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

by Paula Guran

  The air in the inn lightened immensely. I felt as if I could truly take a breath for the first time in months. The dining room was empty, but soon it would be full again, with living and dead who only wanted a bit of something to eat before they passed through.

  My aunt made a brief noise of satisfaction, a tick of her tongue behind her teeth, and started to gather up the dishes.

  “Well, come on,” she said lightly. “There’s dishes to do.”

  NGHI VO lives on the shores of Lake Michigan and her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Uncanny, PodCastle, and Lightspeed. Her short story “Neither Witch nor Fairy” appears on the 2014 Tiptree Award Honor List. She believes in the ritual of lipstick, the power of stories, and the right to change your mind.

  HIS HEART IS THE HAUNTED HOUSE

  AIMEE OGDEN

  The monster hunter has lived too long.

  Karyn sits silently in the passenger seat of his old GMC truck while he pops two Vicodin and downs them with a swig of PBR. He grunts in frustration when the lever on the side of his seat refuses to give, and the busted-up mechanism grinds out a reply in kind before shifting to recline. Karyn wonders sometimes which will give out first: the man, or his truck? She hopes it’s the man, but if the truck goes that shock might be enough to do him in. And then she can go, too.

  Karyn has been dead for too long.

  The hunter pulls his cap down over his eyes and coughs, settling into what he seems to think is a restful position. The second his breathing slows, Tish mists head-and-shoulders up out of the dashboard. She squints at Karyn, who shrugs. It’s Tish’s turn tonight; she’s not going to butt in line.

  Satisfied, Tish sinks into the hunter’s chest. He winces but doesn’t stir. In dreams, he can almost hear them. In dreams, they’re almost real. The reverberations of Tish’s rage roll off the hunter’s shoulders, rocking Karyn all the way over on the passenger side. He took Tish away from her home—took Tish and won’t let her go. Won’t let any of them go. They remind him, night by night, what he’s done, what he’s stolen. Karyn’s not sure if he hears, but hammering at the inside of his skull is better than giving up and letting him tow her around like a kite.

  Sometimes Karyn likes to linger and absorb the others’ rage—that can be enough to rekindle her own when it gutters. But tonight she slides away, putting space between herself and the blunted knife of someone else’s pain.

  There’s a fist-sized rock on the ground beside the front tire. It would fit perfectly into the GMC’s tailpipe. Karyn and her sister Rena once crammed a potato into the muffler of Rena’s douchebag ex’s Grand Am with satisfying results; a rock won’t fit quite as snugly but it would at least fit. Would. Karyn stoops, swipes at it a few times. The rock doesn’t budge; her fingers pass clean through. A few wisps of silvery mist swirl off and unravel into nothingness.

  There are two kinds of ghosts: their own, and someone else’s. The ghosts who choose to stay behind, those are the ones who get to break the windows and slam the doors and push the unsuspecting hunters down flights of stairs.

  And then there are the ones who get towed helplessly in the wake of someone else who won’t let them go. The ones who don’t get to do, who only get to be carried around. The ones used to abrade the old scars of someone else’s guilt and shame.

  Karyn is the wrong kind of ghost.

  The others are close by. Tish still stalks the hallways of sleep in the hunter’s head, looking for his face in the mirrors, trying to make him see hers.

  María-Belén sits on top of the truck, picking at non-existent cuticles. “Nice night,” she says and Karyn scoffs.

  Meanwhile, Easterday is a pale white smear against the darkness, tugging at the short tether of her afterlife. Easterday is new, scarcely more than a kid. It’s not fair, and Easterday knows it. She still strains at the boundaries death has imposed on her. Karyn doesn’t try to leave the hunter anymore; she’s his now, for whatever time they have left together.

  She grabs once more for the rock. It stays where it is, and so does she.

  * * *

  They’ve been on the road for two days straight, making aimless circles across the American Midwest. Aimless squares, really, interlocking and of all different sizes, around tall waving cornfields and short squatty grids of soybeans. In the mornings, the hunter sits in one of a thousand identical diners and peruses the newspapers. Karyn strokes the toothed edge of an ancient butter knife while he nurses a cup of gritty coffee. The butter cools into hard clots on his toast.

