The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Three (37 page)

Only two more months to the end of school, and like a tantalizing forerunner to summer, the fair came to town. Sal saw the carnies setting up rides as the bus crawled by the arena parking lot that Thursday morning. The Sizzler, the Tumbler, the Tilt-a-Whirl. The Ferris Wheel, unlit and seatless, leaning on its crane. Sal imagined it busting loose and rolling off down the highway, across the bridge, up the hill past the school and on out of town. She knew exactly how it would sound, a hollow steel-on-concrete rumble, louder than the river that ran so smoothly in its banks. She kept her face pressed to the window until the parking lot was out of sight, but the Wheel only raised itself a little closer to vertical.

After school everyone walked past the bus stop, a chain of kids like a clumsy bead necklace, bunches and pairs strolling down, even the cool kids, even the rebels who might plan to get stoned first, but who were still going to ride the rides. Sal, remembering the sideways swoop and crush of the Sizzler, the jangle of rock music and yelling kids, the smells of burnt sugar and hot oil and cigarettes—the expansion of the parking lot into a convoluted world that could seem to go on forever as long as you took the long way around every ride and that only got brighter and louder and hotter as the day fell into evening and evening into night—Sal, remembering all this, stood alone at the bus stop and waited for the bus that would take her past the fair and home.

Her mom was in the kitchen, crushing garlic into a bowl of soya sauce.

"What are we having?" Sal said.

"How was school? Did you do okay on the math test?"

"Sure, I guess." The test had been last week. "What are we having?"

"Baked chicken. Macey said she might be hungry tonight."

"Oh." Sal picked up a garlic clove and peeled the papery skin.

"Wash your hands."

Sal peeled another clove. "Is she awake?"

"She had a good sleep this afternoon. You might go up and see."

Sal brushed the garlic papers into the garbage and rinsed her hands, debating whether to mention the fair. Probably she shouldn't. Probably her mom wouldn't appreciate the reminder of the passage of time. Anyway, it wasn't like Sal could go, even if she wanted to. Which she didn't.

Macey lay propped up on big pillows, her face turned to the window. She looked like a fragile bone doll these days, all the flesh under her skin eaten up by fever, and when she lay still Sal always found it hard to believe she would move again. She didn't stir when Sal opened her door, but she wasn't asleep. She said, "The Weirdo has another cat."

"Really?" Sal shut the door and toed off her shoes. The bed had been pushed up close to the big window so Macey could look out over the back yard to the alley and the houses on the other side. Sal climbed up, careful of her sister's feet, so she could look out too. "Is it hurt?"

"I think it's maybe pregnant."

Sal contemplated the gruesome possibilities of kittens in the Weirdo's hands. She could just see over the high fence to the roofed chicken-wire pens in the Weirdo's yard. It was impossible to know what was in any of those pens until you saw what the Weirdo took out of one. Cats, raccoons, crows, even a puppy once, taken out of a pen and carried inside and
never seen again
. Three days ago it had been another raccoon. Macey was keeping a log.

Sal said, "Do you think he'll wait until the kittens are born?"

"Gross."

Neither knew what the Weirdo did with his captives, but it was hard to think of a possibility that wasn't horrible. Not when you saw that figure, with its thatched gray hair, lumpy shoulders and white hands as big as baseball gloves, carry some hapless creature into the house with the broken drainpipes and curtained windows. Even
cooking
and
eating
seemed too simple, too close to human.

"Sal," Macey said, "we've got to find out."

"You keep saying that." Sal picked fuzzies off the bedspread, her mind drifting to the candy-bright commotion of the fair.

"But now I have a plan."

Sal's eyes slid to her sister's face. Despite being twins, they'd never looked that much alike. Now, with Macey gone all skinny and white, her eyes shiny with fever and her hair dull and thin, they hardly seemed to belong to the same species. Sal glared at her own robust health when she brushed her teeth in the mornings, seeing ugliness in the flesh of her face, the color of her skin. Macey's mind, too, had changed, as if, riding a tide of febrile blood, it had entered a realm that Sal could not even see.

"What kind of plan?" she said warily.

