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

by Paula Guran

  We are here behind squares of drywall, wrapped in plastic, sealed with caulk. Night makes us restless. Night reminds of how dark this place can get, how much it can hurt here.

  All sixteen of us wear the maroon scarf we were strangled with. After all this is over, they will uncover us and they will dream about the scarf, a shade too dark to be blood but violent all the same. What’s with the scarves? They ask, and we could tell them but no one listens to dead girls. We didn’t matter that much when we were alive.

  * * *

  There was a red scarf in his past. Of course there was.

  His mother wore the scarf around her neck until she got all boozed up. She would rub it across her face, smearing her lipstick. She was lonely and sad and she didn’t pay him any attention until the drink allowed blackness to fall over her mind. Then, she made him crawl in her bed and drew the scarf over his body, flicking his privates, laughing at his smallness.

  She should grieve this but she doesn’t. To be fair, she doesn’t remember all of it, but there are fragments of her wrongs embedded deep in her soul. She turns and twists restless in her own grave. She knows there is something to atone for but she is too frightened to search for it. This is the nature of alcoholic parents. They cannot face their cruelty. They do not want to see the scars.

  Sixteen skeletons, thirty-two femurs. One of Eleven’s legs will be crushed by the collapse of a weight bearing wall. She knows it will happen but she doesn’t care. I cannot understand that. I am still angry. I am still a whole person, even if I am a skeleton. I turn in my plastic prison, my teeth stripped of gums grinding at the thought of such an insult, being turned into dust.

  You put a picture of Jane on the wall. You still love her. Jane is beautiful and her hair is the color of sunshine. We drink in the warmth of it, gulp it like the poison we swallowed to get here.

  The poison was different for each of us. Rohypnol, heroin, alcohol, whatever he had, whatever it took. Were there girls that didn’t take it? I don’t know. Even ghosts cannot travel through all of the places and all of the people.

  Sometimes I start thinking about that, if I’d never taken that drink. Regret has teeth. It can cut you up into pieces and leave you gasping at the unfairness of it all. Maybe you know about that, though I find it hard to believe.

  * * *

  You know me, I whisper in your ear, so like a sea conch. My words turn into waves crashing out into the world. You wake, as your kind tend to do, startled and afraid. We like that, most of us. I like it. I can taste the fear coming off you and it satiates my fury.

  I don’t know why I am so angry. Times doesn’t heal all wounds. My rage did not dull with the years. I fought so hard, but he was so much stronger. I want to hurt someone, so they know exactly what happened to me. I want to be the one doing the hurting, to be so powerful no one ever hurts me again.

  He tries to dream of us, that old man with the cane and the scar above his left eyebrow. The one he says happened when a hammer fell off a high shelf in the garage.

  That was me. That was the heel of my shoe.

  When he tries to dream of us, we feel it plucking at the air around our wall space. We lie still and quiet and we picture the scarf.

  He wakes up screaming.

  One day he will twist his sheet into a noose. When he drops his weight into it, everything turns red. But not today. We’re not ready yet. We have a lot to show him first.

  You keep waking up at night. You can hear things moving but no one’s there. Sometimes there is the faintest sound of screaming. You start leaving the TV on to drown it out, but we change the channels.

  Shadows appear in the hollows beneath your eyes. We have been erased, yet we still leave a mark.

  The old woman in her coffin, we visit her too. She made him, and he made us.

  I wasn’t a bad girl. I didn’t deserve what happened to me. I cried my first year here. I asked myself over and over, what did I do wrong?

  I took a drink at a party.

  I asked God, too, but he never answered me.

  There were girls like me that lived here after him. Girls with long hair and straight teeth who laughed. Who slammed their doors and talked about boys and tacked pictures on their dressers. Girls who had futures as bright as Jane’s smile beaming from the picture you hung.

  Right in front of me, all the time, all the things I could never be.

  “Why?”

  We asked each other that so many times. We guessed. We thought about it. We went into him to see for ourselves. Eleven and Three and Five, they must have hearts not as withered and shriveled as mine. They could still feel sorry for him. Knowing what happened to him just gave me another person to hate. It never made me feel sorry for him at all.

