Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (22 page)

The Mayan Variation

The cops started to file into the stadium at the bottom of the ninth inning, and the crowd buzzed like a huge angry bee, an ominous razor-edged hum that set your teeth on edge.

Barnett, the third baseman, glanced up for a second to watch the cops spreading out in a thin line that encircled the playing field just inside the wall—a couple of them were on horseback, and some of them had dogs. He exchanged significant glances with Guerra, the second baseman, and Guerra shook his head and spat. The cops were certainly taking no chances today.

Shrugging, Barnett turned his attention back to the game. Lou Kesselman had just dropped the rosin bag and was about to go into his windup. Chuck Parrish stepped back into the batter’s box and waggled his hips once or twice—he was one of those absolutely gigantic blacks who look more at home as NFL defensive linemen, and the bat looked like a willow-switch in his huge hands.

Kesselman went into his awkward-looking windup, all arms and legs and odd angles, like a scarecrow twisting in the wind, and then suddenly the ball was by Parrish, and Parrish had been caught looking.

The crowd howled.

3-2. A full count. Barnett wiped his sweating hands on his pants. It was 4-4 with two out in the bottom of the ninth, no men on base, the deciding game of the World Series, the home team at bat in their own ball park, and everything depended on the next few pitches.

Barnett tried to shout, provide a little encouraging infield chatter, but he was too dry to speak. He wiped his hands again; it was cold, the bite of the coming winter riding in the wind, but he was sweating like a pig. His stomach hurt. If only they could hold them, force the game into extra innings. The top of their lineup would be coming up in the tenth . . .

Kesselman went into his windup, pitched, and Parrish took a terrific slice at the ball. There was the hard
thwack
of contact, and Barnett’s heart stopped for a second, but it was only a low bouncer in foul territory.

The crowd noise, already incredibly loud, went up several notches, as if someone had twisted a volume control knob.

Kesselman was standing on the mound with his long arms dangling tonelessly and his head bowed, as if he was praying. Perhaps he
was,
Barnett thought. He had every right to be. He was one of the game’s great southpaws, talked about the way people used to talk about Sandy Koufax and Steve Carlton, but it had been a grueling game on top of a long hard season, and the stakes for this particular game were as high as they ever got . . .

Parrish popped another long shot foul. Koziakiewicz, the first baseman, chased it all the way up onto the dugout roof; but it fell several rows into the stands.

The umpire threw Kesselman a new ball; he picked it out of the air and climbed very slowly back onto the mound. He stood there for what seemed like hours, shaking off sign after sign, while Parrish swished his bat back and forth through the unresisting air. Finally, he nodded.

The crowd, which had been screaming its lungs out only a few seconds before, had suddenly become strangely quiet. Time seemed to slow down and stop, and for several long smothering heartbeats there was no motion anywhere on the field. Through the deathly hush, Barnett could hear the noise his teeth were making as they ground together. His muscles ached with tension, and he was sensing everything around him with an extraordinary crystalline precision he’d never known before: The sound of a car engine somewhere, faint and far away. The grim, set faces of the surrounding policemen. One of the police horses shuffling nervously and blowing out its lips in a snort, a white cloud of vapor rising from its nostrils. The fans in their seats, tier upon tier of them rising sheer into the steel-grey sky. The glint of light on camera lens. The umpire leaning forward behind home plate, hands on knees, his cheeks red and stiff with cold. A scrap of paper blowing across the infield. The same wind catching a loose end of the tarpaulin covering the structure that had been erected a few yards behind home plate, making the cloth flap with a heavy wet-canvas sound, like the beating of leather wings.

Kesselman pitched, and as soon as the ball left his hand, Barnett knew that Parrish was going to hit it.

He did, and it climbed into the sky toward left field, rising . . .

Barnett straightened slowly out of his crouch, watching hopelessly as the ball sailed high overhead, thinking in anguish, Christ, it’s going to go out, it’s going out . . .

Martinez, the left fielder, chased it past the warning track and made a tremendous leap up the outfield wall, stretching out desperately, but the ball whistled past his glove and out of the park with a yard to spare, and Martinez fell heavily back into the dirt.

Barnett stood there numbly, barely hearing the frenzied noise of the crowd, barely noticing the grinning Parrish as he went jogging by on his way around the bases. After a moment or two, Barnett grinned—grotesquely, ruefully, bitterly.

There would be no joy in Mudville. The game was over.

He looked over at Guerra, and Guerra’s eyes were sick.