  Over by the windows, Dawb perches on a high stool with her knees drawn up. Mrs. Thelma Owens drifts back and forth behind the grill, occasionally criticizing the line cook’s technique with the eggs. “Sloppy,” she mutters, as he breaks another yolk, and her deep-south accent wrings several extra syllables out of the word.

  Jaspreet reads over the hunter’s shoulder and groans each time he turns the page too soon. She slides into him, tries to force her hand into his and hold the newsprint flat. No luck. He shakes his hand out, once, but keeps browsing without lingering.

  Out in the parking lot, by daylight, Easterday is a mere trick of the eyes, an illusion. Blink, and she’s gone.

  There’s a lead in Kansas: could be werewolves; the hunter circles one tidbit in the paper’s police blotter. The ghosts sigh. None of them died anywhere near there; little hope of a chance encounter with a lost teacher, classmate, loved one, friend.

  They drive hard all day. Karyn and María-Belén swap barbs on whether this is the time the hunter bites it. “Werewolf” is Karyn’s pick for the dead pool. Not that anyone will be around to collect if one of them has called it right; hopefully, they’ll be swept along into the trash bin of memory once the hunter breathes his last. But there’s a certain sick satisfaction in the betting.

  María-Belén has put her stock in a heart attack. When the purported werewolf turns out to be nothing more than a feral half-coyote, it looks for a minute as if she and the hunter are both about to cash in. But he leans on the GMC until the scarlet drains from his face and his angry ragged breathing has faded to his usual soft ragged breathing. He slams the car door shut behind him and peels out. The women follow along, unasked and unwilling.

  The coyote carcass stays behind to feed the hungry night. The black-flies are already drawing in when Karyn takes a last look back.

  The hunter drives south the next day, toward a little town some hundred miles south of Wichita; an off-the-beaten-path destination, but a frequent one for him. When he makes his way up the long winding driveway past acres of wheat, his friend is sitting on his ramshackle porch, cleaning the rifle laid out across his lap. He looks up at the GMC’s rattling roar and lifts a hand in greeting. He doesn’t get up. He lost his left leg below the knee to the same poltergeist-addled house that took Easterday.

  The hunter joins him on the porch, sitting on a crate of bottled water, resting his feet on an ancient sun-bleached cooler. Both nurse tin cups of coffee and swap the same catalog of stories: favorite victories, favorite scars. A favorite waitress in a little taqueria off Route 66. The barbacoa tacos in the same joint. Talk winds down around the well-worn spool of the ones we lost. Easterday has the honor of being referred to by name, though the hunter’s friend calls her Angie, like her mother did. Mrs. Thelma Owens is that old black lady, the one we found out behind the church. Dawb gets called out by name too, though the hunter mispronounces it as Dob because he’s only seen it printed in the obituary, never pronounced out loud.

  He carries obituaries around the same way he does the women. They’re stashed in the dashbox, newsprint smeared and bleeding where wet splatters of beer or booze have dried.

  Beans and toast for a late breakfast and the hunters are still savoring every scrap of guilt they can wring out of themselves. Karyn wants to slap the tin cup into the window hard enough to break it. She wants to upend the cooler of fish guts over his head.

  She stares off into wheat rows so straight they might have been combed out by t
he hand of God. When the hunter gets to her death, he calls her that cute redhead. He and his friend roll descriptions of her dogman-gnawed corpse alongside mouthfuls of masticated bread. The splintered bones. The sewer smell of her ruined guts.

  Easterday is out there in the wheat, trying to lose herself in the vast terrible sameness. It won’t work. It never has.

  The hunter’s friend has a tip, a phone call he got yesterday morning but isn’t up for handling himself. West side of Michigan, he says, and electric potential runs up and down the place where Karyn’s spine used to be.

  The hunter leaves the dishes next to a pile of others on the counter. There are ants. He leans over the cooler to shake his friend’s hand before he goes, like he needs distance from something as truly deadly as giving the old man a hug. Karyn is waiting at the truck by the time he swings into the driver’s seat, keys jangling.

