The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Volume 1

by Paula Guran

  Time was, if you could name a storm, you could catch it, for a while. Beat it.

  If it didn’t catch you first.

  So the more names in the catalog, the luckier they feel.

  We’ve never sold Lillit’s first catalog. That one’s ours.

  After Lillit goes, I try naming storms.

  A Somanyquestions: the storm of younger sisters, especially. There is nothing you can do about it.

  A Toomuchtoofast: that storm that plagues mothers sometimes. Bring soothing cakes and extra hands for holding things and folding things.

  A Leaving: that rush when everything swoops up in dust and agitation and what’s left is scoured. Prepare to bolt your doors so you don’t lose what wants to be lost.

  When I sneak up to the Cliffwatch to show my sister, she’s got rain for hair and wind in her eyes, but she hugs me and laughs at my list and says to keep trying.

  Mumma never knows how often I visit her.

  “Terrible storms, for years,” Varyl tells it, “snatched people straight from their houses. Left columns of sand in the chairs, dragged weeds through the bedding.”

  But then we happened, right back at the weather. I know this story. And the battle’s gone on for a while.

  Long before Lillit and Varyl and I were born, the Mayor’s son shouted to the rain to stop before one of her speeches. And it did. Mumma’s aunt at the edge of town yelled back lightning once.

  The weather struck back: a whole family became a thick gray mist that filled their house and didn’t disperse.

  Then Mumma’s aunt and the Mayor’s son shouted weather names when storms approached. At first it was frightening, and people stayed away. Then the Mayor realized how useful, how fortunate. Put them up at the Cliffwatch, to keep them safe.

  Then the news crier, she went out one day and saw snow on her hand—a single, perfect flake. The day was warm, the sky clear, trees were budding and ready to make more trees and she lifted the snowflake to her lips and whirled away.

  The town didn’t know what to think. We’d been studying the weather that became smarter than us. We’d gotten the weather in us too, maybe.

  Mumma’s aunt turned to lightning and struck the clouds. Scattered them.

  Right after that, the ocean grabbed the bluff and ripped it down. Left the Cliffwatch tilted over the ocean, but the people who’d got the weather in them didn’t want to leave.

  That was the battle—had been already, but now we knew it was a fight—the weathermen yelling at the weather, to warn us before the storms caught them too. The parents yelling at their kids to stay out of the rain. Out of the Cliffwatch.

  But I’d decided. I’d go when my turn came.

  Because deciding you needed to do something was always so much better than waking up to find you’d done it.

  Mumma’s aunt had crackled when she was angry; the Mayor’s son was mostly given to dry days and wet days until he turned to squall one morning and blew away.

  The storms grew stronger. The bigger ones lasted weeks. The slow ones took years. At market, we heard whispers: a few in town worried the storms fed on spent weathermen. Mumma hated that talk. It always followed a Searcloud.

  Sometimes, storms linked together to grow strong: Ashpales and Vivids and Glares.

  I lied when I said Mumma never looked back. I saw her do it.

  She wasn’t supposed to but the Mayor had walked on and she turned and I watched her watch Lillit with a hunger that made me stomp out the gate.

  Returning to the Cliffwatch is worse than looking back. Don’t tell anyone but she does that in secret. All the time.

  She doesn’t visit then. She stands outside the gates in the dark when she can’t sleep, draped in shadows so no one will see her, except maybe Lillit. I sneak behind her, walking in her footsteps so nothing crunches to give me away.

  I see her catch Lillit in the window of the Cliffwatch now and then. See Lillit lift a hand and curl it. See Mumma match the gesture and then Lillit tears away.

  Mumma doubles her efforts to lure Lillit back. She leaves biscuits on the cliff’s edge. Hair ribbons, “in case the wind took Lillit’s from her.”

  She forgets to do the neighbors’ laundry, twice, until they ask someone else. We stay hungry for a bit, then Varyl goes after the washing.

