John Adams - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

A ghost, then. But she was not black—an English miss, to judge by her accent. A white girl—though perhaps not of Europe? Of Everfair, then, the Fabians’ damned infestation of a colony wreaked on lands they’d bought of him? Yes! Had not Minister Vandelaar told him recently of an attempt by those traitors to aid that black brute’s escape? Though temporarily successful, it had, so the intelligence minister said, cost the rebels of Everfair an important casualty.

Which would be this Lily. Lily Albin, as he recalled now. Daughter of the rabble’s leader, a hoyden suffragette.

Was this to be his sole manifestation?

Where were the sooty multitudes who had haunted him all this while, whose silent groans had pestered him so, bidding fair to drive him mad? As he understood Travert’s method, if the nigger ghosts could not be Condensed, they could not be got rid of.

The girl answered as if he’d asked his questions aloud. “Do you think you have any control of who you see?” Her eyes whitened like a blind woman’s. “Or how? Or what?”

Rising from beneath the thin scent of the garden’s flowers, the mephitic cleaning compound’s fumes assaulted him anew. They couldn’t have traveled here from the cellar—he must still be inside it! In the Condenser’s cage! How could he have forgotten? The stool he sat on was the same. The rest of what he experienced, the vegetation and the building heat, might be nothing more than a hypnotic nightmare induced by that quack Travert.

He swung his head from side to side, peering around the foliage, looking for the Jew or one of his assistants. Shouldn’t they be waiting nearby?

The girl Lily laughed. The ivory hollow beneath her neck flexed like the foaming pool below a waterfall. “You thought the Condenser would cure you?” She subsided to a low chortle. “Of course you did. Why else submit? But whatever gave you the idea?”

He should humor her. He wiped away a trickle of sweat. His attendants must return soon—or, no, he was asleep and would soon wake. How long had the nigger “Fifine” lain prostrate? Despite his more sensitive and highly evolved nervous system, he surely ought to begin to recover momentarily. He stood up from the stool and thrust aside some obscuring boughs to get a better look around. His entourage remained absent, but a flickering motion just out of sight impelled him forward. A manlike shape, glistening in the patchy sunlight as if made of ebony. He walked swiftly toward it for several meters.

Then he stopped.

The garden was not small. The museum’s walls did not enclose it. Nothing did. It was a jungle, not a garden.

Why should this frighten him? Dreams could not hurt or kill him. He would not die.

He reversed his path. Now that he was thinking clearly he realized how stupid he’d been to leave the spot where he first found himself. But when he returned it was to see his seat occupied by the dead girl. “I hope you don’t mind? Easier for me than standing.” With smiling casualness she gestured again at her mangled leg.

Ever the gentleman, Leopold refrained from pressing the claim of his superior birth, though the oppressive warmth and the burgeoning smell of the cleaning compound threatened to overwhelm his senses. He put a hand out to halt the world’s swaying and flinched back from the pricking thorns of the branch he’d grasped. He stared in pain and surprise at the blood welling quickly out of many little wounds—his sacred essence! Wrapping his handkerchief around the cuts seemed to do no good; if anything, they bled more fiercely than before, specks of scarlet growing wider, wetter, joining to make of it one sopping crimson banner.

His Russian cousins could perish as a result of such small injuries. And he?

“Oh, I don’t believe you’re done for just yet.” The ghost Lily gazed up at him with blank eyes. “Though with so much blood you’ll be creating many more _____, of greater power. As you will come to find.”

He didn’t understand the word she had used. “I beg your pardon? More—more—what do you say?”

“_____!” Again she gave her chilling laugh. “The ones you expected to find here instead of me.”

The nigger spirits, she meant. He thought she nodded. “Those spawned so far wait with your retinue for you to waken.”

The stink and heat and dizzying sway worsened. He fell to his knees. He felt the hot blood soak through his trousers where they sank into its spreading pool. He must rouse himself out of this trance now, and then let the Jew’s assistants deal with executing whatever this abominable treatment had brought forth. Leopold strove with all his might to wake.

“But no one will be able to do anything to your _____, to even touch them. Except for you.”

He was lying on his side. He tried to sit up. What did she mean? “Fifine’s” dirty-looking little birds had been easily dispatched.

“Ah, but have you the sort of close and respectful relationship with your dead that she does?” The ghost girl seemed to have lain down next to him, for her face was but centimeters away. “No. You do not.”

With those words, her white face sprang suddenly nearer—or did it swell with decay? Tightening like a mask, it slipped rapidly to one side and receded on a tide of blackness. Then that tide too receded.

His eyes were open. Gray clouds parted to reveal the cage’s tarnished ceiling. Leopold lay now on his back, looking heavenward. He lifted his wounded hand: no sign of injury remained.

“Your Majesty!” The Jew rushed to his side, Gagnon and Marie Henriette right behind him. The dream was over.

Or was it? A haze of darkness formed above them. Gradually it lowered and interposed itself between the king and his attendants, forming at last into the likeness of a group of soot-skinned savages. Which, as before, no one else appeared to see. Which, it seemed obvious now, no one else ever would.

There were three of them: a handless young buck; a withered old granny with her head staved in; a child with no feet at the ends of her legs. They closed around him, clumsily lifting him from the cage’s floor. Leopold’s scalp crept as he felt the soft resilience of their nonexistent flesh. He retched convulsively and shoved away the tiny hands, the yielding arms. These newly palpable horrors.

All his life, Leopold had known himself to be as brave and strong as he was good and handsome. All his life till now.

“Sire!” The oily voice of Travert intruded itself into the king’s thoughts.

“My dearest!” The queen too sought his attention.

Leopold opened eyes he hadn’t realized he’d shut. The ghosts were defiantly visible. But still, always, only to him. Ignoring the phantoms’ reproachful gazes, he leaned on the arms his supporters offered, letting them lead him out of the Condenser. As if the weeping niggers reaching to interrupt his passage with their weak and truncated limbs weren’t present. As if they made no actual contact. As if the king didn’t understand himself doomed till death to feel, over and over, the hideous warmth of their touch.

FROM Beloit Fiction Journal

Before I decided to finally give up on New York, I subbed classes at a junior high in Brooklyn. A sixth-grade math teacher suffering from downloading anxiety was out for the year, and jobs being what they were, I took any opportunity I could. Subbing math was hardly my dream job; I had a degree in visual art, for which I’d be in debt for the rest of my life. All I had to show for it was my senior collection, a series of paintings of abandoned playgrounds, stored in a U-Pack shed in Ohio. There was a time when I’d imagined I’d become famous, give guest lectures at colleges, and have retrospectives at MoMA. Instead I found myself standing in front of a class of apathetic tweens, trying to teach them how to do long division without accessing their browsers. I handed out pen and paper, so that for once in their lives they’d have a tactile experience, and watched as they texted, their eyes glazed from blinking off message after message. They spent most of the class killing vampires and orcs inside their heads and humoring me by lazily filling out my photocopies.