Boondocks Fantasy

by Jean Rabe

  Judy had lamented that they had lost an opportunity to get to know their “neighbors,” many of whom lived far enough away that they had never met or spoken. She wished she could pay forward what she could not pay backward. The couple had thanked the cat creatures the only way they could, and she wanted to make certain that, in the future, the neighbors would know about one another’s crises; that they could assist when one of them needed a hand. Kent had suggested a barn-warming cookout and posted a notice about it in the post office, the gas station, and the feed store, the town’s only businesses.

  “Do you think they’ll really come?” Judy asked nervously as she laid down the last table setting.

  “They’ll come,” Kent said. He had no idea why he felt so certain of it, but his words came true. The neighbors started arriving at exactly 4:00 PM., families with children, aging widows, farmers with wives and helpers. Most drove old pickup trucks, others cars, and a few brought trailers that they parked in the driveway and all along the gravel road.

  To Kent’s surprise, they did not come empty-handed. Many brought food, like fresh steaks and chops to throw on the grill, vats of beans, fresh-baked bread, and biscuits, and homemade butters, jams, cheeses, and deviled eggs. Live animals appeared as well. One man brought an orphaned heifer, while another gave them a newborn, banded steer-to-be whose mother wanted nothing to do with it. One farmer brought four lambs, each the third of triplets. Another had a bushel basket filled with tiny runt piglets. A small box of newly incubated peeps, a bucket of brown eggs, and the neighbor’s back-up gander joined the rest of the presents. Someone even had the foresight to bring a partial bag of multi-species milk replacer and a sack of different-sized nipples to appease the Austins’ plethora of bottle babies.

  Kent had not expected to see so many people, let alone so much food or any gifts at all. He thanked them all profusely. Several men tended to the grilling, while Kent and his many benefactors led the animals to their new home. In minutes, they had a brooder set up for the peeps, bottles made up for the orphans, and the brand-new stalls covered with straw that someone else had brought. Clearly, the neighbors had conspired to fill the Austins’ barn, working to bring a bit of everything and not too much of anything.

  The men wandered all over the barn, marveling at the workmanship and the skill of the crafters. Then they came to the main part of the barn and laughed at the Cat Wonderland the Austins had provided and the cat creatures had created. Carpeted climbing platforms, myriad scratching posts, hammocks, and pouches sprouted from massive wooden bases. Six kittens, each with a different colored collar, scampered over the construction, running along beams, leaping at dangling toys, wrestling one another on the many slides and platforms. Chloe sat at the entrance to one of the pouches, purring proudly.

  The bowl of collars sat on the floor, ready for future barn cats. Beside it sat an enormous plate of cat food and an electric fountain bubbling over with fresh, running water.

  The man who had brought the heifer said delightedly, “Anyone who spoils his animals this much deserves every one he has.”

  Kent knew a familiar twinge of guilt. If only he could have rescued the cows, they would not have needed the farmers’ help; but he appreciated that the man felt good about his gift. Farmers often killed third-of-triplet lambs and runty pigs, but a bottle calf might bring a few hundred dollars at an auction. Kent vowed that he would do everything in his power to keep these gifted animals alive, happy, and well. He could think of nothing to say other than, “We’re cat people.”

  Cat people. Only as the words came out of his mouth did Kent recognize their double meaning. The ones who built the barn are also Cat People. Before he headed back outside to greet and thank all of his guests, to promise to assist any one of them who had needs or problems in the future, he threw one last glance around the new barn.

  When Kent had made his shopping list for Judy that fateful day, he had asked for the most spectacular cat gyms, pounds and pounds of fresh fish, and the collars. He meant the toys to assure the Cat People that Austin Farm would always provide a sanctuary for any cat needing a home. The fish was to thank them for their week of hard work. The idea for the collars had come from the fairy tales, a recurring theme of which was that pixies, elves, and fairies considered clothing a form of bondage. They interpreted offers of new clothing as a way to enslave them, and they would flee in fear.

