Some of the Best From Tor.com, 2013 Edition: A Tor.Com Original

by Various

  She swatted at a swarm of no-see-ums, bringing her attention back to the task she was being paid for. She counted five more tortoises, eight gulls, a really big water strider—that made her paddle faster because she did have a few issues with Florida’s insects—a nice ten-foot alligator, and—

  Bloomp!

  Something splashed to her right. She looked up into a cloudless sky. Nothing could have dropped from an overhead branch; she was in the middle of the river.

  Ker-chunk!

  That was much closer, soaking her right arm. Any human being who met Anna’s gaze from within those interlaced fingers of foliage would have caught a momentary glimpse of a scared child looking out from her adult face. But the thing watching her from the bushes wasn’t human, though it had alert and intelligent eyes, a long pink face, and a grayish-brown beard. It smiled with a toothy grimace.

  Anna’s pulse slowed when she recognized a rhesus monkey, which cocked a skinny arm, and let fly another rock. That one plunked into the river well short of the boat. Anna laughed as the monkey screeched, inspiring a derisive chorus. There were others back there—many others—but all less brave, merely egging on their leader.

  The monkeys were invaders, too, but Anna found them harder to dislike than pythons. Cuter, more anthropomorphic. And they didn’t eat all the other animals. Urban legend claimed they were descended from Hollywood monkeys, released into the wild when a Tarzan movie wrapped. Anna was skeptical; she had watched all those jungle flicks—her parents owned both the Weissmuller DVD sets—and had noticed capuchins and spider monkeys, but no rhesus macaques. That didn’t mean it wasn’t possible. Maybe their ancestors had just ended up on the cutting room floor. All Anna knew was that monkeys were not native to Florida, so someone must have let them loose, back in the day.

  The lead monkey screeched again. Anna smiled and took out her phone, snapping a picture with the zoom function to get a nice close-up of the face. No cell reception out here, but when she got back to the Lodge, she’d email it to her mom with a note: “Any interview questions for this one?”—a reference to her parents’ oft-told, so-cute, how-we-met story. Then she switched from smartass daughter to dutiful biologist and added three monkeys to the database, using an asterisk, because she’d heard at least a dozen more, even if she hadn’t actually seen them.

  She was almost to the moss-draped chain-link fence that was the downstream border of Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park. Beyond lay the Shadetown Road bridge, and the intrusion of the twenty-first century: a series of subdivisions with street names like Limpkin Court and Turkey Trail and Razorback Road, all named for whatever had been killed or displaced to build them.

  The fence marked the end of paradise. It was time to turn back, call it a day.

  But seeing the monkeys, thinking about where they’d come from—and where she’d come from—had put a bee in her bonnet, as Granny would say, to do something she hadn’t done since she was a kid.

  Would a noise qualify as invasive? There was decibel-based pollution, sure. But what about a sound that was artificially introduced into the landscape, only to propagate unexpectedly, crowding out the natives? Because, surely, before the 1930s, Florida children like her dad must have created their own yells of look-at-me exhilaration when they swung out on a vine and dropped into the middle of a swimming hole, right?

  Anna laid down her paddle. She took a deep breath. She balled her hands into fists, raised them and beat on her chest like a drum. She opened her mouth wide and began to yell—to yodel, really, a yell more Austrian than African, more Hollywood than Florida, a fake that over time had become real.

  “Aaahhh-eeeeeeee-aaahhhh-eeeee-aaaahhhh-eeeeee-aaaahhhhh!”

  Her long, ululating cry pierced the quiet of the jungle.

  It carried across the surface of the water, and the animals responded.

  Two anhingas broke their cover, flapped into the cypress tops.

  A family of rhesus macaques chortled and hooted and beat their own chests.

  A limpkin emitted a rattling scream.

  A twelve-foot gator slid into the river and lazily stroked upstream away from the din, its prehistoric brain ticking coolly away.

  Anna gave the call again, queen of this jungle, primal and fearless.

