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  THE MAGAZINE OF

  FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

  May/June * 61st Year of Publication

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  NOVELETS

  WHY THAT CRAZY OLD LADY GOES UP THE MOUNTAIN by Michael Libling

  THIEF OF SHADOWS by Fred Chappell

  DR. DEATH VS. THE VAMPIRE by Aaron Schutz

  THE CROCODILES by Steven Popkes

  SHORT STORIES

  A HISTORY OF CADMIUM by Elizabeth Bourne

  THE REAL MARTIAN CHRONICLES by John Sladek

  REMOTEST MANSIONS OF THE BLOOD by Alex Irvine

  SEVEN SINS FOR SEVEN DWARVES by Hilary Goldstein

  SILENCE by Dale Bailey

  FOREVER by Rachel Pollack

  THE ATCHISON, TOPEKA & SANTA FE by Robert Onopa

  THE GYPSY'S BOY by Lokiko Hall

  DEPARTMENTS

  BOOKS TO LOOK FOR by Charles de Lint

  MUSING ON BOOKS by Michelle West

  COMING ATTRACTIONS

  FILMS: BLOCKBUSTER AS RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE by Kathi Maio

  COMPETITION #79

  CURIOSITIES by Bud Webster

  Cartoons: Arthur Masear.

  COVER ART BY KENT BASH FOR “WHY THAT CRAZY OLD LADY GOES UP THE MOUNTAIN.”

  GORDON VAN GELDER, Publisher/Editor

  BARBARA J. NORTON, Assistant Publisher

  ROBIN O'CONNOR, Assistant Editor

  KEITH KAHLA, Assistant Publisher

  HARLAN ELLISON, Film Editor

  JOHN J. ADAMS, Assistant Editor

  CAROL PINCHEFSKY, Contests Editor

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (ISSN 1095-8258), Volume 118, No. 5 & 6, Whole No. 689, May/June 2010. Published bimonthly by Spilogale, Inc. at $6.50 per copy. Annual subscription $39.00; $49.00 outside of the U.S. Postmaster: send form 3579 to Fantasy & Science Fiction, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Publication office, 105 Leonard St., Jersey City, NJ 07307. Periodical postage paid at Hoboken, NJ 07030, and at additional mailing offices. Printed in U.S.A. Copyright © 2010 by Spilogale, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Distributed by Curtis Circulation Co., 730 River Rd. New Milford, NJ 07646

  GENERAL AND EDITORIAL OFFICE: PO BOX 3447, HOBOKEN, NJ 07030

  www.fandsf.com

  CONTENTS

  Novelet: WHY THAT CRAZY OLD LADY GOES UP THE MOUNTAIN by Michael Libling

  Department: BOOKS TO LOOK FOR by Charles de Lint

  Department: MUSING ON BOOKS by Michelle West

  Novelet: THIEF OF SHADOWS by Fred Chappell

  Short Story: A HISTORY OF CADMIUM by Elizabeth Bourne

  Short Story: THE REAL MARTIAN CHRONICLES by John Sladek

  Novelet: DR. DEATH VS. THE VAMPIRE by Aaron Schutz

  Short Story: REMOTEST MANSIONS OF THE BLOOD by Alex Irvine

  Short Story: SEVEN SINS FOR SEVEN DWARVES by Hilary Goldstein

  Short Story: SILENCE by Dale Bailey

  Short Story: FOREVER by Rachel Pollack

  Short Story: THE ATCHISON, TOPEKA, & SANTA FE by Robert Onopa

  Department: FILMS: BLOCKBUSTER AS RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE by Kathi Maio

  Short Story: THE GYPSY'S BOY by Lokiko Hall

  Novelet: THE CROCODILES by Steven Popkes

  Department: F&SF COMPETITION #79: HOOKED ON MNEMONICS

  Department: CURIOSITIES: ALVIN STEADFAST ON VERNACULAR ISLAND, by Frank Jacobs (1965)

  Department: FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION MARKET PLACE

  Department: COMING ATTRACTIONS

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  Novelet: WHY THAT CRAZY OLD LADY GOES UP THE MOUNTAIN by Michael Libling

  When asked about this story, Michael Libling said, “I continue to be amazed at how often the setting and characters in so much of my writing can be traced to the first 14 years of my life, living in a small town (Trenton, Ontario), hanging out in my parents’ tiny café, talking with the regulars.... ‘Crazy Old Lady’ is no exception. These are people I know, doing stuff they never did."

