She howled in the distance, and I watched a puff of steam rise into the air as she disappeared.
I imagined her running along the tracks of the funicular railway, a tireless engine racing up, and up, towards the top of Victoria Peak, towards a future as full of magic as the past.
Ken Liu’s fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy &Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld, among other places. He has won a Nebula, a Hugo, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. He lives near Boston with his family.
There was a presence in the cold, peering from the darkened alleys and discarded refuse, spying from between bricks and mortar . . .
GO HOME AGAIN
Simon Strantzas
She remembered so little of her father, but what she did was vivid, crystalized in the fractures of her psyche. His sour breath, his distended gorge rising and falling as he stared at her, licking his razor lips. If she closed her eyes, she could almost hear his slurred voice bellowing at her cowering mother. The phantoms of his presence surrounded her. She knew this was so because every part of her wanted to break down into sobs. But she would not offer even his memory that satisfaction. In hindsight, she could remember his withering face, his jaundiced skin, his waning strength, but none of these things struck her as abnormal. She was blind to the truth and perhaps always had been. Even when her father disappeared for good, she did not question it. Ives knew nothing more of life than that, believed the world was one way and no other. Even if she could not express the thought, she understood that nothing was permanent, that everything in the world tended toward chaos. It was the reason fathers died and black mold infected the only tangible proof they had ever existed at all.
Afterward, once bruises healed and wounds scarred, once Ives was old enough to understand, her mother told tales of her husband, of his generosity, of the feats he had accomplished before his death, but Ives understood those notions could not be reconciled with the shade that haunted her memory—the man who had glared at her between crib slats, the man whose skin seeped terminal foulness. They were the true memories, and Ives would be the keeper of them if her mother could not.
The return to the house had been slowed only by Ives’s reluctance and a basement window swollen shut. So many years spent fleeing only to return and find nothing had changed. Nothing beyond the creep of fungus across the walls. Ives shined her flashlight as she carefully trod, part of her scouring the rubble for any mark of her late father’s passing, but she found none. Instead, only gravity’s constant desire to unmake them.
The noxious mold had spread across vacant rooms, swirling around broken fixtures and outlets. It was a bizarre pattern, one she very nearly understood and yet one that remained frustratingly beyond. Part of her longed to touch the spreading cancer, as though that would somehow reveal what had been so deceptively hidden, but she resisted. It was a trap: touching the growth offered no reward she might want. And yet, again, the longing was there, like the ache to leap from the edge of a bottomless gorge, or to thrust a hand deep into the flames of a fire—that urge to experience death, even while running fleet-footed from it.
The floating spores were so thick in the air that Ives could barely breathe. They coated her mouth, slipped down into her lungs—the mere thought scratching her throat, wanting her to cough. Instead, she bit down and stifled the sensation before she inadvertently launched more spores into the air. Her eyes filled with tears, tears for no one but her, for nothing but what life had brought her on a platter and tried to convince her was fruit. But she was no fool; if it were, it would not be so terribly bitter.
Anchorless, her pale mother floundered. With no forethought, she moved them from Montreal to Ottawa, where she believed a new beginning awaited. But her anxieties made the trip along with them, and those few places where she found employment were impossible to maintain. Ives had no better luck entering school mid-stream—her English was poor and their living arrangements were far too mercurial for any allowances to be made. Instead, she remained with her mother and feigned happiness in hopes it would inspire the same. But her mother was not her. She was not strong, and she could do little to keep food on their table, or soon enough a roof over their heads. Ives was barely nine by the time she was sleeping in a parked car with her mother, and nowhere near ten when her mother left to get food and never returned. Ives waited patiently in the car for days, staring at the buildings along the street. It was between their brick she saw the first sign of her life’s infection, a small vein of darkness that broke through the mortar like a snake from its skin.
The house fared worse. No one had stepped foot within its skewed walls since Ives and her mother had left in tears. What once was solid became less so—a phantasm fading from notice, invisible to the world around it. Ives, too, nearly passed it on her approach, the overgrown landscape obscuring the drive, and it was only the tug of memories unburied that caused her to slow enough to spot it.
Artwork from Ives’s young hands remained affixed to the broken refrigerator, but what shapes she once drew had become a mystery. Lines, spirals, blobs, each so carefully delineated, some arcane pattern whose purpose had been long forgotten. A sorrowful atmosphere pervaded. Within it, a faded table and set of chairs materialized, as though from Ives’s half-remembered past. She ran her finger across the surface and left marks in the dust like scars, but the colors beneath were no less muted. She shined her flashlight on the kitchen wall where the black mold expanded outward like a web, spiraling from the cracks and into others, glistening in the harsh light.
Ives imagined the tumors had been black and tuberous, poison growing inside her father, and her mother’s loathing for life could have been little different. Both stole everything. Ives had and abandoned her with no hope of survival. But she did survive. The abandoned car was her shelter, her home, and though she knew somewhere deep inside that her mother would never return, she continued to wait. Even when she was discovered by a parking officer, even when she was taken back to the station by child service workers, she silently waited. It was only after she was given a room with other children, asked to sleep and eat and wait with boys and girls whose parents had lost them, that she saw the dark entirety of her life in full relief. She was nothing like those children. She remained alone in her cot, staring at the corners of the walls, no longer waiting for something she finally understood would never come.
