The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (17 page)

“Not today. I’ve got plenty to do in the garage.”

“Please?” she said to David. “I need you to help me with something.”

“Well . . . ”

“My science project. It’s really cool.”

“I’ll bet it is,” said the man. “You know, my wife was interested in science. Do you remember David’s mother?”

“Yes,” she said, looking at her shoes.

“Eileen was doing research when I met her, at college. We got married right after graduation . . . ”

“Dad, please.”

“She was a very nice lady,” said the girl.

“Yes. She was.” His father took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a second. “Anyway, you two have a great time. And don’t be such a stranger, Sherron. You’re always welcome here.”

“Thanks, Mr. Donohue.”

“Then—I’ll see you later, Dad.”

His father winked. “You can count on it.”

“Are you going to tell my dad?”

“Not if you don’t want me to.”

They walked around the corner to the next street. The pavement smelled like melting asphalt. Somewhere a sprinkler hissed, beating steam into the air. Her house had trees that kept the sun away from the roof and the windows, so when they went inside it was hard to see for a minute. No one was home. She poured two glasses of sweet tea from the refrigerator and led him to her room.

As soon as she closed the door she took the cricket out of her pocket. Before it could hop away she put it in a Mason jar. A grasshopper and a beetle crawled along a leaf at the bottom. As soon as she touched the jar they stopped moving. She screwed the wire lid back on.

“Your folks let you keep those?”

“I told them it’s for school.”

“What do you need them for?”

“My project. If I get a fish tank, I can have frogs, too. And one of these.” She opened a book to a picture of a small snake.

“Why?”

“I found it on the Internet.”

“But
why
?”

She turned her computer on and showed him a page from a university website. There was an article called
Thanatosis: Nature’s Way of Survival,
with close-ups of insects, a possum, a leopard shark and a hog-nosed snake. He read the first paragraph. It explained how some creatures protect themselves when afraid by pretending to be dead.

“You think I’m like them?”

“I don’t know yet. But I’m going to find out.”

“Well, you’re wrong.”

She noticed that his eyes were now focused on the bulletin board by the computer, and the headline of the newspaper clipping she had pinned there months ago:
LOCAL WOMAN, SON DIE IN FIERY CRASH.
She snatched it down and put it in the drawer.

“Oh, David. I’m really sorry.”

“I better go.”

“But I need you to help me.”

“You think I’m faking it.”

“No, I don’t. I was there this time.”

“Then you know I’m a freak,” he said. “Like one of those animals. Like a bug.”

“You’re
not.
”

“What’s the difference?”

“They just—freeze up when they get scared. But you weren’t even
breathing.
Your
heart
stopped.”

“So what am I scared of?”

“It’s okay to say it. David, I saw you chasing the truck. Every time he leaves—well, you’re afraid he won’t come back, either. Aren’t you.”

He made a sound like a laugh. “You don’t know anything.”

“Don’t I?”

The laugh stopped. “If he doesn’t, it means I got a second chance, and I blew it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you get it? She was going to take me, but I was off playing that stupid game. She wasn’t supposed to take Eric. It was supposed to be me.”

Her mouth stayed open while she tried to find words.

“I have to go now,” he said.

Once he was out from under the trees the sky was fierce again. Leaves curled, flowers turned away from the sun and the asphalt began to glisten. He heard footsteps on the sidewalk that were not his own.

“You’re right. I don’t know anything.”

“Forget it, Sher.”

They passed rosebushes, the yellow petals now almost white. It was half a block before she spoke again.

“Can I ask one question?”

“Go ahead.”

“How does it feel?”

“I told you, I don’t remember.”

“Can you at least try?”

He kept walking, stepping over cracks. Mrs. Shaede’s Rain Bird sprinkler came on and a silver mist rose into the air.

“Wilson’s Market,” he said under his breath.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“The one on Charter Way? What about it?”

“We used to go there, when I was little.”

“We did, too.”

“There was this one time,” he said slowly, as they neared the end of the block. “I was four or five, I guess. Eric wasn’t born yet. She was wearing her long coat.”

