by Various
Anselm lifted his head. His voice was surprisingly melodious, clear and strong enough to come back in echoes overhead. Rayburn looked up, startled, as chanting drifted back like birds from the vaulted ceiling, the beautiful deep chanting of a monkish choir, sounding the responses of the ancient service for the dead. He blinked. Vaulted ceiling? But the light was too bright; his gaze wavered and dropped to the dark figure wrapped in light, straight and unbreakable as the cross itself. The chanting went softly on, counterpoint to a long Latin prayer that Rayburn did not understand, during which no one in the audience moved a muscle. Eventually the monk fell silent, and heads lifted to meet his stare. Ray was shocked to see tears glinting on that ascetic face.
“I shall not speak to ye of the world beyond, or of the fact of God’s good grace with this gentle lady lying here. We know already she is at His knee even now, for sure and the evil one could have no power over her, and her sins so light her time in purgatory was but a breath, over before it was well begun. I shall say only that but for her this gathering could not be, and so let us rejoice in the memory of she who made us, even ye, Angus Blackheart, and a more wicked man I never met.”
There was an inarticulate rumble somewhere toward the back, overlaid by a fierce and masculine, “Shush, Angus, ye crashin’ bullock!”
“I’ll not be shushed by the like of Jamie MacDou—”
“Both of ye shush or you’ll both be recitin’ paternosters until the Good Lord comes into his own!” Anselm bellowed. Profound silence fell again.
Rayburn fought a mad smile tickling the corners of his mouth. This wasn’t really happening. Any moment now Jack the handyman was going to open the outer door and peer in, and find him daydreaming all alone in front of Eleanor Dancy’s casket. Unimaginative Jack, whose very footfall would shatter Merlin’s most puissant spell.
Stay away, he begged silently, and looked up at Anselm to find the monk watching him expectantly.
“Brother Gregory,” the monk intoned, and he jumped, for not even Liz called him by his given name. He far preferred Ray.
“Will you say your piece now?”
Rayburn stood uncertainly away from the wall, nervous, now that it came to it, facing a crowd unlike any other he had ever encountered. The stock words of comfort that fell so soothingly from his tongue stuck there now as he moved into the place at the podium vacated by Father Anselm. What would these intense, deeply religious folk know of the glib lip service of his century to the god they kept at their elbow?
He looked out at them watching him so gravely, a host of people he had never seen—and yet he could name them all, even the red-haired girl who had been the first of all. Dear, hoydenish Anne, whose boy’s breeks and boots and skill with a bow had once saved a prince. All at once he realized that if Liz had possessed red hair, she would look just like Anne. Was that why he had been so strongly attracted to her, felt so surely as if he knew her, like an old friend waiting to be? He had no doubts Liz could match any evil Duke ever born . . .
He cleared his throat hesitantly. “My friends,” he began, faltered, and went on, deliberately. “Yes, I believe I can say that in all truth. You are my friends, the friends of my childhood and my growing up. For year after wondrous year I lived your adventures. I cried with you, and laughed with you, and ran in breathless fright with you, and stood on lonely hilltops and fought with you. You made my life rich in ways I never even understood until this moment. I am ashamed to say that at some point I forgot you. I forgot Eleanor Dancy. I forgot the elemental magic that created you. But you didn’t. You remained true to your own world and to each other, as unchanging as the goodness that brought you forth. You taught me things I can never thank you for. Eleanor taught me. This wonderful lady, with her vast talent and imagination, made a whole world in her own image, a thing given to few to do—and fewer to do well. Yet the fact that she did do it superbly is attested to here, today, in the sight of all of you. I look at you, and I think I must be mad. I know you—and yet you never lived. Not really. Nowhere except in the minds and hearts of a million children—and a million adults who were better for the experience. Perhaps I’m dreaming right now, standing here in the dazzle letting myself be carried away by memories brought forth by a name on my roster of services today. Eleanor Dancy. I forgot her once. But I shall not again. And I shall not forget you. My friends. Thank you for coming.”
