The Very Best of F & SF v1

by Gordon Van Gelder (ed)

  As it grew later, the sky darkened and what was cold before became colder still.

  “Listen,” my father said, “I have a feeling like the one when we used to track deer. He’s nearby, somewhere. We’ll have to outsmart him.”

  I nodded.

  “I’m going to stay here and wait,” he said. “You keep going along the path here for a while, but, for Christ’s sake, be quiet. Maybe if he sees you, he’ll double back to get away, and I’ll be here to catch him.”

  I wasn’t sure this plan made sense, but I knew we needed to do something. It was getting late. “Be careful,” I said, “he’s big and he has a stick.”

  My father smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said and lifted his foot to indicate the size ten.

  This made me laugh, and I turned and started down the path, taking careful steps. “Go on for about ten minutes or so and see if you see anything,” he called to me before I rounded a bend.

  Once I was by myself, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to find my man. Because of the overcast sky the woods were dark and lonely. As I walked I pictured my father and Cavanaugh wrestling each other and wondered who would win. When I had gone far enough to want to stop and run back, I forced myself around one more turn. Just this little more, I thought. He’s probably already fallen apart anyway, dismantled by winter. But then I saw it up ahead, treetops at eye level, and I knew I had found the valley where the deer went to die.

  Cautiously, I inched up to the rim, and peered down the steep dirt wall overgrown with roots and stickers, into the trees and the shadowed undergrowth beneath them. The valley was a large hole as if a meteor had struck there long ago. I thought of the treasure trove of antlers and bones that lay hidden in the leaves at its base. Standing there, staring, I felt I almost understood the secret life and age of the woods. I had to show this to my father, but before I could move away, I saw something, heard something moving below. Squinting to see more clearly through the darkness down there, I could just about make out a shadowed figure standing, half hidden by the trunk of a tall pine.

  “Cavanaugh?” I called. “Is that you?”

  In the silence, I heard acorns dropping.

  “Are you there?” I asked.

  There was a reply, an eerie sound that was part voice, part wind. It was very quiet but I distinctly heard it ask, “Why?”

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Why?” came the same question.

  I didn’t know why, and wished I had read him the book’s answers instead of the questions the day of his birth. I stood for a long time and watched as snow began to fall around me.

  His question came again, weaker this time, and I was on the verge of tears, ashamed of what I had done. Suddenly, I had a strange memory flash of the endless beer in Mrs. Grimm’s basement. At least it was something. I leaned out over the edge and, almost certain I was lying, yelled, “I had too much love.”

  Then, so I could barely make it out, I heard him whisper, “Thank you.”

  After that, there came from below the thud of branches hitting together, hitting the ground, and I knew he had come undone. When I squinted again, the figure was gone.

  I found my father sitting on a fallen tree trunk back along the trail, smoking a cigarette. “Hey,” he said when he saw me coming, “did you find anything?”

  “No,” I said, “let’s go home.”

  He must have seen something in my eyes, because he asked, “Are you sure?

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  The snow fell during our journey home and seemed to continue falling all winter long.

  Now, twenty-one years married with two crewcut boys of my own, I went back to the old neighborhood last week. The woods and even the school have been obliterated, replaced by new developments with streets named for the things they banished—Crow Lane, Deer Street, Gold Creek Road. My father still lives in the same house by himself. My mother passed away some years back. My baby sister is married with two boys of her own and lives upstate.

  The old man has something growing on his kidney, and he has lost far too much weight, his once huge arms having shrunk to the width of branches. He sat at the kitchen table, the racing form in front of him. I tried to convince him to quit working, but he shook his head and said, “Boring.”

  “How long do you think you can keep going to the shop?” I asked him.

  “How about until the last second,” he said.

  “How’s the health?” I asked.

  “Soon I’ll be food for the worms,” he said, laughing.

  “How do you really feel about that?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “All part of the game,” he said. “I thought when things got bad enough I would build a coffin and sleep in it. That way, when I die, you can just nail the lid on and bury me in the backyard.”

  Later, when we were watching the Giants on TV and I had had a few beers, I asked him if he remembered that time in the woods.

  He closed his eyes and lit a cigarette as though it would help his memory. “Oh, yeah, I think I remember that,” he said.

  I had never asked him before. “Was that you down there in those trees?”

  He took a drag and slowly turned his head and stared hard, without a smile, directly into my eyes. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he said and exhaled a long, blue-gray stream of life.

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  Other People – Neil Gaiman

  Neil Gaiman is one of the most popular artists nowadays in a variety of media—from his Sandman graphic novels to his movie scripts to his novels (including Anansi Boys, Coraline, Neverwhere, and American Gods), his ability to stir the imaginations and reach the hearts of different audiences reminds me of no one so much as Ray Bradbury. Here he delivers a fresh take on a classic theme.

  “Time is fluid here,” said the demon.

  He knew it was a demon the moment he saw it. He knew it, just as he knew the place was Hell. There was nothing else that either of them could have been.

  The room was long, and the demon waited by a smoking brazier at the far end. A multitude of objects hung on the rock-gray walls, of-the kind that it would not have been wise or reassuring to inspect too closely. The ceiling was low, the floor oddly insubstantial.

