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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  Outside the sun seemed weak and screened through water. White clouds moved swiftly overhead. He brushed ice from the books weighting the bed of the pick-up; scraped the windscreen clean. The engine heaved when started, like an animal roughly awakened. Childer directed the truck down the road and away.

  At sixty or seventy miles per hour he sometimes felt he was no longer limited to his body that other things contained him instead. The long fences with barbed wire starry between their pillars, the animals gut-split by the side of the road. The low grass that clung to the bad soil by the shoulder, the vultures aloft and eyeing their prey. Then the sight of something beautiful would rise up out of the landscape and reduce him. That had been Finn: a hitchhiker, slightly sunburnt at the roadside. Childer’s human desire had stirred. Now he increased his speed, hungry for the sense of exaltation. But the world around him played dead.

  When he reached the bakery, the night shift boy was still working. Relief swept him like a strong wind, leaving him shaky on his feet. He stood in the warm sweet air of the shop and watched the boy arrange pastries on wax paper. The sleeves of his sweatshirt were pushed up past his elbows, putting the thin bones of his wrists on display. The sweatshirt was hooded and worn, just like the angel’s.

  The boy looked up. “What can I get for you today?”

  “Just a cup of coffee,” Childer said. He didn’t want the coffee, but he wanted to see the boy make it. Raising the carafe, careful with the hot and fragrant steam. The boy’s hands wrapped around the cup, leaving fingerprints, traces. Childer’s gaze traveled from the cup to the boy’s face. His eyes were gray, his hair wheat-colored. A silver chain cut across the hollow of his throat, where his pulse was beating. Childer could not see what depended from the chain. He wanted to press his thumb there till the pulse slowed and stilled. Till the heart ceded its function, surrendered, abstained.

  He had thought to stay and offer the boy a ride home when his shift ended. But indecision gripped him. He felt restless in his own skin. He remembered the angel waiting in the garden. He wondered how he would explain the presence of the boy. The new body the inevitable grave. The earth was hard and to break it would take hours. The angel would watch him, unspeaking. Flowers would crawl from where the boy’s body was laid. Childer measured his want against the wan horror of this image: the flowers seething inexorably upwards, pity printed on the angel’s luminous face. When he pictured it he could feel his hands raw where they would grip the shovel. The red pain reminding him of what he couldn’t bear.

  He walked rapidly from the bakery and came to rest with his forehead pressed against the truck’s front window. Snow wasn’t falling any longer, but the glass was cold, so cold he couldn’t feel it. It was a relief. He closed his eyes and pictured birds flying, dozens of them and then thousands, so many he could count them only by the sound of their wings. They flashed before his eyes, dark forms, bound for a new country. He wanted to follow them, but they had no set direction. They moved according to a tropic pull, like plants that navigate towards sunlight, their secret course whispered to them in germination, destination obscure yet somehow plain.

  For hours after leaving the bakery he drove without aim. Out in the cropped fields nothing stirred amongst the blunted rows of corn or cotton. The sunlight was closer to silver than gold. He tasted snow on the wind. Once or twice the tires of his truck skidded. He imagined leaving the tarmac, the truck’s body flipping, his head snapping against the windscreen before coming to rest. He had weighted the pick-up bed against such an accident, but now he found he wanted it.

  When the sun had passed its summit he pulled off on the shoulder and parked the truck. He took the encyclopedias from the pick-up bed and began to tear out their pages in fistfuls, as many pages as he could seize in his hand. They were so thin under his fingers that he was reminded of the shells cicadas left in the summer, clinging like living creatures to the bark of trees. Wind lifted the pages and carried them over the fields until Childer could no longer see them. The photographs of aurora, gone forever; the diagrams of birds and all their migrancies. Floating like foreign snow over distant farms and townships, coming to nest in the bare trees. As each book emptied, he dropped the binding. His hands ached where the paper had cut him, but the cuts were not deep enough to bleed.

