Nebula Awards Showcase 2019

by Rebecca Roanhorse

  Don’t be shy, the cabinets are here for your comfort. It’s like looking at dolls, as the posters say. That’s why you came. For the strange dolls in the grotesquerie. The Oddities.

  We’re keeping the lights low. Any brighter hurts our eyes, bounces off the mirrors. You can still see the finer details, if you lean really close. We’ve left the glass off the fronts, just for you. Touch the sutures, the pins, if you like. Try to push aside the velvet skirting to see the workings below. We’re all like dolls here, with some spare parts. Interchangeable. May I take your hand?

  That’s right. Good.

  Let me catalog our alphabet of differences for you. Here are the heads, the horns, the holes where they tried to let out headaches. Here are the spines, curved like serpents. Here, the jars of jellies with heads too big to be human. A pair of burly palms like beetle’s claws, skin tight over bone.

  Here are the doubles and triples, the cephalics, their two legs supporting so much thought. The twins, wrapped around one another like trees. Here is the stone baby, we found him in the trash. See his marble skin, worn away where someone had been touching him too much? We’ve been teaching him his letters.

  ◉ ◉ ◉

  Our Curator’s Special Collection

  Through here, the lights are brighter. I can’t fit your bin past the door, but that is the curator’s desk, his chair. His coat, hung neatly, his stethoscope, the rubber gone a bit rot. He always kept very good notes. Paid well, too.

  He’d seen the Royal Collection in Denmark, the walls crowded, the glass containers and the formalin. He’d once wondered aloud what such a display might cost. But he wasn’t cruel. He wanted to fix us. Or, at least pin us still so he could study us, like you’re studying the articulated skeleton in the corner. It was for posterity. Never confuse good intentions for malice. A friend told me that once. He’s not here now, not really.

  Am I holding your hand too tight? No? You can barely feel it? Good. We’ll keep moving, then. More to see.

  ◉ ◉ ◉

  A Room of Objects That Are Very Sharp

  Lie still, this is what you paid for. I can’t push any faster. Heavy bins are difficult to pivot around corners, as are tails. You could be more considerate.

  You might recognize these cases. Medical tools, some very old. Many rusty hinges. Of course that’s rust. Ancient. You all love the tools so much. The spreaders, the extractors, the mechanical leeches.

  Open the drawers of Items We’ve Let Touch Us Because Someone Just Like You Said It Would Make Us Well. The hooks and saws, the foul tastes and that stuff that made us gag and didn’t make us any better. You all wrote neat words down about each experiment anyway and that made you better. Details matter, like on the X-ray. Angles, perspective. Lie back. Hold my hand again. You see the mirrors? They’re too high for us to see ourselves in, always. But we can see you with them, no matter where we are.

  We can see you, and you can see us as we really are.

  Remember the way we turned to bone and stone when you looked at us on the street? Froze, waiting to see what you’d say? Imagine the pain of it, the hardening of each joint when you thought that word, the non-scientific one, the one that rhymes with eek. You feel it, don’t you. That chill down your spine, the hardening? Yeah, we know. That’s why you pay your dime.

  So we’ll stay quiet and let you look.

  ◉ ◉ ◉

  The Hall of Criminals and Saints

  One more room. Through this arch. Don’t worry about my skin, it flakes now, when I’m too long out of water. The scales fall from me like coins and people swallow them.

  Here are my last loves. I’m always one for the bad boys, the good ones too. The first name’s blurred, damp, but you can see he was strong. Broad brow, firm jaw. He wasn’t really a criminal, but his skull matched the phrenologist’s map. They locked him up behind glass, just to be safe. This one was a criminal, but they didn’t catch him. He came here on his own, looking for us. See how similar his skull is to my love’s? To yours?

  Here is my best friend, her black and gold wings tacked to the wall with seventeen #7 steel mounting pins, her gilt-flecked glass eyes, so like marbles, focused on the ceiling. Wore out her blue eyes, she did, trying to find differences among our guests. You are all so alike. We used the best marbles. Don’t look at her eyes. You haven’t earned that yet.