“The gray one? I remember that.”

“Anyway, we went like always, just the two of us. And we got a shopping cart and she let me push it, so I could help. You know, put the milk and the groceries in for her. I stopped to look at the cereal, and I was going to tell her what kind to get, but when I looked up she was way ahead. I could only see the back of her coat. And you know what? There was another cart behind her, and another little boy was pushing it, and she was handing
him
the cans. I didn’t understand. I thought they were going to drive off and leave me there. So I started to cry. I yelled, ‘Mama, that isn’t me!’ And when she turned around, it wasn’t my mother. It was another lady with the same kind of coat. But before she turned, that was the feeling. If you want to know.”

Her eyes were bright as diamonds and she had to look away.

And then she did something she had never done before. She hooked her arm through his and reached down and lifted his wrist and laced her fingers between his fingers and held his hand very tightly. He let her do that.

After a while she said, “You know, they have better nurses at middle school. Maybe they can give you pills to make it stop.”

“I don’t care.”

“I do.”

“Maybe I
was
dead. So what? Next time, I hope I don’t wake up! What do you think of that? Huh?”

When she did not answer he looked around for her.

If she was not there she should have been.

The next school year was a crazy one, say like landing behind enemy lines and fighting your way out, and the next one was even worse, so he saw less of her, even before his father learned the truth and started driving him to the Institute for tests. By then it did not happen very often but at least David was with him. The only time he was not was when Dad’s heart gave out suddenly during senior year. She broke up with Vincent when her family moved and people said she went away to college to study pre-med but no one knew exactly where. If you ever meet her, you might tell her this: Just that life goes on, and her project—say his name was David—finally figured out that there are so many small dyings along the way it hardly matters which one of them is Death.

A hard-boiled used bookstore owner with a knack for finding things has a murdered Chinaman, a unicorn’s questionable gift, and a pushy little sorceress to deal with . . .

The Maltese Unicorn
Caitlín R. Kiernan

New York City (May 1935)

It wasn’t hard to find her. Sure, she had run. After Szabó let her walk like that, I knew Ellen would get wise that something was rotten, and she’d run like a scared rabbit with the dogs hot on its heels. She’d have it in her head to skip town, and she’d probably keep right on skipping until she was out of the country. Odds were pretty good she wouldn’t stop until she was altogether free and clear of this particular plane of existence. There are plenty enough fetid little hidey holes in the universe, if you don’t mind the heat and the smell and the company you keep. You only have to know how to find them, and the way I saw it, Ellen Andrews was good as Rand and McNally when it came to knowing her way around. But first, she’d go back to that apartment of hers, the whole eleventh floor of the Colosseum, with its bleak westward view of the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades. I figured there would be those two or three little things she couldn’t leave the city without, even if it meant risking her skin to collect them. Only she hadn’t expected me to get there before her. Word on the street was Harpootlian still had me locked up tight, so Ellen hadn’t expected me to get there at all.

From the hall came the buzz of the elevator, then I heard her key in the lock, the front door, and her footsteps as she hurried through the foyer and the dining room. Then she came dashing into that French rococo nightmare of a library, and stopped cold in her tracks when she saw me sitting at the reading table with al-Jaldaki’s grimoire open in front of me.

For a second, she didn’t say anything. She just stood there, staring at me. Then she managed a forced sort of laugh and said, “I knew they’d send someone, Nat. I just didn’t think it’d be you.”

“After that gyp you pulled with the dingus, they didn’t really leave me much choice,” I told her, which was the truth, or all the truth I felt like sharing. “You shouldn’t have come back here. It’s the first place anyone would think to check.”

Ellen sat down in the armchair by the door. She looked beat, like whatever comes after exhausted, and I could tell Szabó’s gunsels had made sure all the fight was gone before they’d turned her loose. They weren’t taking any chances, and we were just going through the motions now, me and her. All our lines had been written.

“You played me for a sucker,” I said, and picked up the pistol that had been lying beside the grimoire. My hand was shaking, and I tried to steady it by bracing my elbow against the table. “You played me, then you tried to play Harpootlian and Szabó both. Then you got caught. It was a bonehead move all the way round, Ellen.”

