The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  Jack didn’t realize he was on the floor until Barney reached down to help him up. And then the shock of that, Barney getting off his chair, helping him, touching him, shocked Jack back to where he was. “Hey, Jack,” Barney said. “Looks like you had a rough time of it in there.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said as he got to his feet. He looked down at his torn shirt and jeans, the bloody scratches and bites on his chest and arms. Holding his breath, he reached up to touch his face. His fingers came away with more blood on them, but he was pretty sure he was himself.

  “You want to sit for a moment?” Barney said. “You look a little wobbly.” He gestured with his head toward the gray metal chair against the wall.

  Jack smiled, surprised he could do it. He said, “So if I sit down does that mean I become the Door Man? And you wander off, and what, go get laid for the first time in a thousand years?”

  Barney laughed. “Ha. You wish, kid. You don’t get to guard the door just by sitting in my seat. We’ve got standards.”

  “Barney,” Jack said, “you knew, didn’t you? That’s why you didn’t recognize me at first. You saw the other face, overlaid on top of mine.”

  Barney shrugged. “Yeah. I saw it.”

  “Then why the hell didn’t you tell me? I almost died.”

  “Not my job.”

  “What? Do you guys have some kind of union or something?”

  “Kind of like that,” Barney said.

  Jack burst out laughing, then stopped, afraid he couldn’t control it. “Jesus,” he said. “I’ve got to get home somehow. Without attracting any cops or ambulances.”

  Barney said, “You can use the employees locker room, sixth floor. There’s a shower. I figured you might need a change of clothes so I put out an Empire uniform for you. But don’t worry, putting it on won’t trap you into parking cars for all eternity.”

  Jack smiled. “Thanks, Barney. You’re all right.”

  Jack was at the stairway door when Barney called to him. He turned, and Barney said, “I’ve got something for you. Might come in handy.” He tossed a small bright object at Jack who caught it in his right hand. When he looked in his palm, Jack saw it was a gold skeleton key, about three inches long. The head consisted of three flat circles, while seven short prongs formed the lock end.

  Jack stared at it a long time. Finally he looked up at Barney. “Holy shit,” he said.

  Barney’s face turned hard, and when he spoke the old-man folksiness had vanished from his voice. “Jack Shade!” he said. “You give that sonofabitch what he deserves!”

  Jack stood across the street from William Barlow’s house. It was early evening, and Jack might have worried that Barlow would spot him, except it was Jack Shield time, and he was good at that. After cleaning up as best he could at the garage, Jack had not returned to the Hotel de Reve Noire. Long ago he’d made it a rule not to go back until the job was finished, and this William Barlow assignment was a long way from over. So he’d gone to a small office he kept, where he changed clothes, treated his cuts, and packed up a few supplies. Before he’d set out for Barlow he’d spent a long time staring at the key. Could he use it for what he really wanted? Would it obey him? Or did Barney charge it for one purpose and one purpose only?

  He was half deciding to try it when Ray appeared in the small office, standing in front of the door. Slowly, the fox shook his head. “Oh hell,” Jack said. “Yeah, I know.” When he put the key back in his pocket Ray vanished.

  Now he watched Barlow’s McMagic Mansion and debated the best way to get inside. He imagined kicking in the door and catching Barlow in the act of sacrificing some small creature. In the end he just muttered, “Fuck it,” and walked up and rang the bell.

  William Barlow opened the door wearing a green sweat suit and holding the New York Times Auto section. The moment he saw Jack his mouth fell open and he stepped backward. With his free hand, the left, he made a gesture to bar the threshold.

  “Oh, William,” Jack said. “Really? You think you can keep me out?” He snapped his fingers and a small capsule he’d been holding broke and scattered bright green powder in the air. The green flared as the powder absorbed the blocking spell, then fell dully to the floor.

  Barlow’s face visibly composed itself into a friendly smile. “Keep you out?” he said. “Why would I do that? I’ve been waiting for you. What happened? Did you find Alice? Could you help her?” Jack walked around him, once, twice, counterclockwise, always keeping his eyes on Barlow, his face, his feet, but especially his hands. “What are you doing?” Barlow said. “Why don’t you tell me what happened? Is she—” In the middle of talking he brought his hand up for a blinding spell.