What she would not reveal was what she witnessed while inside that locked automobile, waiting for her mother to bring her food. People of different shapes and ages walked by, most ignoring the old car, some peering in the windows. For these, she did as her mother instructed and hid beneath a blanket, remaining perfectly still until she was sure they had gone, and then waiting a time longer. There was more outside the car to worry over, more than scarred men and staggering, hard-faced women. There was a presence in the cold, peering from the darkened alleys and discarded refuse, spying from between bricks and mortar. It wanted her, wanted her as she had never been wanted before. Had she known where to go, she might have run and not looked back.
Dim salvation came in the guise of an aunt she never knew existed, summoned from Sherbrooke by the call of the police. Ives was collected into open arms and taken away, back to that small town to be given the sort of life she never thought possible. There, she was safe, impossibly loved by a woman who had given up on a child of her own, and yet Ives still could not scrape her soul of the crooked house’s stain. She lay awake at night in her soft, painted room, wondering whether it was back there that everything had begun to go wrong, if it was there that her infinite choices had been to a single devastating place.
Was that decaying house any different than her? Sickness grew along its foundations, ate away its support, spread in ever-widening circles so as to consume everything around it. Fingers of mold reached out like shadows across the walls, the ceilings, the fl
oors. She could see them quiver in the beam of her flashlight, struggling to be cloaked once again so they would be free to move, to touch, to explore. If she closed her eyes, she could imagine them wrapping around her throat, trying to choke the last dregs of life from her battered body.
She stood at the foot of the uneven stairs to the second floor and felt awash in evocations of childhood more vivid than any before. The flashlight’s small circle climbed the treads before her. Ives found herself surprised it did not light the face of her own younger version, perched on the stair halfway between floors with stuffed toy in hand, staring up at what loomed at the summit. A cold chill ran along Ives’s legs, the specter of something behind her, but the flashlight found nothing—no haunting spirits of the past, no memories made flesh. Instead, there was an empty sitting room, the plaster of its walls crumbling with neglect.
Three bedrooms with open doors waited at the top of the stairs, but she had no desire to enter any of them. The air smelled of stale earth, and she wondered if she had not erred in returning to the house. What hid in the corners of that forgotten hallway? Were they mere shadows or masses of that black mold, expanding from the bubbling walls as though it were more than simply a fungus, as though it were something from beyond trying to force its way through? Part of her sought an explanation that would bring some modicum of sense to all she had experienced, but inside her head was another voice, wiser and unfamiliar, that wanted her to leave the house and never look back. It was that voice she almost obeyed.
But one door, one room, would not be dismissed. She could feel a force within it drawing her, wordlessly promising the answers she had so long sought. The air had so congealed with dust and spores, as dense and sickening as honey, that she had to push her way slowly through it. With each step forward, her hesitation increased. Every fiber of her being warned her, but she continued, despite knowing she would find nothing to bandage her suffering wounds. Closure was a lie the world wanted to believe. But there could be no closure, no ending, There were no circles, only lines, each with a beginning and an end. And there was nothing between.
As though Ives’s vision had once been fogged, suddenly the shape at the center of the room snapped into focus, though Ives did not believe it was possible. It was a crib, her crib—she would forever recognize those slats—but its once-protective shape had been corrupted by teeming black mold. Ives shined her flashlight and saw the mold had spread everywhere, across every wall, every surface, strains of it in a Fibonacci spiral, each tendril recursively spiraling until every surface was inhabited, The black mold pulsed underneath her flashlight like veins of a body, pumping dark ichor throughout. When she traced them back, each strand clearly originated from a single place, one colorless position in the middle of the room. The place where Ives’s blackened crib stood.
She could not resist coughing any longer, the dense air accreting in her lungs, and the echo that reflected did not sound proper. It was as though it emerged from another, one who both mocked Ives while striving to become her. Colder, deeper, it lacked any of the nuances of human speech. It was alien. When she turned around once more to point her flashlight beam at what stood behind her, what she found was not merely spore-filled air but something far worse.
It was a shape, darker than the shadows around it. It had no face, no real head of any kind beyond a formless lump. There were no eyes, but it saw her nonetheless. She knew it saw her, for it choreographed its movements with hers. The thing stood nearly her height, was wider than her by half. Where might have hung arms instead grew a bundle of long tendrils, each pulsing and stretching into the black course that erupted from the crib. The surface of the shapes bubbled like molten rock, cauliflower protuberances covering its body. It was not human, but it wanted to be. Wanted to grow legs and arms and a face. Wanted to look her in the eye for some unfathomable purpose. The smell was utterly repulsive, but it was that odor that clarified its origins, led Ives to understand what it was that slouched toward her, waiting to be born. Holes pockmarked its body, visible only in the light’s reflection off its glazed surface, and those openings shrank with each advancing step, its strength growing. Terror strangled the words in Ives’s throat, but her fractured mind finally put the pieces together. Despite her horrible choking fear, she managed to scream aloud, “Daddy! No!”