  She lies restless in her coffin and we knock on the lid. We whisper terrible things to her. We haunt her worse than we haunt you. There will be no peace for her, until there is peace for us.

  Maybe she had her own horror story. But I cannot find it in my soul to care.

  Your ex-wife, the luminous Jane, visits. You have an ex-wife that still cares about you and I am a skeleton wrapped in a tarp. How is that fair? You are a person and I was a person and I died and no one cared and you mope your life away and everyone cares.

  Jane tells you Connie is worried about you. You look tired, she says. She wears her concern like a scarf, bright against her skin.

  I can’t sleep, you tell her. There’s something here with me.

  Jane asks if you’ve thought more about seeing someone. About your father. How you love and hate him. I see the marks he left on you. Sure, I get it, he didn’t hit you, but he said things to you. He made you feel like nothing and opened wounds that never healed. We all carry scars with us, from this place to the next.

  We don’t have names anymore. We are the sixteen. I am Twelve. Three thinks you’re handsome. Five says we should leave you alone. But the rest of us, you make our teeth set together. We see you, the movies you watch on your laptop, browser set to private. We see what you want to do.

  If I could free my fingers, I would gouge your eyes out.

  * * *

  Time passes funny here.

  I have a list of all the things I’ve never done.

  I’ve never kissed another girl. (I would have liked to.)

  I’ve never made love. (I have had sex. Forcible, awful, soul murdering sex.)

  I’ve never gone to college.

  I was never a senior.

  I never drove.

  I never met my father.

  I never fell in love.

  I never went to a concert.

  I never left the great Sunflower State of Kansas, even.

  It’s a pretty long list.

  We fourteen (minus Three and Five) talk about what we will do when we break free. I want us to ring your bed so you wake up staring up at a circle of dead girls. I want to smell the urine you let loose. I want to lean down and suck your scream out. The things my dead heart wants sets me trembling. It makes my bones chatter against each other and you sit up in bed. I scream as I remain a statue and then—the fury in me becomes a raging hot thing in my chest. It crawls up the scythe ladder of ribs and leaps atop the humerus, slides down the bone slide and into my first finger on my right hand. My finger jerks. It cuts a hole in the plastic. It jabs at the drywall. The heat pulses through it. There is a small, star-burst scorch pattern burnt through the wallpaper.

  Connie sees the mark two days later.

  What’s this—she says . . .

  She touches her fingers to the small, tiny hole. The wetness of our tears sticks. When she lifts her hand, the wallpaper peels away. We wait and we plead, FIND US.

  Oh GOD, what is that smell? She puts her hand over her mouth.

  You come to see. It overpowers you both. The stench of decay assaults you, dead girls rotting in plastic coffins. You lean down and peer into the hole. My finger, dirty white porous bone, points at you.

  Oh, God, you say. Oh, God.

&n
bsp; God has nothing to do with this place.

  You get a crowbar. You find the seams in the drywall. You pry a square out.

  You know what I am when you see me. My teeth gleam through the plastic.

  I think it’s a body, you whisper.

  The end is coming fast. I knew it, I saw it, but now it is here. Connie is screaming into the phone. You’re just standing there, with tears in your eyes, like I matter now. I’m sorry, I think you say, but you are hard to see. You are turning transparent, blurring around the edges. Now time is moving too fast, the last of the sand through the hourglass.

  I can feel myself becoming light as air. When I push my ghost fingers against the plastic, they pass right through. People are here, but they are vague shapes and their voices are muted and distorted. Don’t, I try to scream, but nothing comes out. Don’t do this to me!

  I don’t want to leave! I’m not ready! I never got to do anything! All I did was die! Don’t I get ANYTHING?

  L’ERIN OGLE is a mother, nurse, fitness instructor, and author living in Lawrence, Kansas. Her stories have been published by Syntax & Salt, Daily Science Fiction, Metaphorosis, and PseudoPod.

