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

“Yes.”

Press your hands to the brick, the voice said, and she did. Shut your eyes, it said, and she did.

Laughter. A little girl ran into a swathe of sunlight. Herself, age five. “No,” she whispered.

Watch.

Agnes at ten, Agnes at twelve. The house. Her house. Each room, each smell.

Christmas cooking and make-up and wet paint. Her mother’s smile growing slimmer and the rest of her less so as time sped by. Ganesha, scrambling from room to room with one long undiminishing mischievous giggle.

Joy, then. Ganesha’s joy. The bliss of wholeness. The ecstasy of love, of family. Home meant love, meant wholeness. Shrinking, suddenly, when Agnes stormed out at age sixteen. After that a bereft, endless wondering. Where did she go? Why was she so upset? How have I failed her?

Her mother standing alone at the top of the stairs. Cigarettes. Burned TV dinners.

“Please,” Agnes said, too loudly, knowing what was next.

The house, empty. Ganesha stumbling. Shrinking. And then weeping, as pain began to break him apart. Hands growing twisted, pudgy child-fingers becoming cat-sharp claws. Pieces of trunk sloughing off. The transect maintenance worker brought oranges, but they did not stop what was happening to her friend. They merely channeled off his anger, his rage, his ability to lash out. When the wrecking ball came it was almost a relief. Ganesha went gladly, already mostly gone. Something bigger was there, though. A bigger, deeper something that was Ganesha but wasn’t. It shrieked. She wept, hearing it wail.

The windows went still.

“I thought you were all... on your own. Separate. Micah didn’t know what was happening to any of the other houses.”

A rippling shifted through the walls, and when the voice came again it came from a crude and jagged mouth that opened in the bricks above the fireplace. Autochthonous sentient structural emanations are complex. The spirit that takes on physical form, the thing that humans interact with, is only one piece. There is another piece. One that grows out of the earth the house is built on. One that springs from a common source with all the other autochthonous emanations in the area. These pieces are rarely aware of each other. Until they need to be. Do you understand?

“Sure,” and Agnes was startled to see that she did. She thought of how her mother understood God. She thought of the thing she had sensed, for an instant, in the bank. Something bigger and colder and crueler and more terrifying than a human mind could ever comprehend.

We saw you, Agnes. We saw what was inside of you. We knew that you were the one who could help us.

TRASK WAS STRESSED out about something. His forehead had extra lines in it; his eyebrows were arrows aiming at each other. He was immersed in his phone. When she logged the block of house keys back in, he left the key in the cabinet lock. Like he always did.

“Are you going to demolish all of them?”

He looked up from his phone, his face contorted briefly. By what? Hate, she thought at first, but that wasn’t right, whatever it was had no such intensity. Apathy, maybe, but that was only half the story. Trask took two reports from the top of the stack and flung them at her. “Read it yourself if you’re so nosy.”

He doesn’t care about you, she realized. He never has. He thinks you’re stupid.

Agnes filled paperwork with scribbles until Trask left the office to take a call, and then she opened the cabinet and pocketed the key to Micah’s house. She dumped the rest of the keys from Transect 4 into her backpack, and put the block back in the cabinet, and locked it.

After thirty awful seconds, Agnes unlocked the cabinet again and took the keys to the rest of the Transects.

Trask’s screen was still on. She stared at it. Her plan was a terrible one. She could destroy the keys, but how much time would that buy them? Trask would learn what had happened soon enough, and he didn’t need a key to knock a building down. She’d be out of a job and those spirits would still get destroyed.

Agnes sat down at his desk. He didn’t leave her alone with so much power at her fingertips because he trusted her. He did it because he didn’t think she was smart enough to do anything about it. He gave her the job not because he liked her or saw potential, but because she showed him how desperate she was. How hungry. Hungry enough to betray her own mother for a shit job with no health insurance.

She clicked over to the window where the day’s offers had piled up. One by one she clicked yes, selling off a couple dozen buildings with Trask’s credentials. And then she made a series of offers on the Bank of America properties scattered throughout the county, offering ten million dollars for each of them when most were barely worth ten thousand.

Then she opened his calendar and typed in an appointment for him, tomorrow at twilight, at 12 Burnt Hills Road, with the plumbing maintenance foreman.

Trask might wonder what that was, how it had gotten there; he might even call the plumber to confirm. But most likely he would not. He was a man who trusted his calendar.

Would it kill him? she wondered. The thought of being a party to Trask’s murder did not disturb her as much as it should have. What she’d mistaken for officious mentorship had been contempt, combined with a love of feeling smarter than someone. More importantly, she’d do anything to keep Micah from going through what her home had gone through.

Chase would dispute the sales she had approved as Trask, and the offers he’d made, but Bank of America would take them to court to get them to honor these entirely legal contracts.

Later she buried the backpack full of keys in the red raw clay where her house had been.

“THAT’S THE LAST of it?” Micah asked, when she set the milk crate down on the porch.

“Such as it is.”

“You were living there?” he asked, wrinkling his nose in the direction of her car.

“Who really lives, anyway,” she asked, squatting to kiss his mouth. He handed her a glass of iced tea.

She took a sip, then drained the glass. “This is seriously the best iced tea I have ever had in my life.”

“I know,” he said. “And it has the added benefit of not having any calories.”

He put his arm around her. Night was coming and so was November. His heat was so strong and clear she didn’t believe it wasn’t real.

That morning, she had visited 12 Burnt Hills Road. Trask had been missing for two days. She expected blood and carnage, but the inside of the house was as it had always been. Wind wailed, weakly, somewhere.

The police came, said the stones above the mantle.

“They would have seen the address in his calendar,” she said. “I’m sorry, but there was no way for me to erase it after he saw it...”

He is well hidden. As is his vehicle. They found nothing, and departed. Touch the stones, if you want to see.

She didn’t, but she did. And saw him get out of his fancy truck, call out for the plumber, pat his pockets for the keys he knew he had not brought because the plumbers had their own set. Saw the front door creak open. Saw Trask step inside. Saw stones and wood and brick crawl together. Saw windows shatter into long cruel talons at the end of stumpy fingers. Saw the seat of Trask’s trousers darken.

“This is temporary,” she said, thinking of the cold cruel immense entity she had glimpsed at work. With Trask missing and the police involved, the court battle would drag on for a while. But not forever. “Eventually, the bank will move forward with a way to do what it wants.”

Yes, the house said. And so will we.