Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  The reporter did not reach for it, as he was too deeply immersed in trying to encompass all he'd learned that night. Thought led onto thought and drew him spiraling down into his imagination. He couldn't tell how long he'd sat contemplating the struggle between light and dark.

  "This interview is now ended," said Larchcroft, bringing August back to full consciousness. The reporter looked up to see that the room was now filled with the early light of day.

  "What type of sacrifices?" August asked the visage.

  "The dearest kind, my boy," said Larchcroft, laughing as a beam of morning sun shot through the single window across the room and struck him full in the face. He stared momentarily into August's eyes and then abruptly and completely disappeared. The laughter lingered for a brief time, quickly diminished to a whisper, and then vanished.

  August grabbed his notebook, stood up, stretched his aching legs, and left the room by the way he'd come in. As he walked the hallways toward the front entrance of the mansion, the sound of his footsteps echoed throughout the stillness of the massive building. He wondered where Larchcroft and Baston and the servant had gone. When he reached the door, he noted with a smile that it was bright green, something he'd not remembered from the previous night upon his arrival.

  August walked the entire mile and half from Larchcroft's estate into town, and when he arrived at the office of the Gazette,… he found it already abuzz with the day's activity. Because of the interview he now carried in his notebook, he felt none of the usual hesitancy in approaching his boss. He rapped on the old man's office door, and a gruff voice commanded him to enter.

  "Where were you last night?" asked the editor. There were dark pouches beneath his eyes, and what hair he possessed was askew with wispy eruptions. It was unusual for him to be seen without jacket and tie, but August noticed both were missing. His white shirt was rumpled and ink-stained; one sleeve turned up in a sloppy cuff as the other was turned down and unbuttoned.

  "I had the interview with Larchcroft," said August. "I'm sure you'll want it for the front page."

  The boss shook his head, his expression grim. "Sorry, kid, but you've been trumped."

  "What do you mean?" asked August.

  "Early in the evening last night, just after dark, a young woman was murdered in town. The third floor of a dump over on Paine Street. The Windsor Arms. Nobody was around, I couldn't find you, so I had to go. Brutal. Somebody opened a hole in this girl's head, right here, and poured in a pint of India ink," said the old man, pointing to the center of his forehead. "Blood everywhere."

  August sat slowly down in the chair across the desk from his boss. "What was the girl's name?" he asked.

  "May Lofton. We don't know much more about her yet."

  "Was she a schoolteacher?" asked August.

  "She might have been. She definitely didn't seem to be the type to frequent a place like that. Why, you know her?"

  "No."

  "The constable found something interesting near the body though. Maybe they'll catch the killer …" The editor closed his eyes and stretched. "I could fall asleep right now. Anyway, what did you get?"

  August reached across the desk to lay his notebook in front of the editor and then sat back into his chair. "This still might make the front page," said August. "A long and detailed recounting, basically, a confession, from the Man of Light."

  The editor sat up straight and leaned over the desk, drawing the notebook to him. He yawned wearily, opened the cover, and flipped past the first few blank pages. A moment passed, and then his eyes fiercely focused, as if what he was reading had fully awoken him. He turned two pages. "Fascinating," he said. "You see this?" He lifted the open notebook and turned it to August.

  The young man's jaw dropped and the color drained from his face as the editor flipped slowly through the pages for him. Each and every page he'd committed the interview to was covered from top to bottom, side to side, with pitch black, not the least speck of white showing.

  The editor cocked his head to the side and paused before speaking. "I guess you know the clue the constable found with the dead girl was a sheet of paper, like this, but instead of writing, it was completely black."

  August wanted to protest his innocence but found himself speechless due to an unfounded yet overwhelming sense of guilt. The editor's bleak stare seemed to drill straight into him, while outside the sky had darkened even more than was usual for a winter's day. Feeling the night closing in on him, he stood, turned, and fled the office. The editor yelled behind him for his other workers to stop the young reporter. Still August managed to escape their clutches and the confines of the Gazette. Outside, an angry crowd pursued, following him to the riverbank, where they found his discarded clothes, and later, at dusk, after searching all day, his lifeless, frozen body, pale as the light of the moon.

