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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  K_______ ’s hands peeled the flesh back still further. I could see solder marks, where seams had been joined.

  “The hide isn’t dry. How did he get it to heal? What did he use? How does it move?”

  He attempted haphazardly to slice into the tigress’ chest, denting the metal. He pulled up the tigress’ eyelid, his fingernail tapping at her pupil. Glass. I looked at her feet. The strange marks I’d seen in the village had not been made by claws. Henry had given her knives, forged into the shape of talons.

  I felt myself half-smiling, an echo of the old enchantment, Henry’s genius, Henry as a shikari.

  “Whatever he’s done, however he’s done it,” K_______ said, his voice scarcely under control, wobbling with joy, “We’ll lead an expedition back here. Photographers. Film cameras.”

  He jabbed the scalpel into a seam between the metal pieces, levering at it. A dark fluid leaked out. Blood? Not blood? Henry never explained himself. I still had K_______’s rifle. I swung it slowly around to the front. When he heard the click, he looked up, entirely startled.

  “What are you doing?”

  I fired into K_______’s face, approximating the angle he himself would have taken had he stumbled over his own weapon in the forest, drunk on gin, and a fool. I left him where he lay, skull exposed. I used my handkerchief to polish his rifle and put it into his own hands. Took his scalpel.

  Anyone who found K_______’s body would imagine he’d been attacked by a tiger, and inadvertently shot himself in the scuffle.

  I chopped down two saplings, lashed the tigress to them with my machan ropes, and began a laborious drag. I’d drop her into that ravine. Everything was clear to me now. If the world learned of this tiger, they’d cut down the forests to find more like her, though surely there were no more. This would’ve taken Henry years to accomplish, however it was he’d done it. Magic. Gears.

  Kumaon would be overrun. All the remaining living tigers would be taken, shot, opened like stuffed toys, left to dry in the sun, unused, unburied.

  I hauled her through the trees, straining at her great weight, squinting toward the earliest light, toward the place I remembered from 1918. If I threw her off the cliffs here, she would not be found. Dead, I’d tell the villagers, and fallen, just as I’d told them before. My fingers were blue with cold despite the effort of hauling her, and my breath came sharply, each gasp painful.

  At last, I found the place, and panting, unlashed her. My heart, by this juncture, was pounding inside me like something independent of my body, a metal bird flying for no reason other than someone else’s will.

  I pushed the tigress over the edge. I watched her fall for the second time, her golden face and fur, her gleaming, opened breast. I was not watching my footing. Is it any wonder I fell? Not from the cliff, as I might deserve, but over a small rise, and into a clearing, flat rock beneath me.

  Hours have passed. I cannot stand. It’s cold now, and the light fades again. My left leg, in my trousers, is bent in such a way that I know it would be useless to attempt to place it back in line. I’ve bled into the ice, and it shines like a glass ruby on an elephant’s forehead.

  I have this journal, and my pencil, and I write for comfort. What else do I have, after all these years wandering in the wilderness? Tomorrow, I’ll burn these words. I write only to tell myself what happened, not to place the story into the world.

  Out there in the sky I see each star again, and like every man dying from the beginning of his days, I regret the things I didn’t do, and I regret the things I did.

  19 September 1950

  Dawn.

  All night, Henry’s tigers paced around me, circling close enough to brush me with their fur. I couldn’t count them, couldn’t name them. There may be hundreds, or twelve, or a thousand.

  Now, the sun is risen, and snow has fallen here at the top of this mountain, over me and around my body. If I could stand, I might look down again onto my own lost village, the teardrop lake at the center of the vista like the eye of a god, wide open for eternity, never freezing, never anything more or less than blue. No passage to heaven from that lake. One needs a river, one needs a fire, one needs bones.

  Ram nam satya hai, sing the voices in my memory, a hymn to carry the victims away, shrouded and saved from further sorrow.

  What will the tigers leave of me? Will there be bones to send to my wife? Who will find them here? The villagers await the sound of my fire, five shots to come and take the tiger from here, but I won’t fire this rifle again. They will assume me dead, along with K_______, and the tigress escaped.

