The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7

by Jonathan Strahan

  "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.

  "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.”