The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (71 page)

When had she last used a car for Social Services?

"February of last year," Mrs. Dudley said. "February fifteenth, to be exact."

Lena did not remember speaking the words aloud, either. But that hardly mattered. It was Social Services' job to understand problems before they became issues. That was how they'd first found Jude, after all. Surely the glasses had logged her examination of the gloves and the car and the system had put two and two together. It could do that. She was sure of it.

"You subvocalized it," Mrs. Dudley said.

Yes. That was it. People did that, sometimes, didn't they? They muttered to themselves. It wasn't at all unusual.

"People do it all the time," Mrs. Dudley told her.

Lena forced herself to speak the next words out loud. "Did the owner of the car save the gloves for me?"

Mrs. Dudley paused. "That's one way of putting it."

"What do you mean?"

Outside, the highway seemed empty. So few people drove, any longer. Once upon a time, four o'clock on a Friday afternoon in late October would have been replete with cars, and the cars would have been stuffed with mothers and fathers lead-footing their way into the suburbs, anxiously counting down the minutes until they earned a late fee at their daycare. Now the car whizzed along, straight and true, spotting its nearest fellow vehicle every ten minutes and pinging them cheerfully before zipping ahead.

It felt like driving into a village afflicted by plague.

"I think we need to bring you in for a memory exam, Lena," Mrs. Dudley said. "These lapses aren't normal for a woman in your demographic. You may have a blood clot."

"Oh," Lena said, perversely delighted by the thought.

"But first, you have to do this one last thing for us."

"Yes. The house in the suburbs."

"You must be very careful, Lena. Where you're going, there's no one else on the block. It's all been foreclosed. And it's going to be dark, soon."

"I understand."

"The foreclosures mean that the local security forces have been diminished, too. Their budget is based on population density and property taxes, so there won't be anyone to come for you. Not right away, anyway. Everyone else lives closer to town."

"Except for the people in this house."

Another pause. "Yes. The ones who live there, live alone."

J
ackson Hills was the name of the development. The hills themselves occupied unincorporated county land, the last free sliver of property in the whole area, and the crookedness of the rusting street signs seemed meant to tempt government interference. That was an old word for molestation, Lena remembered. You came across it in some of the oldest laws.
Interference
. As though the uncles she spent her days hearing about were nothing more than windmills getting in the way of a good signal.

Was it an uncle that was the trouble, this time? The file was very scant. "
Possible neglect,
" it read. The child in question wore old, illfitting clothes, a teacher said. His grades were starting to slip. His name was Theodore. People called him Teddy. His parents never came to Parent/Teacher Night. They attended no talent shows. But they were participatory parents online; their emails with Teddy's teachers were detailed and thoughtful, with perfect spelling and grammar.

"We intend to discuss Teddy's infractions with him as soon as possible",
one read.
"We understand that his hacking the school lunch system to obtain chicken fingers every day for a month is very serious, as well as nutritionally unwise."

Teddy had indeed hacked the school lunch system to order an excess of chicken fingers delivered to the school kitchen by supply truck. He did this by entering the kitchen while pretending to go on a bathroom break, and carefully frying all the smart tags on all the boxes of frozen chicken fingers and fries with an acne zapper. With all the tags dead, the supplier instantly re-upped the entire order. The only truly dangerous part of the "hack" was the fact that he'd been in the walk-in freezer for a whole five minutes. Surveillance footage showed him ducking in with his coat zipped up all the way. The coat itself said that his body temperature had never dipped.

"I don't get any junk food at home," the boy said, during his inevitable talk with the principal. "They don't deliver any."

The gate to Jackson Hills was still functional, despite the absence of its residents. It slid open for Lena's car. As it did, a dervish of dead leaves whirled out and scattered away toward freedom. It felt like some sort of prisoner transfer. The exchange made, Lena drove past the gate.

The car drove her through the maze of empty houses as the dash lit up with advertisements for businesses that would probably never open. Burger joints. Day spas. Custom fabbers. In-house genome sequencing. All part of "town and country living at its finest." Some of the houses looked new; there were even stickers on the windows. As she rolled past, projections fluttered to life and showed laughing children running through sprinklers across the bare sod lawns, and men flipping steaks on grills, and women serving lemonade. It was the same family each time.