  You’ve earned admission. A catalog. A touch of seams, of beetle’s claw. A place on the floor, no more. Not our eyes.

  Look here, my children, bone and dust. You didn’t think I could have those? Neither did we. They were a surprise, the small fish, their mouths so beautiful before they were hooked.

  Stay quiet, it will be over soon—

  ◉ ◉ ◉

  This Way to the Exit

  Stay quiet. The lights dazzle your eyes too now. We’d never tell you that you all look odd to us. That would be rude. We’d never stare. But the truth isn’t kind: you’re all kind of boring, really. Identical eyes and matching limbs, smooth faces and parts all in the same order every time you come through. The curator was boring too, once we looked close enough.

  But you’re changed now, at least a bit. A touch of chitin, those beetle hands. They look good on you. They match your soul: Luminous and opaque.

  Would you like to stop at the gift shop? No? Would you like a pill, a potion? There’s a taste on my tongue, like brine. Something volatile. Here is a kiss to remind you. Here is a story to take home. A parting gift. A souvenir.

  Your kind always leaves so terribly, gaze darting from seam to seam, then to sticky carpet, to my sharp eyes, my tongue, then, finally, the exit. You crawl and stumble: building up speed, tapping your ineffectual hands beautifully against the glass.

  END

  A Human Stain

  Kelly Robson

  Peter’s little French nursemaid was just the type of rosy young thing Helen liked, but there was something strange about her mouth. She was shy and wouldn’t speak, but that was no matter. Helen could keep the conversation going all by herself.

  “Our journey was awful. Paris to Strasbourg clattered along fast enough, but the leg to Munich would have been quicker by cart. And Salzburg! The train was outpaced by a donkey.”

  Helen laughed at her own joke. Mimi tied a knot on a neat patch of darning and began working on another stocking.

  Helen had first seen the nursemaid’s pretty face that morning, looking down from one of the house’s highest windows as she and Bärchen Lambrecht rowed across the lake with their luggage crammed in a tippy little skiff. Even at a distance, Helen could tell she was a beauty.

  Bärchen had retreated to the library as soon as they walked through the front door, no doubt to cry in private over his brother’s death after holding in his grief through the long trip from Paris. Helen had been left with the choice to sit in the kitchen with two dour servants, lurk alone in the moldering front parlor, or carry her coffee cup up the narrow spiral staircase and see that beauty up close.

  The climb was only a little higher than the Parisian garret Helen had lived in the past three months, but the stairs were so steep she had been puffing hard by the time she got to the top. The effort was worthwhile, though. If the best cure for a broken heart was a new young love, Helen suspected hers would be soon mended.

  “We had a melancholy journey. Herr Lambrecht was deeply saddened to arrive here at his childhood home without his brother to welcome him. He didn’t want to leave Paris.” Helen sipped her cooling coffee. “Have you ever been to Paris?”

  Mimi kept her head down. So shy. Couldn’t even bring herself to answer a simple question.

  Peter sat on the rug and stacked the gilded letter blocks Bärchen had brought him. For a newly-orphaned child, he seemed content enough, but he was pale, his bloodless skin nearly translucent against the deep blue velvet of his jacket. He seemed far too big for nursery toys—
six or seven years old, she thought. Nearly old enough to be sent away to school, but what did Helen know about children? In any case, he seemed a good-natured, quiet boy. Nimble, graceful, even. He took care to keep the blocks on the rug when he toppled the stack.

  She ought to ask him to put the blocks in alphabet order, see how much his mother had taught him before she had passed away. But not today, and probably not tomorrow, either. A motherless, fatherless boy deserved a holiday, and she was tired from travel. The servants here were bound to be old-fashioned, but none of them would judge her for relaxing in a sunny window with a cup of coffee after a long journey.

  They would judge her, though, if they thought she was Bärchen’s mistress. She would be at Meresee all summer, so she needed to be on good terms with them—and especially with Mimi.