“So, how’s it gonna be, Natalie? You gonna shoot me for being stupid?”

“No, I’m going to shoot you because it’s the only way I can square things with Auntie H., and the only thing that’s gonna keep Szabó from going on the warpath. And because you played me.”

“In my shoes, you’d have done the same thing,” she said. And the way she said it, I could tell she believed what she was saying. It’s the sort of self-righteous bushwa so many grifters hide behind. They might stab their own mothers in the back if they see an angle in it, but that’s jake, ’cause so would anyone else.

“Is that really all you have to say for yourself?” I asked, and pulled back the slide on the Colt, chambering the first round. She didn’t even flinch . . . But, wait . . . I’m getting ahead of myself. Maybe I ought to begin nearer the beginning.

As it happens, I didn’t go and name the place Yellow Dragon Books. It came with that moniker, and I just never saw any reason to change it. I’d only have had to pay for a new sign. Late in ’28—right after Arnie “The Brain” Rothstein was shot to death during a poker game at the Park Central Hotel—I accidentally found myself on the sunny side of the proprietress of one of Manhattan’s more infernal brothels. I say
accidentally
because I hadn’t even heard of Madam Yeksabet Harpootlian when I began trying to dig up a buyer for an antique manuscript, a collection of necromantic erotica purportedly written by John Dee and Edward Kelley sometime in the sixteenth century. Turns out, Harpootlian had been looking to get her mitts on it for decades.

Now, just how I came into possession of said manuscript, that’s another story entirely, one for some other time and place. One that, with luck, I’ll never get around to putting down on paper. Let’s just say a couple of years earlier, I’d been living in Paris. Truthfully, I’d been doing my best, in a sloppy, irresolute way, to
die
in Paris. I was holed up in a fleabag Montmartre boarding house, busy squandering the last of a dwindling inheritance. I had in mind how maybe I could drown myself in cheap wine, bad poetry, Pernod, and prostitutes before the money ran out. But somewhere along the way, I lost my nerve, failed at my slow suicide, and bought a ticket back to the States. And the manuscript in question was one of the many strange and unsavory things I brought back with me. I’ve always had a nose for the macabre, and had dabbled—on and off—in the black arts since college. At Radcliffe, I’d fallen in with a circle of lesbyterians who fancied themselves witches. Mostly, I was in it for the sex . . . But I’m digressing.

A friend of a friend heard I was busted, down and out and peddling a bunch of old books, schlepping them about Manhattan in search of a buyer. This same friend, he knew one of Harpootlian’s clients. One of her
human
clients, which was a pretty exclusive set (not that I knew that at the time). This friend of mine, he was the client’s lover, and said client brokered the sale for Harpootlian—for a fat ten percent finder’s fee, of course. I promptly sold the Dee and Kelley manuscript to this supposedly notorious madam who, near as I could tell, no one much had ever heard of. She paid me what I asked, no questions, no haggling—never mind it was a fairly exorbitant sum. And on top of that, Harpootlian was so impressed I’d gotten ahold of the damned thing, she staked me to the bookshop on Bowery, there in the shadow of the Third Avenue El, just a little ways south of Delancey Street. Only one catch: she had first dibs on everything I ferreted out, and sometimes I’d be asked to make deliveries. I should like to note that way back then, during that long, lost November of 1928, I had no idea whatsoever that her sobriquet, “the Demon Madam of the Lower East Side,” was anything more than colorful hyperbole.

Anyway, jump ahead to a rainy May afternoon, more than six years later, and that’s when I first laid eyes on Ellen Andrews. Well, that’s what she called herself, though later on I’d find out she’d borrowed the name from Claudette Colbert’s character in
It Happened One Night.
I was just back from an estate sale in Connecticut, and was busy unpacking a large crate when I heard the bell mounted above the shop door jingle. I looked up, and there she was, carelessly shaking rainwater from her orange umbrella before folding it closed. Droplets sprayed across the welcome mat and the floor and onto the spines of several nearby books.