The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Ellen Datlow ed.

  “Jimmy?” I called softly, moving ahead of Mrs. Beauvais. “It’s me, are you down here?” I glanced back at the social worker picking her way along the frozen ground, both arms out for balance as if she were walking a tightrope or something. I should have made her wait in the car, I thought, watching her pause to frown at her right boot. She’d stepped in something.

  Without waiting for her, I plunged into the thickest part of the tall dead weeds close to the bridge support, both arms out in front of me so I wouldn’t go face-first into the cement if I tripped. Abruptly, one of the stalks tilted down and hit me right on the bridge of my nose. Tears sprang into my eyes even though it wasn’t quite as bad as the time the army brat who lived upstairs from us punched me in the nose. I staggered sideways, my hands grabbing for something, anything. Weeds broke off in my left hand; what felt like several jets of warm, humid air hit my right palm, and then I was sitting on the ground with Jimmy standing over me. He was wearing only a light, threadbare brown plaid shirt and jeans, but he didn’t look cold.

  “What’re you doing here?” His voice sounded tired and old.

  “Looking for you.” I got up and brushed myself off. “Just like everybody else in town, I think. Well, your social worker and her assistant, anyway. The one who drives the red VW. They made me help them.” I spotted Mrs. Beauvais about twenty feet away, turning around with a desperate, bewildered expression on her face. I waved at her. “Hey, over here!”

  Jimmy pulled my arm down. “Don’t bother. She can’t hear you. Or see you.”

  I twisted out of his grip. “What are you talking about? She’s just right there—” I raised my arm to wave at her again and saw the air in front of me ripple, as if it were shimmering in intense heat.

  “Okay, go ahead—wave, yell, yodel for all I care.” Jimmy chuckled. “Can you yodel?”

  I couldn’t but I tried waving and yelling some more. Mrs. Beauvais didn’t even look in our direction as she stumbled around in her expensive boots.

  “Jeez, Jimmy. How are you doing it?”

  “I’m not doing anything. They are.” He jerked his thumb upward. I looked. Instead of the underside of the bridge, there was—

  Well, I don’t know what it was; I still don’t. That might have been because only part of it was visible, as if someone had torn a strip out of the world overhead so it could show through, like a hidden attic between a ceiling and a roof, but I don’t think so. It did remind me of an attic but it also made me think of a submarine. Or, strangely, a cross between Mrs. Beauvais’s pocketbook, still swinging from the crook of her arm, and the roof of my mouth.

  Too weird; I wanted to lower my head but my neck wouldn’t move and closing my eyes made me feel dizzy. There was another, worse feeling creeping up on me as well, a strong sense of not mattering, of being so small next to everything else that I might as well not exist. It was horrible and scary but at the same time I also felt oddly relieved to know where I stood in the universe of things. But not happy; definitely not happy.

  “Jimmy?” I said weakly.

  “I know,” he said. “This is my dharma.”

  I’d never heard the word before; it lodged in my brain like a barbed hook. “Who—or what—is up there?” I asked. I thought I saw faint shadows moving in the vaulted darkness. Later, much later, I thought of a church or a cathedral, but it wasn’t like that at all.

  “I just told you—my dharma. That’s what they said, anyway. It means this is how it is for me.”

  “Oh.” I wanted to tell him that my neck wouldn’t move but I couldn’t remember how to say something like that.

  “I don’t know if that’s really the right word, considering they’re doing it to me,” Jimmy went on. “Probably doesn’t matter—I can’t stop it. They’re just gonna keep doing anything they want to me.”

  “What are they doing?” I asked.

  Jimmy hesitated. “They’re still trying to find a word for that. If they ever do, it’ll probably be a bad word. Really bad. But what it is, they make me know things.”

  My neck was starting to hurt. “They tell you stuff?”

  “No, they make me know things.”

  “That’s what I meant—they tell you things.”

