Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  Ms. Gillespie sat upright, still screaming, and threw the blood-black sheet over the baby’s face. Before Bernadette could stop her, she leapt free of the bed and tore out of the window, her womb still raw and open. Whether she climbed or fell down the fire escape, Ramona never saw.

  Bernadette moved quickly. She never seemed to encounter anything she did not expect. She took up the Cambion, tightened its swaddling, jiggled it a little to stop its soundless crying, and passed it to Ramona like a parcel. “Hold her steady,” she said, business-like, “the girls like steady hands.” Even back then, Bernadette only ever spoke to Ramona in essential facts. In requirements, as though that was all there was.

  And then, with a sigh of annoyance, she gripped her Saint Raymond medal, crossed herself in a quick prayer, and hurried down the fire escape after her patient. And Ramona was left sick and shaking, holding what Ms. Gillespie had birthed.

  Later, safely back within the towers of the Morningside Heights campus of the New York College of Theogony and Preternatural Obstetrics, the thing squirming hotly in her arms would feel no different from a baby.

  It was a baby, as far as Ramona could tell, eyes shut tight against a new, bright, cold world. So cruelly ordinary a thing. It smelled like a baby. It made a baby’s faces and spit bubbles. It shivered like a baby; Ramona held it closer to her chest, and it rooted, just as if it had a right to find a nipple.

  The girl was, she supposed, exactly as parasitic and insensible to others’ pain as most babies tended to be. Only, her screaming was easier to ignore, if you wanted to, for being soundless. Even after Ms. Gillespie was found a full day later, naked and babbling in a storm-drain, Ramona could not find anything particularly un-babylike about the one who drove her there.

  But then, Ramona could never really bring herself to look at it straight on.

  ***

  “Davie, you have to come fast if you want to see the selkie babies get born!” Kora called, and listened for the slap of the seal-boy’s hands and feet behind her.

  Kora would have brought Davie along just to see him walk. Usually the little webbed feet carried him upright in delicate, almost sneaking steps. But whenever he tried to move quickly, he threw himself down on all fours and flop-crawled, beating the ground to death with his front flippers. His slaps and barks made the best kind of echoes off the College’s sharp, spire-y towers.

  If he wouldn’t cry and tell everybody, Kora would have brought him down into the tunnels, just to see what kind of echoes he could make. But he was only four. It had taken her this long to convince him to cross the wall and the tiny grove of linden trees that separated the Seminary from all the good places. Now that they were through, he stopped his flopping every few feet to look doubtfully around.

  He was going to make her miss Ramona’s whole class. And she couldn’t leave him because he couldn’t find his way back, and somebody would find out and be mad. Besides, she wanted Ramona to see that she’d brought him with her. “Come on, Davie, she’s going to be done soon. They’re all going to be born without you. We have to go faster than this!”

  “I don’t want to go faster,” complained Davie, “I don’t want to run away from home.”

  “You’re not running away from home,” Kora told him, “Theogony is part of your home.” She didn’t stop walking. It was the middle of May (the spires above them stabbed like fishbones into a clear blue sky), but it was too cold for her to stand still. It was usually too cold for her to stand still.

  “But I live at the Seminary…”

  “You live in Morningside Heights, don’t you?”

  “Yeah…”

  “Well,” she said, reasonably, looking around, “all these big buildings are in Morningside Heights. And the all the Columbia buildings, too, and the Teacher’s College, and Barnard College…and Grant’s Tomb. You remember I said how big Grant’s Tomb is?”

  Davie nodded, his pretty black eyes wide.

  “So you see, you can’t really leave home, because it’s all your home.” She thought quickly, changing tones. “Anyway, I live everywhere. I just go around to all the places, and everyone knows me, and I do whatever I want.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Davie, but his eyes didn’t shrink, and he was following.

