by Tanith Lee
“I bet you’re not sorry you stayed,” I said to her as everybody was gathering up their papers and their coats, and she made a face that could have meant anything.
Outside the church, the sky was mostly dark and streaked with red but there was just enough light to see by. Some of the sessions would go on into the evening, but quite a few of us were dispersing to our cars.
This was never my favourite kind of countryside. Far too flat and featureless. I imagine it had all been under the sea at one time, and the best thing you could say about it was that the views were uninterrupted. Looking out now, across the road and the fields beyond, I realised that I could see all the way to the far horizon. On the horizon sat the disappearing rim of the sun, on a strip of ocean that was like a ribbon of fire.
In a minute or less, the sun would have dropped and the effect would be gone. I wasn’t the only one to have my attention caught by it.
I could see Chantal about halfway across the parking area. She was out where there were few cars and she was alone. She was little more than a shadow-silhouette in the fading light but, as before, she was immediately recognisable.
I saw this little ghost take a faltering step, and then another. And then I saw her break into a run.
I don’t know why. But it was as if she’d seen a doorway open up between the sun and the sea, and she’d set her mind to reach it before it closed.
Whatever was in her mind, she was running straight for the road.
I wasn’t near enough to reach her. I looked around for her parents and saw them, loading their stuff into a brown Allegro. I’ll swear to what happened then, because I saw it. I don’t think anyone else did.
Her mother looked back over her shoulder. That’s all she did. She didn’t call out and she didn’t even change her expression. Just looked at the running child, and the running child stopped about a dozen yards short of the road.
A couple of cars zipped by. Then the child turned and started back.
She climbed into the brown car without a word and they all drove off together.
As I said, that was last year.
This year, we went again.
Vicky had picked up a first prize in one of the classes in the city festival a few months later, and it had raised her enthusiasm enough for her to want another crack at this one. When the time came around, we sent in the forms. We skipped that perverse morning session, finally giving in to the lesson of experience, and went straight for the afternoon.
I remembered little Chantal, and when we got there I looked for her name in the programme. I felt a slight disappointment when I didn’t see it. I was curious to see how she might have developed — at that age, a year can make a lot of difference in one way or another — but it seemed that I wasn’t to find out.
Well, it was only curiosity.
But here’s the odd thing. Chantal wasn’t there, but her family was.
I knew it as soon as I saw Cecil B up in the gallery with his camera. Of course I immediately looked around the pews, and saw the mother with the boy. But no little dead girl.
The boy was in short pants and a clean shirt with a little bow tie. He was behaving himself. Or was he? By the look of him, you’d think he’d been drugged. He certainly wasn’t the squirming live wire I remembered from the year before. In fact he had the same kind of slack, dead-eyed expression that I’d seen on his sister.
So if they were here, where was she? Could she have changed so much that I’d passed her outside and hadn’t recognised her? I looked towards the doorway, expecting her to walk in and join them, but the stewards were closing up the room ready to begin.
The competition started, and the boy just sat there.
Until a name was called, and with a nudge from his mother he got to his feet.
Surprised, I watched him move to the piano. He took short steps. If body language could show a stammer, I reckon that walk is what you’d see. When he reached the piano, he turned to face the audience. And when the accompanist hit the first note, he switched on his smile.
The woman leaned forward in the crowd, her gaze intent, her lips already beginning to shape the first of the words. Upstairs, the man rolled the tape.
I looked at Vicky, and Vicky looked at me.
And down by the piano, when the moment came, the boy placed his hand over his heart, opened his mouth, and sang like a clockwork nightingale.
THE FORTUNE TELLER, by Chris Ferrier
The orphaned girl will not marry the prince.
While gathering wood in the dark forest,
She will lose her way in a sudden storm
And fall into an exhausted sleep
in a snowdrift.
Hungry wolves will gnaw her bones.
The rich man’s son will not find
the beautiful stranger
He danced with at a midnight ball
Before she vanished
in a mysterious black coach.
After ten years of searching,
He will marry a fat widow
with three daughters.
The farm boy will leave home
to become a hero.
He will soon become a mercenary instead
And die on a rain-soaked battleground
Remembering the smell
of his mother’s baked bread.
You will meet me at a festival or a fair,
A dark woman wearing a red flounced skirt
And glittering jangling bangles.
I’ll sit at a table and turn the cards,
Gather and shuffle them,
and lay them out again.
I know the moment the smallest seed
will sprout.
I know when empires will rise and fall.
I know the hour each stranger around me
will die
And I know the reason why.
I never stay long in one place.
But, for a single silver coin,
I’ll tell you the future.
The rich man’s son will not
find the beautiful stranger.
The orphaned girl will not marry the prince.
WHOM EVEN DEATH MIGHT FEAR, by Darrell Schweitzer
There stands a tavern at the world’s rim, a creaking, sighing place, great and many-gabled, builded on a raised lip of stone, leaning precariously into the abyss.
