The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Yes,” Aune said. “Exactly like that. I visited once when I was just a girl. The farm was in ruins. Now the world will have changed again. Maybe there is another farm or maybe it is all forest now.” She paused for a moment, so that they all could imagine it. “My great-grandmother was a girl of eight or nine. She went to school for part of the year. The rest of the year she and her brothers and sisters did the work of the farm. My great-grandmother’s work was to take the cows to a meadow where the pasturage was rich in clover and sweet grasses. The cows were very big and she was very small, but they knew to come when she called them. In the evening she brought the herd home again. The path went along a ridge. On the near side she and her cows passed a closer meadow that her family did not use even though the pasturage looked very fine to my great-grandmother. There was a brook down in the meadow, and an old tree, a grand old man. There was a rock under the tree, a great slab that looked like something like a table.”

  Outside the windows of the English manor, a tree formed itself in a grassy, sunken meadow.

  “My great-grandmother didn’t like that meadow. Sometimes when she looked down she saw people sitting all around the table that the rock made. They were eating and drinking. They wore old-fashioned clothing, the kind her own great-grandmother would have worn. She knew that they had been dead a very long time.”

  “Ugh,” Mei said. “Look!”

  “Yes,” Aune said in her calm, uninflected voice. “Like that. One day my great-grandmother, her name was Aune, too, I should have said that first, I suppose, one day Aune was leading her cows home along the ridge and she looked down into the meadow. She saw the people eating and drinking at their table. And while she was looking down, they turned and looked at her. They began to wave at her, to beckon that she should come down and sit with them and eat and drink. But instead she turned away and went home and told her mother what had happened. And after that, her older brother, who was a very unimaginative boy, had the job of taking the cattle to the far pasture.”

  The people at the table were waving at Gwenda and Mei and Portia and the rest of them now. Sullivan waved back.

  “Creepy!” Portia said. “That was a good one. Maureen, didn’t you think so?”

  “It was a good story,” Maureen said. “I liked the cows.”

  “So not the point, Maureen,” Portia said. “Anyway.”

  “I have a story,” Sullivan said. “In the broad outlines it’s a bit like Aune’s story.”

  “You could change things,” Portia said. “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “I’ll just tell it the way I heard it,” Sullivan said. “Anyhow it’s Kentucky, not Finland, and there aren’t any cows. That is, there were cows, because it’s another farm, but not in the story. It’s a story my grandfather told me.”

  The gardeners were outside the windows again. There was something ghostly about them, Gwenda thought. You knew that they would just come and go, always doing the same things. Perhaps this was what it had been like to be rich and looked after by so many servants, all of them practically invisible—just like Maureen, really, or even more so—for all the notice you had to take of them. They might as well have been ghosts. Or was it the rich people who had lived in a house like this who had been the ghosts? Capricious, exerting great pressure without ever really having to set a foot on the ground, nothing their servants dared look at for any length of time without drawing malicious attention?

  Never mind, they were all ghosts now.

  What an odd string of thoughts. She was sure that while she had been alive on Earth nothing like this had ever been in her head. Out here, suspended between one place and another, of course you went a little crazy. It was almost luxurious, how crazy you were allowed to be.

  She and Sisi lay cushioned on the air, arms wrapped around each other’s waists so as not to go flying away. They floated just above the silky ears of one of the greyhounds. The sensation of heat from the fireplace furred one arm, one leg, burned pleasantly along one side of her face. If something disastrous were to happen now, if a meteor were to crash through a bulkhead, if a fire broke out in the Long Gallery, if a seam ruptured and they all went flying into space, could she and Sisi keep hold of one another? She resolved she would. She would not let go.

  Sullivan had the most wonderful voice for telling stories. He was describing the part of Kentucky where his family still lived. They hunted wild pigs that lived in the forest. Went to a church on Sundays. There was a tornado.

  Rain beat at the mullioned windows. You could smell the ozone beading on the glass. Trees thrashed and groaned.

