The Urban Fantasy Anthology Part 34

"That's good."

"And I sleep with my door locked."

"Good."

Then she said, "Can I ask you something?"

I knew what was coming.

"Would you write on my arm?" She shoved up her sweats.h.i.+rt sleeve and stuck out her bare forearm. There were raised white scars running horizontally just above her wrists.

I was wrong. I hadn't expected that question nor had I expected the scars. It took me a moment to talk. "What do you mean? I asked.

"With a Sharpie. I think it will help me to be brave. If you write a message."

I had no idea what to write but I took the Sharpie she handed me and opened it. It smelled like chemicals. It smelled like back-to-school and summer sport's camp when I had to write Max's name on his baseball hat and backpack and lunch box. A bunch of lunchboxes were recalled because of lead content. I wondered what other dangerous substances lurked in products for children.

There were carcinogens in things that seemed perfectly innocuous, like bubble bath and hot dogs.

"I don't think Sharpie is good for your skin," I told Coco. "It doesn't say nontoxic. It's permanent."

"Exactly."

She was still holding her arm out so I wrote, "Farewell my Zombie," She smiled with satisfaction and pulled her sleeve down over it.

"Don't let your father see," I said.

She nodded.

"What happened? To your wrist."

"When I was a baby I got really sick," she said. "I'm better now. But I had to take all this medication and get all these treatments that really f.u.c.ked me up. Sorry. Messed me up. I'd survived all that but my life at home sucked and I didn't want to live anymore."

I suddenly wished I'd insisted on using non-toxic marker on her arm. "I understand," I said. "But you can't give up now. I mean, really. You can't."

She looked at me blankly.

"Okay?"

"Okay," she said. Then: "Can I ask you something else?"

Here it was.

"What really happened with your son?" she said, just as I thought she would.

I hadn't talked about it in so long.

"Everyone thought he had a brain tumor," I said. "But it wasn't like that. It wasn't like that at all. They wanted him and they got him. So that's why I'm here. In case I can help anyone else."

Coco reached out and gently touched my hand. "Sorry but...do you think, maybe, you just might not want to look at what really happened?"

I jumped as if she'd slapped me. "Get out please," I said.

"Oh! Sorry! I'm so sorry, Miss Merritt. I didn't mean to upset you."

The thing is, maybe Coco's right. Maybe Max really did have cancer. Maybe Coco had cancer and recovered and then wished she hadn't. Maybe her father isn't a zombie but maybe he did lay a hand on her. Maybe there's no such thing as global warming and it's okay to drive an Escalade but I don't think so. Maybe people are just out there trying to scare us. Hmmm. Maybe the presidential candidate and his running mate are not trying to eat us up. Maybe I'm crazy; maybe I'm perfectly sane. Who knows?

Well, baby, I know this. Today I am going to shut the office and ride my bike (because who wants to take a chance on making that hole in the ozone bigger, just in case) down Was.h.i.+ngton to the beach. I am going to take off my shoes and walk on the wet sand. I am going to eat my cheese sandwich and watch the sun set like a beautiful apocalypse. Maybe I'll even build a sandcastle. Those are the things you and I used to do. That is why I haven't been to the beach in all these years. But today at sunset I am going to close my eyes and I am going to remember every little thing I can about you. From your eyelashes clumped with salt water, to the sand under your fingernails, to the little curled sh.e.l.ls of your toes. I am going to remember all our days at the beach and the way you used to burrow into my arms when you were cold and the way, when you were a little older, you used to pick roses from the garden for me, in spite of the thorns.

I am going to apologize to Coco when she comes back but I am not going to apologize to any more zombies. I am going to find out some more details and if a zombie or cancer or whatever you want to call it threatens Coco Hart or any kids I know I am going to kick that motherf.u.c.ker zombie's a.s.s.

I miss you, baby. But it's better than forgetting.

We Are Not a Club, But We Sometimes Share a Room.

Joe R. Lansdale.

Nothing is new under the sun.

Urban Fantasy is not new, but the recognition of it as a commercial genre is. Actually, it hasn't been that long ago that horror fiction of any kind, though it existed of course, was not a commercial genre.

