Phantom

by Steve Berman

  The song is all around her now.

  The red brick Federal style house has undoubtedly been there longer than anything on the band’s program. The symmetrical windows are bordered with green shutters; the yard is overgrown but not neglected. Steps set parallel to the front of the house lead up to a screened-in porch that wraps around the left front and side of the house. Peter leaps up the steps, but when he gets to the porch door he is not sure what to do. Knock? Call out? He tries the door; it pulls easily open and he steps in. The porch is empty: no plants, no furniture, nothing. The only entrance to the house itself is a white door with a brass knocker. There is a half-empty plastic bottle of water on the floor by the door. He knocks repeatedly, calls Olivia’s name. No reply. He turns the brass doorknob and has to lean in with his shoulder and push before the door opens. He leaves the door open and walks inside.

  The room he enters is like the yard, cluttered but not ignored. A sofa bracketed by lace-covered side tables, a recliner, a coffee table and scattered chairs date from no particular era, but the walls are done in a frantic Victorian wallpaper. Opposite the sofa above a bricked-over fireplace hangs an elaborately-framed painting of mountains dropping to a stormy beach; small boats dot the waves while ill-defined figures wait on the shore. There is no television and no phone, no books or photographs, but there is a girl of about ten or eleven sitting on the sofa, thin legs crossed at the ankles, hands folded serenely in her lap. Her dress is too thick for July, her hair is the same color as Olivia’s, and her eyes are the same as the band leader’s.

  Before Peter can apologize for walking in unannounced and say he is looking for his friend who came in just a minute ago, the girl gets up and walks to the far wall of the room, where there is a white door with a heavy brass knob. She opens it and beckons him to follow her.

  This room is lined with shelves filled with books, old, oversize volumes. Against the far wall is an enormous old roll top desk, closed and locked, with a padded wooden desk chair on wheels. In the center of the room stands an aquarium tank in which swims an enormous fish. A boy about the same age as the girl stands beside the tank. He wears a shirt and trousers that appear to be made from the same material as the girl’s dress, and his eyes are closed.

  Peter walks up to the tank. The fish appears to be some kind of eel. Its head is disproportionally large, its eyes protruding and black, its mouth filled with needle-thin fangs. Its body is covered in a cloud of fine, waving antennae. It circles methodically within the tank, adding a quick burst of speed each time it reaches the corner nearest the desk. It looks like a picture Peter had seen in a grade-school reference book of sea creatures from the aphotic depths, creatures so ominously unlike anything he had ever seen before that he had dreamed of them for a week afterward.

  The girl walks over to the tank and removes the eel, which immediately falls limp in her hands. The boy reaches into the left pocket of his slacks and produces a folding knife. With his eyes still closed, he opens the knife and carefully slices off the eel’s antennae, which float to the floor like dust. When he is done, the girl returns the eel to the tank. The creature comes to life and thrashes in the water, coiling and uncoiling, its body helpless to locate itself and its regular path, its fanged mouth open as if to scream. Water splashes from the tank and hits Peter’s hand. The smell of brine is overpowering.

  The girl takes the boy by the hand and leads him to a staircase on the opposite side of the room. They stop at the foot; the girl gestures to Peter. He walks between them and climbs the stairs.

  He finds himself immediately in a room with no windows and no visible source for the soft light that fills it. There is a background wash of sound like air-conditioning but the room is the same temperature as the rest of the house. The room contains no furniture other than a large four-poster bed covered in loose white sheets on which Olivia lies supine. Her head and shoulders move gently as if to music; her hands flutter by her sides. Her legs are still. Her eyes are closed. Her lips form words but she does not speak. There is nothing random about her motions; they are orderly, purposeful.

  Peter walks up to the bed and looks down at Olivia. She is smiling as her lips move. He considers lying down beside her but decides that would be a mistake. Instead he leaves her to whatever she has found, the music he cannot hear, and descends the stairs. He avoids looking at the tank; he cannot bear to see if the eel continues to thrash, or has resumed its ordered circuit, or floats motionless on top of the water. The children are not in the study or the living room or on the porch. He walks carefully down the outside steps and returns to the common.

  The sun has set; the band is gone. Only their car remains. Peter sits back down on the same bench where he listened to the band’s old music. He will make no effort to leave. He will wait for Olivia here in the mountains, in the darkness, in the silence beneath the cold and nameless stars.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  STEVE RASNIC TEM is a past winner of the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards. His most recent book is the collaboration The Man on the Ceiling with wife Melanie Tem, an expansion of their award-winning novella. In November Centipede Press will be publishing In Concert, a collection of all their collaborative short fiction.

  STEVE ELLER lives in Seattle. On the occasional sunny day, he likes to sit on his rooftop deck and stare out over the bay. A bottle of Pyramid Hefeweizen might be found nearby. He shares his penthouse with a woman named Susan and two feline sisters, Sophie and Megan. He once won a Bram Stoker Award, but doesn’t care to bring it up. He has season tickets for the Seahawks and Storm. He dedicates this story to Dr. Howard Leonard, PhD.

  BECCA DE LA ROSA lives in Dublin, Ireland. Her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Fantasy Magazine, among other places. Read more of her work online at www.beccadelaRosa.com.

  STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES’ most recent novel is The Long Trial Of Nolan Dugatti. It concerns a time traveling centipede, that in turn concerns us all. Before that it was the horror novel Demon Theory. Next up, Ledfeather, a love story with suicide. After that, a horror collection from Prime Books, The Ones That Almost Got Away. Then, the world. As for what Jones does besides read, and write about himself as if he’s not in the room: he teaches fiction at CU Boulder.

