The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018

by John Joseph Adams

  “Uncle?” I force the word from my constricting throat. It comes out a croak. I swallow. “Uncle?”

  There are no more sounds.

  I tell myself Uncle is fine, and then I tell myself I am a bad liar, that the silence is too heavy to be natural, and that the next unnatural silence will come from me. The footsteps have stopped completely, but still I wait. I count to thirty, to fifty, to seventy-five, before knowing Uncle could really be hurt overpowers my cowardice. I open the door fully conscious of the hairs rising on the back of my neck and the goosebumps prickling my arms. The sound of the beads scritching over the wooden door does nothing to soothe my nerves. Outside my room it is dark, but the light over the stairwell is on. I poke my head over the threshold and feel the beads from the lintel sliding cool on the back of my neck.

  “Uncle?” I call softly, then again, louder: “Uncle? Are you all right?”

  There is still no sound.

  I grip the doorframe and step one foot outside. I cannot see around the stairs. I cannot see Uncle. I feel my way slowly outside and, seeing nothing—though perhaps what had happened couldn’t be seen?—dart into the light of the stairwell.

  I nearly trip over Uncle. He is slumped at the bottom of the stairs, as if he’d started to go up, become light-headed, and sat down just before passing out. There is no blood, and no wound that I can see. Perhaps he had been walking strangely because he felt sick?

  Still I am wary when I crouch over him, clutching his thin shoulder and staring down at his chest to make sure it still rises and falls. He is alive, at least, but his breathing comes shallow and fast, and a strange smell of rot covers him that is both odd and familiar—the scent of the house when I wake up in the mornings, that fades until I go to bed. The smell grows stronger, and I look from Uncle to the dark room around me. The shadows move as they always move, and yet the stench creeps closer. Rot, death, decay. That is what’s coming.

  The clock chimes quarter past and I think I might leap out of my skin.

  I want to leave Uncle and go to my room—the room with a door I can close and beads that are supposed to protect me. But before I can decide whether bolting will remain on my conscience forever, a shadow peels away from the darkness: a dragging corpse with a face I almost recognize.

  The creature before me might have been human once, but the body it wears is in tatters. Dark skin in a wash of brown and green shades hangs off of torn muscles and ligaments and bones, just as the fibrous rags of a blue pinstriped dress shirt and stained off-white briefs hang from it. Maggots wriggle in the creature’s empty eye sockets and drip from the thing like blood. Its lips are gone, leaving black gums and a ghastly wide smile that never wavers. It reaches out to me with fingertips that are almost entirely bone, and a familiar scarred hand.

  The corpse’s mouth opens. “Cousin,” it says in French, “give me your body, so I can avenge my death.”

  It makes the creature real when that honey-sweet, broken-glass voice pummels its way out of my missing cousin’s mouth. I start to scream, but the taste of its stench makes me choke. Someone—Uncle—clutches the back of my knee, and I scream and scuttle away before realizing I have left us both alone to face the creature, the stranger who’s wearing my cousin’s skin. I grope toward the kitchen light, but before I can turn it on, the smell of rot is overwhelming and the creature is in front of me.

  I freeze as abruptly as I moved before, and my breath stops with my body. The corpse’s hands touch my face with hard fingers, pressing my forehead where Uncle touched me just before he closed my door. Darkness seeps into my vision, and a new presence crawls in from the edges.

  Something pushes me hard in the chest, but it is not a hand or a body, it is that presence—who is Kanku?—in my chest and my head, stretching through my legs and my arms and my pelvis, trying to push me out.

  With a snap like a rubber band or a sparked synapse, I am outside myself. I feel nothing. I think I must go somewhere, but I do not know or care where that place is. I only know my body is walking away from me, out of the kitchen and into the living room, and I feel nothing about this but mild curiosity: why am I not inside my body? A knife hangs casually from the hand that was mine. I wonder what it is for.