  Up in the old clock tower in town where a storm took the second and minute hands but left the hour, a weatherman starts shouting about a Clarity.

  Mumma starts running toward the cliff, but not for safety.

  Varyl and I go screeching after her, a different kind of squall, beating against the weather, up to the Cliffwatch.

  A SECRET CATALOG OF STORMS

  A Loss That’s Probably Your Fault: a really quiet storm. Mean too. It gets smaller and smaller until it tears right through you.

  A Grieving: this one sneaks up on mothers especially and catches them off guard. Hide familiar things that belong to loved ones, make sure they can’t surprise anyone. A lingering storm.

  An I Told You Not To, Sila: an angry storm, only happens when someone finds your lists. The kind that happens when they burn the list so that no one will know you’re catching wayward.

  The biggest storm yet hits when we’re almost done running.

  We’re near the top of the cliff, the big old house in our sights, and bam, the Clarity brings down torrents of bright-lit rain that makes the insides of our ears hurt. Breathing sears our lungs and we can’t tell if that’s from the running or the storm. And then the storm starts screeching, tries to pull our hair, drag us over the cliff.

  We try to shelter in the Cliffwatch.

  The wind hums around us, the ice starts blueing our cheeks, Varyl’s teeth start chattering and then stop, and oh let us in, I cry. Don’t be so stubborn.

  Varyl pounds on the door.

  But this time, the door doesn’t open for Varyl. The door doesn’t mind Mumma either, no matter how hard she pounds.

  Only when I crawl through the freeze, around to the cliff’s edge and yell, something turns my way, blows the shutters open. I pull my family through, even Mumma, who is trying to stay out in the wind, trying to make it take her too.

  We get inside the Cliffwatch and shake ourselves dry. “That Clarity had an Ashpale on the end of it,” I say. I’m sure of it. “There’s a Bright coming.”

  So many storms, all at once, and I know their names. They are ganging up against us.

  I want to fight.

  Varyl stares at me, shouts for Mumma, but Mumma’s searching the rooms for Lillit.

  “We can’t stay here and lose Sila too,” Varyl says. She turns to me. “You don’t want this.”

  But I do, I think. I want to fight the weather until it takes me too.

  And maybe Mumma wants it also.

  Varyl clasps my hand, and Mumma’s, the minute the weather stops howling. She drags us both back to our house, through the frozen wood, across the square, past the frozen fountain. Our feet crunch ice into petals that mark our path. Varyl’s shouting at Mumma. She’s shaking her arm, which judders beneath her shirt, all the muscles loose and swingy, but the part of Mumma at the end of the arm doesn’t move. Because she saw what I saw, she saw Lillit begin to blow, saw her hair rise and flow, and her fingers and all the rest of her with it, out to face the big storm, made of Ashpale and Vivid and Glare and Clarity.

  That was the last time we saw Lillit’s face in any window. Mumma had brought ribbons but those blew away. Now sometimes she scatters petals for Lillit to play with.

  Climbing the remains of the Cliffwatch later, we find small storms in corners, a few dark clouds. You can put them in jars now and take them home, watch until the lightning fades.

  Sometimes they don’t fade, these pieces of weather. The frozen water that doesn’t thaw. A tiny squall that rides your shoulder until you laugh.

  They’re still here, just lesser, because the weather is less too.

  That day, all the storms spilled over the bay at once, fire from below and li
ghtning and the green clouds and the gray. That day, the weathermen rose up into the wind and shouted until they were raw and we hid, and the storms shouted back—one big storm where there had been many smaller ones—and it dove for the town, the Cliffwatch, the few ships in the harbor.

  And the weathermen hung from the cliff house and some of them caught the wind. Some of them turned to rain. Some to lightning. Then they all struck back together. The ones who already rode the high clouds too.

  We wanted to help, I could feel the clouds tugging at my breath, but some of the winds beat at our cheeks and the rain struck our faces, pushing us back. And the terrible storms couldn’t reach us, couldn’t take us.

