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

by Paula Guran

  “I’ll find her. It’ll be like before.”

  His mum nodded, staring down at her mug. He’d never seen her this bad before, her face pink and pained, eyes squeezed small. As though she was trying to keep the world out of her head. He leant over and put his hand on hers.

  “We’ll get her back. We always do.”

  He didn’t know the city as well as he used to. It was ebbing from him, everything that tied him to this place was vanishing piece by piece.

  “Who’s she hang out with these days?”

  Lee finds the shop, nestled out beyond the university, near Rusholme. Places up that way feel hidden and this is no different. He almost walks right past it. It’s a newsagents, though he knows it isn’t really. Terry, the bloke who runs it, had a nice line in coke back when Lee went clubbing. The shop has moved a few times since then, used to be up near the library till some private landowner came and bought up the ground beneath them. Now he’s here, sandwiched between restaurants on Curry Mile.

  Terry doesn’t remember much, or at least he says he doesn’t. She bought from him for a while, a bit of weed here and there, once or twice some pills. Nothing too drastic.

  “Can’t say I thought much of the lad she was with. Too old for a lass like her.”

  His name is Nathan. Lee doesn’t get a surname from Terry, but he gets an address. An estate over in Wythenshawe. No one knows for sure how long Kirsty’s been with him. Terry delivered stuff to him once or twice.

  It’s a cul-de-sac, ringed with houses. Practically every one of them the same. In the middle of the day it’s quiet. Most people at work, kids at school. Driveways lie empty. Scaffolding is stacked against one property that he passes, builders chatting with drinks. They take no notice of him.

  What is he planning on doing? He isn’t sure. Knock on the door? Break a window? Try and find a spare key under a mat somewhere? He’d bet a tenner that none of those would work.

  Lee finds number three. It stands out amongst the others. The front window is boarded up, though the glass appears to be intact. The grass in the front garden is overgrown, and a horrible smell is coming from the piled-up beanbags lying against the hedge in front of the property. He glances at the upstairs window. The curtains are drawn and the lights are off.

  Fuck it. He knocks on the door and waits.

  There’s no sound from the house. If she knew he was coming, she’d have found somewhere else to stay.

  In the corner of his eye he spots a gap in the boards on the window. Inside he can just about make out the living room. It’s dark, and it takes a moment for his eyes to register everything. A small coffee table sits in the center of the room, wax melted into it from candles that have been placed all around it. They’ve been burned down so much that they’re barely there anymore. On the table, spread out and stuck by the wax, is a map of Manchester. Thick black lines etched into it with charcoal. He recognizes some of the places that he can make out from here: the town hall, the old cinema on Oxford Road, the Arndale.

  There’s writing on the walls, illegible scrawls. Lee remembers finding Kirsty that day years ago. Bloodied arms with symbols scarred into them.

  What is she planning?

  The next day he heads to Koffee Pot for breakfast. He has an urge to immerse himself in the city, in the places he used to go. The Koffee Pot has moved. It’s somewhere up a road in the Northern Quarter now. No longer resident on Stevenson Square. Doesn’t matter, it still feels the same inside. He takes a seat by the window.

  After a few sips of coffee, he notices someone sitting opposite him. A young lad, no more than about thirteen. He’s skinny as fuck, baseball cap pulled down over his eyes and he doesn’t look up at Lee.

  “Alright Lee?” he says in Kirsty’s voice.

  “Who’s this you’ve come to me as?”

  “Does it really matter?” The boy fiddles with a napkin, doesn’t look up. “I know you’re looking for me, and I’d like you to stop. I’m okay.”

  “You’re so okay that you’ve come to chat in someone else’s body. Is that okay?”

  The boy looks up at Lee, and he can almost see her eyes, witchy and hazel, somewhere behind the boy’s own.

  “Mum’s worried sick.”

  He jumps at someone banging on the window. The boy doesn’t react at all, he turns to spot a stag do barreling past down the street. When he turns back, the boy has his head down again.

  “Thanks for giving a shit, but I don’t need rescuing. Not this time.”

