The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  ***

  On Thursday, Beth accompanies Amy to three area nightclubs. The music is too loud. There are too many people. Beth is completely out of place, like an unstrung harp at a Southern rock festival. Amy is all bright chatter and high-pitched laughter, moving from table to dance floor to bar to another table, all so fast it makes Beth dizzy. She goes home smelling of smoke and stale whiskey and lemons gone sour.

  Friday, they go back to the bar where she—or Amy, or…both of them actually—met Paul. The parking lot is packed out to the road, and Beth parks in a tiny space between a light pole and a jacked-up pickup truck. She has a knife tucked in her boot, and damned if she can figure out how she’s supposed to walk with a sharp steel blade snugged up tight against her instep. The bouncer sees her limping and asks if she’s okay. Before she can stop herself, she says, “I’ve got a knife in my boot.”

  He laughs, like it’s obvious she’s kidding, and waves her through.

  Saturday, Amy has a date with some guy who is not exactly her boyfriend. Beth tries to beg off—her whole life is being swallowed following Amy everywhere she goes. “You’ll be with Mike,” she says. “You’ll be fine.”

  “Bob, his name is Bob,” Amy says. “Or Richard. One of those. It doesn’t matter anyway. You said you’d help me. I don’t even hardly know this guy.”

  “You don’t even hardly know me,” Beth wants to say. Instead, she puts on her only pair of jeans and her battered hiking boots and a T-shirt that’s a size too big and says “Chicken Emporium” across the back. She grabs a jacket and a baseball cap and shoves the shotgun underneath the car seat and follows Amy and her almost-boyfriend three towns over to a restaurant she would never eat at herself—too expensive, too brightly lit, too pretty. She parks in the back of the lot where she can see the door and settles in to wait.

  She’s been there less than forty-five minutes when Amy comes out the side door alone. A cab pulls up right away, as if Amy has called from inside the restaurant. It’s back on the street and almost out of sight before Beth is even out of the parking lot.

  She isn’t worried about losing Amy because she’s pretty sure she knows where they’re going, and she slides into the parking lot by the lake just behind the cab. There’s a brief conversation between Amy and the cab driver—should I wait, no don’t wait—then the cab is gone. It’s just Amy and Beth, and Amy turns like she doesn’t even see Beth standing there not twenty feet away and heads for the water.

  “Amy!” Beth closes the gap between them and grabs her arm.

  Amy doesn’t look at her, just shoves her hard and Beth stumbles. Shit. Beth has the shotgun in one hand, and she can’t just pick Amy up and carry her back to the car. Maybe someone else could, someone bigger and stronger, someone… better. “Amy, snap out of it,” she says. Nothing. Amy isn’t looking at her. She isn’t looking at anything. She marches straight ahead toward the water as if marching and water are the only things in the world.

  They’re almost to the water’s edge, the hard-packed sand like iron beneath Beth’s feet as she trots to keep up with Amy. The water is already starting to glow, drawing back from the shoreline as if gathering itself for battle. In desperation, Beth throws herself at Amy, knocking them both to the ground. The water rushes up to them, over them, and—Jesus! Where’s the shotgun? Beth scrambles to her feet, desperately trying to hang onto Amy, who keeps walking as if Beth isn’t even there, as if she isn’t pulling on Amy’s arm with all her might.

  The not-merman is singing or something—noise that sounds like shipwrecks and dying sailors and the crash of mighty impossible waves. And—crap—there are three of them, not just one, and they’re huge, bigger than Beth expected, bigger than she remembered. She grabs Amy around her waist and shoves hard—one step back… two… away from the water. If she can just get back to the parking lot—

  Something grabs her by the ankle and she falls and—how bad can this get?—they have tentacles. Where the tentacle is wrapped around her ankle it burns, like dry acid. She plants her elbows and heaves back with all her strength, but she’s still being dragged inexorably forward.

  Shit.