The tavern has two doors. The first, the most commonly reached by travelers after strange dreams and long journeyings, opens upon the world of mankind. One pauses on that threshold to turn and gaze back the way one has come, before gathering up courage to continue on; or, homeward bound, one might look expectantly down to where Time marches along the shining road into the familiar fields, attended by his servants the Seasons in their cloaks of ice or flowers or fire or gray wind.
But the second door opens into the abyss. Stardust washes onto the doorstep like gleaming foam on a midnight beach. There the bravest may stand to peer into the unreverberate blackness between the worlds, where the starfields flicker with the passage of dragons or ripple and splash like water when the gods rise up out of infinity, like leviathans breaching from the deep.
I tell you that the names of the tavern are many, in tongues ancient, forgotten, and not yet born. It is called the Dreamer’s Rest, and also Revelation, and Madness; but its most ancient and truest name cannot be spoken. It is the subject of much scholarly debate among wizards. No one knows what it actually means.
And I tell you further that so great was my mastery of the forbidden arts, so astonishing my accomplishment, that I came to that place from out of the abyss, as had never been done before in all the histories of dream.
This was the culmination of years of study and struggle; for I had joined secret societies in New York, London, and in ancient lands far to the east. I apprenticed myself to the greatest sorcerer of my time, learned his secrets, and overthrew him. Then, and only then, was my way clear. I hurled my soul into the void. I swam among the worlds and beyond, to sh
ake the very domains of the gods, to invade their palaces and wrest their treasures from them.
Yet, in the end, I was weary; I reached the threshold. I stood there, gasping, my sword drawn, dripping with the blood of dragons, my costume splattered with same, stardust glittering from my cloak and shoes.
Behind me, the stars rippled. The darkness swelled up. Perhaps I was pursued. I hurried inside.
There I entered a low, dark, smoke-filled room beneath heavy beams. Lanterns drifted in the air, borne by invisible hands. Seeing me and noting the direction whence I had come, those seated around the tables grew quiet. Magicians from many times and places and planets, some of whom I jokingly called “colleagues,” gazed upon me in baleful, envious, or even terrified silence. It seemed that even the smoke hung motionless in the air, as did bones or dice tossed in game, or cups raised to lips. All stopped.
Crowded at the far end of the room were folk with the heads of beasts, with gleaming eyes. They parted to let me pass, and I glimpsed among them one with the golden horns of a ram and the face of a beautiful child; and behind me, as I made my way into the corridor, that one began to bleat terrible prophecies, while conversation resumed amid bursts of uncertain laughter.
Flicking my sword nervously from side to side, less steady on my feet than I had realized in my weariness, I sought out, but did not find, Mine Host. This was another of the mysteries of this place, that no one knew who owned it or operated it, though the guests never wanted for service and the cellars were well- stocked. Let the gods be troubled by that, I thought. Let them figure it out. They had nothing better to do.
My mind was in a precarious state. My attention wandered as the corridors twisted, like a labyrinth one comes to in a dream, turning at impossible angles, opening into endless rooms. Here I found a circle of chanting men with faces like bubbling metal, their features contorted with rage or pain; and each held in his hands the half-molten image of the face of his neighbor, all aflame, each image screaming wordlessly in a tiny voice. Yet when they saw me, they too were silent, and closed their hands to cover their secrets.
And, again, a curtain parted, and a lady peered out. She called on me softly to join her in her booth.
Her face and her breasts were pale, dazzling; but even so, I glimpsed her serpentine body and knew that she was a lamia, who would devour me if I came too near.
I had to focus my mind. I had to rest and recover my strength, then achieve that final revelation which, it had been prophesied (as indeed the ram-horned one bleated yet), someone would one day achieve in this place and bear away into the world like a prize.
The one who achieved it, so the story went, would be followed by no other. When that happens, we are told, the true name of the Dreamer’s Rest will be known at last.
Suddenly someone grabbed me by the arm and said, “Come here, you!” I was dragged into a booth. A hastily drawn curtain shut out all but a little light.
I sat in the foul, close air and studied my captor by light of a sputtering lantern, which drifted above our tabletop like a moth. I made out his broken, ugly teeth first, then his stubbled, rough face, his unkempt hair like filthy straw, and finally his narrow shoulders hunched like a scarecrow about to fall off of its pole. The features of the face were aged beyond describing. Only the eyes truly alive, both fierce and pitiable at the same time.
I drew myself up. I fingered my sword, which I still held, with which I could have killed this ancient right then and there with a swift thrust under the table.
“And you might be, Sir —?”
But the other (Mine Host at last?) merely shook his head and made a grunting sound that might have been intended as a laugh.
“You don’t understand any of this yet, do you, pup? Put your pig-sticker away. It won’t do you any good.”
I sheathed my sword, hesitantly, as the other shrugged, reached into some shadowed alcove (or through a solid wall?) and produced platters of food and mugs of thick ale. We feasted for a time, as I desperately needed to, for in strenuous dreams body and soul both waste away; and while the soul adventures among stars and monsters, the body can die back on Earth.
