public relations and marketing consultant. His first story was published in 1984 and was followed by novels The Ragwitch, Shade’s Children, the Old Kingdom series (Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen), the six-book YA fantasy series The Seventh Tower, the seven-book The Keys to the Kingdom series and, the Troubletwisters series (co-written with Sean Williams). His latest book is new Old Kingdom novel, Clariel. He lives in Sydney with his wife and their two children.

  THE YOUNG MAN came in one of the windows, because the back door had proved surprisingly tough. He’d kicked it a few times, without effect, before looking for an easier way to get in. The windows were barred, but the bars were rusted almost through, so he had no difficulty pulling them away. The window was locked as well, but he just smashed the glass with a half brick pried out of the garden wall. He didn’t care about the noise. He knew there was only the old man in the house, the garden was large and screened by trees, and the evening traffic was streaming past on the road out front. That was plenty loud enough to cloak any noise he might make.

  Or any quavering cries for help from the old man, thought the intruder, as he climbed through. He went to the back door first, intending to open it for a quick getaway, but it was deadlocked. More afraid of getting robbed than dying in a fire, thought the young man. That made it easier. He liked the frightened old people, the power he had over them with his youth and strength and anger.

  When he turned around, the old man was standing behind him. Just standing there, not doing a thing. It was dim in the corridor, the only light a weak bulb hanging from the ceiling, its pallid glow falling on the bald head of the little man, the ancient slight figure in his brown cardigan and brown corduroy trousers and brown slippers, just a little old man that could be picked up and broken like a stick and then whatever pathetic treasures were in the house could be –

  A little old man whose eyes were silver.

  And what was in his hands?

  Those gnarled hands had been empty, the intruder was sure of it, but now the old bloke held long blades, though he wasn’t exactly holding the blades... they were growing, growing from his fingers, the flesh fusing together and turning silver... silver as those eyes!

  The young man had turned half an inch towards the window and escape when the first of those silvery blades penetrated his throat, destroying his voice box, changing the scream that rose there to a dull, choking cough. The second blade went straight through his heart, back out, and through again.

  Pock! Pock!

  Blood geysered, but not on the old man’s brown cardigan. He had moved back almost in the same instant as he struck and was now ten feet away, watching with those silver eyes as the young man fell writhing on the floor, his feet drumming for eighteen seconds before he became still.

  The blades retreated, became fingers once agai
n. The old man considered the body, the pooling blood, the mess.

  “Shay Marazion Velvet,” he said to himself, and walked to the spray of blood farthest from the body, head-high on the peeling wallpaper of green lilies. He poked out his tongue, which grew longer and became as silver as the blades.

  He began to lick, tongue moving rhythmically, head tilted as required. There was no expression on his face, no sign of physical excitement. This was not some fetish.

  He was simply cleaning up.

  “YOU’LL NEVER GUESS who I saw walking up and down outside, Father,” said Mary Shires, as she bustled in with her ludicrously enormous basket filled with the weekly tribute of home-made foods and little luxuries that were generally unwanted and wholly unappreciated by her father, Sir David Shires.

  “Who?” grunted Sir David. He was sitting at his kitchen table, scrawling notes on the front page of the Times, below the big headlines with the latest from the war with Argentina over the Falklands, and enjoying the sun that was briefly flooding the whole room through the open doors to the garden.

  “That funny little Mister Shea,” said Mary, putting the basket down on the table.

  Sir David’s pencil broke. He let it fall and concentrated on keeping his hand still, on making his voice sound normal. He shouldn’t be surprised, he told himself. It was why he was here, after all. But after so many years, even though every day he told himself this could be the day, it was a terrible, shocking surprise.

  “Really, dear?” he said. He thought his voice sounded mild enough. “Going down to the supermarket like he normally does, I suppose? Getting his bread and milk?”

  “No, that’s just the thing,” said Mary. She took out a packet of some kind of biscuit and put it in front of her father. “These are very good. Oatmeal and some kind of North African citrus. You’ll like them.”

  “Mister Shea,” prompted Sir David.

  “Oh, yes. He’s just walking backwards and forwards along the footpath from his house to the corner. Backwards and forwards! I suppose he’s gone ga-ga. He’s old enough. He must be ninety if he’s a day, surely?”

  She looked at him, without guile, both of them knowing he was eighty himself. But not going ga-ga, thank god, even if his knees were weak reeds and he couldn’t sleep at night, remembering things that he had forced himself to forget in his younger days.

  But Shay was much older than ninety, thought Sir David. Shay was much, much older than that.

  He pushed his chair back and stood up.

  “I might go and... and have a word with the old chap,” he said carefully. “You stay here, Mary.”

  “Perhaps I should come –”

  “No!”

  He grimaced, acknowledging he had spoken with too much emphasis. He didn’t want to alarm Mary. But then again, in the worst case... no, not the worst case, but in a quite plausible minor escalation...

  “In fact, I think you should go out the back way and get home,” said Sir David.

  “Really, Father, why on –”

  “Because I am ordering you to,” snapped Sir David. He still had the voice, the tone that expected to be obeyed, deployed very rarely with the family, but quite often to the many who had served under him, first in the Navy and then for considerably longer in the Department, where he had ended up as the Deputy Chief. Almost fifteen years gone, but it wasn’t the sort of job where you ever completely left, and the command voice was the least of the things that had stayed with him.

  Mary sniffed, but she obeyed, slamming the garden gate on her way out. It would be a few years yet, he thought, before she began to question everything he did, perhaps start bringing brochures for retirement homes along with her special biscuits and herbal teas she believed to be good for reducing the chance of dementia.

