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

by Anthology

  ***

  I told you mine was not a love story.

  Not at first.

  ***

  “You’re far from home,” the man said, after the knife and the axe had been put to better use, and the roasted bird removed from the fire and divided between us.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You have sea eyes.”

  It was a simple statement of fact, although I had grown up with girls, and some boys, who would have taken it for poetry. In my village, everyone had the gray-blue eyes of where sea and sky met, or of fog rolling in after the sun went down. I suppose there was some poetry there, if a person was inclined to trust poetry.

  His eyes were the brown of the earth and the green of the trees, shot through with the gold of afternoon light. He was not far from home at all. If he had told me he had been born of the fallen leaves of this land, I would have believed him and wouldn’t have been surprised.

  “How did you find me?”

  “Your glass flashed across the mountain.”

  I did not allow my sea-eyes to move from my dinner. “Oh.”

  We finished the bird together, and he left. He took the bones. I took the feathers. Winter was coming, and—in case you were—I wanted the down.

  ***

  From the time I was small, even smaller than you, I was taught that a human could not live in a home without glass in its windows. Everyone knew this. Even the man who lived in the tiniest hovel of our village, his shack without so much as a door, scrounged sea glass to wedge into the knotholes in his board walls. They taught me it would keep the demons out. No one ever explained how something as powerful and implacable as a demon could be deterred by a pane of glass.

  But by the next morning, I had resolved that—demons or no—the glass would have to be removed. I had come to the cabin to be alone. Already my flashing windows had compromised my aloneness. If I wished to avoid further visitors, the glass must go. As far as demons went, I would have to take my chances.

  The day wore on, and I did not remove the windows. I even caught myself wiping a smear from the panes.

  I tried to marshal logic to my cause. I told myself that the superstitions of my childhood were meaningless. That the windows were nothing more than a reminder of an unfortunate past filled with tragedy and mistakes. That it had been an error to take them with me when I fled my childhood home. That if I was with child I could not raise it within glass that had seen what this glass had seen.

  But the longer I argued, the more it became grimly apparent that the windows would have to be removed by someone else. The glass was all that remained of my old home. The panes were clear, pure, and untainted—perhaps the last part of me that was. And as simple as it would have been to smash them, I could not bring myself to do it.

  Until late afternoon returned. When the light flashed from the panes again, theory became necessity, and while I might quail from theory, I have never been one to shirk what must be done in need, and I lifted my axe.

  Just as I was about to swing, I caught a glimpse of a reflection in the glass.

  Jonas. Again.

  I faced him instead of the windows, axe still lifted.

  “Is having a visitor so bad?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Is that why you’re smashing your windows?”

  I scowled. What were my windows to him?

  “Aren’t you afraid of demons?”

  Was he mocking me? I met his eyes, but aside from seeming more gold than green today, I couldn’t find a change in his impassive expression.

  His eyes looked back into mine, and whatever he saw there, he believed.

  “Leave the windows. If you wish to be alone, I won’t come back.”

  “What about the next man who wanders this mountain?”

  “The people of the mountain know this cabin. They will not approach.”

  I was afraid I already knew the answer as I asked my next question. “Why not?”

  “It’s haunted,” he answered. “But there’s no reason to be afraid of ghosts…if you aren’t afraid of demons.”

  All I said was: “Oh.”

  He turned to go.

  “So you won’t be back?”

  He didn’t break stride or turn back as he answered. “I wouldn’t be here now, except to save your windows.”

  And with that, he was gone. I watched him vanish into the woods, and then I watched the sun vanish into the land, and the windows remained.

  ***

  I tracked the moon for nearly a full cycle and did not see another living soul. Nor a dead one either, which was something of a comfort. I was growing daily more certain of you, and had no wish to be haunted by your father’s shade, or by whatever spirit plagued the cabin.

  Another moon waxed and waned, journeying across the windows each night as I lay sleepless on my pallet, and by then, I was sure that even if Jonas never came back, I would not be alone in my cabin before the year was out.

  I kept myself as busy as I could, in those waning days, but it was difficult with the land still and unchanging around me. Before coming to the mountain, my life had been ruled by the tides. When the fishers went out and when they returned. When the beaches at the base of the cliffs were passable and when the sea would sweep you from your feet. Here, without the tyranny of the sea, I had to turn to the subtle sky: where the sun and moon and stars counted each day into the next. The days grew shorter, the nights grew longer, the moon and I grew rounder, and Jonas returned.

  I had my axe in hand when he appeared, but only because I was chopping wood. I was almost always chopping wood in those days; I did not know the winters of the mountain, and the thought of the cold and the dark terrified me. I noticed a shadow out of place, turned to find him, and we both found the great swell of my belly between us.

  My hands clenched my axe, waiting for him to speak. My grey-blue eyes dared his honey-brown ones to say something, as the sea taunts the unwary sailor. His gaze flicked down to you for barely a moment, and then returned. Then he held up one arm and revealed a flash of silver. My breath caught.

  He had brought a fish.