  Worried that creatures of such size and fierceness might not keep their goodwill forever, Kent had hoped that they would understand the symbolism inherent in the collars: the farm would sustain and welcome any cat who agreed to live as a domestic pet. Any feline who wished to remain as wild and free as a fairy would have to find another home. By leaving the collars behind, and unharmed, the Cat People had made their choice clear. They appreciated the commitment Kent and Judy had made to their domestic brethren, but they had gone on their way.

  And, though they lived happily among their fellow farmers, with a myriad cats, for many years after, Kent and Judy Austin never saw the Cat People again.

  THE HORNED MAN

  Steven Savile

  Steven Savile is the author of several media tie-in novels for Doctor Who, Stargate SG-1, Torchwood, Primeval, and Guild Wars, as well as the thriller Silver. He lives in Stockholm but swears blind he doesn’t run around naked in the forest . . . too often. And never wearing antlers.

  The Weather Advisory upgraded the storm to Class 2. I didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but it didn’t take a meteorologist to know that it wasn’t good, given the fact that the snow banks at the side of the road were already higher than the car and the air was so thick with squalling snow I could barely see beyond the wipers as they labored to keep the windshield clear.

  Given what was happening outside, I figured Class 2 was basically weather-speak for Snowmaggedon.

  We were still about a three-hour drive from Jukkasjärvi and the Ice Hotel, way up in the north of Sweden. The directions on the map said drive straight on to the end of the world and turn right. I wasn’t sure where exactly the world ended. I couldn’t see the edge for all the snow. I kept telling myself it was OK, we’d be in a warm bed soon enough, and tried not to think about the fact that the entire hotel was chiseled out of ice, bed included.

  We’d driven past a sports hall about an hour back, or the remains of a sports hall, to be more precise. The sheer weight of the snow had brought the roof down.

  The world outside the car was white.

  Just white.

  Driving in it was exhausting, but thankfully the winter tires had good traction and the snow plows had been out not so long ago. I just stared at the wipers flicking back and forth and had to take it on trust that there was road at the end of the hood. The way the car lurched sometimes as it hit potholes and jounced over ruts was an act of faith akin to believing in the great teapot in the sky. The headlights were useless.

  There was no one else on the road for what felt like a thousand miles in any direction. The trip had been my idea, a romantic getaway to say thanks for putting up with me working on our honeymoon. That was the joy of being freelance: don’t work? Don’t eat! Luckily Mel knew what she was getting into before she said yes. We’d been living together for the best part of a decade before I popped the question. So this was our little getaway. A honeymoon within the honeymoon. We’d been staying in Stockholm doing the rounds: where Olaf Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister, had been shot; the subway art exhibition that just seems to go on and on and on over hundreds of train stations with crazy names; the open air museum with its reconstructed Viking homes; the Vasa, the long ship that sank on its maiden voyage only for the Swedes to dredge her up four hundred years later; climbing to the coronet of the city hall and picking out places we’d been the day before. Then we’d found a brochure describing a little hotel bar made completely out of ice, chairs, tables, bar, even the tumblers with their bright red and blue vodkas. I had it all planned. We’d hire a car, take a few days, drive up there, see the North
ern Lights if we were lucky, and then get a plane back from Kiruna to Stockholm.

  It was one thing to read “1239 km” on the brochure, but something else entirely to turn them into hours on some of the worst roads I’d ever driven, in a snowstorm, with zero cell phone coverage. You don’t think about stuff like gas stations en route and narrow roads, sometimes barely more than dirt tracks winding between impossibly thick forest. Trees, I swear, outnumber Swedes by a factor of eighty thousand to one. Before we were outside of Stockholm’s suburbs the trees had already started to claim back the roads for the forest eternal.

  It had seemed like an adventure. Now it felt like an expedition. Terra Nova. With me cast in the role of the doomed Robert Falcon Scott, and Mel as my sleeping Oates.

  We might have been driving toward the wrong pole, but there was plenty of snow to make up for that.

  I turned up the heat. One of the best things about cars over here is that they have these wires woven into the seats; one flick of a button and your back and butt are toasting away nicely. Of course, that doesn’t stop the arctic chill from seeping in through the cold metal of the door. But compared to those explorers of old I’d got a good thing going.