His voice broke. There was a long, intense silence. And then a rustle filled it, and he looked up through tears to see them all on their feet again, nodding at him gravely as they filed past once more. Hands reached to touch him and moved on to trail lightly over the polished mahogany of Eleanor’s last dwelling before they faded from his sight, blocked by flowing robes or glinting armour or the rich silks of another time. Gradually the room grew quieter; the faint rustling faded, and he looked up in a sort of panic to see the door at the far end standing open once more and the crowd passing through it one by one. My God, what if someone sees them? he thought dizzily. But—he could see the wall of the corridor beyond, despite the silent throng in the aisle. Meg passed through—and disappeared.
“No!” he cried softly, half reaching after her.
“We cannot stay longer,” a voice said beside him, strangely compassionate.
He looked up into Miles’ grave brown eyes. The knight nodded at him and started past. Ray suddenly could not bear to let him go so quickly. “Wait—please.” He caught Miles’ arm, and felt with a thrill through his whole body the mail beneath the velvet surcoat. The knight turned and looked at him calmly, but Ray felt his impatience to be gone. Truly his time was running out.
“Tell me—why did you come? How did you come?”
Miles gave him a surpassingly gentle look that nevertheless made Ray feel like a slightly retarded child. “She was our mother. How could we not come to honour she who gave us life?”
Ray swallowed hard. “Aye,” he whispered, and never heard how he reverted instinctively to speech patterns he had outgrown years ago—the day he set aside these old friends for new ones. “I understand. But—how?”
Miles shrugged. “It is not my place to question the mind of God, good sir. I leave that to the clerics. I am but a knight, and ignorant of such matters. Suffice it that we wanted to come, and it was granted.”
He inclined his head politely and moved on, to vanish like the others at the door. Ray stood alone in the sunlight, groping after reality. And slowly a grin started clear at his toes and burst upward through his body until his whole being felt like a smile. He wanted to shout, to dance, to turn handsprings over the pews like a child and run laughing down the halls, trailing magic like fizzing bubbles of joy. How had he forgotten where magic lived?
Softly he leaned down and kissed Eleanor Dancy’s faded cheek. “Good night, my lady,” he whispered, and gently closed the lid of the casket. An instant later the sun climbed beyond the window, taking the dazzling sunshaft with it. The medieval cathedral vanished along with the faint chink of Miles’ mail shirt.
But away up toward the ceiling, sounding softly in quiet defiance of the strictures of adulthood, rang a faint, silvery shiver of notes, like the distant horns of the Faerie hunt, drifting up from ’neath the roots of a great oak . . .
Originally published in On Spec, Summer 2002 Vol 14 No 2 #49
“You kept me up all night!” is something S. A. Bolich hears a lot. She is the author of five books, with a new series of six launching in 2014. Her first short story was published in On Spec. “Where Magic Lives” was an honorable mention for the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror that year. Her first novel, Firedancer, was a finalist for the 2013 EPIC Award for Fantasy.
The Black Man
A.M. Arruin
The suburb of Bergamot View was well-known as a progressive and enlightened community. Many of its inhabitants supported Greenpeace and other radical organizations, whose bumper stickers they affixed to their SUVs and minivans. One neighbour, Ed Czechuk, had in his younger days been a member of a soc
ialist discussion group, when he was still articling for the law firm in which he was currently a partner. He still had much of the literature, stored in an antique trunk purchased at a garage sale put on by the bankrupted farm families; the trunk sat next to a rack of punk rock CDs and a bookshelf containing Marx’s Das Capital and Guzman’s Living Simply. Ginger Goodings, who lived at the end of Poplar Lane, had one summer painted the interior of her house in overlapping shades of lime and purple, an eccentricity that was not only tolerated, but lauded in the community as a shrewd resistance to the sterility of commodity culture. Many of her neighbours supported starving children with a monthly allowance sent to Africa or Asia. And almost all agreed, over red wines or double lattes, with just enough irony to soften the guilt, that consumption was not the answer to life’s trials and boredoms, and that richness and satisfaction lay mainly in the spiritual and communal. “After all,” said Ginger Goodings, “though it is a cliché, money cannot buy happiness.”