  The freezing lake water is lapping at her boots when she remembers the knife. She scrambles forward, panicked and trying not to be, because panic never helps. She tears at her free leg, at her jeans; the knife is finally in her hands, and she folds over, straight into a face full of water. And it doesn’t matter; there isn’t time for it to matter. She hacks at the tentacle, at her boot, at her soaked jeans. Something screams, and the only way she knows it isn’t her is because the pressure on her leg is gone and she’s falling backward, like a snapped spring, coughing and scrambling and looking for Amy and the shotgun. Water surges up like an angry god, then subsides, leaving her and Amy and even the damned shotgun alone on the sand, like stranded fish.

  “What the hell,” Amy says, coughing. “What are we doing here?”

  ***

  Beth has three questions.

  First, why Amy? Second, how does the Thing call her? Third, what happens when she goes to it, why does it keep letting her go, how close are they to the final time, the time Amy doesn’t return? Technically, the last question is three questions in one, but since Beth isn’t doing this—any of this—anymore, isn’t following Amy, isn’t carrying a shotgun, isn’t looking for Things anymore, ever, the exact number of questions doesn’t matter. The answers don’t matter. It isn’t her problem—really, really isn’t her problem—anymore.

  It’s past one in the morning when she and Amy get back to the house. Their other roommates are out with their boyfriends or at least somewhere other than at the house. Amy hasn’t said anything since the lake, hasn’t yelled or cursed or done anything except sit in the passenger seat and stare out the window. At the house, Beth tells her to take a shower and put on some dry clothes. Beth makes coffee, and the two of them sit for a while in the kitchen, Beth in wet boots and slowly drying jeans, Amy in a tank top and boxers and a fluffy pink bathrobe.

  Beth knows she should say something, but her hands won’t stop shaking and she’s pretty sure her teeth would chatter like a rumble strip if she started talking.

  “Maybe I’ll go see my mom,” Amy finally says.

  “Hmmm,” Beth says, because she really, seriously, doesn’t have anything to say.

  “Yeah,” Amy says. She gets up, puts her coffee mug in the sink, and leaves. Beth can hear the old wooden stairs creak as she walks upstairs.

  Beth closes her eyes and rubs her hand across her face. She pulls herself out of the chair, feeling like she’s 102. Upstairs, she sits at her computer and writes an email to Paul telling him everything—what’s happening to Amy, what she saw, everything she’s done, everything she’s thought, how she feels right this minute, which is like her bones have turned to jelly, like she’s all alone in the world, like she wants to cry. Before she can think too much, she sends it. You can fix this, Paul, she thinks. You have to fix this.

  Five minutes later, she gets a reply: addressee unknown; no such user on this server.

  There are not enough swear words in the world.

  She gets up, strips off her boots and her jeans and her T-shirt and only realizes once she’s shed them how really, really cold she actually is. She pulls on an old pair of sweatpants, another T-shirt, a flannel shirt gone faded and soft. She shoves her feet into a pair of shoes, doesn’t even know which ones, grabs her keys and she’s out of there, so out of there.

  Lighting out for territory.

  She doesn’t know exactly what that means, but she’s pretty sure it’s what she’s doing. Lighting out. Taking off. Getting the hell out of Dodge.

  She takes the interstate north, driving as fast as she can, which is damn fast. She doesn’t care about police radar, would be grateful in some perverse way if the police stopped her. She’d like to be in jail. In jail, she’d have an excuse. Sorry, Amy, I can’t help you. I’m in jail.

  No one stops her, though, and she clocks up to a
hundred in the gray half-light before dawn. North, then west, then north again. The sun comes up behind her. The sky slides from black to gray to blue. Everything is clear and plain and focused. And all she has to do is keep the car steady on the road.

  She drives without stopping until she runs up hard against the Lake Superior shoreline.

  She gets out of the car and walks across leached-out grasslands and sits on the damp beach and looks out across the endless water. People used to think the world was flat, and she wonders if life would be simpler if it were, if there were actual edges you could drop off. She could get back in her car and keep driving, just go, forever and ever. But what she’s left behind would still be behind her. Just like the last time she left. And in a world that isn’t flat, inevitably, inexorably, she will always wind up right back where she started.

  She pulls her knees to her chest and drops her head.