  ***

  I tended to the coals below as he tended to the fish above, and then we shared the heat and the meal in silence. The sleek scaled creature was large for a river fish, but would have been dwarfed by the wonders my parents daily pulled from the sea, or had done, until the day the sea had pulled them back. Its flesh tasted of rain, not salt, but I reveled in it. Between us, we finished the fish and polished the pan with our bread-crusts.

  I was the one who broke the silence. “Are you going to ask?”

  At least he didn’t pretend not to know what I was talking about. “Should I?”

  For some reason, that made me angry: the implication that my trials were none of his concern. Not that they were. It wasn’t as though he burdened me with his affairs, whatever they might have been. I realized I didn’t think of him as the sort of man who had affairs, beyond roaming the mountains and occasionally breaking bread behind the windows of a misplaced sea-woman. I scowled at him.

  “Aren’t you worried the father was a demon?”

  He looked up from his plate. “Wasn’t he?”

  I started. “Is it that obvious?”

  He choked on a laugh. If he hadn’t managed to keep it behind his teeth, I think I would have hit him with the pan.

  “You are with child, and yet you have fled your home to a haunted cabin in the mountains. You are brave, resourceful, determined, and I would not want to face you in a rage. But yes, it is obvious.”

  I sighed, and left the pan where it lay. It was true. In a different way, it should have been obvious to me as well: the whirlwind romance in the shadow of my grief over my parents’ deaths—the grief that had left my soul open and vulnerable. The consuming passion that suddenly evaporated on the night—I later calculated—you had been conceived. Fortunately, my head cleared quickly, and I did what needed to be done. The demon w
as dispatched, his flesh burned in the hidden cave where I found him, directly below our bed. The bed burned too, and I fled in the night with little more than the clothes on my back, the axe in my hands, and the useless glass of my old windows tied into a bundle. I didn’t look back; I knew I would never return. The neighbors would see the unearthly golden flames and assume I had perished with my lover.

  Or perhaps they assumed that I was the demon. With neither of us there to question, there was no way to know for sure.

  “What if I’m the demon?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “If you were, you’d have killed me.”

  “Maybe I’m a patient demon.”

  Another shrug. “There are worse ways to die on the mountain. And if you’re that patient, maybe you won’t ever kill me. And if you don’t, does it matter if you’re a demon?”

  Did it? It had been desperately important by the sea. Was this yet another way this place was foreign from the place of my birth? The old fishermen had always said the hills were haunted; it was why we buried our dead in the land. But perhaps this is what they had meant. Perhaps on the land, all men and women were demons.

  I frowned. “Are you a demon?”

  He considered the question. “I don’t think so. I’m not planning on killing anyone.”

  And if he wasn’t, did it matter if he was a demon? I wasn’t sure. So that was where we let the matter rest.

  ***

  They say that a demon cannot resist the lure of its own flesh. That if it begets or conceives a child of a human, its hunger for the life and soul nestled within its own copy will only grow, until it must consume the source or die. They say that a demon will run to the ends of the earth once the scent of its child is in its nostrils. A demon mother can usually force herself to wait until the child’s natural time. A demon father can almost never be that patient. The stories of rent flesh and dismembered infants make my own tale seem tame and happy.

  ***

  The days continued to pass, and while the moon waxed and waned, I only swelled…to fullness and beyond. Outside, I chopped wood to the eaves, and inside, I laid supplies to the rafters. Jonas returned occasionally and although he assured me the winters were mild, with you beating constantly at my insides, I couldn’t afford to believe him.

  I began to have nightmares. I dreamed about the night I killed your father: the shock that went up my arms as my axe hit his spine and separated his head from his shoulders, the hollow-melon sound of his head hitting stone, the smell of his flesh as it charred and bubbled. Then I dreamed that something had gone wrong. That he had not died. That as I was crippled by the pains of labor, he arrived to eat both our souls. In some dreams he returned looking as he did when I first saw him, in others, he arrived half-consumed by flame, still smoking.

  Then came the worst dream of all.

  ***

  “What if I was wrong?”

  Jonas had found me on the floor of my cabin, sobbing like a farm girl over her spilled bucket. It was a measure of my terror that I was more scared than embarrassed. But he knelt down as though this was no different than any of our other conversations.

  “Wrong about what?”

  I could barely whisper it. “What if he wasn’t a demon?” In the nightmare, I had watched your father’s blood soaking into the earth and suddenly known that I had been wrong. That he was nothing more than a man. And I had murdered him.

  Jonas looked around the cabin, and took in my meticulous preparations, down to the polished glass of the windows. “I don’t think you’d be wrong about that.”

  I laughed bitterly. “There is no world in which I have not been terribly wrong. Either I killed an innocent man, or I bedded and then conceived a child with a demon. If I could do one, surely it is possible I could do the other.”

  “But not both,” he pointed out, and rose.

  I looked up at him, and he helped me to my feet. His hand was warm and solid, as callused as any fisherman’s. He let mine go.

  “You are close to your time,” he said. “There are few people on this mountain, but there is a wise woman. I could bring—”

  “No.”

  “Do you want me to take you to—?”

