Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2014: A Tor.Com Original

by Various Authors

  Jacky leaned over the front of the stage, hummed a few bars of music, and said in a husky voice, “I’d thought of coming out in an evening gown and doing a Dietrich medley. But I’ve seen the way women look at me when I do drag. It’s the look Negroes get when a white person sings the blues. So I’m here to fulfill a secret dream. I’m playing a guy.”

  Rosalin had taken liberties with the decor but 1970 was a hard moment to exaggerate. Jacky’s loft had been described and shown in articles, books, and documentary footage. Like Warhol’s factory, it was iconic. On the walls and above mantelpieces were mirrors, which at certain angles turned into windows looking into other rooms. In those rooms doll automata played cards, a mechanical rogue and his partner cavorted, and one or both might look your way, indicate you were next.

  “When I was young,” Jacky Mac said, “I tried to make myself look beautiful. Later I tried to make myself look young. Now I’m satisfied with making myself look different.”

  In the lawless 1960s, the Angouleme Hotel was almost as famous as the Chelsea across town. When it was sold as co-op apartments and lofts Jacky bought most of the third floor of the building with the proceeds of his clothing line and his performance art. Jacky Mac was not, of course, his real name, which was boring and provincial Donald Sprang.

  For Jeremy Knight the task was making something as ordinary as homosexuality feel as mysterious, hysterical, and dangerous as Jacky had found his life to be. A brief film clip existed of Jacky Mac working out some of this material in the Studio, performing for an audience of friends in just this manner.

  Jeremy caught the odd, fluid near-dance of Jacky Mac, which he’d learned from old videos. On the walls Hendrix, Joplin, and Day-Glo acrylic nude boys and girls melted into a landscape of red and blue trees. A light show played intermittently on the ceiling. Deep yellow blobs turned into crisp light green snakes, which drowned in orange, quivering jelly. The color spectrum dazed the eye.

  Knight/Jacky leaned forward to show a once-angelic face now touched with lines and makeup and asked, “Why do men over thirty with long hair always look like their mothers?”

  On cue, The Killer down front swallowed a few pills, stood up, pulled a bottle from his back pocket, spat out, “Faggot” at Jacky and walked toward the door while taking a long slug. In the old-fashioned manner, Jacky Mac liked his partners rough. It would be the death of him.

  The audience watched the long, slow exit. Wrist limp, Jacky Mac gestured after him. “We have the perfect relationship. I pretend he doesn’t exist and he pretends that he does.”

  It wasn’t just the costume; Jeremy Knight had absorbed every bit of the lost manner and voice of someone society hated for what he was. Ninety years later it was hard to convey. For a few years in his teens Jeremy had been Jenna Knight, making the change because boys in school got neglected and there was an advantage to being a boy with the mind of a girl.

  Each day Knight felt closer to Jacky’s alienation. Saw it intertwine with his own fear of falling off a very small pedestal and back into the vast, penniless crowd in the Big Arena.

  The Killer stopped at the door and yelled, “IT’S YOUR TURN NOW, BITCH” at somebody no one could see.

  Jacky glanced his way, turned back to the seats and found everyone staring wide-eyed. “Dear me, are the snakes growing out of my head again? That Medusa look was so popular once upon a time!” He peered at the crowd and remarked half to himself, “Judging by your faces, I’ve turned you all to stone. Forgive me. My mother always said…”

  But few were listening. All eyes were on a figure in silks floating past the stage humming “Beautiful Dreamer” under her breath, while the audience whispered her name.

  Cass had invented a liaison in this hotel between a self-destructive artist and the ghost of a legendary suspected murderess. The character Jacky was haunted by Evangeline decades after she had died of an overdose.

  Once he caught sight of her he seemed to forget the audience completely and followed her out of the room. When audience members came after them, they found a locked door.

  But the room into which the two had gone was Jacky’s legendary mirrored bedroom. The ceiling, an entire wall, even the floor in places reflected the room and its outsize bed. One wall was a two-way mirror. Jacky was always aware of this, as were some of his bedmates.