  When I turn my head, all I can see in this clearing are pugmarks, tracks circling over tracks, lines and circuits, loops and letters. Each of the footfalls, each of the places where a tail touched the earth, each spatter of blood, each piece of fur brushed onto a tree trunk tells me something.

  Coded lines left behind by Henry, placed in the tiger’s metal minds, along with the calls he gave them, but I’ve no key to break them. When the cats move, I hear their machinery now, the sound of gears against gears, metal against metal.

  All these years haunted by a ghost that wasn’t. All these years imagining tracks around my house, when they were here all along. There are no ghosts but the ones you make.

  I lay last night in the dark and heard the tigers dragging their claws through the snow, each one marking my name. That, at least, was mine, but it’s become something the tigers use. I can’t read it, but I know it belonged to me, just as one knows a book read long ago, the margins scarred with ink, the pages folded down. A possession. This book, this journal, I’d know anywhere. I sought to burn it, but my firestarter is wet, and I can’t strike a flame. Perhaps the tigers will take it too.

  In my hand, I have a penknife, given to me by Henry, the handle made of something’s bones, the blade so thin now that it scarcely exists. Used on pelts, and on tin cans, and on apples, and on birds. Used on tigers and leopards, on man-eaters all over India. Used on tiger cubs. Two hearts eaten, and I thought it made me a man and gave me a vengeance on all the things that take hunters from their lives.

  Over my head, high and far away, an airplane tears a line across the heavens, hunting some smaller prey, and I think about a sky filled with roaring ghosts. I feel displaced in time, a traveler returning home after decades spent in a place where years passed at a strange rate. If I came down from the mountains now, an old man, I might find the children I left in this village thirty-two years ago. I might find myself, walking into the woods. I might find Henry, twisting metal into life.

  I am well-acquainted with the paths to heaven from this part of the mountains. I do not expect heaven.

  Send my bones up in smoke along with those I killed, and let us hunt together, shifting between prey and shikari, stalking, killing enemies already dead. The bones in my pouch belong to the dead. Burn them.

  A hunter hunts. We are all hunters here.

  Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the historical fantasy Queen of Kings, the first volume of a trilogy. Previously, she wrote The Year of Yes: A Memoir, which has been translated into nine languages, and optioned for television and film. She has appeared as a featured author and speaker at venues including The Texas Book Festival and Wordstock, and has been interviewed on a variety of national and international television and radio programs, including The Today Show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, and many more. Her writing has appeared in and/or been excerpted in a number of literary anthologies, the New York Times, Elle, the Washington Post, and more. As a playwright, she is the creator of The Upstart Crow Project, an organization that will commission thirty-seven female playwrights to adapt all the plays of Shakespeare into contemporary versions. She is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and lives in Brooklyn.

  Alone in her apartment she could let down her hair to slither, unrestrained . . .

  PEARLS

  Priya Sharma

  I sat in the park watching a couple who were like all lovers, only intent on one another. Th
e girl was a beauty ripe for harvest, her hair a golden sheaf. The boy’s desire was visible in the way he kissed her. I felt a pang. I, too, had been lovely once and loved.

  My hair made jealous noises in sympathy.

  A man walked by and I could hear the furious beat that was piped straight into his ears. His curious gaze slid over my sunglasses and cap, then the sketches on my pad.

  I loved the park. It had appeared in my work many times. I liked how it muted the traffic’s song and softened the steel and glass towers with a shimmering heat haze. I felt sleepy and my pencil made loose, lazy marks on the page, but the coils that passed for my hair were invigorated by the warmth. I hissed at them but the serpents twitched and jerked. They refused to be stilled. They longed to creep and crawl, to enjoy sunlight on their scales.

  The young lovers were staring at me.

  It was time to go so I packed my things away. Somehow, it was always time to go.

