The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “Then it wasn’t yours to see in the first place,” I said.

  The little Mullard girl began to sing. Melody’s brothers joined in as the harmony and soon the whole family had clasped hands in a circle around Hugh’s fake stump.

  David turned his back to me on his hands and knees and I wondered what he was doing. Then he put one wobbling hand on the edge of the stump followed by the other, and he pushed himself slowly to his feet.

  “Hey,” Hugh said again, pushing me away. “You do see things, and you need to share them with people who don’t.”

  David closed his eyes and swayed a moment.

  “No, I don’t,” he said quietly. “I’m not one of the good guys.”

  Melody came up smiling with one hand held out for him.

  “Walk with me again until you are?” she said.

  He took her hand with the wide eyes and open mouth of a man being saved at the last second from drowning in the sea. Together they stepped onto the edge. They paused and gazed at each other like the wedding picture. This was another one, a renewal of the vows.

  “Do you want to say goodbye?” she asked him.

  He glanced over at Hugh and me. Hugh was reaching for him with a look of feral desperation on his face. Me, I nodded to David and he nodded back.

  “No,” he said. “Never again.”

  Then she took him into her arms in a dancing embrace and they plunged into the Knot. I half expected them to disappear in a flash. Or maybe I hoped.

  All I heard was the pop and creak of them hitting canvas. When we approached, she was cradling him close like an infant and he was unconscious.

  The Mullards came forward with a blanket and they bundled David inside. The brothers hoisted him between them and started for the studio door.

  “Thank you all,” Melody said, clasping mine and Hugh’s hands. “You saved a life today.”

  Hugh tugged his away. “No, we murdered a great show that made people happy.” He turned to me. “You murdered it.”

  I didn’t think so then, not yet, so I didn’t even watch as he stormed off through the forest, punching tree after tree.

  “I’m glad we could help,” I said.

  Melody kissed me on the cheek and hurried off after the limp form of her husband, the late David Findley.

  Tony wasn’t well enough to travel in person at the end thanks to the cancer growing in his body like something on one of our old shows. I tried last October to rent a Winnebago and take him up the coast; he always loved the trees like David. We got maybe thirty miles out before he was too sick to keep going, but it wasn’t him who said it. He’d have gone the whole way in that little plastic bathroom to make me feel better.

  Make me feel better.

  What he did instead with the last year he had was walk the world through Google Maps, steering down back country roads with the arrow keys. He went twice or three times across the country that way.

  I told myself Acres of Perhaps died for many reasons, not just because of losing our resident “genius.” People gave a lot less of a shit about fantasy and a lot more about the bullet-flying, hose-spraying, billy-clubbing reality of the time. If you were square, you wanted to be told about better times on television in Westerns and variety shows. If you were cool, a show like ours couldn’t keep up with the farm-league David Findleys on every college campus with speed, weed, and acid. If you wanted weird, if you wanted surreal, there was always the news.

  We tried, though, and I wrote my best scripts in that last half season. Remember the one where the disgraced comic book artist has to draw pictograms for our first contact with an alien race? That was mine. I also did the one where the white-bread people of a wholesome Midwestern town chase the stranded motorcycle gang into a warehouse and burn it down.

  But come on. It was over. And as the stories and scripts came slower to me, I began to realize I might be over, too. I knew it on the last day of filming when Hugh handed me my check.

  “You know not to come back here, don’t you?” he said.

  “I sure do,” I said, folding the check for my pocket.

  Hugh and I made up a little before he died. We were in the elevator at a convention years later, standing in opposite corners with grinning teenagers glancing back and forth between us, when out of nowhere he said, “The fucking Love Boat? Really?”

  I calmly looked at him and said, “Flood Zone Manhattan? Really?”

  Deadpan, he said, “We’re both writing disaster pictures.”

  “At least Ethel Merman dies in yours,” I said.

