The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  * * *

  It was May Day again. This year, the Gnat had decided not to come. She’d been at a friend’s place and called to say she was spending the night and skipping the trip. He’d given the news to his parents when they returned from a bridge party.

  The next morning, his mother started fussing, worrying that the Gnat would change her mind as soon as they’d left for Cainsville.

  “She’d call before that,” his father said. “She’s a big girl.”

  “I can phone and ask if you want,” Bobby said.

  “Would you? That’s sweet.” She patted his back as he walked past. “Whose house did you say she was at again?”

  He answered from the next room, his reply garbled, but his mother only said, “Oh, that’s right. Now, does anyone know where we left the tanning lotion? I want to get started early this year. Wait, I think Natalie had it…”

  A few minutes later he found her in his sister’s room. “She’s not there. I remember her saying something about going to the roller rink.”

  His mother sighed. “I wish she wouldn’t. Those places seem so unhealthy for girls, with the lights all off and so many boys…”

  “I can talk to her about it tomorrow if you’re worried.”

  Another pat as she zoomed past, tanning lotion in hand. “Thank you, dear. You’re a good brother, even if she doesn’t always appreciate you. Did you pack that pie you made?”

  “Pie?” His father appeared in the doorway. “Bobby made pie? Apple, I hope.”

  “Shepherd’s pie,” his mother said. “He made it last night while we were out. Didn’t you notice the mess when we got home?” She glanced over. “So you did find hamburger meat in the freezer.”

  “One last package, like I said.”

  “I was so certain we’d run out.” She headed for the hall. “All right. Time to go.”

  * * *

  The waitresses at the new diner let him warm his casserole in the oven. He was sitting in the back, watching the timer, when the door swung open and Rose burst in, Hannah at her heels.

  “That smells good,” Hannah said. “Is it true? You made pie?”

  “Shepherd’s pie. I hope you’re not still mad at me. I’m…” He lowered his voice as he walked toward her. “Sorry about the last time. That’s why I made the pie. For you and Rose. To say I’m sorry. For the elders, too. I don’t want anyone to be mad at me.” He gazed into her eyes. “I hope you’ll have some.”

  She seemed nervous, but forced a smile. “Sure, Bobby. And I’m sorry, if I overreacted. You scared me and—”

  “What have you done?”

  It was Rose. She hadn’t spoken since she’d entered. He hadn’t even glanced her way, seeing only Hannah. Now he looked over to see her standing in front of the oven, staring at it. When she turned to him, her face was even paler than usual, her blue eyes bulging.

  “What have you done, Bobby?” she whispered.

  “Done? What—”

  “I had a dream,” she said. “Last night.”

  “More dragons,” he scoffed. “Dreams of me and screaming dragons.”

  “No.” Her horrified gaze never left his. “It wasn’t dragons I heard screaming.”

  “Whatever.” He turned away. “You’re crazy. Your whole family is crazy.”

  “Where’s your sister, Bobby?”

  He shrugged, his back still to Rose. “She stayed home.”

  “Where is your sister,” she said each word slowly, carefully, and he was about to reply when the door opened again. He turned as Mrs. Yates and two of the elders walked in. They seemed concerned. Only that. Then they stopped, mid-stride. They inhaled, nostrils flaring, and when they turned to him again, horror filled their eyes, the same horror that crackled from Rose’s wide-eyed stare.

  “Bobby,” Mrs. Yates said. “What have you done?”

  He wheeled and raced out the back door.

  * * *

  Before he knew it, he found himself back where he’d been the last time, in the backyard of the empty house. He looked around wildly, saw a break in the lattice work under the deck, and crawled through, wood snapping as he pushed his way in, splinters digging in, blood welling up.

  When he got inside, he turned around and huddled there, hugging knees that stank of dirt, his arms striped with blood.

  Blood.

  He remembered the blood.

  He shot forward, gagging, stomach clenching, head pounding, the images slamming against his skull. He kept gagging until he threw up. Then he sat there, hugging his legs again as the tears rolled down his face.