Gilchrist, the rightfielder, made a break for it, dodging through a gap in the line of cops and sprinting for the outfield wall. He was almost over it when two cops grabbed his ankles and hauled him back into the park. Gilchrist struggled frantically, and then a nightstick rose and fell, and he was clubbed to his knees. The cop clubbed Gilchrist again, knocking him face forward into the gravel of the warning track.

The ring of cops began to close in, like a noose tightening.

Sickened, Barnett turned away and threw his fielder’s glove on the ground. Kesselman was already walking slowly toward home plate, his head down, and Martinez and Francesconi were coming in from the outfield, casting glances back at the two cops who were dragging Gilchrist along over the Astroturf.

He looked at Guerra again, and Guerra, his lips pale, said, “Well, tough luck on us, I guess.”

Barnett shrugged. “Yeah,” he said, and started walking in. His legs felt like water, and it was all he could do to keep himself moving forward. Over to one side, near the home team dugout, Parrish was being mobbed by his teammates in a frantic celebration, but that didn’t concern them anymore; the leaping, gesticulating figures might just as well have been in another world. Ahead he could see his own teammates standing in a despondent group just beyond home plate, in front of the tarpaulin-covered structure, surrounded by a crowd of officials and jostling reporters with microphones and minicams. Amid a heat-shimmer of popping flashbulbs, the Baseball Commissioner pulled the tarpaulin away, and the waiting crowd cheered.

As Barnett crossed home plate, the reporters closed in around him, and he could hear the network color men chattering away:

“. . . since its inception, fans have stopped complaining about inflated player salaries . . .”

“. . . increased Series attendance . . .”

“. . . the idea from the ancient Mayans, who played a kind of ball game of their own, and who, at the end of the game, would . . .”

“. . . the losing team . . .”

Just ahead of Barnett, Kesselman screamed, a horrible, gurgling scream that seemed to hang endlessly in the air. Barnett stopped involuntarily, his heart thudding, but two cops grabbed him by the elbows and hustled him forward toward the waiting altar and the bloody knife.

The Clowns

Introduction to The Clowns

Gardner Dozois is one of the best short-fiction writers alive and the most important sf editor since John W. Campbell Jr. He is also my friend and, often, my editor. He has bought and published more of my stories than anyone else, and he has helped me make each far better than it would have been otherwise. He has been instrumental to my career, and I’ll never be able to repay him, certainly not in this silly introduction, not if it were twice as long as the book. So I’ll concede defeat, tell a few anecdotes, and let you get on to “The Clowns”—a terrific story, as you’ll find out soon enough.

Gardner wrote my first personal rejection letter, which arrived in my Seattle University dormitory mailbox the third week of the Clarion West Writers Workshop in summer 1994. This communiqué from the honest-to-Asimov Big Time became stained, limp, and worn as it passed among my fellow students, drawing the adoration and awe normally afforded relics of the saints.

Soon, my personal rejection letters from Gardner began to alternate with personal acceptance letters from Gardner. The latter begin a lot like the former, with a lengthy paragraph ticking off the reasons the story is all wrong for
Asimov’s,
only to continue, “But I guess I’ll take it anyway.” Next come several paragraphs of revision suggestions, and if you’ve read any of these stories, you see that I do everything Gardner says. The letter usually concludes with an urgent plea to make said revisions as soon as possible, before Gardner is lynched and the
Asimov’s
presses are burned and all its Hugos are retroactively revoked by torch-wielding James Whale mobs of hardcore fen enraged that he even would consider buying such a peculiar cross-genre non-hard-sf thingamabob, in which case my story will be doomed to perhaps-deserved unpublishability forevermore, and so on and so forth. I love acceptance letters in general, but Gardner’s are my favorites.

About two hours after I first met Gardner in person, at the most recent World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore, I stood next to Michael Swanwick in a crowded con suite, watching Gardner hold forth in the corner. With a malicious glint in his eyes, Michael turned to me and said, “This party is dull. Let’s enliven it.” Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed me by the arm, hauled me across the room, flung me at Gardner, pointed to me and yelled: “This guy says your magazine sucks! He says he wouldn’t be caught dead in your lousy magazine?” “Oh, yeah?” Gardner roared. “Well, fuck you!” I replied in kind, being a quick study, and things escalated, as Michael giggled and several dozen bystanders not in on the joke got very quiet and very wide-eyed. I keep hoping that someday our vicious public quarrel will be the stuff of fannish legend, like Kornbluth punching Forry Ackerman in the gut. Certainly I retell the story everywhere I go, so I’m doing my part.