  After the tornado passed through, men came to Sullivan’s grandfather’s house. They were going to look for a girl who had gone missing. Sullivan’s grandfather, a young man at the time, went with them. The hunting trails were all gone. Parts of the forest had been flattened. Sullivan’s grandfather was with the group that found the girl. A tree had fallen across her body and cut her almost in two. She was crawling, dragging herself along the ground by her fingernails.

  “After that,” Sullivan said, “my grandfather only hunted in those woods a time or two. Then he never hunted there again. He said that he knew what it was to hear a ghost walk, but he’d never heard one crawl before.”

  “Look!” Portia said. Outside the window something was crawling along the floor of the forest. “Shut it off, Maureen! Shut it off! Shut it off!”

  The gardeners again, with their terrible shears.

  “No more old-people ghost stories,” Portia said. “Okay?”

  Sullivan pushed himself up toward the white-washed ceiling. “You’re a brat, Portia,” he said.

  “I know,” Portia said. “I know! I guess you spooked me. So it must have been a good ghost story, right?”

  “Right,” Sullivan said, mollified. “I guess it was.”

  “That poor girl,” Aune said. “To relive that moment over and over again. Who would want that, to be a ghost?”

  “Maybe it isn’t always bad?” Mei said. “Maybe there are happy, well-adjusted ghosts?”

  “I never saw the point,” Sullivan said. “I mean, ghosts appear as a warning. So what’s the warning in that story I told you? Don’t get caught in the forest during a tornado? Don’t get cut in half? Don’t die?”

  “I thought they were more like a memory,” Gwenda said. “Not really there at all. Just an echo, recorded somehow and then played back, what they did, what happened to them.”

  Sisi said, “But Aune’s ghosts—the other Aune—they looked at her. They wanted her to come down and eat with them. What would have happened then?”

  “Nothing good,” Aune said.

  “Maybe it’s genetic,” Mei said. “Seeing ghosts. That kind of thing.”

  “Then Aune and I would be prone,” Sullivan said.

  “Not me,” Sisi said. “I’ve never seen a ghost.” She thought for a minute. “Unless I did. You know. No. It wasn’t a ghost. What I saw. How could a ship be a ghost?”

  “Don’t think about it now,” Mei said. “Let’s not tell any more ghost stories. Let’s have a gossip instead. Talk about back when we used to have sex lives.”

  “No,” Gwenda said. “Let’s have one more ghost story. Just one, for my birthday. Maureen?”

  That breeze tickled at her ear. “Yes?”

  “Do you know any ghost stories?”

  Maureen said, “I have all of the stories of Edith Wharton and M. R. James and many others in my library. Would you like to hear one?”

  “No,” Gwenda said. “I want a real story.”

  Portia said, “And then Sullivan will give me a foot rub, and then we can all take a nap before breakfast. Mei, you must know a ghost story. No old people though. I want a sexy ghost story.”

  “God, no,” Mei said. “No sexy ghosts for me. Thank God.”

  “I have a story,” Sisi said. “It isn’t mine, of course. Like I said, I’ve never seen a ghost.”

  “Go on,” Gwenda said.

  “Not my gho
st story,” Sisi said. “And not really a ghost story. I’m not sure what it was. It was the story of a man that I dated for a few months.”

  “A boyfriend story!” Sullivan said. “I love your boyfriend stories, Sisi! Which one?”

  We could go all the way to Proxima Centauri and back and Sisi still wouldn’t have run out of stories about her boyfriends, Gwenda thought. But here she is, here we are, together. And what are they? Dead and buried! Ghosts! Every last one of them!