  Gran was right. I am a monster. And I don’t even know how it happened.

  “Bobby?”

  It was Mrs. Yates. He scuttled backward, but she walked straight to the hole and bent to peer in. She smiled, but it was such a terribly sad smile that he wished she’d scowl instead, scowl and rage and call him the monster he was.

  “I am so sorry, Bobby,” she said. “I don’t know…” She inhaled. “I won’t make excuses. We could tell things weren’t… We had no idea how bad…” Another inhalation, breath whistling. “I’m so, so sorry. I wish I’d known. I wish I could have helped.”

  He said nothing, just kept clutching his knees.

  “I can’t stop what’s going to happen now, Bobby. I wish I could. I would give anything to fix this. But I can’t. I can only make it easier.”

  He started to shake, holding his legs so tight his arms hurt.

  “I read those newspaper articles,” she said. “About your grandmother. What she said. Your dreams. We should have talked about that. Perhaps if we’d talked…” She shook her head, then peered in at him. “You dreamed of golden castles, didn’t you? Castles and meadows and streams.”

  “And dragons,” he whispered.

  She went still. Completely, unnaturally still. “Dragons?”

  He nodded. “I dream of dragons screaming. And then I wasn’t dreaming and they still screamed.”

  “You should have told—” She cut herself short, chin dipping. “Let’s not talk about the dragons. You won’t hear them anymore. I promise. But the castles. You liked the castles?”

  He nodded.

  “Would you like to see them?”

  “They’re gone. They went away.”

  She inched a little closer to the gap in the lattice. “I can bring them back. Back as bright as they ever were. Castles and meadows, cool breezes and warm sunshine. Laughter and play, music and dancing. Is that what you remember?”

  He nodded.

  “Would you like to go there?”

  “Yes.”

  She ducked her head and crawled under with him. In one hand, she held a bottle. She pulled out the stopper and held the bottle out to him. The liquid inside seemed to glow, and when he looked up at her, she seemed to glow, too, the wrinkles on her face smoothing.

  “Do you trust me, Bobby?”

  He nodded.

  “Then drink that. Drink it, and you’ll see the castles again. You’ll go there, and you won’t ever need to come back.”

  He took the bottle, and he drank it all in one gulp. As soon as he did, the dragons stopped screaming, and he saw Mrs. Yates, glowing, every inch of her glowing, like sunlight trapped under her skin, her eyes filling with it, drawing him in as she reached out to hug him. He fell into her arms, and the glow consumed everything, the world turned to gold, and when he opened his eyes, he was sitting on sun-warmed grass, staring up at a castle, and a girl laughed behind him and said, “Come and play, Bobby.” He turned, and she looked like Hannah but not quite, and she smiled at him, the way Hannah used to smile at him. He pushed to his feet and raced after her as she ran off, laughing.

  And that was where he stayed, just as Mrs. Yates promised. Endless days in a world of gold and sunshine, days that ran together and had no end. Every now and then he would fall asleep in a lush meadow or in a chamber in the beautiful castle, and when he did, his dreams were terrible nightmares, where he was bound to a hospital bed,
screaming about dragons. But the nights never lasted long, and soon he was back in his world of castles and meadows, running, chasing, playing, dancing until he forgot what the screams of dragons sounded like, forgot he’d ever heard them and forgot everything else—his grandmother, his sister, his parents, the girls, Mrs. Yates—all of it gone, wisps of a dream that faded into nothing, leaving him exactly where he’d always wanted to be.

  The Dry Spell

  by James P. Blaylock

  The rain gauge was empty when Harper pulled it out of the middle of the lawn and held it up to the sun, which was just now showing through broken clouds in the east. There was supposed to be rain by this morning, but there wasn’t so far, and now the clouds seemed to be leaving town in a hurry, heading toward the desert, where they would evaporate like failed hope. That had been going on all week. Lana, his wife, had told him a few moments ago that the sky looked “threatening,” but the word was apparently an exercise in imagination. Lana was sitting on the couch inside, sorting through old photos, swept up in a pleasant, rainy day nostalgia that entirely eluded Harper.

