The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four

by Jonathan Strahan

  I lazily cut through the Martin's parking lot. Hunched over a loaded cart, a gray-haired woman with three children in tow—grandkids?—glared at me, or maybe at the world, or at the decades that separated us. I averted my eyes as I sprinted past. I headed uphill for home, the air suddenly damp and cloying, sweat stinging my eyes. Compared to Des, I was the old woman; she had all the kid's enthusiasms: ghost stories, horror movies, treasure hunts, farts, the night sky, the taste on the tongue of stuff that wasn't meant to be tasted. "Arm sweat and leg sweat taste different," she told me the night the AC broke. "I'll show you. And your arm and my arm taste different, and your left arm tastes different from your right arm. See? Isn't that something, Jen? How can anyone ever be bored?" And then she had plucked a dog-eared Norton Anthology from the orange crate beside her bed and stood silhouetted in the window and read aloud, with great drama, while I laughed at her:

  From childhood's hour I have not been

  As others were—I have not seen

  As others saw—I could not bring

  My passions from a common spring—

  And at that point in my run, just as the humidity and the storm broke, and I plunged into a sheeting downpour like a drowning pool, I realized what the 13 letters had to be.

  From the lightning in the sky

  As it pass'd me flying by—

  From the thunder, and the storm—

  And the cloud that took the form

  (When the rest of Heaven was blue)

  Of a demon in my view—

  Back at the apartment, I plugged in EdgarAllanPoe, and what do you know? It didn't work either.

  "Well, fuck me," I said aloud, sounding so much like Des, on our first meeting, that I had to laugh.

  Our first meeting. When a single DVD case seemed almost to float upward and into her hand.

  So I filled the left column with SeventhVictim, which gave me this:

  A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

  1 S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R

  2 E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D

  3 V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U

  4 E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D

  5 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M

  6 T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S

  7 H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G

  8 V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U

  9 I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H

  10 C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B

  11 T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S

  12 I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H

  13 M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L

  I tackled the first clue, zmteatuxgfkmi. Z in the first row corresponded with H up top; M in the second row corresponded with I; T in the third row corresponded with Y, and so on until . . .

  hiyanancydrew

  "Hi, there," I said aloud, delighted. It was like communicating with the dead, only not in any weird-me-out way. It was more of a collaboration: Jen had written something, and now I was reading it, long after the fact.

  Clue No. 2 turned into timenowforfun. No. 3 was betterbealert.

  I started decrypting Clue No. 4, already feeling the process had curdled from a puzzle to a chore. Once you had the key, doing the conversions was pretty tedious, really, nothing but a—

  neverforg

  Still with my fingertip on Row 9, I stared at the nine letters I had written—or (face facts, Jen) the letters Des had directed my hand to write. For an instant I considered setting down the pen, shredding the tableau, trunking the notebook and moving on with my life. Instead I proceeded to Rows 10 through 13.

  neverforgetme

  OK, now I was weirded out. When had Jen written these pages, anyway? They were in the middle of the notebook, on sheets just as old as the surrounding paper, and just as permanently attached to the spine; the pages, anyway, were not afterthoughts. But if that plaintive request (no, demand)—"Never forget me"—wasn't directed at me, then to whom was it directed?

  I looked at the facing page, that single coordinate above that single clue:

  xmmwghmztgomz

  Gomez, indeed. I stood up, walked across the kitchen, opened the fridge, rummaged for the only thing alcoholic in the house (a single bottle of Mike's Hard Lemonade, left over from a Yarns Ignoble get-together), popped the top, methodically drank it at the sink watching chipmunks scale the neighbor's brick wall, rinsed the bottle, perched it atop the pile in the recycling bin, returned to the dinette table and decrypted the last clue:

  firstofeleven

  Nearly 6 o'clock. Far too late to start now, and tomorrow a double shift at the store. First thing Sunday, then, I'd acquire some satellites and start connecting the dots, track the multi-cache Des had prepared for me. Perfectly valid reasons for a two-day delay. Nothing whatsoever to do with dread.

