Pandora's Closet Part 1

Pandora's Closet.

Martin Harry Greenberg.

Jean Rabe.

INTRODUCTION.

If the shoe fits... there's a story in this anthology about it.

Garments and accoutrements have played key roles in fact and fiction throughout the ages-Cinderella's gla.s.s slipper, Superman's cape, Abe Lincoln's top hat, Sherlock Holmes' coat and pipe-none of which you'll find here, but I use these as examples. I've no intention of spilling any proverbial beans and ruining the authors' surprises in this simple introduction.

What you will find tucked inside the following pages is an incredible collection of stories featuring clothes, shoes, jewelry, and more... things that you might discover in some fantastical closet hidden away in the minds of our tale-spinners. Some stories are linked to history, some to beloved fables, and some spring from the authors' own worlds. All of them should either bring a smile or send a s.h.i.+ver.

Hmmmmm... just what did Quig find?

And what is the opposite of solid?

The collection of talent is amazing-from Hugowinning veterans to promising newcomers who reached into Pandora's closet and pulled out something that turned into their first professional sales.

The stories are worth rereading. All nineteen of them.

That's quite a few tales for one anthology, and it's due in part to the calculator I pulled out of the closet in my office.

I dutifully jotted down the word count of each story as it came in and double-checked it with Microsoft Word's wonderful word tallier. Next, I added all of the individual stories' word counts with... that calculator from my closet. Horrors! I was short on content. So rather than use Word's wonderful word tallier, as I hadn't yet started stringing the stories together, I contacted more authors to see if they had something interesting in their closets that they might write about.

And I used... that calculator... again.

Still short.

One more author.

One more...

Before I started putting them all together for the publisher and returning to Word's word tallier.

Uh-oh, I guess I wasn't as short as I first thought.

Now, I'm not saying the calculator out of my closet didn't work properly. I well and truly could have hit the wrong b.u.t.tons every time I used it. I have been known to unbalance a checkbook. But I tried it again a moment ago and got the same result. So that malfunctioning calculator (or my defective finger) is responsible for you holding a slightly thicker book in your hands and getting to read so many great stories.

I'd prefer to think that Pandora had a hand in putting this collection together.

Enjoy, Jean.

THE RING.

by Timothy Zahn.

It had been the fifth free-fall day in a row on Wall Street, the kind of day that grinds all the anger and frustration out of an investor and leaves him feeling nothing at all, unless it's a weary desire for rest or death, and either would be fine with him.

Which was why Nick Powell, department store floor manager and formerly hopeful stock market investor, walked completely past the small curio shop on his way home from work before the exotic gold ring sitting on its black velvet pad in the window finally registered.

Even then, he almost didn't stop. His modest and carefully nurtured portfolio had been nearly wiped out in the bloodletting, and there was no place for impulse purchases in a budget that included food and clothing and a Manhattan rent.

But his girlfriend Lydia loved odd jewelry, and a week's worth of preoccupation with the markets had turned their permanent simmering disagreement about money first into a shouting argument and then into a cold and deadly silence. A suitable peace offering might help patch things up.

And who knew? In a little shop like this the ring might even be reasonably priced. Retracing his steps, Nick went inside.

"Afternoon," the shopkeeper greeted him. He was an old man, tall and thin, with wrinkled skin and a few gray hairs still holding tenaciously to his pale skull. But his blue eyes were sharp enough, and there was a sardonic twist to the corners of his mouth. "What can I do for you?"

"That ring in the window," Nick said. "I wonder if I might look at it."

The old man's eyes seemed to flash. "Very discerning," he said as he left the counter and crossed to the window. Nick winced as he pa.s.sed, something about the air that brushed across his face sending a tingle up his back. "Antique German," the shopkeeper went on as he turned around again, the ring nestled in the palm of his hand. "Here-don't be afraid. Come and see."

Don't be afraid? Frowning at the odd comment, Nick leaned over to look.