  The lawn had a faded, thin look to it, and the petunias he had planted last weekend were half withered. April showers hadn’t materialized, and the entire street looked parched, like mid-September in a heat wave. There was an irritating warmth to the morning, too, as if they were in for another day of “fine weather,” which meant no weather at all. May was the dead end of what passed for the rainy season in southern California, and the chance of rain would be more and more remote as the days drifted past.

  Last night on the news there had been a “storm watch”—reporters dressed in unnecessary rain slickers, looking furtive with expectation, as if at any moment the sky would open up and the populace would have to roll their arks out of mothballs and load up the cats and dogs. Harper had awakened early in the morning, listening for the patter of raindrops on the shingles, slowly coming to realize that he had been dreaming, the victim of his own mental storm watch.

  He set the rain gauge down on a front porch chair and walked out to the sidewalk to pick up the Times, which was double-bagged, like last night’s reporters. Abruptly he felt a scattering of tiny, windblown drops on his face, and there was the promising smell of ozone rising from the concrete. But just as quickly as it had materialized, the breeze carried it away. He looked up at the clouds, estimating which of them had made this wheezing pretence of an effort, but overhead there was a broadening window of vacant blue sky. Impulsively angry, he bent over and cranked open the valve on the front yard sprinklers. He was through waiting. The wild idea came into his head to turn on the sprinklers in every front yard on the block. He could explain to his neighbors with no exaggeration that he was performing a scientific experiment in weather manipulation…

  He heard a screen door slam shut. It was his neighbor, Sharon, out on her side porch with her five-year-old son, whom she called Doc. She grinned skeptically at Harper. “What’s with the sprinklers?” she asked, gesturing at the sky.

  “I thought I’d force the issue,” Harper told her. “Maybe I can shame Mother Nature into actually raining for a change.” He laughed even though it wasn’t funny to him. He was pretty sure that Sharon thought he was insane anyway, and it was better to make it seem like a joke. He picked up the little screwdriver that he kept on the porch and fiddled with the adjustment screws on the top of two of the pop-ups, decreasing the amount of water coming out so that all of it fell only on the grass. There was no use watering the sidewalk and street.

  Sharon had picked up her newspaper and pulled off the plastic wrap. She had a section of it opened up. “Rain forecast!” she said, waving it at him. She laughed and shook her head, but then saw that Doc had unwound a couple of yards of hose and was turning on the spigot. He shot a jet of water at his mother and started laughing, but then quit when he saw that she wasn’t amused. Sharon gave Harper a look, as if Doc’s madness was his fault, and then shut off the water and went inside, taking the boy with her.

  Harper went back into the house. Two cardboard boxes lay on the floor in front of the couch, stuffed with half a lifetime’s worth of yellow photo packets. “Take a look at this,” Lana said to him. She didn’t glance up, but reached over and picked up a photograph that she had apparently set aside. For a moment she sat there smiling at it. “Remember that storm in Maui?” she asked. “When we were staying at that little place on the beach in Hana? What was that called? The Bamboo Hilton or something?”

  “Bamboo Castle, I think.” Harper took the photo from her and looked at it. He found that he remembered it in detail, actually, although it had been twenty years ago. It had taken them four hours to drive the sixty miles from the airport out to Hana on the narrow highway that ran through the jungle, and they had gotten to the cottage after dark, carrying a loaf of banana bread and a bag of papayas and tiny orange limes that they had bought from a hippie farmer in a roadside stand. Harper remembered the sound of waves breaking on the rocky beach when they arrived, the beach and ocean barely visible in the darkness, and then the full moon appearing through broken clouds, illuminating coconut palms and the tangle of jungle along the edge of the beach. They set up dinner on the lanai and watched the palms swaying in the moonlight and the moonlight shining on the ocean, the beach utterly deserted, as if they had washed up onto an enchanted island, which they pretty much had.