  “I went to Nathan’s. I saw the map.”

  What have you got planned? He doesn’t ask.

  “Yeah, I guessed that was you. Bloody Terry, right? I told Nate not to trust him. Doesn’t matter. We’re long gone now.”

  Lee reaches out to the boy, feeling as though he can reach through and find his sister and pull her out of the body and back into reality. The boy shuffles back.

  “Please don’t. Might wake him up, then we can’t chat. I’ve missed you Lee. You’ve not called in a bit.”

  “Been busy.”

  “London’s changed you, you Southern cunt.” He can hear her laugh, though the boy’s mouth doesn’t change expression.

  “I noticed this place has moved.”

  “About a year ago I think. Cocktail place moved in. The city’s different. Don’t you feel it? Doesn’t it make you sick?”

  The boy looks around at the people sitting near them, suspicious. Lee looks around too, copying him, but not understanding why. A waitress comes over to take his mug but he clutches hold of it even though it’s empty. The boy with Kirsty’s voice hasn’t ordered anything.

  “I don’t know what I feel Kirst, I’ve not been here for years, it doesn’t feel like home anymore.”

  “Exactly. Exactly. No more mithering about. Things have got to change Lee. They have to. It’s got to go back to how it all was.”

  “But that’s not the city. It’s just me. Places change, people change, sometimes at the same time. Doesn’t mean anything bad. Doesn’t mean anything. Just means stuff evolves.”

  “You’re wrong Lee.”

  The boy grabs hold of his wrist and his eyes roll into his head, the whites stare back for just a moment, then the color returns and he stares back at Lee.

  “The fuck’s going on?”

  He goes back to his mum’s empty handed and she cries on his shoulder for a little while, before he makes her a brew, and they sit with the TV on in the background, talking about Kirsty.

  When Lee went to look for her all those years ago, the first time she disappeared, he remembered the stories, little snatches from her friends, sometimes from strangers. The names they called her. Nicknames whose origins he could never pin down. He saw those same nicknames on the bus months later, etched into the metal headrests, scored into the glass on the window, and he winced when he saw them. Lies, tales, and rumors had lead him to the squat out in Oldham. How she’d fallen in with the scally fuckers who lived in that moldy, broken home, he’d never known, but he’d dragged her out by her arm. She’d called him all sorts but he was keeping her safe, he was doing the right thing. None of the others in that place had tried to stop him.

  His mum had been so relieved. They sat vigilant all night in case she tried to leave again.

  Tonight, they sit together the way they did all of those years ago, hopeful that she will walk down the stairs as though nothing has happened.

  The sightings came in few and far between. Texts saying she’d been seen walking through The Printworks in tattered clothes, bleeding. No, make that lying prone in the middle of Deansgate, speaking in tongues. Another one said she’d been lying low in Heaton Park, sleeping rough in a tent she’d stolen from the Trafford Centre. But none of the leads came to anything, and all of them contradicted one another. Kirsty, for a few days, existed across the whole city all at once.

  Then there was a sighting of her in-between the cities. A patch of wasteland just beyond the Irwell. She’d been standing there in the rain,
arms aloft, soaked to her skin. Another boy there too, probably Nate. She was screaming at the sky. He was reading from a book. That had been three days earlier, according to the friend who rang him. Lee felt frustrated, how slow it was for news to come his way, but at least it was news. That was something.

  He walked there one morning, it was just ten minutes from his mum’s place, just ten minutes from where Kirsty had lived. There had been something here, years ago. He remembered something vague: a hotel, an estate? Something he’d never dared enter. Now whatever had been there was demolished, and a mound of dirt had been stacked at the verge, next to the road. There was no building equipment, no sign of any presence there anymore. Just an empty patch of land that belonged to no one. Except that wasn’t true. He trod through dewy grass toward the center, stumbling over rocks and holes where foundations and pipes were supposed to be laid, and looked up at the sky. Gray clouds shifted across Manchester, a light rain fell, and he dreamt of his sister, standing there, scarred and screaming. Up ahead of him, rising up fast and different was the city. The towering hotels and old warehouses dulled and washed out in the rain. This is what she had seen, he thinks shaking himself out of the past, focusing on the here and now.

