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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  I approach the middle doorway, but even standing right at the shadow’s edge I can’t peer more than a meter or two beyond the entrance. Without consciously acknowledging the fact, I am unable to enter, muscular control drained by an awareness of evil. Instead I discharge the camera’s flash, splashing its garish light over the rough internal walls. At the far end of the passage is a male, almost naked, what clothing he wears tattered and meager.

  His eyes spark red. I gasp, and step back as the afterimage fades.

  “Señor?” comes a voice from behind me. I expel a weak gasp as I turn and stumble to the side. A small man wearing farmer’s clothes and a large straw hat squints up at me with sardonic curiosity, as though my reaction is an absurdity he can’t quite fathom.

  I apologize in my uncertain Spanish. “You, um, surprised me. There was someone . . . In the, um . . . en el laberinto.”

  He stares in that direction then scowls, his lips twitching like anxious slugs. “Bandido?”

  I try to explain that the figure seemed like an ancient Mayan, like many of the friezes that depict Toniná’s prisoners.

  He shrugs incomprehension or indifference then steps into the dark passage. I try to stop him, but he brushes me off and disappears. I hear his feet scraping down the rough path. A minute or two later he returns. His dark pupils peek through a mass of wrinkles, enough to evaluate me.

  “Nada?” I say. He nods.

  “Do they hide here? Bandidos? Do they hide in those—?” I gesture toward the darkness.

  He says nothing. Either he can’t understand me or he thinks me crazy.

  After a few moments of silence, irritated by his inaction, I ask him what he’d wanted in the first place.

  “Turrand?” The word seems distasteful to him.

  “Morley Turrand. Sí.”

  His long battered hand offers me a Zapatista doll. It looks familiar. I remember leaving it behind in the cantina a few days before.

  “Where did you get this?” I ask.

  “Qué?”

  “The doll . . . Zapatista doll? Who gave it to you?”

  “Fantasma,” he answers without a hint of irony. A ghost? He follows up with a jumble of words I’m too surprised to translate, though I gather he thinks I’ve been careless.

  I ask if he knows who the ghost was.

  He says I know her—that is what matters.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Fantasma,” he repeats, pointing at my chest.

  June 1996. Sometimes this is how I remember meeting the woman. She sits across the table from me, smoking her thin cigarette with calm intensity. She isn’t pleased. We have spoken briefly and though she denies being a prostitute I can’t imagine why else she would be here.

  Offering me the Zapatista doll was an unsettling moment—so familiar, giving me a shiver of déjà vu, and filled with the white chocolate-mixed-with-vanilla fragrance of ceiba. Yet her explanation fascinates me, even if it smacks of unstated intent. I should refuse it and send her away.

  “Take the doll,” she whispers. “It is a gift. To remind you that not all find peace.”

  I frown at the insistence in her tone.

  “Take it,” she repeats.

  I grasp the doll despite myself and study the odd crudity of its making to avoid the embarrassment of having obeyed her so easily. Now, however, having accepted her gift, I find myself being drawn to the woman. My skin tingles as though her slim fingers caress my face. I raise my eyes from the doll to stare at her, imagining the small blossom of a body she hides beneath unappealingly masculine clothes. The beginnings of desire stir in my gut.

  “Now you want me,” she says, “whether or not I am a puta.”

  “If you’re a streetwalker, I’m not interested.”

  Her smile is private and knowing. I feel voyeuristic merely seeing it.

  “To pay for sex,” she says, “would be an affront to your masculinity, would it?”

  “No, that’s not—”

  “Do not fear, Señor Turrand,” she interrupts, “I have not loved for a long time, and would not consider it now except that you interest me.”

  “I interest you?” I say, taken aback by her forthright manner.

  “Sí. As I interest you.”

  I should be put off by her condescending manner, but the deep tones of her voice vibrate through my mind, overturning denial and stoking the fires of arousal.

