The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

by Joe Hill

  The Marquis de Carabas began walking. He had an envelope containing a love poem in his pocket, he was wrapped in a damp blanket, and he hated his brother for rescuing him.

  When you create yourself from scratch you need a model of some kind, something to aim toward or head away from—all the things you want to be, or intentionally not be.

  The Marquis had known whom he had wanted not to be when he was a boy. He had definitely not wanted to be like Peregrine. He had not wanted to be like anyone at all. He had instead wanted to be elegant, elusive, brilliant, and above all things he had wanted to be unique.

  Just like Peregrine.

  The thing was, he had been told by a former shepherd on the run, whom he had helped across the Tyburn River to freedom, and to a short but happy life as a camp entertainer for the Roman Legion who waited there, beside the river, for orders that would never come, that the shepherds never made you do anything. They just took your natural impulses and desires and they pushed them, reinforced them, so you acted quite naturally, only you acted in the ways that they wanted.

  He remembered that, and then he forgot it, because he was scared of being alone.

  The Marquis had not known until just this moment quite how scared he was of being alone, and was surprised by how happy he was to see several other people walking in the same direction as he was.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” one of them called.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” called another.

  “I’m glad I’m here, too,” said de Carabas. Where was he going? Where were they going? So good that they were all traveling the same way together. There was safety in numbers.

  “It’s good to be together,” said a thin white woman, with a happy sort of a sigh. And it was.

  “It’s good to be together,” said the Marquis.

  “Indeed it is. It’s good to be together,” said his neighbor on the other side. There was something familiar about this person. He had huge ears, like fans, and a nose like a thick gray-green snake. The Marquis began to wonder if he had ever met this person before, and was trying to remember exactly where, when he was tapped gently on the shoulder by a man holding a large stick with a curved end.

  “We never want to fall out of step, do we?” said the man reasonably, and the Marquis thought, Of course we don’t, and he sped up a little, so he was back in step once more.

  “That’s good. Out of step is out of mind,” said the man with the stick, and he moved on.

  “Out of step is out of mind,” said the Marquis aloud, wondering how he could have missed knowing something so obvious, so basic. There was a tiny part of him, somewhere distant, that wondered what that actually meant.

  They reached the place they were going, and it was good to be among friends.

  Time passed strangely in that place, but soon enough the Marquis and his friend with the gray-green face and the long nose were given a job to do, a real job, and it was this: they disposed of those members of the flock who could no longer move or serve, once anything that might be of use had been removed and reused. They removed the last of what was left, hair and tallow fat and all, then they dragged it to the pit, and dropped the remnants in. The shifts were long and tiring, and the work was messy, but the two of them did it together and they stayed in step.

  They had been working proudly together for several days when the Marquis noticed an irritant. Someone appeared to be trying to attract his attention.

  “I followed you,” whispered the stranger. “I know you didn’t want me to. But, well, needs must.”

  The Marquis did not know what the stranger was talking about.

  “I’ve got an escape plan, as soon as I can wake you up,” said the stranger. “Please wake up.”

  The Marquis was awake. Again, he found he did not know what the stranger was talking about. Why did the man think he was asleep? The Marquis would have said something, but he had to work. He pondered this, while dismembering the next former member of the flock, until he decided there was something he could say, to explain why the stranger was irritating him. He said it aloud. “It’s good to work,” said the Marquis.

  His friend, with the long, flexible nose and the huge ears, nodded his head at this.

  They worked. After a while his friend hauled what was left of some former members of the flock over to the pit and pushed them in. The pit went down a long way.

  The Marquis tried to ignore the stranger, who was now standing behind him. He was quite put out when he felt something slapped over his mouth and his hands being bound together behind his back. He was not certain what he was meant to do. It made him feel quite out of step with the flock, and he would have complained, would have called out to his friend, but his lips were now stuck together and he was unable to do more than make ineffectual noises.