  BLOOD IS ANOTHER WORD FOR HUNGER

  RIVERS SOLOMON

  In a wooden house on a modest farmstead by a dense wood near a roving river to the west of town, miles from the wide road and far away from the peculiar madness that is men at war, lived the Missus, the Missus’s grown daughters Adelaide and Catherine, the Missus’s sister Bitsy, the Missus’s poorly mother Anna, and the Missus’s fifteen-year-old slave girl Sully, who had a heart made of teeth—for as soon as she heard word that Albert, the Missus’s husband, had been slain in battle, she took up arms against the family who’d raised her, slipping a tincture of valerian root and skullcap into their cups of warmed milk before slitting their throats in the night.

  The etherworld, always one eye steady on the realm of humankind, took note. Disturbances in the order of things could be exploited, could cut paths between dominions. The murder of a family by a girl so tender and young ripped a devilishly wide tunnel between the fields of existence, for it was not the way of things, and the etherworld thrived on the impermissible.

  Sully’s breaths blurred together into a whispery, chafed hum as she stood over the bodies. Blood marked her clothes, hair, and skin. She tasted it in her mouth, where it had shot in a stream from Bitsy’s artery. Her tongue, too, was coated, but Sully wouldn’t swallow. She couldn’t bear to have that hateful woman all up inside her body, slick and salty and merging with her own blood. Saliva gathered in her mouth till she had no choice but to spit on a patch of rug in the second bedroom, where Bitsy and the Missus’s daughter slept.

  She stumbled downstairs and out to the barn and grabbed the bar of soap from the metal tin that held all her possessions. Determined, she slaked it over her tongue before biting off a morsel and swallowing it, just in case a smidge of Bitsy had made its way into her and needed eradicating.

  Sully’s whistley, syncopated pants could’ve been the dying wheezes of a sick coyote or the first breaths of a colt, the battlesong of a screech owl, a storm wind. Sully closed her eyes. In the darkness and quiet of the barn, she could hear every night sound as loud as a woman hollering a field song. The music of it entered her, and she succumbed. When next Sully opened her eyes, she could breathe properly again. A few moments after that, she felt steady enough to return to the house.

  Sully gathered the blood-laden sheets from inside and carried them to the property’s stream, where the rush of water rinsed away the stains. She knew well how to untangle blood from cotton, having regularly scrubbed clean the Missus’s, the Missus’s daughter’s, and the Missus’s sister’s menses-soiled undergarments.

  When her fingers turned still from the mix of cool water and the brisk night wind, she carried the sheets to the tree and hung them over the naked branches. The beige linens blew back and forth in the wind, possessed. Sully went inside to warm her hands over the woodstove then carried the bodies of her slavers one by one over her shoulder outside. She dug a single grave for hours and hours and hours into the night, into the next day, and into that night, too, never sleeping, and filled the wound she’d made in the earth with Missus, Adelaide, Catherine, Bitsy, and Anna, and covered them with soil.

  Her heart should’ve ached for these women—they’d raised her from age six—but it did not. She was still seething, madder, in fact, than she’d been before the kill because her final act of rebellion had not brought the relief she’d imagined it would. These ladies who’d loomed Goliath in her life, who’d unleashed every ugliness they could think of on Sully, were corn husks now, souls hollowed out. Irrelevant. How could that be? How could folks so immense become nothing in the space of time it took a blade to swipe six inches?

  It was Sully’s unsoftened anger in the face of what she’d done that cut a path between dominions. The etherworld spat out a teenage girl, full grown, called Ziza into Sully’s womb. Ziza had spent the last two hundred years skulking in the land of the dead, but she rode the fury of Sully’s murders like a river current back to the world of flesh. Ziza felt it all, wind and sky and the breath of wolves against her skin. She spun through the ages looking for the present, time now foreign to her after being in a world where everything was both eternal and nonexistent.

  “Yes, yes, yes!” Ziza called as she descended from the spirit realm down a tunnel made of life. Breathing things, screaming things, hot, sweaty, pulsing, moving, scampering, wild, toothy, bloody, slimy, rich, salty things. Tree branches brushed her skin. Sensation overwhelmed her as she landed with a soft, plump thud into the belly of her new god. Ziza took in the darkness, swum in it. It was nothing like the violent nothingness of her home for the past two centuries. For here she could smell, taste, feel. She could hear the cries of the girl carrying her, loud and unrelenting.