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  “Once, I was called Coronela María de la Luz Espinosa Barrera. Perhaps you have heard of me.”

  I haven’t and she knows it. Her smile makes my heart beat faster.

  “Should I?”

  “If you cared for more than yourself, perhaps . . . yes. History is importante, Señor.”

  Annoyance rises again, but it only fuels my desire for her. I frown—and the woman laughs. “Just Coronela then.”

  “Coronela.” I taste the word, letting it vibrate in my throat.

  “Come!” She takes my hand and pulls me to my feet. The table rattles and the tabernero glances our way. I extract money from my pocket and ostentatiously place it under my half-empty glass.

  “Enough?” I yell across the room.

  He gestures uncertainly, a little befuddled, but doesn’t pursue the matter. Coronela leads me out into the street. “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “I do not make love on cantina tables. Or in back alleys.” She gestures.

  “Your hotel, I think.” Speechless, I follow.

  After a few blocks, she indicates a large space that opens out to our right beyond the buildings at the end of a narrow road. “That is the market,” she says. “It is there that many Zapatista rebels died when their peaceful occupation of the township was repressed most violently by Government butchers.” She gestures around us. “Here is where Genaro el Roto was murdered. Remember the spot. You must come back and photograph it, no?”

  “I guess.”

  “You will photograph it, won’t you, Señor Morley?”

  I stare at her accusingly. “How do you know my name, Coronela?” I demand. “How did you know what I do? I never told you.”

  That secret smile again, advising me that she has no intention of answering my question. “Much depends on you photographing this spot.” She grabs my arm and pulls me close, forcing me to look directly into her eyes. Their black depth mesmerizes me. “When you do, you must carry the doll with you.”

  “The doll?”’

  “Sí, you must keep it close.”

  “Okay, okay, I will.”

  “You must.” She lets go.

  “Also when you go to Toniná in three days time,” she continues, “you must take care what you photograph.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “There are things in that place, ancient resentments, which you must not capture with your camera. The doll, El Roto—it marks you as his and will keep the others at bay. Stupidly, however, you went there without it.”

  “Went there without it? Look, I’ve never been to Toniná. I’ve no intention of going there.”

  “You will have reason to go to Toniná—and you will go, without protection. But I have righted that error. Now you will take the doll.”

  “You righted it? Even though I haven’t gone there yet?” Her eyes hold me in their silence.

  “I don’t have a clue what the hell you’re talking about,” I say.

  She doesn’t smile as she takes my hand. “Come, I will give you what you think you want. Later you may understand.”

  June 1996. Toniná. Is this the way it happens? It feels wrong.

  I’m photographing the ruins for Travel Scene magazine, fairly unenthusiastically, I must confess. I’ve been at it for several hours already and am now facing a wall with three stone-framed doorways leading to underground tunnels—the Palace of the Underworld. Raising the viewfinder of the Minolta to my eye, I focus on the central passage. A lighter shadow lingers in the internal darkness beyond the rough architrave. I
take the shot then pull the camera away from my face, but there’s no one there, only that dark gaping hole into the Underworld. Another glance through the camera’s viewfinder. Nothing.

  I must be imagining things. There aren’t even tourists around—I haven’t seen anyone all day. Nervously I grip the Zapatista doll, which is in my coat pocket. My breathing calms and once again the day seems ordinary.

  I take more shots of the ruins, even forcing myself to get a few inside the structure itself. I find no evidence of other people among its evocative shadows. When I re-emerge from the gloom the atmospheric sunlight has turned into a flat gloaming and I begin the long trek back to Ocosingo. It’s dark by the time I get to the hotel.

  August, 1999. When I check them, none of the other prints of Escena de un Asesinato show any background markings that might be construed as a human being. I take numbers two to ten to Grace at the gallery and she accepts them eagerly. She’s hoping that Norma Rivera’s excessive enthusiasm for the picture will be the start of a trend. Even if others pay less, the commission will help reduce the loss she clearly expects to make.