  “Come close,” said the demon, and he did.

  The demon was rake-thin, and naked. It was deeply scarred, and it appeared to have been flayed at some time in the distant past. It had no ears, no sex. Its lips were thin and ascetic, and its eyes were a demon’s eyes: they had seen too much and gone too far, and under their gaze he felt less important than a fly.

  “What happens now?” he asked.

  “Now,” said the demon, in a voice that carried with it no sorrow, no relish, only a dreadful flat resignation, “you will be tortured.”

  “For how long?”

  But the demon shook its head and made no reply. It walked slowly along the wall, eyeing first one of the devices that hung there, then another. At the far end of the wall, by the closed door, was a cat-o’-nine-tails made of frayed wire. The demon took it down with one three-fingered hand and walked back, carrying it reverently. It placed the wire tines onto the brazier, and stared at them as they began to heat up.

  “That’s inhuman.”

  “Yes.”

  The tips of the cat’s tails were glowing a dead orange.

  As the demon raised his arm to deliver the first blow, it said, “In time you will remember even this moment with fondness.”

  “You are a liar.”

  “No,” said the demon. “The next part,” it explained, in the moment before it brought down the cat, “is worse.”

  Then the tines of the cat landed on the man’s back with a crack and a hiss, tearing through the expensive clothes, burning and rending and shredding as they struck and, not for the last time in that place, he screamed.

  There were two hundred and eleven implements on the walls of that room, and in time he was to experience each of them.


  When, finally, the Lazarene’s Daughter, which he had grown to know intimately, had been cleaned and replaced on the wall in the two-hundred-and-eleventh position, then, through wrecked lips, he gasped, “Now what?”

  “Now,” said the demon, “the true pain begins.” It did.

  Everything he had ever done that had been better left undone. Every lie he had told—told to himself, or told to others. Every little hurt, and all the great hurts. Each one was pulled out of him, detail by detail, inch by inch. The demon stripped away the cover of forgetfulness, stripped everything down to truth, and it hurt more than anything.

  “Tell me what you thought as she walked out the door,” said the demon.

  “I thought my heart was broken.”

  “No,” said the demon, without hate, “you didn’t.” It stared at him with expressionless eyes, and he was forced to look away.

  “I thought, now she’ll never know I’ve been sleeping with her sister.”

  The demon took apart his life, moment by moment, instant to awful instant. It lasted a hundred years, perhaps, or a thousand—they had all the time there ever was, in that gray room—and toward the end he realized that the demon had been right. The physical torture had been kinder.

  And it ended.

  And once it had ended, it began again. There was a self-knowledge there he had not had the first time, which somehow made everything worse.

  Now, as he spoke, he hated himself. There were no lies, no evasions, no room for anything except the pain and the anger.

  He spoke. He no longer wept. And when he finished, a thousand years later, he prayed that now the demon would go to the wall, and bring down the skinning knife, or the choke-pear, or the screws.

  “Again,” said the demon.

  He began to scream. He screamed for a long time.

  “Again,” said the demon, when he was done, as if nothing had been said.

  It was like peeling an onion. This time through his life he learned about consequences. He learned the results of things he had done; things he had been blind to as he did them; the ways he had hurt the world; the damage he had done to people he had never known, or met, or encountered. It was the hardest lesson yet.

  “Again,” said the demon, a thousand years later.

  He crouched on the floor, beside the brazier, rocking gently, his eyes closed, and he told the story of his life, re-experiencing it as he told it, from birth to death, changing nothing, leaving nothing out, facing everything. He opened his heart.

  When he was done, he sat there, eyes closed, waiting for the voice to say, “Again,” but nothing was said. He opened his eyes.

  Slowly, he stood up. He was alone.

  At the far end of the room there was a door, and, as he watched, it opened.

  A man stepped through the door. There was terror in the man’s face, and arrogance, and pride. The man, who wore expensive clothes, took several hesitant steps into the room, and then stopped.

  When he saw the man, he understood.

  “Time is fluid here,” he told the new arrival.

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  Two Hearts – Peter S. Beagle

  Peter Beagle never showed much interest in revisiting his 1968 masterpiece, The Last Unicorn, until a colleague named Connor Cochran got him thinking about Schmendrick, Molly, and the unicorn again. The results were worth the wait.

  My brother Wilfrid keeps saying it’s not fair that it should all have happened to me. Me being a girl, and a baby, and too stupid to lace up my own sandals properly. But I think it’s fair. I think everything happened exactly the way it should have done. Except for the sad parts, and maybe those too.

  I’m Sooz, and I am nine years old. Ten next month, on the anniversary of the day the griffin came. Wilfrid says it was because of me, that the griffin heard that the ugliest baby in the world had just been born, and it was going to eat me, but I was too ugly, even for a griffin. So it nested in the Midwood (we call it that, but its real name is the Midnight Wood, because of the darkness under the trees), and stayed to eat our sheep and our goats. Griffins do that if they like a place.

  But it didn’t ever eat children, not until this year.

