Fichtner “laughed,” or whatever its applicable equivalent might be. Little late in the day to go all modest on us now, Greer, ain’t it?
Greer “nodded”: True enough. He pointed at the half-levelled building, and “asked”—
Rest of you actually still in there, somewhere, or was all this for nothin’?
Buried out back, yeah. But they’ll find it easy enough, even without dogs—the grave’s dug shallow. A beat. Besides which . . . if this was really all about laying me to rest, I’ll eat my damn hat.
Greer could’ve argued that most ops were about more than one objective, at the very least—but it really did seem sort of immaterial at this point, so to speak. So instead, he just “nodded” once more.
Good end-game, son. You played it well—way I would’ve, pretty much.
Yeah? That’s almost flattering.
Uh huh. ’Course, you did learn from the best. . . .
But all twitting aside, Greer knew, it was only justice—payback after those years of Greer putting Fichtner’s ass on the line for whatever new info it might bring, when he’d staked him out like a goat again and again, just to see who’d come sniffin’. All the times he’d done his damn job, while helping Fichtner do his . . .
But: I really did let you go, Cal, Greer tried to get across, neverthe-less. Just like you asked me to. Didn’t use you to draw Ajinabi—that was never my intent. Not you, and for damn sure not Aqsa—
Wouldn’t matter much if you had, not now. But for what it’s worth, Greer, I know. I know. . . .
(everything, now)
Like you could too, you only wanted it.
(Really?)
Cal just gave him a shrug, like: Sure. Why not?
And then, all of a sudden—
—he did.
What was left of Greer Reizendaark raised his phantom no-hand to the sky, waving blithely at the satellite he knew Gal and Guy were currently hid behind, then reached right on back through the feed and into the mainframe to try some real tricks—sow a few search-links, start data-mining. Widening the parameters of the satellite’s sweep to track the rest of Ajinabi’s cell’s fleeing trucks as they dispersed, crossing borders at random; he started a new folder, hidden down deep in the infrastructure. Saved, clicked, saved again.
You’re good at that, what was left of Cal Fichtner “said,” almost admiring. Better than I ever was.
Greer had to agree. Turned out, his last wife had had it right all along, without even knowing—a ghost really was the best kind of spook imaginable.
Well, I been doin’ it all my life, son. Might as well keep on keepin’ on.
The answer came back, fading: Yeah, you just do that. . . .
(But as for me, I’ll see you later. Maybe.)
Or . . . maybe not.
Heat, dust, blood; the totalled SUV, a smoking crater. Mehdi, weeping. And then Greer was abruptly alone, half in and half out, still stuck to the world’s dirty back by—duty? Desire?
While Fichtner, his revenge served plastique-hot, moved on to . . . wherever. Someplace Aqsa awaited him, hopefully, where maybe even poor Gullah had a seat set aside at that infinitely bountiful table.
(Again, if only vaguely, he wondered where Ajinabi himself really had gone—to his bed of virgins, as advertised? Or somewhere just a tad more . . . off-putting?)
One could only hope.
I could do that too, Greer caught himself thinking. Just go, in either direction. But—
“Looking down,” seeing Mehdi looking so stricken, and feeling a weird surge of affection. Plus the sting of power unused, and a million different places to use it—to plug himself into the universe’s hide and genuinely be the puppetmaster he’d only thought himself, before he’d known better.
—no. Not just yet.
Greer “smiled” to himself, settling in, now so adjusted to his new state he could almost feel a memory of lips moving, in sympathy with the concept. And sent Mehdi an email.
the ones outside your door
NEILE GRAHAM
The creatures outside are tricksy. In deep woods overgrowth they’re Raven.
Bear. Wolf. Frog. Whale. Themselves and all selves. One.
On the richly barren moors they’re the Good Neighbours. Tiny flighty
flinty bright masquerading as rideable horses that toss you
undersea or bunching into human-like skins. Raven made the world,
brings us salmon, gives us the moon, the stars, but he’s hungry, wily,
more clever than us. After all, his greedy claws have caught the sun.