  Jack stiffened his fingers to dagger Barlow’s hand, then kicked the man’s legs out from under him. As Barlow fell Jack said, “You stupid sonofabitch. Do you think you can attack me? You may have been good enough to cloak what you were doing when you sent me to the Forest, but in an open fight? I’m a Traveler, Willie. Do you have any idea what that means?”

  Barlow didn’t try to get up. Lying on his side on the floor he moaned, “Please. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Still?” he said. “Still playing Dumb Billie? Then let me tell you, so you’ll know it’s too late.

  “I’m going to guess something—in all your lies there was one thing that was the truth. When you said you were supposed to go first. You could tell, couldn’t you? Was it just your EKG, or did you find some blind seer? Hell, maybe you did a casting yourself. And there it was. William Barlow, dead in six months. Am I right, Willie?”

  Barlow said nothing, and Jack went on, “You just couldn’t stand it. The great magician, the scholar, dead, and your slow dumb wife gets to live. Gets your money, too. Waste it on her stupid feel-good workshops.”

  “Please,” Barlow said. “It wasn’t like that. I loved her.”

  “Sure you did, Willie. You just loved yourself a lot more. So you killed her. Took all that healthy life force for yourself.” Barlow began to cry.

  “Problem solved,” Jack said. “Only, Alice started coming back. The Forest appeared to you. All those voices. And one of them was hers. Did you imagine you could hear her? Was she calling your name?”

  “Please,” Barlow said, “I would have lost—”

  “Lost?” Jack yelled. “You sonofabitch, I lost my wife and my daughter on the same day! My daughter killed my wife, and then I—” He had to stop, his whole body was shaking.

  When Jack spoke again his voice was hard and measured. “Yeah, you didn’t want to lose. All that great juju you’d built up wouldn’t help you at all if Alice could get hold of you. You needed to get her off the scent, and what better way than to send in a substitute? A fake Billie who would go right up to her and she could tear his throat out and go off all satisfied.”

  He squatted down to put his face close to Barlow’s. “It was the water, wasn’t it? I wanted to link us—you and me—so I could find Alice. But you charged the water so it would begin something else. Lay your face on top of mine. And then the dressing room—that was to keep the link open, right?” He stood up again, said, “How long did it take to build up enough mojo to make it all work?” Barlow said nothing. Jack kicked him in the ribs. “How long?”

  Barlow cried out, then said, “Three months!”

  “And God knows what you did in those three months to get yourself ready. A whole lot of nasty.”

  “Please,” Barlow said. “What—what are you going to do to me?”

  Jack grinned. “Do, Willie? I’m not going to do anything to you.” He watched the hope flicker in Barlow’s face. Then Jack took out the gold key and held it up by its three-ring head. In the dim entryway the seven prongs sparkled with their own brilliance. Jack said, “Hey! Magic boy! Do you know what this is?”

  For just a moment, Barlow stared at it, confused. Then he screamed. Jack nodded. “Did your research, did you?”

  Barlow scrabbled backward along the floor until he bumped i
nto a table along the wall. “Please,” he said. “I can help you. I can give you things. I’ll work for you. I’ve got money. I know things. Please.” Jack said nothing, only took out his chalk and drew a blue threshold on the polished wood floor. “Oh my God,” Barlow said. With his knife, Jack traced the outline of a door in the air. A faint image appeared, and when he held up Barney’s key an actual door appeared in the room. No rough garage metal this time, but proper suburban polished wood and frosted glass, with a keyhole rimmed in gold. Barlow gagged, as if he was trying to scream but couldn’t get it out. Finally he cried, “Shade! I’ll give you everything.”

  “Oh, Willie,” Jack said. “Don’t you get it? You don’t have anything. You’re finished.”

  “No! You’re wrong. I can help you get your daughter back.”

  Jack went up to him, and for a long moment stared at Barlow’s frantic face. “You’re a liar, William Barlow. A liar to the end.”

  “No, no, no. I can do it. Really.”