  This is why she had been so angry. So scared.

  A woman leaves the block of flats next to the wasteland and stares at him. For a moment he’s convinced its Kirsty. Another one of her tricks. But the woman turns and walks away quick, lifting her coat above her head to protect it from the rain.

  He knows then that he will see her everywhere.

  Nate’s body washes up at the Deansgate locks two days later. The smokers outside of Revolution spot him. There’s no sign of injury and he’s reported in the papers as a “reveler” who fell. It takes a call from Terry to tell Lee that this is the bloke.

  “You should quit,” he tells Lee. “She doesn’t want to be found.”

  But there’s something about Terry’s voice that doesn’t sound right.

  He doesn’t go back down south, not right away. There will come a time when he’ll have to, when his life down there will catch back up with him, but Manchester has a way of stalling time, keeping things still for longer than they should. He feels as though he’s exhausting his moment of stillness, draining the goodwill of the city. There are days when he feels a haze fall over him, a thick mist coating him, and when it leaves he finds himself in a part of the city he doesn’t recognize right away. He wakes up in the industrial estates of Trafford, under the pagoda in Chinatown, and halfway down Princess Parkway, passing cars honking at him. Then there are worse days, days when he feels he’s in control of himself, days when he goes out looking for her still. Wandering the streets of the Northern Quarter he feels someone brush past him and a whisper in his ear,

  “What are you still doing here Lee?”

  And he knows who it is, but when he turns around, the stranger who spoke to him is already walking away. He can’t touch them. He knows what will happen and so there’s no point. Some days, in cafes and shops, he’ll see someone watching him and he’ll know it’s her, and he’ll approach them, and say, “Please Kirst, come home. Mum misses you.”

  It’s all he has left.

  But their blank expressions tell him everything he needs to know, and he apologizes, and pays for his coffee.

  Lee sleeps at his mum’s place, in Kirsty’s room. It’s that or the settee. At night, when he can’t sleep, he walks from the house, away from Salford, toward Manchester. In Manchester, they call Salford the other city, but to him, it’s the other way around. Manchester, a strange, enlarged reflection of the place he grew up. He skirts around the edges of it, as though he’s looking for a door, and he crosses Bridge Street over the Irwell.

  Dawn is coming up, an eggy cream blasting the sky beyond the clouds. It should be cold but he doesn’t feel it. The walk has kept him warm enough. He follows the river as it runs parallel to Deansgate, bordering Manchester like a moat, keeping on it for as long as he can until it shifts direction and runs away, twisting around and flowing toward Bolton and Pendle. Witch country.

  He recalls the lines on the map in the house, and he looks at the way the river flows. Has it always flowed this way?

  And he notices things within it, bobbing on the river, being carried away from the city. At first it’s just bricks, shopping carts, bottles. But then, the detritus grows, and he sees everything there: bicycles, entire streets and houses, crumbled and broken, and being flushed out. Jagged blocks of tarmac rolling in the current, knocking into road signs, and bulldozing over hi-viz jackets which float of the surface of the water. Some building equipment floats past, and Lee notices the hook of a crane sinking slowly into the depths.

  He sees the first person. They are dead, bobbing on the surface the way Nate probably did. Just another reveler, he thinks briefly. More people come next, so many people. Some are dead, drowned and gray and bloated, but some are alive, desperately looking up at him to save them, clawing at the edges of the river, their bloodied fingernails breaking on the brick.

  He watches as they are carried out of Manchester toward witch country. Then he turns, and starts walking into the current, back toward the city, toward her city.

  DANIEL CARPENTER’s fiction has been published by Black Static, Unsung Stories, Unthology, The Lonely Crowd, and more. He is the host of The Paperchain Podcast (currently on hiatus), a monthly podcast asking writers and artists to respond to prompts set by previous guests. He lives in London with his family.

