Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

His snarl, his momentary monstrousness, did not make him less appealing. It made him more so. Being with so many bad men had hardwired fear into desire.

“Lunch meeting,” Trask said, rising. “File the hard copies?”

Alone in his office, she wrenched open the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet. She flipped through folders, added incident reports and travel logs. Rooting around in the filing cabinet made her feel frightened, like a trespasser. Every time, she had to fight the urge to browse through things that had nothing to do with her. To learn more. To understand. Trask would not tolerate that kind of intrusion. One more way she could lose her job.

But then – there. 5775 Route 9. The house where Micah lived. Was lived even the right word? Micah’s house. But that wasn’t right either. The house didn’t belong to him. It was him.

Cheeks burning, she pulled the folder from the cabinet. Deeds, contracts, mortgages, spreadsheets – all the secrets and stories of the house, encoded in impenetrable hieroglyphics. Resolve settled in her stomach, bitter and hard. Like when, ages ago, in another life, another Agnes had decided for the thousandth time to return to whatever bar or trailer park would best get her whatever illegal substance her body was enslaved to then.

She looked around, wondered if anyone else could see the guilt on her face. Trask’s computer screen was still on, logged in to the property management system. Because he trusted her.

Did banks have household spirits? Places where no human had ever lived? Lots of people spent more time at work than at home, but work was different. What difference would that difference make? Once, she’d slept in a hotel. Its spirit had been flimsy, insubstantial, shifting shapes in an abrupt and revolting fashion. Even her car had a spirit. It never spoke or showed itself, but sometimes its weird jagged dreams rubbed up against her own while she slept.

Agnes shut her eyes and listened. Felt. Called out to the dark of the echoey old space around her.

And something answered. Something impossibly big and distant, like a whale passing far beneath a lone swimmer. Something dark and sharp and cruel and cold. She opened her eyes with a gasp and saw she was shivering.

Smiling and confident on the outside, screaming on the inside from joy and terror, seeing in her mind’s eye exactly how this course of action might cost her everything, Agnes took the folder to Trask’s Xerox machine and began to make herself copies.

HE WAS WAITING for her on the porch of 5775. He hugged his knees to his chest like some people held on to hope. When he saw her, his face split into a smile so glorious her own face followed suit.

“Hi,” he said, rising, T-shirted, eyes all golden fire from the last of the evening sun.

“Hello,” she said, and held up a bag full of fast food. “Hungry?” He clapped his hands, his face all joy. “You’re here early,” he said. “You usually only come through here every couple of weeks.”

“You’ve been watching me for a while now,” she said, handing him the bag. “I don’t know. Something wouldn’t let me stay silent.” He opened the bag, stuck his face in, breathed deep. Happiness made him laugh. Agnes wondered when she had last heard someone laugh from happiness.

She had made the mistake of visiting 12 Burnt Hills Road right before. It had spoken to her, its voice like bricks dragged across marble. It said I want to show you something, over and over. She did not let it.

The file on 5775 had told her nothing. The house was fifty years old, had been owned by a perfectly banal couple who left it to their son and his wife, who sold it to a woman who couldn’t keep up with her mortgage when she got laid off when the school districts consolidated, and had been evicted four years prior. No Micahs anywhere.

He ran down the hall, and came back with a bed sheet. This he spread on the living room floor, and sat on. “Instant picnic!” Micah said, his enthusiasm so expansive she barely felt the pain in her knees when she squatted beside him. Sleeping in the fetal position night after night was beginning to take a toll.

While he took the food from the bag and began to set it up, she watched his arms. Pixelated characters from the video games of her youth adorned his arms, along with more conventional tattoo fodder – a castle; a lighthouse. “How long have you looked like this?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He ate a French fry, then four. “Forever? A couple months?”

“The band on your T-shirt didn’t exist when this house was built,” she said. “Or do you have a whole ghost wardrobe upstairs somewhere?”

He shrugged. “No. I don’t know why they’re the clothes they are.”

“Did you ever look like something else?”

He laughed. Micah laughed. “Sometimes I think so. Did you?”

“Not that I know of. So there’s not a household spirit Book of Rules?”

“Not that I know of.”

They ate burgers, drank sodas. She had so many questions, but what happened inside her chest while she watched him eat answered the only real one. He bit off giant greedy childish bites, and barely chewed.

It made sense that after being empty for a long time, a household spirit might become something different. And lose track of everything it had been before. She asked, “Do you remember the people who used to live here?”

He nodded, eyes on her, lips on his soda straw. “Well. Sort of. I feel them. I can’t really remember them, but they’re there. Like...” Like a dream you’ve woken up from, she thought, but didn’t say out loud.

“I’m not supposed to interact with you,” she said. “I could lose my job.”

“What’s your job?” he asked, all earnestness.

“I make offerings at houses where nobody lives.”

He nodded. The last drops of soda slurped noisily up his straw. “They must pay you well for that.”

“They don’t.”

“But what you do is so important!”

“I’m an independent contractor – basically a janitor,” she said, and thought back to the old maintenance man at her high school, muttering prayers and burning incense beneath a defaced wall once he’d washed away the graffiti. “My mother says we’re all doomed,” Agnes continued. “She says these empty houses are going to add up to a whole lot of angry spirits. She says all the oranges and incense in the world won’t make a difference. When people move back in, the spirits will have turned feral.”

Micah wiped grease from his lips with his sleeve. “There’s a lot of empty houses?”

Agnes nodded. Obviously Micah didn’t watch the news or read the papers. She had been imagining that he knew all sorts of things, through spirit osmosis or who-knows-how. “Chase owns hundreds, in this county alone. Bank of America –”

“That’s sad,” he whispered. His face actually reddened. He was like her. He felt his emotions so hard he couldn’t hide them. The air in the room thickened, grew taut. The hairs of her arms stood on end. His didn’t. At any moment he could start flinging lightning bolts, she thought, or burn us both to ash. She put her hand on his arm, and the crackling invisible fury ebbed away.

“What’s it like? When there’s no one here?” She was thinking of him, but also thinking of Ganesha. Alone in her old house. The rambunctious thing that had been her only friend for so long, who played strange complex storytelling games with her and gave her spirit candy when she made a wise decision. She could taste the anise of it, still, feel it stuck between her teeth like taffy, although even if she ate it all day it would never give her cavities or make her fat. She had spent years trying not to think of Ganesha.