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

by Various

  The guards are shooing out the last of the afternoon rush: whining kids and annoyed blue-haired ladies and hipsters pouring out of the doorway en masse clutching backpacks and sketch pads. There’s a huddle of tourists at one of the already-closed gates asking, Why is the exhibit closing? There wasn’t a sign? Do you know they paid fifteen dollars to get into this museum? The Impressionists are a very important part of their twenty-minute speed walk of the joint, which usually starts at the mummies, goes straight for the Van Goghs, then involves being lost in the contemporary wing looking for a bathroom and buying forty dollars worth of useless art-print notebooks in the gift shop.

  Gary, who’s been a docent in the Impressionist galleries for roughly a thousand years, lasers in with a death glare the minute Lane and Eugenie step out of a service stairway.

  “You know where this crap never happens?” Gary says to them, poking at a couple of middle schoolers with a cane until they toddle off with their school group.

  “English painters?” Eugenie and Lane recite together.

  “English painters never has crap like this!” Gary rants, waving his cane in the air now at a couple of rubbernecking visitors. There’s a white board in the security break room that currently reads 26 DAYS SINCE SOMEONE THREATENED TO SUE US BECAUSE OF GARY. Lane suspects that number’s going back down to zero soon. “What the hell is wrong with you two?”

  Eugenie ducks under the security gate, halfway down the wall already, calling over her shoulder, “Looks clear.”

  “You should just leave the little bastard in there,” Gary suggests.

  “You’ve got a heart of gold, you know that, Gary?” Lane tells him, and follows Eugenie in before Gary can throw his cane.

  The security gate shuts behind Lane with a resolute click of tumblers and locks falling into place—the voices outside the gallery beginning to fade as security guards block off the next two rooms with velvet ropes, closing off all lines of sight.

  Ahead of him, Eugenie is taking a left and heading for the far wall, against which is a dour-looking gold frame with a cobalt mat, Georges Seurat’s Le Cirque trapped inside: eternally unfinished in its sodium yellow and lapis lazuli mosaic of paint daubs. At close range, the painting is like a dot matrix of color: individual reds and blues and yellows perched side by side, giving the illusion of blending from a distance. In raking light, the surface is rough, uneven, and Lane can understand the reflexive curiosity, how some kid with a good eye and bad impulse control might reach out and try to run the pads of his fingers against the canvas, to know for sure.

  That kid is Alex Edison, twelve, on a school trip with North Garland Academy. The teacher, in fits and already bundled off by museum administrators for tea and damage control, said Edison is four foot nothing, asks too many questions, and would be dressed in a pair of wrinkled khaki pants and the dark green blazer of all the school’s students. Thankfully, Lane’s people skills are considered “substandard,” so he’d only been forced to endure the poor woman’s frantic sobs that Edison was obsessed with Moulin Rouge and Toulouse-Lautrec and how could this have happened? Did that painting eat him? for a few minutes before he’d bailed. They’d confiscated a cell phone off of one of Edison’s classmates for a photo reference: the kid is skinny the way all little boys are, with wildly curling blond hair and startled brown eyes.

  “You know the worst part when it’s this painting?” Lane complains, reaching into his supply bag for the envelope of francs. He’d been forced to more or less thieve them from the archivists, who have begun hiding when they hear his voice in their offices.

  Eugenie extends her arm to take his hand. “How you don’t speak French?”

  “How I don’t speak any French,” Lane mutters, and presses the fingers of his free hand through the surface of the image, over the white mane of the galloping pony.

  * * *

  It’s never less of a shock to stumble out of the basilica quiet of the museum into a field, a snowscape, the edge of the crashing sea—a crowd, heaving at a circus in 1890s France.

  Lane hits the sawdust and dirt ground with a thud, landing heavy on one shoulder because there’s no graceful way to tip over from the edge of the frame into the stereoscopic image of an artist’s state of mind. Eugenie doesn’t do much better, flopping down with her fingers still tight in Lane’s, her skirt going halfway up over her head in the too-hot crush of the circus, night pressing into the opened flap of the tent and up against the cluster of people standing at a break in the bleachers.

