The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  Most of all, Barlow built palaces of guilt around the fact that Alice had died at all, at least before him. He was the one who broke his diet, whose numbers had crept up despite the statins and the dreadful low-salt food. All his preparations, the will, the retirement accounts, they all began with the same assumption, that Alice would outlive him.

  How did she die? Jack asked. They were sitting at a brown oval dining table. Aneurysm, Barlow said. Undetectable and as unexpected as a thunderstorm when the weather bureau had promised a sunny day. “How could that happen?” Barlow asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “I’m not a doctor. Or a theologian.” He knew he was being hard, but he’d never get anything done if he had to hold the client’s hand all day.

  Barlow blinked, stared at Jack a moment, then said, “Mr. Shade—can you find her? In that place, that forest?”

  “Yes.”

  “And release her?”

  “Yes.” Jack might have said, “I can try,” but in fact he’d succeeded in every case but one. And that one was special.

  Barlow said, “And will I stop hearing those noises? And seeing the trees?”

  “Yes.”

  Barlow looked down at the table. “When you release her—where will she go?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “I have no idea.”

  The first night Jack was there Barlow had asked if they should stay up together and wait for the whispers to “manifest,” a term that probably came from one of Alice’s workshops. It didn’t work that way, Jack said. The Forest tended to conceal itself when a Traveler came to investigate. He told Barlow he’d have to go track it down himself. He didn’t say that in fact he knew exactly where the entrance was, and it was a garage on West 54th Street.

  Jack slept that first night in the guest room and realized almost immediately it was a mistake. Many women saw their guest rooms as a chance to indulge their more extreme decorating ideas, but this one looked like it was copied from a magazine, or even a furniture catalog. The white bedding, the dull peach-colored walls, fake flowers in the fake antique pitcher, they were all as lifeless as a plastic doll house.

  Despite what he’d told Barlow, Jack went down to the kitchen in the middle of the night. He walked past the butcher block counter and island stove to open the back door. With his head cocked slightly to the left he said quietly, “Alice? Where are you?” Very faintly he heard the whispers of the Forest, far away and nothing like the roar Barlow had heard. And when he stepped outside all he saw was the patio and lawn furniture, more dead than Alice Barlow.

  The next day he told Barlow he needed to sleep in Alice’s bed. At first he thought the client would object, but no, Barlow just nodded and that evening left fresh sheets neatly folded on the king size bed and went off to sleep on the couch. Jack smiled as he changed the sheets. William Barlow might have to surrender his bed but damned if he would change the linens. Jack was just done when Barlow came to the door with an armful of towels and what looked like shampoo and conditioner. He said, “If you want to step out a moment I’ll freshen up the bathroom for you.”

  “That’s okay,” Jack said and reached out to take the towels and hair products. Barlow hesitated, then nodded, and left. Jack watched him a moment, then closed the door.

  Earlier in the day Jack had pocketed a loose bracelet of silver tiles from Alice’s dressing room. Now, as he held it, he thought about the fact that Barlow had kept everything intact in his dead wife’s room. A check of the closets and drawers in the master bedroom confirmed his guess that nothing of Alice remained, the walk-in closet home now to a lonely rack of suits. So why the shrine in the dressing room?

  It took no more than a few seconds to figure out which side of the bed was Alice’s. It wasn’t physical, Barlow hadn’t left a trough in the firm mattress. But when Jack tried the left side he began to wheeze and cough, an effect that vanished as soon as he rolled to the right. On that side there was only a sense of lightness, a lack of any presence at all.

  And yet she was there, he could feel her all around him, especially in the bracelet that pressed against his wrist as if Alice Barlow was taking hold of him. That lightness, Jack realized, had been there all along, it was there before she died. It was what she left behind. “How did you get so lost?” Jack whispered in tears. “What happened to you?”

  Then he held up his left wrist with the bracelet before his eyes. Louder than before he said, “I’m coming for you, Alice. My name is John Shade, and I will find you. I will find you and set you free.”

  Suddenly exhausted, Jack dropped his arm and settled his head against the too-thin hypoallergenic pillow. For just an instant, heat flared in the bracelet, so intense Jack almost tore it off, but then it went cold again, as chill as moonlight. Tired as he was, he still didn’t expect to sleep that night, so it came as a kind of distant surprise when his eyes pulled down, his limbs grew sullen, and then he was gone.