  “I stay here at night all the time,” she said truthfully, though she didn’t mention where, or how. “I might as well live here, anyway, it’s where I’m going when I grow up. Everyone says. I’m not going to be adopted…”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m just not, everyone says. I’m going to grow up and go to school at the College and learn to help Superum babies like Ramona. That’s how come I get to go around and look in all the windows…there’s the Swan building. Hurry up, before someone sees us.”

  The Swan building's sides were full of long pointed windows, which meant that it had nice, deep window-ledges. Kora had to climb quite a few of the trees along the walk (hauling Davie up after her, since he couldn’t climb at all) before she found the one that looked into Ramona’s classroom. But she found her, in one of the small rooms at the end, doing Something Interesting.

  Ramona was always doing something interesting. Today she had her arms up to her elbows in a tub full of water, her slim, careful hands swirling and rolling the water against the sides without sloshing. Then, she took her arms from the tub, droplets of water still shining on her arm-hairs, to write something important on the board. The soft brown hair piled on top of her head wobbled a little, and she pressed her lips together, tight and careful and serious.

  “What's she doing?” asked Davie. Kora had let him have the ledge so he would see better.

  “Demonstrating,” she guessed authoritatively. She could see almost everything from the right tree branch, anyhow. She leaned a little harder on the branch so Ramona would see her in the window when she looked up, and not just Davie.

  “Where’s the babies like me?” asked Davie.

  “In there,” Kora answered vaguely.

  “Where?”

  “Somewhere…” Ramona took a long time writing her important things on the board.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Kora leaned hard as she could on the branch so it tapped the window. She did it again. Ramona didn’t look up.

  “I don’t believe you,” Davie said again.

  Kora leaned out as far as she could, face toward the glass, and rapped her knuckles on the window. Ramona turned from the board and went right back to her tub of water. She did not look up.

  “I don’t see them,” asserted Davie with finality.

  “Pay attention!” Kora told him sharply, “This is important for you to learn. Put your face up against the glass.”

  Davie smooshed his face against the windowpane. It made him look funnier than she thought it would. “Put your tongue out a little,” she said, and Davie did.

  “She’s not looking,” said Kora, scowling. “You have to rattle the window. Hit the window. Just a little bit.”

  Davie brought his flippers down against the window, surprised by the deep, ringing complaint it made. Davie grinned.

  Kora grinned, too, but then pressed her mouth into a careful, serious line, like a teacher’s. “Harder,” she said.

  ***

  Ramona’s classroom window had bowed and broken with a long, unsudden, shuddering groan, a slow-motion fissure meandering up through the two-hundred-year-old leaded pane.

  But she hadn’t thought it would until it did. That was the truth. Ramona wished she could say that without sounding so much like Kora herself, sullen and culpable.

  But she and the Cambion girl both slouched under Dean Sophie's raised eyebrows, her not-quite-frowns. And Bernadette…well, Bernadette's sterner faces always made explanations feel flimsy and insufficient. And today, the beautifully dark face of the Haitian ex-nun seemed particularly uncompromising.

  Across the room, someone had made the mistake of seating Kora in a chair that swiveled, and she now swung around and
around as wildly as the pivot would allow. Her victim and partner-in-crime was kept from sobbing only by the absolute puzzle of trying to spear a straw into a juice-box with his flippers. So the Dean’s questions fell on Ramona.

  “How long, do you think, were they out there unsupervised?” She asked the question dryly while rifling through her desk, as though it wasn’t an accusation.

  Ramona pinched her lips together. “I have no way of knowing…she goes everywhere.”

  A small smile hovered on Dean Sophie’s mouth. “Yes. We’re all aware of her little adventures in the underworld. We’ll discuss those in a moment.”

  So there was to be a discussion, then. Ramona shifted in her seat. “I can’t really tell you what she does down there. I don’t know anything about it.”