  The Sleep Walking audience flocked around the glass, saw silhouettes dance in semi-darkness as Jacky tried to trap Evangeline or she ensnared him. One shadow seemed to pass through another. One or the other always had a back to the audience and both whispered so none outside could hear.

  “How’s the gate tonight?” she asked.

  “Seventy percent for this show, about the same for the midnight show,” he said.

  “Shit,” she said. “It’s going to fold.”

  “Needs a third act,” he said. “I have my eye out for especially unstable repeat patrons.”

  “A third victim,” she said. “Rosalin’s got one but Sonya scares me.”

  He shook his head. “She’s harmless.”

  “A suicide might do,” Keri said.

  “I volunteer my understudy, Remo.”

  “Silly, understudies don’t want to die; they want to kill the leads.”

  Through the glass the two heard, “Where are you, faggot? Fucking the ghost girl?” The Killer had returned.

  Jeremy Knight took a deep breath and walked out of the bedroom. “Let’s talk, one faggot to another. I’m the terrible secret: the herpes sore on the ten-inch cock, the skunk at the tea dance, the troll without the decency to hide under the bridge. I’m the one who’s here to call you sister, to tell you…”

  In Sleep Walking The Killer emptied the pistol into him just as had happened in real life. Audience members screamed. Keri always stayed for this and always had to stop herself from crying. Then she’d slip out for her big scene with Nance.

  Only after his death was Jacky Mac described as “The Kit Marlowe of this bedraggled city.” The press didn’t get into the details of his life. The murderer was never identified, never caught.

  Business did pick up for Christmas/New Year. But January brought bad weather and bad box office. On the last performance that month Rosalin stood several steps above Sonya, looking down at her as she said “This show needed something that would get the Big Arena talking about us and not the thousand other entertainments available. That never happened. We’re posting closing notices next week. All my work wasted. I hope you enjoyed your brief time on stage.”

  Sonya’s eyes glistened. Rosalin recognized tears. They had talked about suicide. But heights bothered the stupid girl, guns were a mystery. Rosalin had thought to bring a knife.

  FINALE

  The show’s final scene was actors playing detectives, questioning the audience members as they filed out of the Studio after Jacky Mac’s death.

  And down the hall, Edwin Lowery and Evangeline Nance went at each other in hoarse ghost whispers. “Oh finally, my daughter, you will have no more to do with that sodomite!” Anger is never hard for actors to achieve in a failing production.

  Keri was scared and irritated. Sonya, like a rat deserting a sinking ship, hadn’t shown up that evening to get her through the dwindling crowd. She screeched, “So unlike the midnight visits to my room when I was still a child! Let us talk about pederasty and hypocrisy!”

  Playgoers, still a bit ensnared by the drama they’d just witnessed, kept pointing them out to the actors/police who would look but be unable to see the ghosts.

  “And that reminds me, dear Father…” Evangeline started to say, when there was a long, piercing and—Keri realized—quite heartfelt scream.

  “That sounds very authentic!” said Jacoby Cass in his own voice and with a look of hope in his eyes.

  Actor/cops and audience members stared down the hall. The Killer was running toward them with tears in his eyes and the prop gun still in his hand, babbling. “… in the elevator … opened the door … blood…”

  Jere
my Knight/Jacky Mac arose from the floor of the Studio to discover what the commotion outside was about and was stunned when Remo/The Killer threw himself sobbing into his arms.

  City police found Sonya holding open the faded gold door of the elevator. She’d knocked Rosalin down and stabbed her multiple times. The surveillance tape showed it all. She’d even looked up and waved.

  When they hustled her out of the hotel and into a police car, Sonya yelled to the crowd, “She wanted me to die, wanted somebody else to die. But her work was over and the play must go on!”

  A reporter asked Cass, “City officials think the production can open again in another few days. Do you believe it’s safe for theatergoers?”

