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

by Paula Guran

  * * *

  Every Sunday, when the Librarians met at the Needle’s bunker, there was a vote taken on what to do, but the vote always came down on the side of staying secret.

  “There is a long history,” said the Needle. “Of monks and nuns guarding the books instead of joining the war. And yet, the time may come. Is it today? Have we done enough to preserve? Is it time to rise?”

  The hands went up. It was not.

  I visited my parents in the library and put them on the table in front of me, memorizing their contents, filling in their gaps. I read the rest of us, the dead I’d never met and the dead I knew. I read stories about love and about murder, stories about farming and about revolution. I read the library end to end, books from the immigrants who’d come from the south and the ones who’d come across the oceans, books from the people who’d been born here on this ground and died here too.

  I pressed my hands to my parents’ pages and turned them. There was a full-page illustration of a woman warrior with a sword, and I looked at that most often. My mother’s book. My father’s book had a full page of my mother herself, wearing her glasses, working on the bibliography of rage and weaponry for the gone, for the America I’d never encountered, one full of dirt roads and donut shops, unplundered graveyards and grocery stores, skyscrapers and sugarcane. Police cars, pummeling. Immigrants, ICE agents. Hunger and hunger and hunger. Hurt.

  “Holy,” I whispered. “Unholy.”

  In the early mornings, the world was lost in translation, a language the soldiers and the men in power didn’t speak. There was fog, and in the night there was a warming river, and we brought people over it. There were babies born and new stories written, but we stayed the same, hidden in the Library of the Low, keeping knowledge from being burned, while the rest of the world caught fire.

  I got my first tattoo as a copy of something from my mother’s book, a katana down my spine, and my second tattoo from my father’s book, a pen down the center of my chest, the same size as the sword. This was my family tree, quill and blade, ink and metal, the same importance, the same time. The back cover and the front. Who knew what my pages would contain? Who knew which of these things was mightier?

  I didn’t remember the past, and I couldn’t imagine the future. I held off on more tattoos, and though everyone wondered, they didn’t force me. There was no forcing a generation without memory of libraries. We had not memorized paper books. We had not touched trees.

  Read after burning, I thought, and went to my father’s book, and looked at it in the dark, but I couldn’t burn it. It was all I had of him, his book and his bones, the words he’d chosen.

  I held a candle to the page with the hole from his heart, and there was nothing of wonder on it, nothing magic.

  Out there, in the rest of the country, people shouted their slogans and were rendered speechless. We farmed under lights we’d made and hoarded knowledge because there was no way to share it. We kept electricity on Earth. When we died, we were meant to pass the knowledge on our skin forward, not lose it on a battleground.

  When I went to sleep at night, I could smell the towns around ours being burned: smoke full of story, secrets drifting overhead, but we took no action. We had a tiny world of our own, and that world was filled with our rituals and ceremonies, with our history, with our books made of the people we’d loved. We thought, for a time, that it was enough to save ourselves.

  This was not the Needle’s plan.”

  What is anyone’s plan? The idea that the world will remain viable, that there will be no clouds of poison, no blight, no famine, is an optimistic one. The idea that one’s children will survive even birth? Also optimistic. And yet.

  When I was sixteen, one of our books got out into the world, the pages thin and the text intricate, and someone made up a story about it. There was a whisper that we were making books out of babies, converting them into the thinnest paper, tattooing their soft skin and turning it into a history of lies. These weren’t even babies that had been born, the story went, but babies we’d preempted from birth, to turn into pocket bibles of revolution.

  The soldiers charged the Librarians with resisting the arrest of everything. We were, they said, worshipping idols and insisting on sentences. All of the Librarians were taken but the Needle, who was so old by now that they decided she’d die on the road.

  The men insisted that the babies were everywhere, that they’d been born to women in their seventies, and nothing the Needle said could dissuade them. They’d inherited knowledge too and believed it as firmly as we believed ours.

  “Who had a baby?” she shouted at them. “How can you think this is a town full of baby killers, if there’s no one of an age to give birth to them?”

  Our Librarians were put into a wagon, some screaming, some shouting slogans other than the ones allotted us. The Needle and the children of the town were left behind, all of us hidden for our entire lives.

  “It’s time to change the color of the ink,” the Needle said, when they were gone. “Sometimes bloodstains are the only writing you get to leave behind. Many of my people left nothing but red.” She looked at me, her eyes narrowed. “We’ll leave more than bloodstains. We’ll leave char.”

  The Needle took us back down into her bunker, hobbling on the stairs.

  “What are you willing to die for, Enry?” the Needle asked me. “You don’t always get to choose, but this time, you do. You, boy, you’re the one I’m talking to.”

  I didn’t know.

  “Open that door,” she said.

  I unbarred it. It was a room full of vials and metal, as secret as the rooms full of books, but different from them. Maybe not different. This was a room full of things that could catch fire or slice strangers.

  “There is nothing holy,” the Needle said, “about tradition. No tradition. Not mine, not theirs. Anyone who’s ever thought so has ruined things all over again.”