  “We traveled in separate cars, of course. Herr Lambrecht is a proper, old-fashioned sort of gentleman.” Helen stifled a laugh. Bärchen was nothing of the sort, but certainly no danger to any woman. “The ladies’ coach was comfortable and elegant, but just as slow as the rest of the train.”

  Still no reaction. It was a feeble joke, but Helen doubted the nursemaid ever heard better. Perhaps the girl was simple. But so lovely. Roses and snow and dark, dark hair. Eighteen or twenty, no more. What a shame about her mouth. Bad teeth perhaps.

  Helen twisted in her seat and looked out the window. The Meresee was a narrow blade of lake hemmed in tight by the Bavarian Alps. Their peaks tore into the summer sky like teeth on a ragged jaw, doubled in the mirror surface of the lake below. It was just the sort of alpine vista that sent English tourists skittering across the Alps with their easels and folding chairs, pencils and watercolors.

  The view of the house itself was unmatched. Helen had been expecting something grand, but as they had rowed up the lake, she was surprised she hadn’t seen Bärchen’s family home reproduced in every print shop from London to Berlin, alongside famous views of Schloss Neuschwanstein and Schloss Hohenschwangau. Schloss Meresee was a miniature version of those grand castles—tall and narrow, as if someone had carved off a piece of Neuschwanstein’s oldest wing and set it down on the edge of the lake. Only four storeys, but with no other structure for scale it towered above the shore, the rake of its rooflines echoing the peaks above, gray stone walls picked out in relief against the steep, forested mountainside. Not a true castle—no keep or tower. But add a turret or two, and that’s what the tourists would call it.

  No tourists here to admire it, though. Too remote. No roads, no neighbors, no inns or hotels. From what Helen could see as she sat high in the fourth floor nursery window, the valley was deserted. Not even a hut or cabin on the lakeshore.

  She’d never been to a place so isolated. Winter would make it even more lonely, but by then she would be long gone. Back in London, at worst, unless her luck changed.

  When she turned from the window, Peter had disappeared. The door swung on its hinges.

  “Where did Peter go?” Helen asked.

  Mimi didn’t answer.

  “To fetch a toy, perhaps?”

  Mimi bent closer to her needle. Helen carried her coffee cup to the door and called out softly in German. “Peter, come back to the nursery this instant.” When there was no answer, she repeated it in French.

  “I suppose Peter does this often,” Helen said. “He thinks it’s fun to hide from you.”

  Mimi’s lips quivered. “Oui,” she said.

  “Come along then, show me his hiding places.”

  The nursemaid ignored her. Helen resisted the urge to pluck the darning from Mimi’s hands.

  “If I were newly orphaned, I might hide too, just to see if anyone cared enough to search for me. Won’t you help me look?” Helen smiled, pouring all her charm into the request. A not inconsiderable amount, to judge by the effect she had on Parisian women, but it was no use. Mimi might be made of stone.

  “To hell with you,” she said in English under her breath, and slammed the nursery door behind her.

  It was barely even an oath. She knew much filthier curses in a variety of languages. Her last lover had liked to hear her swear. But no more. That life had cast Helen off. All she had left in Paris were her debts.

  The clock chimed noon. When it stopped, the house was silent. Not a squeak or creak. No sign of Bärchen or the servants, no sound from the attics above or the floors below. She padded over to the staircase and gazed down the dizzying stone spiral that formed the house’s hollow spine. Steps fanned out from the spiral, each one polished and worn down in the center from centuries of use.

  “Peter,” she called. “Come back to the nursery, please.”

  No reply.

  “All right,” she sang out. “I’m coming to find you.”

  Who could blame the child for wanting to play a game? Peter had no playmates. She could indulge him, just this once. And it gave her a good excuse to snoop through the house.

  ◉ ◉ ◉

  By the time Helen had worked her way through the top two floors, it was obvious that the servants were outmatched by the housekeeping. The heavy old furniture was scarred and peeling, the blankets and drapes threadbare and musty, the carpets veiled with a fine layer of cobwebs that separated and curled around her every footstep. The surfaces were furred with a fine white dust that coated the back of her throat and lay salty on her tongue. After a half hour of wiggling under beds and rifling through closets and wardrobes, she was thirsty as if she’d been wandering the desert.