  Back in the trees something that smelled of sour cabbage dragged its knuckles and roared: woomp, woomp.

  An armadillo fully as big as a VW bug shook its scaly head, snorted, and lumbered through the brush.

  And beneath the river’s surface, a creature reached for Anna’s boat with a webbed hand, its talons approaching the metal hull. Then it changed its mind and kicked away, back down into the depths where it dwelled, away from the light.

  Copyright (C) 2013 by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages

  Art copyright (C) 2013 by Gary Kelley

  Contents

  Title Page

  Begin Reading

  Emily woke suddenly, in the middle of the night, sitting straight and gasping as if finally breaching the surface of Puffer’s Pond. The last thing she could remember was the shrill cry of the 6:00 a.m. whistle from the factory down Main Street in The Crossing. Then a sudden shuddering explosion behind her eyes; a shower of sparks.

  She pulled back the counterpane and moved to the edge of the bed. There, she rested; her bare feet on the cold floor, letting the night’s hush, like between the heaves of storm, settle her. Only when a fly buzzed against the windowpane did she remember everything.

  Her health had been bad, her spirit low. She’d felt so weak for days on end that she could barely make it out into the garden to cull wilted blossoms. Her pen, which usually glided over a page, sowing words to correspondents or conjuring a poem, had become a weight nearly too burdensome to bear. At her father’s insistence, the doctor had come the previous week and demanded to examine her. She’d reluctantly allowed it, in her way. He stood in the upstairs hallway, peering through the partially open door of her room as she shuffled past the entrance, back and forth, three times, fully clothed. He’d called out to her, “Emily, how can I diagnose anything other than a case of mumps in this manner?” but she was loathe to see him, to have him or any other stranger to the Homestead near her.

  All that had somehow passed, though, and she no longer felt a slave to gravity. Gone was the perpetual headache like the beating of a drum, gone the labored rasping for breath. That frantic confusion of thought that had plagued her seemed only a fading nightmare, as if now, at the start of autumn, there’d been a spring cleaning in her mind. Before standing, she took stock to make sure she wasn’t deluding herself, but no, she felt calm and rested. She stood and stretched, noticing a dim reflection of her loose white nightgown in the window glass, a floating specter that made her smile.

  Moonlight sifted in through the two windows and showed her the way to her writing table. There, she lit the taper in the pewter candlestick and took it up to lead her through the darkened house. She wanted to let them know that she’d recovered from her spell. Turning right, down the hallway, she stopped first at Lavinia’s room. A tapping at the door brought no response. She rapped louder, but still couldn’t raise Vinnie from sleep. Quietly, she opened the door and crossed the dark expanse. Bringing the candlestick down in order to light her sister’s form, she was surprised to find the bed still made, empty. She left that room and hurried further down the hall to her parents’. Her mother had been in the poorest health, and Emily was reluctant to wake her, but concern for Vinnie overcame her caution and she knocked heavily three times. Silence followed.

  The raised lantern revealed her parents’ bed to also be empty, still made from the day. She hurried back up the hall to the top of the stairs and called out for her father. The glow of the candle only reached halfway down the steps. Beyond was a quiet darkness from which no answer came. She felt the nettle sting of fear in her blood and called again, this time for Carlo, her dog. At any other time the Newfoundland would have been right by her side. Slowly, she backed away and returned
to her room. She set down the candlestick on her writing table and stepped toward the bed. After a quick look over each shoulder, and a moment of just listening, she pulled the nightgown off and tossed it on her pillow. She was paler then the garment she discarded, glowing within the glow of the candlelight. From the closet, she removed her white cotton day dress from its hanger and slipped it on with nothing beneath. She found her walking boots in the shadow at the end of the bed and guided her bare feet into them while standing. Not bothering to tie the laces, she picked up the candlestick and left the room.