So I was, in a small way, grateful. We ate, and my vigor and confidence returned. I resolved to write an account, when all this was over, of my adventures. All but a few would think it a fantasy, of course; and most of the rest would think me mad. But if any one truly understood what I had written, then I would have to battle and kill him.
For I knew I could allow myself no equal, no rival.
All this while my new-found friend, or whatever he fancied himself, studied me intently, as if I were the greatest and strangest of all treasures ever washed up onto the threshold of the starlit door.
“Are you the one, returned to me at last?”
“The one…what?”
“The one I preserved on that night so long ago, for whom I have since suffered so much?”
“I don’t think so . . .”
For just an instant, then, I admit it, my confidence faltered, and I allowed him to reach across the table and seize me by the front of my jacket with a grip of living stone. He yanked me up, across the table, nearer to him, and he stared into my eyes.
And I saw in his the glimmer of something I had perhaps once dreamed, something I perhaps did begin to recognize; and his eyes glistened as he saw that recognition, which was like a faint ember newly touched by a breath of air.
He let go. I slid back into my seat.
“Listen to my tale,” he said, “and then judge.”
Suddenly I felt alarmingly weak again, as if the meat and bread I had eaten were an airy nothing, like fairy gold. I was again afraid that my magics would fail, that I would plunge from this high place back into the world, like Icarus from out of the sky when his wings melted.
I could only listen.
“It was in an ancient land,” he began, “in a hall of heroes, where men feasted and drank between the wars, where they tended their wounds and told mighty tales of their deeds, where they renewed their strength before setting forth again to accomplish those things which are celebrated in song and saga.”
Yes, I thought, I’m like that myself.
My mind was wandering again. He continued with his story.
“I was not a hero myself. I never wore a plume-crested helmet nor bore a bronze shield. I was just one of the servants. I waited on tables, all the while envying those great ones with their gleaming faces and massive forms, their bright weapons and armor, the thunder of their voices as they boasted.
“I prayed to the gods that I could be as those men, that the heroes would call me comrade, look on me with awe, and sing my story. But there are things that should not be. Somehow my prayers were blasphemous. That is why, I think, the gods, on a whim, granted them; for the gods do not favor mankind, but trifle with us as a child might with insects, stirring them around with his finger or crushing them into the earth for his sport.
“What followed was terrible and wonderful. I alone survived to tell of it. What a song it would make, if only…if only…but I am losing my thread.
“On the night of which I speak, in a year gone past counting, the great lord of our hall had taken a new bride. It was his wedding night, and the boasting and feasting and song were more frenzied than ever; and men fought where the tables had been cleared away, with iron weapons, and dealt wounds, but only in game. The blood spilt was a kind of libation, to sanctify the event.
“And the hour grew late and the fires burned low, our lord having long since taken his bride with him into the wedding chamber. Only a few men still lingered on benches, drinking slowly or gaming with bones and dice. It was then that I spied Death sneaking into our hall. He drifted among the benches and tables like a dark cloud, and when he turned toward me, the hood of his cloak fell open, revealing his bare, skeletal face.
“No one else saw him. Not one of the storied heroes looked up from drink or game or drunken slumber. I think it was because, in malicious answe
r to my prayers, the gods had secretly touched my eyes and opened them to see what others could not.
“And I was loyal beyond fear to that house of heroes, and filled with absurd pride, thinking to be as one of them; and it was I and I alone who challenged Death on our master’s wedding night.
“I snatched up a cleaver from out of the greasy remains of a roast and said, ‘Stand fast and fight with me. Spare our lord and his bride.’
“But Death only laughed at me, in a voice like the coldest wind of winter. Then he did something which, at first, made no sense, and was not threatening, or even mockery.
“He reached out and touched me on the upper lip, right under my nose. His finger was bone, of course, and his touch was hard and dry. He pushed my lip back into my teeth. I flinched and drew away.
“ ‘I’ve touched you there before,’ says he, ‘On the night you were conceived, I came and touched you, reaching into your mother’s womb. I molded your lip like soft clay, marking you as my own, that I might claim you again whenever I choose.’
“Though my thick moustache was matted with food and drink, still, when I put my finger there, I felt the little indentation in the upper lip where, indeed, Death had touched me, as he touches us all.”
In the stinking dark, in the crowded booth in the tavern called the Dreamer’s Rest, as my weariness returned and flooded over me, I reached up and slid my finger over my own lip.
The ancient teller resumed:
“Still I held my greasy cleaver. I picked up a stool to use as a shield.
“ ‘You shall not pass,’ I said.
“But Death only waved his hand. ‘Be not afraid,’ says he. ‘I shall take no one here, not this night. Your lord shall sire a mighty son, the bravest and strongest and most guileful of men, who will drink deep of wisdom and work many magics. But for the balance of things, lest the son become too great, and overthrow the gods and break up the world in his hands like a clod of mud, I must touch him. Stand aside.’
“I remained where I was.