  “But,” I said, “we made the library. We have to protect it.”

  “We made the library because they tried to crush knowledge. We will fight because they tried to crush us,” said the Needle. She trembled, but not with fear.

  “I’m ready to burn, Enry Sharp,” she said.

  We loaded all the books of the Library of the Low into rolling carts, and we took the elevator, using power we normally saved. We rose up from the inside of the earth, beneath a stolen University, and when we came to the surface, we were a small army of young Librarians, and one old woman carrying a knife made of a melted medallion.

  We marched.

  The Needle once told me that we couldn’t fix everything with love, even though some of the books said we could. Some of the poems said it was the answer. Some of the anatomical diagrams of hearts showed them full of certainty. I thought about my father’s heart and the missing words inside it.

  We marched for our parents, with them beneath our arms. We carried their skin and hair. We carried their words. We marched down a dirt road, and on both sides there were places consumed by smoke.

  “Holy,” we said.

  High above us there was a swallow spinning, and below us seeds were still germinating and we were walking in boots we’d inherited, carrying daggers forged of our parents’ wedding rings and jewelry.

  “There aren’t enough of us,” I said to the Needle, as we arrived in the City. Walls of windows, broken. Buildings crumbling, but behind them I could see movement.

  “There are,” she said, and unbowed her lace collar. I could see words beginning to be revealed there, round and round her throat. The Needle’s eyes were blacker than her ink, and her skin shone silver.

  We stood in the center of the road and looked at the house, white columns built on the backs of Americans. Graffiti on its sides and trees from which bodies had been hanged. Some people had thought this was a beautiful place.

  I opened a book in each of my hands, the book of Silas Sharp and the book of Yoon Hyelie Sharp. Beside me, the rest of the Librarians opened the b
ooks of their parents, and the ones whose parents had been taken readied their implements.

  The doors began to open and there were soldiers coming for us. We saw men standing there, old as the Needle. The Needle stood at the head of our formation, tall and unbound, her shirt open, and in her hand she held a torch.

  We all knew that we were about to die. There was nothing in us that was stronger than the guards here, and there were only a few of us to begin with. There were good ways to die, and this was one of them.

  “READ AFTER BURNING!” we screamed, and we set fire to our dead.

  I set fire to the book of Silas, and out of it rose my father, and I set fire to the book of Yoon, and out of it rose my mother.

  The Needle set fire to herself and we closed our eyes at the light she made, the way her body blazed and hissed, words made of magic, words made of the Needle’s own rage and reading.

  This was the Needle’s analysis of civilization, and this was her love, given form. This was what magic looked like at this point in the history of the world, a surge of stories transmitted in smoke.

  I had never seen my parents together until I saw their books. I watched their skin insist on change and the spells contained within their volumes spitting fire. What can you see in firelight? More than you can see in the dark. I watched my mother’s sword and my father’s pen stand at attention, and then I watched them switch instruments.

  I felt my own living skin warming in the light of the people I’d come from, the library that had raised me thus far, the stories that had been altered to show something other than quiet.

  The Needle rose over us, a cloud of words, and she rushed at the men who’d decided America belonged to them. With her rushed the rest of the Librarians, resurrected to revolution, brought back to life with the magic of burned libraries and belief.

  The old men stood, looking up, five of them, skinny, pale, and blinded, as the words of my people circled them, closed in on them, and redlined them out of the story. I watched as the Needle edited. I watched my daddy and my mother making a study of this part of our history, shredding them into fire and then into ash.

  These are the parts of our story that, while alive, are also at rest. The lies entwined with lives, the magic used for shrinking the span of knowledge rather than encouraging it to grow.

  My hands were open, and in them were flames. I kept my hands open as I fought. My hands were full of story.

  Our knives were used too, bloodied on the living, but the living soldiers were surrounded by the words of the dead, and we were stronger than we thought we were. An army of children, but we’d been raised on something better than this.

  I was the one watching when the Needle finished them, her hair flying up in the wind, each strand a sentence. I watched her words rush into their throats, filling them with stories they were not a part of. There was char, and an old white house on fire, and smoke filled with forgotten things.

  I didn’t know the world before the end of the world, but I knew it when it began again, out of dust and dark, out of whispers and bones.

  There were twelve children, and then there was rain.

  Was any of this magic? Not more so than the magic made in spring, and not more so than the spinning of the seasons. It is crucial to remember that none of this is certain, that even when joy is proximate, sorrow might be walking beside it. Indeed, it is crucial to remember how to extend your hand to someone different from your own self.

  Magic is unpredictable. That’s for you to remember. Kindness is too. It is all part of the same continuum, just as you and I are part of the same line. It would be years yet before I met the man I would love, and years before you would be born to a child of a child of his, crying in the arms of the midwife, fingers spread. This would not be the only revolution. There’s never just one. This is how it begins.

  “Enry,” my father said as his smoke faded. By then it was dawn, and we were standing on the lawn of this building built to show what glory looked like from a distance.

  “Henry,” my mother said, as her embers died down.