  “It’s me,” whispered the voice from behind him urgently. “Peregrine. Your brother. You’ve been captured by the shepherds. We have to get you out of here.” And then: “Uh-uh.”

  A noise in the air, like something barking. It came closer: a high yip-yipping that turned suddenly into a triumphant howl, and was answered by matching howls from around them.

  A voice barked, “Where’s your flockmate?”

  A low, elephantine voice rumbled, “He went over there. With the other one.”

  “Other one?”

  The Marquis hoped they would come and find him and sort this all out. There was obviously some sort of mistake going on. He wanted to be in step with the flock, and now he was out of step, an unwilling victim. He wanted to work.

  “Lud’s gate!” muttered Peregrine. And then they were surrounded by shapes of people who were not exactly people: they were sharp of face and dressed in furs. They spoke excitedly to one another.

  The people untied the Marquis’s hands, although they left the tape on his face. He did not mind. He had nothing to say.

  The Marquis was relieved it was all over and looked forward to getting back to work, but to his slight puzzlement, he, his kidnapper, and his friend with the huge, long, flexible nose were walked away from the pit, along a causeway, and eventually into a honeycomb of little rooms, each room filled with people toiling away in step.

  Up some narrow stairs. One of their escorts, dressed in rough furs, scratched at a door. A voice called “Enter!” and the Marquis felt a thrill that was almost sexual. That voice. That was the voice of someone the Marquis had spent his whole life wanting to please. (His whole life went back, what? A week? Two weeks?)

  “A stray lamb,” said one of the escorts. “And his predator. Also his flockmate.”

  The room was large, and hung with oil paintings: landscapes, mostly, stained with age and smoke and dust. “Why?” said the man, sitting at a desk in the back of the room. He did not turn around. “Why do you bother me with this nonsense?”

  “Because,” said a voice, and the Marquis recognized it as that of his would-be kidnapper, “you gave orders that if ever I were to be apprehended within the bounds of the Shepherd’s Bush, I was to be brought to you to dispose of personally.”

  The man pushed his chair back and got up. He walked toward them, stepping into the light. There was a wooden crook propped against the wall, and he picked it up as he passed. For several long moments he looked at them.

  “Peregrine?” he said at last, and the Marquis thrilled at his voice. “I had heard that you had gone into retirement. Become a monk or something. I never dreamed you’d dare to come back.”

  (Something very big was filling the Marquis’s head. Something was filling his heart and his mind. It was something enormous, something he could almost touch.)

  The shepherd reached out a hand and ripped the tape from the Marquis’s mouth. The Marquis knew he should have been overjoyed by this, should have been thrilled to get attention from this man.

  “And now I see . . . who would have thought it?” The shepherd’s voice was deep and resonant. “He is here already. And already one of ours? The Marquis de Carabas. You know
, Peregrine, I had been looking forward to ripping out your tongue, to grinding your fingers away while you watched, but think how much more delightful it would be if the last thing you ever saw was your own brother, one of our flock, as the instrument of your doom.”

  (An enormous thing filled the Marquis’s head.)

  The shepherd was plump, well fed, and excellently dressed. He had sandy-gray-colored hair and a harassed expression. He wore a remarkable coat, even if it was somewhat tight on him. The coat was the color of a wet street at midnight.

  The enormous thing filling his head, the Marquis realized, was rage. It was rage, and it burned through the Marquis like a forest fire, devouring everything in its path with a red flame.

  The coat. It was elegant. It was beautiful. It was so close that he could have reached out and touched it.

  And it was unquestionably his.

  The Marquis de Carabas did nothing to indicate that he had woken up. That would be a mistake. He thought, and he thought fast. And what he thought had nothing to do with the room he was in. The Marquis had only one advantage over the shepherd and his dogs: he knew he was awake and in control of his thoughts, and they did not.

  He hypothesized. He tested his hypothesis in his head. And then he acted.

