The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition

by Paula Guran [editor]

“Well, giants are big, you know; if you were going to associate them with anything, it would be a mountain.”

  “I guess.”

  “Anyway, it made sense to me that the Giant’s name would be his life, so, ‘I am.’ ”

  “If you say so. Just as long as this one brings another big advance.”

  Jim said, “Karen’s pretty optimistic. Post-Harry Potter, wizards and magic are big business in kids’ publishing,” even as he was thinking, Karen Lowatchee, your agent, who repped you on The Still Warrior and, when the heart thing made you scale back karate, suggested you try fiction. She’d liked the chapters on karate for kids, said they showed a real grasp of tween psychology. She was the one who came up with the Jenny Ninja series title, and got you the big advances for the last two. Neil calls her “Glenda the Good Bitch”; she calls him “Microsoft.”

  “What happens next?” Neil said.

  “In the chapter? Renfrew turns the Giant into his keep.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s what happens in the original legend.”

  “Yeah, but—couldn’t he have used the Giant, first?”

  “Invaded England with him?” Jim said.

  “Something.”

  “I don’t know. I kind of like the idea of Renfrew living inside the Giant, wandering around him, listening to the echo of his thoughts, his dreams.”

  “Sounds pretty creepy, if you ask me.”

  “And what’s wrong with that?”

  “Isn’t this book supposed to be for kids?”

  “It’s YA,” Jim said, “Young Adult. Older kids.”

  Over the tops of the pines to their right, Renfrew’s keep raised its ragged crown. “See,” Jim said, pointing at it, “the windows look like eyes.”

  “What has eyes like that?”

  “It’s supposed to be a monster.”

  “Aren’t giants big people?”

  “Not all of them. The ancient Greeks described giants with a hundred arms.”

  “Where do you get this stuff?”

  “Depends. The ancient Greek stuff’s available all over the place. Information on Renfrew is harder to come by. Mostly, I use that website, Blackguide.com.”

  “The one that crashed the computer?”

  “I told you, it wasn’t that: It was all the porn you’d been looking at.”

  “Very funny.”

  Neil’s pace slowed. In front of him, their path intersected another sloping steeply down from the right. As he stepped onto it, Jim said, “Hey.”

  “I’m pretty sure this’ll lead back to the beginning of the trail,” Neil said.

  This place isn’t that big. I’m sure if I kept on a straight line, I’d come out on a side street, eventually. However discouraging the prospect of an even more strenuous climb was, though, the inevitable spat that would result from him not following Neil, not to mention the two or three days after that before the situation returned to normal, prompted him up the new path. As he did, his vision went dark. He had the impression of something huge in front of him, something vast hanging over him, like a wave, only solid, ready to crash down on him. He wanted to cry out, but his tongue was dead in his mouth; his heart lurched like a racehorse stumbling mid-stride.

  Somewhere close by, an old man’s voice said, “What is it? What’s the matter with you?” The words vibrated with rage, barely controlled.

  What’s Neil’s father doing here? Jim thought. He tried to speak. “Mr. Marshall—”

  “Don’t Mr. Marshall me. I know who I am. I’m still lucid.”

  The host of the questions the outburst raised was silenced by the clearing of Jim’s sight, which revealed Neil’s face inches from his. Its angry expression was almost parodic: eyes wide and staring under lowered brows, top lip arched, teeth visible, chin jutting forward. It was also the face of a man in his mid-seventies. Neil’s hair was white, as were his eyebrows; both hair and brows were thick, bushy. The lines across his forehead, to either side of his mouth, appeared cut right down to the bone, while his skin looked loose, its grip on his skull slipping. His gaze was fierce yet unfocused, as if he were unable to pinpoint the source of his rage; already, his lips were retreating from their snarl into the tremors that shook them incessantly.

  The Alzheimer’s, Jim thought. That was the first symptom: before the memory loss, the mood swings, that spasm was telling us what was on the way.

  “What happened to you?” Neil said. “Is it your heart? Are you having another heart attack?” The emotion under his words was sliding into panic.

