Dean Wesley Smith - The Last Garden In Time's Window

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The Last Garden in Time's Window

Dean Wesley Smith

Dean Wesley Smith has sold over twenty novels and around one hundred short stories to

various magazines and anthologies. He's been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and has

won a World Fantasy Award and a Locus Award. He was the editor and publisher of Pulphouse

Publishing, and has just finished editing the Star Trek anthology Strange New Worlds II.

THE sun beat through the window over the sink, making the small main room of the trailer feel

degrees too hot. In my memory, as far back as being a young boy, this trailer always felt hot and stuffy.

In the summer, Grandma and Grandpa never opened the doors. In the winter, the gas stove just put out

too much heat for the tiny eight-by-twenty trailer.

I turned and blocked the door open, then threaded my way past my grandfather's stuffed armchair

to the small kitchen and forced open the window there. A faint summer breeze took some of the heat, but

left the smell of my grandparents. The lingering odors of his cigars, her perfume, were embedded in every

pore of the space.

It was almost as if they were still there, Grandpa in his chair, Grandma in the small kitchen behind

his chair. She always did all the talking when I visited, asking me about work, about which woman I was

dating. Except for an occasional grunt or laugh, Grandpa had very seldom made a noise or spoken an

entire sentence to me.

I stood near the dark gas heater, trying not to touch anything. I didn't want to accidentally trigger a

memory spell. Dirk, my master, had told me a dozen times to be careful, repeating it over and over right

up until I got on the plane. He didn't think my magic was ready to be used or controlled without his

watchful eye. I was just an apprentice and I should damn well remember that.

I did think about his warning, but now standing in my grandparents' old trailer home that sat tucked

back in a shabby trailer park in Boise, Idaho, I was having trouble caring. This was a different world, far

more distant than the thousand miles that separated me now from the world where I learned to control

my magic with Dirk in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Boise was where I grew up and where I now had to try to understand what happened to my

grandparents. Why I had stared at two caskets side by side at the funeral today. Oh, I knew the "how" of

their death. The police said the gas stove had finally leaked, filling the trailer and killing them while they

slept. A neighbor had noticed the smell and called the fire department.

But I just couldn't bring myself to believe it had really happened. Not after all these years of the two

of them living in this trailer. An accident like that wasn't something they would ever allow to happen, no

matter how old they got. Or at least that was what I wanted to believe.

After the service at their graves, I had thought about calling Dirk, asking him to come and help me,

but I knew what his answer would be. He would smile and shake his head, his perfectly-combed hair not

mussing. I could almost hear his voice say the words, When you are ready, you can find the answer to

their deaths. But first you must learn the control and the discipline of your magic.

More than likely he would have been right. I had learned to trust the guy who looked like a golf pro

in his Izod shirts and golf slacks. Dirk seemed to know everything there was to know about magic. He

was rumored, among the other apprentices I was on-line with, to be one of the most powerful magicians

in the world. Considering there were thousands of full magicians around the world and thousands more

apprentices like me, that was saying something.

But sitting in my grandparents' old, tiny trailer, I didn't much care or want to listen. Something had

taken the two most important people in my life from me, and I was going to find out what.

I stood, and without touching anything, tried to really look at the trailer around me, to see if anything

was missing or out of place. One big armchair that had been my grandfather's sat in the center of the

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