  Dementia. There was an apposite word. He’d spent some time thinking he might be suffering from dementia or some close cousin of it, thirty years ago, in direct connection to “funny old Mister Shea”. Who was not at all funny, not in any sense of the word. They had all wondered if they were demented, for a time.

  He paused near his front door, wondering for a moment if he should make the call first, or even press his hand against the wood paneling just so, and flip it open to take out the .38 Colt Police revolver cached there. He had a 9mm Browning automatic upstairs, but a revolver was better for a cached weapon. You wouldn’t want to bet your life on magazine springs in a weapon that had sat too long. He checked all his armament every month, but still... a revolver was more certain.

  But automatic or revolver, neither would be any use. He’d learned that before, from direct observation, and had been lucky to survive. Very lucky, because the other two members of the team hadn’t had the fortune to slip in the mud and hit themselves on the head and be forced to lie still. They’d gone in shooting, and kept shooting, unable to believe the evidence of their eyes, until it was too late...

  Sir David grimaced. This was one of the memories he’d managed to push aside for a long, long time. But like all the others, it wasn’t far below the surface. It didn’t take much to bring it up, that afternoon in 1953, the Department’s secure storage on the fringe of RAF Bicester...

  He did take a walking stick out of the stand. A solid bog oak stick, with a pommel of bronze worked in the shape of a spaniel’s head. Not for use as a weapon, but simply because he didn’t walk as well as he once did. He couldn’t afford a fall now. Or at any time really, but particularly not now.

  The sun was still shining outside. It was a beautiful day, the sky as blue as a bird’s egg, with hardly a cloud in sight. It was the kind of day you only saw in films, evoking some fabulous summer time that never really existed, or not for more than half an hour at a time.

  It was a good day to die, if it came to that, if you were eighty and getting tired of the necessary props to a continued existence. The medicines and interventions, the careful calculation of probabilities before anything resembling activity, calculations that Sir David would never have undertaken at a younger age.

  He swung out on to the footpath, a military stride, necessarily adjusted by age and a back that would no longer entirely straighten. He paused by the kerb and looked left and right, surveying the street, head back, shoulders close to straight, sandy eyebrows raised, hair no longer quite so regulation short, catching a little of the breeze, the soft breeze that added to the day’s delights.

  Shay was there, as Mary had said. It was wearing the same clothes as always, the brown cardigan and corduroy. They’d put fifty pairs in the safe house, at the beginning, uncertain whether Shay would buy more or not, though its daily purchase of bread, milk and other basics was well established. It could mimic human behavior very well.

  It looked like a little old man, a bald little man of some great age. Wrinkled skin, hooded eyes, head bent as if the neck could no longer entirely support the weight of years. But Sir David knew it didn’t always move like an old man. It could move fluidly, like an insect, faster than you ever thought at first sighting.

  Right now Shay was walking along the footpath, away from Sir David. Halfway to the corner, it turned back. It must have seen him, but as usual, it gave no outward sign of recognition or reception. There would be no such sign, until it decided to do whatever it was going to do next.

  Sir David shuffled forward. Best to get it over with. His hand was already sweating, slippery on the bronze dog handle of his stick, his heart hammering in a fashion bound to be at odds with a cardio-pulmonary system past its best. He knew the feeling well, though it had been an age since he’d felt it more than fleetingly.

  Fear. Unalloyed fear, that must be conquered, or he could do nothing, and that was not an option. Shay had broken free of its programming. It could be about to do anything, anything at all, perhaps reliving some of its more minor exploits like the Whitechapel murders of 1888, or a major one like the massacre at Slapton Sands in 1944.

  Or something greater still.

  Not that Sir David was sure he could do
anything. He’d only ever been told two of the command phrases, and lesser ones at that, a pair of two word groups. They were embossed on his mind, bright as new brass. But it was never known exactly what they meant, or how Shay understood them.

  There was also the question of which command to use. Or to try and use both command phrases, though that might somehow have the effect of one of the four word command groups. An unknown effect, very likely fatal to Sir David and everyone for miles, perhaps more.

  It was not inconceivable that whatever he said in the next two minutes might doom everyone in London, or even the United Kingdom.

  Perhaps even the world.

  The first command would be best, Sir David thought, watching Shay approach. They were out in public, the second would attract attention, besides its other significant drawback. Public attention was anathema to Sir David, even in such dire circumstances. He straightened his tie unconsciously as he thought about publicity. It was a plain green tie, as his suit was an inconspicuous grey flannel, off the rack. No club or regimental ties for Sir David, no identifying signet rings, no ring, no earring, no tattoos, no unusual facial hair. He worked to look a type that had once been excellent camouflage, the retired military officer. It still worked, though less well, there being fewer of the type to hide amongst. Perhaps the Falklands War would help in this regard.

  Shay was drawing nearer, walking steadily, perfectly straight. Sir David peered at it. Were its eyes silver? If they were, it would be too late. All bets off, end of story. But the sun was too bright, Sir David’s own sight was not what it once was. He couldn’t tell if Shay’s eyes were silver.

  “Shay Risborough Gabardine,” whispered Sir David. Ludicrous words, but proven by trial and error, trial by combat, death by error. The name it apparently gave itself, a station on the Great Western Line, and a type of fabric. Not words you’d ever expect to find together, there was its safety, the cleverness of Isambard Kingdom Brunel showing through. Though not as clever as how IKB had got Shay to respond to the words in the first place. So clever that no one else had worked out how it had been done, not in the three different attempts over more than a hundred years. Attempts to try to change or expand the creature’s lexicon, each attempt another litany of mistakes and many deaths. And after each such trial, the fear that had led to it being shut away. Locked underground the last time, and then the chance rediscovery in 1953 and the foolishness that had led it to being put away here, parked and forgotten.