  I lived a quiet life, contained within three rooms. Sunshine flooded in through long windows and fell upon the bed, whose sheets were stained with turps and paint. Alone in my apartment I could let down my hair to slither, unrestrained. Without the need for dark glasses, my eyes had to readjust to the light.

  My paintings covered the walls. They occupied tables and chairs. They crowded out the clothes from my closet. Canvases were lined up in the plate rack. I filled a crate and sent it to the gallery when I needed funds. The pantheon of my former life was resurrected. Hermes riding the Staten Island ferry. The Graces shopping on Fifth Avenue. Bacchus drinking in a Brooklyn bar. Eros pimping in Harlem, wearing a ridiculous fur coat.

  I adored the city but it rarely noticed me. Sometimes I’d hear a long low whistle or the call of freak. I’d even been stopped and dollar bills pressed into my palm. Either alms for needy or an invitation to spend a sweaty afternoon in a hotel room. I always declined and went home, filled with difficult wishes, to lie upon the shambles of my bed. When it got too much to bear I’d get up and occupy myself in a fury of oil paint. I’d work until the insomnia and hunger made me weak. Elation made the colors bright and the pictures came alive.

  I watched the night retreat from my window. I stood there until the shops’ shutters rolled up to reveal their displays. A rainbow of plastic beads. Vintage handbags with creases etched into the leather. Indecent mannequins in wispy lace underwear.

  I felt confined. I needed to be outside. I wound a scarf about my head to keep the serpents in check and selected a pair of dark glasses from the basket by the door.

  There was a man on the stairs. He stared at me.

  “I’m Paul.” His proffered hand forced me to stop. “I’ve just moved in across the hall from you. I wondered when we’d meet.”

  I took his hand. After all, I’d no reason to be afraid.

  “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Maddy.” I’d forgotten the order of social niceties.

  Paul peered into my darkened glasses as if trying to see through them. My hair made chattering noises.

  “Did you say something?”

  “No,” I replied.

  “This building echoes. I’m not used to it yet.”

  “Have we met before?”

  “Now you come to mention it, you do seem familiar.” Paul cocked his head on one side “Where are you from, Maddy? Where’s home?”

  I was out of world and time. I’d sickened of home, my villa full of torchlight, shadows and statues. The mosaics of my courtyard were obscured by mud, where once they’d been swept clean each day. Broken urns collected rainwater. Fine tapestries rotted where they hung. I kept the remains of a silenced lyre, the strings long since snapped, beside the pile of rags that were my bed.

  Home was dangerous. Men came with swords and spears, wanting fame and fortune, to feast and fornicate on the glory of the tale. The battles and vigils exhausted me. Arrows clattered on my breastplate. Javelins struck my shield. Sometimes they used a net as if that could hold me. Tall shadows fell on the walls and reached around corners to find me. There’d be whistles, shouts and the smash of stone as I sent one of them crashing to the floor. The air was fetid with fear. I could taste it on my forked tongue.

  The supplicants were worse. They left dishes on milk on the veranda as if I were a pet. Then there was a tribute. A caged mouse. Ravenous, I shoved the wriggling rodent in my mouth and crunched down. Its lifeless tail hung from my lips. A little death compared with all the rest but it caused me so much shame that I ran away. I slithered into the dark, my green tail rattling a warning to worshippers. They fled around me into the trees. More than one stone effigy was found the following morning, immortalized in its own horror.

  I sought the safety of the valley, home only to thorny bushes and bony goats. I meant to spend a night or two. To find a shaded hole full of snakes and sleep. To lie down without the stealthy whispers of swords being unsheathed.

  I must have been tired because I slept for over a thousand years.

  “You ask a lot of questions.”

  “I’m a curious man.” Paul stroked his beard. “Have you ever been to California?”

  “No, maybe one day.”

  We’d progressed to the front step of the building.

  “You should. The Pacific’s terrific. Would you have breakfast with me?” He didn’t pause long enough for me to decline his invitation. “Are you doing anything special today?”

  “Yes. No.” I was taken aback by my own rashness. “Breakfast would be wonderful.”