  I stopped for Sunday dinner at a roadside restaurant where the waitresses wore "plain" Mennonite dresses and the short list of vegetables included applesauce, macaroni and cottage cheese.

  "What can I get yez?"

  "I'll have applesauce, macaroni and cottage cheese. And a pork chop."

  "Onions and gravy?"

  "Yes, please."

  I flipped my paper placemat—which featured a color photo of the Italian shoreline at Sorrento, oddly enough—and transcribed the messages I had uncovered and decrypted so far.

  sorryaboutmom

  dontmournmuch

  The implied pause before the last word made me laugh.

  dontlaughatme

  imissyousoido

  bestrongforme

  yourenotalone

  nightiscoming

  "What's the point, Des?" I murmured. "What are you trying to tell me?"

  "Mighty lot of homework you got there," the waitress said, "and it summer. You want I should set these on another mat?"

  "No, it's OK." My handwritten messages from the dead promptly vanished beneath a steaming plate of roadfood, and I was suddenly ravenous. As I ate, the last three messages kept scrolling through my head. Be strong for me; you're not alone; night is coming. As indeed it was. The sun would be below the treeline by the time I got back to the car.

  What makes a certain type of cache a night cache, as opposed to an ordinary cache that you opt to hunt up at night because you're a night person or contrary or just enjoy making things harder on yourself, is that the coordinates lead you not quite to the cache itself, but to a reflective device, or a series of reflective devices, that lead you to the true location—unlike a will-o'-the-wisp, though that leads you somewhere final, too, I suppose.

  The coordinate in the night-is-coming cache had a small symbol drawn at the end, a crescent moon within a circle. My last four destinations would be night caches.

  The first was beneath a picnic table near a scarred rock face on Sideling Hill, within a headlight's beam of a roadside floral cross. There I found the next coordinates, and the next clue, which decrypted as:

  letgojennyjen

  The second of the night caches was in the woods behind the Appalachian Laboratory, within sight of the building where someone else, presumably, was graphing the Antietam ecosystem now. There I found the next coordinates and the next clue, which decrypted as:

  youcantjoinme

  The third of the night caches was in the rocks along the riverside beneath the Casselman Bridge. There I found the next clue, which decrypted as:

  youweremyfind

  And of course the next coordinates, which beckoned me into the middle of a swamp.

  Even with GPS, finding the Cranesville Swamp by night wasn't easy. It's not what you'd call centrally located—unlike, say, the Everglades—and none of the increasingly obscure crossroads en route was lighted. My quietly hectoring Garmin indicator kept telling me I'd overshot, and I kept turnin
g around in churchyards, where I switched on the overhead and studied my road map, and the driveways of trailers, where I paused as little as possible. It was after eleven by the time I crunched into the shapeless gravel lot, barely large enough for six cars but empty when I got there, thank God. When I opened my door, the surrounding chill filled my car, filled me; I stood, shivering.

  I should have expected the cold, even in June. Cranesville Swamp is, after all, a high-altitude pocket ecosystem in the Maryland mountains, left behind when the great Northern forest retreated into Canada ten thousand years ago; the cold is its reason for being. But reading the Nature Conservancy's flyer in my kitchen and being alone in the dark on the edge of the great tangled refrigerated bowl were two rather different experiences.

  The lot seemed even smaller than it had been. I flicked my flashlight beam about the surrounding trees, taking care not to look too long into any of the spaces between, until I found the weathered wooden sign marking the trailhead. It was big and misplaced, pocked with old staples and tacks, like the bulletin board outside a college cafeteria, but it was free of messages now. That was just as well; I'd had messages enough. I walked slowly toward the trailhead, my face bathed in the handheld moonlight of the Garmin, and saw the confirming numbers; yep, the final cache was ahead. I may have been taking directions from a ghost, but she hadn't let me down yet. Not in that sense, anyway.