  “How many are there in the run, Morley?” she asks. I point toward my hand-drawn signature. Under it I’ve written 2 of 17. “Only seventeen?”

  “That’s how you make these things valuable, Grace.”

  “But we usually extend the run to fifty or or 100.”

  “I want this to be very collectible.”

  “Why?”

  I frown, not having considered it before. “I don’t know. Why not? I burnt the negatives of all the exclusives. There has to be a guarantee of limitation.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Morley. Do you realize what we could lose on a deal like that?”

  “It’s how I want it.”

  She gives me a side-glance sneer that says you think far too highly of yourself, though she doesn’t articulate it further. When I don’t respond she turns her gaze toward the picture.

  “It’s a nice shot, Morley. There’s something compelling in it. Why’s it called Escena de un Asesinato?”

  “Murder Scene. A revolutionary was killed there in 1994.”

  She nods thoughtfully. “That explains something the Rivera woman said: An echo of the last Ocosingo insurgents. She reckoned there was a bandit further up the street. She was keen to show it to her husband. Couldn’t see it myself.”

  “You couldn’t?”

  She shrugs, holding up print #2. “Well, can you?”

  As I leave her to her business, I feel a sense of disquiet scratching at the insides of my skull. I’m sure there had been a shape there on the street in print #1 of Escena de un Asesinato, the suggestion of a bandit-like spectre coming my way. Norma Rivera had seen it. So had I. Why not Grace?

  June 1996.

  Do I make love with Coronela?

  “You must see, Morley, and if not you, you must let your camera see what is before you.”

  I peer through the lens down a shadowy street, snapping pictures as she directs.

  “There,” Coronela says, “El Roto is there. Do you see?”

  Someone is there, in the distance. His eyes are black holes—all three of them, one in his forehead. An old woman with wrinkled skin and withered lips appears in the frame. “No camera!” she screeches.

  Click.

  After we reach the Hotel de Destino, does Coronela come up to my room and with the aggressive lack of subtlety that seems typical of her, does she remove her clothes, place my hands on her skin, encourage arousal in herself and in me? I don’t know. I can’t remember. There are images in my head, erotic moments, heat and passion, all infused with the ceiba scent, but I don’t know if they are memories or simply phantoms of desire.

  “Do you seek love among the dead?” I hear her whisper in my ear. “Futile if you don’t find it first among the living. Should life get too dark, then in death there will only be profounder darkness.”

  “There! El Roto is there.”

  Click.

  She consumes me, draining any desire to escape. I try to push her away, but instead find myself drawn further and further into the heart of her.

  I want to know who she is.

  “Coronela María de la Luz Espinosa Barrera was a veteran of the Mexican Revolution of 1910,” she tells me. “She fought with greater distinction than most men, and was awarded a pension once the fighting was done. But she became an exile in her own land, her temperament unsuited to peacetime society’s inane mores. She wandered the country like a lost ghost, dressed as a man, abandoned in a time that was no longer her own.”

  “And you’re this La Coronela, are you?”

  She laughs. “Perhaps. Perhaps not.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “There! He watches you from the shadows. Shoot!”

  Click.

  “What will I do?”

  “You will take these pictures back to your land,” she says, tapping the camera on the table near me. Her voice is no more definite than breath. “The doll will protect you, but your actions will feed El Roto’s desires.”

  Click.

  Click.

  A black bird flaps against the window and startles me. I open my eyes to the bloody dimness of twilight as it leaks in through tattered curtains.

  I’m alone. The sheets are crumpled and sweaty. I untangle myself, needing to use the toilet, and look for my pants. My camera is lying on the floor near my discarded clothes. I check how many pictures have been taken, only to discover the entire roll is spent. I’m sure it was new only an hour before.

  Later, when I develop the film, I see I have taken a series of pictures in the streets around Ocosingo’s market square. I don’t remember doing it.

  “These are good,” I mutter to myself, knowing I’ve found the soul of my upcoming exhibition.