  ***

  She’s there again—her and the horse and the Zambezi River. She can see the mist from the falls, hear the thunder the water makes as it drops off the edge. There are boats in the water—three, no, four. Boats full of people all looking at her, shouting at her. “Help us, we’re going over.” And she just sits there on her almost-white, almost-a-unicorn horse, not doing anything, not even saying what she knows she should have said to them half a mile up the river—get out, get out, get out.

  ***

  She wakes with a gasp, sitting on the beach, cold and empty. The image of the falls and the water and the boats going over lingers. She wants to dive back in, to take control of the dream, to force the horse to shore, away from the fucking edge. If she’s not in the river, she can’t go over.

  Rivers don’t die when they fall off the edge of the world.

  Damn Paul. He isn’t here and he can’t help her and why was he talking shit about rivers anyway? She isn’t going back.

  She isn’t.

  She gets to her feet with a sigh, so cold she doesn’t remember being warm. She walks back to the car and gets her shotgun and a couple dozen empty bottles she was taking back to the redemption center. She lines them up, three feet apart along the beach, and practices with the shotgun, the waves breaking less than a dozen yards away, until she never misses a shot. She shoots until her shoulder feels as if it’s been pounded into mush, until her finger aches from pulling the trigger, until she runs out of bottles. She doesn’t realize she’s been crying the entire time until she’s back in the car and sees her face in the mirror.

  On the way back to Chicago, she stops for the night at a motel in Tomahawk, Wisconsin. She looks at herself in the mirror over the dresser when she gets to her room. Her face is even thinner and paler than usual, as if it’s been peeled to the bone and only put halfway back together. She smiles without humor and doesn’t even take her clothes off, just falls into bed and into sleep, like the two are exactly the same.

  ***

  The Zambezi River in the rainy season is wide and swift. Water goes over the edge of the falls and hits the bottom of the chasm, rises back up like rain, soaking her and the horse. The river in full flood only comes to the horse’s knees, which can’t be right—they can’t be standing knee-deep in the river. They ought to be drowning; they ought to be swept away, like the world is completely out of their control.

  But they’re not, and she knows that this is the moment, as sure as any moment can ever be in dreams. She and the horse and the river all balanced.

  Waiting.

  Unlike Beth, though, the river doesn’t hesitate. It accepts that there’s an edge, that it’s going over, that there will be a place for it on the other side.

  Beth gathers the reins, stands in the saddle. She can’t stay here forever, poised on the edge. The river won’t let her. But she still has a choice. She can let the river take her or she can take a flying leap.

  ***

  It’s two in the morning when she wakes.

  She checks out, which turns out to be more complicated than it should be, because who checks out at two in the morning? She’s a girl and she’s alone and is she okay, is there something she needs, can they call someone, help her, is she sure? It takes her twenty minutes on the highway to regain her equilibrium and focus on the thing at hand—on Things.

  First, weapons. She’s got a shotgun with mixed silver shot. She’s got an iron-and-steel knife. And blood. She’s got the blood from one of the Things on her jeans from where she hacked that tentacle off.

  It’s not much.

  A crossbow would be useful—something that could stop an elephant. But she doesn’t have a crossbow. And she hasn’t practiced with one in years.

  She gets back to the house around seven in the morning. She cuts the bottom of her jeans into tiny pieces and loads them with dirty silver shot into seven different shotgun shells. She wonders if it makes any difference which of the not-mermen the blood comes from. Then, she wonders how close she needs to get, because close is going to be a problem, and maybe she should have considered the crossbow more seriously.

  Amy comes in while she’s changing her clothes. She’s quiet, dressed in an oversized denim shirt and jeans, her hair pulled back tight.

  “Why is this happening to me?” she asks.

  Beth bites her lip on words that leap, easy, to her tongue. Beth knows—she knows—that the only way to pretend to be safe is to hide, to be as invisible as possible. But being noticed isn’t Amy’s fault. She is not the villain. And what’s the point of telling her she’s done something wrong? The world won’t be better or safer if Amy gives up herself and becomes more like Beth.

