Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 13

"Hey," I said. "I told you I didn't remember where I'd heard the name."

He stared. I stared back. He glanced down at the Gameboy with a rude noise.

"Hey," I said, to make him throw a pillow, "what was your name again?"

n.o.body sleeps in Las Vegas, and so neither do I. But if I did, I have to admit, ghosts would have a pretty good means of waking you up. Nothing like a hovering cold spot on the back of your neck to get you out of bed in a hurry.

I managed not to shriek, which was good, because Stewart was sort of curled up on my chest watching a Burt Reynolds movie-I know, but far be it from me to complain about my boyfriend's taste-and I might have shocked him into apoplexy. Instead, I sucked in a breath and disentangled myself-over his protests-before sliding out of bed to face my molester.

The ghost looked awfully familiar, as if I had seen him somewhere before. But he was just one of the little ghosts of the dam, harmless and inoffensive. By the rocking and beckoning, he wanted something from me.

"La.s.sie wants something," I said to Stewart, because the ghost's demeanor reminded me of a worried dog.

"Shh," Stewart said. "This is the good bit."

"But the ghost," I repeated, "wants something."

"Oh, and I'm supposed to figure out what?" But he hit the mute b.u.t.ton, sat up, and drawled, "h.e.l.lo, sailor."

I winced mostly out of habit. He wasn't actually camping it up all that much.

"I feel like I know him," I said, while the ghost stared at me with hemorrhage-spotted eyes.

"Jeff Soble." Stewart stood. Of course he'd know the guy's name. "Died on the dam. People die all the time, you know. They get unlucky. Something random and stupid goes wrong."

"I know," I said. We both knew. You don't get to be a genius until you're buried and sung over. Stewart and me, we died young.

Looking at Stewart, I realized I didn't remember how I'd died. I opened my mouth to ask, scratching idly under my eye patch, and realized something else. That s.p.a.ce-that hollow place of just not knowing-felt like a cold shadow had slid off my soul. Whatever had happened, it hadn't been pretty or pleasant, and I breathed easier in its absence.

The ghost beckoned again. I caught the motion in my peripheral vision; I was still looking at Stewart. "What do we do?"

"Follow him," Stewart said.

So we did, Stewart grabbing his keys on the way out the door.

Stewart's mode of transportation is inevitably some terrifying old beater replete with rust spots-hard to come by here in the desert-and hard-light peeling. The Nevada sun can fade even automobile paint to creamy yellow in a decade or two. This old Corolla had been red once, about the color of tomato soup. You could still see the color around the frame when you opened the doors. The amazing thing was that it was in perfect working order, which was the other inevitability about Stewart's old cars. He loved to tinker with them, and if you ignored small inconveniences like the lack of modern safety features, they ran like dreams. He usually wound up reselling them for 50 percent of book value to random people who needed them more than he did, and then finding another old junker to fix up the next week.

I like Stewart a lot. I mean, besides the obvious.

Anyway, I piled into the pa.s.senger seat-the desert night hadn't actually turned chill, but by comparison with the day, the mid-eighties felt on the cool side-and turned the radio off before he got the key into the ignition. He shot me a dirty look, but trust me, Stewart's taste in music isn't any better than his taste in movies.

Or men.

The car started right up, though he had to thump the dash to make the headlights glow. We had been staying at the Suncoast; it's a locals place, low-key and off the Strip. So we just headed back down the slope where the western side of the city rises toward the mountains. It's all indistinguishable, interchangeable new construction up there, and every year the cougars come back to their winter range to find houses have sprung up where there was nothing but cactus before, and there's nothing for them to eat but bug-eyed rat dogs.

Unfortunately for the cougars, people get upset when they behave in this perfectly understandable fashion, even though the houses reach all the way up to the canyons now.

The ghost surfed in our headlights, almost washed away by their glow and the light rising like steam from the valley. We didn't have to descend far to lose the view; once we were on the Summerlin Parkway the city dropped out of sight, vanishing because we were now a part of it. Even this late, there was still a steady stream of cars once we reached the 95. The highways don't really grow quiet until after three.

Decatur still had some traffic, too, but it wasn't anything like rush hour. Our gridlock isn't bad by West Coast standards, but people keep moving in and it keeps on getting worse. It doesn't help that there's a shortage of streets that go all the way through, either north-south or east-west. A lot of them end mysteriously in a desert lot or the wall of a housing development, only to pick up again as if nothing had intervened, like a relationship on the other side of a secret affair.