  We laughed together for as long as it took to get to the lobby, and Hugh patted my shoulder with one shaking hand on his way out. That was it. That was as close as we got.

  The next year I was writing for Charles in Charge.

  This is Tony’s computer, and I barely know how they work. I follow the paths he made for me, click the things he showed me how to click, let him do the looking I’ve always been afraid to do, and I’ve been exploring his mind when I’m not typing this.

  Yesterday, I found the orange teardrop marking a spot in the North Carolina foothills in Google Maps. It had a label, and the label was, “Go here when I die.”

  So I am.

  Jenkins Notch is in its own valley between two ridges of the Appalachian foothills, and first you have to go up a road of hairpin turns and switchbacks before coming down again. Not that Tony went there in person, of course. But for him to find the town and find the farm, even when he was in too much pain to sit for twenty minutes at a time . . . it probably almost felt that way.

  The place looks like one of our old sets, Fantasia Americana. There’s a real general store where old men sit around a giant wooden spool playing checkers. There’s a post office operating from an old mobile home surrounded on three sides by a handicapped ramp. They’ve got a Main Street, too, but the little hardware store and clothing shop have long been boarded up, and the only busy place in town is the Circle K convenience store.

  I followed the line Tony drew for me off the main road and through town and into the forest and finally down a bumping dirt track with a ridge of weeds growing out from the middle. The closer I got, the more I worried about whom I would find at the end. I hadn’t called ahead, and Leroy Dutton could stagger from his shack with one overall strap hanging loose from a beefy shoulder and a cocked shotgun on his arm, thinking I’m the tax man. I could end this journey bleeding out in the dust with my chest turned to hamburger.

  That’s not the reason I didn’t go to see Leroy first, though.

  I’m no commando or wilderness scout, so it took me some wandering and thrashing through the brush to find my way to the low-sloping hammock of loamy soil that David described for us all those years ago. I glanced between the sycamores for the little goblin things of “Woodsy,” but I didn’t see any.

  When I came to a path of planks, I knew I was close. I followed them deeper into what now were oaks and cypress, big trees with heavy drooping limbs. Hanging from some were unlit oil lanterns, maybe placed by Leroy himself, and there was evidence people had been walking through recently: trimmed branches, flattened leaves.

  It never occurred to me that the Knot could have rotted into the ground over the fifty years since Leroy fell inside. It didn’t seem possible. And when I reached a domed clearing with a single heavy beam of sunlight aimed at the center, I was not surprised to see the Knot waiting for me.

  Our replica on the stage was almost perfect, but this one was even larger than I imagined. Even now, rotted down low to an irregular circle, it still felt mighty. Someone had assembled a half-circle of log benches around it.

  I’d come a long way, right? I wasn’t drunk or imaginative or knighted by the gods with any magical perception, but yes, I leaned over and looked down into the Knot.

  It was dark, just as David had described. There was a slight intimation of a breeze, a breathing, also like he’d said. My eyes couldn’t focus on the bottom, black and speckled with something like stars
. It might have been night on the other side, where David Findley was still writing in an attic somewhere with a bottle of gin beside him.

  Where Tony was speeding down the Pacific Coast Highway with me.

  I closed my eyes and tipped myself inside.

  We had a hard time agreeing on the opening credits for Acres of Perhaps. A time-lapse of day fading to night in the desert? Turning pages of a book? The sparks of a campfire winding upward to the stars? A flying saucer hovering in observation above a tranquil Earth?

  Hugh wanted something I called the Flying Antique Store, old porcelain dolls and Victorian chairs and grandfather clocks tumbling at the camera from some distant point in space, probably because the props were free. David, who couldn’t care less about the credits, half-heartedly suggested the ticker-tapper of a news broadcast from the “far edges of imagination,” something to lure in the suburban zombies he hoped to awaken.

