STORIES YOU NEVER HEARD of Dorothy J. Heydt
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STORIES YOU NEVER HEARD OF Dorothy J. Heydt Copyright © 1982, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2005, 2020 by Dorothy J. Heydt. Cover art [presumably] © 2020 by Dorothy J. Heydt and Bill Gill. Most of these stories originally appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine or in her anthologies, in the 1980s and 1990s. Some appeared under the name. "Katherine Blake." "Priorities" was posted on the USENET group rec.arts.sf.composition. This ebook is available for free download at http://www.kithrup.com/~djheydt "A Certain Talent" originally appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, Summer 1997. A CERTAIN TALENT Maggie tightened her grip on the steering wheel, as the rough road bucked and shimmied under her, and reminded herself for the dozenth time that she was supposed to be on the wrong side of the road. Somewhere off to the right there was the old pine tree that did duty as a signpost, and if she missed that (the old man in the general store had assured her) she'd get so lost that even God couldn't find her. But she didn't miss it: it pointed with its one living branch into a tangle of weeds that opened into a narrow lane paved only with fallen pine needles. At its end the spiny-leaved oaks opened into a little valley. There was a cottage there, made of logs and no bigger than a shepherd's hut, and a garden whose neat drills of vegetables ran almost down to the burn that threaded its way down to the Eel River. And there, standing in the garden, was a man dressed all in black— Maggie caught her breath. He wasn't dressed at all; that was him. Not black like an African, unless it was an African gorilla: black as a raven, and shaggy. Maggie groped one-handed over the passenger seat for her camera. But as she raised it, fumbling for the shutter release, the creature raised its head and saw her, and turned and ran. All she would have was a rear view of something dark in full flight: and blurred too, no doubt. Still, it meant she was in the right place. She pulled up and parked the car, rather at an angle, in front of the cottage. It was old; the logs it was made of had had time to shed all their bark and take on moss instead. But the door was newer, only fifty years old maybe, and had a window in its top. The window was fifty years old too, and let the light through reluctantly; but she could see someone moving inside. She smiled and waved; she must be rather hard to see as well, but surely with her red hair and white face she couldn't be mistaken for the fellow in the garden. The door opened a crack, then a little wider. The woman inside was a wee thing, only about five feet high, with long brown hair and pretty, frightened grey eyes. "Miss Barbara Tolliver?" Maggie said. "I'm Margaret Ogilvy, from Inverness, Scotland. I did write—but the man at the general store said you hadn't been in to pick up your mail in a while—so I don't know if you've been expecting me." "Expecting—you," Miss Tolliver said, as if the words were French that she had learned in the fourth form and not used since. Then she glanced upwards, over Maggie's shoulder, and said rapidly. "Come in, please, and let's shut the door." Maggie did so. Miss Tolliver was holding onto the back of a kitchen chair, and its feet were beginning to chatter against the floor. "You sit down," Maggie told her. "I'm going to make some tea. That fellow won't be back soon." "What fellow?" So it was going to be like that? Maggie didn't try to answer. She waved Miss Tolliver to her seat, and the camera swinging from her wrist nearly hit her in her own nose. She took it off and set it on the table. The pump in the sink worked, and she filled the kettle with water; lifted the stovelid and set the kettle over the heat. There was firewood stacked neatly beside the stove, and she fed the fire and closed the firebox door before it could spit cinders into the room. "I'm impressed," Miss Tolliver said. "It took me months to figure out that stove." "Oh, I learned on my old grannie's, back home," Maggie said. "She was the caretaker at Urquhart Castle. That's how I got into the business, you see." Then she drew up the other chair and sat down opposite Miss Tolliver. "Now I'm going to come directly to the point if I may, for I don't want to waste your time. It's come to our attention that you have a certain talent." Miss Tolliver looked at her hands. "I've been searching for you over the past two years, ever since that story about the alligators hit the news. But by the time I got to New York, you were gone and so were the alligators." The kettle started to sing, and Maggie spooned tea into the warmed teapot and poured in the water. Mugs; sugar; powdered milk. She brought them all to the table. "Why did you leave New York? The alligators were relatively harmless, weren't they?" "So long as you stayed away from the sewers. It wasn't them, it was the things that came out of Central Park. There were too many people there to get hurt; that's why I went to the small towns." "Where there weren't any creatures?" "I wish it were that easy." Miss Tolliver reached out and put her hands on either side of the teapot, as if she were cold. "There are creatures everywhere. Every place has its own. Most of them sleep most of the time. But where I go, they wake up. So you've heard of the Wendigo on the shore of Lake Winnipeg, and the alligators in the New York sewers, and the things that walk in Central Park—though even the New Yorkers think they're only junkies in search of drug money, till it's too late. You've never heard of the little red man of Crowheart, Wyoming, have you; or the eagle women of Fort Grant, Arizona; or the wicker walkers of Shallow Creek, Kansas. Because once I left, they went back to sleep again before they could get into the papers. "That's why I came here, to Bigfoot country. If I went to, to Twodot, Montana, or Muleshoe, Texas, no telling what I'd waken there. Here, I know it's Bigfoot country, and the Bigfoot is suppose to be mild, and timid, and harmless. So I came here. It was a good idea, while it lasted." The tea had steeped long enough; Maggie poured it out and added milk and a lot of sugar to the mugs. "Drink that; you need it. So he didn't turn out as timid as he was painted?" Barbara Tolliver sipped at her tea. "He was at first. I guess it comes under the heading of 'familiarity breeds contempt.' It's like the squirrels in parks where people feed them; they don't stop being wild, they don't like you, but they know you've got food and it makes them bold. After the first couple of months, I'd see him standing on the edge of the forest. Then he'd come and raid my garden at night. Now he comes in the daytime. He tries the door, but he doesn't know how the doorknob works, not yet. Another time he climbed the roof and tried the chimney-pipe, but some hunters driving past took a shot at him; but they missed, and he ran away." "Missed with their guns, but not with their camera," Maggie corrected. "The photo made the front page of the Sun, and then I knew where to look." There was a thump at the door, and Maggie looked up and said. "Oh, dear me." Framed in the misty glass he stood, black and shaggy as a gorilla, with a man's face and wild, wild eyes. Miss Tolliver cried out and hid her face in her arms, moaning something about a curse; but Maggie snatched up her camera from the table and fired it in his face. He gaped and jumped back. She rose from the table, nearly knocking her chair over, and snatched open the door. The Bigfoot was fast on his feet; she got only three shots of his retreating back before he vanished under the eaves of the forest. She took a few more of his footprints—with her own foot beside them for scale—just for good measure. Mph'm. If Miss Tolliver had realized that a camera was what this walking legend most feared, she might have had an easier time of it. "Now listen," Maggie said, re-entering the cottage. "I really do need to get to the point. I'm here to offer you a job." "A job? Doing what, where? If you think there aren't any creatures in, in wherever it was—" "Inverness, Scotland. Dear lady, I am employed by the Loch Ness District Association for the Promotion of Tourism." "Oh, my God." "I don't know if you saw it in the papers a few years back; some well- meaning fool confessed on his deathbed that he'd faked that photo of Nessie he'd taken back in 1934; one of our best.