There were bestselling authors who wrote some horror stories, Ira Levin, William Blatty, and Tom Tryon come to mind, but there wasn't a long chain of horror novels being trumpeted, and though there were exceptions, most that were written appeared in small presses, or as original paperbacks. It was the same for short stories, though they had an even lower profile.

It wasn't until the popularity of Stephen King that horror became an actual commercial label, both for novels and short stories; mostly the former.

In spite of its immense popularity in the '80s, it faded dramatically in the early '90s, came back in the late '90s, disappeared again, rather quickly, and is now on the scene again, wearing a variety of festive party hats.

I admit up front, and quickly, that I am not a proponent of isolationist fiction. Meaning, by my definition, a kind of story that not only fits a specific genre, or a subset of that genre, but is d.a.m.n proud of it to the point of inclusion and exclusion.

These distinctions are okay, and necessary to some degree, but what I dislike are the hard and fast rules. There are no rules. There's fiction. There are story tellers. And the rest is hair splitting.

It's not my purpose here to round up these stories and brand them. They can be tagged to some degree, but they are not confined by the tag. The authors that wrote these stories all have tales here that loosely-and I will emphasize that word, loosely-fall into a collection box. But the authors themselves are not bound by it, and have written many stories outside this narrow definition.

These kinds of stories have ancestors. There were many writers who opened the lid on this box for the rest of us, and most of those writers were writers who, like those in this volume, were not restricted by it. They knew how to go their own way.

Fritz Leiber is a good example, and he could also be said to be someone who wrote Urban Fantasy/Horror when it wasn't cool. He was there before most anyone. His short stories "Smoke Ghost" and "The Automatic Pistol" are good examples of the general type of fiction gathered here, though these are mutations and hybrids of his pioneering. The connection with Leiber is this: The fiction has the stink of the urban about it, same as many of his stories, either because they take place in the city, or display the weaknesses of humanity in large numbers and close quarters. The terror is often due to the actions of people: pollution, street crime, over population, dehumanization, and so on. What supernatural elements there are, are dragged out of the haunted house and into the tract house and walk-up apartment, or they take place in the wasteland of some horrid aftermath brought on by the mistakes of civilization.

This section of stories owes less to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and more to noir and writers who tripped the dark fantastic with gleeful enthusiasm. Influences come from authors outside of horror, like Raymond Chandler, Das.h.i.+ell Hammett, James Cain, Ernest Hemingway, and Flannery O'Connor, and many others. I'm not suggesting that all the writers here are directly influenced by these writers, only that the type of fiction they write owes a measure of its existence to it, as surely as it does to horror and fantasy writers.

Whatever the individual writer's influences are, in this collection, each of them has put their spin on the work, given it a piece of themselves; something created by their experience, personality, geography, etc.

But there is no doubt that writers of the fantastic are the most important forerunners here. Among those writers, along with Fritz Leiber, is Robert Nathan, someone nearly forgotten these days, best known for A Portrait of Jennie, who blazed a trail for so many others, including Jack Finney. There is also Ray Bradbury.

Ray Bradbury's impact is impossible to measure. It goes off the scale, especially fiction written in his darker days-collections like Dark Carnival and the novels Something Wicked This Way Comes and Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury had the ability to see strangeness in the most common of things. His stories are indebted more to the rural and small town tradition than the urban, but it would be remiss not to mention him. He may in fact be the most responsible for making fantasy stories legitimate.

Richard Matheson's impact on this particular kind of tale is even stronger. His The Shrinking Man takes place in suburbia, and deals with threats of pollution via insecticide, something that causes the hero of the novel, after many adventures, to shrink, and shrink, until he is literally one with the universe. Matheson's book is in the same school as Leiber's short stories, or even Jack Finney's cla.s.sic novel The Body s.n.a.t.c.hers, which is as much about depersonalization as it is a Cold War allegory, though the author always denied the latter. Matheson and Finney both explain their stories with science fictional tropes, but their creations feel and taste more like horror or fantasy than science fiction.

