The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2

by Gordon Van Gelder

  As her husband, Jack was charged with administration of the estate in which (though it was by right mine) I shared only to a minuscule degree through the perversity of my mother. Were Jack legally dead, I, as Tessie’s brother, would almost certainly be appointed administrator—so my attorney assures me. But as long as Jack is considered by law a fugitive, a suspect in the suspicious death of Nicolette Corso, the entire matter is in abeyance.

  True, I have access to the house; but I have been unable to persuade the conservator that I am the obvious person to look after the property. Nor can I vote the stock, complete the sale of the beach acreage, or do any other of many such useful and possibly remunerative things.

  Thus I appeal to you. (And to any privileged human being who may read this. Please forward my message to the appropriate recipients.) I urgently require proof of Jack’s demise. The nature of that proof I shall leave entirely at your discretion. I venture to point out, however, that identifications based on dental records are in most cases accepted by our courts without question. If Jack’s skull, for example, were discovered some fifty or more miles from here, there should be little difficulty.

  In return, I stand ready to do whatever may be of value to you. Let us discuss this matter, openly and in good faith. I will arrange for this account to be reproduced in a variety of media.

  It was I, of course, as even old Jack surmised, whom Jack’s whore saw the first time near the friendship light. To a human being its morose dance appeared quite threatening, a point I had grasped from the beginning.

  It was I also who pulled out Jack’s headlight switch and put the black tom—I obtained it from the Humane Society—in his car. And it was I who telephoned; at first I did it merely to annoy him—a symbolic revenge on all those (himself included) who have employed that means to render my existence miserable. Later I permitted him to hear my vehicle start, knowing as I did that his would not. Childish, all of them, to be sure; and yet I dare hope they were of some service to you.

  Before I replaced the handle of the valve and extinguished Tessie’s friendship light, I contrived that my Coleman lantern should be made to flicker at the signal frequency. Each evening I hoist it high into the branches of the large maple tree in front of my home. Consider it, please, a beacon of welcome. I am most anxious to speak with you again.

  The Bone Woman (1993)

  CHARLES DE LINT

  CHARLES DE LINT (b. 1951) is the author of many novels and stories, including The Riddle of the Wren, Moonheart, The Little Country, and several novels for younger readers, such as The Painted Boy, The Cats of Tanglewood Forest, and Seven Wild Sisters. Many of de Lint’s stories, including the novels Someplace to Be Flying and Widdershins, are set in the fictional North American city of Newford, and de Lint often shares credit with Megan Lindholm, Emma Bull, and Terri Windling for pioneering and popularizing stories that draw on traditionally rural fantasy themes but explore them in a contemporary urban setting. (The term “Urban Fantasy” is often used for such tales, although—like all such labels—there is lots of debate over just what it encompasses.) “The Bone Woman” exemplifies the blend of city life and fantasy that de Lint writes so well.

  O ONE REALLY stops to think of Ellie Spink, and why should they?

  She’s no one.

  She has nothing.

  Homely as a child, all that the passing of years did was add to her unattractiveness. Face like a horse, jaw long and square, forehead broad; limpid eyes set bird-wide on either side of a gargantuan nose; hair a nondescript brown, greasy and matted, stuffed up under a woolen tuque lined with a patchwork of metal foil scavenged from discarded cigarette packages. The angularity of her slight frame doesn’t get its volume from her meager diet, but from the multiple layers of clothing she wears.

  Raised in foster homes, she’s been used, but she’s never experienced a kiss. Institutionalized for most of her adult life, she’s been medicated, but never treated. Pass her on the street and your gaze slides right on by, never pausing to register the difference between the old woman huddled in the doorway and a bag of garbage.

  Old woman? Though she doesn’t know it, Monday, two weeks past, was her thirty-seventh birthday. She looks twice her age.

