by Guran, Paula
“David!” she shouted, and waved, but he pedaled away.
The muffler faded as the pickup headed for the boulevard. Then she heard a faint metallic clatter somewhere on the next block. It could have been a bicycle crashing to the ground.
She hurried for the corner.
Vincent came out of his house, drinking a Dr Pepper. “Where you going?” he said.
“Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
Now there was only the buzzing of bees, the raspy bark of a dog in a backyard.
“I think it was David.”
“What about him?”
“He’s in trouble,” she said, and hurried on.
Vincent followed at a casual pace. By the time he caught up she was squinting along the cross street.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know!”
“Don’t worry about it.” He showed her the can of soda. “Want one? I got some more in the basement.”
“Not now!”
“Aw, he’s all right.”
“No, he’s not. Look.”
A couple of hundred feet down, before the turn onto Charter Way, the bicycle lay on its side in the grass, the front wheel pointing at the sky and the spokes still spinning. David was twisted under the frame, the handlebars across his chest.
She ran the rest of the way, stopped and waited for him to move.
“Not bad.” Vincent walked around the crash scene. “I give him a seven.”
“This isn’t a game.” She studied the boy on the ground, the angle of his neck. She watched his eyelids. They remained shut.
“Sure it is,” said Vincent. “We used to play it last summer. Remember?”
She got down on her knees and pressed her ear to his chest. There was no heartbeat. She unbuttoned his shirt to be sure. Then she moved her head up until her cheek almost touched his lips. No air came out of his nose or mouth. This time he was not breathing at all.
“Help me,” she said.
“I don’t see any blood.”
Vincent was right about that. And the bike seemed to be undamaged, as if it had simply fallen over.
“David? Can you hear me?”
“It looks pretty real, though. The way he’s got his tennis shoe in the chain . . . ”
“Are you going to help or not?”
Vincent raised the bike while she worked the foot free. She slipped her arm under David’s shoulders and tried to sit him up. “David,” she whispered. “Tell me you’re all right.”
“Okay, okay,” Vincent said, “I’ll give him an eight.”
She lowered David back down, dug her fingers into his hair and tapped his head against the ground. Then she did it again, harder. Finally his chest heaved as he began to breathe. His eyelids opened.
“I knew he was faking,” Vincent said.
“You take the bike,” she told him.
“Eric used to do it better, though.”
“Shut up.”
Vincent started to wheel the bike onto the sidewalk. He had to turn the handlebars so he did not run over a small mound on the grass.
“What the hell is that?” he said. “A dead raccoon?”
“Leave it.”
“I hate those things.” Vincent raised his foot, ready to kick it like a football.
“It’s a possum. I said leave it.”
She got up quickly, walked over, took hold of the animal by the fur and tapped it against the ground. Once was enough. The frightened creature sprang to life, wriggled free and scurried off.
“Faker!” said Vincent.
“Take the bike, I told you. We’ll meet at his house.”
She went back to David and held out her hand.
“Come on. I’ll walk you home.”
David blinked, trying to focus. “Is my dad there?”
“I didn’t know you went out,” said his grandmother from the porch.
“Sorry,” said David.
“You should always tell someone.”
“Do you know where my dad went?”
“To get some kind of tool.”
“Oh.”
“Come in the house. You don’t look so good. Would your friends like a cold drink?”
“Not me,” said Vincent.
“No, thank you,” said the girl.
“Is he coming back?”
“Why, of course he is, Davey. Now come in before you get heat stroke.”
“I have to put my bike away.”
“Well, don’t be long.” She opened the screen door and went inside.
“I gotta go, anyway,” Vincent said. He started out of the front yard. “Wanna come over to my place?”
“Not right now,” said David.
“We can play anything you want.”
David was not listening. His eyes moved nervously from the driveway to the end of the block and back again. The girl moved over and stood next to him.
“Maybe later,” she said.
“Okay. Well, see ya.”
She sat down on the porch as Vincent walked away.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought you got hit by a car or something.”
“Naw.”
“What do you remember?”
“Nothing.”
“You never do. But that’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”
There was the rumbling of the muffler again, at the end of the block. David stood by the driveway until the pickup truck rounded the corner and turned in. His father got out, carrying a bag.
“Hey, champ,” he said.
“Where were you?”
“At the Home Depot.”
“Why didn’t you take me?”
“Did you want to go?”
“I always do.”
“Next time, I promise. Hello, there. Charlene, isn’t it?”
“Sherron. Hi, Mr. Donohue.”
“Of course. You’re David’s friend, from school. How have you been?”
“Fine.”
“You knew Eric, didn’t you? David’s brother?”
“Yes,” she said in a low voice.
“Dad . . . ”
“I have an idea. Why don’t you stay for lunch? Would you like that?”
Something moved in her chest, or at least in the pocket of her shirt, trying to get out. The cricket from the rosebush had come back to life. “I would. I mean, I do. But I sort of have to get home. My mom’s expecting me. She’s making something special.”