  Kanku: “My father he killed me”

  Soon my twin’s body will be too weak to leave this room, and Baba will have killed me—again. Day after day I stand at this bedroom door in Mbuyi’s decomposing flesh—though it has lasted years, like it knew this shape would have been mine too if I had lived. I wait for the midnight chimes as the air grows ripe around me. My hour, once again, is closing in.

  I have spent much of my life waiting. Much of my life thinking. There is little living to do without a body to do it with. There have been three long waits in my life, before and after my death. I dwell on my memories, review them, pick at them like wounds made to fester and seethe. I replay my life and my rage, and the memories give me strength to finish the task I have set for myself: I will kill my Baba.

  It all began with Mama.

  “Kanku, come here!”

  In our bedroom, I stop playing cowboys with Mbuyi and run to the kitchen. “Yes, Mama?”

  Mama is stirring a pot on the stove. “Kanku, find me my peeling knife. It’s not in the drawer where it belongs.”

  I think it is on the television, and when I run to the other room it is waiting for me there, just like I thought. I bring it to Mama. She smiles and takes it from me, kisses my cheek. “Such a clever boy,” she says. She frowns at the blade then, spits an annoyed sound through her teeth. “Wash this.”

  I take it to the sink.

  Baba says, “Where was it?”

  I tell him, “You left it on the TV.”

  Mama’s face glows with pride as she nods, but Baba is quiet. Then he says, “You were asleep when I got it out.” He does not sound proud, or even happy.

  “Our son is gifted,” Mama says. I dry the cleaned knife and give it back. She sets it down, keeps stirring the pot on the stove.

  As I leave the kitchen, Baba says, quiet, “A gift is only as good as the person who has it.”

  Something crashes—Mama’s spoon against the pot, I think, or the stove. “Our sons are good boys,” she growls, low, like I am not supposed to hear.

  “So you say,” Baba bites back, just as quiet.

  Inside our bedroom, Mbuyi looks up from a new wire man he is making. Expression waiting to be delighted, he asks, “What did she want you to find this time?”

  I shove Baba’s suspicion away from my face and my thoughts. I won’t tell Mbuyi. It would hurt him to know.

  Mama was proud when I knew things grownups didn’t want me to know. She ruffled my hair and pulled me close when Baba’s friends looked wide-eyed at my words. She said I had a gift, that the ancestors had blessed me. I think maybe Mama was the blessing.

  Remembering the kitchen knife—among other things she had me find—I’ve thought about how I could have known where it was without knowing why I knew. Perhaps I followed a trail of observations: Baba sometimes used the knives in the kitchen as screwdrivers; Baba always fixed the broken things in the house; the TV wasn’t working, and he’d tested the antenna while I played in the family room, but the picture was still skipping, and he was annoyed he’d have to unscrew the back to look inside; the next afternoon the TV was working, but I never saw him fix it and I was home all day. Perhaps I even saw the knife crossing through the room from the kitchen or my bedroom, and left it because Baba might still be using it. I am still not sure how I found things for her, if I even had a gift, but Mama impressed upon me that being a good man, using my gift wisely, would bring good fortune to us all. Mama told me, You are a good boy. I know you will be a good man.

  Mama said when we die, we join our ancestors in the spirit world stretched out over this one like a mirror, like a twin. There, joyfully reunited with our loved ones, we watch over our living family members. They give us honor and we bring them comfort. They give us prayers and we p
rotect them from witches. They beg our advice and we nudge them in the right direction. Because of this, Mama said, no one is ever truly alone. Living or dead, we will always have family.

  “Mbuyi, you cannot catch me! I am faster than you!” When my twin sees me again, I stop to wave the wire man he made, laughing. When he chases me, I run to the kitchen.

  “Give that back! I said give it back!”

  Mama shakes her head at us, but I see her smile as I run past her troop of steaming pots, and I am happy.

  Baba is in the living room. “Mbuyi! Kanku! Stop running around this house while your mother is cooking!”

  We stop. “We’re sorry, Baba,” we say with one voice.

  I hide the wire man behind my back. Mbuyi wrinkles his nose at me.

  “Kanku—come here.” Baba holds out his hand to my twin.

