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

by Anthology

  Out in the hall, Bernadette’s manner took on an extra briskness. “Where has the child gone?” Kora had apparently disappeared, leaving Davie Darby to suck forlornly at the dregs of his juice box.

  “She’s probably just ducked around the corner.”

  Bernadette took Davie’s flipper. “You go and get her before she thinks to take apart the fire alarm,” she said, leading the seal-boy away at a marching pace. Ramona hurried alongside her.

  “I was wondering,” she said, trying out the Dean’s now-that-you-mention-it voice, “if you’ve had the chance to look at my new abstract?”

  “What new abstract?”

  “I left it in your box. The proposal regarding the increase of Leda/Europa births in Sant Ramon?”

  “That sounds very interesting,” said Bernadette tonelessly. “I will certainly look at it.”

  “There’s an incredible amount of work to be done over there,” Ramona continued. “Abduction pregnancies are always complicated, and when you’re dealing with animal forms…I just think that if somebody were to set up a practice there, it would do a lot of good.”

  “No doubt,” said Bernadette, and sped up her gait. “I will certainly look at it. Hurry on, now. Miss Gillespie should return to her lessons, and you to yours.” Then, off Ramona’s look, she said, “Don’t worry about the child’s desk. I’ll find something and have it ready.”

  ***

  It had been hard to look like she wasn’t listening while they talked about her this time.

  Kora learned most things by acting like she wasn’t listening. People talked more, and about more interesting stuff when they forgot she was there. Whenever people decided they wanted to speak to her—in that slow, patient, stern, uninteresting way—that was when she usually stopped listening.

  But this conversation had had too many important things floating around in it.

  They’d found out about her pictures, and that was bad…but maybe she didn’t really need the pictures, now that she was going to be in Ramona’s classes. Maybe she should just go now, and throw them away, or slip them under one of the library doors. The pages didn’t really tell her anything. Not really.

  Kora listened, squinted down across the quad. Dodgeball was over. The too-big kids, the eleven and over kids, were all playing at some game of chase: Annabelle, a very freckled girl with great big brown and white speckled wings, was circling and trying to kiss everybody. None of them was looking for Kora. At least, none of them had a ball to bounce on her head. They’d probably all forgotten about her for the day. She could do it, quick, and come back out again before the bells rang for dinner.

  Kora shivered out of the tree she was in, and walked as inconspicuously as she could along the big clump of lindens, weaving in and out of them, searching for a good stick.

  The game of chase was confused, full of false-sounding shrieks. Kora couldn’t tell if the boys were trying to duck Annabelle’s kisses, or catch them, or just pull handfuls of speckled feathers out of her wingtips. Kora knew which one she would want to do. She had always thought Annabelle’s wings were beautiful, even while Annabelle was calling her The Phantom, and screaming at her to stop staring, stop creeping!

  The older kids’ games were like their dreams: confusing, anxious, stupid, fluttery, angry, hard to get out of once you’d fallen in. Annabelle only dreamed about getting fat and failing tests, and flying into jet engines, and boys laughing at her. That was one reason Kora liked the littler ones like Davie. Littler kids dreamed all sorts of dreams—mushroomy, monster-y, candy-coated, airplane princess dreams—and they didn’t seem to mind when she ended up in them.

  But the too-big kids knew she wasn’t supposed to be there. They all stayed far, far away from her, unless they were playing dodgeball.

  But now. But now! If they were really going to let her be a student in Ramona’s classes she would finally be learning the stuff that real midwives and doulas learned. And Ramona would see her learning it all, see how clever and how careful Kora could be. She wouldn’t still be mad about the window. Nobody gets mad at you for things like windows when you have grownup work to do. You aren’t bad, if that stuff happens to you when you’re doing your grownup work. You’re just busy.

  And if Kora read fast, and learned fast, and paid attention to every single thing…well they would have to give her her certification soon, wouldn’t they? Once she knew everything? Once she had her certification, nobody could make her stay behind at the Seminary. She could go to Sant Ramon, too, and be Ramona’s assistant, rocking all the little half-bulls and half-swans to sleep. She would be such a good assistant, if it was just Ramona and her and no one else!