“Another time, then.”
“I was wondering,” she said carefully. “Could David come, too? She said it was all right.”
“Why, I think that’s a fine invitation. Don’t you, son?”
David considered. “Are you leaving again?”
“Not today. I’ve got plenty to do in the garage.”
“Please?” she said to David. “I need you to help me with something.”
“Well . . . ”
“My science project. It’s really cool.”
“I’ll bet it is,” said the man. “You know, my wife was interested in science. Do you remember David’s mother?”
“Yes,” she said, looking at her shoes.
“Eileen was doing research when I met her, at college. We got married right after graduation . . . ”
“Dad, please.”
“She was a very nice lady,” said the girl.
“Yes. She was.” His father took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a second. “Anyway, you two have a great time. And don’t be such a stranger, Sherron. You’re always welcome here.”
“Thanks, Mr. Donohue.”
“Then—I’ll see you later, Dad.”
His father winked. “You can count on it.”
“Are you going to tell my dad?”
“Not if you don’t want me to.”
They walked around the corner to the next street. The pavement smelled like melting asphalt. Somewhere a sprinkler hissed, beating steam into
the air. Her house had trees that kept the sun away from the roof and the windows, so when they went inside it was hard to see for a minute. No one was home. She poured two glasses of sweet tea from the refrigerator and led him to her room.
As soon as she closed the door she took the cricket out of her pocket. Before it could hop away she put it in a Mason jar. A grasshopper and a beetle crawled along a leaf at the bottom. As soon as she touched the jar they stopped moving. She screwed the wire lid back on.
“Your folks let you keep those?”
“I told them it’s for school.”
“What do you need them for?”
“My project. If I get a fish tank, I can have frogs, too. And one of these.” She opened a book to a picture of a small snake.
“Why?”
“I found it on the Internet.”
“But why?”
She turned her computer on and showed him a page from a university website. There was an article called Thanatosis: Nature’s Way of Survival, with close-ups of insects, a possum, a leopard shark and a hog-nosed snake. He read the first paragraph. It explained how some creatures protect themselves when afraid by pretending to be dead.
“You think I’m like them?”
“I don’t know yet. But I’m going to find out.”
“Well, you’re wrong.”
She noticed that his eyes were now focused on the bulletin board by the computer, and the headline of the newspaper clipping she had pinned there months ago: LOCAL WOMAN, SON DIE IN FIERY CRASH. She snatched it down and put it in the drawer.
“Oh, David. I’m really sorry.”
“I better go.”
“But I need you to help me.”
“You think I’m faking it.”
“No, I don’t. I was there this time.”
“Then you know I’m a freak,” he said. “Like one of those animals. Like a bug.”
“You’re not.”
“What’s the difference?”
“They just—freeze up when they get scared. But you weren’t even breathing. Your heart stopped.”
“So what am I scared of?”
“It’s okay to say it. David, I saw you chasing the truck. Every time he leaves—well, you’re afraid he won’t come back, either. Aren’t you.”
He made a sound like a laugh. “You don’t know anything.”
“Don’t I?”
The laugh stopped. “If he doesn’t, it means I got a second chance, and I blew it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you get it? She was going to take me, but I was off playing that stupid game. She wasn’t supposed to take Eric. It was supposed to be me.”
Her mouth stayed open while she tried to find words.
“I have to go now,” he said.
Once he was out from under the trees the sky was fierce again. Leaves curled, flowers turned away from the sun and the asphalt began to glisten. He heard footsteps on the sidewalk that were not his own.
“You’re right. I don’t know anything.”
“Forget it, Sher.”
They passed rosebushes, the yellow petals now almost white. It was half a block before she spoke again.
“Can I ask one question?”
“Go ahead.”
“How does it feel?”
“I told you, I don’t remember.”
“Can you at least try?”
He kept walking, stepping over cracks. Mrs. Shaede’s Rain Bird sprinkler came on and a silver mist rose into the air.
“Wilson’s Market,” he said under his breath.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“The one on Charter Way? What about it?”
“We used to go there, when I was little.”
“We did, too.”
“There was this one time,” he said slowly, as they neared the end of the block. “I was four or five, I guess. Eric wasn’t born yet. She was wearing her long coat.”
“The gray one? I remember that.”
“Anyway, we went like always, just the two of us. And we got a shopping cart and she let me push it, so I could help. You know, put the milk and the groceries in for her. I stopped to look at the cereal, and I was going to tell her what kind to get, but when I looked up she was way ahead. I could only see the back of her coat. And you know what? There was another cart behind her, and another little boy was pushing it, and she was handing him the cans. I didn’t understand. I thought they were going to drive off and leave me there. So I started to cry. I yelled, ‘Mama, that isn’t me!’ And when she turned around, it wasn’t my mother. It was another lady with the same kind of coat. But before she turned, that was the feeling. If you want to know.”
