And Other Stories (2 page)

But the princess and Hates
Everything had already ridden past the goblin and into the
courtyard. “Mama! Papa!” called the princess. “I’ve come to rescue
you!”

The Evil Enchanter appeared in a
cloud of smoke. He waved his arms to fan away the fumes, and when
he quit coughing, he said, “You’ve come to rescue no one. Now that
you’re here, you shall marry me.” He waved his arms once, and a
priest appeared in a cloud of smoke. After everyone quit coughing,
he turned to the priest and said, “Marry me!”

The priest said, “But I don’t know
you.”

“No, no, no!” said
the Evil Enchanter. “Marry me to the princess!”

“Oh,” said the
priest. “That’s different.”

The princess whispered to Hates
Everything, “When we’ve defeated the enchanter, you’ll be free.
Don’t you hate—”

But Hates Everything had already
lunged forward and begun to chase the Evil Enchanter around the
courtyard.

“Wait! Stop!” cried
the Evil Enchanter. “I can’t make a spell if I can’t stop to
think!”

“That’s the idea,”
said the princess.

“Stop this crazy
horse, please!”

“Then free my parents
and quit trying to marry me and promise not to bother anyone ever
again.”

“What!” said the Evil
Enchanter in outrage, and then “Ow!” as Hates Everything nipped his
buttocks. “It’s a deal!”

“On your word of
honor as an evil enchanter!”

“Yes!
Yes!”

“Very well.” The
princess leaped down from the saddle. “Hates Everything, you’re
free to go.”

Hates Everything seemed as if he
hated having to stop chasing the Evil Enchanter (and he probably
did), but he came to the princess and looked at her as if maybe he
didn’t hate her as much as he hated everything else. The princess
removed his saddle and gave him a hug, and he let her do that, even
though he clearly hated it. Then he charged away from the
enchanter’s palace as if he didn’t hate anything at all.

The Evil Enchanter said, “You
didn’t really beat me. The horse beat me.”

“Goblin!” The
princess yelled, “I’ll double your salary if you’ll cut off the
enchanter’s head.”

“Good deal!” said the
goblin, appearing in the courtyard with its long sword in its
hands.

“Wait!” said the Evil
Enchanter. “O.K., you beat me fair and square.”

“Don’t cut off his
head,” said the princess.

“Darn,” said the
goblin.

“You can still come
and work at our palace,” said the princess.

“Good deal,” said the
goblin.

The Formerly Evil Enchanter waved
his arms, and the king, the queen, the goblin, the enchanter, the
priest, and the princess all appeared in the throne room where the
page was assembling the country’s generals to go rescue their
missing royal family.

“Papa?” The princess
said. “See how well the page managed things while we were gone?
Don’t you think you should make him a prince and engage him to your
daughter?”

“I hadn’t—” said the
king, but the queen nudged him with her elbow. “Oh, right. That’s
exactly what I was planning to do. If that’s all right with you,
young man.”

The page smiled shyly, then said,
“Yes, Your Majesty, that’s very much all right with me.”

The Formerly Evil Enchanter said,
“What about me?”

The king said, “You can’t be
engaged to my daughter, too.”

The princess said, “That’s not what
he meant. He meant it gets awfully lonely on the Eastern Marshes.”
She cupped her hands and yelled, “Fairy Who’s Good with Names! Am I
really the Princess Who Read Books?”

The fairy appeared in a cloud of
smoke. When everyone had quit coughing, she said, “Indeed not!
You’re the Princess Who Kicked Butt.”

“That’s more like
it,” said the princess.

“Oh, my,” said the
queen.

“Hey,” said the
Formerly Evil Enchanter to the Fairy Who Was Good with Names. “Nice
smoke!”

And then the priest, who still
didn’t know what was going on but who knew a good opportunity when
it presented itself, gave everyone a business card that said, in
large print, Marriages Are Our Favorite Business.

And they all lived happily ever
after.

Oldthings

Will Shetterly

Jeffy got silver bullets, Jill got
a matched pair of big golden crosses, and I got a lousy wooden
stake. I sat crosslegged on the floor, looking at this
three-foot-long pointed stick, and said, “What’s this? A
carve-your-own-cane kit?”