Macey finally moved. She rolled her head on the rainbow pillowcase and gave Sal a glittering look. The late light of afternoon shone on the sweat that beaded her hairline. Not the worst fever, Sal knew. The worst fever baked her sister dry, and sounded like ambulance men rattling their stretcher up the stairs.

The smell of garlicky chicken wafted into the room as Macey gave Sal her instructions.

Friday was garbage day.

There was no way in the world to do it casually. Maybe if she was old enough to drive, and had a car . . . But no. Sal didn't think in ifs. If led to
If only Macey wasn't sick
, and even
If only Sal's bone marrow was a match
. If never did anybody any good at all.

There was no way to do it casually, so she just did it. She left the house like she was going to school, walked around the block to the front of the Weirdo's house, lifted the lid of his trash can, hoisted out the sack, dropped the lid and walked away. She didn't look at the Weirdo's windows. If he saw her, he saw her, that was all. She stashed the trash bag, neatly closed with a yellow twist tie, inside the unused garden shed at the side of her house, and then ran, legs and lungs strong from PE, for the bus.

When she got home from school, her parents were in the living room having The Discussion: mortgages, private donor lists, tissue matches, travel costs, hospital fees, time. Time sliced into months, into weeks. Seven weeks to summer holidays. Sal drifted past them to the kitchen, ran cold tap water into a glass, and carried it up the stairs.

Macey hardly seemed to dent her pillows anymore. Her hands lay on the sheet's hem, her head canted toward the window. Sunlight filtered cool through spring clouds and gauze curtains, the same sunlight that dulled the lights at the parking lot fair. Sal had kept her eyes on her book as the half-empty bus trundled past, but the smells—hot dog, caramel, cigarette, machine—had billowed in the open windows and made her hungry. She stood in the doorway until she was sure Macey was asleep, then drank the cold water in one smooth series of gulps and carried the glass back down. The Discussion continued. Even Sal knew the end result would be the same: wait and see. Months, weeks, days. The fair was in town until Monday. She put the glass in the sink and went out the back door.

The garden shed had been there when they moved into the new house. The small house, was how Sal and Macey spoke of it, as it was actually a lot older than the old house, older and smaller, and with neighbors tucked in all around. The people who had lived here before had kept a square patch of lawn and planted irises and other things Sal didn't know between the grass and the weathered wooden fence. Sal's mother had said how nice it would be to have flowers and a "manageable" yard, but Sal noticed she never came out back, and the garden tools and lawn furniture all lurked in the back of the shed collecting spiders. Inside was dark and smelled like mold, but Sal lingered a moment, the Weirdo's trash unacknowledged by her foot. She could almost imagine setting up the lawn chairs inside, hanging the hammock from corner to corner, using one of those collapsible lanterns like they used to have for camping. A tiny house beside the small one. Except Macey could never come in. Sal picked up the trash bag and took it outside.

Look for fur, Macey had said. And bones, and bloody rags, and burnt candles, especially black ones. And incense and chalk.

What Sal shook out onto the shaggy grass was rinsed-out milk cartons, clean dog food cans and cottage cheese containers, and a week's worth of newspapers. The creepiest item was a toilet paper roll that she nudged back into the plastic bag with her toe. She didn't know what to feel about this lack of discovery, but Macey would be disappointed. Or rather, Macey would write another mystery into her log, and then come up with some other assignment for Sal, something a little bit harder, a little bit scarier. She always used to win the contest of dares, back when Sal could dare her to do anything. As Sal shuffled the Weirdo's trash back into its bag, she had to admit to herself that, sooner or later, she was going over the fence into the Weirdo's back yard. She was tempted to get it over with, but that would deprive Macey of her share in the adventure. Sal had to comb the grass with her fingers before she found the yellow twist tie, and then she didn't know what to do with the Weirdo's trash. After a moment's thought, she tossed the bag back in the garden shed and went into the kitchen to wash her hands. Next week she could put the bag in their can for the garbage men to haul away.

Macey was on the IV again when Sal went up after dinner. The drip always made Macey cold, so she had a fluffy blanket wrapped around her arm, a pink one sewn with butterflies that didn't quite match the rainbow sheets. Their mom was convinced that bright colors would keep Macey's spirits up, and even Macey was too kind to tell her she'd rather have something cool and calm, like sand or stone. Against the gaudy stripes, Macey's face was a dry yellowy white, with patches of red in the hollows of her cheeks. She gave Sal a cross look.