  “I’m Kanku!” I almost smile. Baba still confuses us. Mama never has.

  Then you come here! Give that back to your brother.”

  If I give it back, the game is over. “But Baba—”

  “Don’t look at me that way,” Baba snarls, “it isn’t natural.” Baba’s face is hard, cold. It scares me. I look at Mbuyi, confused and afraid, and his face is a mirror of my own.

  “Like what, Baba?” I am grateful to Mbuyi; I know he asks for me.

  Baba only says, “Give that to me,” then, “Mbuyi, come here. Here. Now go, both of you. And don’t run in the house—you are not dogs, do not act like them!” He returns to his newspaper. Mbuyi grabs my hand as we go hide in our bedroom, squeezing it to comfort me. His unease is a mirror of my own.

  Too soon, Mama had stomach pains, or child pains, or some pungent infection Baba would not explain. When Baba was at work, Mbuyi and I would play in Mama’s room even though it smelled so bad I couldn’t keep my face from curling when I opened the door. Mbuyi wanted to play outside with the other kids, and sometimes he would, but often he would keep me company in Mama’s room and make wire cars and men for us to play with from the rug next to the bed. From Mama’s bed, where I curled against her as she slept, I would reach down and make the men dance and sing for us, make Mbuyi’s eyes light up as he held in laughter. We used the figures to tell Mama’s familiar stories. Sometimes, when she woke up, she pulled me and Mbuyi close and said, Did I ever tell you the story about—and we would say no and beg her to tell it even if we knew it already, and she would smile through strained eyes and stroke our arms and murmur tales about the wider world.

  My first long wait was for my mother to recover her health. That wait was the shortest. It lasted a year. Her death brought my own.

  Mbuyi is at the neighbor’s house, where I am supposed to be, but I snuck home before Baba. I hear him from my bed.

  “You think he is a witch?” Baba’s friend says.

  “He refused to leave her, and now she is dead. He must be a witch.” Baba’s voice is cold. He is always cold now, when he speaks of me. When he speaks to me. I do not know how to make his voice change back.

  “He is only a child—and a twin! He is good fortune! How can he be a witch?”

  I am not a witch. Mama knew. Mama loved me. It hurts, always, now she is gone.

  “You have seen the way he looks at people. How he moves his hands when he thinks no one sees. And now he speaks to no one!”

  “It is suspicious . . .”

  I talk to Mbuyi. I talk to Mama. Mama knew I have restless hands. She used to hand me things to toy with—spoons, sticks, dolls. She knew it calmed me. Now I have only my fingers. I move them and remember her. It calms me.

  “I will not take him with us. I will have enough trouble with just Mbuyi anyway. What kind of father keeps a murderer with his son?”

  My heart freezes in my chest. No. He would not leave me behind.

  “No one will take in a witch.”

  “And no one should. He killed my wife—let him lie in the bed he has made.”

  No. I would never hurt Mama. I love Mama.

  I want Mbuyi. I want my Mama.

  No.

  After Mama cut our hair, she burned it in the fire. After we cut our nails, she burned those in the fire. Mama said, Be careful whose gifts you accept, and be careful who you give gifts to. You never know when a witch will use a gift to curse you, sacrificing your life to gain more power. A twin’s death is powerful magic for a witch. So Mbuyi, watch out for your brother. And Kanku, take care of your brother. People come and go, Mama said, but you can always rely on your family.

  “Do not cry, I said!”

  “Baba, don’t leave me, please!”

  “Oh, so now you talk?”

  “We are all going to the new house in America, you said—”

  “Don’t you cry to me, Kanku! You killed your mother—I would not take you to a dog’s house.”

  “I did not! I promise, I tell you the truth!”

  Baba’s big hand cracks, and I fall.

  “You are a liar and a witch. Stay here.”

  “. . . but Baba—”

  “Let go of me!”

  “Baba, please, Baba—”

  “Do not try to follow us. You are not my son—you are no one’s son.”

  Glass breaks. Mbuyi cries out. The car horn shrieks and shrieks.

