The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  “My mother found me in Hamburg, only she wasn’t my mother. ‘She’ was the Devil itself, come to retrieve the dream…and me.

  “He was wearing a disguise?”

  “Not ‘he’, ‘it’. When Lucifer went down he was simply pissed off. The ensuing time spent forging a domain out of hard rock and reflecting on how badly he felt he had been treated turned the pissed off into pure madness. The Devil probably doesn’t even recall its life as a God. Doesn’t recognize the name Lucifer.”

  “So how did you manage to…”

  “It was your father that saved me.”

  “My father? How?”

  “The word had gotten out. The Dream had been rescued from Hell and the Gods knew all about it. After he had introduced himself, in a silvery spidery voice that whispered in my head, your father told me that the woman was not who she pretended to be. And that I must not give the card to her. I must not give the card to anyone. Instead, I must use it…must carry the message forward to all that would listen.”

  “But why didn’t she -I mean, ‘it’ – why didn’t the Devil just take it? And how did you get away?”

  “The Devil may only take what is offered to him voluntarily. When I told this thing that I had been informed that she was not my mother, there were some tears – how could I say that of her? and all that – but eventually, she showed her true form.” He shuddered again and I had no wish for further explanation.

  “I left late at night, running down the streets of Hamburg carrying only what I wore on my back…plus the card containing the Dream. And that is where I met Siglinde Erhard. She told me that she had been waiting for a man in whom she could trust and that voices had told her that I was that man. I must leave Hamburg that night, she explained, and forever do good work. She said that it was only through good work that I may be redeemed. And she told me to go to Meissen.”

  He paused for breath and sat down in the chair once more. “Since then, I have passed the card around to all that would listen…letting them touch it, feel the power, but each time telling them that they may not keep it. You see, I could trust no-one…and yet the very nature of my task was such that I had to trust everyone. Your father told me that the end to my work was near. Someone was coming, he said. Someone who could take my burden from me.”

  I didn’t say anything, just raised my eyebrows questioningly.

  He pointed a finger. “That someone is you.”

  “Me? Jesus Christ, what’s going on here?” I jumped up off the bed and walked to the bureau where my spare cigarette packs were stacked up like reassuring bricks of normality. “Why doesn’t someone from Heaven come down and just take the damned card back?”

  “Because nothing that has ever been in Hell may enter Heaven. It’s tainted…but it can still be used here on Earth.”

  “But you said… I mean, your redemption? Doesn’t that mean you’re going to go there? And you’ve been in Hell.” I waited for a few seconds, watching Dennis Dannerman’s vacant expression, and then something began to gnaw at me. “And if I take the card – which I have no intention of doing, let me add – what happens to you?”

  “I can’t answer any of those questions. What is it they say about ‘faith’? I only know this: you are to take the card – of your own free will – and… you are to release me.”

  I lit a cigarette. “And what will happen to you?”

  He held the card out to me. “No idea.”

  Then the door opened and my father came into the room.

  “Take it, son,” my father said. “Let him go. He has earned his rest.”

  In the years since my father’s death I had forgotten what he looked like. Forgotten the sound of his voice.

  I had photographs, of course, and, occasionally, when I was feeling in the mood or when I stumbled across an old photo album while looking for something else, I would flick through the images of him – photographs taken sometimes with me, sometimes with my mother and sometimes just by himself.

  But those static reminders can serve against memory and not for it. You forget the movement of the mouth, the adjustment of hair, the turning of the head. A million tiny movements and affectations that make the person who he or she really is. No amount of photographs can reproduce that.

  In the small room in the Meissen guest-house the memories of my life with this man came flooding back to me. How I wished, in that instant, for my mother to be magically whisked from the rest home in Wells on the Maine coastline, and carried halfway across the world to my room. But then, in that same instant, I wondered how she would feel…her a frail but still beautiful woman in her eighties and him a relatively young man not quite 60 years old. Just the way he had been when he had been taken from her – from us - all that time ago.