"It's too dark to look at the evidence now."

"I already looked." Sal was not surprised when her sister looked more cross, not less.

"Why didn't you say so? What did you find?"

Sal told her, as accurately as she could remember.

Macey rocked her head on the pillow. "You must have missed something. Did the newspapers have any bits cut out of them?"

Sal hadn't thought to look. She hesitated, then decided on a simple, "No."

Macey made an old lady tsk of annoyance. "He's too smart for that. I should have known." She looked out the window, where dusk was fattening into dark.

A light showed through the curtained window of one of the Weirdo's back rooms. His kitchen, Sal guessed. All the houses in this neighborhood were variations on the one they lived in. She sat waiting for her instructions on the end of Macey's bed, and it was a while before she realized Macey was asleep. She went on sitting, listening to her sister breathe. Somewhere close, a cat softly meowed.

Saturday mornings Sal would carry the TV into Macey's room and they'd watch cartoons together, like when they were kids and they'd sneak downstairs while their mom and dad slept in and muffle their laughter in sofa cushions. Not that she had to sneak to do it now. Sometimes their dad would even move the TV for them before heading off to a weekend consultation. But this Saturday the morning nurse told her Macey'd had a bad night and needed peace and quiet, which would drive Macey up the wall unless she was really bad, but you couldn't argue about things like that with the nurse. So Sal wrestled one of the lawn chairs out of the garden shed and set it up in a patch of sunlight by the back fence where she could keep an eye on the alley, at least, and pretend to be doing her homework and getting a suntan at the same time. Macey could look down from her bedroom window and know Sal was on the job.

She was working on another senseless problem about the farmer who didn't know how big any of his fields were (she imagined a city guy with romantic notions about getting back to the land, and neighbors that laughed at him behind his back) when she heard the unmistakable scuffling and whispers of kids trying to be sneaky. She dropped her pencil in the crack of her textbook and leaned over the arm of her canvas-slung chair to press her face against a crack in the fence.

Three boys, probably about ten years old: too tall to be little, but still children to Sal's thirteen-year-old eye. They wore T-shirts and premature shorts and were elbowing each other into some daring deed. They stood outside the Weirdo's tall fence, and Sal felt a hollow open up inside her chest even before the tallest boy shrugged off the other two and with a gesture commanded a hand stirrup for his foot. The next tallest boy lofted him to the top of the fence . . . there was a thump-scuffle-scrape . . . and then he was over and out of sight. Like the boys in the alley, Sal waited, breathless, for whatever would come next. The boy might have fallen down a hole for all the noise he made.

Her ribs hurt where the arm of the chair dug into her side. Her neck and shoulder creaked. She tried to shift position without losing her line of sight and the chair almost tipped, and she caught herself with her fingertips on the fence, and wondered if Macey was awake and watching, or if Macey was too sick to care.

Then sudden furious meowing, loose rattle of chicken wire, thumps and scrapes, and a bundle fell from the top of the fence—only half in Sal's view but from the caterwaul she deduced it was a cat wrapped in the tall boy's shirt. The two boys in the alley scrabbled to keep the animal contained, while the tall boy appeared, shirtless, scratched, and triumphant, at the top of the fence. He swung a leg over and posed for a second before hopping down.

The hollow in Sal's chest swelled until her breath came short. The cat was meowing, more frantic than angry, now. The boys were laughing. She dropped her books to the grass, got up, and fumbled open the gate.

"Hey!"

The boys, in the act of departing, froze.

"Let go of that cat." Even Sal could hear how lame that sounded.

The shirtless boy looked her over and sneered. "Make us," he said.

The other two, prisoning the bundled cat between them, looked unsure but excited at the possibilities.

Sal swallowed, and thought of Macey maybe watching. She took two fast steps forward and gave the boy a shove. He wasn't much shorter than she was, and was all wiry boy muscle under the scratched skin. He shoved back and kicked her hard in the shin. Then it was all stupid and confused, kicking and clutching, and someone's fist in the back of her shirt, until, in the midst of scuffing feet and angry breathing, came the unmistakable grate of a key turned in a lock.