Matheson's incredible novel, I Am Legend, is also a forerunner of the yarns here. Influenced to a great degree by noir, as well as science fiction, fantasy, and horror, specifically stories about vampires, he managed to write not only a crackerjack tale, but a claustrophobic novel of paranoia and loneliness that has yet to be surpa.s.sed. Every few years it is rediscovered, and its influence is immeasurable. I Am Legend is a wonderful book, a masterpiece, no matter what sticker you glue to it, and it will continue to influence. The DNA is strong in this one, my friends. Take for example Night of the Living Dead and its many sequels and the films and stories it has influenced. Not only were Romero's zombies inspired by Matheson's creation, there have been at least three films directly based on the novel, and a horde of others that lie within its shadow. The same goes for fiction.

And we can't forget Harlan Ellison (not that he would let you), who has put his personal touch on so many urban fantasies and has influenced a horde of writers.

There was also Henry Kuttner, and Cyril Kornbluth, and Cordwainer Smith. They donated many of their ingredients to the literary stews brewed by future writers, and they too have helped shape this specific branch of the field. This is just the beginning of the list of writers who are owed their due for opening the way for the stories in this book. It would take a book just to list them.

It seems that now the time is right for this kind of story to be truly popular. An audience has gradually been inoculated to embrace these tales, where in the past most of these writers were read by a small group of rabidly dedicated fans. With fantastic imagery so much a part of modern-day life, with television channels devoted to science fiction and fantasy, horror and the weird, with commercials using fantastic themes and spending more money to present them than was spent on entire films of this nature in the past, the rarity that was once fantastic fandom is no more.

It's gone mainstream.

Will it last?

Maybe not as Urban Fantasy or Horror, but tales of this nature will endure in one form or another. The stories in this collection will certainly reveal that. They are unusually good, and though they fit the Urban Fantasy/Horror mold, they can also fit numerous other molds; they are like living organisms that can s.h.i.+ft shape and mutate. I am proud of this a.s.sembly, and in the end, it doesn't really matter what you call them.

A brand name is just a nice way to put a book together. It appeals to those who want to at least know whose backyard they have crept into. Nothing wrong with that.

But it's like Enter the Dragon when Bruce Lee points to the heavens, and his student looks at the tip of his finger. There's more out there than just the tip of the finger, my friends.

I don't want to be someone who is trying to minimize readers.h.i.+p by denying people their labels, but neither do I want to be part of directing fiction, as if the stories are cows, through a chute and into the slaughterhouse. The more something can be identified, the more likely it will soon contain sick cows, and pretty soon the whole group is diseased and has to be put down.

It's happened to Splatterpunk and Cyberpunk and Gothic-Romance, and so on.

But if you use the label as a general guide, then so be it. If it makes you happy, I won't kick. What you have here are stories that are created from many genres and non-genres. Add to this literary fiction, as well as cult writers, experimental writers, and the influence of film and radio shows and comic books and music, and you have...Well, you have these magnificent peculiarities.

I suppose I must step forward and own up to the fact that I have a story among them. I was one of the writers the publisher felt had opened these gates wider, behind the great writers mentioned previously, of course.

If that's true, I didn't know I was doing it, and if it bothers you that I'm also an editor and have a story in this grouping, then skip mine and read the others.

Like the cliche sports quote: "I'm just happy to be here."

These stories are all trips into a world of strange magic, places where you have not been. Once you come back from your journey, you're unlikely to forget the voyage any time soon.

Take photographs while you're there, maybe a few notes.

No, better yet, just read the stories again when the mood hits you. They are worlds that you can revisit, without need of luggage or plane fare.

Go visit them often.

They are way worth it, even if the terrain is a little weird and maybe even scary.

The White Man.

Thomas M. Disch.

If human testimony, taken with every care and solemnity, judicially, before commissions innumerable, each consisting of many members, all chosen for integrity and intelligence, and const.i.tuting reports more voluminous perhaps than exist upon any other cla.s.s of cases, is worth anything, it is difficult to deny, or even to doubt the existence of such a phenomenon as the vampire.

"Carmilla"

-J. Sheridan Le Fanu.

It was the general understanding that the world was falling apart in all directions. Bad things had happened and worse were on the way. Everyone understood that-the rich and the poor, old and young (although for the young it might be more dimly sensed, an intuition). But they also understood that there was nothing much anyone could do about it, and so you concentrated on having some fun while there was any left to have. Tawana chewed kwash, which the family grew in the backyard alongside the house, in among the big old rhubarb plants. Once they had tried to eat the rhubarb, but Tawana had to spit it out-and a lucky thing, too, because later on she learned that rhubarb is poison.