  “Oh…” I began, not quite knowing what to say, placing my cigarette on the ashtray and preparing myself to lunge across at him and take him in my arms.

  He shook his head as though sensing my thoughts. “Accept the dream, Charles,” he said, pointing to the card. “Accept your destiny.”

  Without further hesitation, I stepped across to where Dennis sat, still holding the dog-eared piece of card that contained God’s first dream for mankind, and I took it between my fingers, feeling, with a momentary puzzlement, some reluctance on Dennis Dannerman’s part to let it go. Perhaps, I thought, when the chips were down, his faith had deserted him…just for a second. Perhaps he was wondering where he would be transported to, wondering whether he would open his eyes onto pastoral fields or would suddenly find himself crouching once more in the labyrinthine stone tunnels of eternal damnation.

  As I pulled, I saw his lips begin a word, a “Ch…” word…and then he was gone. The chair was empty.

  I looked down at the card and watched the shapes swirl and eddy, felt the shifting of sound and the movement of light, heard the unmistakable serenity of silence and smelled the depth of hope. It made me want to cry…buttocrywithjoy.

  “Let me see it,” my father said. “Let me look upon it, son.”

  And, may God have mercy on me, I handed the First Dream to my father.

  But it wasn’t him at all.

  Most of the rest of it is a blur now. But, sometimes in an unguarded moment, particularly in the warmth of my bed where I lay, another deadline missed, waiting for sleep but praying that no dreams will come to haunt me, I replay those final seconds. I still hear, in my memory, the sharp intake of breath of the man who accepted the card I had voluntarily passed to him, a sound not like any sound I had ever heard from any human being…let alone from my father. And whatever tricks the memory might play, that is something of which I am certain.

  And the deep voice that said, in a sarcastic tone, “Thank you,” and then added, with a hint of gleeful humor, “I look forward to meeting you again”, was no voice I had ever heard around my childhood home, not even when my father was telling me scary stories of shambling monsters made from piles of rain-soaked fall leaves and a chance bolt of lightning, while I lay beside him tucked in my bed, eyes as wide as saucers.

  I suppose the immediate vanishment of my “father” – and the card – should have been accompanied by a maniacal laugh, a puff of reddish smoke and the unmistakable odour of brimstone, but there were none of these Vaudevillian staples and Hollywood CGI effects.

  There was only a stark emptiness. And the imagined silent tears of the Gods raining on a beautiful and endless plain somewhere far, far away… Somewhere I may never see.

  LOST WAX

  Leah Bobet

  Leah Bobet is Toronto born and bred. When not working in Canada’s oldest science-fiction bookshop, or on her degree in linguistics, she tells me her time is divided between “studying belly-dance, learning to knit, a windowsill herb garden that’s spilling off both windowsills and onto the kitchen table, an old blue acoustic guitar, gourmet cooking, and an obsession with urban (local) history and urban exploration.” I’m surprised she gets any writing done at all, but she has been selling stories and poe
ms to a variety of magazines since 2001. The following story shows how you may get your just desserts, but not necessarily in the way you might expect.

  Her website is at www.leahbobet.com

  In the Factory at Calendar Point, the carvers and the wizards and the casters make magic. Simon sweeps up.

  The wax is carted in from beekeepers scattered across the country, each licensed and watched and reporting to the provost every season on the movement of their flocks. Simon washes the floors after the carters have come and gone. He helps carry the crates to the carvers, sometimes, and the book-dusty theoreticians, one sketching the sigils from diagrams on brittle parchment and the others taking knife to wax, molding them in three dimensions. He gathers the curls of spare wax from the floor and burns them in the fire that feeds the casting crucible.

  In the afternoons, Simon brings water to the potters, who paint clay carefully on the carved wax molds; in the evenings he scrubs their wheels and tools, soaking them in water until his fingers wrinkle. He does not clean the casting crucible; that is Jan’s work, stoop-shouldered and sure-fingered, and old as his grandfather was on the day the farm passed to his father and his own indenture began in truth.