  Paul’s grin revealed uneven, ivory teeth.

  We walked side by side. Paul had the rolling stride of a man at no one’s command.

  “What do you do for a living?” I asked him.

  “I trained as an oceanographer but I’ve done a few different things in my time.”

  “And what about now?”

  “Antiquities dealer. Ancient Greece mainly.” Paul smiled. “It’s a passion of mine. I’ve quite a personal collection.”

  I’d thought all the believers, hunters and collectors were dead. That I’d managed to outlive them all. If Paul fell into any of these categories, then we should celebrate. One of us would soon be extinct.

  “I like lost things,” Paul continued. “I was a bit lost myself for a while. It made me reconsider what’s important. Reconciliation. Forgiveness. That life must go on once grief and anger have gone.”

  “What caused that bout of introspection?”

  “A woman. What else?”

  I snorted.

  “What have you lost, Maddy?”

  We stopped at a crossing, the crush of bodies at our back.

  “Everything,” I replied, “everything that mattered. Some things were taken from me and the rest I threw away.”

  I awoke in a panic after my millennium of sleep. The weight of the world crushed me. I’d shed my skin while I’d slumbered and it had become a fibrous shroud. I’d regrown legs instead. My tongue was fused, not forked anymore. My overgrown fingernails had curled over on themselves and broke into strange brass spirals as I clawed at the earth. Villagers now inhabited my burial plot and saw me crawl out of the ground and stumble on unpliant legs. I tried to avert my eyes but they got in my way. I left the curious ones with more than feet of clay.

  I had to find a means to travel. I had to get away. A traveling show was the only way to go. Home became a shabby caravan. Crowds queued to glimpse my reflection. They saw me in the looking glass, stripped to the waist except for a string of pearls. A mass of writhing serpents hung down from my head and covered my breasts. My eyes shocked them the most though. Yellow, the pupils slits, not circles.

  It was a living of a kind. It was a kind of life. I’d have gone on with but for the Lion Man who shook me from my apathy. He knocked on the door of my caravan and asked to come in. He kissed me, unaware of the incompatibility of our species. Or perhaps he didn’t care. I didn’t either. I had my spectacles on. His mane tickled my face.

  “Don’t you find me ugly?” I asked.


  “You’re the most gorgeous gorgon I’ve ever encountered.”

  It was my fault.

  The Lion Man ripped off his shirt. My glasses fell to the floor. I was thrilled into forgetfulness by his warm flesh and opened my eyes, just for a moment. His erection was stone against my stomach. I was caught in his flinty embrace and had to wiggle free.

  I laid him on my bed and covered him with a blanket. I made a bundle of my things. The extra sets of spectacles, spare clothes, my pearls, and an apple I’d saved for supper. It was time to go. Somehow, it was always time to go.

  Paul and I ordered breakfast from a waitress who looked timeless in a black dress and white apron. Her smooth, dark hair was twisted into a bun. A waiter was writing the specials on a blackboard while another wiped down the marble counter.

  “You never take your glasses off.” Paul spoke between mouthfuls.

  “I’ve a rare eye condition. My specialist’s told me to keep my glasses on.”

  “I’m sorry.” Paul looked at me as though he could diagnose the fault through my lenses.

  “That’s nice.”

  “What is?”

  “Nice of you to be sorry.” I stirred my cappuccino. The cocoa dust mingled with the froth. It looked like marbled paper.

  “I love your style—the boots, the dreds, the headscarf. Where are you from?”

  “Here and there. I’ve traveled a lot.”

  “Like?”

  “Europe mostly.” I tore open a croissant, scattering flakes.

  “Doing what?”

  “Painting. Dancing. Idling.”

  Paul’s eyes were fixed on his empty plate. It occurred me that he might be bored. That he might want to leave and I’d spend another day alone.

  “Hey, how about I show you some of my favorite places?”

  “Aren’t you busy?” He screwed up his napkin in his fist. “You must have things to do. Like painting. Dancing. Idling.”