Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Please note: This originally went live on my Patreon page on Sunday night, January 26, 2025. Since then, even more crap has happened in the world and people are freaking out. (Freaking out, btw, does not help. Calm, deliberate, and calculated action helps, along with…well, read the post.) If you want to see most of my business posts these days, you’ll find them on Patreon. I’m only going to post a handful here.

How Entertainment Fits Into Our Lives

I spent the day of 9/11 with the television pegged on CNN, while I talked on the phone and handled e-mail. At the time, Dean and I were traditionally published and a good 80% of our income came from New York City.

We had friends there, friend-family there, and so much business there. I spoke to people, searching for them, figuring out if they were okay or not (and, physically, they were). I informed my agent’s assistant that she was in an evacuation zone, and she needed to leave now, something her boss (who was in Connecticut) apparently hadn’t been willing to do. No one knew what the toxic smoke emanating from the buildings was going to do, so they were evacuating the entire area. I reminded her that she could work from home, because she was afraid she would lose her job if she left.

She got out and she got safe.

Dean, always the most level head in any emergency, grabbed every single extra book we had, along with the books and advanced reading copies that we had stacked up to trade in at Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon. At the time, we lived in Lincoln City, on the coast.

Dean packed the car and took off for Portland, over two hours away. Neither of us liked that he was going, but we felt he had to. At that moment, we had no idea if the attack was localized to the East Coast or if other major cities were going to get hit. We had no idea what would happen to the economy, especially if the attacks continued, and we had no idea if Dean would be safe as he headed to downtown Portland.

What he knew, and what I quickly realized, was that our entire income stream was about to dry up. We had some money in the bank, but not enough to get us through six months to a year (worst case).

Those ARCs and first editions that he brought to Powell’s were catnip for collectors and he got thousands of dollars for them.

The next morning, Powell’s shut down all book buying. Dean’s Hail Mary journey was prescient and would have been impossible if he had waited even 24 hours.

That money got us to January, which was when the first payments started trickling back out of New York City. He was smart, but he did have to spend the day listening to the chaos coming out of New York and D.C. We had cell phones, but most of us used landlines. Still, I kept him updated on what I knew, and after I reached everyone I could, I spent the day locked in horror, alone with the TV and all of those awful images—some of which no major network has replayed.

By the time he got home, we had to shut it all off. We couldn’t handle the stress anymore. We knew that the future was uncertain—bleak, difficult and frightening. For those of you who were children then or those of you who weren’t even born, this is what it felt like: We had no idea if those planes were the first volley in a war. We were catapulted from a familiar world with familiar patterns into one filled with chaos, uncertainty, death, and violence.

I do not remember what we had for dinner that night. Nor do I remember what we talked about if anything. I do remember that every single cable channel—even the ones that should have been showing classic movies—would break in with updates. Not that the movies were any comfort. Every one that had been scheduled was set in the before times, and some even had images of the World Trade Center—the still-standing World Trade Center, before the big disaster.

So there was no television option. But we had a streaming satellite radio subscription. I turned on one of the stations that just played music—no talk at all—and I think I left it on for days.

I had a book due in two weeks, which was almost laughable. That was the project I was working on. But I couldn’t focus on it. I did not return to my writing desk for ten days. By then, I knew that the book deadline was going to be extended (my editor was not in New York at that time; she had been in France), and I had time.

I wrote a short story called “June Sixteenth at Anna’s,” which was about 9/11 in a sideways way, but more than that, it was about worlds lost, moments that are forever gone, and are mostly impossible to recover. When it was published in Asimov’s in 2003, 9/11 was still close. The story finished third in the Reader’s Choice Awards and was chosen for a year’s best volume.

But I didn’t write the story for readers.

I wrote it for me. I had to clear my palate of the horrors I’d seen. I also had to work through that jolt of fear that happens to all of us when our life’s path suddenly takes a terrible turn.

After I wrote the story, I was able to return to the novel. I guess I had officially gone back to work.

But quieting my mind was harder. When there are blanket emergencies—things that happen on a national or worldwide scale—it’s hard to escape them. And sometimes, you shouldn’t escape them.

This past year, we had to deal with a lot of crap in a business we built lovingly for our own work. The betrayal and breach of trust that we suffered also had economic and practical ramifications, and we had to handle those quickly and with great attention.

I didn’t sleep much during that period (or after Dean shattered his shoulder or much with another emergency the year before that), and I didn’t have a lot of leisure. An hour of television at night, the occasional Aces basketball game, and then (stunningly to me) football in the fall provided a bit of distraction.

Mostly, though, I couldn’t afford to be completely distracted. I was in the middle of an emergency and I had to concentrate. When I was able to find a distractable moment, I needed to choose my reading wisely. I had to avoid the new or the challenging. I read a lot of mediocre romance and some rather terribly done mysteries, while waiting for my favorite authors to release new books. And even then, I would balk at some of the topics they had chosen and set the books aside for later.

I’m just getting to later now.

But this was an emergency that I was literally in the middle of. If I didn’t act correctly, make the right choices, and handle the problems in the right way, my business might crumble. Dean was right beside me as were Chris York and Stephanie Writt. I have no idea how we got through June, July, and August, but we did, and the business is better for it.

Friends of mine are going through something similar right now. I am writing this on Sunday night, as the City of Los Angeles and the surrounding areas are finally, finally getting rain after months of drought.

The fires that sprang up during the Santa Anna winds of January made many of my friends flee their homes. I followed on Facebook with some, because I’m not on Twitter. Others I communicated with by phone, and still others I couldn’t locate at all because they had a limited social media presence…and I didn’t feel comfortable calling them in the middle of an emergency. Let me rephrase: a fleeing for your life emergency. I contact friends during emergencies all the time, but if I know they’re in the middle of the crazy shit, I wait a day or so to see if they need something.

Most of my friends who are going through this aren’t hurting for money. They fled to hotels, and one friend noted on Facebook that he had paid for two weeks, just in case.

Not hurting for money makes one aspect of the crisis easier. It means that you have the ability to pay for two weeks in a hotel—any hotel. Sleeping in your car isn’t necessary. Trying to get to family or friends who can put you up (if they’re willing) isn’t necessary either. You can buy clothes and toothpaste, buy a carrier for your dog, and get food.

But it doesn’t help the emotional part. And that second weekend in January, when everything was burning, reminded me of the other disasters I’ve seen or been through: the TV coverage was relentless and it was almost everywhere.

People who had evacuated couldn’t find anything to rest their brains, if they wanted to, although it’s easier now with streaming. If they escaped with their laptops or their iPads or their phones, they could watch something.

At that point in a crisis, you need something mindless.

Eventually, though, you have to dig out. You have to repair the damage. You have to see the lay of the land.

For many, the presidential election has also precipitated a crisis. A lot of people unplugged and disappeared after the election, unable to face what was ahead. The rest of us soldiered on, although we’re handling the firehose of change differently than we did in 2017.

I know some of you are happy with the election. Please don’t tell me, because what’s bothering me the most right now is the blatant bigotry against anyone who isn’t cis, white, and male. If you can tolerate that, you’re free to leave without comment, because if you do comment about this particular point, I will block you.

I’m on social media and yes, in a bit of a left-wing bubble. And I’m seeing a lot of people call anything that is entertainment “bread and circuses.”

They’re wrong.

Entertainment is how we survive.

Yes, we all need to pay attention. We need to fight for our little corner of the universe, whatever that means. (You can see which corner of the universe I’m focusing on from my note about bigotry above.)

But we can’t be on alert twenty-four hours per day for the next few years. Or even for the next few months.

That way lies complete disaster. People can and do collapse from exhaustion in crisis situations (however they define that), and then they’re of no help at all. (Sometimes, as I mentioned above, you have no choice; you must run full speed ahead. But at a certain point, you have to stop running and start building.)

A surprising part of that exhaustion isn’t from lack of sleep; it’s from lack of rest.

The brain is an amazing thing. It can marshal defenses, activate the sympathetic nervous system, and get us through whatever we’re facing. But it’s taxing on the body, and not something we can sustain for years.

I wanted to dig a little into the science for you, but I’m not an expert. Instead, I found something from the Association of Critical Care Nurses. This blog post by Sarah Lorenzini explains the science of crisis response. She’s writing for critical care nurses, but the article applies to all of us.

She writes:

Maintaining your well-being is essential for mastering the SNS response. Practice self-care to mitigate stress and enhance resilience. Engage in activities that promote physical and mental well-being, such as exercise, mindfulness, hobbies and spending time with loved ones. Being tired or hypoglycemic exacerbates negative symptoms associated with the stress response. By nurturing yourself and prioritizing adequate rest, hydration and nutrition, you can maintain composure and sustain your ability to provide compassionate care in demanding situations.

Let me reiterate something buried in the middle of this post, for the “bread and circuses” crowd. She writes, Engage in activities that promote physical and mental well-being, such as exercise, mindfulness, hobbies and spending time with loved ones.

Hobbies. Reading, watching movies and TV, going to sporting events…are hobbies. And hobbies are essential for survival in tough times.

Understanding the science is important—at least to me—and I learned long ago about the importance of shutting off the mind and going “somewhere else” for a little while. Sometimes movies and TV do that, sometimes sports does, but nothing is better than a book or a short story.

(During the worst of our crises last summer, I could only focus on short stories. But they were a lovely distraction.)

I learned this during 9/11. I couldn’t read mystery novels or even romances because at that moment, I was so shaken I wasn’t sure if I believed in happily ever after.

I ended up reading made-up world fantasy novels. They are the actual definition of “somewhere else.” Not somewhere familiar either. Somewhere I’d never thought of.

Science fiction is the same, but at the time I couldn’t find anything long and immersive. I ended up reading a fantasy series that I had on my TBR pile.

It was that series that reminded me of the importance of escape.

Fiction is survival for people in difficult situations. Fiction is necessary.

And we can’t dictate what kind of fiction other people need.

When I was a child living in an abusive household, I consumed as much fiction as possible. Sometimes I needed the escape of a made-up world, but I also read a lot of scary books—many of the Gothic novels because I knew they had a happy ending. And those books reinforced that no matter how dark the world got, people could survive.

Interestingly enough, to me the reader at least, the people who survived were always the ones who took action. Yes, that’s a tenet of fiction. After all, who wants to read about a whining protagonist who does nothing and needs to be rescued at the end?

But it’s also consistent with our biology.

The critical care nurse writes this:

I understand the surge of hormones in response to an emergency and how paralyzing it can feel. However, I have learned to channel my SNS (sympathetic nervous system) to help optimize my performance as a nurse. Instead of perceiving the physical manifestations of stress as hindrances, I reframe them as signs that my body is preparing me for peak performance. I embrace the increased heart rate, rapid breathing and heightened senses as indicators that I am ready to act and make a difference.

Our job, as writers, is to give the people responding to a crisis—any crisis—that escape which will give them the right kind of rest. It might enable them to get an extra hour of sleep at night. It might help them relax just enough to calm down and then move forward.

What we do is extremely valuable.

We should not dismiss it as “bread and circuses,” something to be avoided in a crisis.

We should embrace it as the necessity that it is.

That’ll enable us to continue to write and it’ll allow us to make time for our own rest through whatever crises we experience in our lives.

Storytellers are essential.

So tell your stories, no matter what is going on in the world.

And read the kinds of stories you love, without guilt or judgement.

It’s a great way to take care of yourself and the world around you. Because we all need that little moment of rest.

“How Entertainment Fits Into Our Lives ,” copyright © 2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Addendum added on February 1:

I’m currently reading the issue of The Hollywood Reporter that came out during the fires. It had this tidbit: Apparently LA Residents (even those who had been evacuated) flocked to the movies in the non-fire zones. People needed an escape.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/wildfires-movie-theaters-1236111782/

As one woman said, “What else are we going to do? I wanted to get away from it all.”

Just more evidence that entertainment is important, even in the tough times.

 

 

Just a quick little post to let you all know that Dean’s Kickstarter for his marvelous Marble Grant stories has just gone live. There’s a lot of goodies here in addition to the books. You’ll find discounted workshops and a lot of short stories.

Take a look at the video I finished over the weekend, and see if Marble Grant is right for you.

Head to the Kickstarter by clicking here.

When Ry gave her the magic gun, she thought it the most romantic gift she’d ever received. But after his death she had to put the gun in her past or risk losing her future.

Until the day she can no longer keep the gun at bay. It demands answers. Answers only she can find. Answers that involve a ceremony she never fully understood. Until now.

“Handfast” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

  

Handfast By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The most romantic gift anyone ever gave me? A gun.

Valentine’s Day, ten years ago. Ryder. God, what a sweet man. Six-three, all tattooed muscle, black hair shorn off that year to accent his dark, dark skin.

We were on the roof of his place, trying to keep candles lit in the cold breeze blowing across the Hudson, eating take-out sushi with custom-made chopsticks clutched in our frozen fingers, sitting on lawn chairs wedged into the ice-covered snow.

Ry gave up on the candles midway through, decided to go to his apartment to get a lantern—he said—and did come back with one. Battery operated, large, already on. And in his other hand, a Tiffany’s blue box big enough for a cake, tied with the ubiquitous white ribbon.

Despite the box, he couldn’t afford Tiffany’s. Not even something small, and certainly not something that large. Even if we could have afforded Tiffany’s, we wouldn’t have bought anything there.

We were militantly anti-ostentation back then. It went well with our lack of funds. But we believed it, acted on it, maybe even looked the other way when someone in a silk suit and shiny leather shoes ventured into the wrong alley, stepping in only when that rich bastard looked to be in trouble for his life—never stepping in to save his wallet.

I opened the box with trembling fingers, stuck the ribbon in my pocket and stared at a small lockbox that looked old and well used.

Ry nodded. He wanted me to open it.

So I did.

And saw the gun.

It wasn’t any old gun.

It was custom-made, silver, and, I later learned, it glowed slightly when its owner touched it. It also designed its own bullets—silver for werewolves, holy-water-laced for vampires, and laser-lighty (filled with fire) for the unknown magical.

I long suspected—and never tested—that the miracle weapon could transform its bullets into whatever the owner imagined.

We handfasted me to the weapon. He claimed he had another one, but I never saw it.

Handfasting required the candlewax (he was planning ahead), a bit of mercury, a touch of burnt almond. And some other magical oil-based concoctions I’m not going to describe, just in case.

And yeah, handfasting—pagan term for wedding. But it also meant a bargain struck by joining hands. I thought then that applying hand to hand-grip was the same thing.

I had no idea where Ry had gotten the weapon or how he learned to control it. I didn’t understand why he gave it to me.

I’d love to believe what he told me that night: He gave me the gun because he loved me.

But that couldn’t have been entirely true, because who gave a gun out of love?

When I pushed the next day, asking the right way—what made you think of me when you saw this?—he said I was so much more talented than he was, I deserved the weapon, and the weapon deserved me. And then, the day after that, he admitted he had one too, and we’d go practice with them, just him and me, Upstate, the next time we had the dough.

There was no next time. There wasn’t even a day after that. Not for Ry.

Someone caught him in our alley, shredded him, took the tattoos as souvenirs. I found him, still alive, barely. But not alive enough to tell me what happened. Or alive enough to let me know he heard me when, stupid me, I told him I loved him for the first and only time.

***

Fast-forward a decade to the winter that never died. Press coverage that year pegged it as the coldest in two decades, blaming arctic air that should’ve lived in Canada but, like any other snowbird, decided to move south.

I had my own place by then, two buildings over, tall enough to get the occasional sunset glinting off the nearby roofs. I liked that: the dying sunlight reached the kitchen of my glorious apartment, just about the time (in the winter at least) I was having whatever it was I scrounged for breakfast.

My apartment: three rooms, hard-fought. Actually purchased when the building went condo just before the damn housing crisis. Now I was—as the pundits so euphemistically call it—underwater, and for once, I gave a damn.

Then I’d come to my place, warded and spelled, with the most comfortable furniture I could find (mostly discards on garbage day, dragged up the elevator, refurbished and softened), and reveled in having a safe harbor, somewhere no one else ever breached. Not anyone, including the post-Ry lovers, the so-called friends, the clients and the hangers-on.

Just me and the silence I’d created, a place to refurbish myself after each day’s hard knocks and scrapes.

Somehow I stopped being militantly anti-ostentation. I was still anti-ostentation—no one would mistake the interior of this place for anything fancy—but I’d grown up enough to have financial entanglements and to adopt some of the trappings of a good citizen.

Protective coloration, really.

I’d needed it.

Back in the day, me and Ry were a team, and he was the stronger. We’d partner up, go after the shadows, fight till dawn, screw till noon, sleep a little, and start over.

Then he died, and I went full-moon batshit crazy searching for his killers, never sleeping, the edges of the world growing jagged and dark, finding clues where none existed, missing clues that’d probably been there, going, going, going until I ended up face-down in an abandoned subway tunnel and no memory of how I got there.

I had to choose, with my face pressed against the oil and the decades-old piss, whether I’d keep going or whether I’d just let it all end.

And weirdly, it was Ry who saved me. Ry, with his crooked half-smile and his embrace of anything dangerous. Ry, who had a tattoo on his left bicep of a bright yellow smiley face holding a sword in one little gloved hand and a dripping scalp in the other, with the word Onward in gothic letters underneath.

That tattoo always made me grin, especially when he flexed it, making the sword move up and down as if the smiley face were marching at a parade.

I saw that tattoo as clearly as if it were in front of me and, instead of regretting the method of its theft, I let out a tiny laugh. That moved the dusty dirt in front of me, and almost made me gag on the stench. Which, for some reason, I also found funny.

I was exhausted and spent, and in some ways, ruined. Completely different than I had been before.

I sat up, then stood up, and staggered my way out of the tunnel, heading back into my life. Which I rebuilt—alone—bit by bit. In the places that had never functioned alone, I built—I trained, I learned, I became.

I stayed in the City. Because the City had taken Ry from me. I couldn’t get him back: Magic didn’t work that way—at least not any kind of magic I chose to participate in. But I could find the missing pieces.

I could find whoever or whatever had killed him.

I could have answers—

Or so I thought. At first. Before I realized that a girl’s gotta eat. A girl’s gotta live. A girl’s gotta move forward.

So I did.

***

And then the winter of our discontent. Valentine’s Day wasn’t a bright spot for anyone. Yet another storm had arrived the day before, canceling flights, snarling traffic, and delaying the all-important flower deliveries to shops that relied on them. By the time the actual holiday rolled around, the City was enveloped in sleet on top of two feet of snow.

I rented an office near the alley where Ry got attacked. The office wasn’t much—third-floor walk-up with a frosted door, frosted windows, and a radiator that clanged to its own tune but at least kept the place warm. I had an actual desk which I got from an office five doors down—a blond wood monstrosity that smelled like old cigarettes, giving the office a slightly musty air, something I actually liked. In keeping with the thirties motif, I kept an open bottle of Scotch in the bottom drawer, although I rarely touched liquor. Any more.

I cribbed an old leather sofa from that same abandoned office, and found two matching desk chairs in the garbage behind my apartment building. The only money I actually spent on furnishing the place was for my chair, which was the most high-tech thing I owned. It had more levers and dials and options than the first (and last) car I ever drove.

The office had no computer or phone or anything remotely resembling office equipment. I don’t write reports. I collect funds up front, and don’t give paper receipts. If I need more money from my clients, I ask them for more. If they refuse to pay, I refuse to work.

I’m not one of those private detectives who works pro bono because the case interests them. I work because I need the money—and if I didn’t work, I’d go back down that crazy subway tunnel, and the overwhelming stench of decades-old piss.

It’s not even fair to call me a private detective. I use the title sometimes because it’s easier than explaining what I do. What Ry and I used to do. What I never stopped doing, after he was gone.

I shove the magic back where it belongs.

Sounds easy, but it’s not. And there are only a few of us that can do it.

By now it should be clear: I wasn’t sitting alone in my office on Valentine’s Day because of the snow. I hated Valentine’s Day with a bloody passion. I tried not to. It wasn’t the fake holiday’s fault I was always so miserable at this time of year.

I usually tried to tell myself that Valentine’s Day had peaked for me that night on the roof, with the lantern and the Tiffany box. And sometimes that worked.

But not on the tenth anniversary. Not as I slogged my way through the snow and sleet, watching inane couples in their finery get out of cabs or stumble out of the subway, pretending the day (night) was perfect after all. Maybe it was the combination—wind, snow, Valentine’s—that caught me.

Or maybe I was finally feeling my age for the first time.

Whatever it was, it convinced me to haul out that open bottle of Scotch the moment I collapsed into my high-tech desk chair. I had had the same open bottle of Scotch for months now, ever since a baby demon with a heart of gold (long story) had slept in my office for two weeks and nursed on the bottle like it was demon-mama’s teat. No way was I ever drinking from that bottle again. So I got a new one—after I found baby demon’s distraught mama and finally reunited the two of them.

Me, an open bottle of Scotch, sleet tapping the frosted glass like werewolf claws. I thought I had the night all planned—when the gun appeared out of nowhere.

The gun. You know, the one from the Tiffany’s box.

Or so I thought at first.

Well, not entirely true, because you don’t think about where a gun came from when it appears right in front of you, business end pointed at your face, trembling as if held by an unsteady hand.

And nothing else.

I set the bottle of Scotch down, then made myself calmly and deliberately screw the cap back on. I would have put the bottle back in the bottom drawer, but the gun’s trembling got worse, and I really didn’t want to get shot just because I was being a neat freak.

I wondered what kind of bullets were in that thing—silver, holy-water-dipped, flaming hot. Damn near any of them would kill me, since I’m just good old-fashioned flesh and blood. I stared at the wobbling muzzle of that gun, then realized I had some control.

We’d been handfasted after all. The weapon belonged to me and I to it, which was probably why it couldn’t go through with the shooting.

I held up my right hand and said in my deepest, most powerful voice, Come to me.

The weapon’s trembling increased, but it didn’t move. My heart moved enough for both of us, trying to pound its way out of my chest.

I tried the command again, and again, the damn gun just shook more.

So, figuring the rule of three, I tried one final time. Join your handfast partner.

The gun stopped trembling. And then it whirled as if pursued, and floated away from me. I sat for a moment, stupidly, then realized that the damn gun didn’t belong to me. It was a different weapon than the one locked in the lockbox I kept in the Tiffany’s box.

I got up and stumbled after the gun. It floated down the hallway, then down the stairs, always staying at chest-height, just as if someone were holding it.

It reached the lobby, bumped out the door (I have no idea how it got open), and into the sleet. I followed, coatless, instantly chilled, and nearly slammed into a couple wearing less clothes than I was, giggling their drunk way out of a nearby bar. They didn’t seem to see the gun, but I couldn’t take my gaze off it.

Because it went into the alley, where Ry died. And then it started banging against the brick wall behind a Dumpster, as if it were trying to get into something.

I wished for gloves. And boots. And a coat. I was sliding on ice, and still the alley had the stench of weeks-old garbage. It didn’t matter how cold or wet something got, the smells remained.

I tried not to look at the back corner, where Ry bled out. It was covered in a snow pile six feet high anyway. The gun kept banging and scraping, and I finally decided to violate one of the major rules of automated magic.

I got between the gun and the wall. The gun kept hitting the same brick, scraping it white. I grabbed the damn thing, surprised that my fingers fit where the mortar should have been.

So I pulled.

The brick slid out easily, and I slid backwards, nearly falling. I caught myself on the edge of the ice-cold Dumpster.

The gun turned itself sideways, shoving its grip into the open hole. It had stopped trembling.

It balanced on the edge of the brick below for just a moment, then toppled downward.

I jumped back, afraid it would go off by accident.

But it didn’t.

It rested on top of the ice as if all the magic had leached out of it. Its color was different too. No longer silver, but a muddy brown instead. I tilted my head, blinked hard, my face wet with sleet.

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, smearing the cold rather than getting rid of it.

The gun still looked odd. I figured it actually looked odd—it wasn’t my magical sight that had changed; the gun was different.

So I crouched. And looked closer.

And gasped.

Something had wrapped itself around the grip. Brown and mottled. It took a moment for my eyes to make sense of what I saw.

The word Onward in Gothic script.

Bile rose in my throat.

I nudged the gun with my foot, then managed to flip the weapon over. The image on this side was a distorted yellow, desiccated and faded.

I swallowed hard, my stomach churning.

Then I stood and made a small flare out of my right fingertip. I used the flare to illuminate the hole in the bricks.

Saw shreds, images. Messed on the top like someone had rifled a drawer, and laid flat below, like carefully folded linen napkins waiting for a fancy dinner.

I lost my not-fancy dinner. And breakfast. And every meal for the past week.

Some investigator.

I’d searched for those patches of skin from the very beginning—all six of Ry’s tattoos—knowing his magic lurked in them.

Only, as I braced one hand on the wall, and used the other hand to wipe my mouth, I realized that there were a lot more than six scraps of skin in that wall.

A lot more.

I allowed myself to get sick one final time before hauling out my phone, and calling the only detective at the NYPD who would ever listen to me.

Ryder’s older brother.

Dane.

***

He showed up ten minutes later, wearing a dress coat over an ill-fitting suit, and a this-better-be-worthwhile attitude. He wore his hair regulation cut, and he didn’t have the muscles or the tattoos. Still, there was enough of a family resemblance to give me a start every time I saw him walk toward me. Same height, same build, same general energy.

“Three-hundred dollars up front for dinner,” he said. “Includes five courses and champagne. We’d just finished appetizers.”

“Special girl?” I asked.

“I’m hoping,” he said. “We’ll see if she’s still there when I get back.”

She might be waiting a long time, I thought but didn’t say. I just showed him the open hole in the brick.

“What?” he asked impatiently.

“Just look,” I said, my voice raspy, throat sore, my breath so foul I tried not to face him.

He grabbed his phone and used it like a flashlight, then backed away when he realized what he was looking at.

“What the hell?” he asked.

He peered into that obscene storage space, then looked at me, his handsome face half in shadow.

“How did you find this?” he asked, as if I had created the horror all on my own.

I poked the toe of my battered Nike against the gun.

He turned the phone’s light toward it, saw the desiccated but still visible smiley face, and swallowed hard, then shook his head.

“You’re out here without a coat or hat or mittens, and you’re telling me you just stumbled on this gun?”

He didn’t mention his brother’s skin, wrapped around it, or the fact that there was more shredded skin in that opening.

“No, I’m not saying that.”

Now that he mentioned how I was dressed, I realized just how cold I was. My teeth started chattering. I shoved my hands in the pocket of my jeans, not that it did much good.

“I asked you how you found this?” Dane snapped.

“And I showed you,” I said.

“It means nothing.” His voice went up, echoing between the buildings.

“Only because there are some things you refuse to let me tell you,” I said, matching his tone.

He stared at me, breathing hard. I tried to stay calm, but it was difficult, considering how bad I was shivering.

“Magic?” he asked with a sneer he once reserved for Ry, but had transferred to me since Ry’s death.

I nodded.

Dane rolled his eyes and shook his head. “You think this crap has been here all along?”

I shrugged one shoulder.

“You want to tell me, without talking about magic, how you came down here?”

I sighed. I could have said no, I supposed, but I didn’t. “I followed the gun.”

“And whoever was holding it,” he said.

“I didn’t see who was holding it,” I said.

“Convenient,” he said, “since it looks like Ry’s gun.”

It is Ry’s gun, I wanted to say, but knew better. Because then Dane would ask me how I knew that, and I would point to the layer of skin wrapped around the grip.

“Ry told me he had one,” I said. “I never saw it. How do you know it’s his?”

Besides the skin, I mean, I added mentally. Of course, Dane didn’t hear that.

“Pretty unusual thing, huh?” Dane said. “Ry called it magic. Me, I think it’s some kind of toy, since it supposedly invents its own bullets.”

I ignored that jibe. “He ever use it in front of you?”

“No, he wanted to take me to the range to practice with it, but he….” Dane let out a sigh. “He died before we could go.”

“Who ended up with the gun?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Dane said. “I never saw it again.”

“So you remember it after ten years?” Lying on the ice, with Ry’s skin wrapped around it, the gun didn’t look that distinctive, at least not to me.

“I’d tell you I recognized it by that lovely silver barrel,” Dane said, “but I didn’t even notice that part at first.”

I waited. I was going to make him say it, the bastard.

“I don’t think we’re going to have to test the DNA on that skin,” Dane said quietly.

I nodded.

“But we might have to on the rest of this stuff in here.” Dane peered at that hole. “Why would the gun turn up now?”

It had been exactly ten years since I got my gun. But I had no idea if Dane knew I had one too, and I wasn’t about to tell him.

“The anniversary’s coming up,” I said.

“Yeah, like I can forget that,” Dane said dryly. He sighed again. “I’m going to call this in. You need to go inside before you freeze solid.”

“What about the gun?” I asked. “Do you think it should go into evidence?”

He looked at me. He knew what I was thinking. Hell, all of New York would have known what I was thinking. The city had seen a lot of news lately about weapons stolen out of the NYPD’s evidence storage.

“You want to pick it up?” he asked.

Of course I didn’t. Neither did he. But he had opened the door, and he was the magic-denier, not me. I reached around him, and with shaking fingers, sorted through the Dumpster until I found a box that wasn’t too junked up. It was a shoebox with some stains along the bottom, but it didn’t smell that bad, so I grabbed it.

I was going to scoop up the gun with the box lid, but I stopped halfway. I didn’t want to mess up that grip. (That tattoo.) So I glanced at Dane. He was watching me closely.

I slid the lid underneath the box, then held the box in my left hand. I turned my right palm upward. Then I concentrated on the gun and hooked it mentally to my right hand. Slowly I raised my hand, and the gun rose too.

Once the gun was a foot off the ground, I crouched, slid the box underneath it, and turned my palm down. The gun bounced into the box, and I slapped the lid on it.

Dane watched me, face gray in the half light. His gaze met mine, but he didn’t say anything. I knew, if asked, he would say only that I slid the box under the gun and scooped it up.

I offered him the box.

He shook his head. “You keep it.”

“There could be evidence here,” I said, taunting him.

He shook his head. “We’ll have more than enough. Now, go inside.”

He didn’t have to tell me twice. I scurried to my building, feeling as if I would never get warm again.

***

So Ry had handfasted to the gun, just like I had.

I carried it up the stairs to my office, noting that the box did have an odor, but I wasn’t sure if the odor came from the Dumpster or that tattooed slice of skin. I didn’t want to think about that either.

Instead, I locked the entire box inside my office safe. Then I went to the ladies room down the hall ostensibly to run warm water on my hands but, in reality, to get whatever was on that box off my skin.

I shivered and shivered, even after I warmed up. The shivering didn’t just come from the cold.

After I’d cleaned up, I grabbed my heavy down coat, my unattractive knit cap, and my gloves. I slipped everything on, locked the office, and headed home.

I needed to know if my own gun was still there.

When I reached the street, the cold returned with a vengeance. It was as if I hadn’t gone inside to get warm at all.

A crime scene unit had the alley blocked off. Dane appeared to have left, and some unis guarded it all. They stared at me as if I were the bad guy. I pivoted, went the other way, and headed to my place.

At least the sleet had stopped, but the sidewalk was slippery. The restaurants along the way—this place was so gentrified now—were filled with well-dressed couples pretending to be happy. And maybe they were over their—what had Dane said? $300 meals? I preferred the take-out sushi eaten with custom-made chopsticks on a roof so cold it made this evening seem like the Bahamas in summer.

I still missed Ry, the bastard. I liked to think I had moved on, but I hadn’t. Not inside. Not where it counted.

I took an elevator to my apartment, and let myself in. The apartment was warm, homey, perfect, just like it had been since I bought it. I closed the door and locked it, then checked the wards just in case.

They were fine.

I peeled off my gloves and tossed them on an occasional table. Then I went into my bedroom and opened the closet.

There, on the top shelf, was the Tiffany’s box. I pulled it down, and gingerly untied the ribbon. I tugged the lid off and looked inside. The lockbox was still there. I opened it too, and stared at the gun, gleaming in the light.

It looked no different than it had every other time I had looked at it. It was a shame I had never used it, a shame that it hid here in the dark, as if it were at fault for Ry’s death.

I ran my fingers across its cool surface. It glowed faintly, in recognition. I wished I knew how to use it. I wished Ry had told me where he had gotten it, why he had chosen a Tiffany’s box to keep it in, what it all meant.

I closed the lockbox, then closed the Tiffany’s box, and retied the ribbon, like I’d done dozens of times over the years. I put the gun on the top shelf of my closet, then closed that door. If only it were that easy to put the gun out of my mind as well.

Something had caused the second gun to come to me. Something had powered it. Something—or someone.

I wouldn’t know what until I knew more about the guns themselves.

I grabbed my cell to call Dane. Then decided I wasn’t going to speak to him on the phone.

I would go to him, wherever that was.

I took my gloves off the occasional table and let myself out of the apartment, using the edges of my magic to track Dane.

It wasn’t hard.

He was at the precinct, at his desk—which, I was certain—was not where he wanted to be.

***

The limestone façade of the three-story precinct building looked dirty against the sleet-shiny snow. Ry used to call it the Home of the Enemy, but he didn’t really mean it. He was always mad at Dane for refusing to acknowledge the magic or the work Ry and I were doing.

The rivalry between them didn’t mask the love they had for each other, though, and I knew Dane had been as torn up over Ry’s death as I was.

I let myself inside, the smell of fear and sweat enveloping me. I took the steps up to the detective unit, and slipped inside.

Nighttime made little difference. There were always detectives poring over files, tapping on ancient computers, or talking tiredly into the phones.

Dane was sitting at his desk toward the back, hands pressed against his cheeks, staring down at some paperwork in front of him. His suit coat was hanging over the back of his chair, and his long dress coat was hanging on a peg on the wall.

I walked over to him and hovered, waiting for him to acknowledge me.

“At least fifteen different skin types,” he said. “And they’re just estimating. Who does that?”

He sounded tired. I guess the possibly special woman hadn’t waited for him after all.

“Not who,” I said. “What does that?”

“Yeah, some kinda animal,” he said more to himself than to me. Because we both knew that he was deliberately misunderstanding me.

It was a good question, though. Demons shredded skin, but they used the unbelievable pain from the process to increase their own power. There were lots of creatures from all sides of the magical divide that consumed skin, mostly as food, and a handful that took the magic from tattoos.

But nothing native to New York. Because all of the native creatures destroyed the skin when they did what they did.

I knew of nothing that took tattoos like trophies.

“Was everything—” I couldn’t bring myself to say skin fragments. “—tattooed?”

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Mean something to you?”

I shook my head, but he wasn’t looking up. Maybe he took my silence as an acknowledgement.

“Do you know where Ry got the gun?” I asked.

Dane finally raised his head. He seemed to have aged years in the past few hours. He seemed surprised by the question.

“There were two,” he said. “They belonged to my parents. I figured he had given one to you.”

My cheeks heated. I had never told Dane about the gun. I hadn’t told anyone.

Dane was frowning. “He was going to—you know—ask you to marry him. He was all goofy about it. He even found a Tiffany’s box, because engagement rings come in Tiffany boxes. He thought you’d get it.”

I thought we didn’t believe in marriage. I thought marriage was so…middle class, so ostentatious.

I had missed the point.

Why me? I had asked Ry.

Because I love you, he had said, so sure, so certain.

And then, at my confusion, he had shrugged, said he was cold, and we’d better hurry. Still, we handfasted me to the gun. My gun. And his matched.

Like wedding rings.

Son of a bitch.

“Did your parents have wedding rings?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Dane said, “but my folks were pretty traditional. They wanted the guns to go to me and Ry, like we were supposed to split up the rings.”

Dane leaned back, closed his eyes for a minute, shook his head, then added, “I was the only sane one. The only one who didn’t see little sparklies in the universe or dark things crawling out of corners. My folks were so disappointed…”

Then he rocked forward and opened his eyes.

“I thought you knew,” he said again, but I wasn’t sure if he was talking about the guns or his parents or all of it.

I shrugged, pretending at a nonchalance I didn’t feel. “What were the guns for?”

“Monster hunting,” he said sarcastically.

I nodded, not going there.

“Thanks,” I said, and threaded my way through the desks.

“Hey,” he said. “You need help?”

Not your kind of help, I nearly said. Instead, I shook my head. “You guys are doing it all.”

And as I walked out, I realized that was true. After I had come to my senses, I left the investigation in the hands of the police.

Even when I had known that whatever killed Ry hadn’t been human—at least, by my definition. Maybe by Dane’s.

But not by mine.

***

The guns had history, and I needed to find it. I could look in moldy books or try to find something accurate online. Or I could ask the guns themselves.

I didn’t want to ask the one with Ry’s tattoo wrapped around its grip. I wasn’t sure who or what would answer me.

And I didn’t want to find out.

So I walked back to my apartment, and got my gun down a second time.

Everyone describes silver as cold, but it’s not. Especially when it’s been indoors, and the endless winter continued outside. The gun was warm against my hand, the silver never needing polish.

I wrapped my hand around it, saw—

Ry, grinning as he watched me open the box…

I made that image disappear, saw—

Something huge and scaly, looming over a pair of sleeping boys, then a bright white light zinging out of the muzzle, and the huge, scaly thing exploding into a thousand little pieces…

I shook my head, smiled a little, saw —

Hands with two matching rings, clasped, each around the grip of a different gun. “With my heart, I hold you,” a male voice so like Ry’s said. “With my soul, I touch you…”

It was a handfasting ceremony, only of a kind I’d never heard of. With the guns in the middle.

Marriage, the old-fashioned way.

I rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. Then frowned, thought of an experiment, and decided to try it.

I set the gun on top of the box.

Then I went into my kitchen, and thought, Join your handfast partner at the gun itself.

After five minutes, it wobbled its way toward me, muzzle pointed at my heart, trembling like Ry’s gun had.

Find your box, I thought, and the gun wobbled its way out the door. I followed it, as it returned to the very place it had started.

I picked the box up and wrapped my arms around it.

Anniversaries had power.

I had thought the gun came to me at the anniversary of Ry’s death.

The gun had come to me at the anniversary of our love—the marriage he had tried to give me, ten long years ago.

***

With my gun in my shoulder holster, I went back to the office.

I doubted I would ever get warm, even though I was wearing my coat, thick gloves, and my hat. I was cradled in the heart of a long, cold winter, and I might as well embrace it.

Ry’s gun was inside the safe, the remains of my favorite tattoo still attached to the grip.

First, I put my gun on the desk. Then, gingerly, I picked up Ry’s.

He laughed.

I took my hand off the grip, shaking.

Then touched it again.

I don’t care how dark things get, he said. We’ll always have each other.

As if he hadn’t left. As if he were still here.

I set the guns beside each other, and they started to glow. If they were real guns—real as in the way Dane defined guns—I would be fleeing now, expecting some kind of weird explosion.

But I was curiously unafraid.