  She's Jimmy Alvin's cousin from Connecticut and she's come to Gideon for a spell because her dad got caught dipping into somebody else's money and somebody else's wife, and went home and put a bullet through his head. And then her mom up and did something pretty awful to herself too; she isn't dead, though everybody says she might as well be.

  Sara Marie Sands, a fist over five feet, that's all she is, with brown hair and browner eyes and a quiet sense of self folks can't help but admire, considering the soap she's been living. No tears. No whining. No making a mopey display of herself the way some almost orphaned are wont to do.

  Gumption. That's what they call it. And the kid has more of it than the whole junior class put together. She can do handstands, handsprings, and hit a jump shot or climb a rope as good as any of the guys, most of whom have been laying it on thick since the moment she arrived. (Think buttercream icing on vanilla cupcake.) The teachers love her too, and not only Mrs. Laroche in gym; Sara has spent time in Europe, speaks French, some Gaelic, reads books she doesn't need to, and never gives them any backtalk. The girls, of course, they recognize the threat she poses. When Sara first turned up after Christmas break, suspicion and envy rolled through Gideon High like a West Quoddy fog. Hell, you could smell the stuff. But Sara's dark past also made her a trophy of sorts in the friends department, and most conceded she'd paid her dues. A dead dad and vegetable mom are worth a few brownie points, after all.

  But the boys, they won't let up. More than a few claim they've seen her in some video on MTV2. Fall Out Boy or The Killers, maybe. Or some girl who looks a heck of a lot like her, anyhow. She can't help but smile at some of the stuff she hears, the antics to impress, but keeps her reactions low-key, mindful not to lead any of them on. Most understand. Or pretend to. Mourning and mating aren't the best of mixes at the best of times.

  Kevin Akers. He hasn't managed two words to her in the whole time she's been in town. Not that he hasn't wanted to. He just doesn't know what he could say to a girl like Sara. Or what a girl like Sara might want to say to him. Fact is, had folks been keeping a tally of likely suitors, this boy would have been at the bottom of their list, had they given any thought to him in the first place, of course.

  Judged by size alone, Kev isn't anybody you'd want to tussle with, but the few who know him know different. David in Goliath's body is how his mom used to put it. If he has a temper, nobody has seen it. If he has a voice, few have heard it. Kev has never raised a hand in class, let alone volunteered an answer. The boy isn't soft-spoken; he's unspoken. And that mouth of his, does it ever register anything outside of glum?

  When his size does work for him, it is rarely a result of his own doing. Take Kev's sophomore year when Coach Hackles shanghais him for the Bobcats. Varsity team, yet. Collars him in the cafeteria, yanks him right out of the lunch line, his lime Jell-O left quaking in its dish. Plants him front and center, Coach does. Nose guard. And still the kid remains invisible. Out of uniform, not even the cheerleaders give him the time of day, and not because of any snootiness or malice, though there is plenty of both to go around. Nope, it just never clicks he's on the team. “Killer instinct, Akers, there's your problem. You don't have any.” Once Hackles has you pegged, rightly or wrongly, there is
no shaking the rep. But the Gideon Bobcats are historically short on heft, and Kev sticks.

  The boy has his reasons, of course, for being the way he is. Damned if he's going to broadcast so much as a peep. “Only safe trap is a shut trap,” his grandpa used to tell him, before hammering the message home with horror stories of locals who failed to pay heed. Grandpa ran with a sorry lot, so it seems at times to Kev, the old man's ultimate demise but one more crack in his oddball fraternity's pot.

  There were the twin brothers who worked at the Dobbin-Henry mill up Kersey way, fine, upstanding family men, their carousing days long behind them, who babbled on of flashing lights and wondrous rays and joyrides through the stratosphere with sentient pecans in titanium knickers.

  The spinster-lady bank teller who, while perusing the pages of an unnamed James M. Cain novel in the gazebo on the village green, proclaimed she'd been visited by the Prophet Ezekiel, who not only torched her book with a sidelong sigh, but delegated her to spread word the end was nigh.