  RICHARD PARKS

  b. 1955

  Richard Parks lives in Mississippi with his wife and a varying number of cats. His fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, multiple times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and in numerous anthologies including Year's Best Fantasy and Fantasy: The Best of the Year. His third story collection, On the Banks of the River of Heaven, was released by Prime Books in 2010 and his Lord Yamada collection, Yamada Monogatari: Demon Hunter, in 2013.

  Cherry Blossoms on the River of Souls, by Richard Parks

  The tales varied as to why the well was outside the village rather than inside. Some say that an earthquake and rockfall destroyed the original town site and the survivors rebuilt the village at a safer distance, leaving the now-dry well where it was. Others say that a saké-addled farmer relieved himself in the well one night, so offending the spirit of the well that it had moved itself and had been dry ever since. Whichever version one believed, the well was where it was, and nearly every evening the boy called Hiroshi came to stare down into the darkness, and listen.

  The well was full of music.

  “Hello,” Hiroshi said to the unseen musician, as was his habit. There was no answer.Hiroshi was never quite sure what he would have done had the darkness answered him.There was a spirit in the well, of course. His uncle Saito, the priest, said there were living spirits in everything, and Hiroshi believed that. Still, the darkness did not answer him.

  One fine spring evening his uncle Saito walked out of the village to where Hiroshi sat by the well. He had been a soldier and was now a priest, but it was as Hiroshi’s uncle that Saito came to speak with Hiroshi that evening. “Greetings, Nephew,” he said, and sat down beside the boy.

  “Hello, Uncle. Is there something the matter?”

  “I’m not certain. I would be grateful if you would help me decide, so I must ask: what is your fascination with this well?”

  “Is Father worried? He’s raised no objections so long as I do not neglect my obligations.”

  “My brother is a practical man, and you are a dutiful son to him. However, my question was not to my brother.”

  Hiroshi blushed. “Forgive me, Uncle. I sit here because I like to listen. There is a sound coming from the well, from down in the darkness. It’s almost as if the music is being played just for me; almost as if I’ve heard it before. I don’t understand that, but that’s how it feels.”

  Saito sat down beside him and leaned forward just a bit, listening. After a while he pulled back the sleeve of his robe and picked up a pebble. He dropped it over the side.

  “What do you hear now, Hiroshi?”

  “I hear the pebble rattling against stones... fading. Now I hear nothing.”

  “No splash? Not even a small one?”

  “No.”

  Saito nodded. “Nor will you ever. This was a well. Now it is not. Now it is just a hole down deep into the underground. The underground is the province of dead things, and dead things should not concern the living. Look around you now. What do you see?”

  Hiroshi did as his uncle directed. He saw children his age fly
ing kites in the waning light, running along the ridges of the flooded rice fields, playing games with tops and hoops, laughing.

  “It all seems childish,” Hiroshi said.

  “Is it inappropriate for children to do childish things? Or the living to do what nature decrees that the living must? This is your world, Hiroshi. There is nothing in that well that should be of concern to you. Will you think about what I have said?”

  “I will, Uncle,” Hiroshi said, and Saito left him there. His uncle glanced back once but not a second time as he walked away.

  Hiroshi, being an honest boy, did what he had promised to do. He thought about what his uncle said, and he studied carefully, for a moment or two, the activity, now fading with the day, around him.

  “I’ve played those games,” he said to himself. “Time and again. They do not change—the kites pull on the wind as they always have, as they will for anyone. This song is for me.”

  All this was justification and pointless. The only justification Hiroshi needed was the song he still heard, coming from the depths of the well.