  “I’m fine,” Jim said. “Just caught up in . . . ” What? What do I call whatever’s happening to me? (And, by the way, what the hell is happening to me? Is this some kind of stroke?) “In a rather vivid day dream, I suppose—a memory, really, of one of our past visits here.”

  “Oh? Was that before or after you fucked Rose?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Yes, yes, that’s what you always say; what you’ve always said.”

  “But you’ve never believed me, have you?”

  “I don’t know what I believe. I’m the one whose brain is disintegrating, remember?”

  “It isn’t,” Jim started, then stopped. Technically speaking, Neil’s brain wasn’t disintegrating, but there were worse ways to describe what was happening to his personality, to the aggregate of memories and attitudes that composed Neil. Anyway, Neil already had turned his back on him and was striding up the path. The disease might be wrecking his mind, but so far, his vitality was undiminished. Jim labored not to fall too far behind.

  Neil said, “Do you remember the end of Renfrew’s story?”

  “Do you mean my book, or the legend?”

  “Which was which?”

  “My book ends with Renfrew entering the cave at Wemyss in search of the path to the Graveyard of the Old Gods. He leaves Thomas, his apprentice, in charge until his return, which doesn’t take place during Thomas’s very long life, or that of his apprentice, or that of any of the men and women who have come since. However, the book says, that doesn’t mean that, one day, the old wizard won’t emerge from the mouth of the cave, squinting at the light, and begin the long walk back to his old home.”

  “That wasn’t it.”

  “You want the legend, then. That ends with a group of the Covenanters coming armed to Renfrew’s keep in order to arrest him on charges of sorcery. When they arrived, though, they found the place deserted, as if no one had lived there for decades, or longer.”

  “That isn’t it, either.”

  “I don’t—there’s a tradition, a kind of afterword to the legend proper, that if you follow a certain course through the woods around Renfrew’s keep—and if certain conditions are right: the stars are in alignment, that sort of thing; I think an eclipse is supposed to figure into the equation, somehow—then Renfrew himself will appear to you and offer to teach you what he knows. Is that what you were thinking of?”

  “Yes,” Neil said.

  Jim waited for Neil to add something more; when he did not, he said, “What makes you ask?”

  “Ask what?”

  “About Renfrew’s course?”

  “What about it?”

  “You just asked me to tell you about it.”

  “I did.” Neil shrugged. “I don’t remember that.”

  There was no point in anger; though buttressed by his meds, Neil’s short-term memory was far from perfect. Jim said, “You know what I was thinking?”

  “How much longer you have to wait before you can put me in a home?”

  “What? No, I told you, I’m not going to put you in a home.”

  “That’s what you say now.”

  “That’s what I have said—what I’ve been saying ever since you were diagnosed.”

  For a change, he hoped the silence that greeted his reassurance meant the subject of their debate had slipped through the sieve of Neil’s immediate recollection. His quiet seemed to imply that it had, another moment caught in the plaq
ue crusting his neurons, then he said, “I hope you and Rose will have the decency to wait until all my things have been moved out for her to move in.”

  “Neil—”

  “It would be nice if you could wait until I’m in the ground, but I’m guessing I could hang on for a while, and you certainly aren’t getting any younger. Neither is she; although she isn’t as old as we are, is she? Maybe she’ll be inclined to do the decent thing, but you won’t, will you?”

  “I’m sorry: I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.”

  Neil lengthened his stride, mountain-goating up the path. Jim didn’t bother chasing after. Better to hang back and hope that, by the time he caught up, Neil’s thunderstorm of emotions would have passed; though he wasn’t sure what he rated the chances of that as. It had been years, almost a full decade, since he and Rose had seen one another, and that had been by accident, a chance encounter at the Union Square Barnes & Noble that had led to nothing more than the occasional e-mail. If he hadn’t told Neil about the meeting, or the correspondence, it was because, long after his whatever-you-wanted-to-call-it with her had receded in his memory, in Neil’s mind, it was a flame only recently and poorly extinguished, whose smoldering embers might yet ignite again. He would have made too much of the e-mails in which Jim told Rose about his visit to the set of the Renfrew film, Rose told him about her recent trip to Paris with her ninety-two year old mother, mountained the molehills into a secret, ongoing affair. In the wake of Neil’s illness, he supposed he had been writing to her more frequently, but his correspondence with all his friends and family had increased as his communication with Neil had grown more erratic.