  Jack wasn’t listening. He shoved in the key harder than necessary, and for a moment worried it night have jammed. But no, the prongs meshed into the tumblers, which Jack knew were layers of reality, entire worlds. The key turned and the worlds shifted into place, and when Jack opened the door he saw darkness, lit only by pale tendrils of fire.

  The whispers roared in the room, nearly drowning out Barlow’s desperate cries. When they died down Jack could hear the mixed growls and laughter of the wild beast that once was Alice Barlow.

  He didn’t stay to watch, there was nothing there he needed to see. He walked out of Barlow’s house, leaving behind wild thrashing sounds and the smell of blood.

  When he got back to the hotel, Jack entered through the basement and went up in the service elevator to get to his room. He took a long shower, then sat on his bed even longer, trying not to think. Finally he got dressed, a blue oxford shirt, tan pants, and a blue silk jacket. He stared for a moment at the pile of black clothes lying on the floor, then left the room and went back out via the service elevator.

  He entered through the front door now, and there in the lobby stood the hotel owner, carefully setting roses, one by one, in a green vase. He watched her for a while, admiring the grace and economy of her movements in a gray wool dress. “Hello, Irene,” he said.

  She turned quickly, with a bright smile. “Jack! Welcome home.” She wore a small gold pendant of an owl he’d once given her, on a thin gold chain. “Would you like a drink?” She set down the final three roses in front of the vase.

  “That would be wonderful,” Jack said.

  In Irene’s small office, with a glass of brandy before each of them, Irene said, “Annette called. She asked me to invite you to a game in Philadelphia. Next Tuesday. Old-fashioned, she said, the way you like it. And then she said the oddest thing. I wrote it down to make sure I got it right.” She picked up a small piece of paper. “It was two things, actually. She said blindfolds would not be necessary.” Jack smiled. “And she said to tell you she would prefer it if you would leave your fox at home.”

  Jack stared at her for a moment, then burst out laughing.

  On September 17, 2004, the fourteenth birthday of one Eugenia Shade, a bottle of beer flew off the kitchen table and smashed itself against the wall. Eugenia’s father, a Traveler named Jack, sometimes called Care Free Jack, or Johnny Easy, had just told his daughter she could not drink beer, and so she laughed at the broken glass and the amber puddle on the floor.

  Over the following weeks more and more things surrendered their stationary lives to take flight. A personal CD player smashed through a window. Chairs rearranged themselves in a wild dance. Any jar of food left out on a table or shelf was likely to destroy itself.

  Eugenia’s mother, Layla Shade, originally thought some action of her husband’s had backfired, or worse, some spirit he’d angered had invaded their home. No, her husband told her, it was Eugenia herself, or rather an energy configuration, a poltergeist, that sometimes entered teenage girls. He told her their daughter was just an innocent host, but he knew it was more complicated than that. Geists, Jack knew, fed on the confusion, anger, and surging desires of adolescence. Eugenia wasn’t doing it, but probably liked the fear and confusion she saw in her mother.

  Weeks, then months, went by, and Layla begged Jack to do something, an exorcism, a spell, something, she hated being so nervous around her own daughter. Her husband assured her that geists were basically harmless, that teenagers almost always outgrew them, and that aggressive action might only make things worse. Not nearly as certain as he pretended, Jack secretly spent many hours online, especially in the Travelers Archive, a collection of research and first-person accounts that once was stored in underground vaults. Pretty much all of it confirmed what he’d told his wife.

  Still, Jack went so far as to consult his old teacher, whom he had not seen or spoken to in years. “So the archives are right?” he told her. “I do nothing?”

  Anatolie, as she was called, was a large woman with long, thick dreadlocks that coiled around her massive belly like protective snakes. Despite her size, she lived in a fifth-floor walkup in Chinatown, in an apartment Jack always thought was too small for her, let alone a visitor. She agreed with his assessment, but then mentioned, in an offhand manner, “You might want to build up credit.”

  “Credit?”

  “Yes. A conditional vow in case you need help and don’t have time to perform the necessary appeasements. If everything goes smoothly you will have no need to invoke it.”