  Kora found her stick, a long, thick, smooth one, still a little green so it wouldn’t break. She used it as a walking-stick, strolling along, smiling through chattering teeth. She was just wondering if Sant Ramon was a warm place to live, when someone thundered up behind her.

  “What are you grinning at, Creeper?”

  “Nothing…” Kora turned to face Aiden Averback, biggest of the all the too-big kids. Almost fourteen. He was pretty and curly-headed, with bright black horns and bright yellow eyes, but he’d never be adopted, and that just made him angry at everything. Just now, though, he seemed especially to want to be angry.

  “Don’t give me ‘nothing’! Fucking night-crawler!” He threw the dodgeball at her head, but she batted it away with her stick, “You think you can just go creepy-crawling around wherever you want?”

  Kora remembered, now, he’d had a dream, last night or the night before. It had been a stupid, nothing dream, him doing stuff to a girl with no clothes on; Kora wasn’t even sure how she’d ended up in the middle of it. But his eyes were like yellow sparks when he saw her standing there, watching. He’d wanted to hurt her then. He was going to try to hurt her now.

  She turned away, into the trees, toward the wall. He caught her in a quick, hard grip. “You do, don’t you? You think can go spying on whoever, and nobody’s gonna stop you.”

  “No…” she said, wriggling loose, “and I don’t have to talk to you.” Because you don’t matter, because I’m going to Sant Ramon to be Ramona’s assistant.

  “Don’t move, maggot.”

  She got ready to make a run for the wall, but Aiden’s grip found her throat and squeezed. “You’re gonna die, you know that?” His voice was close and dangerous. “You’re gonna die, and nobody’s going to care. Nobody. And you know why?”

  “Why?” Kora choked out, before she swung the stick at Aiden’s head, hard enough to make him let go. He wrenched it away from her with an angry howl, but she was off and running through the trees.

  Aiden was fast, thundering after her, swinging the stick all the way. Thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack.

  But she was faster, and she reached the wall before him. She wouldn’t lead Aiden Averback to her secret entrance. So she disappeared up another tree as he came crashing through. He looked around, too stupid and angry to look straight up. He snorted, threw down the stick, and went away.

  She’d find something of his to burn, later.

  Kora climbed down from the tree, shivering fiercely, dropping to her knees to find the top of the manhole. Right at the wall, under dirt and leaves, the cracked concrete slab was just as she’d left it. It was heavy, but so was she, and strong. She uncovered the manhole, wedged the stick in place, and slipped down into her own special, silent darkness.

  The steam-tunnels were the only place where she was ever really warm.

  She wouldn’t throw away her pictures just yet, she decided. She might need them after all. She’d move them to some deeper, darker spot until everyone forgot about them.

  For now, she took out a pencil and wrote out as best she could, in the corner of one picture whose tentacles didn’t coil quite to the edge of the page, all the things she learned that day:

  Kora Gillespie is not a demi-god.

  She is malicious.

  She is a night-crawler.

  Kora
put a star, so she’d remember to look up what malicious meant.

  Then she sat down, and breathed in the thick, blanketing air, until she was sure the bells had already rung for dinner.

  ***

  There was no trial period, no transition, not even a full day’s grace. By the next afternoon, the Cambion girl sat smack in the front row of Ramona’s Immaculate Conception and Gestation class, grinning like she’d won. And from that minute on, there was no avoiding her.

  With the rapidity of a wasp, Kora found her way to the center of every single classroom’s attention and nested there.

  She never did anything openly anarchic, but the atmosphere was the same as if she started a trash can fire at the beginning of every lecture. She sat with such scarily unblinking attention, and scribbled with such composer-like intensity, that she could dissolve a class into nervous, murmuring giggles without saying anything at all.

  Once she grew bold enough to ask questions, all was lost.