  Jacoby Cass had heard from Inspector Chen that the authorities regarded this as a murder that could have taken place anywhere. The elevator, though, would need to be thoroughly inspected and his supervisors would accompany him.

  Cass anticipated a flurry of green handshakes but knew Sleep Walking Now and Then was booked solid for at least the next six months. He told the reporter, “Yes. Notice that at no time was the life of any patron threatened!”

  “Is the place haunted,” Keri Mayne was constantly asked.

  Leaving the building the night of the murder, she had felt Rosalin’s presence in the lobby and wondered if her death was her greatest piece of theatrical design. Until then Keri hadn’t thought much about spirits. “Yes,” she always said. “And I’m dedicating each of my future performances to the ghosts.”

  Seeing Jeremy Knight and Remo arrive at a party as a couple, a social blogger asked, “Does this feel like your on-stage relationship?”

  Remo shook his head. Jeremy stopped smiling for a moment and said, “Yes.”

  As a foreign correspondent put it, “The Big Arena was made for moments like this.”

  Copyright © 2014 by Richard Bowes

  Art copyright © 2014 by Richie Pope

  The strands thrum faintly beneath her fingertips, like the strings of a lyre. Plain grey wool, held taut by the stone weights tied at the ends, awaiting her hand. She can feel the potential in the threads, the resonance. She has that much of the gift, at least.

  But it is madness to think she can do more. It is hubris.

  It is desperation.

  Her maid stands ready with the bone pick. She takes it up, slides its point beneath the first thread, and begins to weave.

  * * *

  Antinoös will be the most easily provoked. He has no care for the obligations of a guest, the courtesy due to his host; he sees only the pleasures to be had in food and drink. If these are restricted, marred—the meat burnt, the wine thin, the grapes too soon consumed—then he will complain. And it will take but one poorly phrased reassurance for his complaint to become more than mere words.

  The guards will know to watch for this. When Antinoös draws his knife, they will be ready. Others will come to Antinoös’ aid, of course; the tables will be knocked aside, the feast trampled underfoot, the rich treasures of the hall smashed to pieces.

  Antinoös will not be the first to die, though. That will be Peisandros, who will fall with a guard’s sword through his heart. After him, Klymenos, and then Pseras of the guards; then it will be a dozen, two score, three hundred and more dead, blood in a torrent, flames licking at the palace walls, smoke and death and devastation.

  * * *

  She drops the shuttle, shaking with horror. No, no. That was not how she meant it to go.

  “My lady?” the maid asks, uncertain.

  She almost takes up scissors and cuts her error away. Some fragment of wisdom stops her: that is not her gift, and to try must surely end in disaster. Instead she retrieves the shuttle, sends it back through without changing the shed. Unweaving the line that had been. “The pick,” she commands, and her maid gives it to her in silent confusion. With a careful hand she lifts the warp threads, passes the shuttle through, reversing her movements from before. Undoing the work of hours with hours more, while her maid helps without understanding.

  I must weave a funeral shroud, she had told them. She’d intended it to be for them. Not for all her city.

  But the power was there: within her grasp, beyond her control.

  She retires for the night, trembling, exhausted. Frightened. And exhilarated. When morning comes, all is as it was before, her problems unchanged, her desperation the same. Gathering her courage, she goes back to the loom.

  Surely control may be learned.

  * * *

  After so many years enjoying the hospitality of the palace, the men will not be easily persuaded to leave. Frustration and failure will not do it; if those were sufficient, they would have departed long since. They stay on in perpetual hope of success, and will not leave until they believe that hope gone.

  She will choose her tool with care. Eurymachos is renowned for his silver tongue; he will bend it to her chosen end. A dropped hint here, a frank conversation over too much wine there. Why should a man stay, when he believes another has claimed the place he intended to take? An elegant man, well dressed and better spoken than his rivals—and they will see the proof of it, when she bestows smiles upon him she denies to all others. For him, she will drape herself in rich cloth, adorn her ears and neck with gold. For him, she will play the coquette.