I recommend the Gardner Dozois tour of historic Philadelphia, which lies between his and Susan’s apartment and all the good eating places. “There’s a lot of old shit over there,” he says over his shoulder, waving vaguely in the direction of Independence Hall. Passing a wrought-iron cemetery fence without a backward glance, he summarizes: “Lots of famous dead people there.” As we pass an impressive equestrian statue, my wife, Sydney, catching on, asks, “Whose statue is that, Gardner?” Without missing a beat, he replies, “I think he founded the Navy.” But he can speak at length, and does, about the best dishes to order at Mustard Greens—which serves not soul food, but Chinese—and which sex shops have the most interesting clientele, and where the best belly dancers can be found.

I once sat beside Gardner on an all-male van ride through the city, en route to a Philadelphia Science Fiction Society meeting. To pass the time that otherwise might have been squandered in useless frivolity, Gardner taught us a series of rude songs about sf writers, each of them set to a TV theme, none of which I will repeat here or anywhere else, and also taught us some of his “sure-fire” pickup lines, which he demonstrated by screeching them out the window, with a remarkable lack of success, whenever the van passed a woman, which was often. My favorite Gardner pickup line:
“How bad could it be?”

None of which prepares you for “The Clowns,” one of the scariest stories I’ve ever read. It scared the willies out of me when I read it in
Playboy
in 1985, and it scared them out of me again when I re-read it last night. For one thing, I’m older now, and I’ve seen some clowns of my own, and I know the smell of fear really is “a sudden bitter burnt reek, like scorched onions,” yes, exactly. Thank you, Gardner, for everything. And now let us all join hands and wade bravely into the C. Fred Johnson Municipal Pool.

Andy Duncan

The Clowns

by Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann,
and Susan Casper

The C. Fred Johnson Municipal Pool was packed with swimmers, more in spite of the blazing sun and wet, muggy heat than because of them.

It was the dead middle of August, stiflingly hot, and it would have made more sense to stay inside—or, at the very least, in the shade—than to splash around in the murky, tepid water. Nevertheless, the pool was crowded almost shoulder to shoulder, especially with kids—there were children everywhere, the younger ones splashing and shouting in the shallow end, the older kids and the teenagers jumping off the high dive or playing water polo in the deep end. Mothers sat in groups and chatted, their skins glistening with suntan oil and sweat. The temperature was well above 90, and the air seemed to shimmer with the heat, like automobile exhaust in a traffic jam.

David Shore twisted his wet bath towel and snapped it at his friend Sammy, hitting him on the sun-reddened backs of his thighs.

“Ow!” Sammy screamed. “You dork! Cut it out!” David grinned and snapped the towel at Sammy again, hitting only air this time but producing a satisfyingly loud
crack.
Sammy jumped back, shouting, “Cut it out! I’ll tell! I’ll
tell!
I mean it.”

Sammy’s voice was whining and petulant, and David felt a spasm of annoyance. Sammy was his friend, and he didn’t have so many friends that he wasn’t grateful for that, but Sammy was
always
whining. What a baby! That’s what he got for hanging out with little kids—Sammy was eight, two years younger than David—but since the trouble he’d had last fall, with his parents almost breaking up and he himself having to go for counseling, he’d been ostracized by many of the kids his own age. David’s face darkened for a moment, but then he sighed and shook his head. Sammy was all right, really. A good kid. He really shouldn’t tease him so much, play so many jokes on him. David smiled wryly. Maybe he did it just to hear him
whine—

“Don’t be such a baby,” David said tiredly, wrapping the towel around his hand. “It’s only a
towel,
dickface. It’s not gonna kill you if—” Then David stopped abruptly, staring blankly off beyond Sammy, toward the bathhouse.

“It
hurt,”
Sammy whined. “You’re a real dork, you know that, Davie? How come you have to—” And then Sammy paused, too, aware that David wasn’t paying any attention to him anymore. “Davie?” he said. “What’s the matter?”

“Look at
that,”
David said in an awed whisper.

Sammy turned around. After a moment, confused, he asked, “Look at what?”

“There!” David said, pointing toward a sun-bleached wooden rocking chair.

“Oh,
no, you’re not going to get
me
again with
that
old line,” Sammy said disgustedly. His face twisted, and this time he looked as if he were really getting mad. “The wind’s making that chair rock. It can rock for hours if the wind’s right. You can’t scare me that easy! I’m not a
baby,
you know!”

David was puzzled, couldn’t Sammy
see?
What was he—blind? It was as plain as anything . . .

There was a clown sitting in the chair, sitting and rocking, watching the kids in the swimming pool.

The clown’s face was caked with thick white paint. He had a bulb nose that was painted blood red, the same color as his broad, painted on smile. His eyes were like chips of blue ice. He sat very still, except for the slight movement of his legs needed to rock the beat-up old chair, and his eyes never left the darting figures in the water.