Hillfolk trade their cranky babes for our sweet sleepers. Tempt away
our pretty ones. Make deals we pay for. Seduce our poets
underhill for seven silent years then gift them with sore truth.
When wind bangs against the boards of our house, grateful
for warmth we park by the fire to spin their yarns; they huddle
their ears against our walls, hungering to hear themselves
named and known. How they grin to hear us tuck them safely
within the boxes of our tales. They gulp this music down,
sucking their sharp teeth for last sweet-sour strands of what’s
meant to shape them. How they love these juicy words. How they
burst the boxes’ walls, polishing teeth ever so bright in the dark, dark world.
down where the best lilies grow
CAMILLE ALEXA
Odette’s maman says she plucked her along with other skinny reeds down by the shallow brackish waters of the Durendal Fen near the water’s tail end where the best mud lilies grow among the beaked sedge and whorl grass. There the small lilies push up, tiny stars tossed against green and black, blossoming like white prayers to hazy dappled cloudshine, offering themselves like virgins opening legs after wedding vows.
Now Maman lies dying, a bitter-spirited woman calling her only daughter a thing of bleached bone, leached blood and dank marshy waters, fashioned of the sodden limbs of the fen’s waterlogged dead, not birthed at all.
You’re not my child, she croaks, twig fingers clutching the neck of her elixir bottle. You’re a marsh baby, just a Little Bit of the bas lieu. A creature of fenwater blood and hollow reed veins and sponge moss muscle.
The fen drags at Maman’s rickety-stilt cabin, the waters older even than Maman, their name from sometime long before, someplace far away. Durendal, Odette knows, was the sword of Charlemagne’s greatest champion, and once belonged to Hector of Troy. Its hollow golden hilt housed the blood of Saint Basil and a scrap of the Blessed Mary’s raiment, and Odette thinks on this as she scours watery willow roots for the reagents of Maman’s midwifery: herbs to help with bleeding and hemorrhage, with pain and memory, with forgetting and sorrow.
Maman’s voice wafts from the cabin, carrying over the fen’s chitinous insect whirr: Little Bit! Little Bit! Bring you your maman’s elixir. . . .
Odette grabs the last brown bottle, its neck fluted and delicate like a trumpetflower crusted with dried brown medicine and mean old woman spittle, both dribbled to obscure the paper label. Years ago, Maman bought ten crates of Le Docteur’s Elixir Miracle from a travelling tinkerman with a squinty eye and a cleft lip and a painted wagon promising strange beasts. The tinkerman let Odette part the dank velvet curtains draping his wagon and crawl in, and she saw the pale misshapen things in jars and cried. She’d thought they’d be alive. But they were just poor sad dead things in jars, every one.
Here’s you your elixir, Maman, Odette says. Maman seizes the fluted bottle with trembling fingers, drags it to her crinkled lips. Odette knows better than to guide her hand; last time, Maman offered to slice it clean off with the gutting knife and drop it into the marshwaters along with the stillborn deBourde twins from across the fen.
Don’t mourn les enfants, she’d told Odette when she caught her leaking tears. We’re all just a bit of fenwater and mud in the end. A big bit or little bit, but all returning to water one way or an
other, sooner or later.
As fen midwife, Maman helps everyone out of this world, same as she helps them in: swaddled in bleached linen, their eyes closed and their mouths open. When someone passes, Odette leads the procession down to the water’s edge where the best lilies grow. Everyone stands with heads bowed, caps in hands, and says last words before lowering loved ones into the brown muddy water between reeds, where undercurrents suck toward deeper channels and down, down into cushioning muck.
And then, day or night or anyplace in between, the marsh moths come.
They cluster thick and soft and pale around the swaddled linen bundles floating outward on insistent sluggish currents tugging always at the bottom of the reeds and making the white mud lilies sway and bob like nodding heads in church. White, white, white, those moths. Whiter than lilies. Whiter than bleached bones. Whiter than sunshine when it tilts hard and blinding into Odette’s eyes and doesn’t let go.