  One by one, they will go. Grumbling, disappointed, a few vowing some revenge against Eurymachos for having stolen the place they thought to claim. But they will go, without a fight. Their numbers will dwindle: one hundred and eight, four score, two score, twelve. They will leave, and with each chamber emptied she will breathe more easily.

  Until only one remains. Smiling, smoothspoken Eurymachos, to whom she has shown much favor. He will not leave. For has she not made a promise to him, in the absence of her husband, whom all presume dead?

  Too late, she will see that it has gone too far. He has coaxed from her words she never meant to speak, implications she cannot disavow. To do so would bring war, and the destruction she sought to avoid. She will have no choice but to acquiesce, for the sake of her people, for the sake of her son.

  She will fail, and pay the price of that failure until the end of her days.

  * * *

  This time she is shaking with rage. To be so manipulated, so trapped … she would die before she allowed that to happen.

  Or would she? After all, the future now hanging on the loom is her own creation. However undesirable, it is possible. She could not have woven it, were it not so.

  Her maid waits at her shoulder. They have long since begun to tell tales, she knows, her maidservants whispering of their mistress’ odd behavior. They think it only a tactic for delay, an excuse for avoiding the men. That, they whisper, is why she undoes her work each night, reclaiming her spent thread, only to start anew in the morning.

  As reasons go, it is a good one. They need not know the rest of her purpose. If any hint of that reached the men, all hope of her freedom would be gone.

  Night after night, fate after fate. She can only keep trying. Surely somewhere, in all the myriad crossings of the threads, there is a future in which all will be well.

  * * *

  Her son will ask again for stories of his father, and she will tell him what she knows. That the king was summoned to war, and he went; that many who sailed to the east never returned.

  This time, Telemachos will not be content with the familiar tale. He will insist on hearing more. When she cannot satisfy him, he will declare his intent to go in search of the truth.

  It will wrench her heart to let him go. The seas took one man from her already; will they take this one as well, this youth she remembers as a babe at her breast? But release him she will, because perhaps he will find what she cannot: an escape from this trap, for himself, for her, for them all.

  He will board the ship and go to Pylos, to Sparta, and in the halls of a king he will indeed hear the tale. Full of joy, he will set sail for home—but on the beaches of Ithaka, he will find a different welcome.


  Antinoös, Ktesippos, Elatos, and others besides. Armed and armored, prepared not for war, but for murder. There on the beaches they will cut her son down, and his blood will flower like anemone in the sand.

  When the news reaches her, it will break her heart. She will fling herself from the walls of Ithaka, and her sole victory will be that none among her suitors will ever claim her.

  * * *

  She wants to weep, seeing what she has woven. The threads fight her, their orderly arrangement belying their potential for chaos. Each thread is a life, and each life is a thousand thousand choices; she is not goddess enough to control them. Only a woman, a mortal woman, with a trace of the divine in her veins. And a trace is not enough.

  It has become far too familiar, this unweaving. Forward and back make little difference to the speed and surety of her hands. Melantho gathers up the loose thread silently, winds it back onto the shuttle, but her mistress does not miss the sullen look in the girl’s eyes. This is one who has made her life pleasant by giving herself to the men. She does not like being a maidservant, even to a queen.

  A queen who can trace her ancestry back through her grandmother’s grandmother to the three daughters of Necessity. From them she inherits this fragment of their gift, to spin thread and link it to men, to weave the shape of their fates on her loom. If she continues her efforts …

  But she has no chance to try again. When she goes to that high chamber the next morning, Leodes is there, and the frame is bare of threads. He knows what she has been doing; they all know, for Melantho has told them. Leodes has always been more tolerable than the others, for he is their priest, and alone among them he respects the obligations of a guest. He chides her now for her dishonesty, though, for lying to them all this time about the progress of her weaving. There will be no more thread for her, no days and nights spent safe in this room, trying to weave a path away from danger.

  He leaves her there with the empty frame and empty hands. She is not without choices: she has woven a hundred of them, a thousand, a new one every day. But every one ends in disaster. She will not choose disaster.