The guns glowed and locked to each other. The tattoo grew into an entire man.

Ryder.

See-through, but there.

“I missed you,” he said.

I didn’t care if he was real or not. “I missed you too.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d understand,” he said. “We never finished the ceremony.”

“I know,” I said.

He nodded, reached toward me, his hand going through my face. I felt nothing, not even a rush of wind.

And oh, how I wanted to.

“What happened?” I asked, because I had to, because I had a sense time was short.

“Demons,” he said, and his image flickered.

He glanced at the guns. The glow was fading.

“No,” I said.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too,” I said. “Stay.”

“I wish.” His voice was faint. “Balance the scales…”

And then he was gone.

Again.

The son of a bitch.

***

I felt it—the batshit crazy. It was coming back, or maybe it had never left. I could go after everything, clean up everything, fight everything—and be consumed.

Or I could stand up.

Fight.

Figure it out.

The guns didn’t glow any more. The tattoo was gone.

I touched Ry’s gun. It was cool. So was mine.

Balance the scales.

Demons—and skin.

I let out a breath, grabbed both guns, and headed to the alley below.

***

No crime scene tape. No footprints in the snow. No tire marks where the crime scene unit had parked their van.

The brick was back in place.

I walked to it, touched it, felt edges, still there. The hiding place, still there.

Son of a bitch.

“Finally,” he said, his voice echoing between the buildings.

I turned. He looked bigger, eyes glowing ever so slightly red, Ry’s face covering his imperfectly, five tattoos glowing on his scaly skin.

Saw—in my mind’s eye—two boys, sleeping, a demon hovering over them, exploding in the dark, and scales raining down—on the oldest boy, the one closest to the door.

“Your parents took your magic away from you,” I said.

“They thought they could,” Dane said, his voice deeper, more echoey. “They took the wrong magic.”

They took the good magic, leaving the scales.

Balance them, Ry had told me.

“You killed him,” I said.

Dane didn’t answer me, but the tattoos glowed. The death hadn’t been intentional. I knew that, or Dane wouldn’t have crumbled like he had. They had had a fight—over the guns?

“What do the guns have to do with it?” I asked.

“One of them is mine,” he said.

“Why didn’t you take Ry’s after he died?” I asked.

“I couldn’t find it. But you found it. Thank you,” he said. “Now, give it to me.”

I had no other weapons. I hadn’t expected to fight demons tonight. I wasn’t really in the fighting and slaying business any more. Just the investigating, resolving business.

I pulled Ry’s gun out of my pocket. My hand trembled as I gave the gun to Dane.

He took it, looking surprised at the ease.

“I never realized you were this logical,” he said.

“You never knew me,” I said. Which was fair: I never knew him either.

And I had dismissed Ry. Ry, who had called Dane “The Enemy” right from the start.

Dane grinned. “I like you, you know.”

I nodded, as if I cared. He looked down at the gun, and weighed it in his hand, as if it were something precious.

Which it was.

Join your handfast partner, I whispered.

The gun in Dane’s hand trembled. He held it tightly. The tattoos on him—Ry’s remaining tattoos—glowed.

Then peeled off, one by one, each fastening itself around the gun.

For a moment, there were two men before me, one thinner, less substantial, the other glowing red, the gun between them.

My gun had found my hand as well—and I didn’t remember grabbing it. Then I realized it had heard the same command, thought the command was its.

I knew what kind of bullets demons took, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to shoot Dane—not with Ry fighting him for the gun.

They struggled, the ice melting beneath their feet, the heat of Dane’s evil warming the entire alley. The gun remained between them and then—

Something popped as if a bubble had burst.

Ry staggered backwards, substantial, bleeding (bleeding!!!), and falling, holding his gun.

Dane, dripping scales, reached for the gun and without thinking, I imagined white light—bullets—heading toward him.

They did, shooting out of my gun and hitting his torso.

I reached down, grabbed Ry, pulled him backwards with me, away from the white-and-red glowing demon-man in the center of that alley. We made it behind a stupid snowplow-created pile of snow when Dane exploded, bits raining everywhere.

Except on us.

Balance the scales.

Not just the scales of justice. The scales of a demon, returning where they belonged.

I wrapped my arms around a bleeding, warm, living man.

“Ry,” I said.

“Took you long enough,” he muttered.

“You didn’t explain—”

“No excuses,” he said, and then he passed out.

***

I had no story for the ambulance attendants. I had no story for the cops. I pled ignorance, lost memory, frostbite…I don’t know. Those lies are gone, along with any trace of Dane.

Ry thinks Dane died that night ten years ago, and somehow his demon self managed to get to Ry, so that Ry’s power would keep them alive.

But I think—the magic suggests it—that Dane died a lot longer ago than that. Maybe the night of the demon attack, the ones the gun stopped.

Because demons can create hallucinations, images, visions, like the crime scene. How easy for one boy to die and feed a dying demon, keeping it alive, just barely, waiting for the right opportunity to grow into something stronger.

From the moment I met him, Ry said he distrusted Dane. I thought that strange for brothers. But it wasn’t. It was the man reacting to something he barely remembered from his own childhood.

Ry doesn’t agree.

But it doesn’t matter.

Because we’ve done purges. We’ve saged the entire alley. We’ve warded it and cleansed it. We invited old friends to do the same.

Dane’s gone.

And Ry’s here.

And it’s no hallucination or vision.

The most romantic gift anyone’s ever given me was a gun. And a handfast.

And a future.

Together.

At last.

 

____________________________________________

“Handfast” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Handfast

Copyright © 2021 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Streets of Shadows, edited by Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon, Alliteration Ink, September 2014
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2021 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Fixzma/Dreamstime, 88and84/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

December allowed me to have some extra brain time. Some of the crisis events of the previous six months had passed or been dealt with or are (even now) being dealt with. We’ve reestablished a rhythm in life, so I was able to read more in the midst of the usual holiday craziness.

I read holiday anthologies only in the holiday season, so sometimes it takes me years to finish one. There are two here that took years to finish, but I found stories I liked in both of them. And then there is the Library of America Christmas stories collection. I didn’t get far into it, but I will be reading it for several more years. It’s a slow read, because the stories are chronological and I can already see that I disagree with some of Connie Willis’s choices. (Prerogative for the heavy reader.) She leans more into sf/f than I would and of course, completely ignores romance. And also, much of the mystery oeuvre. Still, worth looking at, I suspect. I’ll know more in a few years.

Of course, I read a lot more than that as well. My schedule slowly freed up (as much as my schedule can) and I had some time for reading, leisure and otherwise. Here’s what I liked from the leisure.

December 2024

 

Brown, Leah Marie, “Finding Colin,” Winter Wishes, Zebra Books, 2017. This novella comes from a book with no attributed editor, something that always annoys the heck out of me. No matter. The stories were good enough, but “Finding Colin” was charming. It has a great voice, a great sense of humor, and a story problem that made me vaguely uncomfortable (and I think the author intended that). A hardcore fan spends her vacation dollars to track down the man of her dreams, an actor named Colin. She finds out where he’s filming his latest movie and…well, the story goes from there. And it didn’t go the way I feared it would. It’s a lot of fun, and well worth reading.

Dunne, Griffin, The Friday Afternoon Club, Penguin Press, 2024. I feel an affinity for Griffin Dunne. I was going to write that I have no idea why, but that’s really not true. Dunne is a survivor. His family was famously dysfunctional. His beloved sister was murdered. He dropped out of school (understandably, as he recites the incident), and yet has managed to have a major career in the arts. Given his history, he shouldn’t have survived, and yet he has.

His father, Dominick Dunne, came to my attention after he had lost his daughter and became a crusader for justice. He continually wrote about the way the courts and the justice system failed victims’ families. His aunt by marriage, Joan Didion, has been one of my favorite writers for my entire life. (That’s her on the left, arms around her daughter.)

So I wanted to read this book to read about the family, which I knew was interesting, but also to read about Griffin Dunne, whose work I’ve admired since he was the only memorable part of An American Werewolf in London. The book is well written (not surprisingly) although it clearly retools the stories that Dunne has probably been dining out on for years. Still, there were some surprises, particularly from his good friend Carrie Fisher, and some truly sad and heartfelt moments. The book ends with the birth of Dunne’s daughter, and it should end there. But that leaves another twenty years or more of his life to discuss at some point.

Even if you have no idea who any of these people are, you might want to read this. It really is a testament to survival and stubbornness and lots of other fascinating things.

Lipshutz, Jason, “In Control,” Billboard Magazine, November 16, 2024. This is a fascinating—to me, at least—article about a badly managed company (Warner Music Group) that turned itself around with new management. Considering that’s what’s happening with our WMG Publishing right now, this was an exceedingly timely and hopeful article. Dunno if you all will find it as interesting. Hope you do.

Meier, Leslie, “Candy Canes of Christmas Past,” Candy Cane Murder, Kensington, 2007. I have no idea when I first started this book, but I note that I recommended Laura Levine’s story in 2020. Which means I haven’t picked it up since then. So…four years later…I was in the mood for cozies again at holiday time, I guess.

Leslie Meier’s story features her regular heroine, Lucy Stone, in a story that takes place in two time periods—when she is a grandmother and her kids and grandkids come to visit, and when she’s a young mother, dealing with a new home and a toddler, while pregnant in a new town. The house is a fixer-upper and it’s falling apart around her, yet she makes time to solve an old crime involving glass candy canes. The 1980 details are marvelous, the discomfort of advanced pregnancy plain, and the stress on young parents also vivid. The mystery is meh, but I always find that with cozies. The read, though, was great.

Mitchell, Gail, “Quincy Delight Jones,” Billboard Magazine, November 16, 2024. It’s hard to believe that Quincy Jones is gone. He was perhaps the influence on all music in the last 60 years or more. If you don’t believe me, read this piece, and think about the choices Quincy made, the talent and creativity he brought to everything he did. Then maybe watch “We Are The World: The Greatest Night In Pop,” a documentary about something that just seems impossible now. It was impossible then too, but Quincy helped pull it off. If you’ve never thought about Quincy Jones, well, you’re in for a treat.

Oppenheimer, Mark, “The Gonzo Life and Tragic Death of ‘Heff'” The Hollywood Reporter, October 23, 2024. I found this to be an utterly fascinating character study of a…well, I don’t want to say tragic figure, but someone whose life didn’t turn out the way anyone thought it would. John Connery Heffernan III was one of the people behind the movie Snakes on a Plane. That ended up being his biggest success. Then after a few years of being somewhat famous, he disappeared from his friends’ lives. That led Oppenheimer to track him down only to learn that Heff was dead. So, Oppenheimer wanted to know what happened. This story is as strange as the movie.

Provost, Megan, “Teaching Possibility,” On Wisconsin, Fall, 2024. Apparently, the University of Wisconsin selects a book for every student at this incredibly large campus to read each year in the Go Big Read (for Go Big Red, a school saying) every year. This year’s book was by Rebekah Taussig, whose book is part of Carolyn Mueller’s class in disability and identity. The interview is with Mueller, but I also suggest you pick up the book…after you’ve read the interview, of course.

Walker, Joseph S., “Crime Scene,”  The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2023, edited by Amor Towles, The Mysterious Press, 2023. I think this is the only story that made it into both Best-of collections for 2023, and it deserves to be there. The crime scene in question is the scene of President Kennedy’s assassination. The story is smart and twisty, and like my notes on most smart and twisty stories, I can’t tell you much more than that without ruining it. Just pick it up and enjoy.

Willis, Connie, “Introduction,” American Christmas Stories: The Library of America Collection, Library of America, 2021. Connie’s introduction on the history of Christmas storytelling in America is fascinating. I knew much of it, and feel like she missed a few things (L.Frank Baum, for example), but overall, this is really worth the read. Well researched and well considered.

Crime reporter Atkins discovered Scrawny Pete at the scene of a murder-suicide. The hard-bitten reporter took to the cat, and the cat took to him.

Together they travel through the city on the police beat—until the day they come across another crime, one that Scrawny Pete understands.

“Scrawny Pete” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

Scrawny Pete By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

He found Scrawny Pete, flea-bitten, hair coming out in patches, and eyes like a baby’s, in a fifth floor walk-up, crouched beside two dead bodies. The cat wouldn’t come to anyone but him, and in a moment of weakness, he took the damn thing. The vet’d cleaned him up, put antibiotics on the scabs, gave Atkins some salve and some special food and sent him on his way.

A cat owner.

And not just any cat. Scrawny Pete was on his way to becoming a legend.

The dead bodies had been part of a domestic. Typical, in its way. Murder-suicide. Always seemed that the man shot the woman and ate the gun. Fifteen years on the crime beat for whichever daily tabloid paid him enough to write his five hundred words of wisdom showed him that there was nothing in the human existence that someone didn’t try to solve with a gun. In the mouth, out of the mouth, in the heart, in the stomach, it didn’t matter. In America, someone whipped out a gun and entire lives ended. A flash, an instant, leaving more heartbreak than any newspaper could cover.

As if it wanted to. Whoever said, “All happy families are alike, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own ways,” had been more right than Atkins wanted to imagine.

The problem with Scrawny Pete, as Atkins soon learned, was that the damn cat was terrified of being alone. Surprisingly, loud noises didn’t bother him, and neither did the smell of blood, but his own company in the quiet of Atkins’s apartment drove the cat absolutely crazy. Atkins tried leaving the television on, and bringing home a kitten, but Scrawny Pete was intelligent enough to know that a TV wasn’t company, and he didn’t tolerate any furry companions in his fancy abode.

Somehow the damn cat talked Atkins into taking him everywhere. Atkins started wearing a great coat with a large pocket that Scrawny Pete—who was smaller than most six-month-old kittens—took to riding in. Atkins found that Pete could be smuggled anywhere, restaurants, hotels, even doctor’s offices. And once he started writing about Pete in his column, well, he didn’t have to smuggle the cat anywhere any more.

It was June 21st, one year to the day after he’d gotten Scrawny Pete, that he found himself taking an old Otis to the top floor of a scrungy apartment building on the lower East Side. The cops were already on the scene. Some rookie was standing outside the main door, arms crossed, unwilling to let in any comers even with press badges until he saw Scrawny Pete. Atkins mumbled as the Otis’s doors slid open on the fourteenth floor that if he’d known a cat was worth more than a press badge he’d’ve gotten the cat years ago.

Scrawny Pete had no answer. If anything, the cat seemed tenser than usual.

Pete was always unnaturally tense. Atkins attributed it to the poor critter’s upbringing by such obviously happy folk. He could only imagine how awful it had been. The walk-up hadn’t had any cat food. The only sign that a cat had even lived there were the claw marks on the living room sofa. Obviously the happy couple had let Scrawny Pete fend for his dinner in the hall with the other stray cats, and had let him the bulk of his life outside—which had probably been good for Scrawny Pete or he might have been the first to taste the gun, long before hubby decided the family needed a vacation in Never-Never-Land.

But in this hallway, which smelled of grease and garlic and Asian cooking, overlaid with filth and a bit of despair, Pete’s naturally tense body became a hard little wire. Atkins put a hand on Pete’s back, like he used to do when they first started traveling together, before he realized that nothing—not honking horns, not screaming people, not the breeze from a passing train—could spook Pete enough to make him leave the pocket. Pete’s security was Atkins, and that cat wasn’t ever going to let go.

Apartment 14A had a crooked metal sign and an open presswood door, the outside of which had once seen the backside of someone’s foot. The breaks in the wood weren’t new and they weren’t clean, and all they left was a thin layer of really cheap oak covering between the inhabitants—or former inhabitants as the case might be—and the rest of the world.

Atkins pushed his way inside, felt Pete turn into a statue against his side and start making little huffing noises. Two detectives stood inside, both in plainclothes, cheap off-the-rack suits that had seen better days. The ME stood over the bodies with the department’s camera, preserving the scene for posterity, although it was obvious what had happened.

Husband shot the wife before eating the gun. The air still had an acrid whiff from the double discharge. Atkins was surprised he could smell it over the stench of blood and voided bowels.

The detectives recognized him, showed him where to stand so that he wouldn’t violate the scene. Pete was still huffing, his fur rising on his back. Strange behavior. Stranger way still to spend their one-year anniversary.

Atkins stared at the couple. Young, by the looks of their hands. Poor, by the looks of the apartment. But not that poor, by the looks of their stuff. In fact, a bit upscale for a neighborhood like this.

“Slumming, Atkins?” one of the detectives asked.

“Heard the call,” he said, hand still on Pete. “What is it about this day, hm? It’s not Christmas. Not nothing at all. What makes people go off on this day?”

“What?” the detective said. “There been other calls today?”

Atkins shook his head. “A year ago today, I got Pete at a place just like this one. In fact…” His voice trailed off. He shuddered, something he hadn’t done at a crime scene in more than a decade.

“What?” the detective asked, but Atkins ignored him. Instead he crouched, put his hands up to his face as if he were forming a camera, and looked through the frame.

“Do bodies always fall like that in a murder-suicide?” he asked.

“Like what?” the detective asked.

“Side by side, twinned up like they’re in bed next to each other, only they’re on the floor.”

“Naw.” The answer came from the ME. He’d taken the last shot. “Usually, they are in bed. It’s only a few who do it in the middle of the living room. I think they had some kind of argument, he grabs the gun, waves it in her face, she thinks he ain’t gonna do nothing, maybe even dares him, he shoots, realizes what he’s done, then shoots himself.”

Sounded plausible.

Pete was making little sounds of distress. Atkins put his hand back in his pocket. Pete was shivering. In the whole past year, in all the strange situations, he’d never once felt Pete shiver. Not even in the middle of winter.

“Never figured you for one of them animal lovers who took his friggin pet everywhere,” the other detective said.

Atkins shrugged, pretended an indifference he didn’t really feel. “It gets readers.”

“Sure does,” the first detective said. “The wife reads your column now like you’re writing the adventures of Scrawny Pete. You should mention him every day.”

“Yeah,” Atkins said. “He sure has a place in a story like this one.”

“I don’t see no story here,” the ME said. “Sad to tell, but who really cares when some guy takes out himself and his wife. ‘Cept the friends and family, of course.”

Atkins looked at him. The ME was a skinny redhead with premature aging lines from frowning instead of too much sunlight. “No kids?” he asked.

“Not a one.”

“How common is that?”

The ME shrugged. “I’m not a walking book of statistics.”

“I mean, isn’t it usually long-marrieds, or newly separateds, or bad divorces who resort to this?”

“Can’t say.” The ME looked over his shoulder. But one of the detectives frowned.

“Where you going with this, Atkins?”

“Nowhere,” he said. “Just seems strange to me. The couple that I got Pete from, they were in this position, no kids, dead in the living room in a fifth floor walk-up not a lotta different from this.”

“The world’s weird, Atkins,” one of the detectives said. “Who’d’ve figured? It’s like you and that crazy cat.”

“Yeah,” Atkins said softly, not taking his hand off Pete. “Who’d’ve figured.”

***

It didn’t stop him from checking anyway. Superstition was sometimes a reporter’s best friend. He and Pete spent the afternoon digging through records, and what he found chilled him. The past five years, there’d been a murder-suicide on the same date. Same day, same pose, different precincts. No one recognized the scene. And because it was looked like a murder/suicide, no one did more than a cursory investigation. Did he shoot her? Yeah. Did he shoot himself? Yeah. End of story.

But not really.

Atkins called the detective in charge of the latest one, told him what he’d learned, and didn’t explain how he got his hunch, except to say that he remembered the anniversary of getting Pete.

Pete was still freaked. Atkins had learned, in the year he’d had Pete, that cats had memories, emotional memories, like people. The apartment drove him crazy; whenever one of the neighbors got to shouting, Pete dove under the couch. He sat in the corner like a terrified rabbit when Atkins wasn’t home, not moving at all, defecating and urinating in the spot where Atkins left him in the morning. He’d done that for a week before Atkins, who knew that Pete understood a litter box, tried taking Pete to work.

The rest, of course, was history.

The detective didn’t call back for two days. By then, Atkins was three columns away from the scene. He remembered it, of course. That night, Pete had slept like a baby in his arms, something he wouldn’t admit to anyone, barely admitted to himself, and the cat seemed spookier than usual. But life marched on and Atkins with it, turning in his five hundred words, crime beat, the most popular column in the city with or without mention of Scrawny Pete.

“Atkins,” the detective said.

“Yeah?”

“You got a story here. Want it? We wouldn’ta got it without you.”

Reporters lived for calls like that. Atkins was no different, even after fifteen years. He went to the precinct, which was gray and dirty and smelled like ancient coffee, just like every other precinct in the city, and listened as the detective explained, in excruciating detail, how they went over the crime scene, how they found things that didn’t exactly fit: a shoe mark in blood that didn’t belong to any of the cops; a handprint on the coffee table; fibers in the wounds that had nothing to do with either deceased.

The detective didn’t apologize. He knew that Atkins was a pro, Atkins understood how overworked they all were, how they liked to close cases, especially easy ones, like a murder/suicide, how hard sometimes serial killings were to see.

Luckily, or so the detective said, this one was easily solved. A neighbor—one Tobias Craig—heard the fighting, complained, complained again, finally decided to take matters into his own hands. Apparently he snapped every June 21st. Left a visible trail once they knew what to look for. Every apartment super with the June 21 murders remembered the guy complaining about the noise.

The cops had interviewed him at every scene and he’d always been the one who said the expected litany: It don’t surprise me, officers. They were fighting all the time.

Atkins knew better than to ask for a why, but he got it anyway: Apparently Craig’s name was all over the system, not as a criminal, but as a victim. Parents dead of a murder/suicide—a confirmed one—that happened in front of the children on June 21st, 1979. He’d been six at the time.

Atkins found the clippings, saw the blood-spattered children being led out of the apartment. In his imagination watched them watching their father pull out the gun like the ME had said, pull the trigger, kill his wife, then in sudden remorse, kill himself. He’d forgotten the children, sleeping in the next room, the children who’d crawled out of their shared bed to see what the noise was just in time to watch him eat his gun.

Scrawny Pete’d seen it of course. That explained the terrors, the fears of being left alone with neighbors who shouted and screamed. Was he their cat, the dead couple’s? Or had he originally been a stray who’d taken food from Craig? No telling, and certainly Pete wouldn’t say. Not in any way Atkins wanted to see anyway.

So he wrote the column, asked if it could go on more than 500 measly words, and because he rarely asked, and because his longer columns usually got national attention, sometimes awards, his editor said sure. Atkins wrote the story, mentioning Pete’s reaction to the smells, the repeated scene. Mentioning, only mentioning. And then he’d gone on to reflect on the way the system failed the victims and the way it created more victims and was it guns or the human race’s innate violence that caused a man to shoot his wife and then himself, to start a ball rolling that would leave five couples dead after some kind of terror at the hands of a crazy man who’d once been a blood-spattered six-year-old kid.

People didn’t remember the analysis or the arguments or the excellent prose, some of the best of his career. Nope. They remembered the bizarre nature of the story, and they remembered Pete. And over the years, it became the crime that Pete solved, and Scrawny Pete became a legend.

Atkins didn’t mind. Cats could become legends. Reporters shouldn’t. Reporters schlepped from scene to scene, observing, recording, trying to make sense out of one corner of the world. Sometimes he managed it, sometimes he didn’t. But he was the best at it, for a few years at least.

The years he had Scrawny Pete in his pocket.

 

____________________________________________

“Scrawny Pete” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Scrawny Pete

Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published as an Amazon Short, June 2005
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2016 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Jeffery Koh/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s alternate history stories have won or been nominated for every award in the sf field. “The Arrival of Truth” shows why. In pre-Civil War Virginia, some slaves tell a story about Sojourner and the Truth. One young girl, forced to give up her own children and nurse a white baby, wonders what the Truth will mean. Will it set her free? Or will it force her to make terrible choices of her own?

In “The Arrival of Truth,” Kristine Kathryn Rusch casts light on the powerful struggle between right and wrong, slavery and freedom.

“The Arrival of Truth” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

The Arrival of Truth by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I first heard the story the morning they took my third child. My body, half-hidden in the feather bed, ached from the effort of birthing a baby I would never raise. My breasts dribbled milk that would soon feed a white child. The Missus and Old Sal, the midwife, took my new baby out of the room so I couldn’t hear it cry. I reached for it—all small, bloody, and wrinkled—but wasn’t strong enough to get out of bed. As the door closed, I turned by face against the Missus’ feather pillow and wished I had died.

A breeze rustled the gingham curtains on the open window. Voices echoed in the yard, and from Big Jim’s yelp, I knew I had had a son. The voices hushed for a moment, then Big Jim cried, “No! No! That’s my boy! You can’t take him away! That’s my boy!” and I tried to sink deeper in the soft bed, softer than I was used to, the bed the Missus used when a girl gave birth to a baby she could sell and make more money for the House. Big Jim’s shout got cut off mid-word as a whip snapped and cracked through the air. Big Jim would get another scar because of my baby, and the child wasn’t even his.

The door creaked open, and Nesta stood there, eyes sad as eyes could be. She snuck inside and let the door close quietly. She was big and soft, and I wanted to bury my face against her chest and cry until no more tears would come, but when her hand caressed my forehead, I couldn’t look at her.

“Oh, baby,” she said. “All that learning didn’t save you. It don’t save none of us, long as we look different from them.”

She took a cornhusk doll, painted black, with frizzed yarn hair and a sackcloth dress, and tucked it in my arms. “Sojourner’s coming,” Nesta said. “And when she gets here, all them white folks are going to learn the Truth.”

Then she slipped out the door, quietly as she came. I buried my face in the doll’s rough skin and I wished, Lord how I wished, it could move and cry and pat its little fist against my cheek.

***

Some days I can still remember the feeling of being a child, the closest to white I’ll ever get.

The old Missus, she had ideas that her son, Master Tom, said was dangerous and harmful to his way of life. But when he was a boy and had no say in the house, the old Missus would teach some of us. She taught us how to read and spell and how to talk proper. She read to us from the Bible and said we needed to know God’s Word so we could get into heaven. She made us promise we would never tell nobody what she done because she would have to stop and some of us could get killed because of her mistakes. So we practiced reading in private, hiding the books when the old Master or Jake the overseer or any guests came to the House. The old Missus talked to use like we were the same as the white folks she spent the rest of her time with. And she loved us, each and every one. No babies got sold when she ran the House, and she promised that when she died, we would all go free.

But she died one sunny afternoon when her horse stumbled and threw her. The old Master said her will was written by a crazy woman who didn’t understand money, and he wouldn’t abide by her wishes. So none of us got our papers, and none of us were set free. The old Master brought us—the ones she educated—into the House and made us “the best House niggers” in the state of Carolina. We were never allowed to leave, never able to talk with the field hands or any of the others, as if he was afraid our knowledge would spread like pox through a room full of children.

***

Three days later, when I could stand alone, the Missus let me return to my cabin behind the House. I took the doll with me, clutching it like the child it had replaced. The Missus had promised me to the Wildersons down the road, and I was to pack my things and get before nightfall.

Big Jim wasn’t inside, but we had already said our goodbyes before he took the livery out that morning. He said he’d keep my side of the bed warm, but we both knew I wouldn’t be back until the Wilderson baby was weaned. A lot could change in that kind of time. People could get sold, people could get killed, people could disappear in the middle of the night. I only promised that I would love him as long as I lived.

The cabin was neat except for a pile of bloody rags that sat by the door. Jim had probably used them to stop the bleeding on his arm where the whip had wrapped around his skin while he was trying to save my baby boy. The cabin wasn’t much—a straw bed, a few chairs, and a table—but it was the place where we could speak our minds. After the old Master died, and Master Tom married, places like that had become harder and harder to find.

I put my other dress and my doll in a scarf and packed it in a wicker basket. Then I went out front to catch the delivery wagon as it made its way into town.

I sat on the back, and got off on the road outside the Wilderson place. The Wildersons had a bigger plantation than we did, and more babies this year than we did. But Missus Wilderson wouldn’t tolerate a field hand nursing her babies, and she wanted someone “almost human”—like me. After I’d been there a while she told me I didn’t talk like a nigger and if she closed her eyes she could pretend I was a person, someone worth talking to. She expected me to be flattered, and even though I thanked her in a quiet voice, I could see she was surprised by my tone.

Big arching trees hung over the Wildersons’ lane. After the wagon dropped me off, I walked, exhaustion making my limbs shake. I had to stop once, and lean against a wide tree trunk to catch my breath. My mother used to go back to the fields the same day she had a baby, and my pa used to say that was what faded her away. Dizziness swept through me, just as it must have through her the day she collapsed on the field—the day after my baby brother was born—and the overseer beat her to death with his whip. The old Missus had fired him, and the old Master had jailed him for destroying property. But that never did bring my mama back.

“Hey, girl, they’s expecting you up to the house.”

The voice came from a big man standing just inside the trees. His skin was dark as tree bark and his muscles bulged out of his ripped and torn shirt. His eyes shone with intelligence and when he spoke, he smiled.

“How much farther is it?” My voice sounded breathless.

“Half mile maybe,” he said.

I nodded, the thought of the extra distance defeating me. Maybe I could go a few more yards, but not a half mile. My body hadn’t recovered enough.

He peered at me through the trees, then crossed the road and stopped beside me. He was a big man, bigger than Big Jim. “You don’t look so good.”

I nodded again, afraid to say anything.

“How long since you had that baby?”

“Three days.” The words were no more than a whisper.

“And they sent you to walk? Here, honey, lean on me. I got strength enough for both of us.”

He touched me and I jerked back.

“It’s like that, is it?” He spoke softly, almost to himself. “Okay. I ain’t gonna hurt you, honey. Just let me put my arm around you, and then you can lean against me. Okay?”

I swallowed, not wanting him to touch me, but knowing I wouldn’t make it to the great house any other way. He slid his arm around my back, his skin hot against mine. He smelled of soap and honest sweat, and his touch was gentle.

“Come on,” he said, and together we walked down the center of the road leading to the great house. The trees towered over us, and an occasional bird chirped. The Wilderson plantation was quiet. No one shouted over the breeze. No overseer’s whip echoed in the distance. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought no one lived at the end of the road.

A bead of sweat trickled down my forehead, and the man tightened his grip. By the time we had reached the house, he was almost carrying me while keeping me upright.

“Lord a mercy, girl, where you been? The mistress is swearing and that baby’s crying like it won’t never shut up.” A woman stood on the porch, hair tied back in a scarf, sun reflecting off her dark face. She had her arms crossed on her hips and her skirts swished as she walked. She was in charge of the house. No one had to tell me that.

“She’s three days from the baby,” the man said, “and they left her down the road. She can barely walk and I think she’s bleeding.”

“Don’t know how to take care of their people over there,” the woman muttered as she walked down the stairs. She leaned over me and took me from the man. She was almost as strong as he was. Her hand brushed my breast as she reached around. “Lord, you’re full up too. We’ll get you to a bed, put that baby against you. He’ll ease that pain in your chest some.”

I looked at her sharply. Maybe she was referring to my swollen breasts. But I didn’t think so. I wondered how many babies had been taken away from her.

The man hadn’t let go of me. The woman looked at him. “I got her, Sam,” she said. She pulled me close, but he still didn’t let go. “Let her go, Sam. You ain’t allowed in the house.”

Sam released me. I stumbled against the woman, then she supported me.

“It’s a crime,” he said, “the way they treat people. When Sojourner comes—”

“Shush,” the woman said. “We don’t have talk like that at my house.”

“This ain’t your house.” But he said no more. He tipped a make-believe hat at me. “When you’re feeling better, you come sit with Sam. We’ll have ourselves a talk.”

I nodded, and the movement made me dizzy. When we reached the porch, the front door opened, and Missus Wilderson stood there, face blotchy and red. “They said you’d be here this morning. A sugar teat isn’t doing my Charles any good.”

Behind her, I could hear a baby wail. The sound made the pain in my chest grow stronger.

“She’s sick,” the woman holding me said.

“Something she’ll pass to the baby?”

“Her babe was born a few days ago. She ain’t recovered yet.”

Missus Wilderson humphed and moved away from the door. “As long as she can feed my boy, I don’t care what you do with her, Darcy.”

Darcy didn’t reply. She helped me in the front door. The house was cooler than the outdoors, and the hallway was lighter and airier than the one I was used to. She led me past the kitchen to a small room furnished with a cross and some figures made out of straw. I set my basket down, and she eased me onto a chair. The dizziness swept across me as she opened my bodice and handed me a wet rag. I ran it across my chest and my face. The cool cloth sent a shiver through me.

Then Darcy was beside me again, the squalling baby in her hands. I reached for him before I knew what I was doing. I didn’t want to feed another woman’s child. I wanted to feed my own. But if I closed my eyes, I didn’t see this little boy’s pale skin. All I felt was his soft baby fat. He smelled of newborn, and he clamped onto my breast with a greediness that hurt.

I rocked him, not opening my eyes, not wanting to see him, and I crooned a lullaby that Big Jim used to sing to our boys before they got taken away. But I couldn’t pretend. I knew that someday this boy in my arms would grab a woman with skin darker than his, beat her senseless, knock her to the ground, and stick himself inside her. I knew he would hire an overseer who used a whip instead of kindness. I knew that no matter whose breast he nursed on, he would never see people with dark skin as human beings.

***

After a week of Darcy’s food and care, I could walk on my own. The dizziness left me and the ache in my bones left with it. I missed the ache—it was my last attachment to my child. The bleeding stopped after about a day, and we didn’t discuss it or what it might mean about my chances for having future children. Little Charles was growing fat, and he reached for me instead of his mother, much to her dismay.

I had no place in the household, except as a milk store for Charles. I had to stay near the house, so that I could feed him when he was hungry, but other than that, I could do anything I wanted.

It took me another week to find Sam. His words had bothered me because they echoed Nesta’s. When Sojourner comes . . . When she gets here, all them white folks are going to learn the Truth.

Twilight had fallen across the fields, making shadows long and dark. Charles was already asleep. I walked toward the field-hand cabins—no restrictions on me here. Apparently Master Tom hadn’t told the Wildersons that I could infect their darkies with all kinds of evil knowledge.

Children scrabbled in the hard dirt, and adults sat on porches and talked. Sam sat outside his cabin, whittling, and listening to the conversation around him.

“Okay if I join you?” I asked.

He indicated a space on the wood stairs leading up to the door. I gathered my skirts under me and sat.

“I didn’t spect to see you again,” he said. “You one of them precious house girls your master always bragging up.”

A shiver ran down my back and it was still light enough for Sam to catch it. “He don’t treat his people right, do he?”

I bit my lip and looked across at the children. They were yelling and carrying on, playing a game I didn’t understand.

“And he didn’t want no baby around to remind him of that, did he?”

I started to stand up. Sam reached over and grabbed my arm. I pulled away from him.

“He hurt you right bad.”

His words brought back that night: the smell of liquor on Master Tom’s breath, the weight of his body on mine, the bruises I couldn’t hide from Big Jim. He had wanted to kill Master Tom that night. I had stopped him.

Sam was watching me with the same intensity he had that day in the lane. “And you ain’t never gonna let a man touch you again, are you?”

“Lordy, girl, you a bunch of sticks and bones, and that baby broke some things when it busted out of ya. I had me a woman once. Don’t need another.” He waved a hand. “Sit. Tell me why you come searching me out.”

I sat back down and laced my hands in my lap. My fingers were cold, despite the heat of the night. “When I came here, you spoke of something. You said, ‘When Sojourner comes.’ What did you mean by that?”

He let out air slowly, then glanced around to see if anyone was looking. Twilight had given way to darkness. The children were inside. Candles flickered through the open windows, and five cabins down an old man smoked a pipe on his porch.

“You ain’t never heard of Sojourner?”

“Once I did. Nesta, the cook up to the Great House told me when they took my baby away. She said when Sojourner gets here, white folks are going to learn the truth.”

“The Truth, girl.” He put an emphasis on truth so strong that I could hear the capital letter. “You was born into this life. I can tell from that fancy speech of yourn. Was your mama born into this life?”

I nodded. My family had come to the colony with the Master’s family. The old Missus said we had a good and strong heritage.

“And you been a house woman your whole life?”

Again, I nodded.

“They raised you like family till the young master decided that the people can’t be family.”

“This isn’t about me,” I said. “I want to know about Sojourner.”

“Girl, what I’m saying is you’d know if you was raised in the fields.” He leaned back in his chair. The chair creaked. The muscles rippled through his dark skin. “When I was a boy, they’d sing a song when the overseer was gone. They’d sing about the promised land and how the savior would come to the land and take us all to a better place. You ain’t never heard them stories?”

I shook my head. My mama was happy that the old Missus took me into the schoolroom. When Mama put me down at night, she would say, “You almost white, honey. Someday, you go free and you will live without no whip and no dogs.”

“You do remember when that boy up to Virginia led a bunch of the people and killed the white folks?”

I didn’t remember it because it happened the year of my birth. I had heard of it, though. Master Tom would talk to the overseer about it. The way they had to keep us separate so that we would never think of a rebellion. “I know of it,” I said.

Sam stared straight ahead. Nothing moved in the darkness. “I was ten. The overseers came down and locked us all in our cabins. They took the men away and the women were left alone with the children for days. They was afraid the rebellion would spread down here and all the white folks would die. Anyone caught singing about the promised land got whipped. And anyone who talked about a savior got beat within an inch of his life.”

“I don’t remember that,” I said, and felt inadequate because of it. I was glad the darkness hid my face. My mama talked about the bad times, but I never associated it with the rebellion. It hadn’t mattered to me. It had happened before I was born.

“That didn’t stop the stories. They just got whispered in bits and pieces, back and forth. We spected things to get worse. And we spected our savior to come. But no one ever did.” Lights came on in the kitchen in the back of the house. I strained to hear the baby’s cry, but the yard was quiet.

“Then a few years ago, a runaway come through the barn. He was torn and bloodied and tired, but he told a story, Lord, we wanted to hear. He said Sojourner came to his plantation and taught white folks Truth. And all the people went free.”

I sat up straighter. “What happened?”

“He was too addled to tell us. We passed him along, and another came, just as bloodied, saying the same thing. Only he said Sojourner led them into battle, like the white folks’ Bible talked about, and all the people went free.”

“How come we haven’t heard about it?”

Sam shook his head. “These battles are quiet ones. Ain’t nobody getting caught, and ain’t nobody gonna tell.”

“Sounds like tales to me,” I said. I stood up and brushed off my skirt. “White folks won’t let niggers free, not without a fight. And if niggers put up a fight, then white folks kill them, and kill other niggers until the fight has gone out of us.”

Sam was silent for a long moment. I thought, with my simple argument, I had knocked a hole in his belief, and I felt oddly disappointed. The story of Sojourner had an appeal to it that I wanted to feel. I didn’t want to destroy his belief so easily.

“You call the people ‘niggers,’” he said. “Just like the white folk. We all know we different. But we ain’t niggers or pickaninnies or any of them pet terms they use. We’s people just like they is. And we shouldn’t make ourselves sound any other way.”