  Sully had never been with child before, and she didn’t understand the pain that overtook her so sudden as she shoveled the last gallon of dirt over the graves of her masters. Spasms in her abdomen convinced her she was dying.

  As she fell backwards to the ground, her belly turned giant and bulbous. She stared up at the crescent moon and spat at it for the way it mocked her with its half-smile. Sully hated that grinning white ghoul, and with all the spite at the fates she could muster, she howled and she howled and she howled at it. She howled until she became part wolf, a lush coat of gray fur spiking from her shoulder blades and spine. It was magic from the dead land that Ziza brought with her, where there was no border separating woman from beast.

  Hearing the pained wailing, Ziza made herself as small as possible as she felt herself being birthed, not wishing to damage her host. With her last ounce of etherworld magic, she shrunk herself down to the size of a large baby for the time it would take to come out.

  “Help,” moaned Sully, but she’d killed anyone who might be able to offer intervention. “Help me!” Sully’s womb contracted, and overwhelmed with the urge to push, she squeezed until that baby who was not a baby came out of her.

  Sully’s mouth hung agape as she watched the birthed-thing crawl from the cradle of her thighs then grow bigger, bigger, and bigger until it was full grown. It was a girl Sully’s age, and though she was not quite smiling, she was—Sully struggled to put a name to the stranger’s expression—impressed with the situation. “Lordy,” said Sully, but she was in too much pain to worry over this oddity. The skin betwixt her legs had suffered from the delivery, now inflamed. Her vulva felt like a broken bone.

  She tried to stand but was too weak, and the freshly bornt teenager offered a hand. Sully took it but shoved it away once she was up, then limped along to the kitchen where she fixed herself a poultice of mashed bread and soured milk. The smell of it turned her stomach and she vomited on the table before collapsing over a chair. Was this how it would end, in this dank kitchen, on this dank farmstead?

  Sully felt a hand on her back. “Ma’am?” the fresh-bornt teenager said. “M
y name’s Ziza. I’m going to take care of you,” she said. She had a small, squeaky voice that reminded Sully of a mouse. “Don’t you worry,” she said.

  Ziza pressed the bread-and-milk poultice to Sully’s vulva, fastening the mixture to her body with strips of cotton. She mashed herbs into a thick, leafy tea. “Drink this, girl,” she said, smiling with a joyful warmth that did not match the bloodiness of these hectic circumstances. “It’ll help along with the poultice.”

  Sully’s nose curled up at the scent of it. “You just raised me up from the dead, and now you’re telling me you can’t swallow a little of my brew?” asked Ziza.

  Lulled by Ziza’s gentle, chiding way, Sully obeyed—her first time ever to do so not under the threat of violence. “Shhh, now. Sleep,” said Ziza. She began to hum, but it wasn’t a lullaby sort of song. Too lively.

  “I’m not tired,” Sully insisted, but she couldn’t breathe through the pain between her legs and her words came out as a series of gasps. “Am I dying?”

  “You’re passing out,” said Ziza, stroking Sully’s face.

  “You an angel or something?” asked Sully.

  “Oh, I think you might be the angel. An avenging angel,” said Ziza. Sully hadn’t spoken to a soul besides her masters in years. She hated how heavy her eyelids felt, how much of a strain it was to keep them wide open. The limits of her body were robbing her of this moment, this bewildering, strange moment.

  “Sleep,” said Ziza. And then one more time, “Sleep.”

  For once it was a blessing for Sully to do as she was told.

  Two days later, Sully stirred awake. The pain had gone, and someone had carried her to Missus’s bed, which was made up with the linens Sully had washed.

  “Ziza,” she called out, remembering her savior’s name. It slipped prettily off her tongue and teeth. “Ziza? You there?” Distantly she heard singing, but it was so faint she wondered if she was hallucinating it. She swung her legs over to the floor and stood, her bones and muscles creaking stubbornly. “Ziza!”