  “I don’t think I’ve told any of you about him,” Sisi was saying. “This was during the period when they weren’t building new ships. Remember? They kept sending us out to do fundraising? I was supposed to be some kind of Ambassadress for Space. Emphasis on the slinky little dress. I was supposed to be seductive and also noble and representative of everything that made it worth going to space for. I did a good enough job that they sent me over to meet a consortium of investors and big shots in London. I met all sorts of guys, but the only one I clicked with was this one dude, Liam. Okay. Here’s where it gets complicated for a bit. Liam’s mother was English. She came from this old family, lots of money and not a lot of supervision and by the time she was a teenager, she was a total wreck. Into booze, hard drugs, recreational Satanism, you name it. Got kicked out of school after school after school, and after that she got kicked out of all of the best rehab programs too. In the end, her family kicked her out. Gave her money to go away. She ended up in prison for a couple of years, had a baby. That was Liam. Bounced around Europe for a while, then when Liam was about seven or eight, she found God and got herself cleaned up. By this point her father and mother were both dead. One of the superbugs. Her brother had inherited everything. She went back to the ancestral pile—imagine a place like this, okay?—and tried to make things good with her brother. Are you with me so far?”

  “So it’s a real old-fashioned English ghost story,” Portia said.

  “You have no idea,” Sisi said. “You have no idea. So her brother was kind of a jerk. And let me emphasize, once again, this was a rich family, like you have no idea. The mother and the father and brother were into collecting art. Contemporary stuff. Video installations, performance art, stuff that was really far out. They commissioned this one artist, an American, to come and do a site-specific installation. That’s what Liam called it. It was supposed to be a commentary on the transatlantic exchange, the post-colonial relationship between England and the US, something like that. And what he did was, he bought a ranch house out in a suburb in Arizona, the same state, by the way, where you can still go and see the original London Bridge. This artist bought the suburban ranch, circa 1980, and the furniture in it and everything else, down to the rolls of toilet paper and the cans of soup in the cupboards. And he had the house dismantled with all of the pieces numbered, and plenty of photographs and video so he would know exactly where everything went, and it all got shipped over to England and then he built it all again on the family’s estate. And simultaneously, he had a second house built right beside it. This second house was an exact replica, from the foundation to the pictures on the wall to the cans of soup on the shelves in the kitchen.”

  “Why would anybody ever bother to do that?” Mei said.

  “Don’t ask me,” Sisi said. “If I had that much money, I’d spend it on shoes and booze and vacations for me and all of my friends.”

  “Hear, hear,” Gwenda said. They all raised their bulbs and drank.

  “This stuff is ferocious, Aune,” Sisi said. “I think it’s changing my mitochondria.”

  “Quite possibly,” Aune said. “Cheers.”

  “Anyway, this double installation won some award. Got lots of attention. The whole point was that nobody knew which house was which. Then the superbug took out the mom and dad, and a couple of years after that, Liam’s mother the black sheep came home. And her brother said to her, I don’t want you living in the family home with me. But I’ll let you live on the estate. I’ll even give you a job with the housekeeping staff. And in exchange you’ll live in my installation. Which was, apparently, something that the artist had really wanted to make part of the project, to find a family to come and live in it.

  “This jerk brother said, ‘You and my nephew can come and live in my installation. I’ll even let you pick which house.’

  “Liam’s mother went away and talked to God about it. Then she came back and moved into one of the houses.”

  “How did she decide which house she wanted to live in?” Sullivan said.

  “That’s a great question,” Sisi said. “I have no idea. Maybe God told her? Look, what I was interested in at the time was Liam. I know why he liked me. Here I was, this South African girl with an American passport, dreadlocks and cowboy boots, talking about how I was going to get in a rocket and go up in space, just as soon as I could. What man doesn’t like a girl who doesn’t plan to stick around?

  “What I don’t know is why I liked him so much. The thing is, he wasn’t really a good-looking guy. He had a nice round English butt. His hair wasn’t terrible. But there was something about him, you just knew he was going to get you into trouble. The good kind of trouble. When I met him, his mother was dead. His uncle was dead too. They weren’t a lucky family. They had money instead of luck. The brother had never married, and he’d left Liam everything.