By the time we turned onto Carey, I had a p.r.i.c.kly feeling, and the traffic had thinned to nothing. I could still see the cars if I leaned over and glanced in the rearview mirror; they flowed north and south on Decatur in a soft intermittent stream, red and white like signal fires. I longed to be among them.

But Stewart was driving, and the ghost was leading us into darkness. I settled back and crossed my arms over my seatbelt, wondering why I felt the urge to strike out, to escape.

"Oh, G.o.d," I said. "Pull over. Pull over."

When Stewart pulled off onto the crunching hardpan shoulder, I bailed out of the little car and crouched in the shadow of the door, vomiting. The ghost hovered, as if my illness concerned it. Or maybe I was slowing it down. It didn't matter. We were here. The ghost led us down a gravel drive past a ranch sign and a mailbox adorned with the name Bukvajova in reflective letters. "I feel like I should know that name," I said, and Stewart looked at me funny.

He stopped the car well back from the house and touched the headlights off. We opened the doors in unison, like thugs in a Tarantino movie-you ever stop to think how much Hollywood has changed the way we perceive and pattern reality?-and slid out into the warm, windy dark.

The breeze had risen. I could hear howling and chiming from the bottom of the drive. "I bet the neighbors love that," Stewart said, locking his door.

"It's a bottle tree," I said.

"How do you know that?"

I checked to make sure my own door had latched. "It's been here for years."

"And you don't remember where you've heard the name Bukvajova before?"

"Should I?"

"Oh, Jack-Jackie," he said. "Something is definitely up."

I should probably have understood what he was driving at, but I just wound up shaking my head. It was a funny sensation, like when you know the answer to a question, or the name of a thing you're pointing at, and just can't pull it forward into the conscious part of your brain.

"So who lives here?"

"A-" I started to say, and realized I didn't know the answer to the question. "I don't know."

"Of course you know," Stewart said. "What were you just about to say?"

"A hedge-witch." The bottle tree howled torment in the meandering wind. "She's a hedge-witch. She drinks ghosts. I was just here today."

"Vegas forgets things," Stewart said. "You had better not be picking up that particular power. Because I'm not going to visit you in the home."

The words were hard, the voice fragile and tight-strung. I reached out and squeezed Stewart's hand. You spend a hundred years with somebody, you get to know their defense mechanisms. "We'll figure it out."

"You're not going to argue with me?"

I shrugged. We were close enough to the house now that the light from the kitchen window washed his face. "What would arguing get me? Something is obviously weird around here, and we have to figure it out."

"Right," he said. "So the hedge-witch Bukvajova lives here, and you don't remember why you know that or why you know about her bottle tree. And the ghost of Jeff Soble is leading you."

"Leading us."

"Leading you," Stewart said. "Whose ear was it blowing in?"

Touche. I let him lead me down the gravel drive to the covered patio and the door. "Are we just going to knock?"

"Are you afraid of a little hedge-witch?"

"Yes. Why are we here, Stewart?"

"Because something is happening to you. And I want to find out what it is. And make it stop. And if it doesn't have something to do with a Bukvajova, I'll eat the hat of your choice."

"Any hat at all?"

"Jackie," he said, and squeezed my arm. "Knock on the door."

But I didn't have to. We must have made enough noise to wake the dead, because first the interior door opened on a cascade of light, and then the security door squeaked wide. Steel doesn't rust in the desert, really. Not for a long time. But it was pretty obvious that the hinges were full of grit and hadn't been oiled in thirty years. I wondered if she kept meaning to get around to it and just forgot.

The spill of air-conditioning past my hands and thighs could have pushed me back a step, or maybe drawn me forward.

"I'm Jackie," I said. "This is Stewart."

"Of course you are, Jackie dear," she said. She held the door for us. "Come inside."

I hesitated, but Stewart stepped up, and I certainly wasn't letting him dance into the spider's web unsupervised. She shut both doors but didn't latch them, and I wondered if she worried about home invasions this far back from the street. I set the dead bolt behind us. No use tempting fate, and I wasn't worried about being locked in when the lock didn't require a key.

