The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

I said, “At least you got the bastard,” and Aunty Irina shook her head grimly. She said:

“He’s just in fugue,” and I looked at Arion and saw that the wound in his throat was already closing up. Aunty Irina made a disgusted noise. She drew a knife from her boot and cut his jugular again. It only bled a little this time, I guess because he didn’t have a lot of blood come back to flow yet.

I asked, “What happens now?” and Uncle Jacques said hoarsely:

“We’ll have to run again.” He looked around at the mess of the bar and added, “I’m sorry.”

Lanark began to cry then, that dry hacking men cry with, and I knew he’d been scared clean out of his mind. Aunty Irina went over to him and took his face in both her hands and kissed him, a deep kiss like they were lovers, and then she stared into his eyes and talked to him quietly. He began to blink and look confused.

Uncle Jacques meanwhile crouched with a groan and took Arion by the feet, starting to drag him backwards toward the door.

Aunty Irina turned quickly and said, “Leave that. You just sit and repair your eye.”

He said. “Okay,” and sat down, breathing pretty hard. They feel pain as much as we do, you see.

What happened was that we had to do it, me and Aunty Irina, and as we were dragging the body out through the lobby Miss Harlan came down with the lantern and helped us. Every so often as we took him up the road to the sawmill, he’d start moving a little, and we’d have to stop while Aunty Irina cut him again. The wind almost blew out the lantern and the rain soaked us through. Still, we got him up there at last.

We found a couple of old rusty saws in an office, and they didn’t work real well, but Aunty Irina showed us how to do it so he’d come apart in a couple of places. She explained how nothing could kill him, but the more damage we did, the longer it’d be before he could piece himself together to come after her and Uncle Jacques. So we did a lot to him. It was hard work, just three women there working by one kerosene lantern, and the rain coming through the roof the whole time in steady streams.

You don’t think women could do something like that? You don’t know the things we have to do, sometimes. And knowing the kind of creature he was made it easier.

Most of him we dropped down a pit, and used the old crane to send a couple of redwood logs after him, and I reckon they weighed a couple of tons apiece. I’m not telling you where we put the rest of him.

It might have been near dawn when we finished and came back, but it was still black as midnight, and the storm wasn’t letting up. There were two empty bottles on the bar and Lanark had passed out on the floor. Uncle Jacques had made himself an eyepatch. He said it’d be likely another day before he got his eye working again.

I offered to fix them some breakfast before they set out. They thanked me kindly but said they had better not. They gave us some careful instructions, me and Miss Harlan, about what to look out for and what to say to anybody else who came looking around. They told us some other stuff, too, like what that awful Hitler was going to do pretty soon and about International Business Machines stocks. Cut off from the world like we were, we couldn’t make a lot of use of it, but it was nice of them.

And they apologized. They said they’d only been trying to make the world a better place for people, and it had all gone wrong somehow.

I got one of Papa’s coats down for Uncle Jacques, and he shrugged out of the bloody torn one he had on. I burned it in the stove later. It flared up in some strange colors, I tell you.

Then they walked out together into that awful night, poor people, and we never saw them again.

When Lanark sobered up he said he didn’t remember anything, but he never asked any questions either, like why there was a hole in the ceiling or where all the blood had come from. We cleaned up and mended as best we could. One thing we had plenty of in this town was lumber, anyhow.

That’s all. The radio worked for a few years, and when it finally broke we couldn’t fix it, so I put it away in the attic. We missed it, especially once the war started, but maybe we were better off not worrying about that, with what we’d been told.

Lanark never talked about what happened in so many words, but one time when he was sober he told me he’d figured out that Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina must have been Socialists, because of the way they talked, and maybe J. Edgar Hoover had come after them. I told him he was probably right. Anyway nobody else ever came sniffing around after them. There was a wildfire across Gamboa Ridge a few years later, 1938 that would have been, and now there’s only an old rusted stove back in the manzanita to show where their house was.