  “I don’t know,” Beth says. “And I don’t care. Tonight we’re going to end it.”

  Amy gives her a grin that’s half its normal wattage, but she says, “Awesome,” like she means it.

  ***

  On the way to the lake, although Amy hasn’t asked and Beth isn’t sure she ever will, Beth explains everything in far more detail than anyone anywhere would ever want to know. Amy listens and doesn’t say a word. Not even, “My God,” or “Are you nuts?“ Beth can’t tell if Amy believes what she is saying, if Amy’s too tired to care, or if Amy’s just so goddamned grateful that, even if Beth is insane, it’s better than waking up cold and wet on the shores of Lake Michigan.

  “What does it do, though?” she finally asks when Beth is finished.

  “What?”

  “Why me and how does it get me and what does it want?”

  Beth frowns, pretends she’s concentrating extra hard on the road, which she’s not—driving is the easy part. “They pick things—legends—to be,” she finally says, “even though they’re not those things, even though they’re just Things. They can become anything. Like it’s a game. Well, not a game to you.”

  Or me.

  She doesn’t add that last part because it’s never been a game to her and she doesn’t care—really, really has never cared—why the Things do what they do.

  “Look,” she adds after a moment. “I don’t know. You came down to the water. It got your… your DNA or something. It calls you.”

  “But what does it want?” Amy asks again. Beth is sure that to Amy this is the central question. But she doesn’t know the answer. Blood, she figures. Life. Because that’s what they all want, every Thing she’s ever encountered. Blood and weakness and fear. As far as she can tell, it’s what they thrive on.

  She doesn’t have to answer Amy, though, because they’re already at the lake.

  “You can stay in the car,” she tells Amy as she’s pulling the shotgun from the trunk. She says it like it’s an invitation, like it’s the goddamned prize—aren’t you lucky, you get to stay with the car.

  “No,” Amy says.

  “What?” Because, frankly, Beth stopped thinking about Amy the moment she told her to stay with the car.

  Amy rubs a hand across her cheek. “How close?” she asks. “How close do you have to be to shoot them?”

  “Fifty yards,” Beth says, like there’s a perfect answe
r to that question. “Maybe a little closer.” Amy looks at her, like she’s cursing Beth to tell her the whole entire truth. “Well, probably I need to be standing right in the goddamned water.” And how that’s going to work, she hasn’t a clue. Because there are three of them. And they have tentacles.

  “If I distract them, can you get closer?”

  There’s no answer to that question except no. Because what’s the point of saving someone if they sacrifice themselves for you to do it?

  “But I should come,” Amy insists.

  “You can’t help me!” Beth shouts.

  “Jesus!” Amy steps back. “Okay.”

  Beth tells herself that her hands aren’t shaking—they aren’t—as she walks down to the water. She can’t hear cars on the road behind her, no air traffic, no birdcalls. There’s just the soft shush of her boots on the hard-packed sand and the quiet lap, lap, lapping of the waves against the shore.

  This isn’t going to work.

  It’s not.

  But there’s no one else. She’d hoped that Paul… that she could pass this to him. That she could know and still not-know. But that’s not how it works. And now she’s the only one who can stand here and at least try. Maybe she’ll get one. Maybe she’ll be lucky and get two. That’s something. That’s what she tells herself.

  “Hey!”

  Hell.

  Amy is standing ten yards away from her, right at the water’s edge. She’s waving her arms like she’s trying to attract someone’s attention at a party.

  “Amy!” Beth’s voice is half-shout, half-whisper.

  Amy ignores her, steps into the water. “Hey, you! Stupid monster things! I’m here. Come and get me.”

  “Get out!” Beth shouts. “Get out now!”

  Too late.

  The lake boils like a cauldron over a white-hot flame.

  The Things that aren’t mermen rise from the water, rise higher and higher until they loom above Beth, above Amy. Like giants, like Neptune from the ocean depths, with beards and gold crowns that glint even in the thin light from a cold moon. They really do have tentacles, huge ones, thick as the limbs of an ancient oak tree. One of them has a trident, which he raises and points straight at Amy.