  He dreamed he was walking in the Forest, only it was disguised, the way it so often was (even in the dream he remembered telling that to Barlow). This time it appeared as some kind of march or demonstration in a city that may have been Manhattan. All around him everyone was holding signs or shouting slogans. Only, he couldn’t read the signs, or understand the loud chants, and then he realized, the souls, the lost, they were not the people in the march, the people were the trees. The souls were trapped inside the fake demonstrators, unable to speak, or to tell Jack what they needed. The fire, so cold, so pale, wound around the tree people with their signs, like a thin fog.

  Jack tried to speak but his words came out all thick, as if his jaw moved too slowly, so he reached up to massage it, loosen his tongue. He was several seconds rubbing his lower face before he realized—there was no scar. He was back the way he was before—before everything fell apart. Back when he was Handsome Johnny, and being a Traveler was, well, something that made you better than other people, all the dumb William Barlows of the world. Disgust twisted his insides. He didn’t want to lose his scars, he deserved them, he needed them. They made sure he never forgot.

  All around him, the people, the trees, stamped and shook their signs. If they were trying to tell him something they were wasting their time, the signs meant nothing, the voices just scrambled sounds. Tree language. He remembered now that he was on a mission, and he called out, “Alice? Alice Barlow? Are you here somewhere? Can you show yourself?”

  His eye caught a flash of motion to the right, and he turned in time to see a thin woman in a pale red dress dart behind the crowd of demonstrators and head toward a kitchen supply shop. “Alice, wait!” he called above the noise of the demonstrators. Pushing aside the tree people, who took no notice of him, he made his way in her direction.

  It was only when he got free of the crowd and their signs, and could see that she had stopped in front of the show window full of knives, that he could see it wasn’t Alice Barlow, it wasn’t even a woman but just a girl. Fourteen years old. Arms and legs stick thin. Long straight hair, her mother’s hair, dyed black, sharp and bright against the pale red dress that echoed the faint fire flickering through the forest.

  “Oh God,” Jack whispered. “Oh my God. Eugenia.”

  She turned around now, slowly, with that adolescent drama smile, and lowered her head slightly so she could look up at him as if she was just a child again. Softly she said, “Hello, Daddy.”

  And the store window exploded, and all those gleaming knives and cleavers came flying at Jack.

  He managed to knock most of them out of the way, all the while shouting, “Genie! Don’t go! I can help you—” But not all. A carving knife and a long-pronged fork hit his face and he screamed in pain. No! he thought, Not again. He looked away, lost focus, for just a moment, and when he turned back she was gone.

  He touched his face to see how much damage the geist had done only to discover there was no blood, no fresh wounds, just the hardened scars of an attack long ago. So Handsome Johnny was gone and he was himself again, Scar
-faced Jack, Johnny Ugly. Johnny Lonesome.

  “Mr. Shade!” a man called, and when he turned to see who it was he discovered himself awake, back in the Barlow bedroom, with the client himself trying the locked door and yelling, “Mr. Shade! Are you all right? I heard noises.”

  Jack sat up and discovered books scattered on the bed and the floor around it, bestsellers and art books from the low decorator bookshelf opposite the bed. They must have flung themselves at him while he slept. Could a poltergeist operate from a dream?

  “I’m all right!” he said loudly. “Go back to bed, Mr. Barlow. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  When he heard Barlow leave, Jack lay on the bed, ignoring the books as he tried to steady his breath and lower his heart rate. “Eugenia,” he whispered. He thought, as he did so often, of the early days, when cups or plates started crashing on the floor, and then the coffee table flung itself across the room, and all the drawers of his wife’s dresser smashed into the wall above the bed. He remembered how Layla had screamed she couldn’t stand it anymore, Jack had to do something, how he’d held her and told her, with all the reassurance of his great knowledge, his experience as a Traveler, that it was just a phase, that doing something would only strengthen it. If you left them alone geists just faded away. Lying in his client’s bed, remembering, Jack felt the tears slide down his cheeks until they hit the dead crevices of his scars.