  My idea—and I’ve marveled since that it came to me—was to show a family sitting down to watch television on the other side of the glass, Mom in her housecoat and Pop in his loosened tie and the kids settling in, all of them staring expectantly at the viewers as though they were about to be the show. That’s what we went with.

  I saw none of those things falling through the Knot like I expected. I would have settled for scenes from my life because at least Tony would be there, but all I got was the stretch effect from Vertigo, zooming the edges of that stump into infinity, lined with swimming lights.

  It felt like settling into bed after being awake for years.

  Tony was not the one who woke me, but I wasn’t surprised. What were the chances he’d be waiting by the Knot on the other side when I came through?

  The man who did was heavyset with horn-rimmed glasses and a head of white unruly hair. He wasn’t in overalls and he didn’t have a shotgun, just an undershirt and blue jeans.

  “Barry?” he was saying.

  “What year is it?” I croaked. “Who’s the President? Did 9/11 still happen?”

  The man who once was David Findley sat on the edge of the stump. “Tony’s still gone,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you still Leroy Dutton?”

  He clasped my arm and tugged me from the soft black soil. “Always was,” he said.

  With his help I got to my feet, knee-deep in leaves. I found my way back over onto solid land in three wobbling steps.

  “Are you still . . . ”

  “A hillbilly? If you’re asking if I can play a banjo, I have to say the answer is yes, but I can only pick out the first few bars of the Acres of Perhaps theme.”

  I peered down into the Knot and all feeling of infinite depth and darkness was gone. “So it is just a stump.”

  David glanced in. “I’ve gone back and forth on that. I’ve never believed like I did back then, but then, maybe I don’t have to.”

  I felt very strange and light, and it took me a moment to ask, “How did you know? About Tony?”

  “He sent a letter and told us you’d be coming.”

  Tony, still planning my travel from beyond the grave. “When?” I asked.

  “I’d have to look at the letter,” he said. “A couple of months ago. You want to come back to the house to see it, maybe get some water?”

  “No moonshine?” I said.

  “I quit that stuff years ago, believe me, and the McDantrys up and left in 1970 anyway. I bought their property from the bank.”

  “You own the Knot?”

  “I own the Knot.” He grinned. “Isn’t that crazy?”

  “Yes,” I said. It all was.

  “The kids and grandkids used it for a stage,” Leroy said. “They did puppet shows and magic shows and little plays and Franny used to have her revival sermons here for us. She’s a Unitarian minister now.”

  “Children played in the Knot?”

  “They still do sometimes when they come to visit,” Leroy said. “We built a little platform for it and set up the benches like our own Globe Theater.”

  “They don’t . . . fall through?”

  “Not literally, no.”

  By then I was feeling warm, and my head felt heavy and barely attached to my neck.

  “Hey,” I said, taking his arm before I fell back in. “That whole thing back then in LA . . . I wasn’t your friend.”

  “I know,” Leroy said.

  “I killed you,” I said.

  “A little bit,” he conceded.

  “Stories came to you easily and love came to you easily and you could be whatever you wanted in the open and you didn’t want what I couldn’t have.”

  “I knew that fifty years ago, Barry. Did you come to hear how everything turned out okay? That’s fine, but first you have to know that it didn’t for a long time. For a long time, I was the world’s angriest feed and seed delivery man.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

  “You have to understand that, okay? You did something shitty to someone who saw you as a friend.”

  Keep going, I thought. Go all the way through with the needle, me or the Knot, I didn’t care.

  “But I did something you didn’t. I healed and scarred over. Maybe it was easier here in the woods with Melody, but you could have done it, too, if you’d let yourself. You didn’t have to write for Diff’rent Strokes or The Facts of Life or whatever you did, and you didn’t have to blame me or yourself for it.”

  “I should have been the one who left the show,” I said.

  “Why? You were always as good as me. You’re the one who didn’t think so, only because you did it differently.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut with my fingers. I killed him for nothing.

  “All those stories that could have been,” I said.