David had seen clowns before, of course; he’d seen plenty of them at the Veterans’ Arena in Binghamton when the Barnum & Bailey Circus came to town. Sammy’s father was a barber and always got good tickets to everything, and Sammy always took David with him. But this clown was
different,
somehow. For one thing, instead of performing, instead of dancing around or cakewalking or somersaulting or squirting people with a Seltzer bottle, this clown was just sitting quietly by the pool, as if it were the most normal thing in the world for him to be there. And there was something else, too, he realized.
This
clown was all in black. Even his big polka-dotted bow tie was black, shiny black dots against a lighter grey-black. Only his gloves were white, and they were a pure, eye-dazzling white. The contrast was startling.

“Sammy?” David said quietly. “Listen, this is important. You
really
think that chair is empty?”

“Jeez, grow
up,
will ya?” Sammy snarled. “What a dork!” He turned his back disgustedly on David and dived into the pool.

David stared thoughtfully at the clown. Was Sammy trying to kid
him? Turn the tables on him, get back at him for some of
his
old jokes? But David was sure that Sammy wasn’t smart enough to pull it off. Sammy
always
gave himself away, usually by giggling.

Odd as it seemed, Sammy really
didn’t
see the clown.

David looked around to see who else he could ask. Certainly not Mr. Kreiger, who had a big potbelly and wore his round wire-rimmed glasses even in the water and who would stand for hours in the shallow end of the pool and splash himself with one arm, like an old bull elephant splashing water over itself with its trunk. No. Who else? Bobby Little, Jimmy Seikes and Andy Freeman were taking turns diving and cannonballing from the low board, but David didn’t want to ask
them
anything. That left only Jas Ritter, the pool lifeguard, or the stuck-up Weaver sisters.

But David was beginning to realize that he didn’t really
have
to ask anybody. Freddy Schumaker and Jane Gelbert had just walked right by the old rocking chair, without looking at the clown, without even glancing at him. Bill Dwyer was muscling himself over the edge of the pool within inches of the clown’s floppy oblong shoes, and he wasn’t paying any attention to him, either. That just wasn’t possible. No matter how supercool they liked to pretend they were, there was no
way
that kids were going to walk past a clown without even
glancing
at him.

With a sudden thrill, David took the next logical step. Nobody could see the clown except
him.
Maybe he was the only one in the world who could see him!

It was an exhilarating thought. David stared at the clown in awe. Nobody else could see him! Maybe he was a
ghost,
the ghost of an old circus clown, doomed to roam the earth forever, seeking out kids like the ones he’d performed for when he was alive, sitting in the sun and watching them play, thinking about the happy days when the circus had played this town.

That was a
wonderful
idea, a lush and romantic idea, and David shivered and hugged himself, feeling goose flesh sweep across his skin. He could see a
ghost!
It was wonderful! It was magic! Private, secret magic, his alone. It meant that he was
special.
It gave him a strange, secret kind of power. Maybe nobody else in the
universe
could see him—

It was at this point that Sammy slammed into him, laughing and shouting, “I’ll learn
you,
sucker!” and knocked him into the pool.

By the time David broke the surface, sputtering and shaking water out of his eyes, the clown was gone and the old rocker was rocking by itself, in the wind and the thin, empty sunshine.

After leaving the pool, David and Sammy walked over the viaduct—there was no sign of any freight trains on the weed-overgrown tracks below—and took back-alley short cuts to Curtmeister’s barbershop.

“Hang on a minute,” Sammy said and ducked into the shop. Ordinarily, David would have followed, as Sammy’s father kept gum and salt-water taffy in a basket on top of the magazine rack, but today he leaned back against the plate-glass window, thinking about the ghost he’d seen that morning,
his
ghost, watching as the red and blue stripes ran eternally up around the barber pole. How fascinated he’d been by that pole a few years ago, and how simple it seemed to him now.

A clown turned the corner from Avenue B, jaywalking casually across Main Street.

David started and pushed himself upright. The ghost again! or was it? Surely,
this
clown was shorter and squatter than the one he’d seen at the pool, though it was wearing the same kind of black costume, the same kind of white gloves. Could this be
another
ghost? Maybe there was a whole
circusful
of clown ghosts wandering around the city.

“David!” a voice called, and he jumped. It was old Mrs. Zabriski, carrying two bulging brown-paper grocery bags, working her way ponderously down the sidewalk toward him, puffing and wheezing, like some old, slow tugboat doggedly chugging toward its berth. “Want to earn a buck, David?” she called.

The clown had stopped right in the middle of Main Street, standing nonchalantly astride the double white divider line. David watched him in fascination.