  He lay there until dawn, eyes on the ceiling as he waited until first light would allow him to get up and take the final step before he could leave the gray house. Once he was sure the sun had come up he went into the oversize lifeless bathroom where he washed his face and got dressed, all but his shirt. On his way back from the bathroom he noticed something odd, a small black leather copy of MacGregor Mathers’ translation of the fifteenth-century manuscript, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage. He smiled. Maybe Alice had advanced beyond the dabbler stage. She must have hidden this behind the big showy art books, where she could count on William never noticing it. Softly Jack said, “You deserve better than the Forest, Alice. I’m coming for you.”

  Back at the bed he set down a small black rectangular leather case he’d brought with him from the hotel. Various instruments lay inside it, only one of which he needed. A black knife, unadorned, with a polished ebony handle and a double-edged carbon blade exactly five inches long.

  He held it up and stared at it awhile as he turned it in the morning light. Then he cut a shallow line along the inside of his arm. There was a network of such lines, light scars, and Jack had often wondered if some doctor, or even a cop if Jack was ever careless enough to get arrested, might think he was a junkie. Or self-destructive. He watched the fresh cut slowly ooze with blood, then took a deep breath and finally spit into the wound.

  Jack had to grip his thighs to keep from crying out. There was always pain, but this—

  The action had begun when Jack had shared that simple glass of water with Barlow back in the office. There’d been nothing in the water but Jack had charged it to align the two of them, so that his own etheric pulse would hold some of the client’s bond with his dead wife. When he spit into the cut he temporarily united himself with Barlow, so that the wound could call out to Alice. It was the surest way to find her in the confusion of the Forest.

  The action was never easy—it was like injecting himself with someone’s grief, or fear, or guilt—but he could never remember it hitting this hard. When the pain subsided enough that he could breathe a little easier he discovered his face wet with tears and sweat. He went into the bathroom and washed again, then put on his shirt, packed his knife, and left the house, hopefully without waking his client.

  At 9:47 in the morning Lonesome Jack Shade stood on Lexington Avenue, north of 72nd Street, and watched a slim young man open the door to Laurentian Chocolates. Along with his all black clothes Jack wore the carbon blade knife in a sheath up his left sleeve.

  Jack knew he should go get what he needed before the shop filled with customers, but he hated what he had to do. He wondered, did chocolate-shop owners around the city all talk to each other? Would Monsieur Laurentian see Jack’s knife, roll his eyes, and say, “Oh, it’s you.” Or would he just moue in fear, like the last poor truffle-maker?

  Jack sighed. At least he could disguise himself. He pretended it was to escape detection, but knew it was really to lessen the embarrassment of what he was about to do. He slipped the knife from its sheath and stared at the point, so sharp it could cut sunshine. In two quick touches he lightly pressed the point against his forehead and then his lips.

  He cried out, loudly enough that a woman walking five dogs turned around and stared at him, and a bike messenger reflexively shouted, “Fuck you, man!” Gently, Jack moved his fingertips around his face, feeling a smooth plastic quality that told him the trick had worked. Once it firmed up, his false face would look so bland that Laurentian would not be able to describe Jack at all. “I don’t know,” he’d tell the police if he even bothered to call them. “It was just one of those faces. You know. As if it wasn’t really there.”

  On the street corner Jack touched his nose, his cheeks, the area around his lips. It still felt like some opaque plastic mask but it held firm against his prodding. He crossed the street toward Laurentian Chocolates.

  He was nearly at the door when he felt a light brush against his legs. He glanced down and there was the golden tail, its tip just leaving his left knee. Unlike at the poker table, where the fox had vanished almost before Jack caught sight of it, it turned to sit on its haunches right in the middle of the sidewalk, its fur dazzling in the sun. No one but Jack could see it but people automatically walked around it, some squinting at the glare from the invisible fur. One young woman walked by, stopped, and turned to stare right at the spot where the fox sat, then shrugged and walked on. You’ve got a future, Jack thought. With any luck it’ll never find you.