  The two of them looked around, and I could see their tattoos glowing like birds might, if the world was a world where birds lived, or like whales might, deep in the sea and looking for love, calling out in song to others of their kind. Not everything was gone. Some things were invisible, and other things had been in hiding and were coming out again.

  “What does this word mean?” you ask me, and you touch a word on my skin, red ink, because after the world began again, we used red instead of black, to say that we had blood flowing and that nothing was fixed in forever.

  “What do you think it means?” I ask. The meanings change along with the words. The text on my skin is a new story daily, and here is what I know.

  I wake up every morning, and the world has changed overnight. I can feel my father’s blood and my mother’s magic, and I can feel the Needle, her body blowing apart.

  When do things change entirely, you wonder? When do they get better? When will it be possible?

  It is possible now.

  You’re built to open your fists, and show me your palms, and to pass food from them into the hands of others. You’re built for comfort and for fire, for battle and for poetry, and you are a child of my family, and my family was made by the world.

  Here we stand in the dark now, and I’m old and you’re holding my hand and walking me from the bed to the window. We’re looking out at all of it, the wonder and the danger. There are voices and the sun blazes, and everything is bright enough that if I were reading the letters on your skin, I wouldn’t be able to parse them.

  Now look at your own hands and the wrinkles in them. Those wrinkles are what happen when you clench your fists. You were born for this resistance, for this preparation, for this life. You were born to fight.

  MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY is the New York Times–bestselling author of six books, including the novels Magonia and Aerie and, most recently, The Mere Wife, a contemporary novel adaptation of Beowulf. Her new verse translation of Beowulf was published in August 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Headley’s work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony and by Arte Studio Ginestrelle, where the first draft of Beowulf was written. She was raised with a wolf and a pack of sled dogs in the high desert of rural Idaho and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS FROM 2019

  I usually don’t do a recommended reads/honorable mentions list because I invariably forget to include some great stories. And, of course, I can’t read everything published. (Or even know it exists.) This year, although recognizing those faults, I’m giving it a shot. Those with an asterisk (*) are highly recommended.

  Novellas

  Ballingrud, Nathan: “The Butcher’s Table” (Wounds: Six Stories From the Border of Hell)

  Bear, Elizabeth: “A Time to Reap” (Uncanny #31)

  Bestwick, Simon: “And Cannot Come Again” (And Cannot Come Again)*

  Clark, P. Djèlí: The Haunting of Tram Car 015

  Cooney, C. S. E.: Desdemona and the Deep

  Langan, John: “Natalya, Queen of the Hungry Dogs” (Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. E. Datlow)

  Moore, Tegan: “A Forest, or a Tree” (Tor.com)

  Sharma, Priya: Ormeshadow*

  Smith, Michael Marshall: “The Burning Woods” (I Am the Abyss)*

  Solomon, Rivers (based on the song by Daveed Diggs, William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes): The Deep

  Tantlinger, Sara: To Be Devoured

  Warren, Kaaron: Into Bones Like Oil*

  Wise, A. C.: Catfish Lullaby

  Stories

  Aliyu, Rafeeat: “58 Rules to Ensure Your Husband Loves You Forever” (Nightmare #77)

  Arkenberg, Megan: “It Is Not So, It Was Not So” (The Dark #51)

  “The Night Princes” (Nightmare #81)

  Barnes, Steven, and Tananarive Due: “Fugue State” (Apex #120)

  Bear, Elizabeth: “Lest We Forget” (Uncanny #28)

/>   Bermudez, Amanda J.: “Totenhaus” (Black Static #68)

  Bestwick, Simon: “Below” (Terror Tales of Northwest England, ed. P. Finch)

  de Bodard, Aliette: “A Burning Sword for Her Cradle” (Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. E. Datlow)

  Braum, Daniel: “How to Stay Afloat When Drowning” (Pareidolia, eds. J. Everington & D. Howarth)

  Broaddus, Maurice: “The Migration Suite: A Study in C Sharp Minor” (Uncanny # 29)

  Bruce, Georgina: “The Lady of Situations” (The Lady of Situations)

  Buckell, Tobias S.: “N-Coin” (Apex #120)

  Carroll, Siobhan: “The Air, the Ocean, the Earth, the Deep” (Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. E. Datlow)

  “For He Can Creep” (Tor.com)

  Cataneo, Emily B.: “The Longest Night” (Black Static #72)*

  Chan, L.: “The House Wins in the End” (The Dark #50)

  Chronister, Kay: “Roiling and Without Form” (Black Static #68)

  “Thin Places” (The Dark #50)

  Cisco, Michael: “Their Silent Faces” (Spirits Unwrapped, ed. D. Braum)

  Coen, Pip: “Second Skin” (F&SF, May/June 2019)

  Coles, Donyae: “Breaking the Waters” (PseudoPod 666)

  Das, Indrapramit: “A Shade of Dusk” (Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. E. Datlow)

  DeLucci, Theresa: “Cavity” (Strange Horizons 7/8/19)

  DeMeester, Kristi: “A Crown of Leaves” (Black Static #70)