  I shook my head. I did not trust any wise woman of this mountain. I feared what she would do to you if she suspected your parentage. I feared what she would do to me as I lay depleted by childbirth. Something had kept me alive this far, either it would have me safely delivered of you, or it would not.

  “Do you want me to stay?”

  That question I could not answer. And so he left.

  ***

  A day later I was cursing myself as a greater fool than the man who tried to sail his boat on shore. I had fled the sea, but it had finally caught up to me, and I found myself on hands and knees on my wooden floor as wave after wave passed over and through me, each one taking a little bit more of my strength back to the depths.

  My own waters had left me hours ago, but you clung still, like a barnacle deep inside, unwilling to let go. I pictured you stuck; drying like a sea star deserted by the tide. Another wave passed, and I groaned to feel a surge pass from me. Not you. I looked down. The waters of the sea had turned red, like a sunset.

  Whatever had kept me alive this long had abandoned me. I was going to die. And then, in the quiet between the waves, I felt you struggling, still wet and quick. I had to live. You had to live. Somehow.

  I screamed for help until I was hoarse. I forced myself to stand and make my way to the windows, hoping to see Jonas there as he had been so many times now. But there was no one. My fists pounded the glass in rage and frustration. The sun was already low in the sky; its rays leapt from the panes back out to the valley, and…my fists stilled. I pictured Jonas watching for those flashes from the mountain. And I was certain that if he did not see them, he would come to find out why.

  I beat against the glass over and over with my pain, until each pane, and I, had shattered, and the blood of my hands mixed with the blood coating my thighs, and I lay on the floor, screaming and cursing as the afternoon light crept over me, thrown back only by my glittering tears. You were harder and harder to feel, and as the room darkened, you slowed further, and I couldn’t tell if the world was dimming, or if I was.

  And then the pain was gone. The waters receded, and there was Jonas. And there you were, warm and wet and alive.

  ***

  “You lied to me,” I accused him, half dozing as you suckled. “You said you weren’t a demon.”

  Jonas shook his head. “I said I didn’t think I was a demon. Do you think you are a human, or do you know?”

  “That’s very technical.”

  He shrugged. “I did warn you this place was haunted.”

  Well, that he had. I tucked you closer in my arms, feeling the broken pieces of my soul knit together as I traced the shell of your tiny ear.

  “Are you going to kill me?” I asked.

  “I said I wasn’t planning to. I don’t lie.”

  My mind was not entirely at ease, but as I tried to work out a way to ask if he was likely to kill me without having to plan it, he asked his own question first.

  “Why break the glass, if you thought I was a demon?”

  His voice had changed, or maybe it was only the way I heard it. But his callused hill man hands had not. The hands that had, only hours earlier, lifted you from me and placed you on my chest. “If you hadn’t come, I would have died. If you did, perhaps you wouldn’t kill me, and if you didn’t, what did it matter if you were a demon?”

  He smiled, and I looked into his eyes, once again the comforting brown of buried autumn leaves after their fiery colors have faded, with just a hint of the green of new grass, and the tiniest glimmer of golden yellow.

  As I drifted off to sleep, one last fear broke free, and I fought the current to wakefulness one last time. “Are you this one’s father? Have you come to take him?”

  “No,” I heard him say as I slipped into the dark. “You were most th
orough.”

  By the time I realized he hadn’t answered my second question, I was already asleep.

  When I woke, he was gone. But you were not.

  ***

  I had cause to be glad of my autumn hoarding. Jonas had not lied; we were not in danger of freezing to death, and things grew through the winter, but I was tired, and weak, and you were demanding, and without my stores I would have reached spring in dire straits indeed.

  You, I didn’t worry for. Once you had reached the world, and I looked into your eyes, golden like fire, I was certain that you would find a way to live. Without the threat of your father coming to steal your life to add to his own, you thrived.

  In time, I found new glass for the windows. Even if it would not protect us, I still liked to sit in the afternoons with you in my arms, or rolling in the grass at my feet, and watch the light leaping off the panes like fishes. In time, word that the cabin was no longer haunted reached the mountain village, and I met our neighbors. I found I did not mind the occasional breaks in our aloneness. Others were not so frightening now. My shattered soul had healed, and I was no longer vulnerable to demons.

  Jonas never returned.

  ***

  So you see, little one. It is all as I promised.

  My story is not a love story. It is a story of grief followed by death, exile, deception, and abandonment.

  But love came to it. In the end.

  Bookburners, Episode 5: The Market Arcanum(Novelette)

  by Margaret Dunlap

  Originally published by Serial Box Publishing as part of Bookburners, Season One

  1.

  Sal had come to the Societas Libris Occultatem's gym under the Vatican to lift weights, put in some treadmill time, and take out a little pent-up aggression on the heavy bag. All of those plans, however, flew right out the window when she found Liam with his shirt off, taping his hands and showing off both his physique and tattoos to very good advantage. Not that she wasn’t intimately acquainted with all of his ink already. Still, just because a girl was familiar with the scenery didn’t mean that she couldn’t appreciate the view.