Poppa Fred had his sense of humor
removed when he was four, I think. He said, “You know what it is,
C.T.”

Mother Dearest said, “There’s a
mallet, too.”

“Oh, great,” I said.
When I shifted some wrapping paper, I found a hammer made of
polished oak, like the stake.

“Frederick made it
himself,” Mother Dearest said. “For you.”

Poppa Fred looked away like he
didn’t care.

Jeffy and Jill had collaborated on
their presents for everybody: string necklaces with crude wooden
crosses set between bulbs of garlic.

“See?” said Jeffy.
“It’s, like, two-in-one.”

“It was my idea,”
bragged Jill.

“That’s great,” I
said. “You can pick your teeth with the wooden piece, and with that
stinky garlic around your neck, you won’t have to take a bath ever
again.”

Jeffy said, “No, C.T., the garlic’s
s’posed to keep off—” He stopped then ’cause Jill had begun to
cry. Mother Dearest hugged her, of course, and made a face at me
like I’d said something wrong. Poppa Fred just kept looking away at
the window like he could see right through the wooden
shutters.

And Grams kept on staring at the
fireplace like no one was in the room at all.

I’m not always so grouchy,
especially at Krizmiz. It’s just that this was the first Krizmiz
since Grams’s brain went south. I loved her more than anyone,
‘cause she’d known so much. Mother Dearest and Poppa Fred were
trying to give us an old-fashioned Krizmiz, but they didn’t
understand it the way Grams did.

Grams knew the old stories about
Krizmiz back before Thingschanged. Then Krizmiz wasn’t a day of
giving each other secondhand junk or stupid ugly homemade things.
Before Thingschanged, Krizmiz was a season of its own. Stores put
up decorations three months in advance, and the whole country
worked together making wonderful stuff for everyone to buy. And on
Krizmiz, everyone in the country got lots and lots of the wonderful
stuff, and everyone was happy.

But after Thingschanged, none of
the wonderful stuff worked, not the ‘lectrical stuff or the
mot’rized stuff. People went back to the country, ‘cause in the
cities, there were riots and fights and folks starving. And it was
all made worse ‘cause after Thingschanged, the Oldthings
returned.

It was a drakla that got Gramper.
It would’ve got us all if Grams hadn’t known what to do. There were
lots of draklas for a while, men in dark suits and women in soft,
shiny dresses, but the worst was when Gramper came back. Grams did
what had to be done. She taught us all what to do, before she had
her stroke.

Besides draklas, there were
witchers, wolf-folk, dusty bandaged people, ghosters, and stiff,
slow shufflers with glassy eyes. The safest thing was to stay in at
night, so that’s what we usually did. If an Oldthing did catch one
of us out of doors, we took care of it—the same treatment worked on
all of them.

Krizmizeve was a cold, windy night.
Jeffy and Jill and I decided to sleep in the living room in front
of the fireplace, near Grams. Jeffy and Jill were still mad at me,
so they put their blankets on the far side of Grams’s cot. It’d
been a long day for the twins. They fell asleep almost
immediately.

I lay there, watching the fire
dying and listening to Grams breathing and wondering if things
would ever get better for any of us. I was almost asleep when I
heard a clompety sound on the roof like fat eagles had landed. I
remembered that draklas and witchers could fly. That woke me up
completely. My Krizmiz stake was lying beside me, so I grabbed it
and lay there, clutching it in both hands.

And then I felt stupid. We hadn’t
seen a drakla in two years, or a witcher in near as long. I told
myself whatever I heard couldn’t be an Oldthing. And even if it
was, all the doors and windows were bolted. Nothing was going to
get into our house. I looked at Jeffy and Jill and Grams, and I
smiled, thinking I’d have to do something nice for the twins ‘cause
their stupid garlic crucifixes must’ve taken a lot of work. And I
started to go back to sleep.

