Best of British Fantasy 2018

by Jared Shurin

  Then one day let’s say I make a mistake and touch one of the birds. Now I tend the infection; a grey that spreads. I stroke the grey; it feels like the velvet of an ancient and crumbling curtain, it pulses like slime mould, seeking out nutrients from my body. I wrap up the infection site neatly as I was once told to, but just for aesthetics. I defy anyone to read the advice available and not laugh. The disease goes creeping towards my heart, just as it suggests.

  Let me tell you what my morning looks like: get up none too early, clean last night’s dishes, change my dressing. The grey velvet progresses. It is said to get to the genitals quickest of all, though I haven’t looked at mine in a long time, so I’ve no idea. I call the cat (she does not come), leave food for anything that might still need to eat, make something for myself. I have a shelf full of old jars and what’s in them counts as food. There is no one to watch me smear the brown stuff on rice cakes, and anyway the salt from my crying jags is a pretty good seasoning. I wash one of the broken cars, sweeping out the hay and picking about for anything useful. I work, and the sun pinches in the shadows of the trees across the dirt road where no one ever goes. The shadows start to stretch back, filling the land from the ground up, and then it’s blue-dark, and I put on my head torch, and go about the place, wishing I could speak insect. Wishing I could speak to anyone.

  What does your morning look like? I try to assemble something convincing: you wake up sweet and refreshed in your studio, and the city is loud and the morning sunlight very robust, rubbing up against your paintings and smoothing the lines on your face, slight as they are themselves. You make yourself a tapioca wrap and coffee, and you talk to the whole world on your phone: the whole world wants to know how you are, because that is how you are, magnetic, alive. Then you must have some bills to pay, some preparation for the smooth running of a plague-free life. And then you make art until classes, or therapy and the theatre group, then classes. I imagine this life you have as full of sounds, bustle. I imagine you becoming annoyed, over-worried, taxed by the constant overturn of voices, traffic, demands, brilliance, beauty. I imagine you whole and continuous in your healthy body. I have to imagine it, because I cannot tell what does or doesn’t exist beyond a ten kilometre radius of the affliction where I am now. Where I will be as the small end, with patient slowness – a mother in her long grey dress – bends across my body to lay me down.

  For thirty-four years I had no idea about apocalypses. It’s strange, I used to think they were a global event. I suppose that was a position of privilege. Now I know better. An apocalypse can be limited to a single city, or even a street, shattered into debris by a gas explosion. An apocalypse can be as small as a palm, as large as a house, seemingly sturdy, now desolate to look at on its patch of hopeful ground. It takes on fairy tale dimensions. It can fit about one like a skin, like a grey fur covered in ticks. At the end of the world there is a farm and I am living in it, more and more undone by this particular catastrophe. I have lost the use of my tongue; my mouth full of softness, my teeth sending sparks of static when I chew. I cannot cry now, it has become a disease without release. But it doesn’t know me, not at all. And the people that are supposed to know it, know nothing either. And me? I’m as lost as the rest. Just for fun, of a night I sit on the rotten wooden deck and stare out across the empty field, imagining horses there, gleaming, snorting, rushing about with their tails up. The velvet inches over and into me, I can feel its ministrations in my heart, my heart starting to beat like powdery moth wings. But the world, the world is populated by many wondrous things: horses and the horses I make when there are none; you and all that is aside from you, and I understand this, right to the very end I get to, no matter what anyone else has said, or failed to say correctly.

  The Prevaricator

  Matthew Hughes

  Alphronz became a prevaricator because of a lesson he learned when he was a little boy, not long before the sixth anniversary of his naming day. His mother had told him she would take him that afternoon to the Grand Market in the centre of the City of Wal and he should therefore not get his clothes soiled while he played outside.

  Alphronz went down to the street from the little flat where they lived in the suburb known as The Bords. A trip to the Grand Market was a treat because his mother would allow him to choose a fifthing’s worth of sweetmeats from the confectioner’s booth. A fifthing would buy several boiled sweets, and Alphronz would be allowed to choose each one. He was particularly fond of the aniseed balls.

  So he played sedately with his little squad of wooden soldiers on the pavement outside their tenement and time passed. Then he heard the rumble of the omnibus’s iron-bound wheels and the clopping of its quartet of horses and stood to watch it go by. He saw it stop some distance up the street and there he saw a woman with her hair bound up in a blue cloth and wearing a yellow woollen jacket climb aboard the conveyance.

  Alphronz suffered a pang of abandonment. His mother owned just such a scarf and jacket. She had boarded the omnibus and was now riding away without him. His little mouth opened in a sob and tears sprang from his eyes. His wails drew the attention of passersby. A matronly woman, the butcher’s wife, stopped and stooped to ask what was wrong.

  “My mama’s gone without me!” he cried.

  “Now then, no need to cry,” said the woman. “She’ll be back directly, you’ll see.”

  But Alphronz was not to be so easily consoled. Fresh torrents ran down his cheeks and he emitted a heartrending moan. The matron frowned then reached into her reticule and brought out a silver half-penny. “Here,” she said. “Now stop crying.”