  I had the music down low because Mel was asleep in the passenger seat and I didn’t want to wake her. She had a blanket pulled up to her chin. She was like a little child: put her in a car for any length of time and the movement would lull her to sleep. Every few minutes I’d catch myself looking at her and wondering how I’d been so lucky. I liked to watch her sleep. That was my secret. Ever since that first night we’d slept together I’d find myself staying awake a few minutes more just to watch her sleeping.

  I had started out listening to an ’80s playlist—Icicle Works, Killing Joke, Siouxsie Sioux, and a little Lloyd Cole—but after hours staring at the monotony of white I needed something with a little bit more life to it so I flicked over to my party playlist. Lots of mind-numbing nerve-jangling pop.

  The Teddybears were busy getting their mother a house when the moose stepped in front of the car—at least it looked like a moose in the glimpse I caught of it, great antlers, broad haunches, before the impact broke one of the antlers and cracked right through the windshield. We were only going about ten miles an hour. As it was, it felt as though I’d just driven straight into a brick wall. A second after the glass cobwebbed, the airbag deployed. I wrenched my hands away from the wheel but not quickly enough to save my wrists from burning right across the veins. The bag pinned me into the bucket seat.

  Without a passenger-side airbag, Mel had been thrown forward in her seat, only for the belt to cut across her shoulder and pull her back. She screamed, not realizing what was happening. I tried to tell her everything was OK, but the hiss of the airbag and the suddenly discordant jah-jah-jah of the music coupled with the shattered windshield and the lurch of the car as the moose rolled off the hood said everything was most definitely not OK.

  I reached across, putting my hand on Mel’s knee. “You OK, kiddo?”

  She gave me a smile that said Sure, you half killed me in the middle of God-knows-where, I’m just peachy, how about you?

  The airbag deflated slowly, the air leaking out of it with a mocking hiss. After a few minutes it had gone down enough that I could lean over to her. I cupped her cheek with my right hand, wincing slightly as my burned wrist brushed against her jaw. I felt like the world’s greatest moron, but they didn’t make mugs for that. Or maybe they did. No doubt Hallmark had a card range, at least. “Sorry. I didn’t see it.” I shrugged, like it ought to be obvious that really I was apologizing for all of it, for the harebrained idea of traveling almost a thousand miles through the forest-wilderness of a foreign country in driving snows because I thought the Northern Lights and a bed of ice might be romantic.

  She smiled back at me and said, “It’s not your fault,” the subtext being, You’re special; you don’t think like normal people, so why would I expect you to think about stuff like cell phone coverage and roadside rescue? Welcome to my life.

  Unsurprisingly, the engine had stalled.

  I turned the key twice, only for something in the steering column to grate, and then nothing. The sum of my mechanical knowledge amounted to: check the spark plugs, then dial AAA.

  Until that moment I had been doing my best not to think about the cracked windshield. I wasn’t so much worried about the insurance coverage, as I was its holding together for however many more miles we had to go before we slept. We couldn’t exactly stick it together with duct tape.

  I was going to have to brave the great outdoors. It could have been minus twenty or minus forty degrees out there, I couldn’t tell, and without the right equipment I wasn’t sure it even mattered. The coats were in the trunk. We’d bought them from a small camping store in the old town. They were supposedly authentic Sami, lambskin and fur, but right then I would have killed for Gore-Tex and as much synthetic warmth as possible. Call me a city boy, but it’s man-made all the way when I am serious about staying warm. We were deep into Sápmi territory. Until about forty-eight hours before I’d been calling it Lapland, but the woman who sold us the coats had taken great pride in telling us all about her culture. Some of it, it seemed, had stuck in my head.

  I tried the engine again. No joy. So I reached into the glove box for my cell phone, knowing even as I turned it on there wasn’t a hope in hell for a GPS antenna within a hundred miles. Still, I had to try it, just so I knew it didn’t work. It was the hunter-gatherer thing spliced with the male ego. I wanted Mel to know I was good in a crisis. The irony of it was she knew I wasn’t. Of the two of us, she was the one who changed the fuses and bled the radiators and did all the odd jobs, like plastering the holes in the old walls of our apartment. She was hardly a Penelope Pitstop in need of saving from the Ant Hill Mob. She was more like Dick Dastardly, I thought, and I couldn’t help myself. I chuckled like Muttley.