  “Hello, Ray,” he said to the fox, who bowed his head a moment. Jack Shade had met Ray on one of his first travels, when he found himself in a bad place, surrounded by, of all things, predator chickens. He did an action for help and Ray had appeared, a fitting protector, Jack supposed. Now Ray came to him mostly to warn him, or show him things. The name was Jack’s choice, short for Reynard, of course, but also the correct pronunciation of Ra, the Egyptian Sun god, for in the catalogue of foxes—mountain fox, fox of the willows, fox of the stairways, tracker fox—Ray was a noon fox, a solar helper, bringing clarity and strength.

  “Thanks for being here,” Jack said. “You know I hate this part, it’s so damn embarrassing. But what can I do? I’ve got to give the Door Man what he wants.” Ray stared at him awhile longer, then leaped off the curb to vanish in front of a taxicab, whose driver hit the brakes then looked confused before he sped up again.

  The owner of the chocolate shop appeared to be around twenty-two but was probably ten years older. In black creased pants, shiny wingtips, and gray vest over his pale blue shirt he looked as old-fashioned and immaculate as his glass display cases filled with exotic concoctions. He looked Jack up and down briefly, his expression confused as he tried to focus on the face that wasn’t quite a mask, then more relaxed again as he let his eyes move back to Jack’s muscular upper body and thighs. “Good morning,” he said, with a smile. “You’re my first. At least for today.”

  Blank-faced Jack pointed to a tray of dark chocolate truffles covered in chocolate powder. “I’ll have one of those,” he said.

  Mr. Laurentian nodded his appreciation of Jack’s good taste. “Certainly,” he said. “Shall I put it in a presentation box?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Jack watched Laurentian carefully set the truffle in a miniature cardboard box, which he tied with a red ribbon and a slight twirl of his hand. “Thank you,” he said. “That will be 7.95.”

  With a sigh Jack slipped the black knife from the sheath in his sleeve and pointed the tip at Laurentian’s neck. “I’ll just take it,” he said.

  “Oh!
Oh God,” the chocolatier said. “Take whatever I’ve got. I mean, there’s not much. I just opened. But take it. Whatever’s in the register.”

  “I just want the truffle,” Jack said

  The young man froze, as if stuck in the strange moment. Then he said, “Of course. Yes. Let me get a bag, I’ll put all the truffles—”

  “No. Just this one.”

  “What? Are you—it’s only 7.95! I said you could—” He stopped himself, realizing he was trying to argue an armed robber into taking more than he wanted. It was a reaction Jack had seen before. “Here,” Laurentian said. He thrust the small box at Jack, who grabbed it and ran from the store.

  A principle of opposites governed the entryways to what an old German Traveler once called “non-linear locations.” Opposites and doorways. In New York City, you entered the Forest of Souls in a garage on 54th Street, through a red metal door marked “Employees only.” As with every other NLL entrance, you couldn’t get through unless you paid the Door Man. In the Empire Garage this job fell to a white-haired gentleman named Barney. And Barney liked chocolates. Stolen chocolates.

  When Jack began his travels Barney demanded nothing more than chocolate kisses. Just one each time. He used to pull the little ribbon top and smile as the foil came away. As he popped the brown cone in his mouth he would nod to Jack to go on through. The nice thing about chocolate kisses is that they were easy to steal. But then a couple of years ago Barney had gone upscale. Jack had heard that some Wall Streeter had taken up traveling after the credit swap bubble burst, and had ruined things for everybody by giving Barney his first dark chocolate delight. Now it had to be a truffle. Fresh. And it had to be stolen.

  “Why can’t I just buy you one?” Jack asked him once.

  Barney had smiled. “Money comes and goes, Jack. Silver, paper, even beads sometimes. You got money, you never know what you got. But stealing is forever.”

  He found Barney, as always, sitting on a steel chair against the wall of the garage, alongside the door he protected. He wore a blue shirt and pants, with “Empire Garage” in italics on the right pocket and “Barney” in gold script on the left. He was short, about five-eight, and stocky, but not fat. He had a full head of fine white hair, cut short, and a square face with enough fine lines on it that it might have served as a map of the Non-Linear worlds. Jack had no idea how long the old man had served as Door Man. Fifty years? Five thousand years? Maybe the first Manhattan Traveler had found a white-haired man in a beaver cloak sitting on a tree stump next to a cave that served as entrance to the Forest. Or maybe Barney would get the job next week. Non-Linear employment.