  The untied boots made a racket on the steps—better, she thought, than having to utter a warning to whatever revelation lurked in the dark. She discovered that the clock on the mantel in the downstairs parlor had stopped at 2:15. Stillness reigned in every room, from her father’s library to the kitchen. She fled to the conservatory, to her gardens, for comfort. As soon as she crossed the threshold from the house into the growing room, the aroma of the soil soothed her. An Aeolian harp in the one open window made music, and she turned to the plants, desperate for a moment’s distraction.

  It seemed to her like it had been weeks since the last time she’d inspected the exotics. September had definitely come and was drawing the summer out of blossoms. The peonies, gardenias, jasmine drooped dejectedly, their closed petals half-wilted. The summer gentian were long shriveled, and she knew she must pick them before they fell in order to make the purple tea she’d dreamed of. Resting the candle in a patch of thyme, she leaned over pots of oregano to reach the plants and pinch the desiccated flowers from their stems. Only when she had a handful did she recall that her family had vanished in the night. She shook her head, muttering recriminations at herself, put the petals in the pocket of her dress, and blew out the candle. Her eyes had adjusted to the moonlit night.

  Before leaving through the door at the end of the conservatory, she grabbed from a peg the tippet of tulle she often wrapped around her shoulders when walking or working in the outdoor gardens. It was a flimsy wrap, and did little to warm her against the wind that shook the trees in the orchard. She thought of it more as a familiar arm around her shoulders. She kept to the path and called out in a whisper for her father and then Vinnie.

  Upon reaching the heart of the gardens, she rested upon the log bench her brother, Austin, had built when just a boy. She resolved to go next door to The Evergreens, Austin’s house, and get help. She had a choice to either reach it by traversing a lonely thicket or going round to the street. For the first time ever, she chose the street.

  She hadn’t been in front of the Homestead in over a year, and the thought of being seen drained her will. She found it ever preferable to be in her room, sitting at her writing table, watching, through the wavy window glass, the traffic of Main Street. For long stretches in the afternoon, before she’d put pen to paper again, she’d watch her neighbors come and go. Her imagination gave her their names and their secrets, but she felt in her bones that only at a distance could she know them.

  It was different when the children came into the yard and stood beneath her window. They could smell that she’d been baking. When the cookies cooled, she’d slip them in a crude envelope she made from butcher wrap and then attach a parachute of green tissue paper her mother had been saving and forbade anyone to use. There’d be three or four children on the lawn, looking up at the white form behind the glass, a mere smudge of a phantom. Opening the window, she’d say nothing, but launch the cookies, the green paper cupping the air. The parcel would float gracefully down into their grasping hands. They’d hear her breathy laughter, the window would slam shut, and they’d scurry in fear.

  She opened the wrought iron gate of the fence that ran between the property and the sidewalk, cringing with the squeal of its hinges. Looking around, she waited for someone or something to come at her out of the dark. She left the gate open so as not to make it cry again and headed right, toward The Evergreens. The wind pushed against her and dry leaves scraped the street. She shifted the tippet on her shoulders but it could do no better. It was only early September, yet she smelled a hint of snow and felt winter in her brain. A line from a poem she’d written surfaced, and she spoke it under her breath: “Great streets of silence led away.…”

  She’d taken no more than fifty steps, head down, anticipating the comfort she’d find in the presence of Austin and the arms of his wife, Susan, when from the street behind her rose the sound of horses’ hooves, the clickety-whir of carriage wheels. The noise slowed and then stopped her; zero at the bone. She dared not turn to look, and hoped the late-night travelers would pass her without notice. From the corner of her left eye she saw the contrivance pull just ahead of her and stop. It was an elegant black brougham with a driver’s seat, a cab, and two white horses dappled with dark spots like a leopard’s markings.

  Emily turned and lifted her head but couldn’t make out the driver beyond his silhouette. He was dressed in a heavy coat, collar up, a wide-brimmed hat, and gloves. He turned and lit the two lanterns that were attached to the front of the cab and then resumed his slumped posture. The door swung open and a male voice called out of the dark compartment, “Miss Emily Dickinson?” She blushed as she always did when confronted by a stranger. A man stepped out of the brougham. She took two steps back.