  There aren’t any men in the stories the hunters tell. It’s not that they don’t die just as much as anyone else. Karyn’s seen plenty of men die in the hunter’s orbit. Max and José and Kev, other hunters who went down in the line of duty; Clayton and Tim, the two well-meaning young idiots who thought they could learn how to smoke out a demon possession after reading a few articles online; Ángel and Aarón, who died protecting their farm. The hunter doesn’t keep them, doesn’t treasure them to hone the sharp edges of his regrets. He brings them up now and again. But he doesn’t need them.

  Karyn doesn’t want to be the unanswerable void to someone else’s cry of but what else could I have done? She has her own questions she wants answered.

  The hunter yanks the atlas from the floor in the back and tosses it open on the passenger’s seat. He thumbs through to Michigan, gives it a quick onceover. The car turns over on the second try and he cranes his head to back up all the way down the long drive. Karyn perches on the center console and runs her finger over the blue-veined map until she imagines she can feel the familiar names of tiny towns where they’re inked onto the paper.

  They spend the rest of the day on the unlovable stretches of country highways that network Kansas and Missouri and Illinois. The GMC sets to knocking if the hunter spends too long on the freeway. Somewhere past Peoria, he pulls into a rest stop and sets up for the night.

  His dinner comes from the vending machine: two bags of Fritos, a soda, and an Almond Joy for dessert. He adds a little Jack to dilute the last few drops of Coca-Cola, when that’s gone he adds a little more. On unsteady feet, he lurches out of the truck to throw away the empty wrappers and relieve himself one last time. When he comes back, he takes a big canister of Morton’s Iodized Salt from the back seat and pours it in a lopsided circle. He steps over it, climbs back in, and retrieves a sprig of sage from the back seat. This he sets aflame with a lighter from his pocket and tosses it on top of the dashboard to spark and smolder. The car fills with smoke fast and finally he cracks the windows open to cough foul air into fresh. Only when it’s aired out a bit does he crank the chair back into its reclined position and close his eyes.

  Salt and sage won’t keep the dead women out. Neither have antihistamines, sleep aids, or a host of hard liquor. The circle he’s drawn is in the wrong place. His heart is the haunted house, and the ghosts won’t go until it quits beating.

  It isn’t Karyn’s turn tonight but she rises into his head like swamp gas anyway. The other ghosts fall away in the face of her hungry need. They know their destination too. They know how close she is to coming home.

  He knows something is wrong. He must expect it by now, that dark ripple on the surface of his dreams that soon gives way to wounded, weeping women. In here, she’s more real than he is, and she slices through him like an ax through spiderwebs.

  “Listen to me,” she demands, chasing the unraveling thread of his subconscious as it careens between memories of family reunions and football games, cowers behind an old aftershave jingle. “Listen to me!”

  His body rolls up onto one shoulder and the shape of the dream shifts with him. “Why didn’t you save me?” Karyn’s voice echoes from somewhere outside herself. No. That’s not her. The word you is the furthest thing from her mind. She wants her scholarship back, a chance to finish school and come back home and grow the best grapes Greenhill has ever seen and put the town on the tourist map for real and bring the tourist money along with it. She wants to know if her sister ever settled down with either of those two shitheads who’d been stringing her along, if she has kids or a dog or a cute little house north of town that she can walk to the beach from.

  “You could have done more,” Karyn’s voice says, without her mind behind the words, “you could have—”

  No. Karyn wrests control, crumbling the false words into ash. “Listen!” she screams, spreading out into him, forcing herself into every corner.

  For a moment, his fists clench. He lurches, as if to sit up. Karyn startles, and his waking mind crushes her into a corner of itself. She ebbs free as he gags, curses, presses his sleeve to his face. His nose is bleeding. There’s no more sleep for the hunter after that. Karyn sits on the passenger seat the whole night, watching him blink dryly at the scratched ceiling.

  He gets a late start the next day, long after dawn rakes its coals across the sky. But he doesn’t hit the road north. Instead he pulls over at an urgent care clinic. At the reception desk, he reluctantly peels a few bills out of his wallet and goes to sit beside an aquarium with nothing but a ragged-looking pleco to occupy it. It’s an hour of waiting alongside sniffly kids and a teenager with his arm wrapped in a bloody towel. Karyn reads the headlines of every year-old magazine in the racks before a nurse calls for the hunter. After a brusque exchange of health history and a blood pressure reading, the nurse disappears.