"WELCOME HOME," her dashboard read.

T
he house stood at the top of the topmost hill in Jackson Hills. Lena recognized it because the map said they were drawing closer, and because it was the only house on the cul-de-sac with any lights on. It was a big place, but not so different from the others, with fake Tudor styling and a sloping lawn whose sharpest incline was broken by terraced rock. Forget-me-nots grew between the stones. Moss sprang up through the seams in the tiled drive. There was no car, so Lena's slid in easily and shut itself off with a little sigh, like a child instantly falling to sleep.

At the door, Lena took the time to remove her gloves (when had she put those on?) and adjust her hair. She rang the bell and waited. The lion in the doorknocker twinkled his eyes at her, and the door opened.

Teddy stood there, wearing a flannel pyjama and bathrobe set one size too small for his frame. "Hello, Lena," he said.

She blinked. "Hello, Teddy."

"It's nice to meet you. Please come in."

Inside, the house was dusty. Not dirty or even untidy, but dusty. Dust clung to the ceiling fans. Cobwebs stretched across the top of every shelf, and under the span of every pendant light. The corners of each room had become hiding places for dust bunnies. But at Teddy's height, everything was clean.

"Where are your parents, Teddy?"

"Would you like some tea?" Teddy asked. "Earl Grey is your favourite, right?"

Earl Grey
was
her favourite. As she watched, Teddy padded over to the coffee table in the front room, and poured tea from a real china service. It had little pink roses on it, and there was a sugar bowl with a lid and a creamer full of cream and even a tiny dish with whisper-thin slices of lemon. When he was finished pouring, Teddy added two sugars and a dash of cream to the cup. Then handed her the cup on a saucer with both hands, and then pressed something on his watch.

"It tells me when it's done steeping," he said. "Would you like to sit down?"

Lena sat. The sofa shifted beneath her, almost as though she'd sat on a very large cat. A moment later it had moulded itself to her shape. "It's smart foam," Teddy said. "Please try some of your tea. I made it myself."

Lena sipped. "You've certainly done your homework, Teddy," she said. "You're not the only person to research me before my arrival, but you're the only one who's ever been this thorough."

"I wanted to make it nice for you."

It was an odd statement, but Lena let it pass. She took another sip. "This is a very lovely house, Teddy. Do you help your parents with the housework?"

He nodded emphatically. "Yes. Yes I do."

"And are you happy, living here?"

"Yes, I am."

"There don't seem to be many other kids to play with," Lena said. "Doesn't it get lonely?"

"I don't really get lonely," he said. "I have friends I play with online."

"But it can't be very safe, to live here all alone."

His mouth twitched, a little, as though he had just heard the distant sound of a small animal that he very much wanted to hunt. "I'm not alone," he said.

"Well, I meant, the neighbours. Or rather, the lack of any."

His shoulders went back to their relaxed position. "I like it here," he said. "I like not having any neighbours. My parents didn't like it very much, at first, but I liked it a lot."

Since he had left the door open, Lena decided to go through it. "So, when are your parents coming?"

"They're here," he said. "They just can't come upstairs, right now."

Lena frowned. "Are they not well?"

Teddy smiled. For a moment, he actually looked like a real eleven-yearold, and not like a man who had shrunk down to size.

"They're busy," he said. "Besides, you're here to talk to me, right?"

"Well... Yes, that's true, but..." She blinked again, hard. It was tough to string words together, for some reason. Maybe Mrs. Dudley was right. Maybe she
did
need her brain scanned. She felt as though the long drive in had somehow hypnotized her, and Teddy now seemed very far away.

"I hope that we can be friends, Lena," Teddy said. "I liked you, the last time they sent you here."

Her mouth struggled to shape the words. "What? What are you talking about?"

"You wore those gloves, last time," he said. "In February. You'd had a really lonely Valentine's Day, the day before, and you were very sad. So I made you happy for a little while. I had some pills left over."

It was very hot in the room, suddenly. "You've drugged me," Lena said.

Teddy beamed. "Gotcha!"