  He was almost at the top of the path. He had climbed higher than he’d realized; to his right and over his shoulder, he could look down on the roofless top of Renfrew’s keep. To his relief, Neil was standing waiting for him. “There you are,” Jim said—panted, really.

  “Here I am,” Neil said. His expression was almost kindly. “Need a minute?”

  “Half a minute,” Jim said, leaning forward. “Neil—”

  At Neil’s feet, their path formed an acute angle with another climbing up from the right. As he started down it, Jim said, “Hey.”

  “I can see the place where we started,” Neil said, pointing.

  Jim squinted. Was that the white of the wizard’s statue? They would have to descend from here somehow, he supposed, and this new path, crossed by tree roots that formed an irregular staircase, was probably the best option he could expect. He stepped down and it was like dropping into a well. There was the sensation of falling straight down, and the impression of everything flying up all around him, and the sound of roaring filling his ears. Terror swept through his chest, his head, made them sickeningly light. He flailed his arms. There was nothing under his feet; he was falling.

  Something crashed into him from the front. He heard an Oof!, felt his direction change. Now he was moving forward, his arms and legs caught with someone else’s, tangled, the pair of them thudding and scraping against rock and dirt. He rolled over and under, over and under his companion, then landed hard on his back, his right kidney shouting at the rock it came down on. Above him, the sky was a blue bowl someone had set spinning. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, Neil was leaning over him. There was a cut high on his forehead leaking blood onto his brow, but aside from that and some dirt, his face was the same as it had been at the start of this strange walk, thirty-nine and looking it. “You klutz,” he said. “Karate master, my ass.”

  Jim flung his arm around him, flinching as his back complained. “I’m sorry,” he said into Neil’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  “You mean, aside from the gaping wound in my head? Yeah, I’m peachy.”

  Jim released him. “I am so sorry,” he said as he struggled to his feet. “I just . . . I slipped.”

  “And you couldn’t miss me on the way?”

  “I didn’t want you to feel left out.”

  Fighting it, Neil smirked. “You are such an asshole.”

  “But I’m your asshole.”

  “Enough shit comes out of you, anyway.”

  “Ah, I’m sure a little single malt will help.”

  “First sensible thing you’ve said all day.”

  They had rolled almost halfway down the path; no surprise, given the bruises Jim could feel ripening under his shirt, his jeans, the scrapes visible on Neil’s arms, his neck. He supposed he should be grateful neither of them had broken a limb, or been concussed. At least Neil had been right about this path returning them to the entrance to the nature preserve: through the trees, the wizard’s statue stood a pale beacon. As Neil stepped from tree root step to tree root step, Jim weighed telling him about his . . . what would he call them? Hallucinations? Visions? Waking dreams? Maybe “experiences” was the best word for them. Whatever: it was on the tip of his tongue to say that he had just relived their life together when they’d first met, then seen them at points another twenty and forty or so years in the future. When I’m the author of a series of successful children’s books and he’s in mid-stage Alzheimer’s, not to mention still obsessing over Rose Carlton: yes, that would go over splendidly.

  Neil was drawing away from him. Strangest of all was that, now that the two of them were their proper selves, he was not more upset by what he had just been through, his experiences. (That still wasn’t the right word, but it would do for the moment.) While he had been at each of those other times, the moment had been as real as anything—that he had been wrenched from this specific point in his life had seemed as odd, as disorienting, as any other detail. Returned to the age at which he had entered the nature preserve—the age he was supposed to be—Jim found his and Neil’s alternate selves suddenly distant, novels he’d read years ago, their plots dim weights resting in the depths of his memory.

