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

by Paula Guran

  Zanna sat at her writing table. She heard the crawlspace door creak, then the shudder of the fridge when the main power cut off. She went to the kitchen and rummaged through the knife drawer until she found one that looked sharper than the others, then returned with it to her workspace, not for any reason she could fully express, even to herself.

  She looked out the window, the up-mountain window, with its Prismacolor trees. She pulled West Virginia Wildlife from her research crate, its cheesy seventies cover portraying a cougar, a bear, a coyote, a buck, and something that might have been an otter in the same riverside tableaux, and opened to the reptile chapter.

  “Aha!” came from under the floorboards. A minute later, the lamp came back on, and the fridge gurgled. “Did that work?”

  “Yeah,” Zanna called down.

  Shar returned a moment later, running a hand through her hair for invisible cobwebs. “Maybe stick to coffee or microwave tomorrow. Do you want me to make you lunch?”

  “Nah, I want to get some writing done first. Only . . .”

  “Only what?”

  “Only there are four skinks and two lizards native to this area, and none of their tracks match the tracks I saw.”

  Shar looked over at Zanna’s reading material. “Maybe they’ve discovered another since 1975.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Any other mysteries I can solve so you can get back to writing yours?”

  Zanna hesitated. She wasn’t sure if she really wanted the answer to this one. “You—you mentioned the guy’s tattoo.”

  “Uh huh?”

  “When did you see it? You got out of the car, came straight over to me with coffee. You couldn’t ever have seen more than his foot from where we were.”

  “The day before, when we stopped for the keys.”

  “He was wearing a zipped jacket when he opened the door.”

  Shar crossed the room and settled on the couch. “So, what? You think I’m a suspect? Or your lizard is?”

  “I have no idea what to think. These are things I noticed. They don’t make sense.”

  “That’s the problem with real life. It’s too messy for fiction. Too weird. All those mysteries solved by a single hair found in a drain in fiction, or a single tire track. You’d go out of your mind trying to solve a real mystery. Not that there’s a mystery here. Just drop it. Unless there’s something else?”

  “You never asked,” whispered Zanna.

  “What did you say?”

  “You never asked where the body was. You came and sat next to me. It would have made sense for you to assume the body was inside the house, but you never asked and you nodded in his direction even though he wasn’t visible from that side.”

  “You must’ve said it on the phone.”

  “I didn’t. I know I didn’t. You had to have been there earlier, seen the body or something. What the fuck, Shar?”

  They stared at each other. How long had Shar been her assistant now? She couldn’t even remember, which was weird in itself, actually. “Maybe I should take a walk down the mountain again. I’ll bet those cops are still there. I can tell them what I’ve found . . .”

  “A lizard that doesn’t exist?”

  “An assistant who is lying to me.” Zanna stood. She held the kitchen knife by her side, not knowing what to do with it.

  “What if I told you that you really, truly, don’t want to know the answers to your questions? That I’ve taken care of everything you’ve needed for twenty-two years, and I think I’ve earned the right to ask you to trust me.”

  Twenty-two years. Zanna chewed on her lip, thinking. “I’d say I trust you if you flat-out say you didn’t murder him, but either way, you know what happened, and you’re lying to me. You’ve earned the right to ask me to trust you, but I don’t know if I can when I can see you’re not being completely honest.”

  Shar lay back on the couch and put the pillow over her head. “Just once, in all these years, I’d like you to say ‘I trust you completely.’”

  “What are you talking about? I’ve always trusted you. You know my bank accounts, you have my credit card, you . . .”

  The pillow lifted. “You say that every time too, but when it comes to it, if I say ‘don’t poke at the body’ you always do. And can we skip the knife thing? You aren’t going to use it.”

  Zanna looked down. The knife looked oddly familiar in her hand, like she had written this scene. She had a thousand questions and didn’t even know which one to ask.

  She tried to keep the panic out of her voice. “How are ‘always’ and ‘don’t poke at the body’ in the same sentence? When has this ever happened before?”

  Shar propped herself on her elbow. “Tell me about writing your last book.”

  “The Mosquitoland Murders? We flew into Minneapolis and rented an old house in the woods a few hours away.”

  “The actual writing. Do you remember anything of the time we spent there?”

  Zanna considered, then shook her head. “No. I never remember the big drafting binges. It’s a shame. We pick these beautiful places, and then it all passes by in a blur.”

  “Okay. How about your first book? Do you remember your first book?”

  “Of course. Campsite 49.”

  “Not the first book you sold—the first book you wrote.”

  “It was horror, I guess. Dark fantasy, something like that. The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye. There was a creature.”

  “Do you remember anything else?”

  “God, I was only a teen. The creature laid eggs in people.”

  “And why did it get rejected?”

  “They said it didn’t ring true as fiction. Too messy and weird. Derivative. I never figured out how to fix it, and then I wrote Campsite 49, and now I’m a mystery writer instead of a horror writer. What are all these questions?”

  “One more: what did you eat for dinner last night?”

  “I ate—um . . . I don’t know. I guess I was caught up in writing, but I’m pretty sure I ate something.”

  “Salad. You had a salad. How far did you get on the book yesterday?”