  “You still wrote some,” Leroy said.

  “No, I mean you. I mean your stories.”

  Leroy squinted at me. “Do you think I stopped writing?”

  “I thought—”

  “—that I’d be too busy shooting Indians and skinning raccoons? Who do you think wrote those plays and puppet shows?”

  “It’s not the same,” I said.

  “The same as what?”

  “The same as Acres of Perhaps.”

  “Barry,” he said. “I don’t want to let you off the hook without giving you some more shit first, but what do you think I’ve been writing?”

  “Puppet shows,” I mumbled. “Plays for kids.”

  “It was just a different network,” Leroy said. “And my grandson Tucker? He can do one hell of an impression of a dropping atomic bomb.”

  Wait, I wanted to say. I wanted the world to wait, let me hear it clearly. “You wrote scripts?”

  Leroy shrugged. “Sure. Here and there, maybe a couple hundred.”

  A couple hundred. Scripts. Of Acres of Perhaps.

  “Are you sure I’m not on the other side of the Knot?”

  “If you can’t tell the difference, Barry, then maybe there isn’t one.”

  On our way back, we walked in silence until Leroy said, “You know, I could have written for The Love Boat, too.”

  “Could you?”

  “Sure. They pull into Acapulco and at midnight, the ghosts of murdered Aztecs steal everyone’s gold.”

  “You’d have to write in Billy Barty or Paul Lynde,” I said.

  “Okay. One is a famous diamond thief and the passengers hang him from a yard arm when he doesn’t confess.”

  “That’s not bad,” I said.

  We followed the planks back toward a farm, not a gray shanty with the siding peeling at the corners but something with two stories and a gleaming metal roof. A woman with gorgeous long gray hair hanging almost to her waist was climbing out of a giant Toyota pick-up truck. She was wearing a suit.

  Leroy pointed to me. “Look what I found in the Knot.”

  She didn’t close the door. She hurried over, her heels kicked free, but then she stopped with her hands on her hips.

  “Are you taking him back to sin?” />
  “What?” I glanced at Leroy and then back to her. I never imagined she might be the one to greet me with a shotgun, probably not far out of reach in that truck. “No. No. Not at all. I wanted to—”

  She pulled me in for a hug. I didn’t raise my arms to return it right away, only slowly.

  “It’s okay, Barry. That’s what my family thought. I just wanted my husband back.” She leaned back, looking me over. “How long were you out there?”

  “I think he might have been lurking there since the sixties,” Leroy said.

  She frowned but said, “Well, that would explain a lot. I’m sorry I just got home. Had to go to the school board in town.”

  “She used to be superintendent,” Leroy said. “Still is, if you count all the ‘consulting’ she does.”

  I wondered if her district taught evolution. I had a feeling it did if Leroy was anything to go by.

  “Are you going to stay awhile?” she asked me.

  “Do you want me to?”

  “We both do,” she said. “Tony did, too.”

  “I’m sorry?” I said, not sure I’d heard.

  “Come on,” Leroy said.

  We walked to the edge of the grass beneath a copse of trees toward a small shed or cabin with three lightly molded windows. He opened the door for me and inside were two desks, one with a computer and one with Leroy’s old typewriter.

  “Tony sent it a few months ago,” Melody said. “He told us you kept it for years.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Leroy pointed. “What I figure is you can use that and I can use the computer, or maybe the other way around, and I can write stories about walking skyscrapers and you can write stories about Mars.”

  “Who would want them?” I asked.

  “Well, Tony would, for one,” he said. “But I’m guessing we can find some asshole in Hollywood to sell them for us.”

  So I’m sitting now in a creaking swivel chair. I’m looking out through the windows. There’s a glass beside me of something called “unsweet tea” which is what we drink around here now instead of booze. I’m resting my fingers on the keys—I don’t plan to type, don’t plan to even try—but the cool plastic waits.

  Waits for when I’m ready again.