  While he waits, the hunter doesn’t leaf through National Geographic or read flu shot factoids from the wall poster. He stares into space, eyes glazed. Karyn counts the wrinkles on his forehead until, for a moment, she thinks his half-lidded gaze has sharpened on her. Then the door opens and a doctor with the faint divots of acne scars on his forehead pops inside.

  He checks the hunter over, then hovers on the border between kindness and condescension as he reassures the hunter that the occasional nosebleed is nothing to worry about, and has he ever considered modifying his diet or implementing an exercise routine? The hunter takes the pamphlets the kid hands him without a word, and shreds them in the parking lot. The confetti swirls in the stiff midday breeze; some of it flies up past Easterday, who is perched atop the two-story clinic as if she’s thinking of jumping. As if she’s thinking that jumping would do anything, change anything, mean anything.

  He gases up at a Kwik Trip and buys a plastic mug of plastic-flavored coffee. Karyn follows him inside and runs her fingers over—through—rows of orange Reese’s cups and golden Twix. They didn’t have peanut butter M&M’s when she was alive. She wonders how they taste, if the candy-peanut butter ratio is more generous than Reese’s Pieces in their stingy little shells. For a moment, as he peruses snacks, she slips back inside the hunter and tries to convince him to buy a pack. She imagines the sugar shell cracking between his teeth, the smooth change of texture inside. He grabs a packet of Twinkies. Disappointed, she cuts free of him and drifts outside.

  María-Belén is watching a wasp crawl in and out of the inch gap of the open window. “Maybe it will sting him while he drives,” she says lovingly.

  “You bet on a heart attack, not a car crash.” Mrs. Thelma Owens is the one with the line on vehicle-related mortality.

  María-Belén shrugs. “A falta de pan, buenas son tortas.”

  The door jingles, and the hunter emerges. He doesn’t head for the GMC but skulks around the side of the building. Karyn follows him to what must be the last payphone in the state. He punches a familiar string of digits: his friend’s phone number. His finger hangs over the 7, the last digit, for the space of a long ragged breath, a cough, and a curse. Then he jerks his hand up and drops the phone into its cradle. Quarters clatter in the coin
return and he turns his back on them.

  Karyn can smell the cold damp of Lake Michigan drawing close, like its own kind of ghost. She recognizes the bump-bump-bump of I-94. The exits before Greenhill fall away one after another.

  “Please,” Karyn whispers, with the rhythm of the road. In the passenger seat, she clenches her fists on her lap and releases them again. “Come on. You remember the place. Pull over.”

  María-Belén leans on—through—the seatback. “It’s too far off the highway, Karyn. He’ll never stop over there. I’m sorry.”

  When she sees the overpass that will carry them past Greenhill, Karyn winces. “Pull over,” she chants. “Pull over. Pull over.”

  The exit lane opens up to the GMC’s right but the tires stay pointed straight ahead. If Karyn’s post-corporeal body could weep, it would. But it does still know how to scream.

  “Pull over!” she cries, and shoves herself sideways into the hunter to yank the steering wheel.

  The truck wobbles. The hunter swears and puts one hand to his chest even as he adjusts course with the other. The hollow hole of Karyn’s chest thunders with his heartbeat. She tries again to jerk the wheel, to force his foot toward the brake pedal. Nothing gives. Maybe it was just a heart palpitation in the first place.

  She drifts to the back of the truck, past Tish and Dawb and Mrs. Thelma Owens and Anamaria and Lucy and Jaspreet and Janine who ride silently in the flatbed. Easterday hangs behind and overhead, refusing the proximity of the truck but unable to stop herself from being towed along in its wake. Tish says something that’s lost to the roar of the road. Karyn shakes her head and looks backward. Greenhill’s too deep into rolling land to see from here but she watches the county road shrink into a dull point and then silent nothingness.

  The moon is full, not that it matters this deep into the woods. The GMC’s high beams blast out from its parking place, and the bright light casts long shadows. The hunter kills the ignition and the meager light dies with it.