  No one took me in, not even a witch to make a sacrifice. I was seven years old when I realized Mama was wrong, that Mama lied.

  It is important to know where you come from. It is important to remember your roots. As I wait for dark power to swallow the air, as I wait while Baba and that girl fritter away downstairs, as I stand in Mbuyi’s room picking maggots out of my cheeks and hips and squishing their wriggling bodies, I remember with religious fervor the distance that I have come, and fuel my rage.

  The second long wait spanned the end of my life and lasted most of my death. For almost two decades I waited for my family to come home.

  The sun is not pretty anymore. It burns like their eyes, always watching. Warning me away. Throwing stones at the witch. Only the dogs are not afraid. They smell death. They are starved as me, their ribs showing and spines poking and dry tongues dragging from their mouths. I talk to them, but they are not friends. Their fur is spiked with ticks. They are waiting.

  I stole food. I sheltered with and ran from other “witch” children cast out on the street. I grew bony with hunger, and bitter, and mean. I knew I was going to die. And where were my ancestors, who I prayed to? Where was Mama’s comforting warmth to my spirit? How much of what she said was wrong when she told me of death and the afterlife?

  As death knelt close, I knew I was truly alone in the only world that mattered.

  I made a choice.

  And Mama was right: the death of a twin is powerful magic.

  They are no longer waiting.

  They gorge their feral stomachs.

  The people turn their eyes away.

  As I hovered over my body, I waited:

  . . . Mama? . . . Ancestors? . . . Anyone?

  . . . No.

  They ate me. Tore into my body like jackals. They ate me . . .

  But . . . they are only dogs. This is not their fault.

  Mama left me.

  Baba killed me.

  Mbuyi let him kill me.

  I’ll show them a witch. They will come back home.

  I am waiting.

  The first body I took was a witch boy I ran from once. He was twelve, an adult to my seven-year-old eyes.

  When I was alive, he found me eating chicken and foufou I stole from a table when a missionary stood to hug his friend. I ran with heart in my throat through the streets until the shouting died. Then I huddled with my stolen food, my first meal in days, under an awning on a quiet street of shops. I ate like the street dogs, quick and brutal and wary. The witch boy still surprised me. He pulled me up by my wrist, stole the chicken from my slick fingers, and shoved me hard onto the ground. These are my streets, he said as I skittered away. He sucked the rest of the meat into his mouth as I seethed with wretched hatred.
He noticed my fist, cradled to my chest. But before he said, Give me that, I was running.

  While I lived, alone on the streets, I ran and I hid. As a dead boy, I explored my hometown fearlessly, in the open, though I could travel only a few kilometers from where I died. Whenever I got too far, my consciousness narrowed and fluttered like a fish gasping for breath. I found the witch boy again as I explored. I wondered if I could hurt him now. I meant to burrow into his chest, try to squeeze his heart. Instead I felt his spirit quail against me. I thrashed it with glee and shoved it out.

  The sudden wall of sensation knocked me flat, and then his memories assailed me. I lay in the street like a drunk. It took most of the night for me to master his body. The next day I stole and I ate. I had longer legs. My new body was weak, but stronger than mine had been when I died. I survived for two glorious days in his body. Then it began to rot.

  I stole more bodies while I waited for my family. People who wronged me in life. People who should have stood up for me, taken me in. People with hands in my death. Always they began to rot after a few days. I discarded them quickly so no one suspected a witch. I learned one other thing during these experiments: while cloaked in a body, my tether was gone.

  More than a decade passed before Mbuyi came home to visit our old house. I watched him walk through town, ask after me, come away angry. I wanted his body, but I hesitated. In all of my memories, Mbuyi loved me, took care of me. I watched him plant his feet in the ghosts of Baba’s footprints and look down the road. He did not feel my presence as he apologized to a dead boy.

  If he is really sorry, I thought, he will not fight me too much.

  The last wait I spent trapped in my Baba’s house, in a bedroom that should’ve been mine: I waited for the day I could finally kill him for killing me.