She sat us down and made us tea, boiling water in a proper brown pot. I watched her pour it into three chipped mugs, which she brought to the table, touching and set down together. Stewart picked out the brown one. I let the hedge-witch taste hers first, and then Stewart-he's very hard to kill-before I touched mine.

There was a tannin ring around the cup halfway down. I drank anyway, looking around the kitchen. It was a long, narrow room with a table set broadside and a clock centered on the wall. The hands were stopped. A paler ring marked the brown-and-gold wallpaper where it had been pushed askew.

"Were you married?" I asked her.

She shook her head. Her hair hung lank, the sour smell stirring around her when she moved. "I don't know. I don't recall."

"I was married," I said, and set my tea aside. "But I don't remember her name." Stewart gave me one of his unforthcoming looks. "Anyway, she's dead now."

"Lots of people are dead," said Ms. Bukvajova. "They live in memory."

I looked at the row of corked colorful bottles stacked on the granite pastry board and at the three or four empty ones racked up in the dish drain. Stewart raised his eyebrows.

"Sure." I poked my spoon against the side of the sugar bowl. The bottle tree howled loud enough to be heard through closed windows, over the hum of the swamp cooler. "As long as somebody remembers. Is that what you're doing? Remembering them?"

A tremendous clash rang from the bottle tree, like a string of gla.s.s bells violently shaken. I winced; Stewart started; Bukvajova perked up and peered out the kitchen windows. "Caught one?" Stewart asked. "What do you use them for?"

"Memories," she said. "He can't get them all if you keep topping it off. If you fill it up fast enough."

"He?"

She poured herself more tea, tilting the Brown Betty teapot with the skill of a practiced hand. "He eats memories."

Stewart leaned forward over the table and took her scaly hands. "They get ... diluted, Mrs. Bukvajova?"

"You can only pour the water over the same leaves so many times and get..." She made a helpless gesture, and tapped the pot.

"Get tea?"

"Or whatever. Did you boys want something to eat? Jackie, what's your friend's name?"

"No, thank you," I said. I couldn't imagine being hungry. "Mrs. Bukvajova"-following Stewart's lead-"why did you leave the circus?"

"There were ponies," she said. "And a cheetah named Ralph. He was friendly, and you could play with him." She looked down into her tea, then up at Stewart, as if he had spoken. "I'm sorry, dear, what was I saying?"

"Why you left the circus," he said.

She shook her head-"But I was never in the circus"-and frowned, painfully. "Was I?"

Another reason I like circus folk is that they have long memories. The sorts of memories we all used to have, when we lived in villages. Which is to say, based more on an oral-history sort of consensus version of events than on what really happened, blow by blow.

It's the folk process. When something gets pa.s.sed down hand to hand, identifying details are shaved off, idiosyncrasies smoothed away, personality blurred, until what remains is a refined core of agreement. Memories get conflated, simplified.

It doesn't start off being the truth.

But because of the way the world works, it becomes the truth before too long. Compromises become history, become something everybody knows. b.l.o.o.d.y old ballads are the handed-down tabloid TV of the thirteenth century. It may not be what really happened. But by the end it's what happened, after all.

As we got back into the car, the sun was starting to creep up behind Frenchman Mountain. "We need to go see the Flying Bukvajovas."

Stewart knuckled his eyes. When he pulled his hands down, the whites were bloodshot. "Tell me it's not an evil ringmaster."

"Okay," I said. "It's not an evil ringmaster."

"You want to ask them about their lost sheep?"

I shrugged. "I want to find out how the sheep got lost."

"Well, I don't want you getting lost as well." He patted my hand. The aged Toyota grumbled to life. "I don't suppose you know if this has just started happening?"

"No," I said.

I didn't remember.

Getting in to see Bartolomj Bukvajova was easier than it should have been. The patriarch of the family was in his late fifties, hair still black as a freshly inked brush, wide shoulders rippling under his T-shirt with every gesture. He was the catcher, and I wondered how it affected the family dynamic that they really did know he wouldn't let them fall.

There was a lot of bitterness in that thought when I thought it, and I did not know why. Whoever my father was, he'd surely been dead for most of a century by now.

I looked at Stewart and wondered if I should ask him my old man's name, or if it would just freak him out unnecessarily. But he was looking at Bartolomj, who had stood up from behind a folding card table in his RV to extend a hand.