“But that’s a good thing,” she said. “You keep your eyes peeled, Mr. Nelson. You’ve seen things already, and you haven’t seen the last of them.” She tapped my arm with her juice-box straw. “I have faith in you,” she said. “I wasn’t sure at first. That’s why I came to visit, to see if you were keeping the faith. And I see now that you are—in your own way.”
“I ain’t got no faith,” I said. “I done aged out of it.”
She stood up. “Oh, pish tosh,” she said. “You proved otherwise last night. The others tried to stay out of the light, but not you, Mr. Nelson. Not you.” She set her juice box on the step beside mine. “Throw that away for me, will you? I got to be going.” She stuck out her hand. It felt hot to the touch, and powerful. Holding it gave me the strength to stand up, look into her eyes, and say:
“I made it all up. The dog Bo, and the trips to Venus and Mars, and the cured lumbago. It was a made-up story, ever single Lord God speck of it.”
And I said that sincerely. Bob Solomon forgive me: As I said it, I believed it was true.
She looked at me for a spell, her eyes big. She looked for a few seconds like a child I’d told Santa warn’t coming, ever again. Then she grew back up, and with a sad little smile she stepped toward me, pressed her hands flat to the chest bib of my overalls, stood on tippytoes, and kissed me on the cheek, the way she would her grandpap, and as she slid something into my side pocket she whispered in my ear, “That’s not what I hear on Enceladus.” She patted my pocket. “That’s how to reach me, if you need me. But you won’t need me.” She stepped into the yard and walked away, swinging her pocketbook, and called back over her shoulder: “You know what you need, Mr. Nelson? You need a dog. A dog is good help around a farm. A dog will sit up with you, late at night, and lie beside you, and keep you warm. You ought to keep your eye out. You never know when a stray will turn up.”
She walked around the bush and was gone. I picked up the empty Donald Ducks, because it was something to do, and I was turning to go in when a man’s voice called:
“Mr. Buck Nelson?”
A young man in a skinny tie and horn-rimmed glasses stood at the edge of the driveway where Miss Priss—no, Miss Rains, she deserved her true name—had stood a few moments before. He walked forward, one hand outstretched and the other reaching into the pocket of his denim jacket. He pulled out a long flat notebook.
“My name’s Matt Ketchum,” he said, “and I’m pleased to find you, Mr. Nelson. I’m a reporter with The Associated Press, and I’m writing a story on the surviving flying-saucer contactees of the 1950s.”
I caught him up short when I said, “Aw, not again! Damn it all, I just told all that to Miss Rains. She works for the A&P, too.”
He withdrew his hand, looked blank.
I pointed to the driveway. “Hello, you must have walked past her in the drive, not two minutes ago! Pretty girl in a red-and-black dress, boots up to here. Miss Rains, or Hanes, or something like that.”
“Mr. Nelson, I’m not following you. I don’t work with anyone named Rains or Hanes, and no one else has been sent out here but me. And that driveway was deserted. No other cars parked down at the highway, either.” He cocked his head, gave me a pitying look. “Are you sure you’re not thinking of some other day, sir?”
“But she…,” I said, hand raised toward my bib pocket—but something kept me from saying gave me her card. That pocket felt strangely warm, like there was a live coal in it.
“Maybe she worked for someone else, Mr. Nelson, like UPI, or maybe the Post-Dispatch? I hope I’m not scooped again. I wouldn’t be surprised, with the Spielberg picture coming out and all.”
I turned to focus on him for the first time. “Where is Enceladus, anyway?”
“I beg your pardon?”
I said it again, moving my lips all cartoony, like he was deaf.
“I, well, I don’t know, sir. I’m not familiar with it.”
I thought a spell. “I do believe,” I said, half to myself, “it’s one a them Saturn moons.” To jog my memory, I made a fist of my right hand and held it up—that was Saturn—and held up my left thumb a ways from it, and moved it back and forth, sighting along it. “It’s out a ways, where the ring gets sparse. Thirteenth? Fourteenth, maybe?”
