I can’t swallow. My mouth is dry.
I can’t do it. A puppy is one thing. If I do this, though, I’ll cross a line. I’ll no longer be a ghost.
I’ll be a monster.
I release my breath, silent as dust.
Franky really is a cute baby.
No longer blocked by the moral barrier, I lower my hand to stroke his pink, plump cheek.
Again, my fingers stop short. It’s not my imagination. Something is holding my wrist.
“I’m not going to hurt him,” I mumble, saying it half to myself, half to the unseen thing gripping my arm.
I watch as dust swirls in the dim moonlight, and a second shadow appears on the wall beside my own. Bony old fingers the color of coffee materialize on my wrist. My eyes follow the arm upward, to find a skeletal old man, his face dark beneath a halo of white hair. His expression is stern; his eyes are thin slits.
“Cyrus?” I ask.
He says nothing.
“I won’t hurt him,” I say.
Then, a third shadow, and a fourth. A soldier stands beside me, gray and grainy as old film. He’s soaked. Water pours from his clothes, chilling my bare feet.
Beside the soldier, a little girl with sad eyes shakes her head slowly. She looks familiar; was she the girl in the cellar? She’s little more than mist; I can see right through her to the mirror on the back of the door.
Then I realize I’m seeing only a sweater over a chair in the mirror; in the moonlight, it drapes like a girl’s dress. My feet are cold—it’s an October night in a house with hardwoods like ice—but they are dry. The soldier was nothing more than the shadow of a tree.
And Cyrus? Cyrus is still standing there, now solid oak, and he whispers, in a voice of rustling leaves: “We’re watching you, boy.”
He vanishes as the headlights of a passing car sweep across the room.
I rub my wrist. My whole arm is numb. I decide that Franklin’s chubby little cheeks are best left uncaressed.
After a quick trip to the attic, I go to the laundry room and steal some clothes. Eric’s jeans invoke a certain sense of deja vu; it’s not the first time I’ve worn his used pants. His old tennis shoes are too big for me; I compensate with two pairs of socks.
Then, I’m out the door, into the open sky. Leaves crunch beneath my feet as I walk across the lawn. On the front porch, a line of Jack-o-lantern’s grin, a few still faintly glowing with the last flickers of their candles. I reach the end of the sidewalk and glance back one last time at Seven Chimneys, before crossing the road and taking my return step into the wider world.
Beneath my arm, I cradle Professor Wink.
I can tell he’s going to miss the place.
Me, not so much. Even with thirteen-thousand square feet, some places are just too crowded.
EVIL ROBOT MONKEY
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL
Sliding his hands over the clay, Sly relished the moisture oozing around his fingers. The clay matted down the hair on the back of his hands making them look almost human. He turned the potter’s wheel with his prehensile feet as he shaped the vase. Pinching the clay between his fingers he lifted the wall of the vase, spinning it higher.
Someone banged on the window of his pen. Sly jumped and then screamed as the vase collapsed under its own weight. He spun and hurled it at the picture window like feces. The clay spattered against the Plexiglas, sliding down the window.
In the courtyard beyond the glass, a group of school kids leapt back, laughing. One of them swung his arms aping Sly crudely. Sly bared his teeth, knowing these people would take it as a grin, but he meant it as a threat. Swinging down from his stool, he crossed his room in three long strides and pressed his dirty hand against the window. Still grinning, he wrote SSA. Outside, the letters would be reversed.
The student’s teacher flushed as red as a female in heat and called the children away from the window. She looked back once as she led them out of the courtyard, so Sly grabbed himself and showed her what he would do if she came into his pen.
Her naked face turned brighter red and she hurried away. When they were gone, Sly rested his head against the glass. The metal in his skull thunked against the window. It wouldn’t be long now, before a handler came to talk to him.
Damn.
He just wanted to make pottery. He loped back to the wheel and sat down again with his back to the window. Kicking the wheel into movement, Sly dropped a new ball of clay in the center and tried to lose himself.