He got up and walked around me. The steps sagged under his weight. He went into his cabin without saying good night.

My cheeks were hot. I hadn’t meant to offend him, by insulting his beliefs or by using a word that I had heard since I was a child. I stood on his porch for a long time, thinking about the difference a word made. I had never thought of myself as a person. To me, people were always white.

The light in the kitchen grew, and a bad feeling ran through me. I lifted my skirt and crossed the now-empty yard. I was too awake to sleep, but something called me indoors.

I mounted the back porch steps and let myself in the back door. A hand slapped me across the mouth, and I stumbled backwards, holding up my arm to protect myself. Missus Wilderson stood there, her long hair flowing down her back, her nightgown askew. “You were brought here to feed my baby, not to go whoring.”

I wiped my palm against my mouth, felt if come away bloody. “I wasn’t—”

“Sam is a big man and probably just what you girls want, but I won’t have my baby’s milk tainted, you hear me? You stay in the house at night. You stay here where the baby can have you if he needs you.”

I nodded, knowing that she would never listen to my denials. She turned, grabbed her lamp, and walked back through the darkened hallway, looking like Lady Macbeth from the Shakespeare stories the old Missus used to scare us with.

Darcy stepped out of the corner where she had been standing. She dipped a rag in the water basin and wiped my mouth. “She knows you wasn’t doing nothing with Sam ‘cept talking. She watched almost from the start. She just don’t like him none. She’d have sold him long ago, but the Master says he’s a good one in the fields, and won’t let him go.”

My lower lip hurt. I could feel it swelling. “Why did she hit me?”

“She’s got a sense about her. When you showed up at the door, she said the final time was here, and there wasn’t nothing she could do.”

“Final time?”

“Lord, honey, white folks is as superstitious as we are. They got their strange beliefs too. I think all the white folks know they’re sitting on a powder keg, and they just waiting for it to explode underneath them.”

I took the cloth from Darcy’s hand and wiped my own mouth. I had never thought of rebellion before. No one talked about it at home, at least no one had talked about it with me. If Sojourner had come there, would they have killed me with the white folks? Because I had lessons and could read and talk like a white person, did that mean my skin had lightened? It didn’t stop Master Tom from beating me senseless and planting a baby in me. Or did he only do that to some women? Those who could pass for his own kind?

“They’ll kill us,” I said.

“Ah, honey.” Darcy brushed a strand of hair from my forehead. “At least we’ll die free.”

***

I didn’t leave the house for weeks. Little Charles grew heavier and more demanding. Missus Wilderson ignored me. Darcy made sure I was fed and had someone to talk with, and Sam waved whenever he saw me on the porch. I didn’t wave back.

The humid spring turned into a hot summer. The aches left my body and Charles crawled into my heart. Sometimes, as I put him down to sleep, I called him mine. And in so many ways he was. He reached for me and cooed when he saw me. When he had angry fits, only I could stop them. He tolerated his mother, cried at his father, but loved me.

I found no solace in that.

Mid-July I was sitting in the porch swing, rocking Charles and humming him a lullaby. He didn’t want to sleep. He reached for the butterfly circling around us, played with the buttons on my dress. His eyes would droop and then open again, as if he didn’t want to miss anything. I told him now was the time for sleeping. When he grew up, sleeping would be something he would have no time for at all.

A noise stirred Charles out of his playfulness. He turned his head toward the road, and so did I. A horse’s hooves pounded against the dirt. An angry or panicked horse, one that had ridden at top speed all day. Darcy came onto the porch followed by the Master and Missus. Sam appeared from around back, and even though the Missus tried to send him away, he stayed.

The rider came around from under the canopy of trees. He leaned over his horse, mud-splattered and exhausted. His hair, plastered to the side of his head, was straight, and his skin under the dirt was white. His clothes had once been nice, but they were torn and showed signs of wear.

“Get them out of here,” he said, waving a hand at Sam, Darcy, and me.

“How can we help you?” the Missus’ tone was cold. She didn’t take orders from anyone, especially from someone she didn’t know.

“I came to warn you,” he said. “But I won’t do it with them here.”

The Master nodded at Sam, Darcy, and me, but we didn’t move. “Come inside,” he said. “We’ll find you something to drink and maybe a bite to eat. Give Sam your horse, and he’ll take care of it.”

The man clutched the reins tighter. “Just show me where,” he said, “and I’ll rub down the horse myself.”

“Sam,” the Master said, then caught the look on the man’s face. Pure fear. I recognized it because I had seen it on so many dark faces all my life. “Never mind. I’ll take him to the stables. I don’t want you people here when I get back.”

Charles was wide awake now, and leaning forward. The excitement entranced him. The Missus took him from me. “He’s not going to sleep now,” she said. But for the first time, her words held no blame. The situation had her as spooked as it had the rest of us.

Darcy took my arm and led me down the stairs. We followed Sam into the back. The Master and the stranger were on their way to the stable, the horse limping behind them.

“Something had happened,” Darcy said.

“He’s scared of us,” I said.

“They all scared of us.” Sam reached in his pocket, took out a handkerchief, and rubbed the sweat off his face. “That’s why they treat us the way they do.”

“He’s scared worse,” Darcy said. “You seen him.”

“Yeah.” Sam tucked the handkerchief in his pocket. “That’s why I want to hear what he says. He ain’t going to tell it all to the Missus. He saying something right now.”

The groom came out of the stable, along with two stableboys, looking as confused as we felt. Sam signaled us to stay where we were, and he hurried along the path, then went around behind the stable. Darcy shook her head.

“Boy gonna get himself a whipping if he not careful,” she said.

I stood as quietly as I could. I didn’t like the feeling that surrounded me. The stranger’s presence had added a tension to the place, a tension that made all the other tensions visible.

The groom went to his cabin, and the stableboys sat outside, staring at the stable as if they could learn the secrets. Darcy said no more to me. After a few minutes, she touched my elbow. The Missus had come onto the back porch and was staring at the stable. She no longer held Charles. A slight frown creased her face. She too knew she wasn’t going to get the whole story.

And if she stood there long enough, she would see Sam.

I wiped my damp palms on my skirt and headed up the stairs. “Did you get Charles to sleep, ma’am?”

She looked at me as if I were intruding. “He’s down. I don’t think he’s sleeping though.”

“Long as he’s quiet,” I said. “I think it’ll be a minute before the men come back. Let me help you get out some lemonade, in case they want something cold.”

Her glance was measuring. I brought my head down. My heart pounded. It seemed important to me that she didn’t see Sam.

“I’ll be gone before they get back. I promise.”

She sighed then, and lifted her skirts. I followed her into the big cool kitchen. Her cousin had sent a shipment of lemons from Florida the week before, and although much of the fruit was bruised, some of it was good enough to use. We had had all of the lemonade that morning, and so I stood side by side with Missus Wilderson, squeezing lemons and listening for any sign of the men.

We had filled two pitchers by the time we heard footsteps on the stairs. I grabbed a towel and wiped off my hands, then disappeared out the front way, as the men came in the back.

“—didn’t see me leave,” the stranger was saying. “That’s how they’re getting away with this. No one is left.”

I couldn’t hear the Master’s response. I went out the front door and circled around the house to find Sam and Darcy standing in the yard.

“There you are,” Sam said. “Come to my cabin. We’re far enough away there.”

I glanced up to see if the Missus was watching, but she was nowhere in sight. Darcy and I followed Sam down the path to the one-room shack he called home.

The inside was neat and well kept. The straw mattress had a wooden frame beneath it, and the wooden furniture lining the walls was strong and well made. Not hand-me-downs issued by the family. Sam had made his own home.

I took a cane-backed chair in the corner, and Darcy sat beside me. Sam sat on the edge of the bed, where he could see through the windows and keep an eye on the door.

“It’s happening,” he said to Darcy. “Right now.”

“That’s just talk,” she said.

“Not no more. He’s been riding up from the south, warning every Great House he sees. He ain’t gonna stop until he hits every plantation between here and the capital.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“He said the people were talking among themselves for days, then this stranger shows up, and suddenly the people don’t take orders no more. Then, in the middle of the night, they come into the house just like they did in Virginia all them years ago, with pitchforks and knives and butcher the family. He’d been staying with one of the daughters—snuck in so’s nobody would see, and he got out before the mess got too bad. He grabbed a horse and started to ride, to warn white folks it was coming.”

“Now they’ve probably lynched all the people who done the killing,” Darcy said, “and the rest of us will get punished.”

“Maybe,” Sam said. “Or maybe he’s just the first wave in a battle we ain’t begun to fight.”

“Or maybe he’s crazy,” I said, “and none of this is true.”

“Don’t think so,” Sam said. “He looks like a man who knows.”

We were quiet after that. The small cabin grew oppressive. I went out onto the stairs and heard Charles wailing. He was hungry. The Missus came on the back porch, looking for me. When she saw where I was standing, her mouth set in a thin line.

“I guess you can come back in now,” she said. “Charles needs you.”

I nodded and crossed the yard. Missus Wilderson went back inside. As I climbed the stairs and stood on the porch, I heard voices coming from the kitchen.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” the Master said. “We give them a good home.”

“A good home isn’t all they want.”

I pushed open the door. Missus Wilderson stood near it, biting her nails. Charles was in a basket on the table, face red and streaked with tears. I went to him and picked him up, not happy that she had let him cry without comforting him.

“I’ll take him outside,” I said.

She shook her head. “They’re almost done. I don’t want Charles outside.”

I sighed and sat in a kitchen chair. I unbuttoned my blouse and put Charles to my chest. He clasped with his mouth and both hands. He hadn’t been hungry, he had been starving.

Missus Wilderson watched for a minute, then went into the other room. Her look had left me cold. I had seen her use it with me before. Almost a jealousy, and half an envy, as if she wanted Charles at her breast instead of mine. But it was a sign of good breeding and wealth when a woman didn’t have to feed her own children. Besides it would destroy her figure and give her marks.

I didn’t mind the marks. I just wished they had come from my own child instead.

“I take good care of the people who work for me,” the Master said. They must have been in the dining room. Only in the kitchen could we hear the dining room so well.

“They don’t work for you,” the stranger said. “You own them. I think that’s what they object to.”

“And I feed them, and house them, and clothe them. They’re little more than savages. Only a few can be trained to do anything beyond the most menial task. I take care of them and they’re grateful to me.”

I brushed the thin hair on little Charles’ scalp. Feeding his baby was a menial task? I could read and write and it was against the law for me to have those skills. I could speak better than Missus Wilderson and I was still owned by someone. I was as smart as they were, and still all of my children had been taken away from me. Maybe Sam was right. Maybe I had let their thinking invade my own.

“Grateful,” I whispered to Charles. “We’re not grateful. We’re scared.”

He closed his eyes and continued sucking. I cradled him to me. I didn’t want a revolution in which all the white folks would die. I loved some of them. I loved the little ones, like Charles, before they had time to turn into someone like Master Tom back at the plantation I was born at.

“I thank you for the warning,” Master Wilderson said. “I will heed it as best I can.”

“Protect your family,” the stranger said. “Get rid of as many of those slaves as you can.”

The voices receded from the dining room. Soon I couldn’t hear them at all. I was tense, waiting for Missus Wilderson to come back. She didn’t. Charles fell asleep, letting my nipple slip out of his mouth. I held him and rocked him just a little, clutching him to me.

After a few minutes, I heard a horse on the lane. The stranger was gone.

I took Charles to his daybed in the front parlor. The Master and Missus were standing on the porch looking at the dust cloud in the lane.

“. . . give this kind of thing credence,” he was saying. “It might give them ideas.”

“But don’t we have to protect ourselves?” she asked.

“This family has been on this piece of land for over a hundred years. If slaves were going to rebel, they would have done it long ago, when things were much more isolated. I think he got caught in an unusual incident, and it has spooked him so badly that he is afraid of any nigger he sees.”

Missus Wilderson shrugged and moved away from her husband. She didn’t believe him, but she had no choice except to abide by what he wanted. We weren’t so different, she and I. She had a nice house and a legitimate place in society, but her husband still owned her. She couldn’t do what she wanted to do.

She couldn’t even nurse her child herself.

I made myself stop watching the interchange and took Charles to his bed. He didn’t wake up as I put him down. I covered him with a light sheet and kissed his forehead. He stirred, but his eyes remained closed.

“He’s a beautiful baby.” Missus Wilderson stood behind me. I made myself turn slowly, even though my heart was pounding a drumbeat against my chest. “Even though sometimes I think he’s more yours than mine. Do you love my child?”

We had never had a moment like this before. She wasn’t speaking to me out of anger or even fear. She was actually curious about how I felt. I was the one who felt the fear. I didn’t know what she wanted of me.

I decided to tell her the truth.

“They took my baby away from me the day he was born,” I said. “Once he left my body, I never got to see him or touch him again. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I pretend Charles is that baby. But he isn’t. He’s yours. He looks like you and he loves you and I could never ever do to another woman what’s been done to me.”

The words rushed out of me before I could stop them. She put a hand to her chest as if she were trying to guard her heart. “I never sold anyone’s babies,” she said. “I’m not like your owners.”

“I’m not blaming you. I just wanted to reassure you that I would never hurt or steal your child.”

She nodded, brushed her hair out of her face, and walked out of the room. I leaned against the daybed. My hands were shaking. I had never spoken that frankly with a white person before, not even with the old Missus.

I wondered if anything would change because of it.

***

The tensions remained after the stranger appeared. My Master and the Wildersons had a long conversation and other gentlemen from the area appeared to discuss the situation. From the bits and snatches I gathered, they decided to tighten security around their homes, to punish “uppity niggers,” and to make sure if more than three of us gathered it got broken up.

Missus Wilderson didn’t speak to me again, and I cared for Charles in almost complete silence. Sometimes I exchanged words with Darcy and sometimes I spoke to Sam, but mostly I kept to myself.

Early August brought with it hot nights and sweltering days. Just into the month, I carried a sheet to the back porch swing, hoping to catch a little midnight breeze. I lay across the wooden slats. Even though they were uncomfortable, they were better than the sweaty stickiness of my straw bed. Down by the cabins, I could hear restlessness and children crying as people moved about.

The moon was full, and cast a thin daylight across the path. The dogs started barking out near the road, then just as quickly stopped. The voices from the cabins stopped too. I sat up. It felt as if the entire yard was waiting.

People came out of their cabins and stood on the stairs as if they felt the same thing I did. In the Great House, no one got up except Darcy, who let herself out of the kitchen and stood by the door. She didn’t seem to see me.

We were all looking in the direction of the dogs. Then I heard a gasp. I looked toward the sound. Sam was standing in his door, facing the opposite direction from everyone else. I followed his gaze and gasped myself.

A woman stood at the edge of the path. She was tall and angular, her hair cropped short. “Let’s gather at the edge of the field,” she said.

Sam went and got the others. Darcy and I walked toward the nearest field following the woman. As we got closer, we realized that she was old. Her skin was leathery and tough and her hair had turned white. Neither of us had even seen her before.

She stood on a wooden box that Darcy brought over and watched as the people gathered around her. Mothers held their children close, and the men stood forward, eager for a fight.

“My name’s Sojourner,” she said, her voice just loud enough for all of us to hear. “And I come to give you a message. The white folks ain’t gonna give us freedom. It costs them too much. We got to take freedom. There’s more of us than there is of them. It’s time to make life ours not theirs.”

She looked at her hands for a moment, then faced us again. In the moonlight, her face looked as if it had absorbed the night. “I’m going from place to place telling people it’s time to be free. I want to see all my people stand on their own in my lifetime, and my lifetime is going away quick.”

“You telling us to fight?” Sam asked.

“I’m telling you to take control of your lives however you want to do it. And I want women to take control two places, with the white folks and with your men. We’re all equal in God’s eyes.”

Simple words. As I repeat them back, they have lost the magic they held that night. She spoke with the power of a vision, and we listened as though the words of God himself came from her lips. She stepped down off the platform, and people tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t talk. “I got too many places to stop,” she said.

And she walked away.

The others stayed behind and talked, but I followed her to the road. She walked with her back straight, her head up, even though her movements were slow and tired. So the stranger had been right. Someone was leading my people home. A woman, with a single message, seeking to overthrow an unjust system that had existed for generations.

Shouts and cries echoed behind me. I turned back to see people hacking at their own cabins and setting fire to the Great House. Through the smoke, I thought I saw the Missus’ face. Do you love my child? she asked.

He was the only baby I got, and now they were setting his house on fire because he was born in the wrong place to the wrong family. Wasn’t that as bad as what they had done to us all these years? Or did we follow their Bible: an eye for an eye, a whip scar for a whip scar, a murder for a murder, and a baby for a baby?

A giddiness took me. I ran toward the house. I wanted to be free like the rest of them. I wanted to have my own babies and my own life. I wanted a house with more than one room and Big Jim beside me for all the rest of my days. I wanted to live like free people lived, making my own choices.

But I didn’t want to do it at the expense of Charles and his mama.

Smoke was already inches thick as I burst through the front door. In the back, I heard glass smashing and people laughing. My eyes started to water. I charged up the stairs. Charles was crying, gasping wails that made my heart ache. I ran into his room and gathered him in my arms as the Missus came in.

“You’re stealing my baby.”

“I’m saving him.” I wrapped him in his blankets and hid his face against my arms. “You got to get out now. They’re going to kill you.”

“I can’t let you take my baby,” she said.

“Then come with me. Get out now.”

“Laurel?” The Master’s voice echoed from the other room. For a moment, he sounded like Master Tom, and I wanted to go in and use a knife, hacking him to death. Beneath my surface lurked a sea of hatred.

“It’s like the man said,” she shouted. “They’ve gone crazy.”

He came into the nursery, with a shotgun leveled at me. “Put the baby down,” he said.

“You’re not going to shoot me while I’m holding Charles,” I said. “And you need me. I’m the only one who can get him away from here. You have to convince the people downstairs that you never meant them any harm. And I don’t think you can do it.”

He didn’t move the gun, but I knew he wouldn’t shoot. I turned and ran from the house, Charles pressed against me. The smoke had grown so thick that my breath caught in my lungs. Charles was gasping against me. The fire was eating the entire first floor. We ran past its heat and into the cooler night. I drank the fresh air like cold water. Charles coughed and spit up on me.

Sam was off to one side, leading them all on, and Darcy leaned against a tree, tears glinting off her cheeks. I ran down the road with half a dozen people I had never seen, not caring where I was going, careful to keep Charles’ face hidden.

We ran for what seemed like miles until we found an abandoned barn. I crawled inside, followed by a few others. Charles was crying softly, in fear, and I bared my breast for him. He took the milk, but his eyes remained open. He knew something was wrong.

Outside, we could hear the sounds of destruction. A woman I had never seen before made a place beside me in the straw. “She never said kill ’em,” the woman said. “She just said to take what’s ours. We could have slipped away in the night and nobody would have known.”

I didn’t say anything. I watched Charles eat, and then I soothed him until he slept. The woman beside me slept and I watched the light change through the crack under the door.

I hadn’t been thinking when I took Charles. I needed to go home, to Big Jim. When we took our freedom, we would search for our own children, our own past. But I knew, from the sounds all around me, that people had already scattered all over the countryside, and Big Jim was probably running, just like me.

We had said our goodbyes, just like we had done with our children. And even though I wasn’t ever going to stop looking for them, I doubted I would ever find them.

My arms were growing tired from holding Charles. I wrapped him in his blanket and put him in a nest of straw. Then I went to the door and peeked out. Smoke rose over the trees like a threatening cloud.

When she gets here, all them white folks are going to learn the Truth.

What truth? I wondered. That we hated them for holding us in place? That we hated the way they ripped up our lives and treated us like cattle? That we were human too? That was truth? That was something white folks had never been able to see? It seemed so simple. They had to have been blind to miss it.

Cries and yells echoed around me, and my body ached to join them. Smash a wall with an axe, destroy a man for taking a child. An eye for an eye.

A baby for a baby.

I looked back at Charles, sleeping peacefully. Within my reach, I had the best revenge of all.

***

I didn’t take it. At least, not in the obvious way.

After the fires, we followed the old Underground Railroad line and eventually ended up west, where the land goes on for miles and people are as scarce as coyotes. The trip wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t as rough as it could’ve been either. Charles and I survived.

Which was more than Big Jim did. I went back to my old home the morning after Sojourner appeared, and found his grave outside the house where I had been born. They’d buried him two weeks after I’d left. Master Tom had killed him for some infraction no one remembered. The Great House was torched, and the Master’s family dead, just like the Wildersons, who had been too stupid to listen to me. I left with Sam and Darcy and the rest from the Wilderson house, and they were the ones who got me and Charles safe.

Now we live in a house with five rooms in a community made up of our people. I wasn’t the only one who grabbed a white child, and by an unspoken pact, we never told them a word about their origins. Charles believes I’m his real mama and Sam his real papa. And he thinks that skin color changes like eye color. Some babies are born dark and others born light. I’m not going to tell him otherwise. I don’t ever want him to see me as anything less than I am, nor do I want our roles to get reversed, and for him to become the slave to my master.

We never learned what happened to Sojourner. We just know that most of the eastern and southern sides of the country disappeared in flames. All people may be equal in God’s eyes, but every once in a while only wrath will make us equal on earth.

And I still dream about that moment in the barn, when I looked at Charles and saw only his white skin. Not his baby fat, not his beloved blue eyes, not the little hands that trusted me. Only a white boy who would grow into a white man, and white men had hurt me and left me to die. When I took him in my arms, the anger filled me—

And then I remembered why I ran into that house for him. Why I had risked a freedom I had always desired for one baby boy.

I had lied to Missus Wilderson.

He was a substitute, yes, for the children I would never ever see.

But that never stopped me from loving him.

 

____________________________________________

“The Arrival of Truth” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

The Arrival of Truth

Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Alternate Warriors, edited by Mike Resnick, TOR Books, September 1993
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2016 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Zacarias Pereira Da Mata/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

I do most of my business writing on Patreon these days, but roughly once per month, I’ll put a post for free on this website. If you go to Patreon, you’ll find other posts like this one.

Generational Change

Those of you who read my monthly Recommended Reading List know I love The Year’s Best Sports Writing volumes. I always feel sad when I finish reading it, but this year, I felt especially bereft. Normally, I would have started The Best American Essays or some other nonfiction book to fill that slot, but I didn’t have anything on my TBR shelf that would have fit into that mix of uplifting and difficult and well written.

So, thanks to some automated bot suggestion on Amazon, I ordered The Best American Sports Writing of The Century, edited by David Halberstam and Glenn Stout. The book is almost 25 years old (and does not have an ebook edition for obvious reasons), but I didn’t care. I figured there would be a lot of good reading in it.

What I hadn’t expected was the healthy dose of perspective that came from David Halberstam’s brilliant introduction.

Halberstam was one of the most influential writers of his generation. He died in a car accident, not ten years after writing that introduction. I suspect he had a lot more books in him that we’ve sadly been robbed of.

He wrote one of the most devastating nonfiction books on the Vietnam War, which came out while the war was still going on. In the late 1970s, he wrote a book called The Powers That Be, which examined the impact the media had on history (put a pin in that right now), and he also wrote some of the classics of sports journalism, including a book I have on my shelf called The Summer of ’49.

All of that experience came together in this long introduction, which you can probably read as part of the “look inside this book” feature on any online bookstore.

What this introduction did was look at the history of sports journalism and sports writing as it developed in the 20th century. In the 19th, sport itself was local and often based in neighborhoods. It took nearly 100 years to become the big entertainment business it was in the 1960s, and another sixty years to become the juggernaut it is today—not that Halberstam lived to see that.

Right now, sport is getting me through some of the world’s dark times, and I noticed as it’s been happening that I had the same experience in 2020.

In the introduction, Halberstam explores several things and does so in the context of 800 pages of historical sports writing. Some of what he does here is what I call “editorial justification.” It’s something that all of us who edit do: Here are the reasons I chose the works in this book—not just because I like them (which I do) but because they make this point or illustrate that concept or explore these tiny corners of this particular topic.

Inside Halberstam’s justification, though, is a brilliant century-eye view of the way writing and journalism and entertainment changed as the world changed.

Reading about those changes got me thinking about our changing world. I’m going to get to modern times later in this post—and yes, I’ll be dealing mostly with fiction—but I’m going to set it up first.

Halberstam started the essay (and the book) with Gay Talese’s 1966 piece on baseball legend Joe DiMaggio (whom most of you probably know of because he married Marilyn Monroe). The Talese article, titled “The Silent Season of a Hero,” is considered by some to be the beginning of a sea-change in reporting called New Journalism.

In his editorial justification, Halberstam wrote:

It strikes me that the Talese piece represents a number of things that were taking place in American journalism at the time—some twenty years after the end of World War II. The first thing is that the level of education was going up significantly, both among writers and among readers. That mandated better, more concise writing.

Right there, I perked up when I was reading. It was kind of a well-duh moment for me: Of course what was happening in the journalism profession and in the craft itself was a reflection of what was going on in society at the time. Of course.

He went on:

It also meant that because of a burgeoning and growing paperback market, the economics of the profession were getting better: self-employed writers were doing better financially and could take more time to stake out a piece. In the previous era, a freelance writer had to scrounge harder to make a living, fighting constantly against the limits of time, more often than not writing pieces he or she did not particularly want to write in order to subsidize the pieces the writer did want to do.

Those changes—writers doing better financially—pretty much describes what happened to the fiction-writing profession as well, from about 1960 with the rise of paperbacks to the massive distribution collapse in the mid-1990s.

After that collapse, everything got very hard for fiction writers for about 15 years. A lot of writers vanished during that time, heading off to professorships or corporate jobs, convinced that writers couldn’t make a living at their chosen profession.

They had a point.

Anyway, a few pages later, Halberstam writes that he did not intend this collection to become a work of history, although it had “a certain historical legitimacy.” He explains:

In the background as we track the century from beginning to end, the reader should be able to see the changes being wrought by society by a number of forces: racial change, the coming of stunning new material affluence, the growing importance of sports in what is increasingly an entertainment age, and finally the effect of other communications on print.

He elaborates on all of those things, but I’m going to focus on the final one. For that, he wrote:

The role of print was changing—it was no longer the fastest or the most important means of communication. Instead by the late fifties reporters had to assume that in most cases their readers knew the [sports] score and the essentials of what had taken place; increasingly their job was to explain what happened and why it had happened, and what these athletes whom they had seen play were really like.

My copy of the book is a sea of underlines here. I really paid attention on two levels—on what Halberstam was actually saying and how all of this analysis could apply to 2025. (Not literally—again, I’ll get to it. Bear with me.)

He discussed politics and regular news reporting as seen through the lens of television cameras, and then wrote that TV had become more powerful in the 1960s than it had ever been before. He wrote:

That meant talented print journalists, to remain viable and be of value, had to go where television cameras could not go (or where television executives were too lazy to send them) and answer questions that were posed by what readers had already seen on television.

Therefore, for print to survive, the reporting had to be better and more thoughtful, the writing had to be better, and above all—the storytelling itself had to be better. Print people were being forced to become not merely journalists, but in the best sense it seems to me, dramatists as well.

I pulled back here and thought long and hard about what he was saying, and the implications.

Of course, I went to modern media first because I have three levels of training. Level one: my B.A. is in history (and I constantly wonder if I should get some graduate degrees in it—until I remember that I would have to focus on a time period and immerse myself in it. My butterfly brain resists that on so many levels that I can’t begin to express how I would feel about it).

Level two: my secondary training is in journalism. I started in print (and initially got published, ironically enough, as a sports writer at 16, covering my high school), and then fell into broadcast journalism. And no, I don’t have a degree in it. I worked as a reporter all through college, and then became a news director. Let’s put a pin in that one too.

Level three: fiction and editing. Once again, I learned by doing, which was pretty much all we had. Sure, there were classes at the universities (one story per semester, taught by someone who had no idea how to make a living at it), but mostly there were workshops (like Clarion) taught by working writers, and talks at fiction conventions and little else.

So…all of those levels combined into the way my brain worked after going deep into the Halberstam piece.

First, modern media.

I’ve been saying for some years now that it needed to change. If it’s broadcast, it’s being run by people who have no journalism experience as well as no courage. Let me add this: It has always been so. TV and radio were generally owned by entertainment companies that were required, by law, to include news.

(Most of these laws, by the way, were gutted first by the Reagan administration and then by each Republican administration since.)

The influential print media left the hands of large family groups (the Grahams at The Washington Post and the Chandlers at the Los Angeles Times come to mind), and were purchased by billionaires. At first, those purchases were praised, but they’re not going well now.

Again, this is not a huge change. William Randolph Hearst owned the biggest media empire in the world in his lifetime, and controlled content with an iron fist.

So the idea that journalism always had free reign was and is wrong.

However, when I say that the media has to change, I’m referring to generational change, just like Halberstam discussed above.

Sadly, education isn’t as good now as it was in the 1960s. The U.S. government turned its back on good education for all in the 1980s—once again under Reagan—but most successive administrations did little to shore it up. A lot of people fell through the cracks.

And now, most folks do not have the time for long-form journalism or explanations of “what happened and why it had happened.” There are/were entire cable news channels dedicated to just that kind of musing, but those aren’t reaching the younger generations either. Cord-cutting and fragmentation is actually bringing journalism into a completely different place than it was when Gay Talese wrote his article in 1966.

In some ways, we’re returning to the 19th century when the news (and entertainment) was fragmented. In other ways, we’re in a whole new place where a journalist or a fiction writer can hang out her shingle and people can come support her and her long-form journalism or fiction or whatever.

That’s good, if you’re good at the social media side, and difficult if you’re not.

But…what I mean when I say that the media needs to change with the world is that with online access and cable and broadcast news and podcasts, there are literally thousands of ways to get information.

Now, journalists need to figure out how to do it on their own. And they need to throw out some of the rules developed at the journalism schools they all went to.

Here we’re going to have a sidebar for one of my pet rants:

When I moved to Oregon, I wanted to freelance for the local Eugene paper. The city desk editor, whom they shuttled me off to, wouldn’t give me the time of day. I had written for major publications around the world. I’d had pieces on NPR and was still working for several information-based foundations. I had been a news director for years.

What I didn’t have, and what he sniffed over, was a journalism degree. My experience counted for nothing; all that mattered to him—and his cronies as the years went on—was the vaunted degree.

Over the years, I’ve worked with people who have J-school degrees but little experience. They’re terrible reporters and even worse writers. Plus they have a two-sides attitude, particularly when it comes to politics.

They don’t want to talk to everyone. They figure there’s only two sides—for and against. Most things in life are more complex than that.

So as the media landscape is fragmenting and becoming more complex, the big media companies are becoming less so.

They’re paying a price for that. But not the price everyone discussed in November. For all the hand-wringing after the election, the loss of viewership among most of the cable news channels isn’t a big deal. It happens after every election.

What is a big deal is that both readership and viewership of all traditional mainstream news has been declining for decades now. And the change is profound. People 50 and older still tend to get their news from traditional sources like television or print, but people younger than 50 get their news from social media or a digital aggregator. Mostly, though, they get their news from a variety of sources, some of them untested and inaccurate.

Rather than lament that this change allows for the spread of disinformation as most are doing, the media companies (and those of us who work in media) should be embracing the change, and finding other ways to fight disinformation.

Let me add this: when big media companies are in the hands of a single entity, be the Murdochs at Fox or Gannett News Media, the news is biased anyway. The owners of large corporations have an agenda. Sometimes it is to make profits. Sometimes it is to spread a certain perspective in the world.

Once again, it has always been thus. I didn’t work for commercial stations back in the day, because commercial reporters were muzzled. They were not allowed to report on any company that advertised with the parent company. So imagine this: no investigative reporting on pollution from a local company. Coverage was only allowed when the story became too big to ignore.

Journalism is changing again, and we need to embrace that change. We need to see the plus sides of it.

Places like Patreon and Substack help, but they have issues as well. They’re private companies that can get sold like Twitter did and then there will be huge (and often unpleasant) changes.

So…my mind went through all of that as I read the Halberstam piece. New Journalism (which is now old journalism) still exists. There are places that publish great long-form articles. Now there’s some great long-form reporting on podcasts and in new forms of media that did not exist when Halberstam wrote his introduction.

The key will be how the creatives—from writers to photographers and others—respond to these new forms of media. Some of us will adopt what we can, and others will cling to the old ways.

Maybe the old ways will return. Who knows?

Once I got through the traditional thinking on all of that, though, my mind turned toward fiction.

No one, to my knowledge, has done the kind of analysis of fiction in the 20th century that Halberstam did (first in the late 1970s, and then again in this article). Sure, there’s been a lot of writing about the history of fiction, in America in particular.

But that writing is myopic. The literary historians in the university system (including my late brother) focused on literary works or “mainstream” bestsellers, books that took over the national consciousness and led to changes and/or discussions.

There have been too many papers written on the impact of Catcher in the Rye or To Kill A Mockingbird and not enough on the overall fiction landscape.

The genres aren’t immune from the myopia. I have read as many books on the history of science fiction and fantasy as I can get my hands on, and probably just as many on the history of mystery fiction (both here and in the U.K.).

There are fewer analyses of romance fiction for two reasons: The first is that the genre is the newest of all of the big genres and second is deadlier. Romance was (and is) perceived as fiction for and by women, so it isn’t considered important (especially by the white men who ran university literary programs for most of the past century).

What books there are on romance were written by romance writers and aficionados for romance writers and aficionados.

So, let me put this out there for graduate students in search of a topic: Examine all of fiction publishing since the 1890s or so—genres, pulps, digests, and paperbacks as well as hardcovers and “important” books. See where such an examination takes you. If nothing else, I can guarantee that your dissertation will be different than all the others.

What Halberstam did so deftly in his introduction, though, is something I need to spend quite a bit of time thinking about.

He combined the changes inside America with the changes in the journalism business. Then he looked at the impact of those changes on the way that sports journalism was produced—

And he examined the impact those changes had on craft.

For example, he included little craft gems like this:

The [New York Times] in those days was still a place where copy editors were all-powerful, on red alert for any departure from the strictest adherence to traditional journalistic form, and [Talese’s] tenure there had not been a particularly happy one. But if he had wrestled constantly with the paper’s copy editors, his work was greatly admired elsewhere, particularly by reporters of his own generation in city rooms around the country who were, like him, struggling to break out of the narrow confines of traditional journalism and bring to their work both a greater sense of realism as well as a greater literary touch.

Passages like this make me think of modern traditional publishing, which got more and more hidebound after the distribution collapse in the 1990s. Then the purchase of those publishing companies by non-book people, who were buying inventory and intellectual property, and who needed these companies to make a profit on the balance sheet.

To do that, they hired editors without experience, many of them Ivy League graduates whose biggest credential was taking classes from some famous fiction writer (who could no longer make a living at writing). (Sound familiar? See J-School above.)

It became more and more difficult for established writers to work with these inexperienced (and low-wage) editors, prompting some writers to change companies. Other writers simply left to do other things, and once self-publishing became a major big deal, started publishing their own works.

There have been a lot of changes in fiction publishing, both indie and traditional, in this century. From the gold rush of new material when the Kindle was introduced in 2007 to the plethora of distribution sites for fiction, the changes have been immense.

For a while, it was possible for all of us to have the same information and act on it in the same way. If you have a newsletter, you get x-many more sales. If you monkey with Amazon’s algorithms, you will get your book in front of these eyeballs. If you use this program, you will have adequate paper books.

And then…suddenly…everything changed. Just like in the California Gold Rush, there’s money to be made in side businesses. You can make money as a cover designer, as a virtual assistant managing social media, as an expert in In-Design.

Not every writer needs those services, but a lot of them do.

What I find most amusing now is that, properly designed, indie books look better than traditionally published books. Traditional publishing companies are still trying to cost-cut their way to profit.

Indies are still experimenting with the latest bestest coolest tech, to see if it will not only enhance book sales, but also the reading experience.

What I hadn’t really considered—and I should have—was the thing that Halberstam was mentioning the most in his rather long introduction. He talked about technological, economic, and cultural change leading to changes in craft.

I know that has happened for fiction writers. I know that a lot of writers feel free to write what they want. I know many writers who are writing long series that would have either never sold at all in traditional publishing or been abandoned midway through the series.

Halberstam talks mostly about changes in storytelling methods, and I think we’re seeing that. I’m not well read enough, though, in the indie world to know what the craft changes are.

And it’s also not just a matter of being well-read. It’s also a matter of influence. When the publishing world was small, as it was in 1966, everyone saw a piece like Gay Talese’s. Everyone had an opinion about it—some good and some bad.

Talese’s influence on his peers came in the form of freedom to write differently as well as the freedom to try something new with the writing career.

We, as indie writers and publishers, can see what the something new is on the business level. I’m watching all the beautiful books being produced by writers like Anthea Sharp and Lisa Silverthorne. I want my books to be lovely as well, and I have a vision for it. Back in the day, it cost thousands of dollars to print beautiful books, and now it can be done as print-on demand.

There are other innovations that don’t interest me at all. Some of them make me ask a business question, “Should I do this? Will I be able to monetize it?” And some of them make me shrug. Some of them make me realize that there’s only so much time in every day, and I need it to do many things, including writing and running my business.

But as I climb out of these hectic and difficult past two years, I can finally see ahead. I didn’t realize, until I read the old Halberstam essay, that part of looking ahead is looking backwards on a macro scale and figuring out what the heck happened in the industry.

The cool thing about the macro scale is this: It makes everything that happened to an individual writer during the change impersonal.

For example, I got caught in the distribution downturn and wasn’t allowed by my traditional publisher to finish a series. I spent the early part of this century scrambling for work.

Then indie came along, and opened a lot of doors. But nothing remains the same. What looked good in 2015 doesn’t look good now. What worked ten years ago doesn’t work at all now.

Change happens. Sometimes it’s good, but often it’s confusing and difficult and frightening.

I was one of the first generations to go to college after New Journalism took over the big publications in New York. I had professors who railed against that. I mostly ignored it because I wasn’t a journalism major. I worked in the industry and learned a lot. But today I find myself thinking of my colleagues, many of whom were journalism majors, and wonder what they’re doing now.

I know of two people who followed the same path I did. One, a beautiful and brilliant reporter, ended up as an investigative reporter on a major Wisconsin TV station. Now, she’s working as senior anchor (and still reporting), benefitting from all the lawsuits that women had filed over the years about ageism. (She fully admits this.)

The other kept getting jobs at places that died. From UPI to major newspapers that closed up shop, he moved from place to place until he finally gave up and went fully into broadcast. I hear his familiar voice on occasion on one of the streaming channels, where he has his own show.

Those two stuck with it, weren’t afraid to take risks, and ended up with forty-year long careers.