The kwash helped if you were hungry (and Tawana was hungry even when her stomach was full) but it could mess up your thinking at the same time. Once in the third grade when she was transferred to a different school closer to downtown and had missed the regular bus, she set off by herself on foot, chewing kwash, and the police picked her up, crying and shoeless, out near the old airport. She had no idea how she'd got there, or lost her shoes. That's the sort of thing the kwash could do, especially if you were just a kid. You got lost without even knowing it.

Anyhow, she was in high school now and the whole system had changed. First when there was the Faith Initiative, she'd gone to a Catholic school, where boys and girls were in the same room all day and things were very strict. You couldn't say a word without raising your hand, or wear your own clothes, only the same old blue uniform every day. But that lasted less than a year. Then the public schools got special teachers for the Somali kids with Intensive English programs, and Tawana and her sisters got vouchers to attend Diversitas, a charter school in what used to be a parking garage in downtown Minneapolis near the old football stadium that they were tearing down. Diversitas is the Latin word for Diversity, and all cultures were respected there. You could have your own prayer rug, or chant, or meditate. It was the complete opposite of Our Lady of Mercy, where everybody had to do everything at the same time, all together. How could you call that freedom of religion? Plus, you could wear pretty much anything you wanted at Diversitas, except for any kind of jewelry that was potentially dangerous. There were even prizes for the best outfits of the week, which Tawana won when she was in the sixth grade. The prize-winning outfit was a Swahili Ceremonial Robe with a matching turban that she'd designed herself with duct tape. Ms. McLeod asked her to wear it to the a.s.sembly when the prizes were given out, but that wasn't possible since the towels had had to be returned to their container in the bathroom. She wasn't in fact Swahili, but at that point not many people (including Tawana) knew the difference between Somalia and other parts of Africa. At the a.s.sembly, instead of Tawana wearing the actual robe, they had shown a picture from the video on the school's surveillance camera. Up on the screen Tawana's smile must have been six feet from side to side. She was self conscious about her teeth for the next week (kwash tends to darken teeth.) Ms. McLeod had printed out a small picture from the same surveillance tape showing Tawana in her prize-winning outfit, all gleaming white with fuzzy pink flowers. But in the background of that picture there was another figure in white, a man. And no one who looked at the picture had any idea who he might have been. He wasn't one of the teachers, he wasn't in maintenance, and parents rarely visited the school in the daytime. At night there were remedial cla.s.ses for adult refugees in the bas.e.m.e.nt cla.s.srooms, and slams and concerts, sometimes, in the auditorium.

Tawana studied his face a lot, as though it were a puzzle to be solved. Who might he be, that white man, and why was he there at her ceremony? She taped the picture on the inside of the door of her hall locker, underneath the magnetic To Do list with its three immaculately empty categories: Shopping, School, Sports. Then one day it wasn't there. The picture had been removed from her locker. Nothing else had been taken, just that picture of Tawana in her robe and the white man behind her.

That was the last year there were summer vacations, After that you had to go to school all the time. Everybody b.i.t.c.hed about it, but Tawana wondered if the complainers weren't secretly glad if only because of the breakfast and lunch programs. With the new year-round schedule there was also a new music and dance teacher, Mr. Furbush, with a beard that had bleached tips. He taught junior high how to do ancient Egyptian dances, a couple of them really exhausting, but he was cute. Some kids said he was having a love affair with Ms. McLeod, but others said no, he was gay.

On a Thursday afternoon late in August of that same summer, when Tawana had already been home from school for an hour or so, the doorbell rang. Then it rang a second time, and third time. Anyone who wanted to visit the family would usually just walk in the house, so the doorbell served mainly as a warning system. But Tawana was at home by herself and she thought what if it was a package and there had to be someone to sign for it?