  The next evening Hiroshi joined his playmates at their games for a time to appease his uncle, but when play time was over and all his friends had gone home, he returned to the well. He moved quickly, with furtive glances all about to see if anyone was there to see. He carried a long rope coiled over one shoulder and a small knife in his sash.

  “The rope was a sensible idea, but that blade may not be enough,” his uncle said. He sounded sad.

  Hiroshi froze as his Uncle Saito stood up from his hiding place behind the well.

  “How did you know, Uncle?”

  “It serves a priest well to know how to look into a person’s eyes and see clearly what plagues them. You are plagued by discontent, Nephew. Unfortunately, unlike other spirits and minor devils, this one bows to no spell of exorcism. You must cast it out yourself.”

  Hiroshi hung his head. “How do I do this, Uncle?”

  “Perhaps by doing what you want. I still advise against it, but this devil shows no sign of leaving you.” Saito took the rope from Hiroshi’s shoulder and made one end fast to a post beside the stone rail marking the well. He threw the other end down into the blackness. “Do you still hear music, Nephew?”

  Hiroshi listened for a moment. “Yes, Uncle. I do.”

  “Then follow it down and satisfy your devil. Then perhaps he will leave and you will come back to us. I hope so, else I must explain your absence to your father, and I would rather avoid that duty.”

  Hiroshi put his hand on the rope. He stared into the forbidding blackness as he often had, but he barely hesitated. “I will come back, Uncle. I promise.”

  “Do not promise. I merely ask that you be careful. Powerful kami are drawn to such places, and most are not likely to be friendly to you. Take this.” Saito held up the shorter of the two swords he’d carried as a soldier. “Remember what little I taught you of the Way of the Gods. Most of all, remember who you are. I think that is the important thing, no matter where a person may go.”

  Hiroshi took a deep breath and climbed over the side of the well. The last thing he saw before darkness closed in was his uncle peering sadly down at him from a circle of daylight.

  That daylight quickly faded as the well shaft made an abrupt turn at the bottom into what looked like an ordinary cave.

  Hiroshi listened very closely, but now he didn’t hear the music at all.

  “That’s very strange. It was a most persistent sound when I heard it from the side of the well. Persuasive, I think,” he said, though Hiroshi still couldn’t fit words to what the argument was supposed to be.

  Now all was silent except for a faint rush of air, as if the winds of the underground could not wait to escape past him and up the well to sunlight. Hiroshi’s hair blew about his face and tickled his forehead. The scent carried by the wind was of damp and mold, and a faint hint of a spice that Hiroshi could not identify at all.

  There was darkness about, as he had expected. Indeed, he’d brought a small lantern along but found he didn’t actually need it. Once his eyes adjusted there was light there, of a sort. He could make out where to walk, where boulders lay in his path and where not. The only thing left to do was to choose which direction to go.

  Where is the music?

  He listened very intently, trying to hear around the moan of the wind in his ears. There had been a promise in that music, something wonderful beyond Hiroshi’s imagining.Familiar, too, though he could not say how.

  After a few moments he thought he heard it again. He wasn’t sure. He wondered if there had been a concentrating effect from the well itself, like wind through a reed flute; the music was much harder to hear this much closer, presumably, to the musician. Hiroshi finally took his best guess and started walking.

  He soon came to what had clearly been part of the underground river, now dry and full of stones. An old woman was waiting for him there, looking impatient. At least, Hiroshi thought it was an old woman; that was what he told himself when he saw her. She was more a collection of rags and bones than anything, but there was a face, and wrinkles, and a thin toothless grin.

  “Give me those!” she said. Her voice was like dead leaves blowing across stones and her eyes glittered like black pebbles.

  Hiroshi blinked. “Those? Those what?”

  “Clothes! Give them to me!”

  Hiroshi thought this very rude, but he was more confused than offended. “Who are you and why do you want my clothes?”

  She ignored that. “You must give your clothes to me before you cross this river. Now!”