The others…? I have no idea where they are now. I do know that, even in those halcyon days, they had trouble finding work because their writing showed their lack of experience in actual reporting.

They’re victims of a change that is no longer really relevant to modern journalism. And another change is coming.

I can see the changes in the media—as I mentioned above.

I’m going to have to think about what’s going on in fiction.

And I’m really looking forward to that.

 

“Generational Change,” copyright © 2024/2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

 

 

…to all of the backers on the Series Collide Kickstarter. You went beyond our expectations. We—I—appreciate the support.

Thank you!

I’m still catching up on the Recommended Reading Lists for 2024. After August, I have to finish September’s (and December, of course), and then I’ll be caught up! Yay!

I remember August better than I remember July. (Whew.) We held a successful anthology workshop. We learned a lot. We made a lot of progress on truly good things. And…we had to hire a lot more lawyers than the two we usually deal with. Such fun that was/is. [sarcasm alert]

I did get a lot more reading done in August than I did in July, but still not as much as I would have liked. Although some of that reading was for the anthology workshop, which I can’t count here, but you will see many of those stories in the coming year, as we revive and rebrand Fiction River. (Oh, I’m looking forward to that.)

So you’ll find some interesting books here, and just two articles to match my necessarily short attention span from that month.

August 2024

 

Baxter, John, Montemarte: Paris’s Village of Art and Sin, Harper Collins, 2017. I plucked this out of my TBR pile because I needed something that was not going to challenge me in the front part of the month. I just needed vignettes, which this has in abundance. What I did not expect was how many story ideas I got from this. Quite a few! I hope I’ll have a chance to get to them before getting distracted by something else. There are a lot of fun things here, as always with a John Baxter travel “guide.”  (It’s an excuse for great literary and historical essays.

Cabot, Meg, No Judgements, William Morrow, 2019. A fun and dramatic book from Meg Cabot. This one is set on a Florida island as a hurricane bears down. Our heroine is a clueless New Yorker who had never lived through severe storms before and can’t quite believe the locals when they tell her that she has to do certain things. Of course, there’s this one particular local who helps her…

One of the most fun things about this book for me is that I lived on the Oregon Coast for 23 years. We had hurricanes, although they’re not called hurricanes in that part of the world. We had Big Storms. And no one from the outside could believe that things would be bad. In fact, when there were tsunami warnings, people drove to the Oregon Coast to watch the big wave hit. Friends of ours had to yank tourists off the beaches so they wouldn’t be killed. (I kid you not.)

So there’s an extra layer in this book for me, but I think you’ll enjoy it even without that. This is Meg Cabot at her most fun.

Nevala-Lee, Alec, Astounding: John W Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, Dey Street, 2018. Alec’s book is a Hugo and Locus Award Finalist. I bought the paperback when it came out. (Note: I’ve linked to a ridiculously priced ebook.) When the book came out, I picked it up a few times, cherry-picked a few references using the index, and got grumpy. I fell into the mistake so many writers make, which is that the book I held was not the book I would have written. Let me say to me (and to all of you who do that): Well, duh. If I was going to write the book, I would…ahem…write the book.

I don’t know what made me pick up the book in August, but I’m so glad I did. It kept me entertained while a lot of the above stuff happened in my life. I had met Isaac a few times, and the bastard groped me every single time. I nearly killed him once in an elevator, because my reaction to being grabbed like that is to hit someone as hard as I could with my elbow, and I refrained only because it was my first Nebula award ceremony as the editor of F&SF. I had a thought that maybe whoever groped me was someone famous—and it was a frail Asimov. His delicate ribcage was only a few inches from my deadly elbow. That would have been bad.

Needless to say that while the rest of the world admires the heck out of that man, I do not. I didn’t know much about Campbell other than the stories the old timers told about him, and I had avoided reading/listening to stories about Hubbard. OMG, that man should have been in jail. Heinlein, whom I had met and who was bombastic as hell, came out the best.

Kudos for Alec for writing about all of these men, warts and all. I love the analysis of what sf became because of them and what still needs to be changed. As worthy a book as I have read in years.

Rose, Lucy, “The Worst Thing that Can Happen is You Suck,” The Hollywood Reporter, June 5, 2024. This is a roundtable interview with actors John Hamm, Matt Bomer, Nicholas Galitzine, Clive Owen, David Oyelowo, and Collum Turner. I love the roundtables that The Hollywood Reporter does because they get a group of professionals together to discuss their art. There’s always something in the roundtables that mean something to me. Here, there are quotes I circled from Clive Owen…

I have never listened to anybody else. Ultimately, you are the one who has to go to work every day. I do what I want to do because that’s what’s going to sustain me through it.

…and John Hamm…

But yeah, to Clive’s point, agents and managers can all bat a thousand in the rearview mirror, they can always tell you what they thought after the thing came out and it was good or bad. It’s in the moment that you have to make the decision. And the worst thing that can happen is you suck.

I love that last part, which is also the title of this piece in the printed form. “The worst thing that can happen is you suck.” Exactly. And that’s not so very bad, now is it?

Silva, Daniel, A Death in Cornwall, HarperCollins, 2024. I’m fascinated by the way that Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon series has changed since the Trump era began. Silva’s books were always on the edge of modern politics, as close to real politics as possible. But it became clear that Silva was struggling with the constant changes instigated by Trump in his first term, and then the worldwide unrest in Biden’s term—from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the utter mess in the Middle East.

Silva solved it by returning Allon to his roots; he was a painter and an art restorer who also became a spy. (And then a super spy.) Now, he has retired and gone back to restoring amazing paintings…and solving worldwide art-related crimes. This crime starts in Allon’s former residence on the Cornish coast of England, with the death of a reknown art history professor and scurries along from there. Highly recommended.

Stoynoff, Natasha,“Brooke Shields Wants You To Know She Is Just Fine,” AARP Magazine, April/May 2024.  Because of the year I had in 2024, I sometimes find it hard to remember articles I had marked as long ago (and far away) as August. I have dumped a few magazines without recommending anything from them because, for the life of me, I have no idea why I marked a certain page.

Not so with the April/May AARP Magazine. I picked it up to see what I had recommended, didn’t see my usual mark, and frowned at it. I distinctly remember reading the Brooke Shields interview and finding it both wise and inspiring.

Brooke Shields and I are of an age. She’s younger, but not by much. And by the time she was being exploited all over the world, I was old enough to feel icky about it, but young enough not to know why. This article addresses her past, yes, but it also looks at her now. At least from this interview, it seems that she has accepted both her age and the changes that aging brings. I recommend this article to everyone.

The Series Collide Kickstarter is winding down. As of this writing, we have hit two stretch goals, which brings the total of short stories you’ll get when you back the Kickstarter to 104. Given the unpredictability at the end of a Kickstarter, we might add anywhere from two to four more stories to that total as we hit even more goals.

That’s a lot of reading.

I don’t know about you folks, but I’m finding myself in great need of escapism right now. Fiction is the best way to block out the problems of 2025. What could be better than concentrating on some made-up adventures right now?

The Series Collide Kickstarter features 100 short stories in 36 series. Fifty stories are by me and fifty are by Dean. Think of the five books in the Kickstarter as a massive sampler. You can sample each series and if you like what you’ve read, you’ll have a lot more series reading ahead of you.

As an illustration, read this week’s Free Fiction story. It’s from my Retrieval Artist series. If you like it, there are 15 novels to grab your attention.

So head on over to the Kickstarter. In addition to the five Series Collide books, you can find other short story collections as well as some writing workshops and the opportunity to submit stories to Pulphouse Magazine (which is usually closed to submissions.)

 

From the award-winning, bestselling Retrieval Artist Universe comes a story about a pulse-pounding race for survival and a foreshadowing of dangerous events yet to unfold.

Takara Hamasaki made plans to leave the far-flung starbase for weeks, but something always stopped her. Until today. Now, she finds herself running for her life as bodies fall all around her, cut down by dozens of identical-looking men. If only she can reach her ship, maybe she can escape. Because one thing seems perfectly clear: The men attacking the starbase plan to leave no survivors.  

“Sole Survivor” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Love my series stories, like the Retrieval Artist? Support the latest Kickstarter containing 50 stories from my different series – Go here now to check it out! 

 

Sole Survivor A Retrieval Artist Universe Story by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

Takara Hamasaki crouched behind the half-open door, her heart pounding. She stared into the corridor, saw more boots go by. Good god, they made such a horrible thudding noise.

Her mouth tasted of metal, and her eyes stung. The environmental system had to be compromised. Which didn’t surprise her, given the explosion that happened not three minutes ago.

The entire starbase rocked from it. The explosion had to have been huge. The base’s exterior was compensating—that had come through her desk just before she left—but she didn’t know how long it would compensate.

That wasn’t true; she knew it could compensate forever if nothing else went wrong. But she had a hunch a lot of other things would go wrong. Terribly wrong.

She’d had that feeling for months now. It had grown daily, until she woke up every morning, wondering why the hell she hadn’t left yet.

Three weeks ago, she had started stocking her tiny ship, the crap-ass thing that had brought her here half her life ago. She would have left then, except for one thing:

She had no money.

Yeah, she had a job, and yeah, she got paid, but it cost a small fortune to live this far out. The base was in the middle of nowhere, barely in what the Earth Alliance called the Frontier, and a week’s food alone cost as much as her rent in the last Alliance place she had stayed. She got paid well, but every single bit of that money went back into living.

Dammit. She should have started sleeping in her ship. She’d been thinking of it, letting the one-room apartment go, but she kinda liked the privacy, and she really liked the amenities—entertainment on demand, a bed that wrapped itself around her and helped her sleep, and a view of the entire public district from above.

She liked to think it was that view that kept her in the apartment, but if she were honest with herself, it was that view and the bed and the entertainment, maybe not in that order.

And she was cursing herself now.

Then the men—they were all men—wearing boots and weird uniforms marched toward the center of the base. Thousands of people lived or stayed here, but there wasn’t much security. Not enough to deal with those men. She would hear that drumbeat of their stupid boots in her sleep for the rest of her life.

If the rest of her life wasn’t measured in hours. If she ever got a chance to sleep again.

Her traitorous heart was beating in time to those boots. She was breathing through her mouth, hating the taste of the air.

If nothing else, she had to get out of here just to get some good clean oxygen. She had no idea what was causing that burned-rubber stench, but something was, and it was getting worse.

More boots stomped by, and she realized she couldn’t tell the difference between the sound of those that had already passed her and those that were coming up the corridor.

She only had fifty meters to go to get to the docking ring, but that fifty meters seemed like a lightyear.

And she wouldn’t even be here, if it weren’t for her damn survival instinct. She had looked up—before the explosion—saw twenty blond-haired men, all of whom looked like twins. Ten twins—two sets of decaplets?—she had no idea what twenty identical people, the same age, and clearly monozygotic, were called. She supposed there was some name for them, but she wasn’t sure. And, as usual, her brain was busy solving that, instead of trying to save her own single individual untwinned life.

She had scurried through the starbase, utterly terrified. The moment she saw those men enter the base, she left her office through the service corridors. When that seemed too dangerous, she crawled through the bot holes. Thank the universe she was tiny. She usually hated the fact that she was the size of an eleven-year-old girl, and didn’t quite weigh 100 pounds.

At this moment, she figured her tiny size might just save her life.

That, and her prodigious brain. If she could keep it focused instead of letting it skitter away.

Twenty identical men—and that wasn’t the worst of it. They looked like younger versions of the creepy pale guys who had come into the office six months ago, looking for ships. They wanted to know the best place to buy ships in the starbase.

There was no place to buy new ships on the starbase. There were only old and abandoned ships. Fortunately, she had managed to prevent the sale of hers, a year ago. She’d illegally gone into the records and changed her ship’s status from delinquent to paid in full, and then she had made that paid-in-full thing repeat every year. (She’d check it, of course, but it hadn’t failed her, and now it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except getting off this damn base.)

Still those old creepy guys had gotten the names of some good dealers on some nearby satellites and moons, and had left—she thought forever—but they had come back with a scary fast ship and lots of determination.

And, it seemed, lots of younger versions of themselves.

(Clones. What if they were clones? What did that mean?)

The drumbeat of their stupid boots had faded. She scurried into the corridor, then heard a high-pitched male scream, and a thud.

Her heart picked up its own rhythm—faster, so fast, in fact that it felt like her heart was trying to get to the ship before she did.

She slammed herself against the corridor wall, felt it give (cheap-ass base) and caught herself before she fell inward on some unattached panel coupling.

She looked both ways, saw nothing, looked up, didn’t see any movement in the cameras—which the base insisted on keeping obvious so that all kinds of criminals would show up here. If the criminals knew where the monitors were, they felt safe, weirdly enough.

And this base needed criminals. This far outside of the Alliance, the only humans with money were the ones who had stolen it—either illegally or legally through some kind of enterprise that was allowed out here, but not inside the Alliance.

And this place catered to humans. It accepted non-human visitors, but no one here wanted them to stay. In the non-Earth atmosphere sections, the cameras weren’t obvious.

She thanked whatever deity was this far outside of the Alliance that she hadn’t been near the alien wing when the twenty creepy guys arrived and started marching in.

And then her brain offered up some stupid math it had been working on while she was trying to save her own worthless life.

She’d seen more than forty boots stomp past her.

That group of twenty lookalikes had only been the first wave.

Another scream and a thud. Then a woman’s voice:

No! No! I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll—

And the voice just stopped. No thud, no nothing. Just silence.

Takara swallowed hard. That metallic taste made her want to retch, but she didn’t. She didn’t have time for it. She could puke all she wanted when she got on that ship, and got the hell away from here.

She levered herself off the wall, wondering in that moment how long the gravity would remain on if the environmental system melted. Her nose itched—that damn smell—and she wiped the sleeve of her too-thin blouse over it.

She should have dressed better that morning. Not for work, but for escape. Stupid desk job. It made her feel so important. An administrator at 25. She should have questioned it.

She should have questioned so many things.

Like the creepy older guys who looked like the baked and fried versions of the men in boots, stomping down the corridors, killing people.

She blinked, wondered if her eyes were tearing because of the smell or because of her panic, then voted for the smell. The air in the corridor had a bit of white to it, like smoke or something worse, a leaking environment from the alien section.

She was torn between running and tip-toeing her way through the remaining forty-seven meters. She opted for a kind of jog-walk, that way her heels didn’t slap the floor like those boots stomped it.

Another scream, farther away, and the clear sound of begging, although she didn’t recognize the language. Human anyway, or something that spoke like a human and screamed like a human.

Why were these matching people stalking the halls killing everyone they saw? Were they trying to take over the base? If so, why not come to her office? Hers was the first one in the administrative wing, showing her lower-level status—in charge, but not in charge.

In charge enough to see that the base’s exterior was compensating for having a hole blown in it. In charge enough to know how powerful an explosion had to be to break through the shield that protected the base against asteroids and out-of-control ships and anything else that bounced off the thick layers of protection.

A bend in the corridor. Her eyes dripped, her nose dripped, and her throat felt like it was burning up.

She couldn’t see as clearly as she wanted to—no pure white smoke any more, some nasty brown stuff mixed in, and a bit of black.

She pulled off her blouse and put it over her face like a mask, wished she had her environmental suit, wished she knew where she could steal one right now, and then sprinted toward the docking ring.

If she kept walk-jogging, she’d never get there before the oxygen left the area.

Then something else shook the entire base. Like it had earlier. Another damn explosion.

She whimpered, rounded the last corner, saw the docking ring doors—closed.

She cursed (although she wasn’t sure if she did it out loud or just in her head) and hoped to that ever-present unknown deity that her access code still worked.

The minute those doors slid open, the matching marching murderers would know she was here. Or rather, that someone was here.

They’d come for her. They’d make her scream.

But she’d be damned if she begged.

She hadn’t begged ever, not when her dad beat her within an inch of her life, not when she got accused of stealing from that high-class school her mother had warehoused her in, not when her credit got cut off as she fled to the outer reaches of the Alliance.

She hadn’t begged no matter what situation she was in, and she wouldn’t now. It was a point of pride. It might be the last point of pride, hell, it might mark her last victory just before she died, but it would be a victory nonetheless, and it would be hers.

Takara slammed her hand against the identiscanner, then punched in a code, because otherwise she’d have to use her links, and she wasn’t turning them back on, maybe ever, because she didn’t want those crazy matching idiots to not only find her, but find her entire life, stored in the personal memory attached to her private access numbers.

The docking ring doors irised open, and actual air hit her. Real oxygen without the stupid smoky stuff, good enough to make her leap through the doors. Then she turned around and closed them.

She scanned the area, saw feet—not in boots—attached to motionless legs, attached to bleeding bodies, attached to people she knew, and she just shut it all off, because if she saw them as friends or co-workers or hell, other human beings, she wouldn’t be able to run past them, wouldn’t be able to get to her ship, wouldn’t get the hell out of here.

She kept her shirt against her face, just in case, but her eyes were clearing. The air here looked like air, but it smelled like a latrine. Death—fast death, recent death. She’d used it for entertainment, watched it, read about it, stepped inside it virtually, but she’d never experienced it. Not really, not like this.

Her ship, the far end of this ring, the cheap area, where the base bent downward and would have brushed the top of some bigger ship, something that actually had speed and firepower and worth.

Then she mentally corrected herself: her ship had worth. It would get her out of this death trap. She would escape before one of those tall blond booted men found her. She would—

—she flew forward, landed on her belly, her elbow scraping against the metal walkway, air leaving her body. Her shirt went somewhere, her chin banged on the floor, and then the sound—a whoop-whamp, followed by a sustained series of crashes.

Something was collapsing, or maybe one of the explosions was near her, or she had no damn idea, she just knew she had to get out, get out, get out—

She pushed herself to her feet, her knees sore too, her pants torn, her stomach burning, but she didn’t look down because the feel of that burn matched the feel of her elbow, so she was probably scraped.

She didn’t even grab her shirt; she just ran the last meter to her ship, which had moved even with its mooring clamps—good god, something was shaking this place, something bad, something big.

Her ship was so small, it didn’t even have a boarding ramp. The door was pressed against the clamps, or it should have been, but there was a gap between the clamps and the ship and the walkway, and it was probably tearing something in the ship, but she didn’t want to think about that so she didn’t.

Instead, she slammed her palm against the door four times, the emergency enter code, which wasn’t a code at all, but was something she thought (back when she was young and stupid and new to access codes) no one would figure out.

What she hadn’t figured out was that no one wanted this cheap-ass ship, so no one tried to break into it. No one wanted to try, no one cared, except her, right now, as the door didn’t open and didn’t open and didn’t open—

—and then it did.

Her brain was slowing down time. She’d heard about this phenomenon, something happened chemically in the human brain, slowed perception, made it easier (quicker?) to make decisions—and there her stupid brain was again, thinking about the wrong things as she tried to survive.

Hell, that had helped her survive as a kid, this checking-out thing in the middle of an emergency, but it wasn’t going to help her now.

She scrambled inside her ship, felt it tilt, heard the hull groan. If she didn’t do something about those clamps, she wouldn’t have a ship.

She somehow remembered to slap the door’s closing mechanism before she sprinted to the cockpit. Her bruised knees made her legs wobbly or maybe the ship was tilting even more. The groaning in the hull was certainly increasing.

The cockpit door was open, the place was a mess, as always. She used to sleep in here on long runs, and she always meant to clean up the blankets and pillows and clothes, but never did.

Now she stood in the middle of it, and turned on the navigation board. She instructed the ship to decouple, then turned her links on—not all of them, just the private link that hooked her to the ship—and heard more groaning.

“Goddammit!” she screamed at the ship, slamming her hands on the board. “Decouple, decouple—get rid of the goddamn clamps!”

Inform space traffic control to open the exit through the rings, the ship said in its prissiest voice as if there was no emergency.

Tears pricked her eyes. Crap. She’d be stuck here because of some goddamn rule that ship couldn’t take off if there was no exit. She’d die if there was another explosion.

“There’s no space traffic control here,” she said. “Space traffic control is dead. We have to get out. Everyone’s dead.”

Her voice wobbled just like the ship had as she realized what she had said. Everyone. Everyone she had worked with, her friends, her co-workers, the people she drank with, laughed with, everyone—

We cannot leave if the exit isn’t open, the ship said slowly and even more prissily, if that were possible.

“Then ram it,” she said.

That will destroy us, the ship said, so damn calmly. Like it had no idea they were about to be destroyed anyway.

Takara ran her fingers over the board, looking for—she couldn’t remember. This thing was supposed to have weapons, but she’d never used them, didn’t know exactly what they were. She’d bought this stupid ship for a song six years ago, and the weapons were only mentioned in passing.

She couldn’t find anything, so she gambled.

“Blow a damn hole through the closed exit,” she said, not knowing if she could do that, if the ship even allowed that. Weren’t there supposed to be failsafes so that no one could blow a hole through something on this base?

That will leave us with only one remaining laser shot, the ship said.

“I don’t give a good goddamn!” she screamed. “Fire!”

And it did. Or something happened. Because the ship heated, and rocked and she heard a bang like nothing she’d ever heard before, and the sound of things falling on the ship.

“Get us out of here!” she shouted.

And the ship went upwards, fast, faster than ever.

She tumbled backwards. The attitude controls were screwed or the gravity or something but she didn’t care.

“Visuals,” she said, and floating on the screens that appeared in front of her was the hole that the ship had blown through the exit, and debris heading out with them, and bits of ship—and then she realized that there were bits of more than ship. Bits of the starbase and other ships and son of a bitch, more bodies and—

“Make sure you don’t hit anything,” she said, not knowing how to give the correct command.

I will evade large debris, the ship said as if this were an everyday occurrence. However, I do need a destination.

“Far the fuck away from here,” Takara said.

How far?

“I don’t know,” she said. “Out of danger.”

She was pressed against what she usually thought of as the side wall, with blankets and smelly sheets and musty pillows against her.

“And fix the attitude controls and the gravity, would you?” she snapped.

The interior of the ship seemed to right itself. She flopped on her stomach again, only this time, it didn’t hurt.

She stood, her mouth wet and tasting of blood. She put a hand to her face, realized her nose was bleeding, and grabbed a sheet, stuffing it against her skin.

She dragged it with her to the controls. The images had disappeared (had she ordered that? She didn’t remember ordering that) and so she called them up again, saw more body parts, and globules of stuff (blood? Intestines?) and shut it all off—consciously this time.

God, she was lucky. She had administration codes. She had a sense that things were going bad. She had her ship ready. And, most important of all, she had been close enough to the docking ring to get out of there before anyone knew she even existed.

She sank into the chair and closed her eyes, wondering what in the bloody hell was going on.

She’d met those men, the creepy older ones, and asked her boss what they wanted with ships, and he’d said, Better not to ask, hon.

He always called her hon, and she finally realized it was because he couldn’t remember her name. And now he was dead or would be dead or was dying or something awful like that. He’d been inside the administration area when the twenty clones had come in—or the forty clones—or the sixty clones, god, she had no idea how many.

It was her boss’s boss who answered her, later, when she mentioned that the men looked alike.

Don’t ask about it, Takara, he’d said quietly. They’re creatures of someone else. Designer Criminal Clones. They need a ship for nefarious doings.

They’re not in charge? She’d asked.

He’d shaken his head. Someone made them for a job.

Her eyes opened, saw the mess that her cockpit had become. A job. They’d had to find fast ships for a job.

But if the creepy older ones were made for a job, so were the younger versions.

She called up the screens, asked for images of the starbase. It was a small base, far away from anything, important only to malcontents and criminals, and those, like her, whose ships wouldn’t cross the great distance between human-centered planets without a rest and refueling stop.

The starbase was glowing—fires inside, except where the exterior had been breached. Those sections were dark and ruined. It looked like a volcano that had already exploded—twice. More than twice. Several times.

Ship, her ship said, and for a minute, she thought it was being recursive.

“What?” she asked.

Approaching quickly. Starboard side.

She swiveled the view, saw a ship twice the size of hers, familiar too. The creepy older men had come back to the starbase in a ship just like that.

“Can you show me who is inside?” she asked.

I can show you who the ship is registered to and who disembarked from it earlier today, her ship sent. I cannot show who is inside it now.

Then, on an inset screen floating near the other screens, images of the two creepy older men and five younger leaving the ship. They went inside the base.

“Did anyone else who looked like them—”

The other clones disembarked from a ship that landed an hour later, her ship answered, anticipating her question for once. Did ships think?

Then she shook her head. She knew better than that. Ships like this one had computers that could deduce based on past performance, nothing more.

That ship has been destroyed, the ship sent, along with the docking ring.

“What?” Takara asked. She moved the imagery again, saw another explosion. The docking ring about five minutes after she left.

She was trembling. Everyone gone. Except her. And the creepy men, and maybe the five young guys they had brought with them.

Bastards. Filthy stinking horrible asshole bastards.

“You said we have one shot left,” she said.

Yes, but—

“Target that ship,” she said. “Blow the hell out of it.”

Our laser shot cannot penetrate their shields.

Her gaze scanned the area. Other ships whirling, twirling, looping through space, heading her way.

Their way.

She ran through the records stored in her links. She’d always made copies of things. She was anal that way, and scared enough to figure she might need blackmail material.

One thing she did handle as a so-called administrator: requests to dock for ships with unusual fuel sources. She kept them on the far side of the ring.

She scanned for them, and their unusual size, saw one, realized it had a huge fuel cell, still intact.

“Can you shoot that ship?” she asked, sending the image across the links, “and push it into the manned ship?”

What she wanted to say was “the ship with the creepy guys,” but she knew her ship wouldn’t know what she meant.

Yes, her ship sent. But it will do nothing to the ship except make them collide.

“Oh, yes it will,” Takara said. “Make sure the fuel cell hits the manned ship directly.”

That will cause a chain reaction that will be so large it might impact us, her ship sent.

“Yeah, then get us out of here,” Takara said.

We have a forty-nine percent chance of survival if we try that, her ship sent.

“Which is better than what we’ll have if that fucking ship catches up with us,” Takara said.

Are you ordering me to take the shot? Her ship asked.

“Yes!”

Her ship shook slightly as the last laser shot emerged from the front. The manned ship didn’t even seem to notice or care that she had firepower. Of course, from their perspective, she had missed them.

The shot went wide, hit the other ship, and destroyed part of its hull, pushing it into the manned ship.

And nothing happened. They collided, and then bounced away, the manned ship’s trajectory changed and little else.

Then the other ship’s fuel cell glowed green, and Takara’s ship sped up, again losing attitude control and sending her flying into the back wall.

An explosion—green and gold and white—flashed around her.

She looked up from the pile of blankets at the floating screens, saw only debris, and asked, “Did we do it?”

Our shot hit the ship. It exploded. Our laser shot ignited the fuel cell—

“I know,” she snapped. “What about the manned ship?”

It is destroyed.

She let out a sigh of relief, then leaned back against the wall, gathering the pillows and blanket against her. The blood had dried on her face, and she hadn’t even noticed until now. Her elbow ached, her knees stung, and her stomach hurt, and she felt—

Alive.

She felt alive and giddy and sad and terrified and…

Curious.

She scanned through the information on the creepy men. They didn’t have names, at least that they had given to the administration. Just numbers. Numbers that didn’t make sense.

She saw some imagery: the men talking to her boss, saying something about training missions for their weapons, experimental weapons, and something about soldiers—a promise of a big payout if the experiment worked.

And if it doesn’t? her boss asked.

The creepy men smiled. You’ll know if it doesn’t.

Practice sessions. Soldiers. A failed experiment. Had her boss realized that’s what this was in his last moment of life? Had he indeed known?

And the men, heading off to report the failure to someone.

But they hadn’t gotten there. She had stopped them.

But not the someone in charge.

She ran a hand over her face. She would send all of this to Alliance. There wasn’t much more she could do. She wasn’t even sure what the Alliance could do.

This was the Frontier. It was lawless by any Alliance definition. Each place governed itself.

She had liked that when she arrived. She was untraceable, unknown, completely alone.

Then she’d made friends, realized that every place had a rhythm, every place had good and bad parts, and she had decided to stay. Become someone.

Until she got that feeling from the creepy men, and had planned to leave.

“Fix the attitude and gravity controls, would you?” she asked, only this time, she didn’t sound panicked or upset.

The ship righted itself. Apparently when it sped up, it didn’t have enough power for all of its functions. She was going to need to get repairs.

Maybe in the Alliance. She had enough fuel to get there.

She’d been stockpiling. Food, fuel, everything but money.

She could get back to a place where there were laws she understood, where someone didn’t blow up a starbase as an experiment with creepy matching soldiers.

She’d let the authorities know that someone—a very scary someone—was planning something. But what she didn’t know. She didn’t even know if it was directed against the Alliance.

She would guess it wasn’t.

It would take more than twenty, forty, sixty, one hundred matching (fuckups) soldiers to defeat the Alliance. No one had gone to war against it in centuries. It was too big.

Something like this had to be Frontier politics. A war against something else, or an invasion or something.

And it had failed.

All of the soldiers had died.

Along with everyone else.

Except her, of course.

She hadn’t died.

She had lived to tell about it.

And she would tell whoever would listen.

Once she was safe inside the Alliance.

A place too big to be attacked. Too big to be defeated.

Too big to ever allow her to go through anything like this again.

 

____________________________________________

“Sole Survivor” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Love my series stories, like the Retrieval Artist Series? Support the latest Kickstarter containing 50 stories from my different series – Go here now to check it out! 

Sole Survivor

Copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Fiction River: Pulse Pounders, edited by Kevin J. Anderson, WMG Publishing, January 2015
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2015 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Philcold/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

As we do every January, Dean and I are participating in Kickstarter’s Make 100 Project. This year, we put together five big thick books with stories from our various series. Each of us has 10 stories in each book, and all of the stories are great introductions to the series that we write.

I have a slight quibble with our tag line. Yes, Dean & I are two authors, but some of my other pen names make guest appearances. You’ll find some Kristine Grayson short stories in these books as well as Kris Nelscott stories. So that’s at least four authors…

You’ll also find Retrieval Artist stories here, Spade and Paladin, Winston & Ruby, some stories from Seavy Village, Diving, the Fey…and that’s just me. Dean’s stories will introduce you to some great characters, from Poker Boy to Pakhet Jones.

The Kickstarter has just gone live. You can visit it and see all the fun rewards if you click here.

Here’s the video I did for the Kickstarter. Enjoy!

When the storm of the century hits Whale Rock, Sheriff Dan Retsler does everything he can to prevent hundreds of deaths. Everything except the thing that could have prevented the storm in the first place. He should have listened to the beautiful woman who came to his office before the storm hit.

He should have believed in her magic. But he didn’t. And now he must face himself—and the horrible results of a storm he could have prevented.

“Strange Creatures” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Love my series stories, like Seavy County? Support the latest Kickstarter containing 50 stories from my different series – Go here now to check it out! 

 

Strange Creatures A Seavy County Story Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

Dan Retsler sat on the hull of a half-submerged boat, the mud thick around his thigh-high fishing waders. In his right hand, he held an industrial quality flashlight; in his left, a pocket knife. He was filthy and wet and exhausted. Night was coming and there was still hours of work to do, buildings to search, items to move. He had managed to send the warning out early enough to evacuate most of the homes along the river, but the destruction was still heart-rending, the loss almost unimaginable.

The trailers were the worst. The water had knocked them about like Tonka toys, ripping them in half, crushing them, scattering them all over the low-lying valley as if they weighed little more than matchsticks.

They were worth about that much now.

He ran a hand through his hair, feeling the thick silt that seemed to have become a part of him. The foul stench of the mud might never come out of his nostrils.

The river looked so tame now, a narrow trickle through the valley. He had seen the Dee flood before: once after a particularly wet December, and during the 1996 February storms, dubbed The Storm of the Century by commentators who felt it was pretty safe to apply that label when the century was nearly done. But he had never seen anything like this, so sudden, so furious, and so severe.

The Dee was a tidal river which opened into Hoover Bay just south of Whale Rock. High tides and too much rain often caused the Dee to flood her banks, but the floods were low and fairly predictable. Until 1996, no water had ever touched the trailer park, dubbed Hoover Village by some wag, and until that morning, had never touched the highway winding its way along the valley and into the Coastal Mountain Range.

The sun was going down, turning the sky a brilliant orange and red, with shades of deep blue where the clouds appeared. The Pacific reflected the colors. Retsler stared at it, knowing that any other day, he would have stopped, appreciated the beautiful sunset, and called someone else’s attention to it.

A hand touched his shoulder. He looked up, saw the coroner, Hamilton Denne, standing beside him. Denne had a streak of river mud on the left side of his face, and his blond hair was spiked with dirt. His silk suit had splotches and water marks, and his Gucci loafers were ruined.

Denne’s wife would probably have a fit—she came from one of Oregon’s richest families, and despised the fact that Denne still insisted on doing his job even though they didn’t need the money. If anyone asked her what Denne did, she would tell them he was a doctor, or if they pushed, a pathologist. She never admitted to the fact that he worked best with corpses. He was able to keep the secret because the coroner’s position was an appointed one in Seavy County, and no one ever printed his name in the papers.

In his left hand, Denne balanced a clean McDonald’s bag and a cardboard tray with two Styrofoam cups of coffee. He nodded toward the sunset. “This looks like the best seat in the house. Mind if I share it? I’ll pay my way with food.”

Retsler didn’t reply. Any other time, he would have bantered back, said something about bribing a public official, or teased Denne about whether or not he could have afforded the food. But Retsler didn’t feel like banter. He didn’t feel like company either, although he didn’t say so.

Denne handed him the coffee tray, then sat beside him. Retsler took out a cup and wrapped his hand around it, letting the warmth sink through him.

“Didn’t know what you liked, so I got everything,” Denne said. “Whopper, Fish something or other, Biggie Fry—”

“Whopper’s from Burger King,” Retsler said.

“Well, you know me,” Denne said. “It was my first time at a drive-through window. The wonders of technology.”

Retsler was too exhausted to smile. He knew it wasn’t Denne’s first time in a fast-food joint, since he’d dragged Denne to them countless times. Denne always protested, and then ate like a thirteen-year-old at a basketball game.

Denne was holding the bag open. Retsler reached inside, and pulled out a Big Mac and fries. The smell of grease and sugar made his stomach cramp, but he knew he had to eat. He pulled the wrapper back and took a bite, tasting lettuce, pickles, onions, and cheese long before he got to the meat.

With the lining of his silk suit, Denne wiped mud off the boat’s aluminum hull. Then he set the bag down, and rooted inside of it, pulling out a Filet-O-Fish. Denne had a penchant for the things, which Retsler always found odd, considering they lived in a place where they could get the freshest fish in the world.

“At the Club,” Denne said, peeling the wrapper from his fish sandwich. He was referring to the Club at Glen Ellyn Cove, Whale Rock’s gated community. “They have old maps of this coastline, some dating from the turn of the century. The last century.”

Half of Retsler’s Big Mac was gone. He was hungrier than he thought. He took a sip of coffee, waiting for Denne to finish. It was always easier to ignore Denne when the man was talking.

“Up until 1925 or so, this river wasn’t the Dee at all. It was the Devil’s River.”

That didn’t surprise Retsler. The Devil, in his opinion, had once dwelt on the Oregon Coast, eventually leaving behind his Punchbowl, his Churn, and oddly, his Elbow.

“When folks decided they wanted to bring tourism into Whale Rock, they shortened the name of the river.” Denne took a bite of the sandwich and talked while he chewed. “Know why it was called the Devil’s River?”

“Sea monster?” Retsler said. The food must have helped him feel slightly better. He answered Denne this time.

“No,” Denne said. “That’s Lincoln City. Devils Lake.”

Retsler wadded up the sandwich wrapper, and shoved it in the bag. He sipped his coffee. It was black and burned. He drank it anyway.

“They called it Devil’s River,” Denne said, “because it flooded unexpectedly fourteen times between 1899 and 1919. On clear nights, they said, the river would rise and fill the valley until this place looked like a lake.”

In the distance, cars swooshed across the Dee River bridge, oblivious to the destruction hundreds of feet below them. The sun was gone now, leaving traces of orange against the night sky.

“You’re saying this is not my fault,” Retsler said.

“Acts of God happen,” Denne said.

Retsler drained the Styrofoam cup. “You don’t believe that.”

“Of course I do.”

Retsler turned to him. “Hamilton, you and I’ve seen some strange things in Whale Rock.”

Denne’s eyes were hidden by the growing darkness. “It was a freak storm.”

“You’ve never lied to me before, Hamilton. Don’t start now.” Retsler stood, grabbed his flashlight, and flicked it on. The beam made the mud glisten. “Thanks for the comfort food.”

Denne had his elbows on his knees, his right hand holding the coffee cup by the lip. “Dan,” he said. “You didn’t start this thing.”

Retsler paused, wondering why that didn’t make him feel better. Then he said, “And I didn’t end it, either.”

***

It began a few days earlier, on the first day of the new year. Retsler answered the call about a suspicious smell on the beach.

The woman who had obviously made the call sat in the loose sand near the concrete cinder blocks lining the beach access. Her black hair flowed down her back. The constant ocean breeze stirred a few strands, but she didn’t seem to notice. Her legs were spread in front of her, her toes buried in the sand. She wore a light jacket despite the day’s chill. Retsler had a sense that she had been crying, but she wasn’t now. Instead, she was staring out to sea, as if the frothy brown surface—filled with dirt from the rainstorms of the last few days—held the answers to questions he hadn’t even heard yet.

Retsler stood on the concrete slab above the beach access and watched her for a moment. She didn’t seem to know she was being observed. Cool mist pelted his face. The moisture felt good. He hadn’t gotten much sleep last night: fifteen drunk and disorderlies; dozens of drunk driving stops; illegal fireworks on the beach. By the time he had turned in, about four a.m., he was praying that the Y2K bug would hit on Christmas so that no one could travel to the coast for New Year’s Eve. Vain hope, he knew, but it was the only one he had.

He walked down the sand-covered ramp. Driftwood littered the beach, a testament to the rough surf of the last month. The air stank of charred wood and something else, something he didn’t want to think about.

When he reached her, he crouched. “Maria Selvado?”

She raised luminous brown eyes to his. Her eyes were so dark they seemed to have no pupils. The whites were stunningly clear. There was moisture on her lower lashes, but he couldn’t tell if it was from the mist or from tears. “Yes?”

“I’m Dan Retsler. I’m the chief of police here in Whale Rock.” As if that meant something. He ran a department of ten, double what they’d had two years ago. Whale Rock was big enough to keep them busy, but not big enough to pay the salaries of more officers.

“Thanks for coming. I didn’t know who to call.”

Probably Fish and Game, he thought. Or the State Department of Natural Resources. Half a dozen agencies probably had jurisdiction over this one.

“Where?”

She waved a hand toward the surf. “That one.”

He followed her gaze. The remains of a bonfire, piled high on a dune. He swallowed hard, thankful that he hadn’t partied the night before, and stood.