  That seemed to Zanna like something she should remember, but she didn’t. “Fine. Shar, what’s the point of all this?”

  “I’m going to tell you something, and you’re not going to believe me.”

  “I thought we did that already at the start of this conversation.”

  “We did, but this is something else.” Shar paused, sighed. “There’s this . . . thing. Like in The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye, okay?”

  “A thing?”

  “A creature. Let’s say those prints you found belong to something, only it isn’t in your book because it isn’t native to this area. It hitches a ride.”

  “Hitches a ride?”

  “Yeah. Can you stop repeating me for a sec? You’ll get it, I promise. So there’s this thing, and like you said, it lays eggs. It does it while the person is asleep, and then the eggs incubate, and the first one that hatches eats the other eggs.”

  “And then it eats through the person and runs away into the world. I know. I wrote this book, remember?”

  “No! You wrote it wrong. It doesn’t eat through the person. It hides in their body, dormant, until it has to lay its own eggs.”

  “How could I write my own book wrong?”

  “I don’t know. You forgot. You always forget.”

  “I still don’t get what you want me to do with this story. I don’t write horror anymore. Why don’t you write it?”

  “It’s not a story, Zanna. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Did you wake up with a sore throat this morning? Your lungs sore, though you don’t remember coughing?”

  Zanna shrugged. It had only been a few hours, but it felt like ages ago.

  “I hate when you make me do this the hard way,” Shar muttered. “You always make me do it the hard way.”

  She reached into her bag and pulled out a baggie of brown powder. “Here, put a pinch of this on your to
ngue.”

  Zanna turned her head away.

  “Come on, smell it. It’s cumin.”

  “I hate cumin.”

  “You two have that in common. Come on, I need you to do this. A small pinch.”

  Zanna didn’t see a way out of it, since she was stuck in a room with someone whose reasonable tone belied the deeply weird things she was saying. She swallowed a pinch of cumin, then coughed. A second later, the coughing grew deeper, like the powder had gotten into her lungs. Then something stranger, like claws inside her chest. She gagged, and heaved something up. It helped itself along the way, tearing at her teeth and gums even as she opened her mouth.

  The thing that skittered out of her was not a lizard or a skink. It had too many legs, and the middle track hadn’t been a tail, it was a long face with a proboscis that touched the ground and it had no eyes and too much skin, slimy, black, loose, and it was so fast, just a blur. It skittered under the couch, and Zanna remembered the sound from the middle of the night. Her mind started to lose both that memory and the memory of what the thing looked like even as it disappeared from her view.

  “What. The. Fuck.” The words hurt.

  “You never believe me until I show you.”

  She held the knife out to Shar. “Kill it!”

  Shar waved her off. “Oh, trust me, we’ve both tried. Burning, shooting, stabbing, drowning. It has a very strong will to live.”

  “What was it doing inside me?”

  “It lives there. You’re its host. I don’t think it actually does you any harm.”

  Zanna ran her tongue around her sore mouth, and Shar amended, “Well, it doesn’t normally do you any harm. I think it anesthetizes you when it’s not in a hurry. When you don’t swallow a mouthful of cumin.”

  “Anesthetizes?”

  “Yeah, so you relax, and you don’t remember it leaving or coming back. You never remember these trips at all. When you read your drafts back home you always say ‘I must have been in the zone. I don’t remember writing any of this.’”

  Zanna nodded. She knew she had to ask the hard question, too. “So what’s your part in this?”

  “I do what I’ve always done, since we were kids and we got stuck in the crawlspace under my dad’s house and it chose you. It got way easier when I convinced you to hire me. Find someplace remote for you to write a couple of times a year when you start showing signs. Powder myself with cumin. Try to make the closest person someone who won’t be too missed if something goes wrong, like this time. Try to keep you away from the body, which is sometimes easy and sometimes a disaster, like today.”

  Zanna again had more questions than she could possibly voice. It was true, she did have lapses, but only when she was writing. Her process had always been weird like that, and two books a year had never felt difficult. She remembered everything in between books, or at least she thought she did. She again fixated on Shar’s language instead of the harder questions. “What do you mean by ‘if something goes wrong’?”

  “That same secretion . . . they’re dozy when I get to them. I can usually scrape the eggs out of their mouths, and they never even know anything happened. Only, sometimes, something goes wrong. It gives some of them nightmares, or maybe they see it, I don’t know, and they fall down the stairs, or they attack it, or they attack someone else, or like this guy, they run out of the house and hit their head, and I still have to scrape the eggs out so the medical examiner doesn’t find anything.”

  “Why don’t you just let them discover the eggs? Or tell someone—a doctor, a biologist?”

  Shar looked horrified. “They’d never let you go. They’d have to lock you up to keep it from getting to anyone, and they’d figure out the same thing I have about it surviving everything we try to do to it. You’ve got contracts. Books to write. Or they’d keep me for having covered it up, and you wouldn’t have me to protect you anymore.”

  That all made a certain amount of sense, even if it was horrible. Shar could be wrong, of course, but she was usually right. “How often does it go wrong?”

  “Maybe one in five? They never connect you. Or me.”