  “Every time,” Eugenie swears, letting go of Lane’s hand to bat the fabric down over her neon-blue panties, the lace edge stunning against the milk white of her thighs.

  Not that Lane is looking, nope. Not looking at all, because he is busy turning red and reaching blindly out into the undifferentiated space behind them until he finds a hard ledge. It is invisible but real to the touch, and Lane slaps on a piece of neon reflective tape, which hangs suspended in midair. It isn’t a perfect solution, but with any luck, it will still be there when they wander back over.

  The first time he’d gone through one of these to fetch a kid, he hadn’t bothered to mark the exit. It was a sunny afternoon Parisian street scene by a middling artist, and the passersby thought Lane was an incredibly shitty mime for half an hour before he felt his way around the air to the frame again, the little monster from Rock Creek Elementary making snotty comments about Lane’s short-term memory the entire time.

  It’s dark enough that the sartorial changes that map the chasm between 1891 and 2012 aren’t too noticeable as long as the locals don’t spend too long looking at the length of Eugenie’s skirt. Sadly, that also means finding the kid is going to be a pain and a half.

  “Ready to go?” he asks.

  Eugenie nods, and takes his hand again because it is a standard policy he’d instituted not to get lost on the inside and for no other reason at all.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Weird stuff gets recorded in the paint.

  Lars, who’d handled this crap before he’d scammed Lane into taking the job, said nobody knew why or what caused some paintings to go from innocuous to eating little kids who didn’t know how to follow museum directions. Sometimes buried in the provenance of the pieces there’s a footnote that warns of a history of shenanigans, but just as often paintings develop the nasty habit spontaneously.

  In 2010, a lady had gotten too close to Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights in the Prado—until then unknown for this sort of behavior—and fell inside. It had taken museum security staff half an hour to draw short straws to see who’d have to go into the damn thing to fetch her, and rumor has it the poor woman still has a nervous breakdown every time she sees a crow. There’s a reason you’re not allowed to take pictures in that gallery, and there’s always a guard standing watch; if you’re going to get sucked into a painting, the surrealists and the weird medieval stuff are the worst.

  But just like the paint retains Dalí’s melting clocks and bleak red-cliff landscapes or the frenetic mix of batshittery that is Bosch’s three-panel opus, it also keeps feelings, a pervasive mood. Nothing is so beautiful and depressing as tumbling into a Van Gogh, because the colors are searing and the sun is ambrosial, and everything around you is convinced of its abject failure, every painting is a desperate bid for relevance and the bitter knowledge of likely disappointment.

  Lane does a lot of emotional eating after the Van Goghs.

  Seurat was an intellectual painter, copying paragraphs out of color theory books and studying the best way to achieve harmony in paint. Plus he ate it at thirty-one, so a lot of the worst middle-aged ennui hadn’t settled in yet. Everything in a Seurat painting is very orderly, arranged in tiers, and when something bisects that arrangement, or moves in a diagonal along the plane, then he’s meant for it to draw your eye: every brushstroke and dot of color as precise as a pixel. He believed colors and shapes could be used to evoke perfect harmony in
a painting, and stepping into one usually feels serene—balanced.

  Except Le Cirque is unfinished, and it’s basically plagiarized from a poster, so everybody in the painting is a little shifty and uncertain.

  There’s an orchestra perched high over the risers, which are peopled by women in long dresses and marvelous hats, wide-eyed little girls tucked in close to their fathers, men in dour three-piece suits, mustaches neatly waxed. They’re all staring into the center of the ring, watching a lissome girl with gold tights balance on the back of a white pony—galloping full speed—her hair streaming out like auburn ribbons behind her, the music lilting over the crowd’s delighted sighs as she does a backflip from one foot to the other, the horse not missing a beat in its run.