  Alphronz looked at the shining disk in his little hand. He had never held a coin before, except a fifthing to give to the confectioner. But a half-penny was worth two-and-a-half fifthings. The child tried to calculate how many sweets it could buy, but he knew only how to add and take away simple sums. Multiplication was as yet unknown to him. Still, it was wealth beyond his scope. He closed his fingers tightly around the coin.

  The woman patted his head, said something Alphronz did not attend to, and walked on. It was only then that he noticed he had stopped crying. He wiped away the traces of his tears and put the coin in his pocket – the one with a button – and sealed it safely. Then he gathered up his soldiers and went around to the alley where lay the sole entrance to his tenement. He climbed the stairs and pushed open the door of the flat only to find his mother on her hands and knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor. She looked up and said, “Are you trying to hurry me? I don’t want you underfoot when I’m cleaning. Go back down and play.”

  Alphronz did as he was bid. But he did not play with his soldiers. Instead, he sat on the bottom step and thought about what he had learned:

  People would give him money if he cried.

  Why would they do that? he asked himself. And he found an answer:

  His tears had made the butcher’s wife unhappy; giving him the coin had made her happy again.

  In the years to come, Alphronz put this lesson to good use. To begin with, he would place himself where there were plenty of passersby, and then he would think of the saddest things he could, until the tears came. Sometimes he would be given a stick of candy, but oftimes, some well-meaning soul would hand him a fifthing or a half-penny.

  In time, he grew too old for the tears to work their effect and he realised that he had outgrown that particular tactic. But as he matured into a small yet wiry young man, the strategy took on a variety of tactical forms while the core of the device remained the same: First make them unhappy, then take their unhappiness away. And always take the money.

  By the time he met his middle years, still small but no longer wiry, it had become his stock-in-trade. He had learned that a reliable generator of unhappiness was envy. Thus Alphronz would appear in a town as a wealthy newcomer, renting a fine house and a carriage, engaging servants to meet his needs, and making a grand splash into a carefully chosen social stratum: those who were financially comfortable but would like
to be more so.

  Over sumptuous dinners and all-night games of brag and follow-the-fox, Alphronz would demur when asked for details of how he had won his obviously vast fortune. The conversations usually flowed along these lines:

  “I’m in grain,” would say a broker who lent money at usurious rates of interest for seed grain to poor farmers and took their land if the harvest was not enough to repay every last groat. “What is your interest?”

  And Alphronz would reply, “Oh, I am retired, though I still keep a hand in, from time to time.”

  “A hand in what?”

  “This and that, opportunities as they arise. Whose turn is it to deal?” Gradually, as the weeks passed and he was the subject of much speculative gossip, he might let slip a mention of ‘secret fiduciary pools’ or ‘high-risk, high-return speculative ventures’. Then he would change the subject and refuse to be drawn further.

  Thus did it become common knowledge that Alphronz had connections to financial elites in distant cities. He was able to buy into lucrative schemes that the cognoscenti reserved to themselves, making vast profits from ventures that ordinary folk never got a sniff of.

  And then would come an evening when Alphronz breezed into the local supper club to order a gourmet feast and a demijohn of the best wine the cellars could offer. He would invite a few of the regular patrons to join him in a celebratory toast.

  “To prosperity!” he’d say, clinking his rim to theirs, then immedi-ately refilling his guests’ glasses and saying, “And to the best of times!” He would then proceed to become cheerily inebriated – or so it would seem – and allow his cronies to tease from him some details of his latest success.

  Over the next few days, he would be quietly and individually approached by those who had heard the details at first- or second-hand. They would ask to be part of the next syndicate that came Alphronz’s way.

  He would show them his palms raised in warning, tell them that such ventures were only for the sophisticated investor, that the rewards were high because the hazards were also out of the ordinary. But that only sharpened their appetites and they would press him to take them into his circle.

  And so he would, though only for small stakes to ‘protect them from the dangers of risk’. Then, after several days, he would bring them profits of forty and fifty parts per hundred. And they would clamour to be included in his next venture.

  After two or three of these teasings, when the hooks were well set, he would inform his little circle of devotees that a large play was now in the offing. “But,” he would say, “this one is not for amateurs. The buy-in is substantial, though the returns will be enormous if all goes well.”

  Envy had by now been supplanted by pure avarice. His cronies would empty their savings and borrow against their houses to raise the necessary stake. Alphronz would give them each a receipt, then load the sacks of gold bezants and silver double-crowns into a strongbox. This would be placed in his carriage and he would depart the town promising to return with their winnings in a week or so.

  And that, of course, was the last the marks ever saw of Alphronz the prevaricator. A league or so out of town, the carriage would have stopped at some inn where a good horse and a stout mule stood waiting. The strongbox would be transferred to the mule and Alphronz would mount the horse and be gone.

  The carriage driver would return to his depot, a coin in his pocket. A day later, his employer would come to Alphronz’s manse to inquire why the draft for the month’s rental had been refused at the fiduciary pool. He might find the house’s landlord come on a similar mission, along with the dealer who rented Alphronz the furnishings and silverware. But the servants who might have answered their inquiries were all gone.