  I only saw it once—I mean, once before—rising up above the trees one night, like a second moon. Only there wasn’t a moon, then. There was nothing in the whole world but the griffin, golden feathers all blazing on its lion’s body and eagle’s wings, with its great front claws like teeth, and that monstrous beak that looked so huge for its head.... Wilfrid says I screamed for three days, but he’s lying, and I didn’t hide in the root cellar like he says either, I slept in the Two Hearts barn those two nights, with our dog Malka. Because I knew Malka wouldn’t let anything get me.

  I mean my parents wouldn’t have, either, not if they could have stopped it. It’s just that Malka is the biggest, fiercest dog in the whole village, and she’s not afraid of anything. And after the griffin took Jehane, the blacksmith’s little girl, you couldn’t help seeing how frightened my father was, running back and forth with the other men, trying to organize some sort of patrol, so people could always tell when the griffin was coming. I know he was frightened for me and my mother, and doing everything he could to protect us, but it didn’t make me feel any safer, and Malka did.

  But nobody knew what to do, anyway. Not my father, nobody. It was bad enough when the griffin was only taking the sheep, because almost everyone here sells wool or cheese or sheepskin things to make a living. But once it took Jehane, early last spring, that changed everything. We sent messengers to the king—three of them—and each time the king sent someone back to us with them. The first time, it was one knight, all by himself. His name was Douros, and he gave me an apple. He rode away into the Midwood, singing, to look for the griffin, and we never saw him again.

  The second time—after the griffin took Louli, the boy who worked for the miller—the king sent five knights together. One of them did come back, but he died before he could tell anyone what happened.

  The third time an entire squadron came. That’s what my father said, anyway. I don’t know how many soldiers there are in a squadron, but it was a lot, and they were all over the village for two days, pitching their tents everywhere, stabling their horses in every barn, and boasting in the tavern how they’d soon take care of that griffin for us poor peasants. They had musicians playing when they marched into the Midwood—I remember that, and I remember when the music stopped, and the sounds we heard afterward.

  After that, the village didn’t send to the king anymore. We didn’t want more of his men to die, and besides they weren’t any help. So from then on all the children were hurried indoors when the sun went down, and the griffin woke from its day’s rest to hunt again. We couldn’t play together, or run errands or watch the flocks for our parents, or even sleep near open windows, for fear of the griffin. There was nothing for me to do but read books I already knew by heart, and complain to my mother and father, who were too tired from watching after Wilfrid and me to bother with us. They were guarding the other children too, turn and turn about with the other families—and our sheep, and our goats—so they were always tired, as well as frightened, and we were all angry with each other most of the time. It was the same for everybody.

  And then the griffin took Felicitas.

  Felicitas couldn’t talk, but she was my best friend, always, since we were little. I always understood what she wanted to say, and she understood me, better than anyone, and we played in a special way that I won’t ever play with anyone else. Her family thought she was a waste of food, because no boy would marry a dumb girl, so they let her eat with us most of the time. Wilfrid used to make fun of the whispery quack that was the one sound she could make, but I hit him with a rock, and after that he didn’t do it anymore.

  I didn’t see it happen, but I still see it in my head. She knew not to go out, but she was always just so happy coming to us in the evening. And nobody at her house would have noticed her being gone. No
ne of them ever noticed Felicitas.

  The day I learned Felicitas was gone, that was the day I set off to see the king myself.

  Well, the same night, actually—because there wasn’t any chance of getting away from my house or the village in daylight. I don’t know what I’d have done, really, except that my Uncle Ambrose was carting a load of sheepskins to market in Hagsgate, and you have to start long before sunup to be there by the time the market opens. Uncle Ambrose is my best uncle, but I knew I couldn’t ask him to take me to the king—he’d have gone straight to my mother instead, and told her to give me sulphur and molasses and put me to bed with a mustard plaster. He gives his horse sulphur and molasses, even.

  So I went to bed early that night, and I waited until everyone was asleep. I wanted to leave a note on my pillow, but I kept writing things and then tearing the notes up and throwing them in the fireplace, and I was afraid of somebody waking, or Uncle Ambrose leaving without me. Finally I just wrote, I will come home soon. I didn’t take any clothes with me, or anything else, except a bit of cheese, because I thought the king must live somewhere near Hagsgate, which is the only big town I’ve ever seen. My mother and father were snoring in their room, but Wilfrid had fallen asleep right in front of the hearth, and they always leave him there when he does. If you rouse him to go to his own bed, he comes up fighting and crying. I don’t know why.

  I stood and looked down at him for the longest time. Wilfrid doesn’t look nearly so mean when he’s sleeping. My mother had banked the coals to make sure there’d be a fire for tomorrow’s bread, and my father’s moleskin trews were hanging there to dry, because he’d had to wade into the stockpond that afternoon to rescue a lamb. I moved them a little bit, so they wouldn’t burn. I wound the clock—Wilfrid’s supposed to do that every night, but he always forgets—and I thought how they’d all be hearing it ticking in the morning while they were looking everywhere for me, too frightened to eat any breakfast, and I turned to go back to my room.