  “Excuse me,” he said blandly, “but I’m afraid I do need to be getting along. Can we hurry this up? I’m late for something that’s frightfully important.”

  The shepherd leaned on his crook. He did not appear to be concerned by this. He said only, “You’ve left the flock, de Carabas.”

  “It would appear so,” said the Marquis. “Hello, Peregrine. Wonderful to see you looking so sprightly. And the Elephant. How delightful. The gang’s all here.” He turned his attention back to the shepherd. “Wonderful meeting you, delightful to spend a little time as one of your little band of serious thinkers. But I really must be tootling off now. Important diplomatic mission. Letter to deliver. You know how it is.”

  Peregrine said, “My brother, I’m not sure that you understand the gravity of the situation here . . .”

  The Marquis, who understood the gravity of the situation perfectly, said, “I’m sure these nice people”—he gestured to the shepherd and to the three fur-clad, sharp-faced, sheepdog people who were standing about them—“will let me head out of here, leaving you behind. It’s you they want, not me. And I have something extremely important to deliver.”

  Peregrine said, “I can handle this.”

  “You have to be quiet now,” said the shepherd. He took the strip of tape he had removed from the Marquis’s mouth and pressed it down over Peregrine’s.

  The shepherd was shorter than the Marquis and fatter, and the magnificent coat looked faintly ridiculous on him. “Something important to deliver?” asked the shepherd, brushing dust from his fingers. “What exactly are we talking about here?”

  “I am afraid I cannot possibly tell you that,” said the Marquis. “You are, after all, not the intended recipient of this particular diplomatic communiqué.”

  “Why not? What’s it say? Who’s it for?”

  The Marquis shrugged. His coat was so close that he could have reached out and stroked it. “Only the threat of death could force me even to show it to you,” he said reluctantly.

  “Well, that’s easy. I threaten you with death. That’s in addition to the death sentence you’re already under as an apostate member of the flock. And as for Laughing Boy here”—the shepherd gestured with his crook toward Peregrine, who was not laughing—“he’s tried to steal a member of the flock. That’s a death sentence too, in addition to everything else we’re planning to do to him.”

  The shepherd looked at the Elephant. “And, I know I should have asked before, but what in the Auld Witch’s name is this?”

  “I am a loyal member of the flock,” said the Elephant humbly, in his deep voice, and the Marquis wondered if he had sounded so soulless and flat when he had been part of the flock. “I have remained loyal and in step even when this one did not.”

  “And the flock is grateful for all your hard work,” said the shepherd. He reached out a hand and touched the sharp tip of one elephantine tusk experimentally. “I’ve never seen anything like you before, and if I never see another one again, it’ll be too soon. Probably best if you die, too.”

  The Elephant’s ears twitched. “But I am of the flock . . .”

  The shepherd looked up into the Elephant’s huge face. “Better safe than sorry,” he said. Then, to the Marquis: “Well? Where is this important letter?”

  The Marquis de Carabas said, “It is inside my shirt. I must repeat that it is the most significant document that I have ever been charged to deliver. I must ask you not to look at it. For your own safety.”

  The shepherd tugged at the front of the Marquis’s shirt. The buttons flew, and rattled off the walls onto the floor. The letter, in its sandwich bag, was in the pocket inside the shirt.

  “This is most unfortunate. I trust you will read it aloud to us before we die,” said the Marquis. “But whether or not you read it to us, I can promise that Peregrine and I will be holding our breath. Won’t we, Peregrine?”

  The shepherd opened the sandwich bag, then he looked at the envelope. He ripped it open and pulled a sheet of discolored paper from inside it. Dust came from the envelope as the paper came out. The dust hung in the still air in that dim room.

  “‘My darling beautiful Drusilla,’” read the shepherd aloud. “‘While I know that you do not presently feel about me as I feel about you . . .’ What is this nonsense?”