He just goggled at me. I gave him a sad look and shook my head and said, “You don’t know much, if that’s what you know, and that’s a fact.”
He cleared his throat. “Anyway, Mr. Nelson, as I was saying, I’m interviewing all the contactees I can find, like George Van Tassel, and Orfeo Angelucci—”
“Yes, yes, and Truman Bethurum, and them,” I said. “She talked to all them, too.”
“Bethurum?” he repeated. He flipped through his notebook. “Wasn’t he the asphalt spreader, the one who met the aliens atop a mesa in Nevada?”
“Yeah, that’s the one.”
He looked worried now. “Um, Mr. Nelson, you must have misunderstood her. Truman Bethurum died in 1969. He’s been dead eight years, sir.”
I stood there looking at the rhododendron and seeing the pretty face and round hat, hearing the singsong voice, like she had learned English from a book.
I turned and went into the house, let the screen bang shut behind, didn’t bother to shut the wood door.
“Mr. Nelson?”
My chest was plumb hot now. I went straight to the junk room, yanked on the light. Everything was spread out on the floor where I left it. I shoved aside Marilyn, all the newspapers, pawed through the books.
“Mr. Nelson?” The voice was coming closer, moving through the house like a spooklight.
There it was: Aboard a Flying Saucer, by Truman Bethurum. I flipped through it, looking only at the pictures, until I found her: dark hair, big dark eyes, sharp chin, round hat. It was old Truman’s drawing of Captain Aura Rhanes, the sexy Space Sister from the planet Clarion who visited him eleven times in her little red-and-black uniform, come right into his bedroom, so often that Mrs. Bethurum got jealous and divorced him. I had heard that old Truman, toward the end, went out and hired girl assistants to answer his mail and take messages just because they sort of looked like Aura Rhanes.
“Mr. Nelson?” said young Ketchum, standing in the doorway. “Are you okay?”
I let drop the book, stood, and said, “Doing just fine, son. If you’ll excuse me? I got to be someplace.” I closed the door in his face, dragged a bookcase across the doorway to block it, and pulled out Miss Rhanes’ card, which was almost too hot to touch. No writing on it, neither, only a shiny silver surface that reflected my face like a mirror—and there was something behind my face, something a ways back inside the card, a moving silvery blackness like a field of stars rushing toward me, and as I stared into that card, trying to see, my reflection slid out of the way and the edges of the card flew out and the card was a window, a big window, and now a door that I moved through without stepping, and someone out there was playing a single fiddle, no dance tune but just a-scraping along slow and sad as the stars whirled around me, and a ringed planet was swimming into view, the rings on edge at first but now tilting toward me and thickening as I dived down, the rings getting closer, dividing into bands like layers in a rock face, and then into a field of rocks like that no-earthly-good south pasture, only there was so many rocks, so close together, and then I fell between them like an ant between the rocks in a gravel driveway, and now I was speeding toward a pinpoint of light, and as I moved toward it faster and faster, it grew and resolved itself and reshaped into a pear, a bulb, with a long sparkling line extending out, like a space elevator, like a chain, and at the end of the chain the moon became a glowing lightbulb. I was staring into the bulb in my junk room, dazzled, my eyes flashing, my head achy, and the card dropped from my fingers with no sound, and my feet were still shuffling though the fiddle had faded away. I couldn’t hear nothing over the knocking and the barking and young Ketchum calling: “Hey, Mr. Nelson? Is this your dog?”
GREAT-GRANDMOTHER IN THE CELLAR
<
br /> PETER S. BEAGLE
Peter S. Beagle [www.peterbeagle.com] was born in Manhattan on the same night that Billie Holiday was recording “Strange Fruit” and “Fine Mellow” just a few blocks away. Raised in the Bronx, Peter originally proclaimed he would be a writer when he was ten years old. Today he is acknowledged as an American fantasy icon, and to the delight of his millions of fans around the world is now publishing more than ever. He is the author of the beloved classic The Last Unicorn, as well as the novels A Fine and Private Place, The Innkeeper’s Song, and Tamsin. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Mythopoeic awards, and is the recipient of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. His most recent book is the collection Sleight of Hand.