  The lobsterman, a pal from Grandpa's days in the Merchant Marine, who prattled on of mermaids at sea, ape-men on land, and the living dead on the Katakani. Your standard issue Lazarus, no doubt, so snickered a Gazette editorial of the day.

  Taken at face they were, but never for long and never by all. And though each swore up and down on their respective stacks of Bibles they were speaking the cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die-God's-honest-truth, and well they may have been, their mouthing-off wrought only shame, disgrace, mockery, their lives marginalized or turned downright topsy-turvy.

  "Yeah, damned forever loony,” Grandpa put it. “But I'm telling you, Kevvy, what happened to them is nothing to what'll happen to you. To us. We'll be crucified, we will."

  Kev keeps his trap shut tight. But his ears and moony eyes, he keeps them wide open.

  Any fool can see Sara is out of his league. Anytime he contemplates otherwise, the guys are quick to set him straight. Randy Gullickson scores the best line hands-down. “Wait for her yearbook photos, man, ‘cause that's the only piece of her you're ever gonna get.” They all crack up over that one. But Kev, he just slips away.

  Sara, nothing gets by that girl. Last week of junior year, she marches right up to him as he's clearing out his locker. “You're Kevin Akers, right?"

  Best he can do is swallow, nod. God, she is even prettier up close. But then he sees something in her he hasn't seen before. An emptiness. A void so vast, he grips the locker for fear of slipping in.

  She asks, “Is there something you wanted to say to me?"

  He checks behind, makes sure she isn't talking to someone more significant.

  "Because if there is, I wish you'd tell me instead of staring. You're making me feel awfully uncomfortable, Kevin. And I don't want to come back to school in the fall and see you in every class doing the same all over again.” There is nothing nasty in her tone. If anything, she comes off like that guidance counselor lady, Miss Kimbrough—eyelids crinkled with patience and understanding, empathetic tut-tuts tagged to the tail of every breath. “So, what do you say we start over, do this right?” She offers her hand, smiles that great smile of hers. “Hi, I'm Sara."

  He can't believe she's talking to him, wanting to get to know him yet. Can't believe he's holding her hand. Most of all, Kev can't believe the stupid words spilling out of his stupid head, his stupid trap. “I know about God."

  "Pardon me?"

  "I can show you...."

  Her eyes narrow, her smile flatlines.

  "I mean, bring you to Him, sort of."

  She wonders if maybe the boy has a screwy sense of humor. But the way he'd said it, the way he stands there. It's as if he's been waiting forever to share this glorious news. No, there isn't anything funny about it. About him.

  Kev tries to backtrack, come off a shade closer to sane. “I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said...."

  "But you did, didn't you?” Back home in Connecticut, when news broke about her folks, do-gooders were over her like maggots kissing carcass. Knocking at the door. Calling on the phone. Dropping leaflets and amulets and spiritual whatnots onto her lap—crucifixes, beads, prayer cards with full-color renderings of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and other mystical kith and kin. Preying at her dad's funeral. Preying outside her mom's hospital room. Open your heart to the love and grace of the Lord. And, fact was, since coming to Gideon, little had changed, save perhaps the subtleties and stratagems. It was all over town how Jimmy Alvin's mom, her Aunt Penny, had been pleading with Sara to turn to the Lord or, at the very least, have a sit-down with Reverend Himner who, by all accounts, was a fair and decent man with a post-graduate degree in post-traumatic stress.

  Sara steps back before stepping closer. “I don't need your god or anyone else's, thank you very much."

  He wants to grab her, hold her. Explain for God's sake. Sticks his hands in his pockets instead. “My Mom, she died of the cancer too. Not that yours did, I mean...I'm just saying, I know what it's like, kind of...."

  She turns, does not glance back. More holy claptrap to explain away the wholly explainable. Serves her right for dropping her guard.

  Forty-six words. Most the boy has spoken to anyone since, well, God knows how long. And he'd trade most anything to take every syllable back.

  Kev braces for fallout, certain he'll hear from Jimmy or Gully or the other guys about how he messed with the poor girl's head. “There's a time and place for pushing God, Akers, and that damn well wasn't it, dumb ass.” And just like that he'll join the long line of Gideon idiots. Gidiots, his grandpa called them. The twin brothers, the spinster-lady bank teller, the lobsterman, and all the other loose-lipped losers.