  The angel was sleeping in the garden. Childer stood over it for a long while, watching. Its unconscious hands gripped at the roots of the plants that grew around it, milkweed and paintbrush and the dark ivy that had now overtaken the house’s wall. There was no sign in the garden that snow had fallen. Flowers were blooming, thick and lavish. Their scent intoxicated him. The leaves of the ivy stirred. Childer heard in the sound something that was almost language: a half-speech, subtle and inhuman. He bent and touched the angel’s face. Its skin was cold. It didn’t waken. He stroked its hair, like he would a child’s; covered its mouth, like he had done to Finn in his dream. An edge of sunlight stayed with it, despite the approach of winter. It was the most beautiful thing Childer had seen.

  “Why did you come here?” he asked it. His voice cracked on the question. He could not bring himself to imagine the days to come: ivy overgrowing the doors and windows, ryegrass creeping gradually through the cracks in the floor. The scent of summer from the garden, like a ghost of what had gone away. And the angel, lambent in its mercy, like a star whose brightness he could not contain.

  He lifted the angel in his arms. Its body was very light. He carried it inside the house, through the kitchen, to the bedroom, where he laid it on the cotton sheets. Tenderly, Childer knelt above it, his knees on either side of its narrow body. He placed a hand against its neck, finding the pulse point.

  The angel opened its eyes. It was still slow with sleep. It smiled and tried to raise itself on the bed. Childer prevented it. He applied pressure where he gripped its throat. The angel’s smile disappeared. Still it did not struggle. Could it die? Childer wasn’t sure. He no longer operated according to logic. Another instinct dictated the actions of his hands. He bore down on the body beneath him. The angel smelled like bruised grass, growing things. Its arms moved convulsively against him, then were still. For a moment Childer saw wings spread out against the Egyptian cotton, wings of a whiteness that put the Nile sun to shame. He turned his head; he couldn’t bear their radiance. They were large enough to carry a man away. He pressed his own forehead to the angel’s. A ragged sob escaped him. He felt the angel’s arms enfold him gently. There would be no release.

  K. M. Ferebee’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Masters Review, Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Not One of Us, and Shimmer. Her nonfiction work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail. Previously she worked as a professional musician in the United States and Europe. Now she is pursuing new careers. Her interests include foreign languages, the philosophy of time travel, and obscure ethical choices. She lives in Texas.

  There were five tiny holes in the sand, each one directly in front of a toe depression. Claws. And the toes were webbed.

  SINKING AMONG LILIES

  Cory Skerry

  I studied the village of Keyward from the packed gravel by the water. Judging by the skulls roped to the pylons in the estuary, the people here knew how to take care of themselves. But even if there was no fight to be had, perhaps the townsfolk would be interested in the one and only book I had to sell.

  I peered at one of the skulls as I passed. It had been there long enough to have lost the lower jaw and most of the teeth; mussels the size of my thumbnails had attached themselves to the sides like bristling purple sideburns.

  It was common enough on the coast to tie pirate corpses out for the gulls, but I couldn’t help but remember how easily I might have become a pirate myself all those years ago, suddenly homeless with only my learned violence to serve me. I shuddered and renewed the tactic of Floating-Among-Lilies, taking a deep breath and transforming the air into a false pink light that only I could see, caressing the edges
of my vision as I exhaled. Thus calmed, I guided my horse along the muddy sand that bordered Keyward.

  The town hunched above salt-worn rocks, bisected by a harried stream. The tall, narrow buildings were almost disguised by the pines, but even from the bottom of the hill I could see iron bars on the lower-level windows. Wooden bridges fluttered with laundry, some of it sporting faded, rusty stains. Bandages.

  The closest building was a stout inn with a pattern of pale streaks marking the walls. Scars from dismantled scaffolding, I realized when I noticed there were iron grids installed across the upper windows as well.

  High above me, a man with a crossbow lazed on a balcony on the second floor. He wasn’t rude enough to aim yet, but his eyes were on me. I was an unusual sight, a woman traveling alone.

  I waved. He pulled a cord. Perhaps it meant I was friendly; perhaps it was a warning. I thought it best to wait for a greeting.