“Or paint,” said her son, Robbie, dead-smash in the middle of his adolescent smartass stage.
“Which reminds me.” Doug Smolz, the accountant, checked his Rolex. “I’m late for my meditation class.” Doug hated both golf and lawn bowling, which he claimed were potent twin symbols of human alienation and environmental disaster, an argument for which he marshalled an impressive array of facts about fertilizers and water consumption, and which had already convinced half the neighbourhood, though not enough to make them give up watering their lawns.
After many years of charity and goodwill, the community association at one meeting was shocked to realize that the neighbourhood contained only two families of visible ethnicity—the Shimozowas and the Mohranrajes, both with dentists as primary breadwinners. So Tom Hawkins, the association president, stood and moved that the problem be addressed immediately, and the duration of the meeting was devoted to a plan. With funds originally earmarked for the organic garden, they purchased a small, brightly lit flat above the old Chinese grocer’s, and decorated it with tasteful furniture and a series of classic novels. Then they sent out a summons, by newspaper and worldwide web, which said:
Wanted: one black man to receive free lodging and sundry benefits in the community of Bergamot View. Please apply in person to the Community Association (evenings).
That evening, the hedge that ringed the woods at the end of Dinger Crescent parted its leafy curtains, and a devil stepped through.
“But you’re not quite the kind of black man we’re looking for,” said Ginger Goodings, the volunteer of that evening. She leaned forward, oddly attracted to this apparition, who put her in mind of her Myths to Live By classes with Guru Babi Cromwell. “You look more like Pan than anything.”
The black man did not smile. He said nothing, but pointed again to the summons. So Ginger phoned Gwen Packer, who phoned Doug Smolz, who cell-phoned Tom Hawkins, already on hole seventeen at the local par-four. They gathered for an emergency meeting and interview, at which the black Pan-man said nothing, but continued to tap the summons with a finger. Finally, because even Doug Smolz could not think of a compelling argument otherwise, they agreed to let the black man live atop the Chinese grocer’s and become the community’s latest and most innovative symbol of political activism. And they threw a block party at which they cooked and ate hotdogs with cheap soda and a modicum of irony, and the kids winged by on skateboards, with stuffed cheeks and dirty mouths, and somebody suggested a volleyball game, and others suggested a speech, but the black man himself said nothing and did not eat.
This was a disappointment that multiplied almost exponentially from day one. Not that anyone wanted their newest neighbour to “jive talk” and “hustle,” as Robbie Goodings said. That would be cartoonish, and racist for that matter. But why didn’t he speak at all? Why didn’t he say thank you, at least?
Soon the black man began to play a violin late into the night. He played well, but it was ludicrous and ungrateful to keep everyone awake, and even the politest suggestion that he close the window or watch the clock was greeted with stony silence. It was also clear, from the dust on the shelf, that he read none of the great literature provided, not even Othello, or the poetry from the Harlem Renaissance. Soon a myth sprang up around him, at least among the more charitable folks in the neighbourhood, and it became generally agreed upon that he had been the victim of some trauma, perhaps in his childhood. As Doug Smolz pointed out, just before rushing off to pick up his son from soccer practice, “People who do not conform to white standards of beauty are often subjected to traumatic experience, which we, as the empowered, must try to mitigate.”
Still, the disappointment turned to outright resentment for some, on occasion of the three month anniversary celebration of the black man’s arrival. He ate three hotdogs at the barbecue, surprising everyone, then proceeded to display a prodigious set of basketball skills in an energetic game of hoops with the kids, followed by a stunning and varied performance of dance moves and rhythmic intelligence which continued through most of Robbie Gooding’s funk collection.
Keeley O’Keefe, who taught Celtic Studies at the university, shook her head in disgust. “That’s offensive. A catalogue of clichés that serves only to perpetuate the stereotype.”