The stench was intermittent, whenever the breeze happened to blow in his direction. Otherwise, he smelled only the salty ocean freshness and knew it could lull him into thinking nothing was wrong.

He slogged through deep sand as he walked up the dune, then crossed to a driftwood log the color of long abandoned houses. On the other side of the log was a pile of charred wood half covered in sand, and about two dozen beer cans, scattered in a semi-circle. The odor was strong here, and mixed with the smell of Budweiser and old vomit.

The carcass lay half in the fire, flesh burned and bubbled, but still recognizable by shape: a seal pup, skinned. Bile rose in his throat and he swallowed it down, reminding himself that he had seen worse and not too long ago: the cats in the bag by the river, the dog the vet said had been tortured for days, the horse, still alive, and half crazed by knife wounds all along its flank.

Retsler had read the studies, been to schools, knew the psychiatric lingo. Serial killers started like this—usually as teenagers, practicing on bigger or more difficult targets, needing a greater thrill each time to duplicate that same sick feeling of pleasure.

Seal pups. Jesus.

He looked away, stared at the ocean just as the woman had been doing. The sun peeked through a break in the clouds, falling on the whitecaps, adding a golden hue to the ocean’s brown and blue surface. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone, flipping it open and hitting his speed dial.

After two rings, he got an answer. “Hamilton,” he said, “sorry to disturb your holiday, but I’ve got something I need you to see.”

***

The woman chose to wait beside him. When he told her he could take her statement, if she wanted, and then she could go, she shook her head. She seemed to think her actions warranted an explanation because, after a few moments, she told him that she worked at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. Her specialty was seals.

Denne saved him from answering. Retsler heard the rumble of Denne’s rusted Ford truck, the one he’d bought in November against his wife’s wishes, because he was tired, he said, of showing up at crime scenes in his silver Mercedes. Not that there were that many murders in Seavy County, which was Denne’s jurisdiction. But Denne had an eye for detail and a knowledge of the obscure that made him useful to all the police departments in the county. For a job that was supposed to be part-time, a job that should have taken very little of his precious social time, it seemed to be a major preoccupation for him, one that was growing more and more of late.

The door slammed and Denne made his way down the beach. Retsler led him to the carcass, and watched as Denne’s face went white.

“This is how someone chose to ring in the New Year?” he asked.

Retsler stuck his hands in the back pockets of his jeans. “I want you to treat this like a human murder scene. And then we’ll—”

“Compare it to that dog, I know.” Denne glanced at the ocean, then at the bonfire. “They wanted us to find this. It’s above the high-water line.”

“Or maybe they were just careless,” Retsler said. “That’s a lot of beer.”

“Looks like it was some party,” Denne said. “I’ll bet there’re one or two people who aren’t happy about how it ended.”

“Thought of that,” Retsler said.

“You know you’ll have to call the State. These pups are protected. Hell, you could get slapped with a gigantic fine if you move a live one. I have no idea what happens if you kill one.”

“It’s the same thing,” Retsler said. Tourists came across seal pups alone on the beach all the time, then picked “the poor things” up and hauled them to a vet, thinking they were orphans. The act of kindness always doomed the pup, whose mother had left it on the beach on purpose and would have been back for it. Very few pups were ever safely returned to the wild; most died after being separated from the mother.

“It’s not quite the same,” Denne said, and went to work.

***

After he’d collected the beer cans and all the other evidence he could find, Retsler offered to drive Maria Selvado back to Newport, but she refused. She said she was staying in Whale Rock for her work. She had told him, as if it were more a threat than a promise, that she would drop in his office on Monday to find out how his work was progressing.

He had left Denne to the mess, and had driven back to the station. It was in the center of downtown, with a display window that overlooked Highway 101. The station had once been prime retail space, but Retsler’s predecessor had demanded, and received, the building because, he said, most crimes were committed just outside its doors.

That was true enough. On most days, the police log was something Jay Leno might read as a joke: two people pulled over for running red lights; Slow Children sign vandalized (for the eighth time) on South Jetty Road; lost puppy found before Safeway store, identified, and returned to owner.

It was the other days that were difficult: the spur-of-the-moment kidnapping outside the local Dairy Queen; the gang war, featuring rival gangs imported from Portland, on the Fourth of July; the drownings, search-and-rescue operations, all caused by the stupid things tourists did on the beach. If someone asked him how hard his job could get, those were the things he mentioned. He never brought up Whale Rock’s secret side.

Denne was familiar with it, and Retsler’s dispatch, Lucy Wexel, was a firm believer that there was some sort of vortex here that brought out the magic in the world. Retsler’s introduction had come two years ago when intact and seemingly recently deceased bodies appeared on the beach, all from the same sixty-year-old shipwreck. Then there were the three so-called women who seduced people to their deaths in the sea; Retsler had seen them, and narrowly escaped. Denne called them mermaids, but they weren’t. They were sirens, perhaps, or sea hags, and they were something Retsler never ever talked about.

Eddie was working dispatch today, with Retsler on call. New Year’s Eve was always a nightmare, but New Year’s Day was usually as quiet as a church—people were either too hung-over or too tired to get out of the house. Even though the sun was peeking through the clouds, the beach was empty, something Retsler was grateful for.

Eddie was sitting with his feet on Lucy’s desk, a Car and Driver magazine on his lap, and three Hershey’s candy wrappers littering the floor around him. When Retsler entered, Eddie sat up, and immediately started cleaning.

“Sorry, boss. Didn’t expect you.”

Retsler waved a hand. “You’re fine.”

“Figure out what died on the beach?” Eddie, of course, had taken Selvado’s call.

“Seal pup. Skinned and burned.”

“Je-Zus.” Eddie whistled, then shook his head. He’d seen a lot of the strange things around Whale Rock as well, but they never ceased to surprise him either. “What the hell would anyone do that for?”

“Kicks, it looks like.” He took one of Eddie’s candy bars. “Mind?”

Eddie shook his head.

“Do me a favor. Look through the files, see if you can find more animal killings, anything that predates that spate of them we had last year.”

“You got it.”

“And do a location map for me too, would you?”

“Sure.” Eddie actually looked relieved. He was usually patrolling because he liked to be busy. He wasn’t suited for dispatch.

Retsler went through the open door into his tiny office. He didn’t pull the blinds on the glass windows—another feature left over from the retail days—but he sat hard at his desk. Incident reports from the night before littered the left corner. He stared at them for a moment, as if they were the enemy, then he frowned.

He might find something in them as well.

He slid them over to the center of his desk, and began to scan. He had to sign off on them anyway—a departmental policy as old as Whale Rock and one he saw no need to change—and he may as well do so now while he was waiting for Denne. Retsler had a few incident reports of his own to file from the night before, as well as the one this afternoon, but he wasn’t ready to put anything down on paper.

Fifteen reports later, almost all of them drunk and disorderlies, almost all of them depressing in their sameness, Retsler stood and stretched his cramping hand.

“Hey!” Eddie said from the front. “Got something weird.”

Retsler left his desk and walked to the dispatch area. Eddie had files scattered around him—both of them would pay dearly for that when Lucy came in on Monday morning—and at the center of it all, a map of Whale Rock. There were multicolored dots all over the village. Retsler had forgotten how good Eddie was at details. Usually he didn’t have to focus on them when he was on the street.

“I used red for this year,” Eddie said. “I mean, last year. You know, ’98. Green’s for ’97, and blue’s for ’96. I put the seal pup in last year’s because the poor thing probably died before sundown.”

“How do you figure?” Retsler asked.

“It takes a lot of work to skin an animal, don’t care how good you are at it. It’s harder if you can’t see too good.”

“They had a bonfire.”

“And found a seal pup at night? I don’t think so.”

He had a good point. Retsler made a mental note of it. He leaned over the map and saw, while there were a few dots all over the city, the biggest concentration of them was around Hoover Bay.

“That’s odd,” Retsler said.

“That’s what I thought,” Eddie said, pointing to them. “And they’re mostly from the last year or so. The rest’re what you’d expect, and if I’d had time, I’d’ve marked ’em by month too. Outside the bay, most of the animals died between May and September.”

“Tourists.”

“Sicko, psycho kids, probably brought to the beach because there’s nothing for them to tear up, or so the parents think.”

That was one of the things Retsler hated the most about summer, the teenagers who invaded from other towns. After they saw the single movie playing at the Bijou, shopped at all the stores, and found out that the casino just outside of town really did enforce its 18 and above rule, they turned to vandalism or small acts of terror to take up their time.

“What about the others?” Retsler asked.

“Late ’96, spaced about a month apart. Been escalating since October. That dog you found tied to the river piling was only two weeks ago, and the cats a week before that.”

“You forgot the horse,” Retsler said.

“Horse?”

“You know, Draytons’ new mare, the one they’d bought their daughter for Christmas.”

“Oh, yeah,” Eddie said, and grimaced in distaste. “It’s not down here as a killing.”

“It should have been,” Retsler said. “The vet had to put her down.” The little girl had been heartbroken, and convinced, somehow, that it was her fault. The parents had promised her a new horse, but she had refused, saying she couldn’t be sure it would be safe. The parents had looked at Retsler then, perhaps wanting him to reassure her, but he said nothing. He wasn’t sure the family would be safe on hillside retreat, with its two-mile long road and 360-degree view of the ocean and the river. He’d thought the horse incident particularly cruel and had thought perhaps it had been directed at the Draytons.

Now he wasn’t so sure. They lived awfully close to Hoover Bay, and a horse wasn’t a dog or a seal pup. Horses had an amazing amount of strength.

Had the horse been the killer’s attempt to ratchet up the pleasure, only to be thwarted? Maybe that’s why the killer went after something like a seal pup, something so helpless and vulnerable and cute that it would be easy to kill.

A shiver ran through Retsler. He didn’t like what was loose in his little town.

***

Denne showed up three hours later. He was wearing a Harvard sweatshirt over a pair of chinos. His deck shoes were mottled and ruined, and he wore no socks. Retsler had seen the outfit before. It was the one Denne kept at his office and used only when something at a crime scene made him leave his regular clothes behind.

Denne’s blond hair was ruffled and his mouth a thin line. He pulled open the door, nodded to Eddie, and then came into Retsler’s office without knocking.

Retsler had just finished going through the reports. Nothing from the area of the beach where they had found the seal pup. He would have expected something to come from the nearby hotels, perhaps, someone seeing the skinning of the pup or getting upset by the conduct of the beer drinkers. He was surprised no one had complained about the smell until that afternoon.

Denne sat in the chair before Retsler’s desk. Even though he was wearing his grubbiest clothes, Denne’s pants still had a crease, and even his sweatshirt looked pressed.

“If you can call two a pattern,” Denne said without preamble, “we’ve got one.”

“Looks like a different MO to me,” Retsler said. He’d had all afternoon to think about it. “Dog tortured to death, left on a stake beneath the Dee River Bridge. Pup’s skinned and burned on the beach. All those beer cans. I’m thinking a bunch of drunk kids got carried away—”

“Whoever skinned that pup was an expert,” Denne said. “The flesh was clean in the unburned areas. And the pup bled. It was alive, at least for part of it. But that isn’t the clincher.”

Retsler folded his hands over the report. He hadn’t wanted to hear that the pup was alive. He hated some of the things this profession made him think about.

“The clincher is the knife itself. It’s one of those thin serrated knives, made especially for that sort of work. Around here, folks usually use knives like that on deer or elk. It’s got a slight nick in the blade. It leaves an identifiable mark. The dog and the pup had it. If I’d thought to keep those cats, I bet they’d have had it too.”

Retsler sighed. Apparently Denne took that for disappointment because he added, “If I were dealing with human deaths here, I could make a case for a serial killer based on the knife evidence alone.”

“What else have you got?”

“Some fibers. A pretty good print, in blood, on the body itself.”

“Good,” Retsler said. “That’s a start. With that, and the cans, we might be able to find something.”

“Hope so.” Denne stood, then paused as if he had a thought. “There’s one more thing. It may be nothing, or it might be everything.”

“What?” Retsler asked.

“Did you find the pelt?”

Retsler shook his head. “I assumed it got burned.”

“No. There was no fur in the fire at all, and they were too far from the water line for it to have been swept away with the tide.”

“I’d better get someone to comb the beach, then,” Retsler said.

“Yeah,” Denne said. “But I don’t think you’ll find anything.”

Retsler met his gaze. “You think our friend is selling the pelts?”

“Probably not. I have a hunch we’re dealing with someone young here.”

Retsler felt himself go cold. “Trophy hunter.”

Denne nodded. “I suspected it with the dog, and I bet, if I looked at your report on the cats, I could find something too.”

“The horse’s mane,” Retsler murmured.

“Hmm?”

“Nothing,” Retsler said.

“If you don’t find that pelt,” Denne said, “I’d bet every dime I’ve got that our killer still has it.”

“Should make it easier to convict someone.”

“On what? Animal cruelty?” Denne said. “Seems minor for this kind of offense.”

Retsler agreed, but felt the day’s frustration fill him. “What am I supposed to charge him with? Prospective serial killing?”

“Wish you could,” Denne said.

“We’ll get the state involved,” Retsler said. “Maybe they’ll have ideas.”

“They’ll think we’re a small town with too much time on our hands.”

“Maybe they would have with the dog or the horse,” Retsler said. “But we’re dealing with a seal pup. That makes these TV news reporters sit up and beg.”

“Think twice before you invite those vultures here,” Denne said. “They’ll mess up the entire case.”

“I’ll wait,” Retsler said, “until I have something that’ll stick.”

Denne nodded. “I’ll give you all the help I can.”

Retsler smiled. “You’ve already given me plenty.”

***

The weekend wasn’t as calm as Retsler would have liked. Two major traffic accidents on 101 backed traffic for hours, and caused several more citations. A suspicious fire downtown in one of Whale Rocks failing seasonal businesses had Retsler calling in a state arson team. A Saturday night bar fight got out of control and spilled into the street, forcing Retsler to call his entire team to help quell the violence. He wasn’t able to think about seal pups and animal mutilations until he arrived at work at eight a.m. Monday morning, sleep-deprived, bruised, and more thankful than he cared to admit that all the tourists had finally gone home.

Lucy was already at her desk, an unlit cigar in her mouth. She had curly gray hair and a military manner that her grandmotherly face somehow softened. Retsler had known her since he was a boy, and sometimes she still made him feel like that boy. He really didn’t want to cross her.

She had two tall cups from Java Joes on her desk. As he passed, she handed him one. He turned to her in surprise. She had made it clear, when he became chief, that she didn’t do windows or coffee.

“What’s this for?”

“I figure you haven’t gotten no rest since New Year’s Eve. Caffeine won’t cure it, but it’ll cover it up.”

He grinned at her. “You’re a lifesaver, Lucy.”

She frowned. “Don’t go ruining my reputation.”

“I won’t tell a soul.”

“Good,” she said. Then she leaned back in her chair. “You got a woman in your office.”

He glanced over, surprised he had missed it. Maria Selvado was sitting primly in the chair in front of his desk, a vinyl purse clutched to her white sweater. Her coat hung over the back of the chair, and she wore what appeared to be a very cheap pair of boots beneath her faded jeans.

“How long’s she been here?”

“Half hour or so. I told her you don’t normally come in until ten.”

“Lucy!”

Lucy chuckled. “Well, I figured if you got in any earlier than ten, she’d think you were good at your job.”

“I am good at my job.”

“Just goes to show,” Lucy said. Then she raised an eyebrow at him. “And if you let that Eddie dig in my files again, so help me God, I’ll pour that coffee down your back.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

This time it was Retsler who chuckled as he headed to his office. Maria Selvado turned her face toward him. She looked even more exotic in the artificial light. “Chief,” she said in greeting.

“Dan,” he corrected.

She nodded. He sat behind his desk. She leaned forward, still clutching that purse. “I came for an update.”

“I can’t tell you much,” he said. “We know that the pup’s death is part of a pattern, and we are working on that angle. We have some leads—”

“A pattern?” she murmured.

He stopped, frowning. She seemed disturbed by his words. “Yes. There have been other animals killed in the same area—”

“But not other pups.”

“Not that we know of.”

She let out a small breath. The news seemed to relieve her. “But you have nothing on the killer.”

“Not yet.”

She raised those liquid eyes to his, and he thought he saw accusation in them. He parted his hands defensively, and then shook his head a little. He didn’t have to defend himself to anyone.

But he did say, because he felt she needed to know, “We don’t have much of a lab facility here. We’ve sent several items to the State Crime Lab. We should hear later today.”

She bit her lower lip. “You’ll keep me informed.”

“If I know where I can find you.”

“I’m at the Sandcastle.”

He shuddered. He couldn’t help it. Someone bought the land a year ago, and in that time tore down the old hotel. The new one had the look of the old—once one of the Coast’s premiere resorts—and people from all over the world had flocked to it in the last few days of the summer. But he had memories of the Sandcastle, memories of finding intact bodies before it, memories of unusual goings-on that dated to his boyhood—talk of ghosts and kelpies and strange creatures that emerged from the sea.

She looked amused. His reaction must have been visible. “They’ve remodeled,” she said. “It’s quite nice.”

“I have no doubt.”

She smiled and stood, her movements fluid and graceful. “Thank you for cooperating with me, Chief.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, and waited for her to leave before he shut his office door.

***

That night, Lucy chose the dinner spot and, as always, she picked the False Colors. It was a pirate-themed bar just off 101, but more locals went there than tourists. The sea chanties, played low, the fireplace that burned real wood, the ropes and life rings that came from real ships played to the out-of-towners, but most people who came to the coast brought their families. The skull and crossbones that decorated most corners, the human skulls on the mantel, the tales of death and murder framed on the walls were not the best atmosphere for children. So tourists usually came once and left, allowing the locals to enjoy the excellent food and the even better bar.

Retsler ordered his usual, a cutely named fish and chips entree that came with a large salad and a double order of bread. He got a Rogue Ale with that, and planned to get a huge dessert, thinking that the combination might allow him to go home and go to sleep at nine p.m.

Lucy had the fisherman’s platter, a meal three times the size of Retsler’s, and he knew by the end of the evening, she would have eaten all of it. After a few minutes, Eddie joined them.

He was still in uniform, and as he sat down, June the waitress scurried over. “You know Jeff don’t like it when you guys come in your blues,” she said in a half whisper.

“What’s he going to do, call the cops?” Lucy asked and then smiled, a grandmother with fangs.

“It’s just he doesn’t think the presence of police adds to the atmosphere.”

“He’s afraid the real pirates will stop patronizing the place,” Lucy said and chuckled.

“It’s okay,” Eddie said. “I won’t do it again. It’s just I had to talk to Dan and I didn’t have time to change.”

“Tell Jeff it’s January 4th and the tourists went home, not that they’re going to be in here anyway,” Dan said. “And tell him he can chase his regulars away if he wants, but this is the slow season and it probably wouldn’t be wise.”

June bobbed her head. “It wasn’t from me, you know. It’s just that Jeff—”

“Is delusional.” Lucy picked up a crab leg and broke it in half. “We know.”

June flushed. “You want something, Eddie?”

“Burger and fries and a diet.”

June left and Eddie leaned forward. “I’ve got a couple of things on that seal pup killing,” he said softly, even though there were no other patrons within hearing range. “Okay to tell you here?”

Sometimes Retsler frowned on discussing work at the False Colors. But that was usually in the summer, when the place was packed with first-timers who really didn’t need tales of car crashes and children crushed by driftwood logs as an accompaniment to their meals.

Retsler picked up a fry. “Let’s hear it.”

Any news would be good news. Retsler expected a visit the next morning from Maria Selvado, and he hadn’t heard from the crime lab yet. He supposed he could give her some information from Denne’s autopsy of the pup, but even someone as involved as Selvado probably didn’t want to hear about knife serrations and the fact that the pup had been skinned alive.

Retsler winced at the memory.

“You okay?” Eddie asked.

Retsler nodded. Then the main door opened, and Denne walked in. Retsler looked up. Denne’s wife had expressly forbidden him from coming here. She had discovered, through small-town gossip probably, that twice before he had shown up here to discuss a case, and had demanded that he not disgrace the family by showing his face in the False Colors again.

Yet there he was, in a charcoal-colored silk suit with a sterling silver pocket watch attached to a fob on the outside. His blond hair had been slicked back, and his aesthetic face looked almost haunted.

“She’s pushing him too hard,” Lucy murmured. “He’s drifting over to the other side.”

Retsler started, then considered the evidence: the truck, the clothes Denne had worn home on New Years, and now the appearance at the False Colors. Denne was abandoning his gated community for the peasants who ran this small town.

Eddie sighed. “You want to hear this or not?”

“Let’s wait for Hamilton,” Retsler said as he waved. Denne smiled—he never quite grinned—and walked down the worn stairs into the main dining area. As he did, he stopped June and ordered, then took the only empty chair at the table.

“Eddie,” Retsler said, “was about to tell us news on our seal pup.”

“Really?” Denne removed his suit coat and hung it on the back of the chair.

Then he rolled up the sleeves of his white button-down shirt, revealing muscular forearms. With his left hand, he loosened his tie, and pulled it off. The entire group was watching him with astonishment. Retsler could feel his own mouth open in surprise.

Denne raised his eyebrows. “Don’t let me stop you, Eddie.”

“Um, yeah.” Eddie shot Denne a slightly perplexed look, then said, “I been having conversations all day, casual ones, you know.”

Retsler did know. One of the strengths of Whale Rock was its citizens’ willingness to discuss anything if approached properly by someone they knew. A glance at the ocean, a mention of the dead pup, and a softly worded query about something related often got a glut of information.

“And I didn’t get nothing on anyone selling pelts.”

“I called fifteen different departments,” Lucy said as she stabbed a scallop with her fork, “and no one in the entire State of Oregon has heard of anyone poaching seals.”

“I asked her to. Hope you don’t mind, boss,” Eddie said.

A year ago, Eddie never would have taken that kind of initiative. “I gave you the legwork of the investigation,” Retsler said. “You can divide it up how you want.”

June brought a longneck for Eddie and an Alaskan Amber for Denne. Retsler looked at him in surprise, but Denne didn’t seem to notice. Lucy did, however, and winked.

“Then what did you need to tell me?” Retsler asked when June left.

“You remember when they tore down the Sandcastle to make way for the new version?”

“A mistake if there ever was one,” Denne said. “You do realize the hotel is on the beach.”

They all looked at him. Building on the beaches—on the sand—was against the law in Oregon.

“How’d that happen?” Retsler said.

“You know the Planning Commission.” Denne took a sip of the amber and looked like a man who had just had the most sublime experience of his life.

“It’s a state law,” Lucy said.

Denne raised his eyebrows. “The Sandcastle Hotel predates the law. The Commission claimed they couldn’t do anything because it grandfathers in.”

“How much did Roman Taylor pay them?” Retsler asked.

“Pay them? Kickbacks, in our small town? Impossible.” Denne leaned back. “Just a sidebar. Didn’t mean to derail you, Eddie.”

Eddie grunted, and took a sip out of his longneck. “Anyway,” he said, “when they were bulldozing the Sandcastle, they found an open area underneath it. There was all kinds of junk under there, old watches, gold coins, shiny stuff. Some of it wasn’t worth much, but some of it was worth a lot, and Taylor said he got it, because he bought the property. Nobody fought him about it and nobody tried to trace it.”

“And, not surprisingly, nobody thought to call us,” Retsler said.

Eddie nodded, meeting his gaze. “Ain’t it amazing how some things just don’t make it to our attention until we can’t do nothing about them.”

“So what do the shiny things have to do with this investigation?” Lucy asked.

“Well, in there was a pile of fur, all sleek and shiny. Turns out it was seal pelts—about twenty of them. Just beautiful things. I guess Taylor’s the kind of guy who hangs deer heads on the walls and he was really excited about them pelts. He took them home.”

Retsler whistled. “This was what? Last January?”

“Yep,” Eddie said. “And that’s not all. Various folks have come up asking for them seal pelts, even though the only people who knew about them were the digging crew and Taylor. Taylor won’t talk to anybody about them.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Lucy said.

June set down Eddie’s hamburger, and placed a double cheeseburger—an item the False Colors proudly called its Gut Blaster—in front of Denne. Retsler couldn’t resist.

“Your wife isn’t going to be too happy when you come home smelling of hot sauce, jalapeños, and onions.”

Denne shrugged. “The woman’s got to learn to calm down.”

This time, Eddie was the one who raised his eyebrows. He picked up the catsup and proceeded to pour it all over his food. “I got one more thing to tell you about them pelts,” he said. “The latest person who’s come to inquire about them is Maria Selvado. She’s been after Taylor since the first of December, and she’s got the Marine Science Center behind her. Guess they’re doing some sort of seal study or something, and the pelts would be really useful. They’re even offering to pay him. But he won’t meet with her. She says she’s not leaving until he does.”

“Our Miss Selvado gets around,” Lucy said.

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “She even went up to his house on the Dee. Got real mad when she saw how he’s displaying the pelts. Guess he’s got them in one of those wall-sized glass cases beside his fireplace. He came to the door and she was yelling something about pins ruining the fur, or something. Anyway, he threw her off the porch, damn near landed her in the river. She hasn’t been up there since.”

“But there was a break-in,” Retsler said.

“Thwarted break-in,” Lucy said. “The alarm kicked on with the sirens and all the lights, remember?”

“And tiny footprints, woman-sized, in the mud beside the window on the fireplace side of the house. Passionate woman,” Retsler said.

“Mystery woman,” Denne said. “She called me, asking if she could have the pup’s body when I was through with it, said she wanted it for the Science Center. I offered to drive it over there for her—I mean, who wants a corpse in your car if you can help it?—and she turned me down. That made me suspicious, so I called the Science Center.”

“And they’d never heard of her,” Lucy said, her eyes sparkling as they always did when the story started getting juicy.

“Oh, they’d heard of her all right. But she hadn’t worked for them for six months. Seems that she broke into the Oregon Coast Aquarium last summer, and was going to liberate the seals. Security stopped her before she made it to the outdoor pen, but the Aquarium offered not to press charges—which would have embarrassed the Science Center—if she promised to leave Newport. She did.”

“And came here?” Retsler asked. “That seems odd to me. We’re not that far from Newport.”

Denne nodded. “The Science Center is none too happy that she’s still representing herself as part of their staff. Not that she was ever staff-staff anyway. She was one of the student projects, interns or whatever, that they get coming through. But they still don’t want their name connected to hers.”

“And they have no interest in the seal pelts?” Retsler asked.

“None,” Denne said.

Lucy nodded. “Selkies,” she said.

All three of them turned to her. She grinned and shrugged. “Come on,” she said. “We have no secrets between us. We are talking Whale Rock, aren’t we?”

“Silkies?” Eddie asked.

“Selkies,” Retsler said. He’d been boning up on his sea-faring lore since the last strange encounter. “They look like seals in the sea, but when they come on shore and shed their skin, they look human.”

“Oh, God,” Eddie said.

“But don’t they usually come looking for love?” Denne asked. “Aren’t they supposed to mate with human women, leave them pregnant, and return to the sea?”

“You’ve been reading too many Celtic stories,” Lucy said. “That may have been true hundreds of years ago. But I think selkies are more sophisticated than that.”

“Sophisticated?” Denne placed his chin on the palm of his hand and looked at her. “Do you mean they’re sending their children ashore in search of a better education?”

“You may mock me, young man, but think about it. What better way to find out about the things that threaten your people than to study those things?”

Retsler was silent. A lot threatened the seal population, which had been thinning in recent years. Some blamed oil spills farther up the coast, others blamed changes in commercial fishing laws, and still others blamed things like tourists taking pups off the beaches. Whatever the cause, there were fewer seals in the last few years than there had been in a long time.

“That seal pup,” Denne said, “was 100 percent seal. There was nothing magical about it.”

“The myths say that the smaller seals—like the common seal—belong entirely to the animal world, but the larger seals, like the gray, the great, and the crested, can be selkie folk.” Lucy pushed her plate aside. “How else do you explain the clean, unrotted pelts, found among all that shiny stuff, as Eddie calls it. It was a nest, a place to hide wealth that enabled them to trade in Whale Rock.”

Retsler put aside the remains of his fish and chips. “So?” he asked. “We have a bunch of selkies in human form walking around Whale Rock?”

“Or in the sea without their pelts. It’s probably hazardous to their health.” Lucy shook her head. “A year’s a long time.”

“What does this have to do with our dead pup?” Denne asked.

“Maybe nothing,” Lucy said, “but selkies do have a kinship with seals. They’re probably not happy about this.”

“You think Maria Selvado is a selkie?” Retsler asked.

“I didn’t say that.” Lucy sniffed loudly. Of course she hadn’t said that. She had implied it, like she often did, and Retsler could ignore her at his own peril.

“Selkies,” Denne mused. “I thought selkies were dangerous.”

“Only if you’re a man in lust,” Retsler said.

“No,” Lucy said. “They are dangerous, if you kill one.”

“What?” Eddie asked, setting down the longneck. “All the other selkies toss their pelts at you?”

“No,” Lucy said. “If you kill one, don’t get its blood in the ocean.”

“Or?” Denne asked.

“Or a storm’ll come up the likes of which you’ve never seen.”

Retsler sighed. “Do you actually believe that, Lucy?”

She met his gaze. There was no twinkle in her gray eyes. “I’ve seen a lot of things, Dan. I don’t disbelieve anything.”

“But you don’t actually believe it.”

“Let me put it this way,” Lucy said. “That myth is not one I’d want to test.”

***

“The language is plain, Retsler.” Roman Taylor was a large man, made to seem even larger by the low ceilings in the second story of his riverside home. He hunched over a rough-hewn log table, made to match the rough edges on the outer walls. The inner walls were smooth and painted white. It was on one of those that a huge case with the pelts gleamed in the morning sunshine. “I bought the Sandcastle Hotel and all its contents. The pelts and the treasures in that room around them were inside the Sandcastle. No one disputes that.”

Retsler stared at the deed before him. Apparently he stared too long because Taylor shifted from one foot to another.

The language was clear. Taylor did own the pelts and there was nothing Retsler could do about it.

“Maybe you should show this to the city attorney,” Taylor said. “Then maybe people’ll leave me alone.”

“They’ll leave you alone now,” Retsler said. “Sorry to bother you.”

Taylor nodded once at the apology. Then he glanced at the case. “That woman’s crazy, you know. If I could find a way to get her out of my hotel I would. If you could think of something, I’d be forever in your debt.”

“Has she broken any laws, Mr. Taylor?”

“I’d be the first to scream if she did.” He walked over to the case. “She says the seals that had these pelts are still alive, and they need them. Isn’t that nuts? You can’t skin an animal like this and have the animal live.”

“Can I see one?” Retsler asked.

Taylor opened the case. The glass swung open, and the scent of fur and an animal musk filled the room. “Come here.”

Retsler obliged. The pelts glistened as if they were still wet, but there was a dullness that was starting to appear around their edges.

Taylor picked up a corner of the nearest fur. “See that?” he asked. “Best work I’ve ever seen. Not a trace of flesh, no knife marks. Just the fur. Isn’t it beautiful?”

Beautiful wasn’t a word that Retsler would have used, but he nodded anyway.

“Hey, Dad!”

Both men turned. A teenage boy stood in the stairwell, face flushing when he saw Retsler.

“Didn’t know you had company,” the boy said.

“The chief’s just leaving.”

The boy grunted. He stood perfectly still as if movement weren’t allowed. “Why’re you showing him the pelts?”

Something in the question made Retsler look at the boy. The boy’s eyes were bright, almost too bright. And cold. So cold that Retsler felt a chill run through him.

“He’d heard about them, that’s all,” Taylor said.

“Dad thinks those pelts are the real thing,” the boy said, his chin raised in something of a challenge.

Retsler became completely still. “You don’t?”

“I think they’re fake. I think he should get them checked.”

“Why?” Retsler asked.

“Because I don’t care how good you are, you can’t remove a pelt making a single cut.”

“Hmm,” Retsler said. “Have you tried?”

“He hunts with me sometimes,” Taylor said too fast. “Don’t you, Michael?”

“We’ve never hunted together in our lives. My father never pays attention to me.” The boy tilted his head, eyeing Retsler speculatively. “You ever spend New Year’s Eve on the beach, chief?”

Retsler didn’t answer. Taylor’s face flushed.

“It’s amazing what people’ll burn—”

“Michael!” Taylor said.

The boy grinned and shrugged, as if he had just been making conversation. “Nice seeing you. Chief.”

And then he walked down the stairs. Retsler’s entire body had turned numb. He had expected a teenager, but not one that would challenge him. Although he had heard stories about Michael Taylor for the last year. A teacher at the high school had asked how to deal with a boy who seemed to love violence. A female student filed a complaint, only to withdraw it a day later.

Retsler debated for a moment whether or not he should follow, whether or not he should search the boy’s room, and then decided the boy wouldn’t issue a challenge like that if he expected to get caught. Better to take it slow, build a case the right way. Maybe Retsler could even talk to Taylor, convince him to send the boy to a hospital where he could get help.

“Sorry about that,” Taylor was saying. “He’s at that age when no adult is worth his time.”

Retsler stared at him. Taylor’s flush deepened. “You know we found a skinned pup on the beach New Year’s Day.”

“No,” Taylor said. “I hadn’t. It’s amazing what people will do.”

“Isn’t it?” Retsler asked. He looked at the case again. “How many of these did you find?”

“Twenty,” Taylor said. “And that’s how many are there.”

Retsler silently counted to himself. Twenty. If the other pelt was here, it was somewhere else. “Maybe I should take a peek at your son’s room.”

“Not without a warrant,” Taylor said.

Retsler nodded. It played out just as he expected. He shrugged, like the boy had, then he thanked Taylor for his time, and left the house.

The river was low here, sixty feet down the bank, and sparkling in the bright sunshine. Taylor had bought the land and built the house the year before he had bought the Sandcastle. Lucy said that Taylor had spent that year getting on the good side of the Planning Commission. Lucy would know.

The pelts were disturbing, the boy more so. But Taylor had a legal right to the pelts, and Retsler would have to work hard to make anything more than a misdemeanor stick on the boy. Taylor had more money than God, which meant that he could afford the biggest lawyers in the country.

Retsler was suddenly walking into the big leagues, and he wasn’t even sure he wanted to play the game.

***

The State Crime Lab could find no match on the fingerprints, nor did they have anything to say about the requests from Whale Rock. They apologized profusely, but perfunctorily, and probably, when they got off the phone, chuckled at the things that passed for important in small towns.

Retsler didn’t care. He had other things to check. Lucy had called Seavy County Deeds and Records, and had found the date of Taylor’s home purchase. It was one month before the animal mutilations started near Hoover Bay. Now she was checking with the local police department in Taylor’s previous home in San Jose, hoping to find another pattern.

It wasn’t much, but it was a start. He also had a call in to an old friend at the FBI who might have a few ideas on how to proceed in a case as delicate, and insubstantial, as this one. Animal deaths and mutilations were bad enough, but, truth be told, they weren’t what Retsler was really worried about. What worried him the most were the coldness of that boy’s eyes, and the possibility—make that the probability—of what the boy would become.

Retsler had all that on his mind as he drove to the Sandcastle. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to see Maria Selvado, but he knew he probably should.

Her room was on the top floor of the Sandcastle Hotel. Like all of the rooms, it had double glass doors on the ocean side that opened onto an extra-long balcony. When she led Retsler onto it, it made him feel as if he were standing over the water. He supposed, in high tide, that he would be. The balconies hung over the concrete breaker that protected the hotel from high surf—another illegal measure grandfathered in by the Planning Commission. Retsler had hated the look from the ground, but he had to admit that, from the balconies themselves, the view was spectacular.

Selvado had let him in, no questions asked. That she had been in her room on such a beautiful afternoon, neither of them mentioned. The room itself was spectacular. The door opened into a hallway which led to a large bathroom, passed a king-sized bedroom, and opened into a well-apportioned sitting room filled with antiques and facing a marble fireplace. The ubiquitous television was hidden in a wall unit that still looked suspiciously out of place. It was also covered with dust.

The ocean breeze had a trace of mist. Selvado raised her face to it as if it gave her life. She was obviously waiting for him to speak.

He cleared his throat. “I spoke to Roman Taylor today about the pelts.”

She turned, stunned.

“He showed me the deed. They’re clearly his.”

“They have nothing to do with him,” she said fiercely. “They don’t belong to him.”

“By law they do.”

She bit her lip and turned away. “The law is wrong.”

“The law is what we have, Ms. Selvado. It may not be right all the time, it may not make things easy, but it’s what we have.”

She shook her head. “It’s not enough.”

He knew that. He leaned on the balcony railing, and dangled his arms over the edge. This next part he did partly because he knew he had made her angry, and he agreed with Taylor: she had to leave Whale Rock. She was too unpredictable. Retsler was afraid she would try to break into Taylor’s house again. If she got near that teenage boy, her own life might be in danger.

“I’ve also learned that you’re presenting yourself as an employee of the Marine Science Center, and asking for privileges due to your position.”

“I am—”

“You were,” he said. “I found out about the dismissal. You’re bordering on fraud, Ms. Selvado. I’ll look at your actions as a simple misunderstanding right now, but any more of it, and I’ll have to inform the Newport police.”

She whirled toward him, her liquid eyes full of fire. There was a power to her, like the sea the day before a storm. “You wouldn’t.”

“I have to, Ms. Selvado.”

“Taylor put you up to this.”

“No.” Retsler sighed. He would give her this next because he had to give her something, and then he would ask her to leave. “I’m dealing with Taylor in my own fashion. I’m trying to make a case against his son. I’m pretty sure the boy is the one who slaughtered that pup.”

“Pretty sure?”

He held out his hands. “Meaning I’m convinced the boy’s the one we want. I simply have to prove it. So if you’ll leave me to my work, maybe I’ll be able to help you.”

“Bargain the boy’s freedom for the pelts?”

“No,” Retsler said. “I think the boy’s too dangerous for that.”

“Then what?”

“I’m not sure yet,” he said, and felt the emptiness of his promise. “But I’ll do the best I can.”

“By asking me to leave town?” she asked.

“It’s a start,” he said.

“For you perhaps.” Then she paused. The ocean was a deep clear blue. The sunshine this early in January was unusual, and welcome. She stared at it as if it gave her an idea. “And maybe for me as well.”

***

The next morning brought a spate of strange calls: boats all over the coastline and up the river had been damaged, not badly enough to ruin them, but enough to prevent anyone from going on the ocean that day. At a dock near Hoover Village, one old fisherman claimed he saw a group of seals nudging a hole in the hull of his boat, then moving to his neighbor’s boat at the next mooring. Retsler had to call his entire staff in to meet the workload of examining each and every boat, and Lucy had the volunteer firemen help as well.

Retsler was so busy, he missed what later turned out to be the most important calls of the day.