  There’s no point in trying to talk to her. Usually no one’s home. When there is, the words spill out in a disjointed mumble, a rambling, one-sided dialogue itemizing a litany of misperceived conspiracies and ills that soon leave you feeling as confused as she herself must be.

  Normal conversation is impossible and not many bother to try it. The exceptions are few: The odd pitying passerby. A concerned social worker, fresh out of college and new to the streets. Maybe one of the other street people who happens to stumble into her particular haunts.

  They talk and she listens or she doesn’t—she never makes any sort of a relevant response, so who can tell? Few push the matter. Fewer still, however well-intentioned, have the stamina to make the attempt to do so more than once or twice. It’s easier to just walk away; to bury your guilt, or laugh off her confused ranting as the excessive rhetoric it can only be.

  I’ve done it myself.

  I used to try to talk to her when I first started seeing her around, but I didn’t get far. Angel told me a little about her, but even knowing her name and some of her history didn’t help.

  “Hey, Ellie. How’re you doing?”

  Pale eyes, almost translucent, turn towards me, set so far apart it’s as though she can only see me with one eye at a time.

  “They should test for aliens,” she tells me. “You know, like in the Olympics.”

  “Aliens?”

  “I mean, who cares who killed Kennedy? Dead’s dead, right?”

  “What’s Kennedy got to do with aliens?”

  “I don’t even know why they took down the Berlin Wall. What about the one in China? Shouldn’t they have worked on that one first?”

  It’s like trying to have a conversation with a game of Trivial Pursuit that specializes in information garnered from supermarket tabloids. After a while I’d just pack an extra sandwich whenever I was busking in her neighbourhood. I’d sit beside her, share my lunch and let her talk if she wanted to, but I wouldn’t say all that much myself.

  That all changed the day I saw her with the Bone Woman.

  I didn’t call her the Bone Woman at first; the adjective that came more immediately to mind was fat. She couldn’t have been much more than five-foot-one, but she had to weigh in at two-fifty, leaving me with the impression that she was wider than she was tall. But she was light on her feet—peculiarly graceful for all her squat bulk.

  She had a round face like a full moon, framed by thick black hair that hung in two long braids to her waist. Her eyes were small, almost lost in that expanse of face, and so dark they seemed all pupil. She went barefoot in a shapeless black dress, her only accessory an equally shapeless shoulder-bag made of some kind of animal skin and festooned with dangling thongs from which hung various feathers, beads, bottle-caps and other found objects.

  I paused at the far end of the street when I saw the two of them together. I had a sandwich for Ellie in my knapsack, but I hesitated in approaching them. They seemed deep in conversation, real conversation, give and take, and Ellie was—knitting? Talking and knitting? The pair of them looked like a couple of old gossips, sitting on the back porch of their building. The sight of Ellie acting so normal was something I didn’t want to interrupt.

  I sat down on a nearby stoop and watched until Ellie put away her knitting and stood up. She looked down at her companion with an expression in her features that I’d never seen before. It was awareness, I realized. She was completely here for a change.

  As she came up the street, I stood up and called a greeting to her, but by the time she reached me she wore her usually vacuous expression.

  “It’s the newspapers,” she told me. “They use radiation to print them and that’s what makes the news seem so bad.”

  Before I could take the sandwich I�
��d brought her out of my knapsack, she’d shuffled off, around the corner, and was gone. I glanced back down the street to where the fat woman was still sitting, and decided to find Ellie later. Right now I wanted to know what the woman had done to get such a positive reaction out of Ellie.

  When I approached, the fat woman was sifting through the refuse where the two of them had been sitting. As I watched, she picked up a good-sized bone. What kind, I don’t know, but it was as long as my forearm and as big around as the neck of my fiddle. Brushing dirt and a sticky candy-wrapper from it, she gave it a quick polish on the sleeve of her dress and stuffed it away in her shoulder-bag. Then she looked up at me.

  My question died stillborn in my throat under the sudden scrutiny of those small dark eyes. She looked right through me—not the drifting, unfocused gaze of so many of the street people, but a cold far-off seeing that weighed my presence, dismissed it, and gazed further off at something far more important.