  Sometimes she semi-automaticked them, not even bothering to put her hand all the way down between rounds. “Ramona, is that a picture of a real faun fetus or half-faun, like Aiden Averback? Can I hold it? Can you make it bigger? Can I make it bigger? Ramona, do the horns hurt when they come out? No, not out of his head, out of the mama’s vagina? What if it’s a girl, and she has curly ones?”

  The dull roar that built up behind these solid walls of questions could never be kept back until the class was over. And the class was instantly over once it started.

  “Kora,” Ramona managed one day after a particularly unsuccessful lab. “I think it would be best if you reserved your questions for after class.”

  “But I raise my hand.”

  “Adult students with too many questions have to keep quiet during class time, and ask their questions later, during office hours.”

  “Oh,” she said, eyes shining with the dangerous knowledge. “Okay.”

  From that day forward, Kora Gillespie was as silent as she could be in the classroom. But in the halls and cloisters between classes, she was an unrelenting storm of chatter, as close on Ramona’s heels as an overexcited duckling. Office hours were now entirely taken up by the seven-year-old’s undauntedly one-sided conversation. Twice, the Cambion followed her straight back to graduate housing and up into her living room without even a pause.

  But Ramona had already determined that she would make herself too busy to annoy, burrowing deep into the work of constructing her Sant Ramon program design. Even Kora could be ignored, if you typed feverishly enough.

  It was a plan that worked wonderfully well, until the dreams started.

  Kora Gillespie was seeping into her dreams. She wasn’t having dreams about Kora Gillespie. Kora Gillespie was walking around in her dreams.

  She’d emerge from the very back of the closet in a kissing dream decades old. Or she’d be looking over Ramona’s shoulder while Ramona answered the essay portion of a dream-exam in gibberish. Or she’d be hovering above Ramona as Ramona fell backward into dream-blackness, a pale, thin, inscrutable, smirking face, just before she started awake in bed.

  It was almost certainly some kind of inheritance from the thing that was her father, this casual strolling in and out of dreams. If it hadn’t been happening to her, Ramona might have called it interesting, and taken notes. But almost every night, she woke feeling that the ghost-white girl was standing just in her blind spot, or that she was just in the other room getting ready to make something burn.

  Ramona never confronted her invader. She had a vague, belligerent idea that if she didn’t acknowledge the game, the fun of tromping all over her brain would more quickly dissipate. But she now was hyper-aware of the girl. Her every breath, and greasy fingerprint, and shuffling step, and stupid question.

  “Why don’t I look like anything?” Kora asked inanely one day.

  “Look like anything?”

  “The other Superum kids all have tails and scales and horns and things like their dads.”

  “You’re fortunate not to look like your father, Kora,” said Ramona irritably.

  “But maybe if I did, it would be a nice surprise when I talked,” she said, though Ramona had stopped listening.

  Ramona had the nightmare one night after a bottle of wine. It was the usual nightmare, certainly nothing more than usual. She was back in that darkened walk-up in Washington Heights, listening to Ms. Gillespie scream.

  She stood by herself—no Bernadette in sight—staring down into the dark passage from which she knew the thing was coming. And Ms. Gillespie arched and screamed, raking her nails across her skin, begging with those now-familiar fear-clouded eyes. Stop It! Please stop It! Please take It from me!

  We fight the fear, dear, that’s what we do. Ramona would always have Bernadette’s words in her head, but never in her mouth. I can’t! she’d say instead, her voice thin and high and horrible, It’s coming already, I can’t!

  And then Ms. Gillespie would roll her eyes up to the ceiling, screaming blindly, almost unconscious. And so Ramona was left by herself to catch the baby when It came bursting out.

  But all that came bursting out was black blood, pouring out and pouring out over everything; her hands and arms, the bedsheets, the floor, an amniotic flood that showed no signs of stopping. Had she lost It? Was there any real baby at all? Was it all just a trick of pain and terror and this poisoned blood?

  No, she knew by now there had to be a real one somewhere, she’d had this dream so many times. She knelt to find it, sloshing in the blackness.

  But she was not alone.