  In that instant, she hoped and then thought for certain it was Sam Bowles, editor of The Springfield Republican and her clandestine correspondent. His stream of letters had dried up since his wife had discovered that he and Emily referred to her as “the hedgehog.” Emily missed him so dearly since his departure for the sanitorium to treat his nervous condition. It would be like him to surprise her with his return in this way. But just as quickly she saw the features weren’t Bowles’, and her joy curdled.

  It was a gentleman, finely dressed in a black tailcoat and trousers, a spotless white shirt. There was a lovely white rose in his lapel. He wore leather gloves and carried a walking stick. The last she dared to take in was his face, which was adorned by a thin mustache but otherwise smoothly shaven. His eyes were dark yet glimmered with the light of the lanterns. His smile was, considering her anxiety, enormously appealing. He took a gold watch from his vest pocket and held it on its chain up close to his eyes. “We’re running late,” he muttered, as if to himself, but loud enough for her to hear. This fact didn’t seem to distress him in the least. In fact, he smiled more broadly.

  Her manners obliterated, she called out louder than she’d intended, “Who are you?”

  The gentleman stepped up out of the street and onto the sidewalk. “I’m nobody, who are you?” he said and laughed. “You know me,” he added.

  He wore some subtle cologne that reminded her exactly of the scent of the garden at the height of summer. The chill left her immediately and her breathing eased. “What do you want?” she asked, now more relaxed but still with a fading memory that she’d meant to be defensive.

  “I’m here to bring you where you need to go,” he said. “I know you’re busy so I’ve taken it upon myself to come for you.”

  “I’m only going up the street to my brother’s house.”

  “Oh, no, Miss Dickinson, you’ll be going much farther than that.”

  “Please. I’m in a hurry. An emergency.”

  He took the glove off his left hand and held it in his right. She was incredulous at the effrontery when he reached down and lightly clasped her fingers. At his touch a blast of cold, like a January wind, ran through her body, lodging in her mind and causing a sudden confusion. He had no right to touch her. She meant to protest, to pull her hand away, but every time forgot what she’d intended and then remembered and forgot again.

  “If I might call you Emily?” he said in a soothing voice.

  “How civil,” she thought while still searching within herself for the panic she expected. The cold that had invaded her slowly diffused into a sense of utter calm more comforting than an afternoon with Susan and the new baby. He gave a half-bow and led her toward the br
ougham as if her fears about him had never existed. She stepped off the curb convinced that a journey was precisely what was needed.

  Emily woke to the movement of the carriage. The shades were up and the sunlight shone through the window to her left. She pushed against the hard bench to straighten her posture and yawned.

  “You’ll want to see this,” said the gentleman, sitting opposite her.

  He smiled cordially and her spine stiffened, a scream rendered numb fell to the bottom of her throat. He pointed out the sunlit window and his gaze insisted she look. The view was dizzying as the rig sped madly through town. She thought they were caught up in a twister, but then she was able to identify a section of street, and the whizzing scenery slowed to a crawl, as if it and not the carriage were moving. The sidewalks were empty in the late afternoon light, and the aroma of the oyster bar downstairs in the Gunn Hotel pervaded the cab. The very next thing she noticed was the spire of the First Congregational Church, and that was all wrong, for it should have been in the opposite direction.

  They went a few more yards down the road and, impossibly, were passing the grounds of Amherst Academy. Whereas the church and hotel were steeped in the summer heat, the three-story school was surrounded by trees whose leaves had gone golden. There were children sitting on the steps of the building and some playing Ring A Rosie in the field out front. Emily remembered that the school had closed just that year, as a new public school had been built. She wondered what had brought the old place back to life. As the carriage rolled by, the children turned in the ring and she glimpsed the laughing face of her second cousin, Sophia.