  I took a deep breath of skunk cabbage and cranberry and walked into the swamp.

  The look of the ground changed in the circle of light before me, became oddly regular, a series of parallel lines in my path: a boardwalk leading into the swamp. I stepped onto it. My footfalls on the planks were hollow-sounding, like a child beating a washtub, or a rowboat bumping against a dock. I walked on, mindful of the boardwalk's sudden turns, sure that a misstep would plunge me who-knew-how-deep into who-knew-what. The bog was doing its best to reclaim the boardwalk. An occasional leafy tendril clutched at my ankle as if hoping to trip me, drag me over and down.

  My thumping tread, cautious and measured and regular, now sounded like a heartbeat beneath the boards. Thanks a lot for that image. I deliberately varied my step, half-dancing along, as through a minefield.

  The breath of the dark swamp was clammy on my arms, and I once again regretted having left my denim jacket at home. I pictured it hanging on its hook beside the front door; I wished I were there with it. My Garmin face tried to reassure me by ticking down the minutes and seconds, not of time but of longitude and latitude. The final cache was only a hundred feet away now, the readout said. Ninety, eighty, seventy-five. I swept my flashlight beam and revealed nothing but level bog all around, trees too far distant to illuminate. If the cache was beneath the boardwalk, I didn't relish mucking about down there bare-handed.

  "Jen," called Des.

  I froze.

  I heard it again, "Jen," then heard it echoed a dozen times from the trees all around. Jen jen jen jen jen. Some night bird's call, working on my imagination.

  I'm good at lurking, Des had said.

  Jeez, what was I doing out here?

  Five feet.

  Three feet.

  Zero feet.

  Here we are, said the numbers on my trusty Garmin 60CSX, you're standing on it.

  I turned in a slow circle, waggled the flashlight beam around my feet, saw no telltale gleam. I tried again, and again, aiming the beam a little farther out each time, and on my fourth pass was rewarded with a single flash on the boardwalk up ahead, where it angled back toward the nearest shore. The gleam was gone almost before it registered, like the flash of a madman's lantern. Ah, there it was again; now that I had a bead, I trotted along the decking—older here, less resonant, with more give beneath my weight—until I reached it: an ordinary bike reflector at the end of an ordinary wire planted in an ordinary tuft of grass beside the walk. I cast about again with the flashlight. Nothing. This must be the place. I knelt, biting my lip—move away, Mr. Snakey No-Shoulders, move away—and felt beneath the planks on that side. In moments I found it, a cylinder the size and shape of a film canister, sitting in a dry space, a sort of shelf, between the planks and a two-by-four that connected the support posts. A microcache like the one in the parking lot, the first one we found together. I zipped up Des' notebook, squeezed it as if it were a living thing, and placed it beneath the planks where the canister had been.

  "Goodbye, Des," I said.

  Too aware of the spaces between the planks to sit, I squatted on the boardwalk, suspended in the darkness, surrounded by cold nothing. I popped the canister lid and removed a single slip of paper the size of a Chinese fortune. In the flashlight beam I saw again that scarily familiar handwriting:

  dsjooxodvfrwg

  OXO, hugs and kisses, farewell. No further coordinates. Number Eleven was the end of the line. I slid my tableau and Bic pen from my shirt pocket and set to work.

  l

  lo

  loo

  look

  lookb

  lookbe

  "Damn," I said as my flashlight went out. I twiddled the lens, thumped the casing against the boards, and got it going again, only more feebly than before. Quickly, now, before I lose the light—

  lookbeh

  How many more letters I needed, I truly can't remember. How many would anyone have needed, in the middle of a swamp at midnight?

  lookbehi

  I whirled.

  Behind me, a few yards across the surface of the bog, in the treeline: a figure.

  I sucked in a breath. With no thought, I cupped a hand over my flashlight beam to hide it.

  The figure moved nearer, stepped onto the planking ahead of me.