Hotel patrons of the Sandcastle lit up the emergency lines with a gruesome tale: a dark-haired woman, bleeding from both arms, dove off her balcony into the sea.

When Retsler finally got the page, he knew at once who had died. Maria Selvado. And he had felt a chill. He went over to the Sandcastle, and demanded to be let into her room.

The door was locked from the inside. A bloody knife sat on the back of the toilet. The bathroom floor was covered with blood. The trail led to the balcony. There was only one set of footprints—women’s size six, flat footed (no arch) with webs between the toes. They ended at the railing, although there were bloody handprints on the iron, and another splotch of blood on the top of the concrete breaker.

The body below was gone, taken by the rising tide, returned to the sea.

On the fireplace mantel was a note addressed to Retsler. It said, simply: When the laws of man fail, we rely on the laws of God. And it was signed with an M.

***

The storm came an hour later, at high tide. Intense and furious, it concentrated on Hoover Bay, the Dee River, and Whale Rock. The rest of the coast had delicious sun and a perfect January day. In Whale Rock, sustained winds of 100 miles per hour ripped the roof off a gas station, tore down several signs, and knocked out power to half the town. Waves crossed the concrete breaker and smashed into the Sandcastle Hotel, destroying it as if it were made of paper.

Retsler had ordered an emergency evacuation of all low-lying areas, even though the National Weather Service swore that the satellite pictures showed no storm system in the vicinity. He had the radio and TV stations broadcast warnings, ordering everyone to high ground, to places that could survive winds, to places of safety. And because he was trusted, the town listened.

Someone later said that the storm would have caused a lot more destruction if it weren’t for Retsler’s clear thinking. Later they would call him a hero because he had saved hundreds of lives. That only two were lost in a freak storm, the governor would say, was miraculous. But Retsler knew better. He knew, the moment he saw the blood, how he had failed.

***

Denne stood, a shadow in the growing darkness. He picked up the McDonald’s bag and shoved his Styrofoam cup into it. Then he walked around the boat to Retsler.

“You’ve ruined those clothes,” Retsler said, avoiding, knowing that he was avoiding. He shut off his flashlight, listening to the calm ocean in the distance, the gurgle of the river behind him. In the darkness, the cloying stink of the mud was almost overpowering. “The wife’ll be mad.”

“The wife isn’t entitled to an opinion anymore,” Denne said. “New Year’s resolution.”

“You can’t stop a woman from having an opinion.”

“You can when you move out.” Denne turned on his own flashlight. The beam illuminated the mud before them, and the footprints that led up to the Taylor’s log house. He put a hand on Retsler’s back. “You can’t avoid this forever, Danny.”

“I’m no sure I want to see this in the dark.”

“It won’t be any better in the light.”

Denne led the way down the path that, twenty-four hours before, had been covered with greenery and winter flowers. He mounted the stairs to the main level.

The windows were gone, the door off its hinges. The water damage was so severe that the rough-hewn logs looked as if they’d been polished smooth.

Denne ducked inside. He shone a light toward the fireplace. It took a moment for Retsler’s eyes to adjust. The light was reflecting off the glass on the case. He stepped away from the beam and peered inside.

Roman Taylor had been crammed into the square space, his arms and legs held in place by some wickedly tight knots. It didn’t take a degree in forensic medicine to know that the man had been alive when he had been tied down. The water mark was two inches below the ceiling, and there was mud in the bottom of the case.

Mercifully, Denne moved the light. Retsler didn’t use his.

“I’ll photograph all of this tomorrow,” Denne said.

“There’s no need,” Retsler said. “He drowned.”

Denne looked sharply at him.

Retsler shrugged. “Who am I going to charge?”

“You might want to wait until you see the rest.” Denne led him down the stairs into the daylight basement. In the corner, someone had stuck a log into the floor. It looked like one of the mooring posts that littered the river. On it, Taylor’s son Michael—or what was left of him—stared balefully at them.

Retsler swallowed hard to keep down the bile. He recognized the position—recognized everything, in fact, right down to the expression on Michael’s face.

The dog. That was how they had found the dog.

Denne raised his flashlight beam. It caught on a knife stuck into the pole. The knife was serrated and used for gutting animals. The handle was ivory, and engraved on it, was this: Michael Taylor. Happy 13th Birthday. Love, Dad.

“Is it our knife?” Retsler asked.

“No doubt about it,” Denne said.

Retsler closed his eyes. He would have had the proof he needed after all. Damn him for talking to Selvado. Damn him and his worries about a conviction. Damn him, and the lack of respect he had for his own abilities.

“Of course,” Denne said slowly, “any good lawyer could make hash of a case based on one single knife.”

“Really?” Retsler asked.

“I think so,” Denne said. He took one more glance at the body. “And I don’t think I was alone in that belief.”

“Millions of dollars in damage,” Retsler said. “Lives ruined. Two deaths. Because of me and my mouth.”

“You didn’t start this,” Denne said.

“But I should have ended it,” Retsler said. He sighed and sloshed his way back to the stairs. “Next time, I trust Lucy.”

“Next time?” Denne asked, following him. “Let’s hope to God there is no next time.”

But there would be, Retsler knew. As long as Whale Rock was here, as long as strange things happened, there would be another clash between the humans and the strange creatures that lived in the sea. He only hoped that the next time, he would try some cooperation, maybe learn how to bend the laws of man, so that no one had to rely on the laws of God.

____________________________________________

“Strange Creatures” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

Love Kris’s series stories, like Seavy County? Support her latest Kickstarter containing 50 stories from her different series – Go here now to check it out! 

Strange Creatures

Copyright © 2014 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Earth, Air, Fire, Water, edited by Margaret Weis, DAW, November, 1999
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2014 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Artalis/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

 

You know, sometimes cats make great assistants, and sometimes, no matter how hard they try, they’re not up for the task. Angel tried to help me with my writing challenge in December, but it didn’t work. First of all, I gave up writing on yellow legal pads in the seventh grade. (Although I did write something like six novels on them, mostly fan fic, because…hello!…I was twelve.)

Anyway, I had a challenge with folks to write three short stories in December. Some writers did that. All the writers who joined and finished a story beat me. Because currently, the story I started is 43,000 words long. Yep, I’m working on a surprise novel. But the December challenge got me back to short fiction—and I wanted to do something similar all year.

I have a lot of novels to write in 2025. They’re pent up, because as of August or so, I couldn’t really concentrate. Too busy saving the business, moving WMG to Nevada, finishing up some other projects, dealing with a legal headache, and a whole bunch of other things. Most of that has cleared, and now my writing brain is ready to go. But it wants to write all the novels and all the short stories…and I know me. I will focus on the novels and forget the short stories unless I have a deadline.

So, writers! I’m going to use you as my assistants in setting a deadline. Not for three short stories each month, but for one. Yep, just one.

Here’s the rules as Dean wrote them written on the Teachable website:

Kris is planning on writing one story a month. So she thought she would open it up as a way to keep herself focused and also to help others focus. So one story per month to write along with Kris.

If Kris writes one story per month and you write at least one or more stories per month, you double your $50 fee in credit on Teachable.

This Write Along goes for three months, then starts over if you want to keep going.

If Kris does not write one story per month for those three months, then no matter how many stories you write, you double your $50 fee in credit on Teachable.

Short story must be over 3,000 words. No upper limit.

No genre limitations.

Kris will report to all of you regularly through each month as she writes or finishes a story.

The cost is $50. This Write Along will repeat every three months. Kris hopes to write 12 stories in a year at least, but she wants to do one per month no matter what else she is writing.

(No credit from anything, I am afraid. Can’t buy in with credit to get more credit.)

So in essence, you are buying at least $50 credit and getting the chance to give yourself a focus to write one short story per month and hear from Kris along the way about her writing.

Kris is excited to do this. She really wants to get 12 stories done this year and feels this will keep her focused on it.

This is a win/win/win write along. Jump in, should be fun and get your writing fired up for the new year!

Lifetime Everything Subscribers, if you want to jump in, write me and I will send you the code and you can do it for fun.

Questions, write to Dean. The email address is on Teachable.

And, speaking of Teachable, because of the weirdness of having four holidays midweek, we decided to extend the 12 Days of Workshops sale. If you really want challenges, then you can get all of our challenges are half off right now, and there are some great ones. There are a lot of other great workshops and deals in the 12 Days, so take a look. It’ll end later this week.

Portia, a magical theatrical dramaturg, answers a friend’s call to help a group of frightened high school theater students connect with their new theater. Fording through snow and the holidays, Portia must discover the cause of their fear—and then fix it, magically. No easy task. 

When theater, ghosts and students collide, Portia must balance all three to keep everyone’s spirits alive.

“Theatrical Revival” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here. 

And if you want more holiday stories, fill your holiday reading stocking to last the whole year here on the Holiday Spectacular store.

 

Theatrical Revival A Wyrd Sisters Story By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

ONE

We don’t celebrate Christmas in our family. My mother and her sisters took the entire Christmas season as an affront. The family usually gathered anyway—sometimes for a Yule celebration, but more often for some Solstice rituals—and we girls had to suffer through the complaints of our mother and her sisters.

They considered Christmas stolen, so that the Roman Catholic Church could convert the pagans from their own religion into something male and patriarchal and horrible.

I’m not going to recap the arguments here. I can still hear them ringing in my ears. Whenever we shopped or had a lovely dinner out of the house or saw Christmas lights, someone launched into an aggrieved litany of everything that had gone wrong since most people stopped believing in magic.

Nowadays, with Aunt Eustacia the only remaining member of that generation, we don’t even assemble at holiday time. Aunt Eustacia takes a cruise—one that pointedly avoids Christmas traditions—and my sisters and I have gone our separate ways long ago, unless we are working on a project together.

My friends at the university consider me one of those sad-sack professors with no place to go during that most wonderful time of the year.

I do consider it wonderful, but for an entirely different reason. Yale shuts down during the holidays. From the Wednesday before the Big Christian Holiday to a few days before the start of Spring Term, no one lives on campus.

Technically, no professor should work in her office either, but that rule got tossed decades ago. Some research needs to continue day in and day out, holidays be damned. And some of us just prefer our offices to our homes, for a variety of reasons.

I prefer my office because it’s a great, quiet place to work. My office proper is in a tower of one of the pseudo-Gothic buildings that dot the campus. Books line the walls and my desk faces the cross-hatched windows that overlook the paths that wend their way between buildings.

The stone walls make me feel like I’m working in an actual castle; the forced air heat keeps me comfortable when I don’t want to light a fire in the big stone fireplace. Phones and computers and anything else that smacks of modern technology lives in my secretary’s area, which is an actual antechamber. Edna is a dragon who keeps all but the most deserving out of my sanctum sanctorum, so that I may remain private and safe while researching whatever project I’m working on.

Still, I suffer from a surfeit of kindness. Everyone wants me at their celebrations. I get invited to meals, holiday gatherings, and the occasional large holiday party—all before December 25.

I’d rather be in my office, finishing up research or my latest book. I work in the theater department here although I often teach in the history and English departments as well. Normally, I teach Elizabethan and Theatrical Studies.

But, mostly, I work as a dramaturge. As far as I know, I am the only magical dramaturg in the country, if not the English-speaking world. So I get hired out a lot on various productions, sometimes before the production is even started, but often when it hits some kind of snag that has a supernatural element. This is not something I discuss at Yale, or pretty much anywhere. But word does get around in the theatrical community.

When the cases are difficult, my sisters work with me. That’s how our family works. Going all the way back to the Middle Ages, each generation of our family has three girls, born in rapid succession. We all have magic, made greater by the presence of our sisters.

We are the basis for Shakespeare’s Wyrd Sisters in the Scottish Play, although we rarely claim it. After all, our ancestors weren’t that well portrayed—and often still aren’t in the modern productions. Hags, witches, scary creatures.

We aren’t scary but we can be a presence. Which is why I try to work alone as much as possible. Modern theater folk can be…jumpy at best.

This year, Aunt Eustacia offered to pay for us all to join her on her cruise. Being trapped with a thousand people on the ocean, even if they weren’t celebrating the holidays, sounded like my idea of hell. My sister Rosalind considered it, but mainly because she hadn’t seen some of the pagan ceremonial sites the cruise line promised to take passengers to.

When she heard that these trips would be curated with a guide, she opted to spend her holidays in Hawaii. Viola didn’t even consider the cruise. She was preparing for the Consumer Electronics Show that would start in Las Vegas the first week of the new year.

Viola is the only one of us who can operate computers and other such technology without blowing it all up. We rely on her for that when we are working together.

Otherwise, I have Edna handle the phones and the computer details and even the computer research. She prints out a lot of things for me, all the while complaining about the waste—even though she is one of the few people who has actually seen the effect I have on electronics. She removes her smart watch before entering my office, leaves her cell phone on her desk, and commands me to stand as far away from her laptop as possible when she tries to show me a video.

Still, we’ve gotten reprimanded by the department quite a few times for our electronics budget. I’ve taken to funding new laptops on my own.

I had planned to dig into the research I was doing on our family during the break. I had gone to England more than once to research the family background and our connection to Shakespeare. I was looking forward to afternoons spent in the fading light of my office, a cup of tea steaming on my desk, and reading every single bit of analysis on the Wyrd Sisters that I could find.

I’d even mapped out my research, which is something I do only when I’m serious.

My mistake was listening to a friend. Amber Harrington had been the fifth trophy wife of a now-disgraced Broadway megaproducer. At the time of her marriage, though, his piggish behavior was only the stuff of rumors, since every single person who worked in one of his productions had to sign a non-disclosure agreement before starting the job.

Amber was divorcing the man for reasons that she kept mostly to herself. But the pretty and vivacious woman who had hired me to make sure their wedding venue was free of “unkind spirits” had become a brittle, fragile woman who was determined to use the fortune that her soon-to-be-former husband had already given her to improve the life of theater kids everywhere.

I liked Amber. She had a good heart, and she had already been through hell in the five years of her marriage. That she had survived more or less intact was a small miracle. That she had enough spine to keep sending her lawyers in to try to finagle more money out of her ex was a surprise.

She wasn’t really that interested in the money. She’d received six million per year in “petty cash” during those five years, and she’d moved it all to accounts her ex couldn’t touch. She was supposed to get another ten million from the pre-nup. She didn’t need more money.

But she had learned a few things from the gossip and the rumors, and she was appalled that she had been a cover for what she called the criminal behavior of her ex. She wanted her attorneys to break those NDAs, claiming that they prevented her from getting needed financial information for the divorce.

She knew—he knew—we all knew that if those NDAs got broken, a lot more than financial information would hit the entertainment press.

But going after him in this moment meant she was ostracized from the theatrical community she once called home. She couldn’t attend the holiday parties, she didn’t go to the holiday shows, and she was uninvited from the gatherings that she had once organized.

Instead, she holed up in her Greenwich home, the six bedroom six-million dollar “English bungalow” that her ex had given her free and clear as a wedding present.

It was in the center of the city. She had hired me to advise the architect and the designer on ways to suggest authenticity without destroying the home’s original design. She and I had bonded then because she had been easy to work with—both on the wedding venue and the house.

I loathed her ex. So I had added a few wards to make the house uncomfortable for him. He had already gone through four other wives, discarding them when they publicly expressed opinions—or, in the case of his first, aged out of the fresh-faced look she had in her twenties.

I never told Amber about the wards, but I think she knew. The soon-to-be-ex hated the house and wouldn’t visit it with her, so he wasn’t contesting her ownership of it (not that he would have won; he had given it to her).

So when Amber asked me to join her for Christmas, I had mistakenly assumed that it would be just the two of us. Instead, it was a gathering of aggrieved women who all agreed to help Amber “destroy” the wine cellar.

The wine cellar was the only part of the house that the soon-to-be ex wanted. Tens if not hundreds of thousands in rare wines. Amber couldn’t make a dent in all of it, but she was going to try.

The divorce attorneys hadn’t gotten around to itemizing the wine cellar yet, so she held a week’s worth of catered meals, all with the proper wine pairing.

I lasted through two days of drunken theatrical mirth before making my apologies. I planned to walk to the train station. It wasn’t that far from Amber’s house, and I needed to decompress. The small layer of snow that had fallen the night before didn’t bother me.  I was used to it, from walking the campus. I just wasn’t used to dragging a suitcase behind me.

I was wrestling with the suitcase on the driveway when Amber caught up to me. Her brown hair was flying out of its bun and she wasn’t wearing any makeup.

“Come back inside, Portia,” she said.

“I need to get back,” I said.

“A mysterious trip with your sisters?” she asked. Amber was one of the few people who knew about our familial talents.

I could have lied to her and told her yes, but I didn’t like lying to her. Too many people had.

“No,” I said. “I’m just not a wine-and-dine kinda girl.”

She smiled. “Yeah. It is indulgent, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“Still,” she said. “Come back inside with me, have some coffee and a good breakfast. I’d like to talk with you. Then I’ll have Severson drive you home.”

Severson was her official chauffeur. She had a staff of five at this house, although she had given most of them the week off.

“I’m not good for modern cars,” I said. “Too many computerized parts. I’ll take the train.”

“Well,” she said. “Metro-North has trains every half an hour. You can sit with me and get back just a bit later, can’t you?”

I let out a small sigh. I didn’t really want to sit any longer, nor did I want to eat. I was tired of socializing.

“I know this isn’t your thing,” Amber said. “I just wanted familiar faces. But I had another reason for bringing you here. I need your assistance.”

That was the best way to get me to do whatever it was she needed. I sighed again and dragged my suitcase across the driveway a second time, then lugged it up the old wooden stairs.

The wraparound porch did not fit with either period, but it was the only design feature that Amber had insisted upon. Even now, it was graced with big fluffy couches covered with blankets, large chairs with reading lamps, and wooden tables that we had to wend our way through.

Hardly anyone was stirring in the house. The sleep-over guests, of which there were five (not counting me) were still sleeping it off. The kitchen had the only light.

The kitchen wasn’t period either. It was state-of-the-art, with a six-burner stove, a gigantic refrigerator, a wine fridge, two microwaves, and—I’m sure—a million other trendy things that I couldn’t see. I never explored it, just sat at the comfortable table near the gabled windows overlooking the snow covered back yard.

The kitchen smelled of fresh coffee and I had to admit that was better than the swill I had planned to drink on the 90-minute train ride up to New Haven.

Someone had delivered baked goods from one of the stellar bakeries in the city, along with a box of bagels from a deli I recognized. There was a note attached to the bagel pile, which stated that there were lox and various cream cheeses inside the gigantic refrigerator.

I poured myself a giant mug of coffee, added some cream and sugar, and grabbed two chocolate croissants, along with a chocolate donut. I figured I deserved some payback for not getting on my train yet, where I could settle with a book and forget that I had wasted two days listening to gossip that I could really care less about.

Amber sat across from me. She also had a mug of coffee and a single plain donut. She hadn’t been drinking as much as her friends. She just seemed to enjoy opening as many bottles of wine as she could. She had sampled each as if she had been at a wine tasting, and then she had poured.

Normally, she was not much of a drinker; more of an athlete. She was wearing winter running gear, and I wondered if she had seen me because she had just come back from a run around the property. It wouldn’t have surprised me.

“Thank you for coming,” she said. “I do like knowing who my friends are.”

I grabbed her hand and squeezed it—which was what passed for extreme affection in this part of Connecticut.

Then we both grabbed our mugs and sipped silently for a moment.

She set hers down first. “I…um…created a problem,” she said. “I didn’t do my due diligence.”

I tried not to frown at her. I didn’t want to be involved in the divorce. It was going to go on for years, and I had better things to do with my time than give depositions, even if they benefitted my friend. I would do if I had to, but I didn’t want to.

“This has nothing to do with the divorce,” she said, as if she had read my mind. Or maybe she had read my face. “You know about my drama project, right?”

It took me a minute to remember what she was talking about. I couldn’t remember the formal name of the project, but it was something she started right after she married the soon-to-be ex. When he started dumping boatloads of money on her as her “petty cash,” she immediately set up a foundation and funneled most of that cash into it.

The foundation was a passion project. She funded drama programs in low-income high schools. She paid for the licensing of the plays, the trips to various contests, and of course, a drama teacher to keep those kids on their toes. If the school had no arts program at all, she also funded a music teacher and an art teacher so that the school could put on musicals and make their own scenery.

I had gone to a number of fundraisers for the project and heard about its successes. She hadn’t reached a ton of schools yet—there were just too many—but she managed to reach a lot throughout the Northeast.

“I don’t remember all the details,” I said. “But I remember the project.”

“Well.” She poked at her donut as if testing its freshness. “I said that if a school did well in several high school drama competitions and the school did not have its own theater, I’d fund one. There are all kinds of rules. Schools have to be pretty impressive to jump through all the hoops, but so far three have.”

She gave me a thin smile.

“Two of the schools were on enough land that we could just build an addition. It took some work with the local government, because all of these schools are government funded, but we managed. It’s the third school that’s the problem.”

I frowned at her. I had no idea where this was going, but I had a sense I wouldn’t like it.

“The school is near one of those bedroom communities—like this one.” She waved a hand at Greenwich. I suspected this venerable old city, which was founded in 1640, would hate to be called a “bedroom community.” “The bedroom community is not happy with the public high school and won’t approve any new construction, even if it’s to improve the school. So of course, I got too involved.”

She ripped off a piece of the donut, brought it to her mouth, and then seemed to think the better of it.

“I bought a nearby theater. It was old and dilapidated, and we fixed it up. We donated it to the school district, with the caveat that only the public school kids could use it.”

I had a hunch I knew where this was going: the real money in the town now wanted the theater, and somehow Amber wanted me to ward it or protect it from the private school kids. I wasn’t sure I even knew how to do that; it was one thing to ward against a single person, another to ward against a group of people that had nothing more in common than their bank accounts.

“It’s a really pretty building,” she was saying. “It’s small, but perfect for high school productions. I love it. But we had so much trouble remodeling it. I figured that it was because of the conflict, you know, with the public school and the town, but that’s not it.”

I sipped my coffee. The richness barely registered. The look on Amber’s face held me. She was sad.

“The kids won’t go in it,” she said. “They’re scared of it. They practiced their holiday concert in their own school and then went to the newly renovated theater to do dress rehearsals. Everyone ran out of the place screaming.”

I frowned.

“And before you ask,” she said, “they all had different experiences. We can’t pinpoint what it is that’s wrong, only that something is.”

“Where is this school?” I asked.

“Davyes, Ohio,” she said. “In the eastern part of the state. It’s not a big town—”

“But you went to school there, right?” I asked. I remembered that. The soon-to-be ex often commented on her impoverished roots.

The smile she gave me was sad. “Yeah. I did. I got my start in the theater at summer camp, not in school. School had pretty much nothing. They were canceling anything ‘non-essential’ long before I got there.”

Non-essential was a misnomer, because study after study showed that kids who were involved in extra curriculars, particularly those in the arts, did better in life than kids who simply learned the established curriculum.

So this was the passion part of a passion project for her.

“We can’t build, and we have this theater that no one wants to use. I suppose we could sell it or abandon it and start again, but then the kids who did all the good work would be long gone. Maybe the drama teacher too.”

Her sad expression intensified. I hadn’t even seen her look that sad about the soon-to-be ex.

“Can you look at the theater?” she asked. “Maybe we built something into it or did something wrong in the construction? Maybe it’s structural.”

“But you don’t think it is, do you?” I asked.

She shrugged ever so slightly. “It was always cold. Even in the summer. And the stories the kids tell about what they experienced—well none of them had anything to do with the way the theater was built. It’s…other things.”

“Which you’re going to have to tell me,” I said.

She shook her head. “I’d like you to experience it yourself,” she said. “Besides. It’s winter break. There’s no one in the theater at all. No one will know…”

“That you brought in an outside expert?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “And they won’t know what you do to fix it.”

“If I can,” I said. And with those words, I realized, I had already agreed to take on the job.

 

TWO

I’ve traveled all over the world for my work, but I was not prepared for Davyes, Ohio. Amber and I arrived the day after Christmas. I flew into Columbus on Christmas Day, since most people didn’t fly at that point. I took the largest plane available, because my very presence caused severe turbulence. Large planes minimized any problems, but didn’t make them go away.

Even if I wanted to take a train to Davyes, I couldn’t. There weren’t any. Nor could I take a plane, even a small one (which I wouldn’t).

Instead, Amber had Severson pick me up in the largest Rolls Royce I’d ever seen. The car was ancient, so it had almost no computerized parts. It was also an orange yellow that I would have called saffron, but he said it was amber. That was why Amber’s soon-to-be ex bought it for her, because he believed it was “her” color.

We picked her up at one of the small private airports about thirty miles from Davyes. The area was remote and beautiful. Rolling hills, lots of green trees and narrow roads that were ice-covered and slick. The snow was just deep enough to make me happy that Severson was driving; he at least had enough experience to keep us from sliding off the road and tumbling down one of the hillsides.

There were ice-covered lakes and more pine trees than I could have imagined. I had been prepared for rural, but not remote. Through most of the drive, we didn’t even see another vehicle, and when we did, it was usually a pick-up truck with political bumper stickers that made me exceptionally nervous.

I was beginning to understand Amber’s caution about coming after the holiday, when, presumably, no one would notice our presence, although I had a hunch it would be hard to ignore in this burnt yellow monstrosity.

We came out of the hills into what looked like a clearing. The road widened, and as it did, I saw dilapidated houses in need of paint huddling near ancient evergreens. The houses became a neighborhood, with a small store at the end of it—a store that advertised liquor first and food second.

The downtown was clearly ahead of us—I could see the square buildings with too much brown brick. There had been a haphazard attempt at stringing Christmas lights over the windows, but half the lights were burned out.

Most of the communities I had traveled through in the last day had looked like Christmas was still on the way—lots of decorations everywhere, expensive lights covering everything from the windows of houses to the gutters to the nearby trees. Even the most Grinchy house had wreaths on the doors or a Menorah in the window.

But here, there were no Menorahs and no wreaths. Through some of the windows in the growing twilight, a lit tree was visible, but mostly all that I could see as we drove past was the flickering of television screens.

No one was outside, not that I blamed them. The air was damp, with just a bit of ice-spitting, not quite enough for a meteorologist to call it all freezing fog, but getting close.

I figured we were going to the school or the theater first, which irritated me, because I wanted nothing more than to stop at the hotel and drop off my things.

Instead, Severson turned down a narrow road that had not been plowed. He drove slowly, past houses that might have been middle class in the 1920s—gabled roofs, enclosed porches, and big picture windows. But the upstairs windows on many of these places were cracked or covered with wooden boards. The paint had peeled decades ago, revealing graying wood beneath, and on many of the houses, the enclosed porch was toppling to one side.

We rounded one more corner, and Severson turned the orange-yellow monstrosity into a narrow plowed driveway.

“Where are we?” I asked.

Amber gave me a small smile. “My house,” she said.

The house was not what I expected a house owned by the fifth trophy wife of the wealthiest Broadway producer in history to look like. Two stories, maybe 2,000 square feet, the house at least had the benefit of paint. The windows glistened, and someone had shoveled the sidewalks leading up to the house as well. Lights were on inside—warm, yellow, inviting lights, not holiday trickery.

“Your house?” I repeated.

Color brushed her cheeks. “Well,” she said, “I grew up here and inherited it after my father died. It’s in my name. I’m not even sure my soon-to-be ex remembers that it exists.”

Which made life easier for us.

“I have a housekeeper who makes sure everything functions,” she said. “I don’t want the house to go to seed like the others around here. I called her, and asked her to make sure there were fresh linens on the beds, a fire in the fireplace, and lots of food in the fridge that we can just heat up when we want to eat something.”

“Not many restaurants here, then?” I asked.

That didn’t even make her smile. “A Denny’s and a McDonald’s. There were a couple of local places the last time I stayed here, a year or so ago, but I wasn’t sure that they were open this week.”

Severson parked around the back of the house. He got out and opened Amber’s door first, then mine. Ice-cold air slammed me in the face, making me realize just how hot the car was.

I got out and waited for Amber. She crossed the driveway and climbed up the three steps that led into the back door. The house was old enough to be raised up, in anticipation of a lot of snow, something that didn’t seem to happen anywhere in the lower 48 any longer.

She unlocked the door and beckoned me as Severson closed the car doors. He went to the back and got our bags out of the trunk.

“Is he staying here too?” I asked quietly. I wasn’t sure if I was uncomfortable or not. I hadn’t ever heard Severson say much, and I couldn’t really get a read on him.

“He’s staying at the Davyes Inn, which is surprisingly nice. He’ll be on call if we need him or I can drive the Olds.”

“The Olds?” I asked.

She smiled. “My parents’ car.  It’s in the garage. And it’s kept up, just like the house.”

“You can drive in snow?” I asked nervously.

She pushed the door open. The smell of woodsmoke filtered out.

“I grew up here,” she said. “Of course I can drive in snow.”

She stepped in and stomped her feet on a pretty rag rug doormat. I followed her into a surprisingly modern kitchen. It still fit into the small space that kitchens took up in century-old houses, but everything was new, from the quartz countertops to the steel-gray appliances. There was a tiny island in the center, but it looked like it was designed for extra counter space. A square table sat in a nook that looked especially designed for eating. A large poinsettia filled the center of the table, and someone had put out red and green checked placemats as if we were expected to eat there soon.

Severson stepped inside and carried our bags past us as if we weren’t even there. He opened a door near the table to reveal a dark and narrow flight of stairs. He disappeared up them as I looked at Amber.

“This is nicer than I expected from the outside,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t come here often, but I do like to be comfortable when I’m here.”

Severson came back down the stairs, reminded Amber that he would be on call if needed, and let himself out the back.

She leaned against the counter.

“This town means more to you than you told me,” I said.

She shrugged one shoulder. “I know what it feels like to grow up here,” she said. “It can feel hopeless, particularly at this time of year.”

I nodded. “When do we see the theater?”

Her mood darkened. “Tomorrow,” she said quietly. “In the daylight.”

And about that, she wouldn’t say anything else.

 

THREE

After a surprisingly good reheated hamburger casserole, made with tomato sauce, elbow macaroni, and kidney beans, Amber excused herself and went to bed. I stayed downstairs and dug through my briefcase, pulling out all the printouts that a friend downloaded for me about Davyes, Ohio.

The city had long been a gathering place, even before white Europeans came to Ohio. They, of course, took the land from the natives and “settled” it. It had been a vibrant community in the 19th century, a railway hub for a number of industries from iron mining to lumber.

There was a lot about the city’s growth, particularly surrounding the railroad and the city’s contribution to World War I. Davyes even had a military camp, a training facility for the troops that “led to the city’s post-war growth.”

But I could find nothing more on that post-war growth, nor was there anything in the official history until the early 1980s, when there was talk of “revitalizing” the city. The railroad no longer went through Davyes, but I couldn’t find in my papers when the railroad stopped coming to this part of Ohio.

I would need more information, maybe, depending on what I found in the theater.

A branch college in the Ohio State University system had opened here in the mid-1950s, flush with money and students from the GI Bill. A number of those students stayed and worked in “local industries.”

I gleaned bits and pieces from histories of other places, but not enough to give me much information at all.

The high school that Amber had attended had opened at the turn of the previous century and had been moved to a large building in the early 1960s, as the baby boom swept over the area.

And then the revitalization happened. The bedroom community that Amber mentioned formed along the Davyes River, filled with “outsiders” who came from other parts of Ohio to enjoy the cheap land, abundant wilderness and the “rural lifestyle.”

Most of these folks came from Columbus or Cincinnati, but others came from larger cities, like New York or Philadelphia, buying second, third, and fourth homes. The new owners were more concerned with land value than they were with the health of the community, although their presence funded a lot of summer places—like restaurants and guest houses that were only open in the good weather, not in the dark times of an Ohio winter.

Maybe Amber’s burnt yellow Rolls wasn’t as out of place here as I had initially thought. Maybe she looked like new money, even though she was living in an older part of town.

I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for, but I suspected it was more than a simple uncomfortable building. There was too much hidden history in Davyes, history I wasn’t sure I was going to like.

 

FOUR

Severson was supposed to show up at 11 the next morning, which was as early as Amber did anything. But I had managed a cold breakfast by seven. I was studying a map that my friend had helpfully printed, showing the distance between the high school and the theater. If I walked between them, it would take all of ten minutes.

Fortunately, someone had hung a beautiful paper map of the city, with the house helpfully highlighted, in the living room. I studied the map, realized that we were closer to the downtown—and therefore the high school—than I had thought.

I wrote Amber a note and shoved it under the coffee maker, which (as far as I could tell) was set to start brewing at 10. I figured she’d see the note at that point.

I put on my jeans, tucked them into my boots, and put on a thick sweater in anticipation of a long day in the cold. Amber hadn’t told me whether or not the theater was properly heated, but I guessed that it wasn’t. Not if there were problems. The heat was probably set at a temperature that would keep the pipes from freezing, and do little else.

Then I donned my coat, pulled on the pom beanie that I kept in the pocket just in case I got caught in a cold wind, and made sure that the industrial strength mittens I usually carried were also in my pocket. I hated having my hands covered, so I tried to do without, unless the chill got in the way of my fingers functioning.

Unlike most of America, I did not carry a cell phone, but I did slip my wallet into the side zippered pocket of the coat. Then I let myself out the back door.

The neighborhood was quiet at this time of day. There was one light on in the house across the street, and the light looked like it was on a timer. I shoved my hands in my pocket, stood for a moment on the front sidewalk, and got my bearings.

Then I walked to the high school, promising myself I’d get myself something warm at the end of the hike.

The bank three blocks from the house told me that the temperature was 25 degrees, and politely declined to let me know the windchill. The wind was slight, though, which was probably a good thing. There were dark clouds on the horizon, and the air smelled of impending snow.

I saw the signs for the high school before I saw the school itself. The signs warned me that I was in a school zone, but the zone wasn’t that obvious. What was ahead of me was a hill that was startlingly steep, particularly in winter weather. There were dozens of pine trees lining the sides of the road, as well as a very broad sidewalk that (fortunately for me) someone had shoveled.

The maps had not indicated that I’d be going uphill in any direction, but it made sense. Davyes was in that part of Southern Ohio that was called the Appalachian Plateau. Part of the city was in what I would have considered the foothills of the Appalachian Mountain Range. The Davyes River ran alongside that.

From what Amber had told me and the printed webpages had confirmed, the Davyes River was the demarcation between the city itself and the new money. Of course, the high school would be near the river. I just hadn’t expected the setting to be quite so scenic.

I struggled to climb the hill. My boots had rubber soles, but I wasn’t used to walking uphill anywhere.

I was puffing my way up to the crest when a lime green Ford Fiesta passed me. It turned left at the top of the hill, belching just a bit of black smoke out of its tailpipe as it did so.

The Fiesta was the only car I had seen since I started walking on this road. I hadn’t seen many cars in the neighborhood either. Davyes had taken the moniker “sleepy little town” to heart.

When I reached the crest, I saw where the Fiesta had turned. A massive parking lot had leveled the top of the hill. The Fiesta was the only car, and it was parked in front of a large single story building that sprawled along the parking lot.

The wind had come up—or maybe there was more of a wind this high up. The wind slapped my already chilled cheeks. I hugged my coat tighter, without removing my hands from the pockets, and stared at the Fiesta.

It had parked near a flagpole. The flagpole’s cable banged against the metal side, adding a kind of drumbeat to the morning. An electronic sign displaying the rotating phrases Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and See You On January 4! was attached to the sloping roof above the double doors. Apparently this community did not go for the more inclusive “Happy Holidays” wishes.

As I got closer, I saw a long slate roof on the other side of the sprawling building. In the center of that slate roof were turrets. I walked to the edge of the sidewalk and peered down.

Built into the hillside was a red brick building that extended as far on either side as the sprawling building. The sprawling building was attached to the red brick building, clearly blocking the original entrance. The red brick building must have been the original high school.

Someone hadn’t cared enough about the “new” building to make it match the original building. The older building must have been something in its day, with two large stories working their way down that hillside.

From here, there was a great view of the Davyes river, which was half iced-over. Just below, there were houses, many of them built in the McMansion style of the 1990s. They clearly didn’t mar the view of the first floor of the original high school.

Footsteps crunched near me. I half turned, saw a tall man standing near that banging flagpole. His hat was as hideous as mine, although his was one of those black hunter hats with the ear flaps that went halfway down the side of the head. He had his hands in his pockets.

When he saw me looking at him, he came forward. He had a thin face, and graying out-of-control eyebrows.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” he asked, nodding toward the view.

“Yeah,” I said, trying to imagine studying in a place like this. That sky over the river—which was currently gray and filled with heavy clouds that promised snow—would constantly change. The beauty would have caught me.

“I have to confess,” he said. “I know who you are.”

I leaned back a little. No one knew who I was, unless they had hired me or had a class with me.

“You’re the advisor that Amber has brought in from Yale, right?” He didn’t say magical dramaturge, so he clearly didn’t know that. “You’re supposed to look at the theater and tell us why the kids don’t like it, right? How would you do that?”

I stuck out my bare hand. The air around it was terrifyingly cold. Apparently, I’d managed to keep it warm in the pockets of my coat.

“I’m Portia,” I said, so that I would encourage him to give me his name.

“Oh, sorry.” He wore gloves, but took my hand anyway. “I’m Keith Adkins, the head of—oh, hell—the only person in the drama department here at Davyes High.”

I smiled at him…and deliberately changed the subject. “Nice to meet you, Keith. I hear you have an award-winning group of students on your hands.”

“Four years running,” he said, “ever since Amber started funding us up.”

“Can I see your department?” I asked. I wasn’t sure why I needed to see where the kids practiced, but I had learned long ago to follow these hunches. Something about the school space and the theater space were different enough that the kids noticed.

They were drama kids, which meant they were more sensitive than the average student.

He shook his head slightly. “We don’t have a facility. That’s what the theater’s for. I came here, hoping that I could reach Amber and maybe convince her to let me go to the theater with you all.”

I wasn’t going to promise that he could join us. Amber might have a reason for leaving him out. I wasn’t even going to address his sideways request.

“You’ve been working without a stage all this time,” I said. “I’d like to see where the kids perform.”

He gave me a sideways look, as if he was assessing me. Then he nodded.

“Come with me,” he said, and led me to the main doors. They were underneath a metal portico that someone had clearly tacked onto the building later, maybe about the same time the electronic sign got added.

The wind actually got worse underneath the portico. I put my hands under my armpits as I waited for Keith to unlock the main doors. It struck me as unusual in these days of increased school security that he even had keys to the entire school building.

He got the door open, and we stepped into an entrance, complete with thick mats that stuck to the floor and giant heaters that seemed to be on full blast. There was another set of doors, and he had to unlock those too before we stepped into the hallway.

Every school smelled the same. Old socks, cleaning fluids, sweat, and a dry scientific scent—as if someone had ground up pencil lead and mixed it with chalk and rubbing alcohol. This hallway also smelled of ancient heater—hot with a tinge of mildew.