Those moths are the spirits of les enfants, Maman has explained, rising up out of tiny bones deep in the muck, unfurling death-pale wings to sunshine, celebrating as we weep, knowing they take another home to mud and to water.
Maman’s voice comes again now from the back of the cabin: Little Bit! Little Bit! Bring you your maman’s elixir. But Odette arrives to find an empty room, only a shallow dent in the mattress, the sweet smell of rotting moss, and a single moon-white moth on the rough-spun pillow, glowing faintly in the midday gloom.
The creature fans its wings: open, close. Open, close. Larger than any moth Odette has ever seen, dark swirls lacing its upper wings and the single black spot of an eye staring from each of its lower.
Maman? Odette whispers, leaning close. Maman. . . ?
At her breath on its wings, the moth shudders, rises, beats toward the glassless window. Odette stumbles after, heedless of shins scraping unpainted splintered sill as she scrambles over, blood trickling down her legs. She tangles in her skirts to fall heavily into soft damp earth beneath. Scrambling to her feet she staggers after white wings flitting toward the bas lieu.
At the water’s edge, where the best lilies grow, the moths already gather. They come gusting in on white clouds of themselves, clustered so thickly they block the sun as they wheel like one creature between it and the girl.
Odette thinks on Charlemagne, and on Hector of Troy. She thinks on the Durendal sword, on its golden hilt with the blood of Saint Basil and a scrap of the Blessed Mary’s raiment. She thinks on small sad dead creatures floating in jars, and she thinks on Maman.
Bone-white moths drop one by one to cover cuts on Odette’s legs and obscure mud-water splotches patterning her skirts. They rest at the bases of her fingers like heaving white jewels on rings lighter than air. They brush her face, antennae mingling with eyelashes, dusting Odette’s lids and cheeks and lips with fine powder. And when the moths flutter out, out over the fens, winging toward the deep cold channels of waters emptying outward into the sea, Odette follows, laughing.
hide
REBECCA M. SENESE
Billy skidded to a stop beside her. She smelled sweat and Doublemint gum as he opened his mouth.
“The opening to Maple Crescent. After dinner. Be there.”
Then he was gone, running away from her, his untucked blue striped shirt flapping in the breeze.
Pauline’s heart pounded. They’d invited her! How long had it taken to get that invitation? Weeks of sucking up to twerpy Annie Burton at lunch. Swiping extra chocolate bars from home so she could use them as bribery. Smiling and laughing at Annie’s stupid jokes, trying not to be sick as the older girl chewed with her mouth open, exposing gobs of melting chocolate goo in her yellow teeth.
But it had all been worth it! She was invited to the best hide and seek game in the school. Pauline wanted to dance down the sidewalk home but didn’t, she kept her steps even and measured. She couldn’t look too excited to be invited to the game. That wouldn’t be cool.
At dinner, she ate all her vegetables, even the brussels sprouts, in record time. Thankfully no one noticed. Her father was too intent on the paper and her mother was arguing with her younger brother, Jason, who was fussing over his food. He kept pushing the offending brussels sprouts to the edge of his plate, balanced precariously. A glare from mother would cause a grumble and he’d pull them back onto the plate for a moment, then push them back to the edge. Pauline sighed. He hadn’t even figured out how to hide them properly, what kind of a brother was that? She was cursed.
She set her knife and fork down beside her plate. Only a trace of mashed potatoes remained.
“Mom, can I go outside?” she said.
“Once you clean your plate,” her mother said without looking.
“I have.”
Her mother glanced over, blinking as if she was just waking up. “Oh. All right then. Put your plate in the sink.”
Pauline scrambled from the table, dumped the plate and cutlery in the sink and was out the door before her mother could change her mind.
The early evening was crisp with the scent of cut grass. Pauline’s runners thumped hard on the asphalt as she ran toward Maple Crescent. Three blocks down and four streets over. She raced past identical houses with similar lawns cluttered with bikes and children’s toys. The sun had shifted since her walk home and she felt like she was chasing her long shadow. Maybe they would even be playing the hide and seek game until dark! The pounding of her heart was not only from running.