The fire was very low, hardly more
than cinders, and my eyes were almost closed, but something made me
look around again. I prob’ly heard a change in Grams’s breathing,
but I can’t swear to that. I can swear to what happened next,
though.

Two heavy black boots oozed out of
the fireplace.

I don’t know why I didn’t scream.
Maybe I still didn’t believe it. Maybe the Oldthing in the chimney
had some power to make people drowzy. I think that was it. I think
if I’d been completely asleep, I wouldn’t be here to tell this
story.

After the black boots came
blood-red trousers, and then a matching crimson coat edged with
bone-white fur, and finally a bloated, grinning Oldthing stood in
front of our fire. It was too fat to have squeezed down our
chimney—Jeffy or Jill couldn’t have squeezed down that chimney—yet
there it was. Its eyes were black beads, and its bloated cheeks
were bright red as if it’d fed on something’s blood, and in its
ash-white beard, its soft mouth twisted into a triumphant
leer.

Grams spoke. “Sa? Tah?”

It spun, maybe even more startled
than me, and faced her. Grams hadn’t talked in months. She sat up
in her cot and she smiled madly, and she twitched while she tried
to say something to the Oldthing or to the rest of us.

The Oldthing brought a red-gloved
finger to its thick lips and grinned. In its other hand, it
clutched a sack that’d grown to be as large as the Oldthing itself,
maybe larger. It stepped closer toward Grams, still making the
gesture for silence. It pointed at Jeffy and Jill, sound asleep, as
if Grams should understand.

But I understood then. It didn’t
matter whether it had something in that sack to deal with us or
whether it wanted to stuff us all into the sack to carry us off.
Grams had done all she could by speaking. It was up to me
now.

I leaped out of bed in my
nightdress with my Krizmiz stake ready, and I yelled for all I was
worth, “Satan!”

The Lord of Night whirled toward
me. Its eyes and its maw gaped in surprise. I plunged the stake
towards its heart as it staggered back toward the chimney. The
point grazed its chest, but I was too slow. I knew that it’d
escape, and return with its servants, and everything would be my
fault.

Then it stumbled. Something had
struck it in the head. I glanced at the twins’s bed, and Jill
grinned back One crucifix lay on the floor at the feet of the
wounded Oldthing. The other was in Jill’s cocked hand, ready to
throw.

A shot rang out. The Oldthing
stumbled, clutching its leg. I saw Jeffy fumbling to load another
silver bullet into his .22, but it didn’t matter. He’d given me the
time I needed. I hurled myself forward as Grams cried out
again.

When Mother Dearest and Poppa Fred
came into the room, they saw that they’d given me a fine present.
Jill said, “C.T. killed it,” and I smiled, shy and proud all at
once. Poppa Fred nodded at me. Before he could say anything, we
heard a clattering on the roof.

We ran into the yard, all except
Grams. A team of antlered deer were launching themselves into the
sky, dragging a blood-dark sleigh behind them. Poppa Fred’s blast
of silver buckshot took out the leader. With it hanging in the
traces, the rest were easy targets.

We smoked and ate the stringy
little deer, all except the mutated one with a glowing nose. In the
Oldthing’s sack, we found toys and tools and clothes and all kinds
of wonderful things, just perfect for each of us. Since we didn’t
know who it’d stolen them from, we had to keep them for
ourselves.

That would’ve been the most perfect
Krizmiz ever if Grams had lived. We found her in the living room. I
find it comforting to know that the last thing she saw was me
killing the evilest of the Oldthings.

Before her stroke, Grams had often
said that if we survived the bad Oldthings coming back, good
Oldthings might follow. I think she was right. Early this spring,
when the last of the little deer had been eaten and we were afraid
we’d all starve, a giant rabbit with a basket of eggs showed up on
our lawn. That gave us meat for a month.

It’s a fine new world. I only wish
Grams was here to see it.

Brian and the
Aliens

Will Shetterly

A boy and his dog were walking in
the woods when they saw a space ship land. Two space aliens came
out of it. One alien was blue, and one was green, and they were
both covered with scales, large red eyes, and long tentacles.
Otherwise, there was nothing unusual about them.