“And it’s a stereotype we invented, as the people who have the power,” said Doug Smolz. He ordered his sons not to watch.
“Should we take the hoops down?” said Ginger Goodings, at the next community association meeting. “Can we forbid funk?”
Tom Hawkins shook his head. “That would be an overreaction.”
Ginger sighed. “I guess you can’t force people to have compassion and good values. God knows I’ve tried with Robbie. He only gets worse.”
No one could think of a solution. When the sweet familiar sounds of the black man’s violin began, they simply shut the window and decided to go over the community association’s books and accounts. They found them completely out of order, and not even Doug Smolz could make sense out of them.
Despite the neighbourhood’s percolating disappointments and resentments, a considerable number of women began to get crushes on the black man, first in secret, then more openly.
“He’s gorgeous,” said Atlanta Bowkers, a doctor at the Women’s Medical Centre. “The way his hair goes, almost like he’s got horns underneath.”
“Makes me horny,” Debra Gentry said, a bit hoarsely. “Why I bet he’d really—”
“What?”
Debra Gentry giggled, then coughed. “Said he makes me horny.”
She flushed, but they all laughed at the pun, which went a long way toward displacing their isolated embarrassments, and inaugurated an immediate sense of shared secret. Within days, there was an almost virtual community of black man admirers, who recognized each other on the street, and nodded gently, and smiled, and sometimes winked.
“He’s a babe,” they would say, in the vernacular of the preceding decade. “He is babe-a-licious.”
“No doubt. I’d love to see . . .”
At which the conversations would inevitably dissolve into chuckles, and mugs would be sipped, and low-fat bagels bit, and in some cases, though not many, cigarettes lit.
Things might have picked up for the black man, with his growing coterie of secret admirers, had he not one day walked unannounced into the community association offices, sat down without a word, and balanced all the accounting. It took him five minutes. When he was done, he simply rose, closed the books, and brought them to Ginger Goodings, who had been watching and fantasizing about his long ebony fingers.
She phoned Tom Hawkins immediately.
“He’s brilliant.” She could barely breathe. “He fixed everything. It took him about two minutes.”
But Tom Hawkins was not impressed. Neither was anyone else on the committee, nor anyone else who heard the story.
“We could have done it ourselves,” said Doug Smolz. “We just didn’t have the time.”
“I was going to do it this weekend,” said
Gwen Packer.
Keeley O’Keefe, who had never attended a committee meeting, let alone been in the building, had her own take. “The light is feeble in there. He could simply see the columns more clearly. They have some genetic advantage with their eyes. Good night vision.”
“Common among hunter-gatherers,” agreed Doug Smolz. “One of the things that makes them superior to those of us in the civilized world.”
“My daddy says he’s an asshole,” said little Dylan Hawkins, at which his father glared, and said, “Who taught you that word?” while everyone else gazed at the floor or their fingernails. Even Ginger Goodings finally disapproved of the black man’s accounting, and suggested that Doug Smolz go over the work and correct it in time for the next meeting, to which Doug Smolz agreed, with the qualification that he was quite busy that week, and wouldn’t have the time to do it to his complete satisfaction.
Word spread quickly; resentments grew. Only Atlanta Bowkers still admitted to wanting to, as she put it, “take a bite out of the black man.” In fact she followed him to the basketball court at the Gwynn Hunter Elementary School one night, just as the moon was peeping through the lattice of poplars on the hill. He had been hitting shots with such accuracy and consistency, and leaping so high, that it looked to be some kind of devilment, and Atlanta Bowkers found a heat flushing down from her belly button, and splitting to sizzle the inside of her thighs.
“Listen, honey.” She blocked his way off the court. “I’m a doctor. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be a nurse.”
He returned her gaze with neither interest nor puzzlement.
She went for broke. “Will you tie me up? Toss me around?”
“I’d prefer not to.” It was the first time anyone had heard him speak.