Lena tried to stand up. Her knees gave out and her forehead struck one corner of the coffee table. For a moment she thought the warmth trickling down her face was actually sweat. But it wasn't.

"Uh oh," Teddy said. "I'll get some wipes."

He bounded off for the kitchen. Lena focused on her knees. She could stand up, if she just tried. She had her pendant knife. She could... what? Slash him? Threaten him? Threaten a child? She grasped the pendant in her hand. Pulled it off its cord. Unflipped the blade.

When Teddy came back with a cylinder of lemon-scented disinfectant wipes, she pounced. She was awkward and dizzy, but she was bigger than him, and she knocked him over easily. He saw the knife in her hand, gave a little shriek of delight, and bit her arm, hard. Then he shook his little head, like a dog with a chew toy. It hurt enough to make her lose her grip, and he recovered the knife. He held it facing downward, like scissors. He wiped his mouth with the back of his other hand.

"I knew I liked you, Lena," he said. "You're not like the others. You don't really like kids at all, do you? This is just your job. You'd rather be doing something else."

"That's..." Her vision wavered. "That's not true..."

"Yes, it is. And it's okay, because I don't like other kids, either. They're awful. They're mean and stupid and ugly and poor, and I don't want to see them, ever again. I just want to stay home, forever."

Lena heard herself laughing. It was a low, slow laugh. She couldn't remember the last time she had heard it.

"Why are you laughing?" Teddy asked.

"Because you're all the same," she said. "None of you want to go to school!" She laughed again. It was higher this time, and she felt the laugh itself begin to scrape the dusty expanse of the vaulted ceiling, and the glittering chandelier that hung from it. She could feel the crystals trembling in response to her laughter. She had a pang for Jude, who would have absolutely loved whatever shit Teddy had dosed her with.

"I just need someone to create data," Teddy was saying. "I've tried to keep up the streams by myself, but I can't. There are too many sensors. I have to keep sleeping in their bed. I have to keep riding their bikes. Both of them. Do you even know how hard that is?"

Lena couldn't stop laughing. She lay on the floor now, watching her blood seep down into the fibres of the carpet. It was white, and it would stain badly. Maybe Teddy would want her to clean it up. That seemed to be her lot in life – cleaning up other people's messes. But as she watched, Teddy got down on his knees and began to scrub.

"It won't be that bad," he said. "I'll make it nice, for you. All I need is someone to pretend to be my mom, so I can do home-school. I have all her chips, still. I took them while she was still warm, and I kept them in agar jelly from my chemistry set." He winced. "I would have gotten Dad's, too, but he was too fat."

Teddy reached out his hand. "Do you think you can make it to the dining table?"

She let him help her up. "Social Services..."

"You can quit, tomorrow," Teddy said. "Just tell them you can't do it, any more."

"But... My mirror..." Why was she entertaining any of this? Why was she helping him?

"I have a mirror," he said. "Your face is the login, right? You talked to my mirror, the last time you were here. You just don't remember, because you blacked out later."

She turned to him. "This is real?"

He smiled, and squeezed her cold hand in his much warmer and smaller one. "Yes, Lena. It's all real. This is a real house with real deliveries and real media and a real live boy in it. It's not like a haunted house. It was, until you came. But it's your home, now. Your own place, just for you and me."

"For..."

"Forever. For ever and ever and ever."

THE ROAD OF NEEDLES

Caitlín R. Kiernan

Caitlín R. Kiernan (
www.caitlinrkiernan
) is the author of ten novels, including
Daughter of Hounds, The Red Tree
, and
The Drowning Girl: A Memoir
and
Blood Oranges
(as by Kathleen Tierney), and more than two hundred short stories, many of which have been collected in
Tales of Pain and Wonder, From Weird and Distant Shores, To Charles Fort, With Love, Alabaster, A is for Alien, The Ammonite Violin & Others, Two Worlds and In Between, Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart
, and
The Ape's Wife and Other Stories.
Coming up is new novel
Red Delicious
. Kiernan has won the Bram Stoker and James Tiptree awards, and has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy, and Shirley Jackson awards. Born in Ireland, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island.