  KAREN HEULER’s stories have appeared in anthologies and in dozens of literary and commercial magazines. She has published two novels and a short story collection, and has won an O. Henry award. Her latest novel, Journey to Bom Goody, concerns strange doings in the Amazon.

  SETH LINDBERG has always disliked those one-paragraph biographies in the back of books, but the feeling might be mutual. He currently resides in California and has a fluffy cat named Sif.

  VYLAR KAFTAN writes everything from hard sf to horror. Her work has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons. She lives in northern California. Visit her website at www.vylarkaftan.net.

  STEVE BERMAN has been a finalist for both the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy (for his debut novel, Vintage) and a Lambda Literary Award (for the anthology Charmed Lives). He’s sold over eighty articles, essays and short stories. He once stole a job from a New York Times-bestselling author (well, she wasn’t all that at the time). He lives in southern New Jersey and does own a few hats.

  LAVIE TIDHAR writes weird fiction. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and since lived in South Africa, the UK, and the remote Banks islands of Vanuatu, in the South Pacific. His short stories appeared in Sci Fiction, Strange Horizons, the World Fantasy Award winning anthology Salon Fantastique and many others.

  NICK MAMATAS is the author of two novels, Move Under Ground and Under My Roof, both of which have been nominated for literary awards. His short fiction has appeared in Mississippi Review, Weird Tales, ChiZine, Polyphony, and in the slicks Razor, Spex, and Nature. Much of his recent work is collected in You Might Sleep . . . By the time you read this, Nick will be living i
n the California Bay Area.

  MICHAEL CISCO is the author of The Divinity Student (winner of the International Horror Writers Guild award for best first novel of 1999), The San Veneficio Canon, The Traitor, and The Tyrant. His short stories have appeared in Leviathan, Album Zutique, and the Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases. He lives in New York City.

  GEOFFREY H. GOODWIN has had a story in Rabid Transit and Not One of Us, three in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and two stories and three poems in The Surgery of Modern Warfare. Those are some of the cooler places that he remembers at the moment. Other good things have happened but everything is temporary and some braincells may have settled during shipment. He also interviews writers for the webzine Bookslut, has an MFA from The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado and is a bookseller in Eastern Massachusetts. His iPod currently has more songs by Skinny Puppy than by any other artist and he can be reached at GeoffreyHGoodwin@aol.com or through his blog at http://readingthedark.livejournal.com.

  CARRIE LABEN grew up on a small farm in Western New York. She now lives in Brooklyn with four cats and an amusing human. She actually really likes birds quite a lot, and blogs about them at pinguinus.wordpress.com. Her work has previously appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine and Apex Digest Online.

  F. BRETT COX’s fiction has appeared in Century, Black Gate, North Carolina Literary Review, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Black Static, Postscripts, and elsewhere. His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The New England Quarterly, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Science Fiction Studies, Science Fiction Weekly, and Paradoxa. With Andy Duncan, he co-edited Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic (Tor, 2004). A native of North Carolina, Brett is Associate Professor of English at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont. He lives in Roxbury, Vermont, with his wife, playwright Jeanne Beckwith.

  ABOUT THE EDITORS

  Paul Tremblay, a two-time nominee of the Bram Stoker Award, has sold over fifty short stories to markets such as Razor Magazine, Chizine, Weird Tales, Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the West Memphis Three, and Best American Fantasy 3.

  Along with his first novel The Little Sleep, he is the author of the short speculative fiction collection Compositions for the Young and Old and the hard-boiled/dark fantasy novella City Pier: Above and Below. He served as fiction editor of Chizine and as co-editor of Fantasy Magazine, and was also the co-editor (with Sean Wallace) of the Fantasy, Bandersnatch, and Phantom anthologies. No Sleep till Wonderland, the follow up to The Little Sleep, will be published in February, 2010. Paul has also served as a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards and is currently an advisor. He lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts, has a master’s degree in Mathematics, has no uvula, and he is represented by Stephen Barbara of Foundry Literary + Media.

  Sean Wallace is the founder and editor for Prime Books, which won a World Fantasy Award in 2006. In his spare time he is also the co-editor of the Hugo- and World Fantasy Award-nominated Clarkesworld Magazine and critically-acclaimed Fantasy Magazine; the editor of the following anthologies: Best New Fantasy, Fantasy, Horror: The Best of the Year, Jabberwocky, and Japanese Dreams; and co-editor of Bandersnatch, Phantom, Weird Tales: The 21st Century, and World of Fantasy: The Best of Fantasy Magazine. He currently and happily resides in Rockville, MD, with his wife and two cats.

  OTHER BOOKS BY

  TREMBLAY & WALLACE

  By Paul Tremblay

  City Pier: Above and Below

  Compositions for the Young and Old

  The Little Sleep

  By Sean Wallace

  Best New Fantasy

  Horror: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition (with John Gregory Betancourt)

  Jabberwocky 1, 2, and 3

  Jabberwocky 4 (with Erzebet Yellowboy)

  Japanese Dreams

  Weird Tales: The 21st Century (with Stephen H. Segal)

  Worlds of Fantasy: The Best of Fantasy Magazine (with Cat Rambo)

  By Paul Trembly and Sean Wallace

  Bandersnatch

  Fantasy

  Phantom