In the corner of his vision, the door to his room snicked open. Sly let the wheel spin to a halt, crumpling the latest vase.
Vern poked his head through. He signed, “You okay?”
Sly shook his head emphatically and pointed at the window.
“Sorry.” Vern’s hands danced. “We should have warned you that they were coming.”
“You should have told them that I was not an animal.”
Vern looked down in submission. “I did. They’re kids.”
“And I’m a chimp. I know.” Sly buried his fingers in the clay to silence his thoughts.
“It was Delilah. She thought you wouldn’t mind because the other chimps didn’t.”
Sly scowled and yanked his hands free. “I’m not like the other chimps.” He pointed to the implant in his head. “Maybe Delilah should have one of these. Seems like she needs help thinking.”
“I’m sorry.” Vern knelt in front of Sly, closer than anyone else would come when he wasn’t sedated. It would be so easy to reach out and snap his neck. “It was a lousy thing to do.”
Sly pushed the clay around on the wheel. Vern was better than the others. He seemed to understand the hellish limbo where Sly lived–too smart to be with other chimps, but too much of an animal to be with humans. Vern was the one who had brought Sly the potter’s wheel which, by the Earth and Trees, Sly loved. Sly looked up and raised his eyebrows. “So what did they think of my show?”
Vern covered his mouth, masking his smile. The man had manners. “The teacher was upset about the ‘evil robot monkey.’ ”
Sly threw his head back and hooted. Served her right.
“But Delilah thinks you should be disciplined.” Vern, still so close that Sly could reach out and break him, stayed very still. “She wants me to take the clay away since you used it for an anger display.”
Sly’s lips drew back in a grimace built of anger and fear. Rage threatened to blind him, but he held on, clutching the wheel. If he lost it with Vern–rational thought danced out of his reach. Panting, he spun the wheel trying to push his anger into the clay.
The wheel spun. Clay slid between his fingers. Soft. Firm and smooth. The smell of earth lived in his nostrils. He held the world in his hands. Turning, turning, the walls rose around a kernel of anger, subsuming it.
His heart slowed with the wheel and Sly blinked, becoming aware again as if he were slipping out of sleep. The vase on the wheel still seemed to dance with life. Its walls held the shape of the world within them. He passed a finger across the rim.
Vern’s eyes were moist. “Do you want me to put that in the kiln for you?”
Sly nodded.
“I have to take the clay. You understand that, don’t you?”
Sly nodded again staring at his vase. It was beautiful.
Vern scowled. “The woman makes me want to hurl feces.”
Sly snorted at the image, then sobered. “How long before I get it back?”
Vern picked up the bucket of clay next to the wheel. “I don’t know.” He stopped at the door and looked past Sly to the window. “I’m not cleaning your mess. Do you understand me?”
For a moment, rage crawled on his spine, but Vern did not meet his eyes and kept staring at the window. Sly turned.
The vase he had thrown lay on the floor in a pile of clay.
Clay.
“I understand.” He waited until the door closed, then loped over and scooped the clay up. It was not much, but it was enough for now.
Sly s
at down at his wheel and began to turn.
IF ANGELS FIGHT
RICHARD BOWES
1.
Outside the window, the blue water of the Atlantic danced in the sunlight of an early morning in October. They’re short, quiet trains, the ones that roll through Connecticut just after dawn. I sipped bad tea, dozed off occasionally and awoke with a start.
Over the last forty years, I’ve ridden the northbound train from New York to Boston hundreds of times. I’ve done it alone, with friends and lovers, going home for the holidays, setting out on vacations, on my way to funerals.
That morning, I was with one who was once in some ways my best friend and certainly my oldest. Though we had rarely met in decades, it seemed that a connection endured. Our mission was vital and we rode the train by default: a terrorist threat had closed traffic at Logan Airport in Boston the night before.