  At the precise trembling moment between day and dusk, the sigils and guardians are cast. Wax puddles out of the molds, spreads across the catchbasin, and molten metal is poured in its place. Simon never sees the finished product. He empties the catchbasins, one by one, pouring thick and lazy drops of wax into the reservoir. The magic is in the wax, he’s heard them say. He is careful. He does not spill a drop.

  Come morning, the orders are delivered to students, wizards, kings and rich men by couriers in dashing clothes of all colours, none ever the same: it would not do to identify a Factory courier to footpads and thieves. Some days Simon thinks he might become a courier in lord’s livery, and when he thinks this he sweeps harder and harder until the Factory shines like the moon. Jan watches him with even looks when this bright mood is upon him, and sends him away: check the carvers’ floor one more time, perhaps empty the chamberpots, dust the lintels so the specks do not get in the molds. Jan is old and his hands are covered in soot. Simon does not get angry when he invents these tasks.

  It is a great honour to work at the Factory. It is a great honour to carry its broom in your hands, for even brooms can be full of magic.

  Simon comes home at dusk, smelling of smoke and sweat and honest labour. He lets a room in a boardinghouse off Progress Square that was still Bear’s Heart Square when he arrived, but people call it Progress already and the old name is near-forgotten. He eats in the kitchen there, simple clean country food a day or two paler from the long trip to bring it to Calendar Point, or from a street vendor when it is middle-month or end-month and his pockets hold a neat packet of coins. There is smoke in the streets, and music. He practices his letters reading pamphlets pasted on walls or drifting through the streets, and dreams of attending lectures, of fairs bursting with wild animals and sleight-of-hand shows. He pays his rent, and sends money home to his family to pay for his labour lost, and hoards the rest in a box beneath his bed against a lack of imagination for luxury.

  Every night Simon shuts his doors, pulls the curtain over his rounded quartered-compass window, and draws the curls of used wax from the stitching of his pocket.

  He comes home with pockets heavy with wax: they are torn and mended and torn again once his clumsy stitching wears away or breaks – he is too timid to ask the house laundress to mend them true. The boardinghouse-mistress and the herb lady do not watch him as he slips into his penny-garret; they privately wonder over tea if he is smuggling opium or casting-metals, and just as quickly dismiss those thoughts: were Simon Lake a smuggler, he would not pay his rent in such small, well-fingered coins. The mistress’s daughter fancies that he carries books, that he is a man of words and deep river-thoughts, but she is of the right age to fill a silent young man’s figure with ideas that were never there.

  Over gaslight he melts the fragments into his wooden wash-bowl until they are soft and ready, and molds them close into the cloudy block that started off a finger’s width, then a palm’s width, then an imperfect factory standard size. The mistress’s dishwasher does not report him: he knows all the ways to remove wax from wood, from stone, from cloth.

  It has taken him time to learn to carve wax: it is softer than wood, and cannot be whittled. It is harder than dirt, and cannot be molded. His rejects he burns in the crucible fires, eased back into the Factory in bits and crumbled pieces. This time, he thinks, every time the block grows strong and whole. This time will be the one, and he wishes.

  The knife flicks, and he whispers the words into the cracks made by his tiny fingernail blade: Give me a better life. Bring me a better life. Bring me something a sign, a hope.

  The greyish wax breathes, and sighs, but there is no smell of magic, just a faint hint of rotten rosemary from the street where the herb lady has dumped her unsold and unsellable wares. Simon taps it with a finger, and it does not reach out, or speak, or scowl. Leftover magic, defective and drained. The wax used before casting is buttery and soft-golden and smells like the best breakfast you never had.

  The bed creaks, and his hand trembles, and the house shifts on its foundations in its sleep. Simon puts his half-formed sigil in the drawer beneath his holiday clothes, and sleeps, and dreams of candlelight.