  August 1999, and it’s the day after the opening.

  In a display of useless pretension, I seek out Norma Rivera, ostensibly to give her the choice of obtaining an unblemished print for her money, just to be fair. But in truth I don’t care about her or fairness. I simply want to see the thing, to assure myself that the figure we both saw at the opening is still there, and not a glitch of memory.

  It turns out that Norma Rivera is the wife of Alex Rivera, CEO of Harvest Futures. Their mansion is on the harbor foreshore in an exclusive northside suburb, and I can’t even get past the gate. But an intercom device, its far end impersonating some sort of semi-articulate minder, finally listens long enough to discover what I want, and replies with the terse diagnosis: “She’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  I pause, trying to summon either genuine surprise or a modicum of sympathy. Neither comes.

  “Um, perhaps I could speak to Mr. Rivera then, if he’s not too busy,” I say at last, rather tactlessly.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the voice replies, “Mr. Rivera is . . . unavailable.”

  Now a pinprick of apprehension scratches across the inside of my belly. The intercom coughs and faintly I hear a gruff voice: “I’ll take care of it.” At that moment, I spot a blue flash through the bushes, down the distant end of the curving driveway. A cop car. Of course there’d be police.

  “Who is this?” the voice growls.

  “I’m a photographer,” I manage then add hastily, “Not the press.”

  He asks me to explain and I do and by the time I’ve finished there’s an officer approaching the gate. I resist the urge to run, experiencing a moment of Hitchcockian paranoia. I didn’t do it, I want to shout.

  The cop opens the gate. “Mr. Turrand?”

  I acknowledge the fact and he asks me to accompany him back to the house. He says nothing as we follow the roadway up to Rivera’s mansion. The day has become colder, but sweat soaks into my shirt.

  Something rather gothic is what I expect from the place, but the house turns out to be modern—all straight lines, glass and hard, functional edges. An incongruously soft-edged man in a dark suit nods in my direction. He approaches and hol
ds out his hand.

  “Detective-Inspector Greer,” he says. “Thank you for cooperating, Mr. Turrand”

  “Ah,” I say, shaking his clammy palm, “I have no idea how I can help. I don’t even know what’s happened.”

  “They’re both dead.” His placid eyes stare into mine. I sense his evaluation, though not as a threat.

  “That’s terrible,” I offer, without much conviction. “How?”

  “Undecided. Did you know the victims?”

  “Victims?”

  “Did you know them?”

  “No, no, not at all. The woman . . . Mrs. Rivera . . . spoke to me at the opening yesterday. I didn’t know who she was. And I’ve never met the other.”

  “I see. If you could follow me, I’d like to show you something.”

  At the door he gives me plastic covers to put over my shoes. “Don’t touch anything,” he mutters. “We’re still examining the scene.”

  He guides me into an open area that looks out through huge plate-glass windows onto an immaculately kept and spacious yard, leading down to a small wharf and Sydney Harbor beyond. It’s the kind of view you see on calendars and has to be worth millions. In the room are more cops, a forensic team with assorted gadgets and bags, and two bodies. Norma Rivera is on the floor, leaning against a white wall with her eyes staring at me, sightless—mouth open as though frozen in the middle of a passionate monologue, all secret in its meaning. There doesn’t appear to be a mark on her. A man I assume is Alexander Rivera is spread-eagled on the far side of the room. There’s blood pooled around him and before Greer guides me away, artfully obscuring sight of him, I realize that his head is shattered, with blood and gore forming a Jackson Pollock splatter across the polished boards.

  “Is this your photograph?” Greer asks.

  Norma has already hung it, giving it pride of place on an open wall beside a small bar. But the glass has been shattered and the photograph ruined; it looks as though three bullets have been fired through the print into the wall behind.

  “I guess he didn’t like it,” I say.

  “Where was the stain you reckon was on the print?”

  “There.” I point. “Right where the holes are.”