  And trailing after the horse and dancing around the edges of the crowd are tumblers and jugglers and clowns with jester hats, their smiles painted madly all over their faces. In the center of it all, brandishing a long, gray snake of a whip, the ringmaster is saying something in grave, thrilling French, making his captive audience gasp. There’s a ribbon flying: dull peach over the flurry of colors and performers and horses below.

  It’s all stunning, really. Very nice. Exceptional balance, visually entertaining, blah blah blah, except this is like the sixth time that Lane’s been forced to visit this particular Paris night and smell these particular animal-and-people smells. The only painting he hates more than Le Cirque at this point is an upsettingly loony one down with the rest of the contemporary art, which gives him awful flashbacks to going one toke over the line in college and wanting desperately, desperately not to be high anymore.

  Getting to hold Eugenie’s hand as she pushes her way through the crowd declaring, “Pardon, pardon!” is the only bright spot of this entire exercise, so Lane tries to enjoy it as well as he can, throwing elbows into people left and right and keeping his eyes peeled for bright blond curls and an out-of-place school uniform.

  They shove past everybody in the cheap seats, and they’ve been through this routine so many times Lane already knows what faces he’s going to get from which disapproving matrons, and how many of the antique coins he needs to count out to get them into the risers, which creak under their feet. The girl on the horse has slipped down to ride sidesaddle now, and in a moment she’ll seize the pony’s mane to slide around its belly to lean out, arms and legs extended gracefully, and everyone will shout in delight again.

  “Do you see him?” Lane shouts, over the cacophony of French he doesn’t understand and music that sounds atonal in the din. They’re getting a few weird glances from the patrons, but hell, it’s the circus. People in strange costumes speaking in tongues probably barely register next to the tattooed man and the bearded lady.

  Eugenie looks over her shoulder, which means the circus lights lim her face in a way that makes Lane’s knees go a little bit weak as she says, “No—maybe he’s hiding under the risers?”

  Lane sincerely hopes the kid—Edison—isn’t, because God knows what’s under the risers. It’s Paris at the turn of the century and there’s already a high concentration of shady folks in open attendance; the people who’ve resorted to hiding under the bleachers have to be real gems.

  “All right,” Lane says, grim. “Let’s check under the risers.”

  Down there, they find some loose change, a ton of garbage, a heavy smell of pee, a few semicrazy drifters, a trio of prostitutes, but—probably for the best—no Edison. So after Lane digs the money out of the dirt to take home to the archivists waiting desperately in reality, he and Eugenie beat it out of there to regroup somewhere that doesn’t smell like a urinal.

  “So he’s not anywhere around the ring,” Eugenie says, frowning.

  The pony and its rider have been swapped out for some complicated interpretive clown performance, which is even worse to watch than it sounds. One of them is miming heaving with tears. It’s very European.

  “I hate this kid,” Lane says, more to himself than anything. Next to him, a woman in an enormous hat narrows her eyes at him suspiciously; they’ve never started a riot in one of these paintings before, but Lane isn’t ruling out the possibility.

  Because the problem that now faces him is that they’ve run out of places and corners to check in the circus tent. Lane’s covered in dirt and sawdust; he smells like carney. Eugenie’s nails have left half-moon marks on the back of his hand as they’ve scoured the place once, twice, three times, and then stopped by the corner with the show ponies again just in case the little monster is hiding there.

  It leaves them with a single, uncomfortable possibility.

  Lane peers out, beyond the risers and past the phalanx of gentlemen in evening wear and long tails, past the acrobats that have arranged themselves like a human arch now, soaring over the ringmaster. Past everything is the back door of the tent, flapping in a brisk evening wind—ominous.

  He’s been to Paris, circa 2009, with its smart cars and ancient cobbles, Saint-Chappelle tucked away inside the Palais de Justice, the Shakespeare and Company bookstore along the Seine, and the sigh-inducing view of Notre Dame from behind. But that’s Paris with modern policing, hygiene, and smartphone translation programs for emergency bathroom requests. The world out there is an age away, recorded into the tiny slivers of the painting from a time when people got into brawls about Divisionism and color theory in the streets.

