The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Sometimes he plays cops and robbers. He used to know some pretty bad guys, back before his mother got religion, and Liam isn’t exactly sure which he is yet, a good guy or a bad guy. He has a complicated relationship with his mother. Life is better than it used to be, but religion takes up about the same amount of space as the drugs did. It doesn’t leave much room for Liam.

  “Anyway, there are some cop shows on the TV. After a few months he’s seen them all at least once. There’s one called CSI, and it’s all about fingerprints and murder and blood. And Liam starts to get an idea about the stain in his bedroom, and the stain in the master bedroom, and the other stains, the ones in the living room, on the plaid sofa and over behind the La-Z-Boy that you mostly don’t notice at first, because it’s hidden. There’s one stain up on the wallpaper in the living room, and after a while it starts to look a lot like a handprint.

  “So Liam starts to wonder if something bad happened in his house. And in that other house. He’s older now, maybe ten or eleven. He wants to know why are there two houses, exactly the same, next door to each other? How could there have been a murder—okay, a series of murders, where everything happened exactly the same way twice? He doesn’t want to ask his mother, because lately when he tries to talk to his mother, all she does is quote Bible verses at him. He doesn’t want to ask his uncle about it either, because the older Liam gets, the more he can see that even when his uncle is being super nice, he’s still not all that nice. The only reason he’s nice to Liam is because Liam is his heir.

  “His uncle has shown him some of the other pieces in his art collection, and he tells Liam that he envies him, getting to be a part of an actual installation. Liam knows his house came from America. He knows the name of the artist who designed the installation. So that’s enough to go online and find out what’s going on, which is that, sure enough, the original house, the one the artist bought and brought over, is a murder house. Some high-school kid went beserko in the middle of the night and killed his whole family with a hammer. And this artist, his idea was based on something the robber barons did at the turn of the previous century, which was buy up castles abroad and have them brought over stone by stone to be rebuilt in Texas, or upstate Pennsylvania, or wherever. And if there was a ghost, they paid even more money. So that was idea number one, to flip that. But then he had idea number two, which was, What makes a haunted house? If you take it to pieces and transport it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, does the ghost (ghosts, in this case) come with it, if you put it back together exactly the way it was? And if you can put a haunted house back together again, piece by piece by piece, can you build your own from scratch if you re-create all of the pieces? And idea number three, forget the ghosts, can the real live people who go and walk around in one house or the other, or even better, the ones who live in a house without knowing which house is which, would they know which one was real and which one was ersatz? Would they see real ghosts in the real house? Imagine they saw ghosts in the fake one?”

  “So which house were they living in?” Sullivan asked.

  “Does it really matter which house they were living in?” Sisi said. “I mean, Liam spent time in both houses. He said he never knew which house was real. Which house was haunted. The artist was the only one with that piece of information. He even used real blood to re-create the stains.

  “I’ll tell the rest of the story as quickly as I can. So by the time Liam brought me to see his ancestral home, one of the installation houses had burned down. Liam’s mother did it. Maybe for religious reasons? Liam was kind of vague about why. I got the feeling it had to do with his teenage years. They went on living there, you see. Liam got older, and I’m guessing his mother caught him fooling around with a girl or smoking pot, something, in the house that they didn’t live in. By this point she had become convinced that one of the houses was occupied by unquiet spirits, but she couldn’t make up her mind which. And in any case, it didn’t do any good. If there were ghosts in the other house, they just moved in next door once it burned down. I mean, why not? Everything was already set up exactly the way that they liked it.”

  “Wait, so there were ghosts?” Gwenda said.

  “Liam said there were. He said he never saw them, but later on, when he lived in other places, he realized that there must have been ghosts. In both places. Both houses. Other places just felt empty to him. He said to think of it like maybe you grew up in a place where there was always a party going on, all the time, or a bar fight, one that went on for years, or maybe just somewhere where the TV was always on. And then you leave the party, or you get thrown out of the bar, and all of a sudden you realize you’re all alone. Like, you just can’t sleep as well without that TV on. You can’t get to sleep. He said he was always on high alert when he was away from the murder house, because something was missing and he couldn’t figure out what. I think that’s what I picked up on. That extra vibration, that twitchy radar.”

