Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds (23 page)

He was still, despite his momentary lapse,
running away from all things unworldly.

And, he told himself, he always would.

***

Sunlight woke him, which he found ironic
since everyone talked about living on the shadow side. Apparently,
his east-facing hotel room avoided that shadow altogether.

He supposed he could close the curtains, but
they were gauzy and white and wouldn’t make a lot of difference. He
checked his watch, saw that it wasn’t even six yet, which was when
the diner opened. He had checked the night before, knowing he would
be leaving as early as he could. He could make it back to Montana
in one long day, but he preferred to drive sensibly. No reason the
chief of police of any town should get caught weaving all over an
empty highway due to exhaustion.

Even with a leisurely shower, he got
downstairs ten minutes before the diner opened. He found himself
wandering outside, to the path. It was dark here, shadowy, the pond
itself looking a bit grim and more algae-covered than he
remembered.

It was also cold, the kind of cold he loved
about the West. Yeah, it would heat up to maybe ninety-five later
in the day, but right now, it was fifty and he wasn’t wearing a
coat.

He looked at the mountain, rising up before
him. He couldn’t see the peak here because he was too close. The
mountain didn’t look formidable when you were on it, only as you
drove up to it from sea level. Then it seemed impossible to
cross.

A chill breeze touched him, the kind he
hadn’t yet gotten used to in the Montana winters. Some of the
locals there called it a prairie breeze because it came from the
East, bringing Midwestern or Canadian cold onto the part of Montana
that passed for flatland. The weather guys called it an arctic
wind, but that suggested gales filled with snow particles. This
felt only like the precursor.

And he shouldn’t feel it, not in summer. He
looked over his shoulder, realized that he was standing near the
kitchen door.

He should have been warmer standing here, but
he wasn’t.

He turned slowly, holding his hands up like a
man with a gun trained on him.

The creature stood behind him, just like he
had expected from that chill. All of the descriptions were right:
childlike, young, maybe male, maybe female. The eyes looked older
than a child’s ever could, but the slender build reminded Retsler
of some paintings he had seen of androgynous figures looming out of
the mists.

He didn’t know how to talk to it. If he asked
it questions, it would probably leave.

So he said, “Beautiful morning, isn’t
it?”

Its mouth opened, as if it were going to
answer him, revealing a slightly pink interior. As he watched, the
creature gained a bit of pinkness all over, as if it were trying to
mimic his flesh color.

“They think you come down here to get warm,”
he said. “I don’t. I think you come down here for company.”

It tilted its head. Its eyes were now blue,
the blue of the Montana sky. Its face had no more definition than
before, but it seemed to relax a little.

“You like cooking, you like listening to
conversation, and you miss your friends. When the Park Service
blocked off the interiors of the Caves, did you lose your own
people or access to ours?”

It nodded toward him, just once, and his
heart leapt. It was answering him.

“I thought so,” he said. “Your people,
they’re not fond of us. The rest of them hide, don’t they?”

It raised its shoulders slightly, then let
them drop. A small shrug. It had been around humans long enough to
learn gestures. He wondered if it could talk. He suspected that it
couldn’t or it would have spoken before now—not to him, but to the
others.

“They call this the Shadow Side,” Retsler
said. “You can’t travel outside of it, can you? You can’t look for
your friends anywhere else.”

Water dripped off its chin. He didn’t know if
it was melting in the relative heat or if those were tears.

He didn’t know if this thing could cry.

Denne would want him to photograph it. Denne
would want him to ask all kinds of procedural questions.

But Retsler wasn’t interested in procedure.
This creature had done nothing wrong. It was just lonely.

He understood that.

He nodded, glanced at the kitchen door, then
back at the creature. “They need to talk to you,” he said. “They
want to make some changes.”

Its head snapped back, its hand came out, and
for a moment, Retsler thought it might hit him. He could actually
feel the anger coming off the creature.