  Instead, the Cliffwatch cracked and the clouds and the wind swept it all up back into the sky where it had come from long ago.

  Later, we walked home. A spot of blue sky opened up and just as suddenly disappeared. A cool breeze crossed my face and I felt Lillit’s fingers in it.

  A hero is more than a sister. And less.

  The milk keeps coming, but the fish doesn’t.

  The weathermen are in the clouds now. Varyl says they keep the sky blue and the sea green and the air clear of ice.

  We climb into the Cliffwatch sometimes to find the notes and drawings, the hinges and papers and knobs. We hold these tight, a way to touch the absences. We say their names. We say, they did it for us. They wanted to go.

  With the wind on my skin and in my ears, I still think I could blow away too if I wished hard enough.

  Mumma says we don’t need weathermen as much anymore.

  Sometimes a little bit of sky even turns blue on its own.

  Still, we hold their catalogs close: fabric and metal; wind and rain.

  We try to remember their faces.

  At sunset, Mumma goes to the open wall facing the ocean.

  “You don’t need to stay,” she says, stubborn, maybe a little selfish.

  But there she is so there I am beside her and soon Varyl also.

  All of us, the sunset painting our faces bright. And then, for a moment before us out over the sea, there she is too, our Lillit, blowing soft against our cheeks.

  We stretch out our arms to hug her and she weaves between them like a breath.

  FRAN WILDE’s novels and short stories have been finalists for six Nebula Awards, three Hugo Awards, and a World Fantasy Award. They include her Andre Norton and Compton Cook winning debut Updraft, its sequels, Coudbound and Horizon; and the middle-grade novel River-land; Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Nature, Uncanny, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2017, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2018 Eugie Foster Memorial Award.

  THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS

  KEN LIU

  Emily Fort:

  So you want to know about Hayley.

  No, I’m used to it, or at least I should be by now. People only want to hear about my sister.

  It was a dreary, rainy Friday in October, the smell of fresh fallen leaves in the air. The black tupelos lining the field hockey pitch had turned bright red, like a trail of bloody footprints left by a giant.

  I had a quiz in French II and planned a week’s worth of vegan meals for a family of four in family and consumer science. Around noon, Hayley messaged me from California.

  Skipped class. Q and I are driving to the festival right now!!!

  I ignored her. She delighted in taunting me with the freedoms of her college life. I was envious, but didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of showing it.

  In the afternoon, Mom messaged me.

  Have you heard from Hayley?

  No. The sisterly code of silence was sacred. Her secret boyfriend was safe with me.

  “If you do, call me right away.”

  I put the phone away. Mom was the helicopter type.

  As soon as I got home from field hockey, I knew something was wrong. Mom’s car was in the driveway, and she never left work this early.

  The TV was on in the basement.

  Mom’s face was ashen. In a voice that sounded strangled, she said, “Hayley’s RA called. She went to a music festival. There’s been a shooting.”

  So much data, so little information.

  The rest of the evening was a blur as the death toll climbed, TV anchors read old forum posts from the gunman in dramatic voices, shaky follow-drone footage of panicked people screaming and scattering circulated on the web.

  I put on my glasses and drifted through the VR re-creation of the site hastily put up by the news crews. Already, the place was teeming with avatars holding a candlelight vigil. Outlines on the ground glowed where victims were found, and luminous arcs with floating numbers reconstructed ballistic trails. So much data, so little information.

  We tried calling and messaging. There was no answer. Probably ran out of battery, we told ourselves. She always forgets to charge her phone. The network must be jammed.

  The call came at four in the morning. We were all awake.

  “Yes, this is . . . . Are you sure?” Mom’s voice was unnaturally calm, as though her life, and all our lives, hadn’t just changed forever. “No, we’ll fly out ourselves. Thank you.”

  She hung up, looked at us, and delivered the news. Then she collapsed onto the couch and buried her face in her hands.

  There was an odd sound. I turned and, for the first time in my life, saw Dad crying.

  I missed my last chance to tell her how much I loved her. I should have messaged her back.