Sitting behind a dusty window in the fading sunlight, the ring had been impressive. Pressed against human flesh in a bright, clean light, it was dazzling.

It was gold, of course, but somehow it seemed like a brighter, clearer, more vibrant gold than anything Nick had ever seen before. The design itself was equally striking: a meshed filigree of long, thin leaves intertwined with six slender human arms, each complete with a tiny but delicately shaped hand. "It's beautiful," he managed, the words catching oddly in his throat. "German, you say?"

"Very old German," the shopkeeper said. "Tell me, are you rich?"

Nick grimaced. So much for any peace offering to Lydia. It probably would just have earned him a lecture on extravagance anyway. "Hardly," he said, taking a step toward the door. "Thanks for-"

"Would you like to be rich?"

Nick frowned. There was an unpleasant gleam in the old man's eyes. "Of course," Nick said. "Who wouldn't?"

"How badly?"

The standing disagreement with Lydia flashed through his mind. "Badly enough, I'm told," he muttered.

"Good." The old man thrust his hand toward Nick. "Here. Take it. Put it on."

Slowly, Nick reached over and took the ring. The old man's skin felt cold and scaly. "What?"

"Put it on," the old man repeated.

"No, it's not for me-it's for a lady friend," Nick said.

"It doesn't want her," the old man said flatly, an edge to his voice. "Put it on."

Nick shook his head. "There's no way it'll fit," he warned, slipping the filigreed gold onto his right ring finger. Sure enough, it stopped at the second knuckle. "See? It-"

And broke off as the ring somehow suddenly slid the rest of the way to the base of the finger.

"It likes you," the old man said approvingly. "It knows you can do it."

"It knows I can do what?" Nick demanded, pulling on the ring. But whatever trick of flexible sizing had allowed it to get over the knuckle, the trick was apparently gone. "What the h.e.l.l is this?"

"It's the Ring of the Nibelungs," the old man said solemnly.

"The what?"

"The Ring of the Nibelungs," the old man repeated, the somber tone replaced by irritation. "Crafted hundreds of years ago by the dwarf Alberich from the magic gold of the Rhinemaidens. It carries the power to create wealth for whoever possesses it." His lip twisted. "Don't you ever listen to Wagner's operas?"

"I don't get to the Met very often," Nick growled, twisting some more at the Ring. "Come on, get this thing off me."

"It won't come off," the old man said. "As I said, it likes you."

"Well, I don't like it," Nick shot back. "Come on, give me a hand."

"Just take it," the old man said. "There's no charge."

Nick paused, frowning. "No charge?"

"Not until later," the other said. "Shall we say ten percent of your earnings?"

Nick snorted. The way things were going, a deal like that would soon have the old man owing him money. "Deal," he said sarcastically. "I'll just back up the armored car to your door, okay?"

The other smiled, his eyes glittering all the more. "Good-bye, Mr. Powell," he said softly. "I'll be seeing you."

Nick was two blocks away, still trying to get the Ring off, when it suddenly occurred to him that he'd never told the old man his name.

There weren't any messages from Lydia waiting on his machine. He thought about calling her, decided that it wouldn't accomplish anything, and ate his dinner alone. Afterward, for the same reason people tune into the eleven o'clock news to see a repeat of the same multicar crash they've already seen on the six o'clock news, he turned on his computer and pulled up the data on the international stock markets.

Only to find that, to his astonishment, the six o'clock crash wasn't being repeated.

He stared at the screen, punching in his trader pa.s.scode again and again. The overall Nikkei average was down by nearly the same percentage as the Dow. But somehow, impossibly, Nick's stocks had not only survived the drop but had actually increased in value.

All of his stocks had.

He was up until after four in the morning, checking first the Nikkei, then the Hang Seng, then the Sens.e.x 30, then the DJ Stoxx 600. It was the same pattern in all of them: The overall numbers bounced up and down like fis.h.i.+ng boats in a rough sea, but Nick's own stocks stubbornly defied the trends, rising like small hot-air balloons over the violent waters.