  The Marquis said nothing. He did not even smile. He was, as he had stated, holding his breath; he was hoping that Peregrine had listened to him; and he was counting, because at that moment counting seemed like the best possible thing that he could do to distract himself from needing to breathe. He would soon need to breathe.

  35 . . . 36 . . . 37 . . .

  He wondered how long mushroom spores remained in the air.

  43 . . . 44 . . . 45 . . . 46 . . .

  The shepherd had stopped speaking.

  The Marquis took a step backward, fearing a knife in his ribs or teeth in his throat from the rough-furred guard-dog men, but there was nothing. He walked backward, away from the dog-men and the Elephant.

  He saw that Peregrine was also walking backward.

  His lungs hurt. His heart was pounding in his temples, pounding almost loudly enough to drown out the thin ringing noise in his ears.

  Only when the Marquis’s back was against a bookcase on the wall and he was as far as he could possibly get from the envelope, he allowed himself to take a deep breath. He heard Peregrine breathe in, too.

  There was a stretching noise. Peregrine opened his mouth wide, and the tape dropped to the ground. “What,” asked Peregrine, “was all that about?”

  “Our way out of this room, and our way out of Shepherd’s Bush, if I am not mistaken,” said de Carabas. “As I so rarely am. Would you mind unbinding my wrists?”

  He felt Peregrine’s hands on his bound hands, and then the bindings fell away.

  There was a low rumbling. “I’m going to kill somebody,” said the Elephant. “As soon as I figure out who.”

  “Whoa, dear heart,” said the Marquis, rubbing his hands together. “You mean whom.” The shepherd and the sheepdogs were taking awkward, experimental steps toward the door. “And I can assure you that you aren’t going to kill anybody, not as long as you want to get home to the Castle safely.”

  The Elephant’s trunk swished irritably. “I’m definitely going to kill you.”

  The Marquis grinned. “You are going to force me to say pshaw,” he said. “Or fiddlesticks. Until now I have never had the slightest moment of yearning to say fiddlesticks. But I can feel it right now welling up inside me—”

  “What, by the Temple and the Arch, has got into you?” asked the Elephant.

  “Wrong question. But I shall ask the right question on your behalf. The question is actually what has
n’t got into the three of us—it hasn’t got into Peregrine and me because we were holding our breath, and it hasn’t got into you because, I don’t know, probably because you’re an elephant, with nice thick skin, more likely because you were breathing through your trunk, which is down at ground level—and what did get into our captors. And the answer is, what hasn’t got into us are the selfsame spores that have got into our portly shepherd and his pseudocanine companions.”

  “Spores of the Mushroom?” asked Peregrine. “The Mushroom People’s the Mushroom?”

  “Indeed. That selfsame Mushroom,” agreed the Marquis.

  “Blimming Heck,” said the Elephant.

  “Which is why,” de Carabas told the Elephant, “if you attempt to kill me, or to kill Peregrine, you will not only fail but you will doom us all. Whereas if you shut up and we all do our best to look as if we are still part of the flock, then we have a chance. The spores will be threading their way into their brains now. And any moment now the Mushroom will begin calling them home.”

  A shepherd walked implacably. He held a wooden crook. Three men followed him. One of those men had the head of an elephant; one was tall and ridiculously handsome; and the last of the flock wore a most magnificent coat. It fit him perfectly, and it was the color of a wet street at night.

  The flock were followed by guard dogs, who moved as if they were ready to walk through fire to get wherever they believed that they were going.

  It was not unusual in Shepherd’s Bush to see a shepherd and part of his flock moving from place to place, accompanied by several of the fiercest sheepdogs (who were human, or had been once). So when they saw a shepherd and three sheepdogs apparently leading three members of the flock away from Shepherd’s Bush, none of the greater flock paid them any mind. The members of the flock who saw them simply did the same things they had always done, as members of the flock, and if they were aware that the influence of the shepherds had waned a little, then they patiently waited for another shepherd to come and to take care of them and to keep them safe from predators and from the world. It was a scary thing to be alone, after all.