Her eyes were bright as diamonds and she had to look away.
And then she did something she had never done before. She hooked her arm through his and reached down and lifted his wrist and laced her fingers between his fingers and held his hand very tightly. He let her do that.
After a while she said, “You know, they have better nurses at middle school. Maybe they can give you pills to make it stop.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do.”
“Maybe I was dead. So what? Next time, I hope I don’t wake up! What do you think of that? Huh?”
When she did not answer he looked around for her.
If she was not there she should have been.
The next school year was a crazy one, say like landing behind enemy lines and fighting your way out, and the next one was even worse, so he saw less of her, even before his father learned the truth and started driving him to the Institute for tests. By then it did not happen very often but at least David was with him. The only time he was not was when Dad’s heart gave out suddenly during senior year. She broke up with Vincent when her family moved and people said she went away to college to study pre-med but no one knew exactly where. If you ever meet her, you might tell her this: Just that life goes on, and her project—say his name was David—finally figured out that there are so many small dyings along the way it hardly matters which one of them is Death.
A hard-boiled used bookstore owner with a knack for finding things has a murdered Chinaman, a unicorn’s questionable gift, and a pushy little sorceress to deal with . . .
The Maltese Unicorn
Caitlín R. Kiernan
New York City (May 1935)
It wasn’t hard to find her. Sure, she had run. After Szabó let her walk like that, I knew Ellen would get wise that something was rotten, and she’d run like a scared rabbit with the dogs hot on its heels. She’d have it in her head to skip town, and she’d probably keep right on skipping until she was out of the country. Odds were pretty good she wouldn’t stop until she was altogether free and clear of this particular plane of existence. There are plenty enough fetid little hidey holes in the universe, if you don’t mind the heat and the smell and the company you keep. You only have to know how to find them, and the way I saw it, Ellen Andrews was good as Rand and McNally when it came to knowing her way around. But first, she’d go back to that apartment of hers, the whole eleventh floor of the Colosseum, with its bleak westward view of the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades. I figured there would be those two or three little things she couldn’t leave the city without, even if it meant risking her skin to collect them. Only she hadn’t expected me to get there before her. Word on the street was Harpootlian still had me locked up tight, so Ellen hadn’t expected me to get there at all.
From the hall came the buzz of the elevator, then I heard her key in the lock, the front door, and her footsteps as she hurried through the foyer and the dining room. Then she came dashing into that French rococo nightmare of a library, and stopped cold in her tracks when she saw me sitting at the reading table with al-Jaldaki’s grimoire open in front of me.
For a second, she didn’t say anything. She just stood there, staring at me. Then she managed a forced sort of laugh and said, “I knew they’d send someone, Nat. I j
ust didn’t think it’d be you.”
“After that gyp you pulled with the dingus, they didn’t really leave me much choice,” I told her, which was the truth, or all the truth I felt like sharing. “You shouldn’t have come back here. It’s the first place anyone would think to check.”
Ellen sat down in the armchair by the door. She looked beat, like whatever comes after exhausted, and I could tell Szabó’s gunsels had made sure all the fight was gone before they’d turned her loose. They weren’t taking any chances, and we were just going through the motions now, me and her. All our lines had been written.
“You played me for a sucker,” I said, and picked up the pistol that had been lying beside the grimoire. My hand was shaking, and I tried to steady it by bracing my elbow against the table. “You played me, then you tried to play Harpootlian and Szabó both. Then you got caught. It was a bonehead move all the way round, Ellen.”
“So, how’s it gonna be, Natalie? You gonna shoot me for being stupid?”
“No, I’m going to shoot you because it’s the only way I can square things with Auntie H., and the only thing that’s gonna keep Szabó from going on the warpath. And because you played me.”
“In my shoes, you’d have done the same thing,” she said. And the way she said it, I could tell she believed what she was saying. It’s the sort of self-righteous bushwa so many grifters hide behind. They might stab their own mothers in the back if they see an angle in it, but that’s jake, ’cause so would anyone else.
“Is that really all you have to say for yourself?” I asked, and pulled back the slide on the Colt, chambering the first round. She didn’t even flinch . . . But, wait . . . I’m getting ahead of myself. Maybe I ought to begin nearer the beginning.
As it happens, I didn’t go and name the place Yellow Dragon Books. It came with that moniker, and I just never saw any reason to change it. I’d only have had to pay for a new sign. Late in ’28—right after Arnie “The Brain” Rothstein was shot to death during a poker game at the Park Central Hotel—I accidentally found myself on the sunny side of the proprietress of one of Manhattan’s more infernal brothels. I say accidentally because I hadn’t even heard of Madam Yeksabet Harpootlian when I began trying to dig up a buyer for an antique manuscript, a collection of necromantic erotica purportedly written by John Dee and Edward Kelley sometime in the sixteenth century. Turns out, Harpootlian had been looking to get her mitts on it for decades.