His heart pounded. He kept his hands up.
“They don’t want to get rid of the kitchen,” he said, keeping his
voice calm. “But out here, outside the Caves, our equipment decays.
Falls apart.”

More water dripped off its chin.

“We repair that damage,” he said. “But
sometimes we have to replace things. Like the dishes. Remember how
we replaced the dishes?”

It watched him. He had no idea how old this
thing was, but he would wager it was decades older than he was. And
he would wager that it was one of the younger members of its
species.

He had no idea if it understood. He hoped it
did. Because he finally figured out its anger.

The interior of the Caves had remained the
same for hundreds of years. The early deaths might have been caused
when humans wandered in, interfered with something important. He
would wager that the Ice Palace meant something to this creature’s
people.

But he didn’t know, and obviously, it
couldn’t tell him. Not easily, anyway.

“Let us make the changes,” he said. “Then
we’ll stay. The kitchen will stay. The path will stay. You can
still observe, and maybe even help again.”

It wiped a hand along its chin, a very human
gesture. Then it closed its fingers around the water it had
collected.

When it opened its hand again, it was holding
what looked like tiny diamonds. It extended that hand to
Retsler.

His heart pounded. He’d learned not to accept
magical items from any creature. He’d once lost a friend to
centuries-old wine. All of the fairytales cautioned against eating
anything offered by the supernatural.

But the creature didn’t want him to eat the
diamonds, at least so far as Retsler could tell.

He brought his right hand down and extended
it, palm up. The creature touched the tips of its fingers to the
tips of his, its skin sending an icy shock through him.

Then the creature closed its hand again, and
smiled.

The smile was a surprise. The face warmed,
and the creature looked almost human.

Retsler smiled back.

The creature nodded, then walked around
Retsler, heading down the path toward the Caves.

Retsler watched it until it disappeared
around a small corner. The chill slowly left the air. He could feel
the warmth of the day wrap itself around him.

No wonder the creature left so early. It
would melt faster in the heat of a mountain summer.

His stomach growled. He ate too much up here,
and he still wasn’t getting full. He glanced at his watch to see
how long the interaction took and was startled to see that three
hours had gone by.

He had lost time. A few minutes conversation,
to him, and he had lost time.

No wonder those children had lost days. He
wondered what they had done in the Caves as the snow fell, as their
parents died in the Ice Palace.

Then he shook his head slightly. He was
intrigued. Dammit. He hadn’t been intrigued in years. Frightened,
yes. Overwhelmed, most definitely. And then he had run away to a
place that hadn’t challenged him at all.

He had never been intrigued in his Montana
job, although learning the job had occupied him for a while. It had
brought him a feeling close to intrigue. But he had never quite
achieved it.

He stared at the path down the center of the
shadow side, leading to a blocked off part of the Caves. Home, but
not home. Water creatures, but no great body of water. A history,
but not the history he had grown up with.

A new start, again.

“Dammit,” he repeated.

And then he turned, and walked into the
kitchen. He didn’t run, and he certainly wasn’t running away.

In fact, he had some information to give to
the chef and the entire staff, maybe to the town parents, and
certainly to Stanley and MariCate. He knew how they should treat
their visitor, and how to keep that visitor calm.

He also knew he was signing on for a ride.
They were, as Bronly had told him, under some kind of assault. But
so was Whale Rock. He didn’t want to go back there.

But he didn’t want to return to Montana
either, where he faced domestic quarrels fueled by too much alcohol
and an easy access to firearms.

Retsler suspected he would find enough of
those up here. It was a rural village after all, despite the
obvious wealth backing the hotel. Wealth didn’t prevent people from
getting angry or drinking too much or losing sight of the things
they loved.

Hell, nothing did.

Humans reserved the right to be stupid.

And they deserved the right to change their
mind.