  It would be several more days before the investors, anxious for their profits and having failed to find Alphronz at any of his usual haunts, would arrive to find the place empty and available for rent. By then, the prevaricator would be far away, spending their wealth to afford himself a fine life.

  After the tenth time he had performed this ‘operation’, as he called it, Alphronz returned again to the Isle of Tortoises in the Tepid Sea. Here he had a comfortable house situated on a bluff above the harbour at Port Amberlyne and was known to be a man who kept himself to himself but scrupulously paid all his accounts in full and on time. His habit of giving handsome gratuities to waiters and doormen won him excellent service at the places he liked to frequent.

  But after a massage to take the kinks of the long sea voyage from his muscles and a celebratory meal at The King’s Plate, Alphronz came home and went down to his strongroom to make a final enumeration of the latest operation’s takings. He calculated that he could live, in the style he preferred, for seven months. Then he would have to go forth once more into the world, choose a new town to infiltrate, and repeat the process.

  The heap of coins and ingots that would keep him at leisure for seven months made a substantial pile on his counting table. Next to it was a smaller but not inconsiderable pile of specie: the seed money for his next harvest of the people he thought of privately as ‘the crop’. It would pay for the rental of property and furnishings, the engaging of servants and a carriage, and all the meals and drinks to which he would treat the crop as he cultivated it and prepared for the gathering of the fruits.

  It occurred to Alphronz, not for the first time, that the seed money would see him through several more months of living expenses on the Isle of Tortoises. If he could devise a means of carrying out an operation without putting in so much of his hard-earned wealth, he would not have to work as often as he did. He would have more time to enjoy existence. Now, as he locked up the strongroom and went up to his favourite chamber, the one with a balcony that caught the evening breeze, he turned his agile mind to the question of how. His day servant had decanted a bottle of pale wine and set it with a glass on the balcony’s wrought-iron table. Alphronz settled into the plush-cushioned chair and poured himself a measure. He inhaled the wine’s bouquet, swirled it twice in the stemmed glass, then took the first fragrant sip.

  As he did so, his memory took him back to an evening several weeks before, when he had been dining and wining with some members of the crop. A prosperous horse-coper who dealt in thoroughbreds for the racing crowd was telling of what he had learned during a trip to the Great Dry Plain to buy breeding stock.

  “On the way back,” the fellow said, “I passed through the city of Barstandle, just to see what I might pick up from a couple of stables I know there. I could hardly do any business, because the entire city was in a frenzy of fear.”

  Alphronz raised his refined brows in inquiry but left it to the others around the table to press the coper for the tale.

  “Wizards,” said the man, “well, at least one wizard. Word had got around that a powerful thaumaturge was looking to buy an estate just down the road from the south gates.”

  “Oh my,” said one of the crop, an importer of luxury goods. “Barstandle does most of its trade with southron cities.”

  “Indeed,” said the coper, “and it’s a brave caravaneer who will lead his wagons past the walls of a wizard’s demesne. But the only other route would mean a three-day detour through the Flintshard Hills, and you know what you’ll find there.”

  Heads nodded sagely. “Bad water and even worse bandits,” said one of the listeners.

  “So what happened?” Alphronz said.

  “A few days went by and the fuss died down. Word was that the town elders had offered the thaumaturge an incentive to go elsewhere.”

  “Wizards usually can’t be bribed,” someone said. “They can conjure up all the gold and jewels they need.”

  But another man said, “I’ve heard that conjured riches don’t last. The gold fades to iron and the jewels turn back into pebbles.”

  More sagacious nodding. “I’ve heard that, too,” said the man who took farmers’ land when they couldn’t pay their debts.

  And the discussion moved on.

  Alphronz
sat on his balcony above Port Amberlyne and sipped his wine. He could not represent himself as a thaumaturge. But in the case of Barstandle, the spellslinger had not actually appeared on the scene. As soon as rumours of his impending acquisition of the estate spread through the populace, the city fathers had sent their inducement to encourage him to settle elsewhere.

  “Wizards have ghosts and familiars to serve them, as well as sylphs and afreets,” Alphronz mused to himself. “But they also have human henchmen.”

  He sipped some more and thought, “Such a fellow might arrive in some town and let it be known that he was seeking properties his master might acquire.”

  To portray himself as a wizard’s henchman would cost far less than masquerading as a semi-retired investor in high-risk ventures.

  And he reminded himself of the lesson he had learned as a little boy. If you can create unhappiness, people will pay to be happy again. And fear was just as good a generator of unhappiness as envy – perhaps even better – and it might require less of an investment.

  Considerably less, as it turned out. Alphronz had heard that there was a retired spellslinger living somewhere on the Isle of Tortoises. A few days of inquiries led him to a village called Five Points and another couple of questions brought him to a nondescript house on the edge of the settlement. A tall, wizened man in a worn grey woollen robe was scratching with a hoe at a vegetable plot beside the house.

  Alphronz approached the waist-high fence. “Are you Jarndycek the sorcerer?” he called.