  “What kind of help?” Jack asked. And, “Help against what?” Anatolie didn’t answer. By her expression she seemed to have lost interest in Jack entirely.

  Down in the street, outside grocery stalls filled with bitter melon and gai lan, Jack called his wife to tell her he had to go out of town for a couple of days. Layla was not happy. “You’re going traveling?” she said. “Leaving me alone with this?”

  “It’s not a job,” Jack said. “It’s to get help.”

  Layla was silent a moment, then said, “So if you—do whatever it is—will that stop it?”

  “Probably not. Or not exactly. But it will give us some insurance.”

  Layla sighed. “Come back as soon as you can,” she said, and hung up.

  Jack rented a car and drove upstate to a place he knew in the woods. The site was not an original but a cognate, a spot with the right configurations to stand in for a location where ceremonies were enacted thousands of years ago. There he lit four small fires, to mark out the action, but also because it was March and he would have to strip naked. Once his clothes were off he used an all-black knife Anatolie once gave him to draw a cross in the dirt connecting the fires. Now he drew the knife down the center of his body from his forehead to his groin. A charge ran through him and he gasped in the chilly air.

  Setting aside the knife he picked up a business card he’d designed for himself, and a magic marker, then stepped into the circle to lie down on the axis between the two largest fires. Beyond the circle he could hear an owl, a deer crashing through some low branches, and a brief high-pitched cry that sounded like a woman’s scream but probably was a coyote. He thought about what he was about to do, wondered if there was some other way. It was still likely the geist would just retreat and his vow would come to nothing. But if his daughter needed him…

  Jack Shade was a freelancer. Jack Choice, as another Traveler once called him, liked to pick his cases, liked to turn away clients who annoyed him. It was one of the reasons he’d broken with Anatolie, who considered Travelers “servants of the soul.” But when you ask for help you have to offer something precious.

  He held the card up high in his right hand. “I, John Marcus Shade,” he said, “make this vow in honor of my daughter, Eugenia Carla Shade. If she ever needs help, if she ever needs a path to open for her, I make this promise. From the moment I should invoke this vow, anyone who finds and brings this card may compel my service. I may not refuse them, I may not turn them
away. I offer this for the sake of my daughter Eugenia. May she never need it. May this vow never be invoked.” Then he stabbed the card down onto his solar plexus.

  The fires all flashed high, then burned out at the same moment. Even as he lay on the dark cold dirt Jack realized he could not feel the card on his body.

  Too exhausted to drive further than the next cheap hotel, Jack got home the next day. The moment he stepped in the house Layla ran up and grabbed his arms. “Did you do something?” she asked. “Did it work?”

  Nervously, Jack said, “I did something. But we won’t know. Not for a while.”

  Layla pulled back from him. “No,” she said. “You were supposed to fix this. I can’t stand it anymore.” Jack looked past her to see his daughter on the wooden stairs to the bedrooms. She was wearing a too tight halter top and too short miniskirt, and spike-heeled sandals—everything her mother would have forbidden if Layla wasn’t afraid of her. She raised her middle finger toward her mother, and then clumsily walked upstairs with an exaggerated sway of her narrow hips. They’d reached a dangerous stage, Jack thought. The poltergeist wasn’t Genie but she wanted to believe it was. She liked the power.

  Jack spent the night on the couch. When his wife told him she wanted to be alone he did not contest it.

  He slept late, woken finally by the sound of his wife’s voice, high and tight as she shouted at her daughter. Jack ran into the kitchen. The date was March 9, 2005.

  The first thing Jack saw was his wife, dressed in a blue sweat suit, shouting at their daughter, who was laughing as she leaned back against the doorway to the dining room. Eugenia wore a red dress and neon-pink sneakers. And then Jack ignored them, suddenly focused on everything else he saw in the kitchen. Iron pots. Large ladles. Knives.

  Eugenia said, in a singsong taunt, “Good morning, Daddy. Mommy seems all upset about something.”

  Jack ignored her. “Layla,” he said, trying to keep his voice even, “what are you doing?”

  “I’m making lunch!” his wife shouted. “I’m making lunch—for my family—in my own fucking kitchen.”