Introduction to “Sisters”

Leah Cutter loves diverse settings. Her
first three novels,
Paper Mage, Caves of Buda, and The Jaguar
and the Wolf
, take place in Tang Dynasty China, World War II
Budapest, and the Viking Era. Lately, she has focused on
contemporary fantasy in such novels as
Zydeco Queen and the
Creole Fairy Courts
. She also writes a lot of short fiction,
with stories upcoming in anthologies
and Alfred Hitchcock’s
Mystery Magazine
.

Her work has received starred reviews and a
lot of deserved acclaim. She should receive even more acclaim after
people read “Sisters.”

Sisters

Leah Cutter

Lin Han still knelt in the courtyard, as
still as the towering rock
steele
behind her that the names
of her family’s ancestors were carved into. The bleak early morning
light washed everything gray: the hard brick she knelt on, the
black iron brazier in front of her, the twisted pine in front of
the double wall that stood guard before the door leaving the family
courtyard. The sacred smoke from the brazier had long since
disappeared, but the heavy smell of burnt wood and paint still hung
in the air.

Double-hour bells rang in the distance,
muffled by Lin Han’s fog. She felt herself stirring, as if she were
waking, though she hadn’t slept all night. She blinked dry eyes and
stiffness poured through her body, as if she were suddenly no
longer young. Her knees started to ache. Her shoulders felt weighed
down, as if a yoke with buckets filled with water lay across them,
like the laborers she saw in the street. She took a deep breath,
the taste of smoke mingling with the tears still gathered at the
back of her throat.

Lin Han curled her fingers into fists on her
thighs, realizing how cold the tops of her hands were when they
touched the warm silk. She pushed herself forward, trying to rise,
and ended up catching herself with her hands, the cold hard brick
pushing back at her. Her legs were filled with sand, leaden, hard
to move.

Slowly Lin Han rose. She swayed like young
bamboo in a storm trying to gain her feet.

As if that was a signal, Old Cook scurried
out.

“Please, Miss, you must go to bed now,” he
whispered urgently.

“No. I will not leave my sister,” Lin Han
said.

Old Cook didn’t have to say it. She heard it
echoing again against the hard bricks of the courtyard, the
proclamation by her mother, her father.

You no longer have a sister.

“Enough of that,” Lin Han said, banishing
those ghosts of memory. “I must take her with me.” Sometime in the
night a plan had come to her.

Old Cook opened his mouth, then closed it and
gestured at the huge brazier. It had
Fu
dog heads on the
sides, each bigger than Lin Han’s head. Ornate legs curved down to
splayed toes. It had taken six men to haul it into the
courtyard.

Lin Han had grown the last year, and so it
merely came up to her chest now. However, she would never grow big
enough to carry it away.

“Fine,” she said. “I need, I need...”

The chill of the morning finally entered her
bones. She shivered abruptly and swayed again. But she refused to
give in to the horror of it, what she needed to do.

“I need something to hold her in.”

“Right away, Miss.” Old Cook bowed low before
racing away.

The long shadows of the courtyard wall to Lin
Han’s right began defining as the sun rose. The twisted pine took
on long needles and distinct branches. The brilliant red tile on
the rooftops beyond the courtyard sprang to life. All around the
quiet courtyard the city of Yen Tu woke up. Already the street
venders with their buckets of millet porridge and clear chicken
broth called out their wares. People walked in the street, snatches
of conversation floating up over the wall.

Lin Han just waited.

Old Cook came back out with an ornate,
porcelain, red-and-white vase. It was skinny at the bottom and
blossomed out at the top. Hard nubs of white stuck out from the
body in curling lines.

Dao Ming would have wanted to put tall lilies
in it, something graceful and overflowing.

Lin Han accepted the weight of the vase,
cradling it in her arms for a moment before taking the cold metal
scoop that Old Cook also handed her. She stood on her toes and
looked into the brazier.

The pile of ash was so small, like Dao Ming
had been.

Mama would kill Lin Han for handling ashes.
She’d insist on a cleansing ceremony from the stinky Taoist priest
with the dark robes who never smiled as well as a second one from
the Buddhist priest in his bright orange robes who was more sour
still.