  He made a frustrated noise. “No. It’s not the same thing. I could tell you something but that wouldn’t mean you’d know it.”

  “What’re you talking about?” I said, getting frustrated myself, both with the argument and not being able to move my head. “If you tell me something, I’ll know it.”

  “Oh, yeah? I can tell you I ran a mile without stopping and got tired but you won’t know my feet hurt and my legs were wobbly and my lungs burned like fire. Even if I told you that, too, you still wouldn’t know it, because it didn’t happen to you. Unless I could make you know it my way.”

  “Oh.” I managed to get both my hands up behind my neck and started rubbing it, pushing on the base of my skull as I did. After a bit, I could feel my head tilting down again little by little. Finally I was looking straight ahead instead of straight up. Mrs. Beauvais tramped back and forth in front of me and although I could see her mouth opening and closing, I didn’t hear her. I didn’t hear anything except Jimmy’s voice and under that, a soft rushing noise, like when you put a seashell to your ear.

  “Is that why you weren’t in school today?” I asked. “Because someone was making you know something?”

  “I didn’t want to,” he said. “I tried to run away but I ended up here.”

  “Have you been here all day?”

  “Not exactly here. But all day, yeah.”

  “Mrs. Beauvais’s assistant thought you might be stuck somewhere, like lying hurt in a ditch and unable to call for help. He said you probably didn’t even know about what happened to the president.”

  “Oh, I know,” Jimmy said. “I know all about it. I know everything.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. They made me know.”

  The pain in his voice made me turn toward him. In the same moment, I suddenly noticed that the daylight was all but completely gone. Everything of the day seemed to rush down on me like an avalanche—Jimmy’s empty desk, Mrs. Barnicle, Judy and her Beatles magazine, hearing that Kennedy had been shot, Jimmy’s aunt and his cousins, Mrs. Beauvais and her assistant, the phone ringing in our empty apartment with my mother on the other end of the line getting madder and madder. Then I felt Jimmy’s hand take hold of mine.

  A riot of new images bloomed in my head.

  I saw the presidential motorcade from several different angles and people lining the Dallas streets; sunlight gleamed off the shiny cars as JFK smiled and waved until part of his head exploded into red mist; Jackie Kennedy, slim and angular in her refined pink suit and pillbox hat, elegant face twisted in anguish, crawling onto the back of the car, not to get the attention of the bodyguard there but to grab up something that had landed on the trunk—part of her husband’s skull. People screaming, sirens screaming, the air itself was screaming, electric with the fear that came with the breaking of the social compact we made not to kill each other.

  Only I didn’t know about things like social compact, not the words, not the concept. Well, yes, I knew but I didn’t know that I knew. As brainy as I was, I was still supposed to be safe from knowing that for a long time.

  Mrs. Beauvais stumbled across my field of vision looking bewildered and scared. Social worker; social compact worker. Her and her assistant, trying to keep Jimmy within the social compact, trying to catch him when he fell outside of it. But they didn’t know about this. Whatever this was.

  “Jimmy.” It was an effort to speak. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “To her. Mrs. Beauvais.”

  “You can. They’re not done with me yet. There’s more to come.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  “When will they be done?”

  “When they are.”

  “But what—”

&nbs
p; “I just showed you,” he said, almost snapping. “I made you know some of it. Only a little.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I could because you wanted to know.”

  Mrs. Beauvais was standing in front of me almost close enough to touch now. The air between us shimmered again. I should reach out and pull her in, I thought.

  “You can’t,” Jimmy said, as if I had spoken aloud. “There’s no room for her in here. No room with them. She’s too full. Maybe you’d better go now before they make you know something.”

  “You think they would?”

  “I dunno. They might. If they do, you could end up like me. Nobody’ll want you. And you don’t have as many relatives as I do. If your mom doesn’t want you, you’ll have nowhere to go.”

  “That wouldn’t happen,” I said.