I’d left messages canceling an appointment, letting the guy I was going out with know I’d be out of town briefly for a family crisis. No need to say it was another, more fascinating, family disrupting my life, not mine.
The old friend caught my discomfort at what we were doing and was amused.
A bit of Shakespeare occurred to me when I thought of him:
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king
He was quiet for a while after hearing those lines. It was getting toward twenty-four hours since I’d slept. I must have dozed because suddenly I was in a dark place with two tiny slits of light high above. I found hand and foot holds and crawled up the interior wall of a stone tower. As I got to the slits of light, a voice said, “New Haven. This stop New Haven.”
2.
Carol Bannon had called me less than two weeks before. “I’m going to be down in New York the day after tomorrow,” she said. “I wondered if we could get together.” I took this to mean that she and her family wanted to get some kind of fix on the present location and current state of her eldest brother, my old friend Mark.
Over the years when this had happened it was Marie Bannon, Mark and Carol’s mother, who contacted me. Those times I’d discovered channels through which she could reach her straying son. This time, I didn’t make any inquiries before meeting Carol, but I did check to see if certain parties still had the same phone numbers and habits that I remembered.
Thinking about Marky Bannon, I too wondered where he was. He’s always somewhere on my mind. When I see a photo of some great event, a reception, or celebrity trial, a concert or inauguration—I scan the faces wondering if he’s present.
I’m retired these days, with time to spend. But over the years, keeping tabs on the Bannons was an easy minor hobby. The mother is still alive though not very active now. The father was a longtime Speaker of the Massachusetts House and a candidate for governor who died some years back. An intersection in Dorchester and an entrance to the Boston Harbor tunnel are still named for him.
Carol, the eldest daughter, got elected to the City Council at the age of twenty-eight. Fourteen years later she gave up a safe U.S. House seat to run the Commerce Department for Clinton. Later she served on the 9/11 commission and is a perennial cable TV talking head. She’s married to Jerry Simone who has a stake in Google. Her brother Joe is a leading campaign consultant in D.C. Keeping up the idealistic end of things, her little sister Eileen is a member of Doctors Without Borders. My old friend Mark is the tragic secret without which no Irish family would be complete.
Carol asked me to meet her for tea uptown in the Astor Court of the St. Regis Hotel. I got there a moment after four. The Astor Court has a blinding array of starched white tablecloths and gold chandeliers under a ceiling mural of soft, floating clouds.
Maybe her choice of meeting places was intentionally campy. Or maybe because I don’t drink anymore she had hit upon this as an amusing spot to bring me.
Carol and I always got along. Even aged ten and eleven I was different enough from the other boys that I was nice to my friends’ little sisters.
Carol has kept her hair chestnut but allowed herself fine gray wings. Her skin and teeth are terrific. The Bannons were what was called dark Irish when we were growing up in Boston in the 1950s. That meant they weren’t so white that they automatically burst into flames on their first afternoon at the beach.
They’re a handsome family. The mother is still beautiful in her eighties. Marie Bannon had been on the stage a bit before she married. She had that light and charm, that ability to convince you that her smile was for you alone that led young men and old to drop everything and do her bidding.
Mike Bannon, the father, had been a union organizer before he went nights to law school, then got into politics. He had rugged good looks, blue eyes that would look right into you, and a fine smile that he could turn on and off and didn’t often waste on kids.
“When the mood’s upon him, he can charm a dog off a meat wagon,” I remember a friend of my father’s remarking. It was a time and place where politicians and race horses alike were scrutinized and handicapped.
The Bannon children had inherited the parents’ looks and, in the way of politicians’ kids, were socially poised. Except for Mark, who could look lost and confused one minute, oddly intense the next, with eyes suddenly just like his father’s.
Carol rose to kiss me as I approached the table. It seemed kind of like a Philip Marlowe moment: I imagined myself as a private eye, tough and amused, called in by the rich dame for help in a personal matter.