  “That’s sick,” Sullivan said.

  “Yeah,” Sisi said. “That relationship was over real quick. So that’s my ghost story.”

  Mei said, “So what happened?”

  “He’d brought a picnic dinner with us. Lobster and champagne and the works. We sat and ate at the kitchen table while he told me about his childhood. Then he gave me the tour. Showed me all the stains where those people died, like they were holy relics. I kept looking out the window, and seeing the sun get lower and lower. I didn’t want to be in that house after it got dark.”

  They were all in that house now, flicking through those rooms, one after another. “Maureen?” Mei said. “Can you change it back?”

  “Of course,” Maureen said. Once again there were the greyhounds, the garden, the fire and the roses. Shadows slicked the flagstones, blotted and clung to the tapestries.

  “Better,” Sisi said. “Thank you. You went and found it online, didn’t you, Maureen? That was exactly the way I remember it. I went outside to think and have a cigarette. Yeah, I know. Bad astronaut. But I still kind of wanted to sleep with this guy. Just once. So he was messed up, so what? Sometimes messed up sex is the best. When I came back inside the house, I still hadn’t made up my mind. And then I made up my mind in a hurry. Because this guy? I went to look for him and he was down on the floor in that little boy’s bedroom. Under the window, okay? On top of that stain. He was rolling around on the floor. You know, the way cats do? He had this look on his face. Like when they get catnip. I got out of there in a hurry. Drove away in his Land Rover. The keys were still in the ignition. Left it at a transport café and hitched the rest of the way home and never saw him again.”

  “You win,” Portia said. “I don’t know what you win, but you win. That guy was wrong.”

  “What about the artist? I mean, what he did,” Mei said. “That Liam guy would have been okay if it weren’t for what he did. Right? I mean, it’s something to think about. Say we find some nice Goldilocks planet. If the conditions are suitable, and we grow some trees and some cows, do we get the table with the ghosts sitting around it? Did they come with Aune? With us? Are they here now? If we tell Maureen to build a haunted house around us right now, does she have to make the ghosts? Or do they just show up?”

  Maureen said, “It would be an interesting experiment.”

  The Great Room began to change around them. The couch came first.

  “Maureen!” Portia said. “Don’t you dare!”

  Gwenda said, “But we don’t need to run that experiment. I mean, isn’t it already running?” She appealed to the others, to Sullivan, to Aune. “You know. I mean, you know what I mean?”

  “Not really,” Sisi said. “What do you mean?”

  Gwenda looked at the others. Then Sisi again. Sisi stretched luxuriously and turned in the air. Gwenda thought of the stain on the carpet, the man rolling on it like a cat.

  “Gwenda, my love. What are you trying to say?” Sisi said.

  “I know a ghost story,” Maureen said. “I know one after
all. Do you want to hear it?”

  Before anyone could answer, they were in the Great Room again, except they were outside it too. They floated, somehow, in a great nothingness. But there was the table again with dinner upon it, where they had sat.

  The room grew darker and colder and the lost crew of the ship House of Mystery sat around the table.

  That sister crew, those old friends, they looked up from their meal, from their conversation. They turned and regarded the crew of the ship House of Secrets. They wore dress uniforms, as if in celebration, but they were maimed by some catastrophe. They lifted their ruined hands and beckoned, smiling.

  There was a smell of char and chemicals and blood that Gwenda almost knew.

  And then it was her own friends around the table. Mei, Sullivan, Portia, Aune, Sisi. She saw herself sitting there, hacked almost in two. She beckoned to herself, then vanished.

  The Great Room reshaped itself out of nothingness and horror. They were back in the English country house. The air was full of sour spray. Someone had thrown up. Someone else sobbed.

  Aune said, “Maureen, that was unkind.”

  Maureen said nothing. She went about the room like a ghost, coaxing the vomit into a great ball.

  “The hell was that?” Sisi said. “Maureen? What were you thinking? Gwenda? My darling, are you okay?” She reached for Gwenda’s hand, but Gwenda pushed away, flailing.