  I opened the door and biting cold came streaming in. And even more like the doomed Captain Scott than I’d ever imagined, I joked, “I’m going outside; I may be some time.”

  “Close the door after you,” Mel said, laughing at my melodramatics.

  I slammed the car door. I couldn’t see the moose. Not a surprise given the hellish snows swirling all around my face, but I assumed that meant it had survived the crash and was off in the forest somewhere talking to its moose kids about stupid drivers not using ABS brakes and power-assisted steering. I was right about one thing: I really couldn’t tell the difference between minus twenty and minus forty. I sidled along the bodywork to guide me around to the trunk. The cold stung tears to my eyes even before I had gotten halfway around the car. Of all the stupid things to notice, my eyebrows were the first thing to freeze. Long before the cold chapped my cheeks my eyebrows were burning. I fumbled the key in the lock twice before I managed to force it in. It refused to turn and I realized the damned cold had probably frozen the lock hours ago. It wasn’t as if it had had the engine’s heat to keep it warm. I wasn’t sure about forcing it just in case I broke the key, what with the coats being inside, and, you know, it being the ignition key, then I realized I was being my usual idiot self. I hammered on the back window and mimed for Mel to lean forward and pop the trunk from inside.

  The lid needed a little bit of help to break the ice that frosted it shut, but after a bit of grunting and kicking uselessly at the tires, it opened. I put one of the Sami coats on, and took the other one for Mel. With the engine stalled, the inside of the car was going to get cold very quickly. I am sure it was a perverse law of physics that said the more your body needs the heat, the quicker the world around you is going to get seriously cold.

  I checked the cell phone again, begging for a single bar.

  Hope, as my dear old mother used to say, is for the hopeless. I was way past hopeless and into beggar territory. And I most certainly wasn’t too proud.

  Even with the authentic Sami fur it wasn’t exactly warm. The wind whipped the snow around into my face, mean
ing I kept blinking every few seconds as a snow-flake made it past my eyelashes.

  The damage was worse than I thought. The hood had caved in, pressing down on the engine block, and the radiator grille was buckled. That was just the superficial stuff. I had no idea what was going on inside the finer workings of the machine.

  Leaning over the hood, I felt sure someone was watching me, but when I craned my neck there was nothing to see but snow.

  I went back around to the passenger side door and tapped on the window. Mel didn’t wind it down, and I couldn’t say I blamed her. I shrugged, miming clueless-ness. She didn’t look surprised. My male ego would take the wounding, just this once.

  As I was working my way back around to the driver’s side, I saw it standing there at the side of the narrow road, sheltering between the thick boles of the tall trees. At least I assumed they were tall. Looking up, I couldn’t see the tops, but that didn’t mean much. I say it. I don’t know what it was, but it sure as hell wasn’t like any moose I’d ever seen, save for the antlers. The snow didn’t make it easy, but I could have sworn it was a man, a good head taller than me, naked as the day he was born save for a headdress of eighteen points. It had to be a headdress, but I wasn’t looking that closely at the horns to be fair. Well, not the ones on his head. The man was hard and huge. In my jeans, beneath the thermal long johns and the boxer shorts, the cold had shrunk my testicles to the size of peanuts, but this guy seemed positively invigorated by the ball-numbing cold.

  “Hey? Hey you?” I called out.

  He said something I couldn’t understand. It sounded like the silken rush of snow slipping from overburdened branches to the ground. It was one of those moments when I was so deeply proud to be American; in the middle of nowhere, shouting at a naked guy, and absolutely clueless when he shouted back. He could have been saying: “Follow me, our village is near here. We have warm beds, food, and a mechanic who can fix your car.” Of course, he could just as easily have been saying, “I cannibal. Ug. I eat tourists for breakfast in morning, after I rut with pretty one. Ug.”