“David?” Mrs. Zabriski said impatiently.

Reluctantly, David turned his attention back to Mrs. Zabriski. “Gosh, I’m sorry, Mrs. Z.,” he said. A buck would be nice, but it was more important to keep an eye on the clown. “I—ah, I promised Sammy that I’d wait out here for him.”

Mrs. Zabriski sighed. “OK, David,” she said. “Another time, then.” She looked across the street to see what he was staring at, looked back puzzledly. “Are you all right, David?”

“Yeah. Honest, Mrs. Z.,” he said, without looking around. “Really. I’m fine.”

She sighed again with doughy fatalism. And then she started across the street, headed directly for the clown.

It was obvious to David that
she
didn’t see him. He was standing right in front of her, grimacing and waving his arms and making faces at her, but she didn’t even slow down—she would have walked right into him if he hadn’t ducked out of the way at the last moment. After she passed, the clown minced along behind her for a few steps, doing a cruel but funny imitation of her ponderous, waddling walk, pretending to spank her on her big, fat rump.

David stifled a laugh. This was better than the circus! But now the clown seemed to have grown bored with mocking Mrs. Zabriski and began drifting slowly away toward the far side of Main Street.

David wanted to follow, but he suddenly realized, with a funny little chill, that he didn’t want to do it alone. Even if it was the ghost of a clown, a funny and entertaining ghost, it was still a
ghost,
after all. Somehow, he’d have to get Sammy to come with him. But how could he explain to Sammy what they were doing? Not that it would matter if Sammy didn’t come out of the shop soon—the clown was already a block away.

Anxiously, he peered in through the window until he managed to catch Sammy’s attention, then waved to him urgently. Sammy held up his index finger and continued his conversation with his father. “Hurry up, dummy,” David muttered under his breath. The clown was getting farther and farther away, almost out of sight now. Hurry up. David danced impatiently from one foot to the other. Hurry
up.

But when Sammy finally came running out of the barbershop with the news that he’d talked his father into treating them both to a movie, the clown was gone.

By the time they got to the movie theater, David had pretty much gotten over the disappointment of losing the clown. At least it was a pretty good show—cartoons and a space-monster movie. There was a long line in front of the ticket window, a big crowd of kids—and even a few adults—waiting to get into the movie.

They were waiting in the tail of the line when the clown—or
a
clown—appeared again across the street.

“Hey, Davie!” Sammy said abruptly. “Do you see what I see?” And Sammy waved to the clown.

David was startled—and somewhat dismayed—by the strength of the surge of disappointment and jealousy that shot through him. If
Sammy
could see them, too, then David wasn’t
special
anymore. The whole thing was ruined.

Then David realized that it wasn’t the clown that Sammy was waving to.

He was waving to the old man who was waiting to cross the street, standing just in
front
of the clown. Old Mr. Thorne. He was at least a million years old, David knew. He’d played for the Boston Braves back before they’d even had
television,
for cripes’ sake. But he loved children and treated them with uncondescending courtesy and in turn was one of the few adults who were really respected by the kids. He was in charge of the yo-yo contests held in the park every summer, and he could make a yo-yo sleep or do around the world or over the falls or walking the dog better than anyone David had ever seen, including the guy who sold the golden yo-yos for the Duncan Company.

Relieved, David joined Sammy in waving to his old friend, almost—but not, quite—forgetting the clown for a moment. Mr. Thorne waved back but motioned for them to wait where they were. It was exciting to see the old man again. It would be worth missing the movie if Mr. Thorne was in the mood to buy them chocolate malteds and reminisce about the days when he’d hit a home run off the immortal Grover Cleveland Alexander.

Just as the traffic light turned yellow, an old flat-bed truck with a dented fender came careening through the intersection.

David felt his heart lurch with sudden fear—but it was all right. Mr. Thorne saw the truck coming, he was still on the curb, he was safe. But then the clown stepped up close behind him. He grabbed Mr. Thorne by the shoulders. David could see Mr. Thorne jerk in surprise as he felt the white-gloved hands close over him. Mr. Thorne’s mouth opened in surprise, his hands came fluttering weakly up, like startled birds. David could see the clown’s painted face grinning over the top of Mr. Thorne’s head. That wide, unchanging, painted-on smile.

Then the clown threw Mr. Thorne in front of the truck.

There was a sickening wet
thud,
a sound like that of a sledgehammer hitting a side of beef. The shriek of brakes, the squeal of flaying tires. A brief, unnatural silence. Then a man said, “Jesus Christ!” in a soft, reverent whisper. A heartbeat later, a woman started to scream.