  She went forward in a great spasm, her arms extended to catch the wall. Going before her on the one hand, the ship House of Secrets, and on the other, House of Mystery. She could no longer tell the one from the other.

  BLOOD DRIVE

  JEFFREY FORD

  Jeffrey Ford [http://www.well-builtcity.com] is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year. His short fiction has been collected in The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, and Crackpot Palace. Ford’s fiction has been translated into over twenty languages and is the recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, and the Grand Prix de l’imaginaire.

  For Christmas our junior year of high school, all of our parents got us guns. That way you had a half a year to learn to shoot and get down all the safety garbage before you started senior year. Depending on how well off your parents were, that pretty much dictated the amount of fire power you had. Darcy Krantz’s family lived in a trailer, and so she had a pea-shooter, .22 Double Eagle Derringer, and Baron Hanes’s father, who was in the security business and richer than god, got him a .44 Magnum that was so heavy it made the nutty kid lean to the side when he wore the gun belt. I packed a pearl-handled .38 revolver, Smith & Wesson, which had originally been my grandfather’s. Old as dirt, but all polished up, the way my father kept it, it was still a fine looking gun. My mom told my dad not to give it to me, but he said, “Look, when she goes to high school, she’s gotta carry. Everybody does in their senior year.”

  “Insane,” said my mom.

  “Come on,” I said. “Please…”

  She drew close to me, right in my face, and said, “If your father gives you that gun, he’s got no protection, making his deliveries.” He drove a truck and delivered bakery goods to different diners and convenience stores in the area.

  “Take it easy,” said my dad, “all the crooks are asleep when I go out for my runs.” He motioned for me to come over to where he sat. He put the gun in my hand. I gripped the handle and felt the weight of it. “Give me your best pose,” he said.

  I turned profile, hung my head back, my long chestnut hair reaching halfway to the floor, pulled up the sleeve of my T-shirt, made a muscle with my right arm, and pointed the gun at the ceiling with my left hand. He laughed till he couldn’t catch his breath. And my mom said, “Disgraceful,” but she also laughed.

  I went to the firing range with my dad a lot the summer before senior year. He was a calm teacher, and never spoke much or got too mad. Afterward, he’d take me to this place and buy us ice cream. A lot of times it was Friday night, and I just wanted to get home so I could go hang out with my friends. One night I let him know we could skip the ice cream, and he seemed taken aback for a second, like I’d hurt his feelings. “I’m sorry,” he said, and tried to smile.

  I felt kind of bad, and figured I could hug him or kiss him or ask him to tell me something. “Tell me about a time when you shot the gun not on the practice range,” I said as we drove along.

  He laughed. “Not too many times,” he said. “The most interesting was from when I was a little older than you. It was night, we were in the basement of an abandoned factory over in the industrial quarter. I was with some buds and we were partying, smoking up and drinking straight, cheap Vodka. Anyway, we were wasted. This guy I really didn’t like who hung out with us, Raymo was his name, he challenged me to a round of Russian roulette. Don’t tell your mother this,” he said.

  “You know I won’t,” I said.

  “Anyway, I left one bullet in the chamber, removed the others and spun the cylinder. He went first—nothing. I went, he went, etc, click, click, click. The gun came to me and I was certain by then that the bullet was in my chamber. So, you know what I did?”

  “You shot it into the ceiling?”

  “No. I turned the gun on Raymo and shot him in the face. After that we all ran. We ran and we never got caught. At the time there was a gang going around at night shooting people and taking their wallets and the cops put it off to them. None of my buds were going to snitch. Believe me, Raymo was no great loss to the world. The point of which is to say, It’s a horrible thing to shoot someone. I see Raymo’s expression right before the bullet drilled through his head just about every night in my dreams. In other words, you better know what you’re doing when you pull that trigger. Try to be responsible.”

  “Wow,” I said, and wished I’d just hugged him instead.