  Expensive defenses like glass, iron, and crossbows meant that Keyward not only had a supernatural threat but they could afford a trained professional to deal with it. I just needed to convince them they’d rather hire me than await the slow mercy of the Assembly of the Divine Lady.

  “Good day, cousin.”

  A man with a dark woolly beard the size of his own head stepped out of the inn, looking down from a wooden terrace that wrapped around the ground floor. Jagged scraps of iron stuck out of the shadows beneath the walk where he stood. The scars from the scaffolding stopped just under the defenses, and I wondered why they’d even bothered putting grids on the windows when anathema would have to get past those enormous iron teeth.

  Clusters of gold coins tipped each of his matted ropes of hair. They only fell past his chin, so he hadn’t been wealthy for long. Mine were to my waist, and while I had a modest amount of coin woven in, I had never had to cut a single one to use it. I wondered what had prompted him to shave his head and start over. That kind of ostentatious prosperity belonged on a tough street lord in a port city, or at least a mercenary like myself—not an innkeeper on the coast.

  Aloud, I only said, “Good day to you, cousin. My second name is Bane. I’m looking for a room.”

  “My second name’s Browan. If you like the place, you can bring your horse ’round back.”

  We entered through the inn’s front door, which held seven different locks and a bar, all of them forged of iron. The windows, too, had been built to keep out anathema—the sills were iron, as were the bars that held the glass panes in place. Keyward could definitely afford my services, and moreover, seemed to need them.

  Browan passed me a drink when I asked for his best. “No one in these parts understands what best means,” he said. “Something tells me you’ve traveled enough to advise whether or not it’s worth the word.”

  My eyes wandered over the room as I swilled the brew over my tongue. Stuffed creatures—mostly shore birds and small predators—perched on the rafters; pelts of marine mammals like seals, otter, and beaver hung above the mantel.

  “It’s darker than I would have brewed it, but if you’re not already sending kegs to Kalperry, consider doing so.”

  “Thank you. Please pardon me if I’m impolite . . . ” I knew without a doubt what he would ask. His line of sight wasn’t quite meeting my eyes. “Out here, we don’t get many westerners. I’m familiar with the Lady’s Column. But your mark?”

  “It’s called the Exit Cross,” I said. Or, to some, the Betrayer’s Cross, but I kept that to myself. The first line represented the pillars that held up the roof of the Lady’s temple. The second intersected it at the center and divided my forehead into quadrants. “I don’t serve the Lady.”

  When Browan rang a bell, an unkempt ghost of a child, all bare feet and shaggy white-blond hair, scurried in and left a tray with thick rye bread, cheese, and an apple. The child darted back out, leaving only an impression of androgyny and fear.

  “If not the Lady, who do you serve, cousin? If you don’t mind me asking?”

  “The people,” I said. “I put an end to trouble. I’m not cheap, but I’m well worth the expense.” I took a bite of cheese, a bite of apple, and a bite of bread, and chewed them all at once. One, two, fifteen, swallow. A seer had predicted my end in a storm of fire and blood, which I preferred to the ignominious death of choking at table.

  “Why would people hire you, instead of sending for the free aid of the disciples of the Fierce Mother?” He sounded genuinely interested.

  “The Fierce Mother is slow in her aid,” I said wryly. “And no one in her employ has this.”

  I unbuckled my cloak and withdrew my line of prizes. I coiled the thin linen rope on the table, letting the trinkets form a clinking spiral of teeth and bones and one withered, resin-encapsulated eye.

  He sucked in a breath, and pointed at the last. “This?”

  “Sandwiel. Kypteri desert. Nothing from the eastern coast, yet, though I saw bandages hanging on the bridges. Perhaps I’ll take a prize here.”

  Browan leaned back and laughed. “Nothing so dramatic as a sandwiel here, I’m afraid. Mackilvie got in a fight with a seal over who owned the fish in his net.”

  “And the defenses on the walls?”

  “That . . . that is for something else,” he said. He smiled. “We’ll take care of it, though. We have a book on anathema, and it’s served us well so far.”

  “The author?”

  He said my name, and I laughed a bittersweet laugh. He clearly didn’t believe me, so I pulled my sword partly from its sheath that he might see IMURI BANE engraved in the hilt.