  More than that, Lane doesn’t know what happens once they leave the scope of the painting: Does the world out there actually exist? Can they come back if they leave the tent? Will there be solid ground to step on, even, once they leave the perimeter of Le Cirque’s range of vision? Lane’s scaled walls and traveled huge landscapes, but always carefully, with the knowledge that the frame eats into the painting at the far left, that past the demarcation there may not be monsters, but there may not be anything at all.

  “So,” Eugenie says as they stand there, looking out into the vast unknowable.

  “Seriously, I hate this kid,” Lane swears. “He better not have gone outside the tent. I haven’t even gone outside the tent. Who knows what exists outside the tent.”

  “There’s nothing left inside the tent to check.” Eugenie sighs, glancing over her shoulder back toward the risers, toward the sea of onlookers, still spellbound by the performance.

  “What kind of punk falls through a painting—which is an extremely traumatic experience—and decides to go explore?” Lane goes on, because really, who does that?

  Eugenie looks pensive and toes the line of the circus tent’s sawdust floor, the tips of her gray Chuck Taylors lining up along the dirt and wood shavings, carefully kept away from the grass and mud beyond. “I think we have to give it a shot,” she decides.

  Lane’s quiet for a long time. “I don’t know what happens if we go out there,” he admits.

  Eugenie slants him a look. “You’ve never been?”

  “In some pictures—but every painting’s different,” Lane murmurs.

  It looks like a city, with streets and buildings and people ambulating here and there, the earth solid beneath their feet. But it’s also a memory, a momentary shock of feelings that coalesced into something solid in the paint.

  “Some of them, you can see into the horizon, some I bet you could go forever,” he goes on. “This one, I don’t know.”

  Eugenie’s fingers tighten around his, and Lane hazards a glance down to her face: lovely and soft in the lights of the circus.

  “You don’t have to go,” Lane starts, because the cultural DNA of him demands a chivalric gesture even though he doesn’t want to let go of her hand.

  She raises an eyebrow at him. “How many words in French do you know?”

  Lane knows four entire phrases in French, thank you very much. Two address the most immediate bodily functions, one is a request for cheese, and the third one is either about tumors or pricing a hooker. His Romance language of choice during college had been Italian, mostly because he’d been grievously misled by some quote involving wooing wome
n in Italian and talking to horses (?) in German during his youth.

  He squares his shoulders. “I know enough,” he lies, and nods back toward the circus ring, to the huddle of people beyond and the tape that marks the exit in the distance. “You should go back—tell them I’ll be a little longer.”

  “That’s adorable,” Eugenie retorts. “You’d be dead in an hour.”

  “I would hold out for two hours at least,” Lane protests, but feels compelled to say, “You could get stuck here, if we go through.”

  “So could you!” she argues.

  And then the whole discussion gets shifted into the realm of the academic because there’s the roar of a lion, and the crowd gathered behind them rears back—enough to send them both pitching forward into the night.

  Lane hears Eugenie say, “Balls,” before they hit dirt, getting a face full of matted grass, in the sudden coolness of evening outside of the crushing heat of the crowd.

  * * *

  The first thing they test is whether they can get back into the tent.

  The answer is: Yes, but the circus employees are going to make us pay for tickets again. The next question is: Are they technically out of the range of the painting yet? Is there a range of the painting? And after a while of taking three steps forward and four steps back—literally—they look at each other beneath the rapidly darkening sky with the uncomfortable, shared recognition that everything else aside, there might be a scared little kid waiting to be found, and adult cowardice really has to take a backseat.

  “The question becomes: Where the hell is he?” Eugenie says.

  The Paris outside the tent looks as seamless and sprawling as the real thing, its medieval cathedral spires reaching heavenward and bridges arcing over the Seine. That means there are twenty arrondissements to search, and within the Latin Quarter a mire of narrow streets, a hundred little churches with opened doors and hiding places, Sacre Coeur looming over—