  Whole summer long the boy agonizes, replays the conversation endlessly, every waking hour devoted to beating up on himself. Why, after keeping it bottled up for so many years, did he choose that moment to let it out? And why to, of all people, her? Had he hoped to spook her, frighten her off? Or did he want to help her by sharing the only thing he had going for him nobody else in Gideon could lay claim to? Heck, nobody else living on the whole damn planet, best he knew. Not that he read the papers or watched CNN. But surely others would have talked. Not everyone would be like him and his grandpa, him and his dad. Not everyone would keep their traps shut. No way.

  He mulls heading over to the Seavue Estates, banging on the Alvins’ door, asking for her, apologizing, but knows he'll only dig himself in deeper. Thinks maybe he'll drop her a note to explain. Tears a page from a notebook. Manages a couple of lines before giving up.

  That's pretty much the way it goes until one afternoon toward the end of July, when Sara shows up at Leith's with her aunt, Mrs. Alvin. Third summer in a row Kev has worked at the lobster pound. Bette Leith had been friends with his mom and she makes it her business to look out for the boy best she can.

  Kev is scrubbing the lobster tank, fighting every instinct, struggling to keep his eyes averted and his head down, to pretend Sara isn't ten feet from him and that he has not noticed her. Later, after she's gone, Bette says, “That girl must have thought you were God's gift, Kevvy. Didn't take her eyes off you the whole time.” Kevvy is what his mother had called him. His grandpa too.

  Come fall and senior year, he works hard to respect Sara's wishes. Tries his darnedest not to look her way, not to creep her out. But every now and then she catches him. Odd thing is, more often than not, Kev catches Sara looking first.

  Just before finals, on a Saturday morning in May, Jimmy Alvin's red Toyota pickup lurches into Kev's yard, stirring up the rust on his dad's crippled Ford.

  But it isn't Jimmy behind the wheel.

  All told, Sara has been in Gideon a year and a half. By Kev's count, eighteen straight months of yearning.

  The boy leaps into his jeans and bounds onto the porch before Sara's toe taps the bottom step. Last thing he wants is her poking about inside. After his mom's passing, Bette Leith had come by to check in on Kev and his dad. She wondered aloud about what had struck first, the hurricane or the tor
nado. In the years since, had his dad not threatened Bette and had she continued to visit, she might've noted how they'd been hit by an earthquake too. The mess is bad enough; mostly, though, Kev doesn't want Sara seeing his dad sleeping it off on the couch behind the stockade of empties.

  He knows why she's come right off. The dead-mama face is a dead giveaway. Eyes that should be crying but aren't. Voice that should be cracking but isn't. Grief waylaid by anger and guilt. “Show me,” she says.

  He plays dumb.

  "You said you know where God is. Show me."

  "I was kidding—"

  "I've watched you, Kevin. I've asked about you. You don't kid about anything. And you're no Born-againer. Jimmy's never even seen you in church."

  "It was a joke.” He can't bear to look at her. Can't bear not to.

  "Was it a vision? Like the miracle of Fatima? Did God speak to you like the Virgin Mary spoke to them?"

  "It's not like that.” He's never heard of any Fat Emma, but figures it can't be a bigger deal than his own.

  "And He told you—told you He was God?"

  "My grandpa said so."

  "Then it's not only you...?"

  "Nah. Grandpa passed on just after my mom."

  "I'm alone now too,” she says, antipathy giving way to empathy. “My mother. Last night.” She keeps it simple, so she won't choke up. Not that she expects to; she just never knows for certain when emotion might get the better of her. She'd mourned her mother when she was mostly dead and has no intention of going through the same now that she is fully dead.

  Kev shuffles his feet, makes sure not to look her in the face, mumbles what he hopes sounds like condolences.

  "Look, I've never been a believer, but after seeing what's happened to my family, maybe my mom and dad had it wrong. I mean, not believing didn't do them or me any good; no harm in seeing what believing might do. Right?” She lifts her chin, moves her lips so near his mouth, Kev puckers by reflex.

  "But it's not....” He swallows. “It's not what you think."