I thought he had killed her.
Old people forget things, I know that—my father can’t ever remember where he set down his pen a minute ago—but if I forget, at the end of my life, every other thing that ever happened to me, I will still be clutched by the moment when I gazed down at my beautiful, beautiful, sweet-natured idiot sister and heard the whining laughter of Borbos, the witch-boy she loved, pattering in my head. I knew he had killed her.
Then I saw her breast rising and falling—so slowly!—and I saw her nostrils fluttering slightly with each breath, and I knew that he had only thrown her into the witch-sleep that mimics the last sleep closely enough to deceive Death Herself.
Borbos stepped from the shadows and laughed at me.
“Now tell your father,” he said. “Go to him and tell him that Jashani will lie so until the sight of my face—and only my face—awakens her. And that face she will never see until he agrees that we two may wed. Is this message clear enough for your stone skull, Da’mas? Shall I repeat it, just to be sure?”
I rushed at him, but he put up a hand and the floor of my sister’s chamber seemed to turn to oiled water under my feet. I went over on my back, flailing foolishly at the innocent air, and Borbos laughed again. If shukris could laugh, they would sound like Borbos.
He was gone then, in that way he had of coming and going, which Jashani thought was so dashing and mysterious, but which seemed to me fit only for sneak thieves and housebreakers. I knelt there alone, staring helplessly at the person I loved most in the world, and whom I fully intended to strangle when—oh, it had to be when!—she woke up. With no words, no explanations, no apologies. She’d know.
In the ordinary way of things, she’s far brighter and wiser and simply better than I, Jashani. My tutors all disapproved and despaired of me early on, with good reason; but before she could walk, they seemed almost to expect my sister to perform her own branlewei coming-of-age ceremony, and prepare both the ritual sacrifice and the meal afterward. It would drive me wild with jealousy—especially when Father would demand to know, one more time, why I couldn’t be as studious and accomplished as Jashani—if she weren’t so ridiculously decent and kind that there’s not a thing you can do except love her. I sometimes go out into the barn and scream with frustration, to tell you the truth… and then she comes running to see if I’m hurt or ill. At twenty-one, she’s two and a half years older than I, and she has never once let Father beat me, even when the punishment was so richly deserved that I’d have beaten me if I were in his place.
And right then I’d have beaten her, if it weren’t breaking my heart to see her prisoned in sleep unless we let the witch-boy have her.
It is the one thing we ever quarrel about, Jashani’s taste in men. Let me but mention that this or that current suitor has a cruel mouth, and all Chun will hear her shouting at me that the poor boy can’t be blamed for a silly feature—and should I bring a friend by, just for the evening, who happens to describe the poor boy’s method of breaking horses…well, that will only make things worse. If I tell her that the whole town knows that the fellow serenading her in the grape arbor is the father of two children by a barmaid, and another baby by a farm girl, Jashani will fly at me, claiming that he was a naive victim of their seductive beguilements. Put her in a room with ninety-nine perfect choices and one heartless scoundrel, and she will choose the villain every time. This prediction may very well be the one thing Father and I ever agree on, come to consider.
But Borbos…
Unlike most of the boys and men Jashani ever brought home to try out at dinner, I had known Borbos all my life, and Father had known the family since his own youth. Borbos came from a long line of witches of one sort and another, most of them quite respectable, as witches go, and likely as embarrassed by Borbos as Father was by me. He’d grown up easily the handsomest young buck in Chun, straight and sleek, with long, angled eyes the color of river water, skin and hair the envy of every girl I knew, and an air about him to entwine hearts much less foolish than my sister’s. I could name names.
And with all that came a soul as perfectly pitiless as when we were all little and he was setting cats afire with a twiddle of two fingers, or withering someone’s fields or haystacks with a look, just for the fun of it. He took great care that none of our parents ever caught him at his play, so that it didn’t matter what I told them—and in the same way, even then, he made sure never to let Jashani see the truth of him. He knew what he wanted, even then, just as she never wanted to believe evil of anyone.