  “We went out for dinner. We gave each other all the right kind of signals, and then we fooled around some and he said he wanted to take me up to his country house for the weekend. It sounded like fun. I guess I was picturing one of those little thatched cottages you see in detective series. But it was like this instead.” Sisi gestured around. “Big old pile. Except with video screens in the corners showing mice eating each other and little kids eating cereal. Nice, right?

  “He said we were going to go for a walk around the estate. Romantic, right? We walked out about a mile through this typical South of England landscape and then suddenly we’re approaching this weather-beaten, rotting stucco house that looked like every ranch house I’d ever seen in a de-populated neighborhood in the Southwest, y’all. This house was all by itself on a green English hill. It looked seriously wrong. Maybe it had looked better before the other one had burned down, or at least more intentionally weird, the way an art installation should, but anyway. Actually, I don’t think so. I think it always looked wrong.

  “Go back a second,” Mei said. “What happened to the other house?”

  “I’ll get to that in a minute,” Sisi said. “So there we are in front of this horrible house, and Liam picked me up and carried me across the threshold like we were newlyweds. He dropped me on a rotting tan couch and said, ‘I was hoping you would spend the night with me.’ I said, ‘You mean back at your place?’ He said, ‘I mean here.’

  “I said to him, ‘You’re going to have to explain.’ And so he did, and now we’re back at the part where Liam and his mother moved into the installation.”

  “This story isn’t like the other stories,” Maureen said.

  “You know, I’ve never told this story before,” Sisi said. “The rest of it, I’m not even sure I know how to tell it.”

  “Liam and his mother moved into the installation,” Portia said.

  “Yeah. Liam’s mummy picked a house and they moved in. Liam’s just this little kid. A bit abnormal because of how they’d been living. And there are all these weird rules, like they aren’t allowed to eat any of the food on the shelves in the kitchen. Because that’s part of the installation. Instead the mother has a mini-fridge in the closet in her bedroom. Oh, and there are clothes in the closets in the bedrooms. And there’s a TV, but it’s an old one and the installation artist set it up so it only plays shows that were current in the early nineties in the U.S., which was the last time the house was occupied.

  “And there are weird stains on the carpets in some of the rooms. Big brown stains.

  “But Liam doesn’t care so much about that. He gets to pick his own bedroom, which seems to be set up for a boy maybe a
year or two older than Liam is. There’s a model train set on the floor, which Liam can play with, as long as he’s careful. And there are comic books, good ones that Liam hasn’t read before. There are cowboys on the sheets. There’s a big stain here, in the corner, under the window.

  “And he’s allowed to go into the other bedrooms, as long as he doesn’t mess anything up. There’s a pink bedroom, with twin beds. Lots of boring girls’ clothes and a stain in the closet, and a diary, hidden in a shoebox, which Liam doesn’t see any point in reading. There’s a room for an older boy, too, with posters of actresses that Liam doesn’t recognize, and lots of American sports stuff. Football, but not the right kind.

  “Liam’s mother sleeps in the pink bedroom. You would expect her to take the master bedroom, but she doesn’t like the bed. She says it isn’t comfortable. Anyway, there’s a stain on it that goes right through the duvet, through the sheets. It’s as if the stain came up through the mattress.

  “I think I’m beginning to see the shape of this story,” Gwenda says.

  “You bet,” Sisi says. “But remember, there are two houses. Liam’s mummy is responsible for looking after both houses. She also volunteers at the church down in the village. Liam goes to the village school. For the first two weeks, the other boys beat him up, and then they lose interest and after that everyone leaves him alone. In the afternoons he comes back and plays in his two houses. Sometimes he falls asleep in one house, watching TV, and when he wakes up he isn’t sure where he is. Sometimes his uncle comes by to invite him to go for a walk on the estate, or to go fishing. He likes his uncle. Sometimes they walk up to the manor house, and play billiards. His uncle arranges for him to have riding lessons, and that’s the best thing in the world. He gets to pretend that he’s a cowboy. Maybe that’s why he liked me. Those boots.