  "Hello," she called, and a sudden light in my face blinded me. I recoiled, staggered as if struck in the face, and stepped backward off the edge of the boardwalk.

  Have you ever reached for a glass you thought was empty, maybe when cleaning up after a party, or a wake? Not only do you splash yourself, but you feel the surprise in your forearm muscles, which clench, go into lockdown mode, might even be sore for a while. That's what stepping into the bog was like. As one foot went down, my body tensed for a plunge that didn't happen. Instead I stepped onto something solid that gave only slightly, like a rucked-up carpet. My ankle twisted, and in the ensuing little dance step of balance my other foot came off the boardwalk too. Legs spasming from the shock of purchase, I stood in a crouch on the matted surface.

  My flashlight had fallen out of reach. It pointed away from the boardwalk, illuminating nothing.

  Then my weight broke through, and I began to sink into the bog. A cold like I'd never known sheathed the tops of my feet, gripped my ankles, climbed hand-to-hand up my legs, like softball captains claiming a bat. With a tearing sound my left leg sank up to my thigh, and I fell sideways, clawing for solidity that wasn't there, coming up only with tangled fistfuls of clammy, clutching moss.

  As I flailed and gasped at the all-encompassing cold that was claiming my body, I heard rapid footsteps along the planks—strangely solid and unghostly—and a woman, not Des, cried, "I'm coming!"

  "Help!" I hollered as I went down again. This time my clawing left hand connected with the edge of the boardwalk, and then strong hands gripped my forearm, hauled on me.

  "I've got you," she said. "Stop kicking, dammit. Reach forward with your other hand. That's it, there." When my chest struck the edge, my feet found solid ground, and I levered myself up, was pulled the rest of the way. My legs came free of the bog with an awful ripping sound, and my left foot was bare. Sobbing, gasping, I clawed the spongy netting from my legs. I had no thoughts beyond freeing myself, as if the severed vines could pull me back into the bog. The horrid bright light was in my face again, an industrial-strength flash, and my rescuer's gray pants had a seriously official black stripe up the side. A firm hand kneaded my shoulder. "Jen, hey, don't worry, you're out of it, you're free, you're safe, OK? You're back on the planks. Really. It's me, Trooper Terry. Marjorie. Hey. Look at me."


  Back at the cars, she called in my license plate and my driver's license number, to make sure I wasn't infamous. The squawk of her radio was answered by an owl in the trees. I sat, shivering, on the still-warm hood of my Tracer, jeans adhering to my legs as they dried.

  Trooper Terry sauntered back over. I guess they can't help sauntering, troopers, with all that crap hanging from their belts. I decided I needed something similar to hold the GPS unit, spare batteries, a notebook of my own.

  "Your license, ma'am."

  "Thanks."

  She kicked gravel. "The Conservancy is worried someone'll set up a meth lab out here, asked us to keep a lookout. You'll understand why I had to check."

  "Sure."

  She kicked gravel again. "You'll be wanting to get home now, get into some dry clothes, I imagine."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "Yes, ma'am," she repeated. She shook her head. "Yes, ma'am."

  Long pause.

  Then she said, "Let's not make a habit of this, OK?"

  "No, ma'am."

  Clearly there was nothing more to say, but she seemed reluctant to go. Her face was shadowed, but I saw her take off her hat, scratch her head, replace the hat, sigh, and walk back toward her car. I could tell by the crunch of her footsteps that she slowed, almost turned around, changed her mind and walked on. Climbing into her driver's seat, she abruptly stood, her head cresting the roof, and called:

  "I'm sorry about Des. I had court duty that day. So I didn't. You know. Didn't see her."

  "Me, neither," I said, which made no sense, but was something to say. A little breeze picked up at just that moment—not that I could feel it, but the bushes were rustling, and I heard a skittering like leaves on the gravel, so I had some evidence—and with the breeze I decided "Me, neither" would be the completely wrong note with which to end the conversation, so I asked, "How's your nine ball?"