The Strange


 CONTENTS
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Epigraph
 Part One: What Happened to Me
 
 Chapter 1
 Chapter 2
 Chapter 3
 Chapter 4
 Chapter 5
 Chapter 6
 Chapter 7
 Chapter 8
 Chapter 9
 Chapter 10
 
 Part Two: What I Did About It
 
 Chapter 11
 Chapter 12
 Chapter 13
 Chapter 14
 Chapter 15
 Chapter 16
 Chapter 17
 Chapter 18
 Chapter 19
 Chapter 20
 
 Part Three: The Consequences Thereof
 
 Chapter 21
 Chapter 22
 Chapter 23
 Chapter 24
 Chapter 25
 Chapter 26
 Chapter 27
 
 Acknowledgments
 About the Author
 Copyright
 
 
 
 Guide
 
 Cover
 Start of Content
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Epigraph
 Acknowledgments
 About the Author
 Copyright
 
 
 
 
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 The Strange
 Author of Wounds
 Nathan Ballingrud
 “The most enjoyable novel I’ve read in years, no contest.” —Mat Johnson
 A Novel
 “Ballingrud stretches the boundaries of the genre by employing these grand worlds.” —The New York Times
 
 
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 To Mia,
 the toughest, most resilient person I have ever known.
 I’m proud to be your dad.
 
 
 
 “Doesn’t an old thing always know when a new thing comes?”
 RAY BRADBURY,
 “—AND THE MOON BE STILL AS BRIGHT”
 
 
 
 PART ONE WHAT HAPPENED TO ME
 
 
 1
 I was thirteen when the Silence came to Mars, settling over us like a smothering dust. We don’t talk about those days much anymore, and most who lived through them are dead. I’m old now—extravagantly old, I like to say—and I’ll join them soon enough. Maybe that’s why I find myself thinking back on those years more frequently, in the night’s long hours: the terror and the loneliness that afflicted us all, and the shameful things we did because we were afraid.
 Maybe that’s why I’ve been thinking, too, about old friends and old enemies, about how sometimes they were the same people. And maybe that’s why dear old Watson has come to visit me at last, gleaming in the lamplight, full of his own enchanted tales.
 All my life I’ve wanted to write adventure stories, but I’ve always been more suited to reading than to writing. I never believed my imagination was up to the task. It’s only now, close to the end, that I realize I never had to imagine one.
 My name is Anabelle Crisp. This is the story of what happened to me, what I did about it, and the consequences thereof.
 
 IT WAS EARLY evening and we were closing up the Mother Earth Diner. Normally my father liked to keep the place open well into the night. We’d been living with the Silence for nearly a year, and during that time it seemed that more and more people wanted a warm, bright place to be when darkness fell. My family was happy to provide that place. We specialized in good Southern cooking—beans and rice, collard greens, barbecued pork, that sort of thing—and we had our walls covered with pictures of famous Earth cities and landmarks. The Silence had imbued those photographs with an elegiac quality, it was true, but that only heightened their appeal.
 That night, we were closing earlier than usual. The Moving Picture Club was presenting a picture show in the town square, which would draw most of the folks away from us. That was fine with me; I was hoping to make it down to the square to see it myself. They were running The Lost World again, and though I’d seen it twice before, I was eager to go again. Arthur Conan Doyle was my favorite