  “But that’s why we never go back to the same place twice?”

  “Yeah. Somebody would get suspicious sooner or later. But—you believe me now?”

  “Yes, I believe you. Are you sure you shouldn’t kill me?”

  Shar looked horrified. “I wouldn’t!”

  “But you’ve let all those other people die. One in five?”

  “The eggs have never once survived. The one in you is the only one, as far as I know. Well, and whichever one laid an egg in you to begin with; I guess there must be others. I didn’t mean to let anyone die, but it’s better than the alternative.”

  “The alternative?”

  “Letting any of the eggs live, or letting you kill yourself. You’ve suggested that a few times, but what if it survived? How would I find it again to try to keep people safe? You can’t do it.”

  The thought had crossed Zanna’s mind. “Then what happens now? I’m not going to let that thing claw its way back down my throat.”

  “You will. You’ll fall asleep tonight and it’ll find its way back. It always does. Then you’ll wake up in the morning, and you won’t remember any of this, and you’ll draft your book, and we’ll go back to the city, and you’ll read your draft and tell me you must’ve been in the zone, and then when you come up with your next book, the plot’ll hinge on a guy who ran out of his house with no shoes, and you’ll research it and I’ll find someplace remote for you to write it. Rinse and repeat.”

  They were both silent a moment.

  Zanna had a question she didn’t want to ask, but asked anyway. “Does it help me somehow? Is this a deal like I can’t write without it? That it helps my creativity?”

  “Not as far as I know,” Shar said. “It might inspire some of your plots—okay, most of them—but I can’t see any reason for the rest. Your work ethic and prose are all yours, I’m sure.”

  “That’s something at least,” Zanna said. “That would be one ugly muse.”

  They were silent again. After a minute, Zanna spoke again, the only thing left to say. “Fuck.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shar?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You really are the best assistant. You deserve a raise.”

  “You say that every time, too.”

  “What if I write it down? ‘Note to self: give Shar a raise’?”

  Shar cocked her head. “Y’know, I don’t think you’ve ever done that before. It’s worth a shot, if you mean it.”

  “I really and sincerely mean it.” Zanna opened her computer and created a reminder for herself. A reminder that would chime at her in one month’s time, and which she’d open and look at in total surprise and have no memory of writing. Then she’d nod in agreement, even if she couldn’t remember what exactly had prompted her to set the alert (or why the second line said “believe her”) and she’d make it happen, because she would hate to lose an assistant as good as Shar.

  SARAH PINSKER’s fiction has won the Nebula and Sturgeon Awards, and she has been a finalist for the Hugo and other awards. Her stories have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, and Chinese, among other languages. Her first collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea (Small Beer Press) and her first novel, A Song for a New Day (Berkley), were both published in 2019. She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums and another forthcoming. She lives in Baltimore with her wife and dog.

  THE COVEN OF DEAD GIRLS

  L’ERIN OGLE

  The key turns in the lock and you step inside. Until you, we have been adrift in waiting, silence heavy in our bones. Time passes slowly inside these walls, dressed in our plastic coffins. Your sister follows you inside and looks around.

  “This isn’t a good place,” she says.

  She’s right, but you’ll chalk it up to the way Connie’s always existed partially in the real world, and part in a
nother place where everything is gauzy and insubstantial. You don’t even hear her, but it would have served you better if you had.

  Hindsight can be a real bitch sometimes.

  You carry in boxes, your entire life divided into cardboard squares, labeled in block letters, marked by a black Sharpie. KITCHEN. LIVING ROOM. WINTER CLOTHES.

  There is a box that says PERSONAL.

  Everyone’s got a box of memories they lug around. We’ve seen this before. People come and people go. No one stays here very long.

  You peel the sticky tape away. The duct tape peels up (of course it’s duct tape—we are familiar with that, all of us) and it makes a sick screeching sound that echoes through the spaces between us. We hold our breath and peer over your shoulder. What kind of man are you, anyway?

  There are photographs and love letters and even a couple pictures of a naked woman named Jane. Her name is scrawled on the letters, printed on the marriage certificate, and the divorce decree.

  You unpack and put your things among us and you don’t notice the walls moving when we sigh. Over the years we have cried so many tears that the yellow flowered wallpaper has begun to detach from the drywall. Tears of regret, of rage, of blood. If you were to peel back the faded yellow sheets, our wet copper scent would fill the air. But you don’t. You would blame it on faulty wiring anyway.

  You are not a person of abstracts. You believe in absolutes.

  You brother’s realtor found this place dirt cheap. He didn’t mention the people from before, the ones who left with dark circles under their eyes, or the man who lived here when we moved in. That man went on to his own future, maybe as bleak as ours. He props himself up on a cane and trawls the urine scented halls of his retirement home. The taste for blood is still blade sharp inside him, but his hands, his body are too soft and weak to sate it.

  When Connie visits, she stares at the walls, but we do not move. Our business is not with her. Our business is with you. If you were to ask why, we would not have an answer. We have been here a long time. We don’t have anything else to do.

  At night you hear things. Creaking, moaning floorboards, a disturbance in the air. You blame it on the house settling, as if houses like this ever really settle. As if they could.