But the words aloud revealed their wrongness. The black mold had tricked her, betrayed her, for what reached out and entangled her in its approximate arms was not her father. It could not be. What embraced her in a malodourous grip did so not with anger or resentment, disgust, hate, or vengeance. What took her in its arms was something else. something so foreign to any of those that she did not know if it had a name. But it took her, regardless, and though she struggled like a demon against it, she knew it was too late. She had been infected. The black alien spores within her had finally taken root.
She remained an eternity in its embrace, time itself slowed by the solidified air. Thoughts coursed through her suspended mind, visions of the past feverishly rushing by, stripped of all meaning. She had no control, her resistance paling in the face of the sickly mold’s control. She could not breathe, her body struggling for air but unable to expel the mass of spores from her lungs. The tendrils that bound her absorbed her convulsions. As though in defense, her mind detached itself and fell into a warm state of delirium.
When consciousness returned, it did so gradually. It was only when she finally opened her eyes that the briar of tendrils that trapped her loosened their grip. Ives fell the floor, breathless, black decay spewing from her lungs, and looked up to see that half-formed grotesquery before her start to liquefy, the dark ooze seeping into the cracks between the warped floorboards. Coughing, she found herself reaching toward it, but, as her hand pressed into it, what remained burst like a thin membrane and rained the rest of its foulness onto the thirsty floor.
When Ives finally found strength enough to stand, she did so on wobbly legs. Her chest still burned from what she had experienced; her head ached, full of unsettled memories. She retrieved the flashlight from where it had fallen and used it to discover that no trace of the half-formed thing remained. But there was more that had disappeared. The dark crib in the middle of the room had gone as well. As she shined the light on the walls around her, she saw that the mesh of fungus no longer glistened as it had before. Its color dulled, pieces had already begun to fall away. It was then Ives experienced the vivid realization of how utterly empty the house really was, how devoid of anything that she might care about. It was the debris of another life, remnants of another world that fell further away the faster the warming spores inside of her multiplied and grew. Pieces of wall crumbled around her like an avalanche, but she uneasily stepped over the debris and toward the rickety stairs. With each step she took, more strength returned, her once stumbling steps becoming confident strides. As her fear ebbed, the house’s walls began to shrink, returning to a shape more ordinary than her memories once painted. Pieces of the house rained down around her as she strode to the front door. When she reached it she threw it open, letting a flood of daylight sweep into the house.
She stepped outside and marveled. The sun had risen, something the mold-coated windows could no longer keep secret. She stared up at the hanging orb. Though she wanted to look away, she could not. It was too large, too overwhelming, and she felt its intense heat. It burned away the last part of her taking refuge in the crumbling house of her childhood, a house she had built from the bricks of her past. She walked away from it and never looked back.
Simon Strantzas is the author of the critically-acclaimed short story collections Beneath the Surface, Cold to the Touch, and Nightingale Songs, as well as the editor of Shadows Edge. His writing has appeared in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, and has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award. He lives in Toronto, Canada, with his wife and an unyielding hunger for the flesh of the living. Find out more at www.strantzas.com.
It was then that he saw the angel. It stood by the tool shed. It did not descend in a cloud, nor announce itself with voices singing . . .
THE BIRD COUNTRY
K. M. Ferebee
Childer killed the boy during the night, quietly, on the bed’s Egyptian cotton sheets. On sheets as white as sun lining the back of the Nile, he knelt atop the boy, knees on either side of his chest, and held a pillow over the boy’s face until he ceased to breathe. Childer had to check, afterwards, the breath. He checked it with a hand mirror: the Victorian way. If some small exhalation smeared the glass, then Childer would have to cover the face again. It felt sullied the second time around, profane. The path from life to death should be direct and steady. There shouldn’t be any detours along the way.
The boy’s name was Finn, and he was fair-haired. Sixteen years old. Childer had taken him out for a walk in the fields. The fields fallow this close to winter, stripped of their hay. Finn’s breath came in pale, coiled bursts against the frosted air. In the warm molting color of autumn his hair seemed light, his skin translucent. He wore a woolen scarf. His family were Irish, and it was in his manner of speaking, his long soft vowels as he said, “In the old days, of course, people knew what winter meant. Not just a season, but the killing season. When the light and heat go out of things. How do we know we’ll get them back? That’s a lot of Christian faith, right there.”
In the house between night and dawn, as Finn’s body cooled beside him on the cotton sheets and the country wind came cold through the cracks in the glass pane, Childer thought about the boy’s voice saying these things. He liked its lilt—the foreign liveliness that reminded him of birds moving upwards and downwards in the sky. His own voice was without accent. It troubled him, this absence of a quality others seemed so effortlessly to achieve. He touched Finn’s thin white throat, then his bruised-looking lips. The muscles that moved to make sound leave the body were still. Childer closed his eyes, but was unable to sleep. When the light turned a first fragile blue, he rose and donned his work boots. He set a pot of coffee brewing in the kitchen and went to the back garden to dig a grave.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition Page 41