  So what was all that? Some kind of projection? Easy enough to trace the roots of at least some of it to the current state of his and Neil’s relationship. Future Neil’s fixation on the Rose business arose from Jim’s anxiety that, as time went on, he wouldn’t be able to relinquish it. Jim’s continued success as a writer was simple wish-fulfillment (although his agent had praised the sections of his book dealing with kids). Neil’s grandfather had suffered from Alzheimer’s, which his father was showing early symptoms of; from there, it was a short jump to imagining Neil eventually overtaken by it.

  The vividness of everything, though, he could not account for. He had indulged in enough hallucinogens in his younger years; could this have been a delayed consequence of that? It seemed unlikely, but what was more likely? The place was the site of a ley line that produced brief time-distortions? Funny how all the tourist info fails to mention that.

  To his right, the lower stretch of Renfrew’s keep was visible through the trees. Ahead, Neil was already at the statue. Legs protesting, Jim picked up his pace. Neil had stopped in front of the sculpture, and appeared to be speaking to it. That can’t be good. Did I say neither of us was concussed?

  Jim did not see the man with whom Neil was talking until he was next to him. Standing on the other side of the statue, the man had been obscured from Jim’s view by it. A head shorter than either of them, he wore his reddish hair short and a dark suit over an open-collared white shirt. Jim wasn’t much for estimating the cost of things, but even he could recognize the quality of the man’s clothes, which made the stains on his jacket cuffs, his shirt, all the more conspicuous. The man raised his eyes to Jim, and their green notice was a physical thing, a heaviness passing over him. “You’re Jim,” he said in a voice that was soft, accentless.

  “Yes,” Jim said, extending his hand. “You are . . . ?”

  The man’s hands were in his trouser pockets; he kept them there. “Renfrew.”

  “Like—” Jim gestured at the sculpture.

  “The very same,” the man said, “though the likeness is a poor one.”

  “Wait—what?” Jim glanced at Neil, who was watching th
e man intently. “I’m sorry: I thought you were saying—”

  “I was.” The man withdrew his hands from his pockets. Blue flames licked the unburned skin of the left; while a slender emerald snake coiled around the right.

  “Jesus!” Jim leapt back.

  “Not quite.”

  “What is this?”

  Neil said, “We completed the course.”

  “You did.” The man—Renfrew?—nodded. “Per the terms of a contract that is older than any of us, I am here to offer one of you my tutelage.”

  “One of us,” Jim said. “What about the other?”

  “The price of tuition,” Renfrew said. “A gesture of commitment.”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” Jim said.

  “Take me,” Neil said.

  “What?”

  “Very interesting,” Renfrew said.

  “Neil what are you saying?”

  “The Alzheimer’s: that’s a sure thing?” Neil said.

  “Sure enough,” Renfrew answered.

  “And you can cure it?”

  “I have been this age for a very long time,” Renfrew said. “You need never meet that old man in the mirror.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Jim said. “Are you listening to yourself?”

  “And there’s no other way?” Neil said.

  “There are many other ways, if you know where and how to find them. This is my way.”

  “I’m sorry,” Neil started, but Jim cut him off: “This is insane.”

  “There was a link,” Neil said, “on the Blackguide site. I clicked on it, and it led to an account by a guy who had walked this course in the 1930s with his brothers. With each new turn of the path, the three of them were at a different point in their lives: younger, then older, then much older. When they arrived back at the beginning, Renfrew was waiting for them.”

  “So all that was real?” Jim said.

  “Real enough,” Renfrew said.

  “I thought if we could follow the course, then I could see how things would turn out—if we’d still be together; if we’d be happy; if Rose would still be around. I didn’t expect—oh, Christ,” Neil said. “Do you have any idea what it’s like—no, you don’t; how could you? Everything—you’re aware that something is wrong, deeply wrong—you can feel it in everything around you—and you’re sure you know what it is, what’s the matter, but you can’t remember it. And then you can remember, and you realize that the problem isn’t with what’s outside, it’s with what’s inside, and you know it’s only a matter of time until you forget again and the whole process starts over.” His eyes swam with tears.