  BOILED BONES AND BLACK EGGS

  NGHI VO

  The sign that sits over the lintel of the Drunken Rooster reads “we have served tea to all the world,” and it is only a slight exaggeration. The inn sits just south of Tsang and just north of Wu. The Sai River, which starts in Pa’i and doesn’t end until it has reached the land of the Engs, flows right by the front door. It is a borderland, on the margin of every country’s map. It is a place where the dead get of hand if they aren’t placated, honored, and fed.

  I own the Drunken Rooster now, but before me came Shang Hua, my aunt by marriage. My father owed her a debt for some very fast talking and two bottles of fermented millet, difficult to come by in that part of the world. When it came to pass that I could see over the edge of the table and somewhat handle a knife without hurting myself, I traveled a full month overland to live with my aunt.

  She let me cry myself out that first night before lifting me up on a sturdy stool and showing me how to cut pork against the grain, with a cap of fat and skin left on top to caramelize in her enormous pot. She lined the pot with onions, letting them cook in a fragrant broth of sugar and fish sauce, and then she directed me to tip in the pork and to splash it over with water.

  “Now what?” I asked, scrubbing at my eyes with the back of my hand. I was still heartbroken at being so far from home, but I was hungry, too.

  She shrugged her round shoulders, the short embroidered cape she wore making them even rounder. She didn’t look like the women I had grown up with. Her face reddened fast in the steam, and the kitchen was always filled with steam. Her eyes were small and often narrowed with distrust. She hadn’t once told me to stand up straight or directed me to practice my handwriting, though, so I was cautiously hopeful that perhaps things would not be so bad.

  “Now it’s just waiting, niece,” Hua said. “Then after we wait, there will be something good to eat.”

  It was quiet at the Drunken Rooster that night, one of those evenings where the world seemed to pause for breath. I could hear the murmur of the Sai in its banks, and the wind whistled a little, coming down from the mountain to say hello.

  In an hour, a little more, Hua whipped the lid off the pot, and the most delicious smell spilled out. Caramelized pork and onions, brown and salty, sweet and glistening with fat. Eaten hot over pure white rice, I thought it was food fit for a princess, but before I reached for the blue bowl that I had brought with me all the way from Chu-hsien, I hesitated.

  “Wh
at about Uncle?” I asked timidly.

  He was my father’s youngest brother. The only thing that I knew about him was that he had run off with a wild woman four years ago who had come through town carrying a pan big enough to fry a small child.

  In response, my aunt scooped out a generous portion of rice, dressed it with some pork and onions, and stuck a pair of chopsticks straight up and down in the bowl.

  “He died two days ago,” she said calmly, setting it on the table.

  I didn’t know what to make of that, wondering if I should be sad for the death of a man who I had never met, but then there was a scraping at the rear of the inn, a noise that echoed through the darkness. I hunched my shoulders in fear, but my aunt only nodded.

  “Ah,” she said, “that should be him now.”

  When the dead come to the back door, their bellies empty and their eyes gazing jealously on the lives that used to be theirs, the food you give them must be the very best. In Tsang, especially in the capital, they don’t consider it a meal unless it’s spicy enough to make your tongue go numb. In Wu, the food is plainer, and Hua said they made it into a virtue, relishing the purest white rice dusted over with a sprinkle of black salt. The people from Pa’i, seafarers, firebreathers, and storytellers come to rest on their shoal of small islands, like their food fatty and plentiful, sweet with plenty of rice wine.

  We couldn’t serve all of them as well as they would have liked, but we did our best. After all, my aunt would say, most people won’t say no to something that starts with a chopped leek and a dead chicken. Living right on the Sai gave us an advantage, both in terms of the food that we could get from the traders and the custom that came in the door. A fair day might see a Pa’i mercenary in for a breakfast of rice porridge, a prosperous Tsang merchant and his family for a lunch of lacquered duck, and a pair of nuns in saffron for a large shared dinner of last winter’s salted pork cooked in apples.

  “I didn’t think that nuns ate meat,” I said, fortunately not so loudly they could hear me. My aunt grabbed me by the arm and dragged me back to the kitchen where she glared at me, her eyes small with anger.