So she went to the door, but it wasn't a package, it was a man in a white s.h.i.+rt and a blue tie lugging a satchel full of papers. "Are you Miss Makwinja?" he asked Tawana. She should have known better than to admit that's who she was, but she said, yes, that was her name. Then he showed her a badge that said he was an agent for the Census Bureau and he just barged into the house and took a seat in the middle of the twins' futon and started asking her questions. He wanted to know the name of everyone in the family, and how it was spelled and how old they all were and where they were born and their religion and did they have a job. An endless stream of questions, and it was no use saying you didn't know, cause then he would tell her to make a guess. He had a thermos bottle hanging off the side of his knapsack, all beaded with sweat the same as his forehead. The drops would run down the sides of the bottle and down his forehead and his cheeks in zig-zags like the mice trying to escape from the laboratory in her brother's video game. "I have to do my homework now," she told him. "That's fine," he said and just sat there. Then after they both sat there a while, not budging, he said, "Oh, I have some other questions here about the house itself. Is there a bathroom?" Tawana nodded. "More than one bathroom?" "I don't know," she said, and suddenly she needed to go to the bathroom herself. But the man wouldn't leave, and wouldn't stop asking his questions. It was like going to the emergency room and having to undress.

And then she realized that she had seen him before this. He was the man behind her in the picture. The picture someone had taken from her locker. The man she had dreamed of again and again.

She got up off the futon and went to stand on the other side of the wooden trunk with the twins' clothes in it. "What did you say your name was?" she asked warily.

"I don't think I did. We're not required to give out our names, you know. My s.h.i.+eld number is K-384." He tapped the little plastic badge pinned to his white s.h.i.+rt.

"You know our names."

"True. I do. But that's what I'm paid for." And then he smiled this terrible smile, the smile she'd seen in stores and offices and hospitals all her life, without every realizing what it meant. It was the smile of an enemy, of someone sworn to kill her. Not right this moment, but someday maybe years later, someday for sure. He didn't know it yet himself, but Tawana did, because she sometimes had psychic powers. She could look into the future and know what other people were thinking. Not their ideas necessarily, but their feelings. Her mother had had the same gift before she died.

"Well," the white man said, standing up, with a different smile, "thank you for your time." He neatened his papers into a single sheaf and stuffed them back in his satchel.

Someday, somewhere, she would see him again. It was written in the Book of Fate.

All that was just before Lionel got in trouble with the INS and disappeared. Lionel had been the family's main source of unvouchered income, and his absence was a source of deep regret, not just for Lucy and the twins, but all of them. No more pizzas, no more hmong take-out. It was back to beans and rice, canned peas and stewed tomatoes. The cable company took away all the good channels and there was nothing to look at but Tier One, with the law and shopping channels and really dumb cartoons. Tawana got very depressed and even developed suicidal tendencies, which she reported to the school medical officer, who prescribed some purple pills as big as your thumb. But they didn't help much more than a jaw of kwash.

Then Lucy fell in love with a Mexican Kawasaki dealer called Super Hombre and moved to Shakopee, leaving the twins temporarily with the family at the 26th Ave. N.E. house. Except it turned out not to be that temporary. Super Hombre's Kawasaki dealers.h.i.+p was all pretend. The bikes in the show window weren't for sale, they were just parked there to make it look like a real business. Super Hombre was charged with sale and possession of a controlled substance, and Lucy was caught in the larger sting and got five to seven. Minnesota had become very strict about even minor felonies.

Without Lucy to look after them, the ninos became Tawana's responsibility, which was a drag not just in the practical sense that it meant curtailing her various extracurricular activities-the Drama Club, Muslim Sisterhood, Mall Minders-but because it was so embarra.s.sing. She was at an age when she might have had ninos of her own but instead she'd preserved her chast.i.ty. And all for nothing because here she was just the same, wheeling the ninos back and forth from day care, changing diapers, screaming at them to shut the f.u.c.k up. But she never smacked them, which was more than you could say for Lionel or Lucy. Super Hombre had been a pretty good care provider, too, when he had to, except the once when he laid into Kenny with his belt. But Kenny had been asking for it, and Super Hombre was stoned.

The worst thing about being a subst.i.tute mom were the trips to the County Health Center. Why couldn't people be counted on to look after their kids without a lot of government bureaucrats sticking their noses into it? All the paperwork, not to mention the shots every time there was some new national amber alert. Or the blood draws! What were they all about? If they did find out you were a carrier, what were they going to do about it anyhow? Empty out all the bad blood and pump you full of a new supply, like bringing a car in for a change of oil?