  In old houses, the worst furniture was banished to the highest floors. As Helen descended, she expected the furnishings to become newer, lighter, prettier, if just as dusty. In the main rooms, the ones Peter’s mother would have used, the furniture was the same: blackened oak carved into intricate birds, fish, and beasts. The sort of furniture that infested Black Forest hunting lodges, but raw and awkward, as if one of the family’s great-uncles had taken up a late-in-life passion for wood carving and filled the house with his amateur efforts.

  Still, if she could get the servants to clean it properly, she might adopt the large sitting room as her own. She could teach Peter just as well there as in the nursery. It would save her from climbing up and down stairs all day long. And though the sofa was backed by a winding serpent with a gaping maw, it was still a more likely setting for seducing a nursemaid than a drafty nursery window seat.

  Under one of the beds she found a thin rib from a rack of lamb, riddled with tooth marks. Somewhere in the house was a dog. She’d have to take care to make friends with it.

  Still no sign of Peter. Perhaps he was a troubled child, despite his placid looks. If so, this summer wouldn’t be the holiday Bärchen had promised. She’d found him in a booth at Bistro Bélon Bourriche, downing himself in cognac. Within five minutes, he’d offered to pay her to join him for the summer at his family home and teach his nephew English. It would be easy, he said. Bärchen knew how badly she needed money. He was always so kind—famous for his generosity among the boys of Montparnasse and Pigalle.

  Helen tapped the rib in her palm as she descended to the ground floor. There, the staircase widened and spread into the foyer, forming a wide, grand structure. At the back of the foyer, the stairs continued through a narrow slot in the floor. To the cellars, no doubt. Exploring down there would be an adventure.

  Helen’s trunk still sat by the front door, waiting for the steward to bring it upstairs. On the near side of the foyer, tobacco smoke leaked from the library. It smelled heavenly. She hadn’t been able to afford cigarettes for months. She’d almost ceased yearning for the taste of tobacco, but her mouth watered for it now. Bärchen would give her a cigarette, if she asked for one. But no. She wouldn’t disturb him. He had kept a brave face all through their journey. He deserved some time alone with his grief.

  She padded into the murky parlor opposite the library and pulled aside the heavy green drapes, holding her breath agai
nst the dust. The sun was high above the mountains. The lake gleamed with light. Dust motes swarmed the air. The sunlight turned the oak furniture chalky, the heavy brocade upholstery nearly pastel. The walls were festooned with hunting trophies—stuffed and mounted heads of deer, wild goats, even two wolves and a bear. Their glass eyes stared down through the cobwebs as if alarmed by the state of the housekeeping.

  She skated her finger through the dust on the windowsill. P-E-T-E-R, she wrote in block letters. When she began the boy’s lessons there’d be no need for work books and pencils. Any flat surface could be used as a slate. It might embarrass the servants into doing their work.

  Stepping back from the window, her foot jittered over a lump on the floor. Two tiny bones nestled under the carpet’s green fringe—dry old gnawed leavings from a pair of veal chops. She tucked them in her pocket with the lamb bone. Then in the dining room she found a jawbone under a chair—small, from a roast piglet. She put it in her pocket.

  Helen found her way to the kitchen at the back of the ground floor. An old woman chopped carrots at the table, her wrinkled jowls quivering with every blow of the knife. Beside her, the steward crouched over a cup of coffee. He was even older than the cook, his skin liver-spotted with age. They watched as Helen poured herself a glass of water from the stoneware jug.

  “Peter likes to play games,” she said in German. “I can’t find him anywhere.”

  The cook began fussing with the coffee pot. The steward kept to his seat. “We haven’t seen the boy, Fräulein York.”

  “I hardly expected bad behavior from him on my very first morning at Meresee.”

  “The boy is with the nursemaid. He is always with the nursemaid.” The steward’s tone was stern.

  “How can you say that? He’s certainly not with her now.” She brushed cobwebs from her dress. “I’ve searched the house thoroughly, as you can very well see.”