  I stood back as she rose easily to her feet. That was when I realized how graceful she was. She moved down the sidewalk as daintily as a doe, as though her bulk was filled with helium, rather than flesh, and weighed nothing. I watched her until she reached the far end of the street, turned her own corner and then, just like Ellie, was gone as well.

  I ended up giving Ellie’s sandwich to Johnny Rew, an old wino who’s taught me a fiddle tune or two, the odd time I’ve run into him sober.

  I started to see the Bone Woman everywhere after that day. I wasn’t sure if she was just new to town, or if it was one of those cases where you see something or someone you’ve never noticed before and after that you see them all the time. Everybody I talked to about her seemed to know her, but no one was quite sure how long she’d been in the city, or where she lived, or even her name.

  I still wasn’t calling her the Bone Woman, though I knew by then that bones was all she collected. Old bones, found bones, rattling around together in her shoulder-bag until she went off at the end of the day and showed up the next morning, ready to start filling her bag again.

  When she wasn’t hunting bones, she spent her time with the street’s worst cases—people like Ellie that no one else could talk to. She’d get them making things—little pictures or carvings or beadwork, keeping their hands busy. And talking. Someone like Ellie still made no sense to anybody else, but you could tell when she was with the Bone Woman that they were sharing a real dialogue. Which was a good thing, I suppose, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more going on, something if not exactly sinister, then still strange.

  It was the bones, I suppose. There were so many. How could she keep finding them the way she did? And what did she do with them?

  My brother Christy collects urban legends, the way the Bone Woman collects her bones, rooting them out where you’d never think they could be. But when I told him about her, he just shrugged.

  “Who knows why any of them do anything?” he said.

  Christy doesn’t live on the streets, for all that he haunts them. He’s just an observer—always has been, ever since we were kids. To him, the street people can be pretty well evenly divided between the sad cases and the crazies. Their stories are too human for him.

  “Some of these are big,” I told him. “The size of a human thighbone.”

  “So point her out to the cops.”

  “And tell them what?”

  A smile touched his lips with just enough superiority in it to get under my skin. He’s always been able to do that. Usually, it makes me do something I regret later which I sometimes think is half his intention. It’s not that he wants to see me hurt. It’s just part and parcel of that air of authority that all older siblings seem to wear. You know, a raised eyebrow, a way of smiling that says “you have so much to learn, little brother.”

  “If you really want to know what she does with those bones,” he said, “why don’t you follow her home and find out?”

  “Maybe I will.”

  It turned out that the Bone Woman had a squat on the roof of an abandoned factory building in the Tombs. She’d built herself some kind of a shed up there—just a leaning, ramshackle affair of cast-off lumber and sheet metal, but it kept out the weather and could easily be heated with a woodstove in the spring and fall. Come winter, she’d need warmer quarters, but the snows were still a month or so away.

  I followed her home one afternoon, then came back the next day when she was out to finally put to rest my fear about these bones she was collecting. The thought that had stuck in my mind was that she was taking something away from the street people like Ellie, people who were already at the bottom rung and deserved to be helped, or at least just left alone. I’d gotten this weird idea that the bones were tied up with the last remnants of vitality that someone like Ellie might have, and the Bone Woman was stealing it from them.

  What I found was more innocuous, and at the same time creepier, than I’d expected.

  The inside of her squat was littered with bones and wire and dog-shaped skeletons that appeared to be made from the two. Bones held in place by wire, half-connected ribs and skulls and limbs. A pack of bone dogs. Some of the figures were almost complete, others were merely suggestions, but everywhere I looked, the half-finished wire-and-bone skeletons sat or stood or hung suspended from the ceiling. There had to be more than a dozen in various states of creation.

  I stood in the doorway, not willing to venture any further, and just stared at them all. I don’t know how long I was there, but finally I turned away and made my way back down through the abandoned building and out onto the street.