And here was the end of it: me standing by my poor, silly sister’s bed, begging her to wake up, over and over, though I knew she never would—not until Father and I…
No.
Not ever.
If neither of us could stop it, I knew someone who would.
Father was away from home, making arrangements with vintners almost as far north as the Durli Hills and as far south as Kalagira, where the enchantresses live, to buy our grapes for their wine. He would be back when he was back, and meanwhile there was no way to reach him, nor any time to spare. The decision was mine to make, whatever he might think of it afterward. Of our two servants, Catuzan, the housekeeper, had finished her work and gone home, and Nanda, the cook, was at market. Apart from Jashani, I was alone in our big old house.
Except for Great-Grandmother.
I never knew her; neither had Jashani. Father had, in his youth, but he spoke of her very little, and that little only with the windows shuttered and the curtains drawn. When I asked hopefully whether Great-Grandmother had been a witch, his answer was a headshake and a definite no—but when Jashani said, “Was she a demon?” Father was silent for some while. Finally he said, “No, not really. Not exactly.” And that was all we ever got out of him about Great-Grandmother.
But I knew something Jashani didn’t know. Once, when I was small, I had overheard Father speaking with his brother Uskameldry, who was also in the wine grape trade, about a particular merchant in Coraic who had so successfully cornered the market in that area that no vintner would even look at our family’s grapes, whether red or black or blue. Uncle Uska had joked, loudly enough for me to hear at my play, that maybe they ought to go down to the cellar and wake up Great-Grandmother again. Father didn’t laugh, but hushed him so fast that the silence caught my ear as much as the talk before it.
Our cellar is deep and dark, and the great wine casks cast bulky shadows when you light a candle. Jashani and I and our friends used to try to scare each other when we played together there, but she and I knew the place too well ever to be really frightened. Now I stood on the stair, thinking crazily that Jashani and Great-Grandmother were both asleep, maybe if you woke one, you might rouse the other…something like that, anyway. So after a while, I lit one of the wrist-thick candles Father kept under the hinged top step, and I started down.
Our house is the oldest and largest on this side of the village. There have been alterations over the years—most of them while Mother was alive—but the cellar never changes. Why should it? There are always the casks, and the tables and racks along the walls, for Father’s filters and preservatives and other tools to test the grapes for perfect ripeness; and always the same comfortable smell of damp earth, the same boards stacked to one side, to walk on sho
uld the cellar flood, and the same shadows, familiar as bedtime toys. But there was no sign of anyone’s ancestor, and no place where one could possibly be hiding, not once you were standing on the earthen floor, peering into the shadows.
Then I saw the place that wasn’t a shadow, in the far right corner of the cellar, near the drainpipe. I don’t remember any of us noticing it as children—it would have been easy to miss, being only slightly darker than the rest of the floor—but when I walked warily over to it and tapped it with my foot, it felt denser and finer-packed than any other area. There were a couple of spades leaning against the wall further along. I took one and, feeling strangely hypnotized, started to dig.
The deeper I probed, the harder the digging got, and the more convinced I became that the earth had been deliberately pounded hard and tight, as though to hold something down. Not hard enough: whatever was here, it was coming up now. A kind of fever took hold of me, and I flung spadeful after spadeful aside, going at it like a rock-targ ripping out a poor badger’s den. I broke my nails, and I flung my sweated shirt away, and I dug.
I didn’t hear my father the first time, although he was shouting at me from the stair. “What are you doing?” I went on digging, and he bellowed loud enough to make the racks rattle, “Da’mas, what are you doing?”
I did not turn. I was braced for the jar of the spade on wood, or possibly metal—a coffin either way—but the sound that came up when I finally did hit something had me instantly throwing the instrument away and dropping down to half sit, half kneel on the edge of the oblong hole I’d worried out of the earth. Reaching, groping, my hand came up gripping a splintered bone.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven Page 9