She passed a cluster of bushes and emerged at the entrance to Maple Crescent. New houses lined one side of the street, partially constructed shells lined the other. Fresh sawdust on the breeze tickled her nostrils. The front of the second unfinished house was covered with a plastic tarp that had come loose and flapped with a sharp snap in the wind. It looked like a tortured flag.
“You’re early.”
She turned to see Teddy Williams slouching on the sidewalk. He frowned at her, beefy hands fumbled with a silver yoyo that he stuffed into his back pocket.
“Billy told me after dinner,” Pauline said. “I finished dinner.”
Teddy kept frowning, shifting on his off-white runners. Behind him, Pauline could see a couple of other kids approaching. Yes, it was Ravi and his brother Jamil, both short with light brown skin. Pauline noticed Bridget and Sandra, cutting across from another street. Bridget had bright red hair cut short which only seemed to accent her height. Sandra, one year older, stood three inches shorter with blonde hair past her shoulders. A gold barrette clipped her hair neatly to the back of her neck.
Pauline turned back to Teddy and raised her eyebrows. He muttered under his breath and shifted again.
Ravi joined them first. “Where’s Billy? He late again?”
“Don’t know,” Teddy said. “Ask her. She was here early.”
Bridget and Sandra were within earshot. Pauline felt everyone looking at her. Her face grew hot. Oh no, she couldn’t stammer and look stupid. She’d never get another chance!
She shrugged in a way she hoped seemed casual. “I haven’t seen him.”
For a moment, all the gazes fixed on her, then the kids looked away. Pauline let her breath out. That had been close.
Over the next several minutes, kids drifted in from all directions except from the new houses on Maple Crescent. Pauline glanced back at them. Why did the kids meet here?
Finally the last of the kids trickled up until there was about twenty of them, but still no sign of Billy. Ravi and Jamil consulted with several of the other kids, then called for attention.
“Billy’s not here, so we’ll just start.” Jamil clapped his hands. “Now we got a new player today.” He pointed at Pauline.
Pauline froze. Again she felt their gaze, this time magnified twenty times. Her cheeks burned. She hated blushing but there wasn’t any way she could stop it. She forced her mouth to move, cracking her cheeks as her lips tried to curve into a smile. Her hand lifted in a limp wave.
“The rules are this—everyone hides and you have to find the
m. The first one you find has to help you find another one, the next one you find helps you find the one after that. And it keeps going. Nobody hides together and kids can change their hiding place. We go until an hour after dark.”
Pauline sucked in a breath. They played until after dark? She hadn’t known that.
Jamil’s expression hardened. “You got a problem? You have to go home early, like a baby?”
Pauline clenched her teeth. “No. I don’t gotta go home.”
Jamil’s black eyes glared her then he relaxed. “Good. We’ll get started. You count to a hundred and then get started.”
“Wait, don’t we have to figure who’s it?” Pauline said.
“You’re it. You’re new. New one is always it first game. That’s the rules.”
Other kids around her nodded, muttering “the rules.” Pauline tried to find a sympathetic face but they were all closed to her. She sighed.
“Okay.”
Jamil led her to a telephone pole and watched as she faced it, covering her eyes.
“No peeking,” his voice hissed in her ear. “Count out loud.”
“One, two, three,” Pauline counted off. Over the sound of her voice, she heard the shuffle of running shoes on pavement as the kids scattered. She kept counting and soon the sounds faded, leaving just the rustle of the leaves in the evening breeze. She passed forty and kept counting. Would they know if she didn’t count all the way to one hundred? She didn’t want to take the chance. Probably they had figured out how long it took and they’d never let her play again if she stopped early. She kept counting.
“Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred.” She stepped back from the telephone pole and blinked. Even the fading light seemed bright now. Her eyes watered. She rubbed them then turned to look around. Not a sign of any of the kids. It was as if they’d never even been there. A thrill ran through her. She was in the game now. Time to get started.
Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing Page 10