The hallway was wide, and had lockers, many of which were slightly dented, and a few had the slight patina of rust along one side. Keith led me down the hallway, past a series of closed doors with numbers along the top instead of classroom names.

There were still holiday posters on the walls and bulletin boards—most advertising a Christmas concert, and some mentioning holiday parties. We reached the center of this part of school—at least I thought it was the center—and there was a surprising skylight on two sides of the ceiling.

Thin light filtered in, revealing a large mess in the center of the floor. Pine needles covered everything, and a gigantic tree skirt was bunched against one of the doors. A janitor’s cart, complete with vacuum, mop and bucket, stood in the center of the wide area.

On the far side of the wide area, the wall was red brick. Apparently, this was where the two buildings intersected, and the architect (if there had been one) hadn’t been able to figure out how to connect the roofs in a logical manner, hence the skylights.

Keith led me around the mess and the janitor’s cart, to a stairway that felt like a tunnel heading down into a stygian darkness. There were lights on both sides of the stairway, but that invisible janitor hadn’t cleaned the fixtures in a long time. The light was dim.

The bottom of the stairs revealed two big doors that were so thick they had to once have been the exterior doors of the old building. He unlocked one of those doors and pushed it open.

The walls contained marks of lockers here that someone had tried to paint over without much success. Dim fluorescents “lit” the hallway, which was narrower than the one in the newer building. The doors in this hallway had labels with actual names on them.

Keith led me to a room just before the fork in the hallway, and above the door, the sign read Mr. Adkins. He reached to one side as he entered, and lights flared on, revealing a large room that had no windows at all. Old-fashioned desks were bolted to the floor, and a chalkboard covered the entire front wall.

Keith had layered white boards over much of the chalkboards, and the white boards still had writing on them.

Advanced English: Pages 200-245 over the holidays. Quiz on January 7.

Junior English: Act Two: Hamlet. Quiz on January 5

Sophomore English: Pages 150-75, Southern Gothic. Quiz on January 8.

“Hamlet?” I asked. “Isn’t that advanced for high school students?”

“Not my choice,” he said grumpily. “I hate that play. These are the schoolboard-approved topics. But I took the students off textbook and gave them the actual text. They were reading the Bowdlerized version, and I couldn’t stomach it.”

I couldn’t help myself. I gasped. I didn’t know any school was still using Thomas Bowdler’s edits of Shakespeare—edits that were first created in the early 19th century to remove “bad” language, sexual innuendo, and anything that might offend young and/or female audiences. The texts were horrible, the violence done to Shakespeare’s work shocking.

“You’re not kidding, are you?” I said.

He shook his head. “We’re using textbooks first approved in the 1950s. They’ve been updated, but not well, and not since the turn of this century.”

A chill ran through me that had nothing to do with the temperature in the room.

I taught at one of the most elite universities in the world. I knew that education had become a war zone at the local level, but I didn’t think about the impact it had on the teachers and the students. The fact that kids couldn’t have proper textbooks was an anathema to me. No wonder we didn’t get many kids from “the hinterlands” as the chair of my department put it; those kids hadn’t been taught anything that would even qualify them for entry to the Ivy League.

“You wanted to see the stage,” Keith said, with a strange emphasis on the word “stage.” “Follow me.”

He opened another door and flicked on a set of lights. This room had clearly been a classroom once as well, but the desks had been removed. The floor still bore the scars from the bolts, just like the walls had nicks and grooves from nails and tacks, as well as from the chalkboards that were no longer bolted to the walls.

I almost asked why this hadn’t been painted, when I looked in the direction he pointed.

Someone had made a sturdy stage out of thick 2 x 4s. The wooden stage extended along the wall that would have held the chalkboards. Someone had hung a long rod across the ceiling, and a red velvet curtain was pushed to one side of that.

It was as makeshift as makeshift got, half reminding me of the “let’s put on a show” tropes that came out of the Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movies of the 1930s. That can-do spirit that could overcome anything, even the lack of a budget and proper facilities.

“This is an old building,” I said. “I thought all schools of its generation had a theater.”

“Oh, it did,” he said. “It got carved up into classrooms, and was deemed impossible to repair.”

“How do you put on a show, then?” I asked, because there was clearly no place to watch a play comfortably in here.

“We put out folding chairs and charge admission,” he said.

I must have looked so appalled that he grinned.

“Honestly, we rehearse here, and then we get one of the churches or the Masonic Temple to rent us their stage.” By the end of that sentence, his grin faded again. “You saw all the room in the parking lot. We have even more down a level, where the back entrance is for this building. But we couldn’t get approval from the city council or the school board. All the money is going to charter schools these days, and none of them are in the city limits of Davyes.”

It was all politics, politics that I didn’t entirely understand. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

“Do you mind if I have a moment alone in this room?” I asked him.

He looked at me, startled. “Why would you want that?”

Because I want to read the room’s energy. I want to know what the kids are used to. I want to understand how they feel about the world they’ve been forced into.

“I just want a sense of the place,” I said. It sounded weak, even to me, but I wasn’t going to tell him about the magical side of things. The fewer people who knew, the better.

His eyes narrowed, but then he shrugged and stepped out of the room, back into his classroom.

“You want the door closed?” he asked.

I almost said yes, but something stopped me. I didn’t feel comfortable in this room. I wasn’t sure if that was because the room itself was so sad or if there was something awry here. After all, this was an old building, and it probably had its own troublesome history.

“I got it,” I said, and grabbed the door’s glass knob. I pulled the door shut, but only loosely. I wanted to be able to get out of here quickly if I had to.

The overhead lights had that hum that ancient fluorescents often gave off. I found another light, near the edge of the stage—a lamp that looked like it should have been in a living room, not a makeshift theater.

I switched on that light and turned off the fluorescents.

The room was suddenly very still. Heartbreakingly still. Theatrical spaces usually had an echo of past performances, but this one did not. The lamp gave off the only light, illuminating one corner of the stage.

I half -closed my eyes and spun around the room. There was a feeling here, but it was an odd one. It wasn’t delight or anticipation or even nerves that often remained long after productions ended. Bored

All I could feel was a sense of patience, and not a good one, either. Not the kind that changed the world and was often an integral part of stubbornness. No, this patience was more resigned, as if a group knew that it was stuck here and wouldn’t get out for a long, long time.

I let out a half laugh. Of course. This was a classroom and had been for a hundred years. It had only been a part of the “drama department” for the last four. Of course, I would have no sense of a theater. Of course, drama didn’t live here.

No plays were ever finished here. They were just rehearsed here. This had become rehearsal space, but it had never achieved a full-blown production.

The other spaces that the kids used? Those would have their own ambience. I had no idea what happened at Masonic temples, although it concerned me. I did know what happened in churches, particularly to people like me.

I didn’t want to venture into them.

I turned on the overheads, shut off the lamp, and opened the door. Keith was standing in the middle of the classroom, staring at the board. When he saw me, he raised his eyebrows just a little.

“No ghost light?” I asked the question lightly, because I wanted him to take it as a joke. Most theaters had a ghost light ostensibly to make sure no one tripped in the darkness on stage. But ghost lights really were for the ghosts. In some theaters, it kept the malevolent spirits away. In others, it kept the ghosts warm and happy.

He let out a small laugh, hearing my tone rather than the seriousness behind it.  “This is clearly not a proper theater.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You’ve done a lot with so very little.”

He gave me a small smile. “So Amber told you that we sent two actors to the Jimmy Awards this year?”

“She told me you had won several regional awards. I don’t recall her mentioning the Jimmy Awards.”

The Jimmy Awards were better known as the National High School Musical Theater Awards. At Yale, we looked closely at high school students who had participated in the week-long program in New York. A high school had to jump through a lot of hoops to be considered part of the program.

“It was in June,” he said, and I caught a hint of sadness. “Fortunately, I traveled with our two nominees. They had never left Ohio before.”

I frowned at him. “That freaked them out?”

“New York City is a scary place to the uninitiated,” he said.

I nodded. I didn’t ask how the students did. He would have told me if they were finalists. The fact that they qualified, that the school qualified, was a big deal, particularly with this inadequate set-up.

“Amber is our fairy godmother,” he said. “If we hadn’t qualified, she would have sponsored us. She’s a member of the Broadway League.”

League members could recommend school programs. I knew that much, because I’d gone to a lot of events around the Jimmy Awards, helping my colleagues look for good future talent.

“I gotta be honest with you,” he said, placing his hands on one of the desk-chair backs. “I showed up here on purpose this morning, hoping you and Amber would stop. I didn’t expect you by yourself.”

I smiled. “Amber sleeps in. We might have stopped later.”

“I’d like to go to the theater with you,” he repeated. “Amber seems to think you can solve our dilemma.”

“I don’t know if I can solve it,” I said. “I have to see the theater first, and it’s better if I do that with as few people as possible. You can call Amber and ask her to be included…”

I deliberately let that sentence hang. I had no idea what his real relationship was with Amber—good or bad—and I didn’t want to be in the middle of it.

He nodded, as if he was used to rejection. “We’re fighting on a lot of fronts,” he said. “Or rather, those of us who haven’t burned out yet are.”

I let out a breath. He was talking about teachers, not himself and Amber.

“They expect us to do the impossible without no money and no support.” His smile was thin. “The school board. Amber’s been a godsend, although they’re trying to figure out how to bogart that money too. But she’s smart about how she donates.”

“I would imagine she is,” I said. I had to extricate myself from this conversation. I needed to walk back to the house before Amber got too deep into her breakfast.

He nodded,

“Let me lead you out of here,” he said. “This place is a maze.”

He shut off lights and got us to the hallway.

“I can drive you wherever you need to go,” he said as we walked.

I didn’t want to explain my effect on cars. Besides, his looked like it couldn’t take any outside pressure, like the kind I might bring.

“I need to walk,” I said, which was also shorthand for I needed to think. I was inching toward something. I just didn’t quite know what it was.

 

FIVE

I barely made it back by 11. Severson was pulling into the driveway as I walked up. Amber was happy to give me an extra half an hour to eat something, pour some hot coffee into my system, and find a hat, scarf, and gloves that matched.

We got into the Rolls at quarter to noon, and Severson drove us the ten minutes to the theater.

Amber hadn’t been kidding when she said it was near the high school. Not the 1950s monstrosity at the top of the hill, but the old part of the building. The city of Davyes had expanded in the 1920s, and those buildings were all on the river-side of the hill, with views across the valley.

The theater wasn’t quite there. It was on a side street between an old hotel and empty lot mounded with snow. Whoever had designed the theater had realized that the theater didn’t need a view, unlike the hotel.

Amber had been right; the theater was small. It took up only a third of that block, even though the back of the theater went deep and abutted the school’s original parking lot.

We didn’t park there. Severson parked on the hill, using the emergency brake and warning us that the road was slippery. He asked Amber if she wanted help crossing, but didn’t ask me. I supposed if she had said yes (she hadn’t) then he might have asked me as well.

The main doors to the theater were up an unshoveled flight of stairs. Amber went around the empty lot side of the building and unlocked a metal door that looked like it had been added around the Second World War.

The smell of heat and fresh paint floated out. She flicked on a light, and went inside. I followed her.

We had entered in the original stage door (which meant that it might have been wood at one time). The layout was obvious, even if someone widened the hallway and closed off the back of the house.

To our left was the box office. Before us was probably the public areas, although I couldn’t quite tell because the door was solidly closed. To our right were more closed doors with Authorized Personnel Only stamped all over them.

I took a deep breath and felt myself relax. This was a theater.

Amber gave me a startled glance. Then she turned on more lights.

Everything was new, from the lighting to the flooring. The new paint smell came from the off-white walls.

I peered into the box office, saw computers and comfortable chairs, and equipment that most theaters used now for electronic tickets. I didn’t dare go in there, unless that was where the problem was.

“Would you mind unlocking everything?” I asked her.

She nodded, then tried the door before us. It was unlocked. The door to our right, however, was not.

Amber worked on unlocking that while I opened the main door. It was exceptionally dark. I had to grope for a light switch which, fortunately, was exactly where I expected it to be.

I entered in the lobby, where the audience would wait before the doors opened to allow them into the show. A fancy staircase with a carved wood banister hugged one wall. That banister was probably original, given the level of artistry in it. I would examine it further when I wasn’t trying to figure out what was going on here.

The lobby smelled of carpet glue with a touch of cinnamon. The cinnamon made me smile, and relaxed me even more. I stepped into the lobby.

Posters lined the walls. Small tasteful lights surrounded the posters as if they were on mini-marquees. Some of the posters were really yellowed newspaper bills, but the names on them caught my attention: Sophie Tucker, Milton Berle, Bob Hope, George M. Cohen, Jerry Lewis, and Eddie Foy.

My breath caught, and the hair rose on the back of my neck. It wasn’t because something happened, but because that inkling I had gotten back at the school was turning into a full-blown assumption.

The doors to my right opened. Amber came through, propping one of them open with a built-in stopper. She had turned up the house lights.

I smiled at her and walked uphill into the theater.

That uphill walk all by itself told me that the building was old. The theaters of that period all had the actual stages uphill from the box office, partly so that the back of the house was elevated (in order to see the stage) and partly because the designers believed that patrons should feel like they were entering an important, magical place.

Which they were.

“Give me a minute,” I said as I walked past Amber.

I walked into the house, and shut off the house lights. The ghost light came on automatically. Amber and the others had spared no expense in this place.

I turned the house lights back on, and looked at the chairs. They were comfortable, but not too padded. I called out, “Haaalloooo,” and my voice fell silent quickly, exactly the way I expected.

This remodel had been perfect.

“I don’t feel like fleeing,” Amber said from beside me. “Do you?”

I shook my head. I had one more place to investigate, and that was the backstage area. I walked down to the front of the house, went around the orchestra pit (which obviously could rise or fall as needed) and climbed the steps to the stage.

I walked to center stage and turned around. The balcony rose in front of me, surprisingly visible. Sightlines were good. I halloed again, and this time the sound amplified all by itself.

I was falling in love with this theater.

There were curtains on either side of the stage, but they had been raised up, in case whoever was producing something did not want to use them. The ceiling above me was a stack of lights and sound equipment, as well as riggings.

I wandered farther back and saw storage areas for costumes, more comfortable chairs for actors who were awaiting their cues, and two tiny green rooms that took only a little space from prop storage.

Yes, there were ghosts here. I could feel them. But I felt no malevolence from them.

To satisfy myself, I walked the entire theater, including the balcony and the remodeled bathrooms, and found myself smiling by the time I was done.

Amber was sitting in the back, toying with her phone. When she saw me approach, she stood.

“Well?” she asked.

“You need to call Mr. Adler,” I said. “We’re going to need his help.”

 

SIX

We met Keith Adler at the nearby diner. It was like something out of It’s A Wonderful Life. There was a soda fountain toward the back and booths that probably hadn’t been changed out since the 1970s, when someone slapped red vinyl all over them.

The tables were scratched Formica and there was a rather terrifying glass sugar container behind a metal napkin rack. At least the menus weren’t stained, even though just looking at them made my cholesterol go up fifteen points.

Still that didn’t stop me from ordering a hot roast beef sandwich and more coffee. Amber settled for a rather sad-looking salad. We were eating when Keith arrived.  He waved a finger at the woman behind the counter, who apparently knew exactly what he wanted.

“Well?” he asked as he pulled off his scarf. Well seemed to be the question of the day.

“I have some ideas,” I said, “but I need more information.”

Amber pushed her salad aside. She sipped from the bottle of water she ordered, and leaned into the corner, frowning the entire time.

I tilted my head a little, not quite knowing how to ask my question.

“Your students,” I said, “they didn’t do well at the Jimmy Awards, did they?”

Amber tilted her head down. Keith’s cheeks flushed a bright red.

“I told you,” he said. “They hadn’t been out of Ohio before. They were overwhelmed by the City.”

I nodded. He had told me that.

“But they were also uneven at the regionals, weren’t they?” I asked.

His lips thinned.  That was my answer.

“Did you break down where the problems were?” I asked.

He glanced at Amber, as if he didn’t want to say, not in front of her.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m impressed as hell with everything you’ve done here.”

He swallowed hard, then took a deep breath. “They…um…were better than the other competitors at difficult stagings.”

“Meaning…?” I asked.

“We were the lowest of the low at a lot of these competitions, so we would start on some drama room stages or church basements. We excel at those.”

“Only to have problems on the larger stages,” I said.

“I haven’t taught them how to handle the pressure,” he said in a voice that led me to believe he blamed himself. “I gave them pep-talk speeches, but that didn’t cut it. I couldn’t get them over their nerves when we were in the finals.”

“You won some, though,” I said.

“Smaller theaters,” he said, glancing nervously at Amber. “We were competing against schools in our category, so we weren’t performing in front of hundreds. Just maybe thirty or so people. We’re good at that.”

“Everyone starts somewhere,” Amber murmured.

“I would love to have tips on how to get them past this,” Keith said. “They need to feel that they’re worthy.”

“We can work on that,” I said.

Amber looked at me sharply, as if she wanted to warn me off. But she didn’t know what I was thinking.

“Now,” I said. “Tell me about that dress rehearsal at the new theater.”

Keith poured ketchup all over his fries

“It started out well enough,” he said. “They’d been in the theater briefly, and they were excited. I took them backstage and they enjoyed exploring. Then, one of the kids, Tyler Applegate, crossed the stage, and started to sing ‘his’ song.”

“Which was?” I asked.

“‘I’m Not That Smart,’” Keith said. “We were doing the—

“Twenty-fifty Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” I said, and smiled. “Great choice for kids.”

“Yeah, if it didn’t have the Jesus Christ scenes.” He shook his head. “Those almost shut us down.”

I knew what he meant. Jesus appeared to one of the spellers in moments of crisis. There were other things in the show that I thought a small-town audience might disapprove of, and I wanted to ask about that. But I didn’t, because I didn’t want him sidetracked.

“So Tyler was singing,” I said.

“And he stopped,” Keith said. “He just…stopped.”

Keith set his sandwich down untouched. Amber sat up.

“You have to understand,” Keith said. “Tyler never stops. He’s one of those drama kids. You have to rein him in.”

I nodded. “Then what?”

Keith looked down, closed his eyes, and sighed. He shook his head slightly as if the memory was painful.

“Then he started to cry,” Keith said softly.

He opened his eyes and picked up the sandwich. He was about to bite into it, but he stopped, and shook his head again.

Amber started to reach for him, but I stopped her.

“They all started to cry,” he said. “I’d never seen anything like it. One by one, they fled the theater, and none of them wanted to go back, ever.”

“You said they were screaming,” Amber said.

“It sounded better than sobbing.” He set the sandwich down again. “And it didn’t leave some of them. Tyler, he’s the one who went to the Jimmy Awards, I had to force him onto the stage. Fortunately, tears work with ‘I’m not that Smart.’”

Kinda. But the song was about a revelation, a kid beginning to realize his own power. Playing it with tears undercut that part.

I finally understood what I was up against, though. Amber got her fries and I took one.

“I know this is short notice,” I said, “but how many kids who were in your production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee could you get to perform it for me?”

“At the theater?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“When?” he asked.

“Tomorrow?” I asked. “This week?”

I could probably stay for another two weeks, but I did have my own classes to prepare for.

Keith set down the French fry as if it had some kind of personal flaw. “I won’t have time to prep them.”

“You won’t need to prep them,” I said. “I really don’t want a performance. I want…”

I couldn’t finish it. I didn’t want to tell him what I was going to do. It involved magic, and that would have been too much for the moment.

“Tell them she’s with the Yale Drama Department,” Amber said. “Tell them she won’t go to the school. Tell them that they’ll have to come to the theater.”

I looked sideways at her. She seemed to understand what I wanted.

“I’ll tell them,” he said quietly. “But I’m not sure if they’ll come.”

 

SEVEN

By three the next afternoon, all nine principal cast members gathered outside of the theater. I was stunned that they all had shown up, not because of the problems in the theater, but because it was the holiday break.

They didn’t look like the theater kids I was used to. These kids wore ancient parkas and regular jeans. A couple of the kids had on tennis shoes, not boots, and a few didn’t seem to have mittens or a hat despite the cold, damp, gray afternoon.

Half of the group were kids of color, which I had not expected in small town Ohio. Two of the girls and three of the boys had skin much darker than mine. One of those boys had long straight black hair and matching black eyes. He was the only one who looked at me directly before looking away.

They gathered around Keith like ducklings around their mother. Or maybe, more like a group of three-year-olds around a safe adult. Occasionally one of the kids would look around Keith at me, and then bow their head as if they expected me to shout at them or something.

I had initially debated whether or not I’d meet them before they went in, but I wanted to see what happened as they entered. Amber was the one who hadn’t shown up. She said, If they reject the theater again… and then shook her head, as if she couldn’t deal with the very idea.

I understood that. She already had a lot of stress in her life, and she had done something kind here, something that meant a lot to her as well. She didn’t want to lose that because of some miscalculation that no one understood.

The kids shuffled. A few of them gazed down the street, as if they expected someone to drive up and save them.

I only had a few minutes before someone would bolt.

“Let’s go inside,” I said, clutching the keys that Amber had given me in my mitten-covered right hand.

“Wait,” the dark-haired kid said. “What do you need from us?”

“I want to hear the opening number from your musical,” I said. I didn’t specify which one. If they were like most schools, there was only one.

“We don’t have any musicians,” said one of the girls who wasn’t wearing mittens or a hat. Her cheeks were bright red, accenting her stunning blue eyes.

“I have recorded music like we sometimes use in rehearsals,” Keith said. He hefted his phone and something that looked like a speaker.

“We haven’t rehearsed,” one of the other girls said, head down. I couldn’t see her face or her expression.

“Yes, I know,” I said. “This is spur of the moment.”

“What if one of us flubs up?” asked a boy in the back. His brown hair was tousled. He clutched his hat in his right hand.

“What do you normally do?” I asked that of Keith.

He glanced at the kids. “Depends. In rehearsal we often start again. In a performance, they make do.”

“Make do today,” I said, and unlocked the door. I had to get them all inside before they decided this performance scared them too much.

I pulled open one of the doors, and felt welcome hot air envelop me.

“I don’t want to go in there,” said the long-haired boy. “Can’t we do this at the school?”

“No,” Keith said with the kind of finality that most good teachers could manage. He almost shoved the kids through that open door, then followed them.

I walked through last.

I had deliberately unlocked the main doors. I wanted the kids to walk through the entire building, except maybe the balcony. I wanted to see where the problem originated.

We walked past the box office. Then I pushed open the lobby doors.

I had gone in before everyone arrived and turned on the lights. Dark theaters often uncomfortable places, not to mention dangerous ones. There were a lot of places to trip in the dark.

The kids walked through the lobby. A couple of them were holding hands—not like young lovers, but like people who were terrified and needed each other for moral support.

I found the place comforting and beautiful. The kids were acting like I was taking them to a haunted graveyard.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s go backstage. Take off your coats and get ready to do the first number. I’m going to want everyone on stage in ten minutes.”

“We can’t do the first number,” the boy with the long hair said. “We don’t have enough audience members.”

I had forgotten: one of the hallmarks of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee was that it used actual audience members on stage.

I was not about to go up on stage, no matter how much the kids needed those audience members.

“I’ll adlib,” Keith said. “Just like we did in rehearsals.”

Then he glanced at me. He looked nervous too.

I led the kids through one of the side doors that led to the back of the house. Once they all entered, I waved a hand at Keith so that he would lead them backstage. I wanted to follow.

The lights were dim here on purpose. There were some open areas in the house where the audience might be able to see a brighter light.

There was magic here, but it hadn’t bothered me when I was alone. It was thin, because this theater hadn’t been used in a long time.

I concentrated. I needed to use my physical eyes and my metaphysical eyes at the same time. Focusing on the magic, I could see just a bit of whiteness rising and falling like dust as the kids passed through it. I took a step forward and touched some of the dust.

It was not threatening. It was warming and soothing.

But a couple of the kids didn’t seem to think so. They brushed their arms, their shoulders, their cheeks, as if the dust was actually falling on them.

It wasn’t unusual for anyone who acted—anyone, really, who was in tune with the theater—to sense magic, particularly when the magic was moving. I now wished I’d had Keith introduce me to the kids. I wondered if one of them was Tyler.

They reached backstage before I did and stopped, huddling together as they peered past the open curtains. I was about to say something when I saw wisps floating toward them.

I frowned at the wisps, then used my full metaphysical eyes.

Not wisps. Ghosts. Ghosts so thin that they hardly existed anymore.

I blinked at them. The ghosts surrounded the kids as if the kids were about to perform theater in the round.

I still had no sense of threat, but the kids hadn’t moved out of their huddle.

“Let’s get onstage,” Keith said. He clearly couldn’t sense the ghosts at all, which was probably why he taught high school theater, instead of becoming a theatrical professional.

The kids moved closer to each other.

“C’mon,” he said. “We have an opportunity here. Let’s use it.”

One of the ghosts placed thin hands on a girl’s arm. She screamed, and all of the kids jumped.

If I didn’t do something now, they’d flee, and I didn’t want them to.

“The air is dusty,” I lied as I approached them.

“That wasn’t dust,” the girl said, her voice hitching. “Someone grabbed me.”

I looked at the ghosts. Some of them were children. Children who all looked alike. A stern-faced man with a narrow face stood among them, and something teased my brain.

Eddie Foy Sr. He was the one who had touched the girl.

Eddie Foy Sr. There were two Eddie Foys. Eddie Foy Sr. was a vaudevillian who performed with his seven children. The children included Eddie Foy Jr. who later acted with people like Jimmy Durante.

Eddie Foy Sr., who played an indulgent father onstage and was anything but off stage.

I glanced quickly at the other ghosts. I didn’t recognize half of them, but I recognized their costumes. Big hats, big shoes, suspenders. A couple of the performers held musical instruments—trumpets, cymbals, and a violin.

These were vaudevillians. Not just Eddie Foy Sr., but Vernon and Irene Castle dancing near the wings. Eva Tanguay, sitting backwards in a chair stage left wearing little more than a bustier and stockings, legs shockingly spread. Bert Williams—often called the Jackie Robinson of vaudeville–dressed in a natty suit and singing ever so softly.

When life seems full of clouds and rain

And I am full of nothin but pain,

Who soothes my thumpin’, bumpin’ brain? Nobody!

The song caught me. Besides the fact that it was his signature song, the lyrics he kept repeating…who soothes my thumpin’, bumpin’ brain…

Nobody.

“I know that you find this theater uncomfortable,” Keith said, “but this is a one-time opportunity. Let’s get into position—”

“Wait,” I said. “Tyler, would you mind singing ‘I’m Not That Smart’?”

The boy with the long black hair stepped out of the huddle ever so slightly. I had thought that Tyler was the kid clutching his hat. That kid seemed like he had a lot more energy.

This kid was subdued. I realized in that moment that he was utterly terrified.

“The last time I sang here,” he said. “It was…”

“Everyone has a bad performance,” I said. “Everyone faces something difficult if they’re going to be in the theater. The key is to step past it and try again.”

He looked at me like I was crazy. Then he glanced at Keith. Keith shrugged.

“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity,” Keith said. “Think of this like an audi—”

“No,” I said. He was about to make the kid even more nervous. No one liked auditions. “Pretend I’m not here. Sing your heart out. Be Leaf Coneybear. Get the pain in there and the hope. Put your fear into it. Leaf is probably afraid. He’s trying to win a competition, after all.”

I usually didn’t encourage actors. I tried to avoid actors. I hated how I sounded, all rah-rah and positive. I usually left that to a director or to one of my sisters if they were nearby. (Not that Rosalind would have been good at it. Viola could be positive if she wanted. Maybe I needed to channel my inner Viola…)

Tyler looked at me as if I had gone insane, but he separated himself from the huddle of students. Eddie Foy Sr. followed him, and my breath caught. Tyler looked out into the house and started, as if he had seen something.

I looked too. It was full. Everyone in the audience was transparent, but I could still see their outlines. The men had on suits and the women dresses that went down to their ankles. The audience ghosts took seats in the fifth row and farther back, including the balcony. But the front four rows were filled with performers.

Some of the faces I recognized, but I couldn’t place. Others were not familiar at all. They had on costumes or still clutched instruments.

I glanced at the kids. Most of them remained in their huddle, but a few of them looked into the house as if they could see hints of the audience.

Maybe they could.

Tyler bit his lower lip. He had removed his parka, revealing a flannel shirt and a pair of jeans that were too short.

“I have the music cued up,” Keith said to him, holding out his phone with his thumb hovering over the screen. “You ready?”

Tyler straightened, then slouched, as if he had suddenly remembered that Leaf Coneybear was not a confident kid. Then he nodded at Keith.

A loud piano chord echoed throughout the theater. Bert Williams stopped singing and looked up. A few of the other ghosts pulled their instruments closer.

A spotlight found Tyler. I looked up. The spotlight was not one of the new ones.

Tyler started in, confessing that “he” wasn’t smart, that his siblings put him down all the time, and just as he began to lose himself in the song, Eddie Foy Sr. grabbed him and shook him.

You have to believe in yourself, kid, Eddie Foy said. You have to understand that performance is all about—

I flicked my fingers at Eddie Foy Sr., sending just enough magic in his direction that he staggered backwards.

Tyler had stopped singing. I had no idea if he had felt the push I’d sent or not.

“Go on,” I said.

Tyler shook his head. “There’s someone else here,” he said.

“Yes,” I said crisply. “There are eleven of us. Ten of us want to hear you sing.”

He shot Keith a frightened look.

“Start over?” Keith asked.

“No,” I said. “Keep going. Without the music. And the rest of you, remember your parts.”

Their parts were mostly small and spoken. They had to call him names. Only the kid playing the vice president of the organization had actual lines.

All went well until Tyler sang about his siblings hitting him. Then the other kids called him dumb—and the ghosts descended on them, telling them to leave him alone, let him perform.

The music stopped again, everyone looking terrified. And I eased out a breath.

I finally understood what was going on.

The ghosts had been lonely. They loved the theater as much as I did. For decades, they had watched performances, but modern theater had left them behind.

They didn’t understand that this was a performance.

“All right, everyone,” I said. “We’re going to do what I wanted in the first place. The opening number.”

“Ma’am, I’m sorry,” said one of the girls. “We can’t. This place is scary, and we’re not going to—”

“You are always going to be afraid in a theater,” I said. “Theaters have their own vibe. The vibe changes with the audience. Pretend you’re performing for an audience of old people who have never seen this show before, people who might not understand the nuances.”

“Portia, that’s not how we do things,” Keith said.

“Well, you’re going to do that way now,” I said.

I walked down the stairs into the audience and stood in the aisle.

“Places, everyone,” I said.

The kids scrambled, looking terrified. The ghosts moved aside. Those with mobile faces seemed confused. But my words had reached them.

Some of the ghosts slithered down the stage and headed toward me, separating when they reached me and heading toward some empty aisle seats.

Eddie Foy Sr. moved to the wings. He was frowning. Most of his kids were sitting cross-legged on the floor as if they were about to get a treat.

Keith recited the part of the announcer, saying this was a spelling bee. And the outspoken girl spelled syzygy, just like she was supposed to. The kid with the messy hair, the one I had thought was Tyler, stepped into center stage to profess that he didn’t believe the lies his parents had told him, that just being at the spelling bee was akin to winning…and the performance was underway.

Eddie Foy relaxed. His kids laughed and applauded and cheered, even though I was the only one who could hear them.

When the music reached Tyler, and, as Leaf, he had to confess to being so nervous he was shaking, I wondered if Tyler was acting. But it didn’t matter. He sold it.

The kids all did well. And by the end of the piece, where they congratulated themselves for living their dreams, ghosts in the front rows stood and screamed their approval.

That sent shivers down my back, but no one else seemed to notice.

The kids reached the end of the song, arms outstretched, singing the title and then running to their positions for the next part of the show.

I applauded, ending it all.

I almost said, as my Aunt Eustacia would have, See? That wasn’t so hard. But it was. Because these kids weren’t used to theatrical ghosts, particularly those who were trying to be helpful, who wanted to guide an actor or a show into perfection.

“You kids are good,” I said. It wasn’t quite a lie. Some of them were good. None of them had nuance yet. They could belt, but they couldn’t emote. Not that it mattered.

They had performed their first song all the way through in this theater, and I could ensure that they would be able to continue to perform.

“Here’s what I’d like to do,” I said to Keith. “I’d like to see the opening number on Friday in full costume with props. Can you arrange that for me?”

“Here?” Tyler asked, his voice small.

“Here,” I said.

“Can we do that?” Keith asked the kids.

“Friday’s New Year’s Eve,” the outspoken girl said. “My folks won’t let me out of the house.”

Good point. Spirits didn’t always do well on New Year’s Eve. either

“Thursday, then,” I said. “In the afternoon. Is that possible?”

The kids looked at each other, then at Keith. He looked at me. “Should we rehearse here?”

“No,” I said. “Amber is bringing in someone to make sure the theater is in the best possible shape.” I didn’t add that the “someone” was me. “So rehearse at the school, and then come here half an hour before curtain. I’ll be in the middle of the house, watching.”

“Okay.” Keith sounded skeptical, but he turned to the kids and gave them instructions. When he was through, he turned back to me.  “You’re done with us for today, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

The kids didn’t have to be told twice. They ran for the nearest door.

I waited until they were gone, and then I illuminated myself, using a spell that made it easier for the ghosts to understand that I could see them.

“Are you proud of yourselves?” I said, making my voice reverberate off the walls. Some ghosts couldn’t hear living voices well. “You almost guaranteed that no one would ever use this theater again. You will never touch the performers again. You will not intervene in a show, even if it goes wrong, and you will not share space with anyone living, even if there is no room to sit in the audience. Am I clear?”

The ghosts had lined up on the stage as if they were about to give a performance. The individual faces were hard to see, all except Eddie Foy Sr. who crossed his arms.

“We will shut this theater down permanently if you do not acknowledge what I just told you,” I said.

Several ghosts nodded. A few others burst into silent tears. Bert Williams whisper-sang “Nobody,” and shook his head.

“They will perform in three days,” I said. “You will be the best audience they’ve ever had. Is that clear?”

More nodding. Then I added one last thing.

“I will bring you a better ghost light. It’ll calm most of you.” I looked at Eddie Foy Sr. as I said that. “You will have three nights to enjoy it before the students get here. They will bring theater back to you, if you let them. But you have to let them.”

Then I turned and strode up the aisle as if I were the toughest theater owner they had ever had the displeasure to know. I shut off the lights, exited the theater, and stepped into the chilly darkness that was Davyes in mid-winter.

My breath looked like a small nearly transparent ghost. I wished I could use a mobile phone, because I really wanted a ride.

But I hadn’t thought about setting one up, so I walked back to Amber’s.

She and I needed to find a proper ghost light, and that would take a little time.

 

EIGHT

We found an old lamp that would be a perfect ghost light in Amber’s basement. Then we discussed what to do on Thursday. I worried that the lack of an audience would embolden the ghosts.

“I don’t understand,” Amber said in her spotless and lovely kitchen. She clutched a thick mug of coffee even though it was 9 p.m. “What do the ghosts want?”

“They’re theatrical ghosts,” I said. “They just want to enjoy, like any other audience.”

“So the ghost of Eddie Foy is actually in the theater?” Amber sounded skeptical.

“No,” I said. “It’s more of a shade of Eddie Foy. I’m sure there are parts of him all over the remaining vaudeville theaters throughout the country. But the ghosts do have a life and they have a mission—to keep the theater alive and provide a safe place for actors and others to pursue their craft.”

“But they touched the students,” she said.

“They did, thinking they were helping. They didn’t understand that Tyler was performing as a character. That song was too personal for them. They got a sense of it with the opening number. Over time, they’ll understand.”

Amber refilled her coffee mug, then shook the pot at me. I declined. I didn’t need anything to become even more hyper.

“You knew about this,” she said, almost accusingly.

“I suspected it,” I said. “When I found out that they hadn’t ever performed well in a real theater. Some of these kids can feel the ghosts. They’re sensitive.”

“I can’t believe there are no ghosts in the high school,” she said.

“Oh, there are,” I said. “Or at least bits of students long passed. Mostly, their attention is wandering or they want to learn something new or they have seen it all and are jaded. There’s very little joy in that classroom. There might be joy in, say, the gymnasium, but the classrooms are not a place to get the kind of support that theatrical ghosts give.”

“That’s why Tyler did so badly at the Jimmy Awards?” she asked.

“Probably,” I said. “If you think there are a lot of shades in this theater, imagine what it’s like at, say, the Lyceum.”

The Lyceum was the oldest continually operating theater on Broadway.

She winced, and set her cup down. “How can they learn this?”

“Well, I debated that,” I said. “I thought maybe I should reveal the ghosts to them, but that would be even worse. Imagine how scared some of these kids would be. Better to have them get used to performing in a haunted space.”

She let out a sigh. “I can’t tell Keith this.”

“No, you can’t.” I didn’t want to disparage Keith. The man was fighting the good fight, even if he was not sensitive enough to be the kind of drama teacher I would prefer.

Amber eyed me sideways. “You have an idea.”

I nodded.

“Spill,” she said.

I took a deep breath. “You need to stay in Davyes for a while. Fight the new money and their attitudes toward the school. Make sure the theater is being used—by the kids from elementary school to high school—every single week.”

“Bring in outside performers?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “The kids have enough competition on that space. Let them learn how to be in it. This group of high schoolers might not relax into it entirely, but think about the elementary school kids. That’ll be their second home by the time they’re in high school.”

Amber gave me that slow smile that always turned her from a striking woman into a world-class beauty.

“That’s what I wanted all along,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“You think this will do it?” she asked.

“I do,” I said with extreme confidence. I didn’t add my one hesitation: Provided the kids could make it through Thursday afternoon.

 

NINE

They were fifteen minutes late. Keith arrived with a van filled with stuff, followed by another van filled with kids. He got out, looking harried.

“They didn’t want to come,” he said as if it were my fault.

I didn’t say anything. I let them set up while I paced the lobby. I didn’t lecture the ghosts either. I had done that for the past few days, trying to give them a crash course on modern theater, warning them that there would be topics they didn’t like.

I got unexpected assistance for Eva Tanguay. She had been known for being one of the most risqué and risk-taking performers in vaudeville. And I wouldn’t be here if I had done the safe things, she told them.

I had to stand back as she gave the ghosts her “take risks” lectures, because I knew how she ended up. She hadn’t taken risks at the right time. She avoided radio, avoided movies. She died forgotten because the show went on…without her.

But her shade didn’t need to know that. And it was giving good advice to her colleagues. They listened to her.

By Wednesday morning, Bert Williams had stopped singing that verse from “Nobody.”