  Jimmy gave a small, bitter laugh. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. But I do. They messed me up, making me know things. It’s like I’ve got scars, only they don’t show the way normal scars do. People look at me and they know something’s wrong. They don’t know what, they just know there’s something off. They try to figure it out—some think it’s a bad smell, I don’t wash maybe, or I’m looking at them funny, like I don’t respect them. Or they can’t see me, they see someone bad they used to know. Maybe some of them even dream that I do things I haven’t done and then think it was real after they wake up.”

  “What about me? I don’t think any of those things,” I said. “And what about Mrs. Beauvais? She doesn’t, either.”

  “Yes, she does,” Jimmy said. “She holds her nose and forces herself to smile and try to help me because it’s her job. But deep down, she thinks I’m bad. As for you—” He hesitated. “Well, there’s some people who don’t get a rash from poison ivy. You’re like one of them.” He sighed. “You better go. They’re coming back for me.”

  “I don’t want to leave you here,” I said.

  “You have to. If they come back and see y—”

  His voice didn’t so much stop as it snapped off like a dry twig. I wasn’t going to look up again because I knew if I did I wouldn’t be able to look away. But knowing that made it impossible not to look. I raised my head.

  I’m not sure what I expected to see—monsters that looked like Frankenstein or the Creature from the Black Lagoon or maybe a robot like the one in The Day the Earth Stood Still. But they were nothing like any of those, the ones who made Jimmy Streubal know things. They were something I had never seen before, something I knew I would never see again. So I took a good, long, hard look at them, I memorized every line and shadow and feature while they looked back at me and did the same. And when I was sure I knew exactly what they looked like, something in my mind clicked, like a switch or a lock, and to this day if I try to describe them even just to myself, no words or gestures will come.

  The one thing I can describe, however, is the way they sniffed at me, tasted me, and then gently pushed me away.

  I tried to reach for Jimmy—whether to stay with him or pull him with me, I still don’t know. It didn’t work. The air around me shimmered and I fell, rolling over and over on the dead weeds in the cold, to stop at the very expensive boots of the very, very surprised Mrs. Beauvais.

  She pulled me to my feet and started yelling at me about how I had scared her. I didn’t say anything, just waited for her to pause for breath so I could suggest we go back up to her car. Even if four thirty-five was long gone and my mother was probably on her way home, I hoped I might get off a little more lightly if I had to face the music with Mrs. Beauvais beside me.

  But she kept yelling and yelling and yelling, and she was holding my shoulder so that her fingers were digging into it harder and harder. I thought she was going to twist my arm off if she didn’t scream her own head off first.

  I tried to pull away from her but that only made her madder. She started jerking me back and forth and it really hurt. I struggled to get away from her and she was trying to hang on to me and finally I just pushed her as hard as I could.

  She went over backward and I started to run away. But she didn’t get up and yell some more and I knew something was really wrong. I went back to look. She had hit her head on a rock and there was blood all over the dead grass and her velvet hat, more blood than I had ever seen in my life.

  I turned to run and a small movement caught my eye. Over by the bridge, the air was shimmering, as if heat were rising from an unseen fire. For a moment, I had a powerful urge to plunge back into it. But I couldn’t leave Mrs. Beauvais lying there, not even if I had killed her.

  It seemed to take forever to get up the easy slope. By the time I reached the top, I barely had enough breath left to run to the nearest house for help.

  I don’t think that I’ve ever had so many people yelling at me for so long, before or since. Everyone who saw me seemed to feel compelled to yell at me for something, even people I didn’t know. Somewhere in all the noise, someone—probably Mrs. Beauvais although it could have been my mother—convinced the police to conduct a thorough search of the area under the Fifth Street Bridge. One of the TV news programs in the capital got wind of it and actually sent out a reporter and a camera crew, and we saw thirty, maybe forty seconds of every cop in town poking around the dead weeds under the bridge. One of them went right past a spot by the bridge support where the air seemed to wiggle and shimmer like it did when it was very hot, but that could have been the film or the TV.