  “You’ll write yourself out of a job,” he said.

  “Sadly, never. Knowing their nature doesn’t necessarily render someone capable of defeating them. Have you identified the anathema?”

  “If I tell you,” he teased, “you’ll kill it and send us a bill. Think of Keyward as a vacation, cousin.”

  He showed me to my room, which was an attic loft with a bed near the warm stones of the chimney. Perhaps I would write myself out of a job, but I wasn’t going to stop using my bounties to have that book copied again, and again, and again.

  Anathema was the blanket term the church encouraged, and it was commonly thought that all anathema were the same: supernatural constructs that could take any form they chose, to torment humanity and tempt us or herd us away from faith. Within the Order of the Fierce Mother, however, we were taught the science of anathema, their anatomy, husbandry, and nature.

  I had come to trust in that science. It had saved my life. I’d pushed for posters and books detailing the forms in which anathema could appear, disseminated among the parishes. “Teach them how to classify, discover, and avoid anathema. They should know how to combat these threats,” I’d insisted.

  High Priest Kellar had smiled at me like a patient father with an unruly child. He responded with the motto of the Order of the Fierce Mother: “It is for us to fight with a sword; they must fight with faith.”

  “We can’t protect them all the time. And it takes us time to answer a summons. We must teach fishermen that a selkie’s blood spilled in the sea will certainly raise a storm. They should learn how to extinguish a marshlight, how to lay the fitful dead to rest.”

  “Without the fear of the dark, Sister Imuri, what need would they have for us, the bringers of light?” Priest Kellar had asked.

  Even thinking about it warmed my guts with a familiar anger. I quickly renewed Floating-Among-Lilies to quell the feeling. When my heart was cool again, I excused myself to tend to my horse. Once done, I exited the dim stable and headed back to the inn, toward the kitchen entry. The lines I had thought were scars from scaffolding continued up the walls to the doorjamb, but here they skewed and overlapped, the crosshatching of a mad artist with a knife. Now I could see them for what they were—claw marks.

  Something had tried to climb inside, and Browan’s mysterious remarks made me suspect it would try again. The scratches weren’t deep—it wasn’t digging its way through.

  It was ju
st writing the promise that it would.

  The science of anathema arrayed itself in my thoughts unbidden. I counted the marks—five in each swipe—layered from multiple nights of scratching. They reached as high as a man, avoiding the iron fittings on the window frames and the kitchen door.

  Whatever it was, it was as big as me. Something that size wasn’t a fair match for ignorant villagers with nothing but a book written by an ex-priest.

  I made certain to bar my door when I retired for the night.

  I woke to a woman’s scream.

  The crescent moon was wasting away on the western horizon and a wet smear of light marked the east. Fog blanketed the sea and shore, fading into wisps among the trees, but from my window, I could see dark shapes slithering through the white miasma, and the shouts of men ricocheted through the ravine.

  I renewed Floating-Among-Lilies, which had torn in my sleep, leaving me with dreams that were sometimes black-and-white and devoid of emotion and sometimes fiery bursts of passion that seemed to break my heart. I was grateful for the awakening.

  With the clawmarks as a warning, I’d slept in my clothes. I donned the thin mail shirt and skirt. As I wiggled my helm into place, my thumbs touched the rusted holes on either side where the holy smith had desecrated his own work by tearing out the wings.

  Browan’s wife stood in front of the fire, clutching a shapeless bit of cloth in one hand and a knife in the other. In firelight, the hunting trophies looked particularly grisly where they stared down from the walls.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Anathema stole a child from Fenny Smith.” She stared at my scarred armor and the Exit Cross on my forehead. After a moment, she pointed through the window. “Up the south hill, above the smithy.”

  I strode out the door into the mist and crossed the narrow ravine that divided the town. Watching-as-the-Owl, I peered between the houses wedged onto the steep hillside. If there was danger, I wanted to see it first. Only moths stirred around the smith’s windows, though the walls below were scored with now-familiar claw marks. Sobs echoed within.