  “No. I don’t expect you would,” said the Dean, dismissively, “we’re not even entirely sure which entry-point she’s using.” The girl spun on, showing no signs she knew her secret was being talked about. At least, Ramona thought, with a look over at the poor seal-boy squirting juice down his front, Kora hadn’t dragged this one down into the steam-tunnels.

  Dean Sophie continued, eyebrows high. “What I’m asking is, how long were they at the window? How much time had elapsed before you…‘noticed’ Miss Gillespie outside your classroom, unsupervised, with a very young child?”

  Unsupervised! Of course Kora had been unsupervised! She was a campus rat, a hurricane. When was she ever anything but unsupervised! As to the young child, well…she always seemed to find one to follow her into chaos when she wanted one.

  Ramona searched to find a tone of voice that was adult and undefensive. “I was lecturing. I was in the middle of a lab.”

  “Well, of course. But…you didn’t hear the pounding? People in surrounding classrooms seem to think it was going on for some time.”

  “I had no reason to think they were capable of breaking the window.”

  “Yes, so you’ve said. You didn’t feel it necessary to go out and see to them at all?”

  Bernadette lifted patient eyebrows. Dean Sophie leaned over her desk expectantly. Did Ramona really need to explain? Did she really have to tell them that this was exactly the sort of thing the Cambion girl lived for, to create enough of a disturbance that someone somewhere would fly into an entertaining rage and drag her back to her schoolbooks?

  “My students are behind on the selkie birthing material. We’ve only just started the MacRitchie treatise on preparing natal salt-baths…”

  (At this, Kora whispered something in the seal-boy’s ear, and began to spin her chair so flamboyantly that its pivot screamed, until Bernadette clamped a firm hand on the back of it.)

  “I am aware that you have obligations, Ramona. I’m not asking you to neglect them,” said the Dean, “but this is not the first class of yours our Miss Gillespie has disturbed, is it?”

  “It certainly is not,” said Bernadette, before Ramona could answer. “The Seminary finds her lurking at least once a day.”

  Ramona gave an unsurprised snort. The Union Theological Seminary next door took in as many of the ancient College’s orphans as it could. The place was full up with halflings, sweet little half-selkies, and half-fauns, and half-swan maidens, but it was just too idealistically Christian an institution to effectively keep anything that didn’t really want to be kept.

  The Dean ignored the snort. “It would seem she seeks out your classes with a certain amount of regularity. Any idea why that might be?”

  “I don’t know!” Ramona threw up her hands before she could catch herself. “Who knows why she does anything she does, or breaks anything she breaks? She’s bored, and malicious, and nobody tells her not to.”

  “‘Salus pro totus creatura prognatus,’” Dean Sophie apparently felt the need to remind her. “I think you understand, and I hope you’ll remember, that at Theogony we are not interested only in the welfare of those Superum children presently being born, or the human mothers presently giving birth to them.” She turned to Kora. “There’s a reason for every behavior. Isn’t there, Miss Gillespie? Miss Gillespie?”

  Kora, who had been trying enthusiastically to tilt her chair now that she found it unspin-able, went suddenly still when the Dean addressed her.

  Kora Gillespie’s face was exactly a seven-year-old girl’s face, and not a striking one; there were no horns pushing up through the pale hair. The pupils of the pale, browless, puddle-gray eyes were almost disappointingly round and human.

  But it was always unsettling to Ramona how quickly Kora could pull back from manic bursts of fiercely determined activity, to sit in almost unblinking silence.

  And then there was a kind of fluttering smirk that never really left her mouth when she was silent, that made her face look not much like a seven-year-old’s at all.

  “Can you tell me the reason you told Davie to bang on Ms. Ramona’s window?” the Dean asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t think you meant for him to break it, did you?”

  “No…I don’t know.”

  These were the same answers she’d given Ramona half an hour earlier, the smirk fluttering even as she stared sullenly at the floor. What more was the Dean hoping to get out of her?

  “I think you do know a little bit. He wouldn’t have done it if you didn’t tell him to. What were you trying to do?”