  Harper had taken the photograph of Lana, dressed in a red, hibiscus-print sarong that she’d bought in the airport. They’d gone down to the beach after dinner, carrying a bottle of champagne and two glasses, and on the empty beach there seemed to be no reason at all to go back up after their swimsuits. The rain had started up when they were waist deep in the warm water, and within moments it was coming down so heavily that they couldn’t see their clothes and champagne bottle on the beach, and they had to bend their heads forward to breathe if they didn’t want a nose full of rainwater. Laughing like fools, they slogged ashore and grabbed their stuff, running up to the shelter of the balcony, where they stood watching the downpour. In five minutes it quit, just like that. The night turned warm, and the moon shone in the sky again. Lana had wrapped herself in the sarong, pulled her hair back, and Harper had taken the photo with the palm tree and moon behind her. It was so perfect that it looked staged.

  He considered it for another moment, saying nothing. Lana had gone on to other photographs, which she was slipping one-by-one into a big, empty photo annual, happy as she always was when she was busy. He wondered vaguely whether she had meant anything by showing him the photo. Probably she meant that it was a good photo, which it was. Lots of memories in it. On that night in Hana they hadn’t been newlyweds by any means, but there was something about the tropical air and the jungle solitude and the on-and-off rain that had worked a certain magic. Aside from eating and an occasional dip in the ocean after dark, they hadn’t surfaced for three days.

  He watched her slide the Hana photo into its niche among the other relics of their past, and then took the newspaper into the den, where he sat down and turned immediately to the weather page, something he did on weekend mornings, checking the five-day forecast, the ocean conditions, and the annual rainfall totals, which were only interesting if it had rained over the course of the week, which of course it hadn’t.

  It hadn’t rained since February, according to the paper. There were 2.14 inches total for the year—worse than last year, which had been the second drought year in a row—and half an inch of this year’s rain had fallen ten months ago, in July, for God’s sake, a summer torrent with lightning strikes that had immolated the top of a queen palm two blocks down the street, a bang-up beginning to the rainy season, literally. After that no storm had dropped more than a quarter of an inch. The glory of that wet July morning seemed to Harper to be the recollection of a dream rather than an authentic memory. The photograph of Lana came into his mind, and he realized uneasily that he’d had this same sort of thought twice in a ten-minute span of time.

 
There were storm clouds in the little weather illustration for Sunday, but Monday was clear and sunny after morning low fog—typical May weather. A hamster could have predicted it, along with more of the same on into June. He found the travel section and laid it aside for Lana, who read every page of it, and then got up and crammed what was left of the paper into the trash. The rest of the news didn’t concern him, or perhaps concerned him too much. Probably it was vital to know how many people had been murdered over the weekend and what parts of the world were annihilating each other or being annihilated, but he had no good use for the information. Like the weather or the passing of time, there was damnall he could do about it. Thinking about it simply poisoned the air.

  Lana appeared in the doorway. “Did you know that the sprinklers are on?” she asked.

  “Probably a prank,” he said. “It’s those damn Palm Street kids again.”

  She nodded doubtfully. “They’re predicting rain for this morning. A sixty percent chance.”

  “I don’t find their percentages convincing,” Harper said. “It’s like predicting a man’s chances of dying. You can’t be wrong forever.” He handed her the travel section.

  “You’re the only person I know who takes the weather personally,” she told him. “Just don’t think about it. If it doesn’t rain then it doesn’t rain. Who cares?”

  “I guess I do. Like you said.”

  “Then let’s walk down to Hosmer’s and get some breakfast—some waffles to sweeten you up.”

  “All right, but no umbrellas,” Harper said, forcing himself to sound enthusiastic. “We’ll tempt fate.” He got up out of his chair and the two of them went outside. Lana wore a sweatshirt, but he didn’t bother with a jacket.

  “Is that what’s up with the sprinklers?” Lana asked. “It’s some kind of challenge? Isn’t that what they mean by sympathetic magic?”

  “Completely unsympathetic in this case,” Harper said. He bent over and shut the sprinkler valve off. The lawn and flowerbeds seemed grateful to him, no longer quite so exhausted. “Think of it as a poor man’s way of seeding the clouds.”