  Gregg Fort:

  I don’t have any pictures of Hayley to show you. It doesn’t matter. You already have all the pictures of my daughter you need.

  Unlike Abigail, I’ve never taken many pictures or videos, much less drone-view holograms or omni immersions. I lack the instinct to be prepared for the unexpected, the discipline to document the big moments, the skill to frame a scene perfectly. But those aren’t the most important reasons.

  My father was a hobbyist photographer who took pride in developing his own film and making his own prints. If you were to flip through the dust-covered albums in the attic, you’d see many posed shots of my sisters and me, smiling stiffly into the camera. Pay attention to the ones of my sister Sara. Note how her face is often turned slightly away from the lens so that her right cheek is out of view.

  When Sara was five, she climbed onto a chair and toppled a boiling pot. My father was supposed to be watching her, but he’d been distracted, arguing with a colleague on the phone. When all was said and done, Sara had a trail of scars that ran from the right side of her face all the way down her thigh, like a rope of solidified lava.

  You won’t find in those albums records of the screaming fights between my parents; the awkward chill that descended around the dining table every time my mother stumbled over the word beautiful; the way my father avoided looking Sara in the eye.

  In the few photographs of Sara where her entire face can be seen, the scars are invisible, meticulously painted out of existence in the darkroom, stroke by stroke. My father simply did it, and the rest of us went along in our practiced silence.

  As much as I dislike photographs and other memory substitutes, it’s impossible to avoid them. Co-workers and relatives show them to you, and you have no choice but to look and nod. I see the efforts manufacturers of memory-capturing devices put into making their results better than life. Colors are more vivid; details emerge from shadows; filters evoke whatever mood you desire. Without you having to do anything, the phone brackets the shot so that you can pretend to time travel, to pick the perfect instant when everyone is smiling. Skin is smoothed out; pores and small imperfections are erased. What used to take my father a day’s work is now done in the blink of an eye, and far better.

  Do the people who take these photos believe them to be reality? Or have the digital paintings taken the place of reality in their memory? When they try to remember the captured moment, do they recall what they saw, or what the camera crafted for them?

  A
bigail Fort:

  On the flight to California, while Gregg napped and Emily stared out the window, I put on my glasses and immersed myself in images of Hayley. I never expected to do this until I was aged and decrepit, unable to make new memories. Rage would come later. Grief left no room for other emotions.

  I was always the one in charge of the camera, the phone, the follow-drone. I made the annual albums, the vacation highlight videos, the animated Christmas cards summarizing the family’s yearly accomplishments.

  Gregg and the girls indulged me, sometimes reluctantly. I always believed that someday they would come to see my point of view.

  “Pictures are important,” I’d tell them. “Our brains are so flawed, leaky sieves of time. Without pictures, so many things we want to remember would be forgotten.”

  I sobbed the whole way across the country as I re-lived the life of my firstborn.

  Gregg Fort:

  Abigail wasn’t wrong, not exactly.

  Many have been the times when I wished I had images to help me remember. I can’t picture the exact shape of Hayley’s face at six months, or recall her Halloween costume when she was five. I can’t even remember the exact shade of blue of the dress she wore for high school graduation.

  Given what happened later, of course, her pictures are beyond my reach.

  I comfort myself with this thought: How can a picture or video capture the intimacy, the irreproducible subjective perspective and mood through my eyes, the emotional tenor of each moment when I felt the impossible beauty of the soul of my child? I don’t want digital representations, ersatz reflections of the gaze of electronic eyes filtered through layers of artificial intelligence, to mar what I remember of our daughter.

  When I think of Hayley, what comes to mind is a series of disjointed memories.

  The baby wrapping her translucent fingers around my thumb for the first time; the infant scooting around on her bottom on the hardwood floor, plowing through alphabet blocks like an icebreaker through floes; the four-year-old handing me a box of tissues as I shivered in bed with a cold and laying a small, cool hand against my feverish cheek.