  To tell you the truth, taking the gun to school at first was a big nuisance. The thing was heavy and you always had to keep an eye on it. The first couple of days were all right, cause everyone was showing off their pieces at lunch time. A lot of people complimented me on the pearl handle and old school look of my gun. Of course the kids with the new, high-tech 9-millimeter jobs got the most attention, but if your piece was unique enough, it got you at least some cred. Jody Motes, pretty much an idiot with buck teeth and a fat ass, brought in a German Luger with a red swastika inlaid on the handle, and because of it got asked out by this guy in our English class a lot of the girls thought was hot. Kids wore them on their hips, others, mostly guys, did the shoulder holster. A couple of the senior girls with big breasts went with this over-the-shoulder bandolier style, so the gun sat atop their left breast. Sweaty Mr. Gosh in second period math said that look was “very fashionable.” I carried mine in my Sponge Bob lunch box. I hated wearing it, the holster always hiked my skirt up in the back somehow.

  Everybody in the graduating class carried heat except for Scott Wisner, the King of Vermont, as everybody called him. I forget why, cause Vermont was totally far away. His parents had given him a stun gun instead of the real thing. Cody St. John, the captain of the football team, said the stun gun was fag, and after that Wisner turned into a weird loner, who walked around carrying a big jar with a floating mist inside. He asked all the better looking girls if he could have their souls. I know, he asked me. Creep. I heard he’d stun anyone who wanted it for ten dollars a pop. Whatever.

  The senior class teachers all had tactical 12-gauge short-barrel shotguns; no shoulder stock, just a club grip with an image of the school’s mascot (a cartoon of a rampaging Indian) stamped on it. Most of them were loaded with buckshot, but Mrs. Cloder, in human geography, who used her weapon as a pointer when at the board, was rumored to rock the breaching rounds, those big slugs cops use to blow doors off their hinges. Other teachers left the shotguns on their desks or lying across the eraser g
utter at the bottom of the board. Mr. Warren, the vice principal, wore his in a holster across his back, and for an old fart was super quick in drawing it over his shoulder with one hand.

  At lunch, across the soccer field and back by the woods, where only the seniors were allowed to go, we sat out every nice day in the fall, smoking cigarettes and having gun-spinning competitions. You weren’t allowed to shoot back there, so we left the safeties on. Bryce, a boy I knew since kindergarten, was good at it. He could flip his gun in the air backwards and have it land in the holster at his hip. McKenzie Batkin wasn’t paying attention and turned the safety on instead of off before she started spinning her antique colt. The sound of the shot was so sudden, we all jumped, and then silence followed by the smell of gun smoke. The bullet went through her boot and took off the tip of her middle toe. Almost a whole minute passed before she screamed. The King of Vermont and Cody St. John both rushed to help her at the same time. They worked together to staunch the bleeding. I remember noticing the football lying on the ground next to the jar of souls, and I thought it would make a cool photo for the yearbook. McKenzie never told her parents, and hid the boots at the back of her closet. To this day she’s got half a middle toe on her right foot, but that’s the least of her problems.

  After school I walked home with my new friend, Constance, who only came to Bascombe High in senior year. We crossed the soccer field, passed the fallen leaves stained red with McKenzie’s blood, and entered the woods. The wind blew and shook the empty branches of the trees. Constance suddenly stopped walking, crouched, drew her Beretta Storm and fired. By the time I could turn my head, the squirrel was falling back, headless, off a tree about thirty yards away.

  Constance had a cute haircut, short but with a lock that almost covered her right eye. Jeans and a green flannel shirt; a calm, pretty face. When we were doing current events in fifth period social studies, she’d argued with Mr. Hallibet about the cancellation of child labor laws. Me, I could never follow politics. It was too boring. But Constance seemed to really understand, and although on the TV news we all watched, they were convinced it was a good idea for kids twelve and older to now be eligible to be sent to work by their parents for extra income, she said it was wrong. Hallibet laughed at her, and said, “This is Senator Meets we’re talking about. He’s a man of the people. The guy who gave you your guns.” Constance had more to say, but the teacher lifted his shotgun and turned to the board. The thing I couldn’t get over was that she actually knew this shit better than Hallibet. The thought of it, for some reason, made me blush.