  Apparently, now meant now. She reached out with one clawed hand, snatching at his sleeve. She managed to tear off a strip of his sleeve and gouge a line of red across his wrist.

  Hiroshi took a step back. “Here, now, Grandmother! Stop that!”

  She stopped for a moment, but she was looking at the blood on Hiroshi’s wrist. “You’re alive!” It sounded like an accusation.

  “Of course I’m alive! What did you think?”

  “That you were not, of course. Now I think you’re a fool.” She blinked, and for a moment Hiroshi saw some kind of recognition there, something beyond the cold darkness he had seen before. It didn’t last. The cold, relentless stare returned. “Clothes. You don’t need them. Not where you are, not where you are going. Mine!”

  The last came out in a shriek of rage and malice. For Hiroshi’s part he didn’t know what she was, but he knew she wasn’t human. A kami, or perhaps a demon in—somewhat—human form. When she came for him again he had his uncle’s wakazashi out and ready. “Stay back, monster!”

  She hissed like a snake and struck at him. Hiroshi dodged and struck back. It was only the feel of the blade as it struck something solid that told him of the hit. The rag and bone creature did not cry out. It merely stepped back, confused. “Mine!” she repeated.

  Hiroshi took a deep breath and a firmer grip on his sword. “You’ve been in the dark too long, Grandmother. Don’t force me to strike you again!”

  She looked at Hiroshi, or rather at his clothes, then looked at the sword again. “Mine,” she said again, “soon enough. I can wait.”

  She cackled with laughter and then spread out her arms like a kite. In answer the breeze there swelled into her rags and she lifted off into the darkness. In a moment she was out of sight in the deeper black of the caves.

  Hiroshi waited for a bit, sword at the ready, but she did not return. He finally put the blade away.

  “Well,” he said. “That was very strange.”

  He didn’t like to think of himself as a fool, despite what the creature had said. He had already met one monster on his short journey, and it seemed likely that there would be others. He wondered if the beautiful music was being played by another monster to lure him down.

  “If so, it worked. But for what purpose? And why is the music fainter now than when I kneeled at the well?”

  “Because it’s farther away, of course.�
�

  Hiroshi’s previous encounter with the clothes thief must have left him more shaken than he’d thought, because he immediately reached for his sword. After a moment he took his hand off the hilt, feeling foolish. The speaker was a small man in the robes of a Buddhist monk. He sat cross-legged on the stones, tending a small fire upon which steamed a small kettle. Before him were cups and a ladle and a bamboo whisk for making tea. A traveler’s bundle served as a rest for his back.

  Hiroshi bowed. “Gomen nasai, honored Sir. I did not see you there.”

  “Obviously. I was about to have some tea, young man. Would you care to join me?”

  The mention of tea made Hiroshi realize he was starting to get hungry. “Yes, thank you.”

  The monk prepared their tea in silence, though perhaps introductions would have been more in order. Hiroshi shrugged and pulled out two of the rice cakes he’d brought with him and offered one to the monk, who politely declined. Hiroshi then ate both of them, though he remembered his manners enough to let the monk take the first sip of tea before he began.

  He also studied the man as closely as manners would allow without staring. His initial impression of small stature was on the mark. The man was tiny, even shorter than Hiroshi himself, though otherwise looked more or less human. Part of Hiroshi was wondering if the monk would suddenly grow fangs and attack him, but mostly he wondered what the man was doing there in that place, and what he knew about the music. He held off asking for as long as he could, but that wasn’t very long at all.

  “Excuse me, but what did you mean about the music being farther away?”

  “Just that it is. You’re much farther from it than you were.”

  That wasn’t very helpful, though Hiroshi didn’t say so out loud. It was more than a little irritating.

  “I don’t understand. Will you explain?”

  The monk didn’t say anything for a while, merely sipping his tea. Hiroshi’s annoyance faded. The monk seemed very tired, and very sad, as if the whole subject was more painful than the man could say.