  Simon sweeps the factory floor as the long afternoon moves on, shifting shadows so he is never sure which planks he has caressed with the straw broom and which left untouched. He stares at the curling shards longingly, treasure and firelight around his feet. The guards will collect his dustpan at the end of the morning; he has never dared palm even a sliver of virgin wax.

  The penalty – in the bindings they would place on his hands and the shame he would place on himself for having to beg again for a position – is too great. But the wizards who watch the factory and grounds do not clap him in irons for seditious thought; his mind is filled with lake stillness.

  Jan sees through it, sees past it, and takes the broom from him. He sends Simon to wash the potters tables again, six hours ahead of normal, and threatens the whip if there remains a speck of grey upon the polished, varnished, scarred wood tables. Simon inhales clay dust that coats his tongue and throat, smoke from the kilns, smoke from the crucibles in the sheltered room next door. The air in the Factory tastes like something tangible, not alive but perhaps conscious. The sound of the whistle that calls end to day’s work knows that it has a name.

  Today, they call his name, only to his ears. Today, they murmur to him, and nobody else hears, but the wizards on duty frown and tap instruments, smell the air, consult their heavy necklaces and pocket-watch-chains of charms, their good clean bowler hats just slightly askew. Simon Lake, Simon Lake meanders through his consciousness. The shards in the dustpan spell it out. The dust on the tables vibrates with it, and when he pours the day’s wax from the catchbasin into the reservoir, it hits with a note that reminds him of his own voice raised in laughter, or anger, or debate.

  Magic is everywhere you look for it in the Factory. It is the motion of the air. At shifts end, Simon follows the air and the whistle and the dust-kin out the door, and into the streets of the city.

  Steam-trains run into the stockyards, and he smells the low moaning of cattle imported to the slaughterhouses for meat and leather. Farmers carts rattle along the roads, bringing in the produce to be sold at market the next morning; the sound stirs memory in him, and the urge to flee to ground. Sweaty and dirt-smeared men laugh and joke along the streets, leaving jobs at other factories, ones that make more mundane things. He sees them, and sees what he might be in ten years, or twenty, and shudders.

  Why did you come to the city? a keening, whispering voice asks. Simon looks around, but there is nobody there to speak so clean and fairly: nothing but the wind. His heart quickens: perhaps it is a wizard-voice. Perhaps he has been chosen for a great task.

  Perhaps it is his sign.r />
  “I came, sir,” he tells it, clearing his throat as if addressing the foreman, “to gain a better life.”

  And have you found it? ask the cobblestones, and the spaces between them, ground with manure and dust and grass-seeds.

  He clutches his hands in front of his body, tight in one another. He has a room and hot potatoes with cheese on pay day. He is paying off his indenture to the soil. The house-mistress’s daughter seems to like him. His parents, if not proud, are not disappointed.

  He shakes his head. “I’ve taken wax,” he confesses, not knowing to who, but knowing he should, he must be honest now. “If I had magic…”

  There is magic in a bear’s heart, so the name has been erased. There is magic in a falcons claw, clutched at the moment of dying. There is magic in things and not just symbols, it whispers, and he listens. Factory magic is not your kind of magic.

  “Then what shall I do?” he whispers, his carving hand growing stiff from tension.

  We have been looking some time, it says, pondering and sweet, for a vessel, a mold, a thing well-designed and willing. Are you willing? it asks, and he draws in a breath.

  “Yes,” he says, elated and terrified and strung tight with delicious vindication – his sign is here at last. “Oh yes.”

  Look to where things are still, the murmur says, tasting of sweet peas at first picking and old blood and sunshine. You will find your advancement there.

  A pair of beat cops come around the corner, one twirling his baton idly, chattering away to the other. Simon closes his mouth, shoves his hands in his pockets, and makes his long way home to Progress Square, vowing in his head to call it Bear’s Heart Square forever more.

  There are a lot of stillnesses in his head: it is why he is permitted to work in the Factory. He spreads out on his mattress that night and dives into them, dives deep.