  So now I knew what she did with the bones. But it didn’t tell me how she could find so many of them. Surely that many stray dogs didn’t die, their bones scattered the length and breadth of the city like so much autumn residue?

  Amy and I had a gig opening for the Kelledys that night. It didn’t take me long to set up. I just adjusted my microphone, laid out my fiddle and whistles on a small table to one side, and then kicked my heels while Amy fussed with her pipes and the complicated tangle of electronics that she used to amplify them.

  I’ve heard it said that all Uillean pipers are a little crazy—that they have to be to play an instrument that looks more like what you’d find in the back of a plumber’s truck than an instrument—but I think of them as perfectionists. Every one I’ve ever met spends more time fiddling with their reeds and adjusting the tuning of their various chanters, drones and regulators than would seem humanly possible.

  Amy’s no exception. After a while I left her there on the stage, with her red hair falling in her face as she poked and prodded at a new reed she’d made for one of her drones, and wandered into the back where the Kelledys were making their own preparations for the show, which consisted of drinking tea and looking beatific. At least that’s the way I always think of the two of them. I don’t think I’ve ever met calmer people.

  Jilly likes to think of them as mysterious, attributing all kinds of fairy tale traits to them. Meran, she’s convinced, with the green highlights in her nut-brown hair and her wise brown eyes, is definitely dryad material—the spirit of an oak tree come to life—while Cerin is some sort of wizard figure, a combination of adept and bard. I think the idea amuses them and they play it up to Jilly. Nothing you can put your finger on, but they seem to get a kick out of spinning a mysterious air about themselves whenever she’s around.

  I’m far more practical than Jilly—actually, just about anybody’s more practical than Jilly, God bless her, but that’s another story. I think if you find yourself using the word magic to describe the Kelledys, what you’re really talking about is their musical talent. They may seem preternaturally calm offstage, but as soon as they begin to play, that calmness is transformed into a bonfire of energy. There’s enchantment then, burning on stage, but it comes from their instrumental skill.

  “Geordie,” Meran said after I’d paced back and forth for a few minutes. “You look a little edgy. Have some tea.”r />
  I had to smile. If the Kelledys had originated from some mysterious elsewhere, then I’d lean more towards them having come from a fiddle tune than Jilly’s fairy tales.

  “When sick is it tea you want?” I said, quoting the title of an old Irish jig that we all knew in common.

  Meran returned my smile. “It can’t hurt. Here,” she added, rummaging around in a bag that was lying by her chair. “Let me see if I have something that’ll ease your nervousness.”

  “I’m not nervous.”

  “No, of course not,” Cerin put in. “Geordie just likes to pace, don’t you?”

  He was smiling as he spoke, but without a hint of Christy’s sometimes annoying demeanor.

  “No, really. It’s just. . . .”

  “Just what?” Meran asked as my voice trailed off.

  Well, here was the perfect opportunity to put Jilly’s theories to the test, I decided. If the Kelledys were in fact as fey as she made them out to be, then they’d be able to explain this business with the bones, wouldn’t they?

  So I told them about the fat woman and her bones and what I’d found in her squat. They listened with far more reasonableness than I would have if someone had been telling the story to me—especially when I went on to explain the weird feeling I’d been getting from the whole business.

  “It’s giving me the creeps,” I said, finishing up, “and I can’t even say why.”

  “La Huesera,” Cerin said when I was done.

  Meran nodded. “The Bone Woman,” she said, translating it for me. “It does sound like her.”

  “So you know her.”

  “No,” Meran said. “It just reminds us of a story we heard when we were playing in Phoenix a few years ago. There was a young Apache man opening for us and he and I started comparing flutes. We got on to one of the Native courting flutes which used to be made from human bone and somehow from there John started telling me about a legend they have in the Southwest about this old fat woman who wanders through the mountains and arroyos, collecting bones from the desert that she brings back to her cave.”