When I first knew Carol Bannon, she wore pigtails and cried because her big brother wouldn’t take her along when we went to the playground. Recently there’s been speculation everywhere that a distinguished Massachusetts senator is about to retire before his term ends. Carol Bannon is the odds-on favorite to be appointed to succeed him.
Then, once she’s in the Senate, given that it’s the Democratic Party we’re talking about, who’s to say they won’t go crazy again and run one more Bay State politician for President in the wild hope that they’ve got another JFK?
Carol said, “My mother asked me to remember her to you.” I asked Carol to give her mother my compliments. Then we each said how good the other looked and made light talk about the choices of teas and the drop-dead faux Englishness of the place. We reminisced about Boston and the old neighborhood.
“Remember how everyone called that big overgrown vacant lot, ‘Fitzie’s’ ?” I asked. The nickname had come from its being the site where the Fitzgerald mansion, the home of ‘Honey Fitz,’ the old mayor of Boston, once stood. His daughter, Rose, was mother to the Kennedy brothers.
“There was a marble floor in the middle of the trash and weeds,” I said, “And everybody was sure the place was haunted.
“The whole neighborhood was haunted,” she said. “There was that little old couple who lived down Melville Avenue from us. They knew my parents. He was this gossipy elf. He had held office back in the old days and everyone called him, ‘The Hon Hen,’ short for ‘the Honorable Henry.’ She was a daughter of Honey Fitz. They were aunt and uncle of the Kennedys.”
Melville Avenue was and is a street where the houses are set back on lawns and the garages are converted horse barns. When we were young, doctors and prosperous lawyers lived there along with prominent saloon owners and politicians like Michael Bannon and his family.
Suddenly at our table in the Astor Court, the pots and plates, the Lapsang and scones, the marmalade, the clotted cream and salmon finger sandwiches appeared. We were silent for a little while and I thought about how politics had seemed a common occupation for kids’ parents in Irish Boston. Politicians’ houses tended to be big and semi-public with much coming and going and loud talk.
Life at the Bannons’ was much more exciting than at my house. Mark had his own room and didn’t have to share with his little brother. He had a ten-year-old’s luxuries: electronic football, enough soldiers to fight Gettysburg if you didn’t mind that the Confederates were mostly Indians,
and not one but two electric train engines, which made wrecks a positive pleasure. Mark’s eyes would come alive when the cars flew off the tracks in a rainbow of sparks.
“What are you smiling at?” Carol asked.
And I cut to the chase and said, “Your brother. I remember the way he liked to leave his room. That tree branch right outside his window: he could reach out, grab hold of it, scramble hand over hand to the trunk.”
I remembered how the branches swayed and sighed and how scared I was every time I had to follow him.
“In high school,” Carol said, “at night he’d sneak out when he was supposed to be in bed and scramble back inside much later. I knew and our mother, but no one else. One night the bough broke as he tried to get back in the window. He fell all the way to the ground, smashing through more branches on the way.
“My father was down in the study plotting malfeasance with Governor Furcolo. They and everyone else came out to see what had happened. We found Mark lying on the ground laughing like a lunatic. He had a fractured arm and a few scratches. Even I wondered if he’d fallen on his head.”
For a moment I watched for some sign that she knew I’d been right behind her brother when he fell. I’d gotten down the tree fast and faded into the night when I saw lights come on inside the house. It had been a long, scary night and before he laughed, Mark had started to sob.
Now that we were talking about her brother, Carol was able to say, almost casually, “My mother has her good days and her bad days. But for thirty years she’s hinted to me that she had a kind of contact with him. I didn’t tell her that wasn’t possible because it obviously meant a lot to her.”
She was maintaining a safe zone, preserving her need not to know. I frowned and fiddled with a sliver of cucumber on buttered brown bread.
Carol put on a full court press, “Mom wants to see Mark again and she thinks it needs to be soon. She told me you knew people and could arrange things. It would make her so happy if you could do whatever that was again.”
The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009 Page 65