  Nobody found anything. There was no sign of Jimmy, no sign of anything, nothing but dead weeds and Mrs. Beauvais’s blood. There was plenty of that.

  I was positive she would bleed to death by the time the ambulance got there. But when they brought her up on the stretcher, she was not only alive but conscious and talking, insisting that they take me in the ambulance with her. So she could have me arrested at the hospital for pushing her down, I thought, but I was wrong about that, too. She told the ambulance guys on the way in that she had been about to take me back up to her car so she could drive me home when someone came out of nowhere and gave her a hard shove that knocked her down and although she didn’t see who did it, it must have been Jimmy. It couldn’t have been anyone else.

  They asked me if I’d seen Jimmy do it; I told them no but I don’t think they believed me. Then we got to the hospital emergency room where my mother was waiting for me and the yelling began again.

  I spent Thanksgiving vacation under house arrest. I did a lot of reading and watched a lot of TV. I saw JFK’s funeral and the film of Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald. I didn’t see Jimmy.

  When school resumed in December, Jimmy’s desk was still empty and it stayed that way. Mrs. Barnicle said he was missing. Unfortunately missing was how she put it. Nobody knew where he was.

  Even after my house arrest was lifted, my mother threatened me with dire punishments if I should ever show the incredibly bad judgment to go down under the Fifth Street Bridge again. I didn’t tell her the threats weren’t necessary; I had the odd sense that she felt it was her duty to make them.

  Eventually, trains ceased to run on that stretch of track. Environmentalists cleaned up the Nashua River. It looked beautiful but you couldn’t have paid most people to go near it anyway.

  I had been living in Chicago for ten years when my mother wrote to tell me that the Fifth Street Bridge was to be torn down and replaced with a better structure. She sent newspaper clippings; I read the articles, looked at the photos carefully, but there was nothing to see.

  I still wonder why Jimmy didn’t come with me out of that strange space under the bridge, whether it was because those…beings, whatever they were, wouldn’t let him go or whether he was just sick and tired of having to be at odds with the whole world. Either way, I always feel a sense of seriously deep loss when I think of him.

  It’s not just the loss of Jimmy himself, although he did leave a big hole in my childhood life. I can’t help thinking that we lost an opportunity for something—“we” as
in people in general. The way Jimmy was being made to know things—I think eventually more people would have been made to know things. Really know them, in the profound and meaningful way that leads to understanding and possibly even—pardon the expression—enlightenment.

  But it didn’t agree with us. I felt how difficult it was when Jimmy made me know what happened to JFK. It was overwhelming and I shut my mind off from it as best I could, partly because Jimmy wasn’t there to help me with it. But mostly because for as long as it was vivid in me, people were angry with me. Jimmy had been right—when you were made to know things in that way, it messed you up with other people.

  I still look for Jimmy. I look for that shimmer in the air, like from intense heat. And whenever I see it, I look the other way.

  Prisoners of the Action

  Paul McAuley and Kim Newman

  Paul McAuley’s novels have won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Sidewise Award. His latest novels are Players and Cowboy Angels. His most recent story collection is Little Machines. A former scientist, he lives in London; his website can be found at www.omegacom.demon.co.uk.

  Kim Newman was born in Brixton (London), grew up in the West Country, went to university near Brighton, and now lives in Islington (London). His most recent fiction includes Where the Bodies Are Buried, The Man from the Diogenes Club, and Secret Files of the Diogenes Club under his own name, as well as The Vampire Genevieve as Jack Yeovil. His nonfiction books include Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books and Horror: Another 100 Best Books (both with Stephen Jones), and a host of books on film. He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines; has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics; and has scripted radio documentaries, role-playing games, and TV programs. He has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the British Science Fiction Award, and the British Fantasy Award. His official website can be found at www.johnnyalucard.com.