  Sitting curled in a dry corner, Kora Gillespie was not staring at the black amniotic lake creeping toward her knees. She was staring at Ms. Gillespie, following Ms. Gillespie’s frozen wide eyes up to the ceiling. “Is it me?” she asked, her voice small and shuddering, barely there. “Is that one mine?”

  Her puddle-gray eyes were locked on It, the creature whose presence Ramona had superimposed so long ago she’d almost forgotten It. The Inseminator, tentacles a tight cage around the body of Its victim, suckers affixed while It thrusted and thrusted its knife-like phallus, perhaps seeking to make an opening where it failed to find one. Finishing, It blinked several guiltless eyes.

  The Cambion looked away, crumpling, shuddering. And Ramona remembered something that she often forgot: Kora Gillespie was a child.

  Don’t pay any attention to that, she heard herself say. That part’s done, that part’s over. There’s only you left.

  Baby Kora suddenly came alive in Ramona’s arms, this time not soundlessly. Ms. Gillespie wakened screaming, as in life, recoiling from the small thing that came out of her, and took her leap from the fire escape.

  Kora stared a moment at the screaming, squirming blood-covered byproduct, paralyzed against the wall. Then she twisted away and fled, leaving the way of her birth-mother.

  When Ramona woke, she needed no one to tell her that Kora Gillespie was missing.

  ***

  Down, and down, there was always more down. No place to sleep. She’d keep walking until the rail tracks ended…Kora wished more than anything she could stop carrying the stupid pictures.

  ***

  Nobody doubted she’d gone for the tunnels, but that was less helpful than it sounded. The New York College of Theogony and Preternatural Obstetrics was criss-crossed by countless crumbling tunnel systems, with dozens of entry points for a seven-year-old girl to wander into. All about 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Ramona guessed a human child could live down there for a little over a day without water. But who knew with Cambions? Who knew anything?

  The search parties were a confused swarm, re-visiting tunnels that had already been visited, getting lost and circling back on themselves, shouting her name as they tromped around above-ground, as though that would do any damn good. At night, they were worse than useless.

  When Ramona wasn’t searching the tunnels, she fell into exhausted dreams about tunnels. Kora was in these, too, on an endless
walk to nowhere, in some imaginary part of some tunnel left unsearched. Or more often, she was just crouched in the dark, waiting. Stop this! She’d scream. If you’re alive, get out of my dreams! Get out of the ground!

  ***

  Kora was too far down to find her way back now…or else she was just lost and walking around and around in the same tunnels. She couldn’t see to tell. This was as good a place as anywhere to close her eyes. She was too dizzy not to close her eyes.

  ***

  The truth of it hit her while she slept slumped over her desk, on the third day. This isn’t my dream, is it? Ramona said to the fevered child crouched in the dark, It’s yours. Where are you?

  When she woke, she knew the answer.

  Shivering, she went out in the late afternoon light, making her way across the campus, ducking and weaving in the tight spots between buildings. Kora’s way. When she reached the uneven border-wall, she climbed it.

  In the first flush of discovering the College’s true purpose, the fledgling Union Theological Seminary had had dreams of a shared meeting-house, where the philosophical and theological ramifications of such obviously miraculous births might be debated and discussed. The meeting-house had been gone nearly a hundred years, but the steam-tunnels that connected to it…

  Ramona came down hard on her knees on the other side, surrounded by a mess of linden trees. She felt around in the mulch. There it was. The concrete slab. Someone had shut the manhole despite the stick in the way. Kora might have stayed down there for weeks. It took two janitors to lift the slab and carry it off, and by then Ramona’s head was screaming.

  But she climbed down into Kora’s own private cave, and let the hot air stifle the screams. Okay, Kora. Where are you?

  She walked and walked, not particularly looking ahead of her, or around her, just walking along the rail tracks in this sacred, narrow and desolate place. And when the rail tracks ended, she shut her eyes between every step. Where are you now? Where are you?

  ***

  She was there. Kora saw her coming even through closed eyes. Aiden Averback had said no one would care when it happened. At least he lied about that.