By Thursday morning, Eddie Foy Sr. promised to keep his distance from all the performers.

By Thursday afternoon, the ghosts had left the back of the house and filled the seats, waiting patiently for the kids to do their single number.

The curtains had been drawn, and I could see feet moving behind them, along with the shadows of props and stage pieces. The show would start late, but no one was counting. For the ghosts, the show was decades late anyway.

I had a seat in the middle of the auditorium. I made Amber sit down front. Severson sat beside her, with instructions to laugh, applaud, and enjoy. He didn’t look like the kind of man who would enjoy anything theatrical, but I hoped he could do a sincere imitation of someone who could.

Finally, a half an hour after the official curtain time, music filled the theater—from the sound system. Kudos to Keith for getting someone to work sound and lighting.

Someone alive, anyway.

Then the curtain went up to reveal risers on the left, a standing mic in center stage, a flag-draped table with two more mics and behind it all, a standing bulletin board with posters and signs like Bully Free Zone and D.A.R.E. visible from the audience. Above it all, a banner saying Putnam County Spelling Bee, over which someone had draped the number 25.

The cute staging impressed me more than I expected. As did the kids’ costumes. They didn’t have to wear anything except their own good clothes, but they did.

The outspoken girl had transformed herself into a kid-approximation of a middle aged adult. Not entirely convincing, but good enough for a student production. And the show got underway.

The kids sang, and tripped, and occasionally wandered to the wrong side of the stage.

I didn’t really watch them, figuring that Amber’s enthusiasm would be enough.

I watched the ghosts. Those that could occupied seats other than the three we occupied. The rest stood along the walls and in the back. Those ghosts that were so transparent that they were barely there seemed to be laughing. Those that had a little more solidity did laugh, and some clapped along.

They seemed to understand a spelling bee. I would have wagered (I did not know) that they had spelling bees at their schools when they were young.

Somehow we had lucked into the right musical after all.

When the song ended, five minutes after it began, the seated ghosts floated to their feet and gave the students a rousing standing ovation. Amber stood too, and elbowed Severson so that he would join her. I stood and applauded as well.

The sound of our hands seemed to fill the theater, but I knew it was more than that. I knew that there was a faint echo of the ghosts’ applause, and that the kids could hear it.

They ran to the front of the stage, joined hands as if they had performed the full two-hour production, and did a proper curtain call.

Then they danced off the stage.

I sank back into my seat.

It had gone better than I expected. It wouldn’t be enough: the kids still had a lot of work to do to feel at home in a theater like this. But this was a start—a good one.

“I don’t know what you did,” Keith said as he descended the stairs from the stage, “but those kids are the happiest I’ve ever seen them.”

“A real theater will do that,” Severson said, and we all looked at him in surprise.

He extended his hands as if he didn’t understand us at all.

“I live in New York,” he said, as if that explained everything. Maybe it did.

Amber hugged me. “You did it.”

I waited what I thought was the proper amount of time and slid out of the hug. “It’s a short-term fix. You have to do the rest.”

“I will,” she said.

“Do what?” Keith asked.

She grinned at me, then slipped her arm through his. “Oh,” she said, as she led him back to the stage. “We have plans.”

The ghosts followed, as if they wanted to hear the plans. I wasn’t as worried about them now that they had a proper ghost light and they would have theater to watch on a regular basis.

Severson remained standing, then he turned to me.

“Did you see something just now?” he asked.

“Like what?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Something wispy, something—.” Then he shook his head. “I don’t do well in small towns.”

“Neither do I,” I said. I was just glad that I hadn’t had to call in my sisters. Rosalind would have hated it here, and Viola would have tried to cause trouble just to keep herself entertained.

“I am to follow your instructions for your return home,” Severson said. “Miss Harrington told me to tell you that her plane is at your disposal.”

Probably literally. The question was would I be better off endangering myself and a pilot or a small plane filled with people?

“Or,” he said, “I could drive you to New Haven.”

That was tempting. The Rolls was the safest car I’d traveled in in years.

“Doesn’t Amber need you?” I asked.

“If she is staying here, and she has told me she is, then she will have to get used to driving herself. This place is too small for me.”

I grinned at him. “And you have season tickets for Broadway, don’t you?”

He looked both shocked and affronted, but he didn’t deny it.

“What did you do to turn this all around?” he asked, clearly trying to take the focus off himself.

“Every theater has a beating heart,” I said. “You just have to know how to find it.”

And to discipline it, just a little, and help it overcome its sadness, its loneliness, and maybe become that someone who soothed its thumpin’ bumpin’ brain.

I looked up. Bert Williams was watching me from the stage. I nodded to him. He nodded back and then danced his way into the wings, looking nothing like the sad shade I had seen days ago.

I smiled.

I had never done a job like this one before. I always worked big productions in famous theaters, saving multi-million dollar investments. I traveled the world using magic to keep the theater alive.

I had never thought of the best way to keep it alive, the way that Amber had been doing. Bringing in the kids. Not the rich kids in the glitzy cities who had grown up with professional theater only a few blocks away.

But these kids, the ones who had to use their own clothes as costumes, the ones who had never left home until they had to compete somewhere else, the ones who slowly realized that there was more to life than TV and work and grades and cold, gray, snowy days.

For a brief moment, I toyed with helping out at high school theaters all over the country. And then I thought about my comfortable office in that neo-Gothic building at Yale, filled with my books and the presence of Edna my secretary-dragon, my research and all the things that I would rather do than stand in the small-town cold, forced to eat diner food because there was nothing else.

Maybe I would do this now and again. Or maybe this was a one-time thing.

But it did open my eyes to a corner of the world I had never seen before.

Which was exactly what theater was supposed to.

 

____________________________________________

“Theatrical Revival” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here. 

And if you want more holiday stories, fill your holiday reading stocking to last the whole year here on the Holiday Spectacular store.

Theatrical Revival
Copyright © 2024 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in the 2023 Holiday Spectacular
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2024 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Canva & ©  SergeyNivens | DepositPhotos

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

 

I barely remember July. We were reorganizing our business, repairing a lot of damage that we found, and trying to catch up on work that was due and wasn’t even started. Dean was still in PT…and then our air conditioner decided it would rather spit water at us than cool us down. (This during a record heatwave.) It was a saga and a half. Of course, I got behind on reading. I was barely sleeping. I look at the pile of recommendeds that I have sitting in my get-this-done spot and there are only 2 books, both of which I was reading in little chunks while I was doing things like picking up lunch. And a few articles from breakfast.

July was pure 2024 for us, too much work and too many (bad) discoveries, only to learn how wonderful life can be, as friends stepped in even when no one asked. It was good and hard and…well…not conducive to reading. Still, I have some things to recommend.

July, 2024

Bowen, Sarina, Bombshells, Tuxbury Publishing, LLC 2021. I adore this book. Some of Sarina Bowen’s hockey books are hit and miss for me. I like sports, but I’m not a die-hard hockey fan (even though I grew up around it). However, women’s sports fascinate me. The Bombshells of the title are her made-up women’s pro team, set in Brooklyn, dealing with the disparity with which two teams, owned by the same billionaire, are funded different. She throws a very good romance in the middle of this, but even better are the sports details. One of the best Brooklyn Bruisers novels. And I’ll note that she seems to have her ebooks available only through Amazon, which is a huge mistake, imho. You can get a paper version. That’s the cover I have here.

Huston, Caitlin, “Only Murders in the Building Musical Is a Twisty Tribute to the Theater,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 20, 2024. Apparently, this awards-edition of the Reporter repurposed this article, but this was the first time I had seen it. It’s a fascinating look at writing incidental music for a show that revolved around a murder on stage. They ended up writing the entire musical. A great piece on the creative process. And, oh, if you’re not watching Only Murders in the Building, you might want to. There’s so much about mysteries and cozies and writing (and TV and movies and theater) here. I have loved the show since it started. It’s a lot of fun.

Kuga, Mitchell, “Across The Aoikiverse,” Billboard, April 27, 2024. Fascinating interview with Steve Aoki. He first came to my attention when I moved to Las Vegas, and he was DJing everywhere or so it seemed to me. For years, I didn’t realize how many pies he had his fingers in. Then I realized how many people he worked with, but I had no idea exactly how many until I read this interview. There’s a long section in here about collaboration and about how it feeds the creative brain. Read this one.

Riedel, Michael, “Once More With Feeling,” Vanity Fair, April, 2024. Cabaret was the first musical that taught me the power of the book. By that, I mean the script for the musical. The book and the music together create a marvelous musical. I first saw Cabaret in production as a freshman at Beloit College, all by myself (one of my first forays in going to performances on my own). I thought the show was amazing, powerful, groundbreaking, and heartbreaking. I staggered out of that production feeling gutted and alone, unable to talk to anyone about it because I was the only one who had seen it.

Later, I saw the film of Cabaret. I have yet to see another version live. But when I saw the film (and a film of the production), I realized just how amateurish that production was. And still, it was powerful, because you can’t defeat the power of the book no matter how terrible the performers are.

I’m fascinated by Cabaret. A theater here will be performing it through February, and I’m trying to gird myself up to see it. Dunno if I will. It’s a tough show in good times…and these are not good times.

Michael Riedel’s piece, though, shows that Cabaret wasn’t ever designed for the good times. I learned so much about the history of the musical and the reaction to it. Fascinating stuff. I don’t know if you’re as interested in theater history as I am, but if you are, this is definitely worth your time.

Rose, Sarah, D-Day Girls, Broadway Books, 2019. I initially bought this book as a gift for a friend who was born on D-Day and loves reading D-Day material. (And bonus! Loves reading about strong women.) Then I looked at the book and thought I would like to read it too. Of course, I didn’t get to it right away…as in 5 years later I finally picked it up.

One of my favorite time periods to read about is WWII. I thought I knew a lot about D-Day, which is essential, but didn’t interest me much as a military operation. (I’m not that big on military history.) But D-Day Girls is spy non-fiction about amazingly courageous women. They risked life and limb to get everything ready. One woman actually had a child with a man who had no idea that she was a spy. (He was French Resistance.) He got captured, and later she did too, leaving the baby with the nanny, who finally had to turn the child in to a home for orphans. I can’t imagine what went through everyone’s minds, and how they survived (however imperfectly). There are stories like that throughout, many not told outside of letters and diaries.

I recommend this highly.

I know that a lot of you writers are preparing for 2025. Dean and I are too after a…well…weird 2024. I’m going to be blogging about a lot of what I learned in 2024 on my Patreon page in the next week, as I process 2024 for myself. So take a peek over the weekend.  I will also be finishing up July’s (yes, July’s) Recommended Reading List and posting it here. I also hope to get through August (but I doubt I’ll manage). I’m going to finish the RRL for the entire strange year of 2024 even if it takes me to next July! (It won’t. I promise.) In case you missed it, I did post November’s list a few days ago.

In the meantime, I wanted to let you know about a big sale we’re doing for writers. It’s called the 12 Days of Writers Workshops (Sale), and each day, we reveal a new bargain. We started eight days ago. So, in case you missed what we’ve done (because you’re not reading Dean’s blog, and really, why aren’t you?), here’s what we have so far. And by the way, the “me” in what I’ve copied below is Dean, not (ahem) me.

General Information… We are going to offer one new workshop or class or challenge a day for 12 days on sale. (Yes, you can get a previous day’s offering as well, but the discounts on the earlier classes may decrease as the sale goes on, so better to grab one sooner than wait.)

We will reveal each workshop(s) or class or challenge and sale price each day here.

DAY 8…. PRODUCTS CLASS and SHOPIFY CLASS BUNDLES both 50% OFF…

Back a year or so ago we offered an INDIE WRITERS GUIDE TO SHOPIFY. Two 9-week classes with a weekly webinar and then we offered a INDIE WRITERS GUIDE TO PRODUCTS. Also two 9-week classes with weekly webinar. Webinars were recorded and are a ton of fun and learning.

These two classes have not dated in the slightest.

The possibilities of making money with Shopify and also products from your writing through Shopify has no end. You just have to be able to see it and do it. This is a modern foundation stone of an indie writer’s career now. These two classes are critical to that learning.

Both 2-class bundles were $900 each, but you can get them in this holiday sale for 50% by using the code

ShopifyandProducts50

You can get one or the other, but I would suggest you plan to take them both.

They are all on WMG Teachable

DAY 7…. FIVE JANUARY REGULAR WORKSHOPS 50% OFF…

We offer core six-week workshops every month, starting on the first Tuesday of every month. There are five assignments to do in the six weeks for each class and again, we consider these the core classes.

Starting January 7th…

• • Writing Into the Dark
  • Teams in Fiction
  • Depth in Writing
  • Advanced Depth
  • Killing the Critical Voice

They are all on WMG Teachable

The code to get any class for January at half the normal $300 price is

Regular50

————-

DAY 6…. FOUR CHALLENGES…

These four challenges have been going for years. You can sign up now with the sale and start them any time you are ready. But once you start, no turning back.

Normally, these are $600, but $300 is the half price cost for the sale. You miss, you get $600 in credit for anything on Teachable except another challenge. You make it, you get a lifetime subscription (except the Everything Subscription).

Code to get them at half price is

Challenge50

• • — THE GREAT CHALLENGE which is to write and send to me one short story a week.
  • — THE GREAT PUBLISHING CHALLENGE which is to publish one major thing a month. (Collection, novella, or novel.)
  • — THE GREAT NOVELLA CHALLENGE which is to write a new novella every month.
  • — THE GREAT NOVEL CHALLENGE which is to write a new novel every two months.

These are now on the first page or so of WMG Teachable

You can go there for more information on each challenge or write me.

——

DAY 5…. ADVANCED CRAFT CLASSES…

The first six months of classes in 2025 are 50% off if you use the code with each class. Also, all three yearly bundles of classes are 50% off as well.  6 classes from 2023, 6 from 2024, and 6 coming in 2025. All 18 are offered in 2025.

Just figure out either the Advanced Craft bundle or the class in the first six months you want on WMG Teachable and hit purchase and then put in the code on the next page and hit apply and you will get the Advanced Craft Class or the full year’s bundle at 50% off.

Code to get any class or any of the three yearly bundles 50% off on each is…

Craft50

Classes are:

2023 Bundle…

• • Advanced Pacing
  • Advanced Character Development
  • Floating Viewpoints
  • Advanced Voice
  • Advanced Conflict
  • Unputdownable

2024 Bundle…

• • Advanced Dialog
  • Advanced Humor
  • Advanced Endings
  • Advanced Information Flow
  • Advanced Genre
  • Advanced Emotion

2025 Bundle…

• • Advanced Rule of Three
  • Advanced Setting
  • Advanced Cliffhangers
  • Advanced Novel Structure
  • Advanced Tension/Suspense
  • Advanced Making Stuff Up

—– DAY 4…. PUBLISHING MONDAY classes and BITE-SIZED BRANDING MONDAY classes…

All are 50% off if you use the code with each class. Just find the Monday class you want on WMG Teachable first and second pages and hit purchase and then put in the code on the next page and hit apply and you will get the Quarter or the full year’s bundle of either one at 50% off.

Code to get any quarter or either bundle of four quarters 50% off on each is… Publishing50

These two classes are like the Creative Survival, Bite-Sized Copyright, Motivational Monday, and Decade Ahead classes we have done over the last three years. There are four videos for each class every Monday morning for all 52 weeks of 2025.

Each quarter is $500 normally and the bundle of each is $1500 normally. So for this sale, each quarter is $250 with the sale and the bundle is $750.  (That’s right, $750 gets you a full year of learning every Monday morning.)

If you want to take both the full year of Publishing Monday and Bite-Sized Branding and Trademark classes, write me and I can get you both for $1,000, a $500 savings over and above half price. Not a deal that will last.

Both these classes are on WMG Teachable first and second pages. Descriptions there. Join me every Monday morning for a ton of stuff about publishing and sales or a ton of information about branding and trademark, or both.

——

DAY 3…. Any of the Eight FOCUS STUDY CLASSES…

All are 50% off if you use the code with each class. Just find the Focus Bundle you want on WMG Teachable first page and hit purchase and then put in the code on the next page and hit apply and you will get the Focus Bundle for 50% off.

Code for all eight to get 50% off on each is… Focus50

Each bundle has seven classes or workshops focused on the topic of the Focus Bundle. The seven classes in each one are under Bundled Content on the left.

Here are the eight Focus Bundles of Classes…

• • Focus on Learning Depth
  • Focus on Learning Beyond Simple Depth
  • Focus on Learning Writing Attitude
  • Focus on Learning Basic Writing Business
  • Focus on Learning Basic Licensing and Copyright
  • Focus on Learning to Write Science Fiction
  • Focus on Learning Productivity
  • Focus on Learning Characterization

Normally each Focus Bundle of seven classes is $500, but for a short time in this holiday sale, they are half price at $250. And yes, you can get more than one bundle.

—–

DAY 2…. Three BEAUTIFUL TROPHY CHALLENGES…

All are 50% off if you use the code with each challenge. You get the full price back in credits if you do not hit the challenge, if you hit it, you will get a Beautiful Trophy Award and more, including on two of them Lifetime Subscriptions.

(Lifetime Everything Subscribers, write me for the code if interested in going for a Beautiful Trophy Award.)

— Challenge… Write 2025 Words A Day for 2025… $600 full price, half price code is:

2025Challenge50

— Challenge… Write as Many or More Words in 2025 as Dean does… $600 full price, half price code is:

DeanFull50

— Challenge… Write Half as Many Words in 2025 as Dean does… $300 full price, half price code is:

DeanHalf50

Just find the challenge you want on WMG Teachable first page and hit purchase and then put in the code on the next page and hit apply and you will get the challenge for 50% off. They will be great fun once again this year.

(No credits for challenges. Can’t use credits to get more credits I’m afraid.)

——-

DAY 1…. KRIS AND DEAN SUGGEST A CLASS TO TAKE…

How it works… You send me one of your own short stories. Both Kris and I will read it very quickly, within a day or so, discuss it, and suggest from what we see in your story what class you could take to really improve your writing craft. Then we will give you a code to take that class for no extra charge.

That’s right, both Kris and I read your short story, suggest a class to jump your skill level, and then give you a code to take the class when you want for free. How cool is that???

Cost is $200.  Write me and I will tell you where to send the fee and also where to send the short story and with what subject line. (No subscriptions or credits apply on this one. No worries, they will on classes coming up.)

Questions on first eight days of this sale, write me. And remember, as the sale goes on, the earlier discounts will reduce.

Cat’s love for John inspires the bestselling romances she writes. Her heroes and heroines experience what she cannot: John’s touch.

John, too, longs for Cat’s touch. Instead, he protects her. But protecting the living comes with risks. If he goes too far, he could lose her forever.

When Cat’s romance novels bring an uninvited guest to her door on Christmas Eve, the choices she and John make could finally allow them to consummate their relationship—or end their time together forever.

 “Inspiration” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here. 

 

Inspiration by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

THE STEERING WHEEL was cold. Frank held his raw red hand over the vent leading to the Oldsmobile’s sporadic heating system. The clear Wisconsin night seemed fresh; subzero temperatures hardened the edges on the world, made it sharper. Even the night sky was blacker than usual.

Frank pulled his down jacket tightly around his shoulders. The gun felt solid against his hip, protection against such a cold night. He glanced at the books on the seat beside him. All of the covers depicted a man and a woman in an embrace. All of the couples seemed to be experiencing some form of ecstasy. He ran his fingers along the smooth surface of the latest book cover, along the raised edges of Catherine Rice’s name. He had read, in one of the romance magazines, that they called her Cat. The name suited her. The author’s photo inside the book cover could have doubled for any one of her heroines—the wide, almond eyes; the soft, seductive smile; the high cheekbones and the shiny, shoulder-length hair. He didn’t know the color yet—of her eyes or her hair—but he would soon enough.

Christmas Eve was the perfect time, the time to catch anyone home, even the writer of best-selling romantic fiction. Unless she went to church. But judging from the sensual content of her books, Cat Rice didn’t go to church. She seemed to believe in a higher power, but that higher power wasn’t necessarily Christian.

Snow covered the rolling farmland. Small wood-and-wire fences ran along property lines, making a wind barrier so that drifts wouldn’t pile on the roads. Every mile or two, a farmhouse loomed, usually decorated with multicolored lights around the huge picture window. Frank would tense, and then relax. Her farm was ten miles up Highway 12, where Springfield-Lodi Road converged in a strange angular corner. The farmhouse had been standing on that corner since he was a boy. He knew where she lived. He simply couldn’t believe his luck in finding her.

A Christmas present to himself, meeting his favorite author. He had imagined the scene a thousand times: Cat opened the door, tears reflecting the green of her eyes. She was suspicious at first, but his kindness, his solicitation at her obvious loneliness, led her to invite him in. They shared mulled cider and gentle kisses beneath the glow of her Christmas tree, and she let him touch her…

But sometimes his fears took over, and he knew that a famous woman like Cat wouldn’t want a man like him, a man who had worked on a Janesville assembly line since he was sixteen, attaching this doohickey to that doohickey, meeting his hourly quota, listening to the roar of the machine…until two days ago, when the company announced its annual holiday layoffs—and laid him off for the first time in twenty years.

No. The men she wrote about weren’t always rich, but they were always bright and intelligent, educated and witty. Sometimes the scenario got away from him. Sometimes, in his imagination, she would slam the door and dial the police, and he would tear inside, rip the phone from her hands, and shove her on the couch, reaching for her clothes, the soft skin inside, taking instead of letting her give.

Sometimes he ached, and not even the gentle sensuality of Cat’s books could ease him. She would understand that. She would have to.

***

John watched Cat lean on the dirty stonework in front of the fireplace, wishing that he could help. He hated the inequities in their relationship. There were so many things that he wanted to do that he simply was not capable of.

Cat stuffed wadded paper between the logs and the kindling, then grabbed a kitchen match, pausing for effect. “Cricket on the Hearth,” she said.

John wrinkled his nose. Every year they had read Christmas stories to each other. This year he had chosen Dickens as the author. John leaned back against the art deco, restored 1920s sofa. “I prefer The Chimes.”

Cat struck the match and watched the flame burn blue, then gold. She tucked the match against a piece of paper. The paper ignited, burned and crisped without so much as charring the kindling. “How about A Christmas Carol?”

He snorted. “That’s everyone’s favorite. I’m sick to death of it.”

She lit two more matches and tossed them on the pile of wood. Papers caught, and finally kindling did, too. “That leaves The Haunted Man.”

They stared at each other. John sighed and brushed a strand of hair from his face. “No, thanks.”

Cat picked up the copy of Dickens’s Christmas Books that lay on the rug just beyond the stonework. “Here,” she said, tossing the book at John.

His hand closed around the book, only to have it fall through his fingers and thud on the glass top of the coffee table. “Wrong year.”

She frowned, scooted over to the table, and opened the book to the copyright page. “Nineteen fifty-nine.”

“Half of ’59 is good; half isn’t,” he said, and winked out, leaving her to stare at the indentation in her antique couch.

“I hate it when you do that,” she said. He could tell from her tone of voice that she was uncertain whether he was still in the room. Sometimes he wondered himself why he did that. Perhaps it was a way to reestablish their distance, a distance he didn’t want to feel, either, but had no choice or control over.

“It’s Christmas Eve. We still haven’t decided which Dickens story to read in front of the fire.”

He knew it was Christmas Eve, and the knowledge frightened him. He had died thirty years ago this night, and he was due for a review—which would either result in a renewal or in his final rest.

He didn’t want to leave Cat. She was so small and vulnerable. And he was not helping her by keeping her focus on him. Yet it was that focus that had given life to her romances. Sometimes he wondered why she didn’t write horror.

She pushed the Dickens aside as if it hadn’t mattered. He was being foolish. She had planned a nice, romantic evening, and he was ruining it. Damn the rules anyway. He had never been through a review before. Sometimes, he was told, the Powers Above conducted a reenactment. Sometimes they snatched a shade in the middle of a project. And sometimes they didn’t do anything at all. They did watch, though, and they did enforce the one rule that John really hated: he could touch anything made before his death, but anything made afterward wasn’t solid to him. Cat had been born in 1961, January. Conceived in 1960, about one year too late.

On the other hand, romance novels made perfect sense. She had to relieve the sexual tension somehow.

“The Chimes,” he said, his voice sounding hollow and echoey like it always did when he was invisible. “You’ll get all the good cheer and Victorian social satire you can stand for a single evening.”

“I’d rather have sex,” she mumbled.

As if he wouldn’t. But he didn’t want her to know that he had heard. “What?” he said.

She sighed. “The Chimes is fine.”

***

The farm loomed ahead, its yard light shining like a well-directed beacon against the night sky. In the yard he could see an unused tractor and a dilapidated barn. The house itself—an old turn-of-the-century two-story, big enough for a family full of children—had light in its curtained window. Through the main window, he thought he caught the multicolored glimmer of tree lights.

Come in, she said, tears glinting in her green eyes.

A shiver of anticipation ran down his back. He pulled the car over onto the shoulder and shut off the engine. The night was so cold, and the car was so junky-looking, anyone would assume that it had simply broken down. He got out and slammed the door. The ca-thunk! echoed in the stillness. He hadn’t seen a single car this evening. Good thing, too, considering the half mile he had to walk.

He had planned it well, figuring that she would let him in to use the phone. Country folk were still hospitable to people with car trouble. With the distances between houses and the bitter cold, no one wanted to be responsible for someone else’s death. He was counting on that kindness. The holiday would help, too.

He jammed his hands in his pockets and began to walk, his boots making little squeaking sounds on the snow.

***

John grabbed the knife and the wine, and proceeded to open the bottle, moving a little away from the table so that he wouldn’t knock over the antique crystal goblets she had set out. Cat went to such lengths to include him, and he enjoyed it. Sharing wine with Cat made him feel almost human, almost alive again. The alcohol would slide down the back of his throat and warm him. For one short moment, he could imagine that with a simple movement of his fingers, he could touch Cat, bring her closer to him, make love to her.

A simple movement of his fingers. All it would have taken to save himself instead of Britta thirty years ago.

Even if he had survived, he would have been too old for Catherine. A seventy-year-old man and a thirty-year-old woman often married for money or companionship, not the kind of love Cat wrote about in her books.

The cork slid free with a squeal. “How about something nontraditional, like A Tale of Two Cities?”

Cat giggled. “God, we’d be up all night.”

Like they so often were when she finished a book. She would read to him, knowing that he couldn’t turn the pages of something so fresh, even if she wrote it on decades-old parchment. Those nights were as close to loving as they could get—John sprawled on the couch, feeling the heat of the fire, eyes closed as he imagined himself the hero of the novel, and Cat the heroine. She never said, but he knew that was what she saw, too. And he also knew that he was her spark, her inspiration. He had read the two novels she wrote before she came to the farm, before she found him. The prose was as good, but the characters were lifeless. The man seemed like a modern-day Heathcliff, done as poorly as a thousand other such characters; and the woman wayward, timid, and determined, rather like Cat when she had moved in. He smiled, remembering the first time he had seen her, trying to drag her antique couch up the stairs on a dolly. He had stayed invisible as he held the end of the couch, easing the weight so that the bumping wouldn’t damage the furniture.

He had worried about such things after she moved in, little helps that he made, worried that one of them would be the selfless act that would lead him away from Cat, to his final rest.

“Are you going to stand there, staring into space like you had a calling from the Angel of God, or are you going to pour the wine?”

Cat held out her glass. He grinned and poured, enjoying the clink of glass against glass—a sound he had caused. She sipped the amber liquid and smiled at him.

He poured his own drink, and then lifted the goblet. “To you,” he said.

She touched her glass to his. “And to our future,” she whispered. But he didn’t drink. He never drank to that toast, for neither of them quite understood the meaning of it.

***

The walk was farther than it originally looked. Frank’s nose ached, and his eyes stung with cold. The jacket he wore had thinned over the years, and he found himself shivering in the meager warmth it offered. He stared at the house ahead, the unwavering yard light, and the curtained windows. Sometimes he thought he saw a shadow moving across the room, but sometimes he thought he had imagined it.

He made himself concentrate on her books. In them the first meeting was always important, sometimes rocky, but crucial to the rest of the story. Very rarely did the hero introduce himself to the heroine, but once in a while it happened that way. Just like now. He had picked a magical night to meet a marvelous woman, and he knew that things would go well.

He had reached the bend in the road, where Springfield-Lodi curved off the highway. The house stood before him across a wide expanse of unbroken snow. The place looked foreboding somehow. He ran a hand across his stomach, feeling the nerves jump. He hadn’t approached a girl in a long time—not since Sue Anne on the assembly line.

Sue Anne. He swallowed hard. He thought sure they would fire him after that. It wasn’t his fault that she died. She had lied to him, led him on—and then, when he challenged her, she had denied everything, said she hadn’t wanted to hurt him.

Well, he hadn’t wanted to hurt her, either.

He swallowed, shrugged off the memory, and walked around to the frozen, mud-covered driveway. A cleared path led to the house. He walked cautiously, thinking of the books, thinking of her—as he had thought of her a hundred times on his assembly line, as he reached here, then there, then here—

The door came too soon. He hesitated for an instant, staring at the plastic, snow-dusted wreath on the weathered wood. There was something about this house. Someone had died here when Frank was very young. He shivered, thinking he hadn’t been this cold in a long time, and then he knocked.

***

 “Or I could do the entire Christmas Carol from memory,” John said. He winked out, and his voice became eerie and hollow. “I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link and yard by yard, I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?”

He reappeared next to the Christmas tree, grinning at his own cleverness. Cat had her head cocked to one side, as if she were listening.

“I think someone knocked.”

His grin grew wider. “Looks like it is A Christmas Carol, then. Although the clock is supposed to strike before we hear anything.”

“I’m serious,” she said. “Who would be here tonight?”

The words chilled him. Britta had said the same thing on the same night thirty years ago. And he had been silly then, too, teasing her that what she heard could have been a bit of undigested beef, a blot of mustard—A Christmas Carol again. Funny how he had forgotten that when he suggested Dickens this year. “We could see if they go away.” His voice sounded hollow even though he was still visible. He didn’t think he could be nervous, but he was.

The knock sounded again. Louder.

“I’m curious.” She walked to the door. A wind chime, made of small glass angels, tinkled in her wake.

John followed, not afraid to show himself to anyone. Her family lived out of town; her friends were gone for the holidays—all she had was him. Whoever was at that door was a stranger.

She pulled open the door, sending in cold air that even John thought he could feel. The man behind the door was small, but powerfully built. His arms in his thin jacket were brawny. He wore no hat, and the tips of his ears as well as his nose were red.

The man’s gaze flickered to John and then to Cat. “My car—I mean, I got—I mean, I’m sorry to bother you.”

“Do you need to use the phone?” Cat’s voice was warm, solicitous.

The man nodded, but John could feel a lie. The man came in, and John moved beside Cat, reaching around her to close the door. The solid wood felt good to him.

“Thank you, Miss Rice,” the stranger said.

***

The instant he said it, he knew he had made a mistake. The chill seemed to seep deeper into Frank’s body. He looked at the shock on Cat’s face, to the thin disapproval on the face of her man. Her man. The magazines never said anything about a husband. Or any kind of boyfriend. He should have known she would have someone here, but somehow that had never figured into his scenario. Stupid. Stupid. He was stupid to be here, just as she had been stupid to lead him on with those books, those promises of hers.

“You know who I am?” Cat asked. She had taken a step back from him and crossed her arms in front of her chest. Her hair was brown—almost mousy, and her eyes a deep blue. The details pleased him even less than the man did.

“I—I’ve read all of your books. I thought, for Christmas, I’d meet you.”

He saw the shades click down, the public persona slip into place. “Well,” she said, and the warmth in her voice was as false as the wreath on the door. “Why don’t you have a seat, Mr.—?”

“Frank,” he said.

“Frank.” She glanced over her shoulder, and he saw what she was looking at. The phone in the nook near the kitchen door. “You look cold. Would you like some wine?”

“No, thanks.” This was slipping out of his control, first the man and now her chill. He looked over at the door. The man was gone. But he hadn’t walked through the room. He had simply vanished.

Frank felt relief slide through him. The man hadn’t been there at all. A projection, a trick the back of his brain was waiting to play on him.

“I have some books in the back,” she said. “Let me get them and sign them for you. It was so nice—”

He grabbed her wrist. “I have the books. I was actually thinking of spending a nice evening, just talking.”

“Oh.” The tightness of her movements sent little ripples of anger through him. She didn’t want to be near him. Like Sue Anne, she didn’t want to be close. “You’ll have to let go of me if you want me to sit down.”

He did. He let her free. And he saw the red marks his fingers left against her skin. And suddenly he wanted to leave more, to show her how silly her romance was. No one had that. Not even her, alone on Christmas Eve. He slid his gun out of his pocket, grabbed her wrist again, and pulled her close, sorry that it had to be like this, but knowing that it would always have to be like this.

***

Just like Britta. Only this time the man was after something other than money. This time there was no split second to push her out of the way, take the bullet himself, only to lose her, too. Funny how saving her had caused him to lose her. Britta had never returned, not wanting the memories. And John had waited, all these years, until Cat.

Cat wasn’t struggling. She was staring at the gun, probably waiting to see what John would do. And he could do a dozen things. Only, he didn’t want to lose her, too.

John stood in the kitchen doorway, careful to be only partially visible. The stranger was waving his gun at Cat, asking her to take off her clothes. She didn’t move. John took the knife from the table, hefted the blade a little. If he killed the man, another man might join them, an unwelcome ghost. But if he let the man kill Cat, then John and Cat would be together, finally, able to touch each other…

Unless this was his renewal. If John were to go to his final rest, Cat might take his place as the spirit of the house. He couldn’t allow her to feel this kind of loneliness, this kind of isolation.

At the last instant, John grabbed the wine bottle and hurled himself across the room, fully visible. As he had hoped, the man raised the gun away from Cat, at John, and the shots echoed yet again, bringing back Britta’s cry, the moment of fading consciousness, the fear that she wouldn’t survive. But Britta, like Cat now, had attacked. Cat shoved herself against the attacker, knocking his gun free and sending it skittering across the hardwood floor. John brought up the wine bottle, spilling wine all over himself as he clubbed the man’s balding head. The man landed on the floor with a heavy thump.

For a moment both John and Cat stared at the stranger. He seemed less threatening now, more a frightened, misguided child.

“Thank God he was over thirty,” Cat said. John smiled, ready to take a sigh of relief when he felt himself wavering. The fading feeling, like the one he hadn’t felt in thirty years, was coming back. He wondered how. His act wasn’t selfless. He hadn’t sacrificed himself. Or maybe he had. Maybe he had done so earlier and had forgotten, and in his review, they decided to take him from her.

But I’m her inspiration, he thought, reaching for her, hoping that in this one last instant, a merciful God would let him touch her, just once—and his hand passed through, as it always had.

He knew that Cat didn’t understand. She was hurrying for the phone, for help, for something to bind that awful man with. She didn’t realize that John was fading, finding a final rest that he did not want.

***

His head throbbed. Frank opened his eyes. His vision doubled and blurred. Something sticky clung to his forehead, and his wrists were pulled at an odd angle against his back. So were his feet. Then he realized that he was tied up. His wrists bound to his waist and his feet. He closed his eyes again and felt tears. All he had wanted was a nice Christmas Eve.

The faint call of sirens echoed in the distance. He sighed, unwilling to struggle.

He heard a rustle and eased his eyes open. Cat had his gun aimed at him. Her hands were shaking.

Frank tried to look around, but the pain in his head made him dizzy. “Where’s your boyfriend?”

“I think you killed him.” Her voice was low, almost too calm. For the first time, he felt frightened. He knew the scenes in her books when someone threatens the hero. The heroine would kill anyone who threatens her man.

The sirens were growing closer. He found himself praying for their arrival. Cat’s face seemed drawn and too pale.

“I didn’t mean for this—I didn’t mean—”

“Shut up,” she said. The gun was still shaking. The sirens grew unbearably loud, and then stalled. Blue and red light circled around the living room. Frank stared at the fireplace, trying to ignore this growing dizziness.

There was a knock, and then the door opened. Voices, immediately:

“This him, ma’am?”

“Yes.”

Hands grabbed him, pulled him to his feet. He almost fell forward. Something trickled into his eyes, something red. He was bleeding to death—she would have let him bleed to death—

“We’ll need you to make a statement.”

“I’ll make it here.” Cat sounded firm, but she looked frail as the lights swirled around her. He wanted to say he was sorry. He looked for the body, but saw none. He didn’t remember shooting her boyfriend. All Frank had done was fire warning shots. Maybe one had gone too far, nicked him.

“Ma’am, at least let one of our rape counselors talk with you—”

They untied the rope around his feet, connected a chain instead. The chain seemed forged especially for him. He thought he recognized all of its links.

“I’ll talk here,” Cat said, “or not at all.”

And then they led him out the door, into the deep cold. The sky still looked clear and Christmassy, the snow spreading across the far fields like a picture on a Christmas card. But the red and blue flashing lights, the prints of a dozen feet along the walk, had ruined the Christmassy look of this house. As he had.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“What?” said the officer holding him.

“Tell her I’m sorry.”

The officer grunted and made no promises. He shoved Frank into the back of the squad car. The plastic seat was cold, and the heat had scarcely penetrated the glass partition. He leaned back and closed his eyes, wishing that this had never ever happened.

***

The fire was dying. John reached for the wood, immediately grabbing a piece from a thirty-year-old tree, then pulled back the grate and tossed the wood inside. He felt almost hollow, not quite here. And then he remembered: the man, Cat, the gun…

“Cat!” John’s voice sounded echoey. He was invisible. He forced himself to wink in, the effort making him dizzy.

She was sitting on the floor, her head propped on the couch. It took him a moment to realize that she was asleep. In her hands she clutched the Dickens book. Her face was red and blotchy. She had been crying.

He crept over beside her, took the book from her hands, and touched her face. “Cat,” he said.

She stirred. Her skin felt soft beneath his fingers. He stopped, touched her blouse, her hair, her nose. “Are you dead?” he whispered.

Her eyes opened. “John,” she said.

“He killed you.” John couldn’t stop touching her. He couldn’t believe how soft she was, how silky her skin was, how warm.

“No.” She was awake now, and touching him back. “I gave him to the police hours ago. I thought you were gone.”

“Me, too.” And then he kissed her, thinking she tasted as good as he had thought she would.

She pulled her lips back for a moment. “How come I can touch you?”

He moved away, and concentrated. He had survived his review. They had renewed him by reenacting his death. He wasn’t going to fade out. He had another thirty years with Cat. And his new death date was tonight.

He leaned back into the kiss. “I’ll tell you later,” he said.

She sighed. She didn’t seem to mind the wait.

 

____________________________________________

“Inspiration” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here. 

Inspiration
Copyright © 2014 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1990
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2014 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Lithiumphoto/Dreamstime, Subbotina/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.