  Davie began to weep again, and was removed to the hall.

  Kora's gaze shifted around the room for a long moment, and then she suddenly decided to answer. “I wanted Ramona to show him how he was born,” she said.

  Dean Sophie looked sideways at Ramona. “Is that all?”

  “He’s too stupid to listen when I read it to him out of the book.”

  Ramona blinked. So Kora had been pawing through textbooks already. Whose, Ramona wondered? “But Kora, you know I don’t birth babies in the classroom,” she said, “I’ve discussed that with you before. We allow women to give birth to babies in their houses.”

  Kora went silent again.

  “I think, Ramona,” said Dean Sophie, “that you were correct in your assessment that Miss Gillespie requires more stimulation than she has at present.”

  Ramona tried to remember when she had made such an assessment. Some terrible punishment for the broken window was forthcoming.

  The Dean came out from behind her desk to swing the axe. “How would it be, I wonder, if she were to sit in on some of your classes?”

  Ramona’s mouth fell open.

  “It would be the natural place for her. We’ve known for years that she would most likely enroll in the College when she grew older.”

  “When she’s older,” said Ramona hoarsely. “I can’t imagine that she’d be anything but a distraction at this…age. I don’t think it would be fair to the students.”

  “The students will need to experience what it’s like to be in close contact with Superum children someday. They can’t go into birthing a demi-god completely blind.”

  “Kora Gillespie is not a demi-god.”

  The Dean nodded, though not relentingly. “I know she’s a challenging presence, Ramona. I wouldn’t ask you to do this if I didn’t think it would be beneficial to all concerned. Do you know how valuable a little time spent with you would be to her? You could completely re-direct her energies. You’ve been with us longer than any other student, Ramona. Is it any wonder she wants to learn from you?”

  Now Ramona understood. As the resident hanger-on, she was to keep the Cambion out of the bowels of the campus, and out of the way of anyone who actually meant to do anything useful.

  “What about my dissertation, my program design? How am I going to get my fieldwork done?” She looked at Bernadette. Surely her own advisor would remember that she was a grad student.

  “Well, as to fieldwork,” said Dean Sophie, also directing herself to Bernadette, “I wouldn’t be surprised if this experience proved immensely valuable wherever you chose to set up your practice.”

  Berna
dette nodded. “You must not refuse any opportunity of learning, my dear. It is all fieldwork.”

  “Good,” said the Dean, as though the thing were settled, which Ramona supposed it was. “I’m glad we’re in agreement. Let’s see what we can do about getting a child’s desk.”

  The Dean addressed Kora, who was now grinning ear to ear. “Alright, Miss Gillespie, you may go out into the hall now, and wait to be taken back to class.”

  Kora removed herself to a few feet outside the door without making a sound.

  Dean Sophie lowered her voice. “Thank you, Ramona, I know that an instructor’s time is valuable.”

  “Fortunately, I’m only a TA.”

  “There is something else I’d like you to get to the bottom of, if you can,” said Dean Sophie in a now-that-you-mention-it tone. “The Seminary’s apparently having trouble with books. If it were only textbooks that were missing…but there seem to be pages torn from some fairly irreplaceable reference materials. From Burke Library and some other places. Nobody seems to know how she manages to keep doing it.”

  The Dean went over to her desk and retrieved a list, a very long list, of titles and missing page numbers. First on the list were three random pages pulled from Malleus Maleficarum. “If you could just find out where she’s keeping them…I don’t think anybody wants anything but to have the pages restored as quickly as possible.”

  “She could have just decided she wanted to make a bonfire of them,” said Ramona, “or that she wanted to see what old paper tastes like.”

  “I think not,” said Dean Sophie. “Have a look at the list.”

  “What makes you think she’ll tell me if I ask her?”

  “Oh, she probably won’t. I wouldn’t ask her if I were you. But…she does seem to be looking for an excuse to talk to you. Use that.”