He fell asleep at his desk about the time the London exchanges were opening... and when he awoke, stiff and groggy, the NYSE had been open for nearly an hour, he was two hours late for work, and already he'd made up nearly everything he'd lost in the previous two days. By the time the market closed that afternoon, his portfolio's value had made it back to where it had been before the free fall started.

By the end of the next week, he was a millionaire.

He broke the news to Lydia over their salads that Sat.u.r.day at Sardis 's. To his annoyed surprise, she wasn't happy for him.

In fact, just the opposite. "I don't like it, Nick," she said, her face somber and serious in the candlelight. "It isn't right."

"What's not right about it?" Nick countered, trying to keep his voice low. "Why shouldn't one of the little people get some of Wall Street's money for a change?"

"Because this was way too fast," Lydia said. "It's not good to get rich so quickly."

Nick shook his head in exasperation. "This is one of those things I can't win, isn't it?" he growled. "I head into the Dumpster and you don't like it. I turn around and bounce into the ionosphere, and you still don't like it. Can you give me a hint of what income level you would like me to have?"

"You still don't get it, do you?" Lydia said, her eyes flas.h.i.+ng with some exasperation of her own. "It's not about the money. It's about your obsession with it."

"Could you keep your voice down?" Nick ground out, glancing furtively around the dining room.

"Because you're just as focused on money now as you were a week ago," Lydia said, ignoring his request. "Maybe even more so."

"Only because I've got more to be focused on," Nick muttered. Heads were starting to turn, he noted with embarra.s.sment, as nearby diners began to tune in on the conversation.

"Exactly," Lydia said. "And I'm sorry, but I can't believe someone can make a million dollars in two weeks without some serious obsessing going on."

Heads were definitely turning now. "Half the people in this room do it all the time," Nick said, wis.h.i.+ng that he'd waited until dessert to bring this up. Now they were going to have to endure the sideways glances through the whole meal.

Still, part of him rather liked the fact he was being noticed by people like this. After all, he was on his way to being one of them.

"I'm just worried about money getting its claws into you, that's all," Lydia persisted.

Out of sight beneath the table, Nick brushed his fingers across the filigreed surface of the Ring that, despite every effort, still wouldn't come off. "It won't," he promised.

"Then prove it," Lydia challenged. "If money's not your master, give some of it away."

The old shopkeeper's face superimposed itself across Lydia 's. Ten percent of your profits, Mr. Powell. "I can do that," Nick said, suppressing a s.h.i.+ver. "No problem."

"And I don't mean give it to the IRS," Lydia said archly. "I mean give some of it to charity or the community."

"No problem," Nick repeated.

Lydia still didn't look convinced. But just then a pair of waiters appeared at their table, one sweeping their salad plates deftly out of their way as the other uncovered freshly steaming plates, and for the moment at least that conversation was over.

Despite the rocky start, the meal turned out to be a very pleasant time. Lydia might like to claim the high ground in her opinions about money, a small cynical part of Nick noted, but she had no problem enjoying the benefits that money could bring.

They were halfway through creme brulee for two when a silver-haired man in an expensive suit left his table and his dark-haired female companion and came over. "Good evening," he said, laying a gold-embossed business card beside Nick's wine gla.s.s. "I couldn't help overhearing some of your conversation earlier. My congratulations on your recent achievement."

"Thank you," Nick said, his heartbeat picking up as the name on the card jumped out at him. This was none other than David Sonnerfeld, CEO of one of the biggest investment firms in the city. "I was just lucky."

"That kind of luck is a much sought-after commodity on Wall Street," Sonnerfeld said, smiling at Lydia. "Would you by any chance be interested in exploring a position with Sonnerfeld Thompkins?"

"He already has a job," Lydia put in.

"Actually, I don't," Nick corrected her. "I quit this afternoon."