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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  The mood had soured. I felt the unexpected sting of tears and was grateful for my glasses. “Of course. We’ll go back.”

  “No,” he covered my hand with his. “You can’t go back. You can only go forward. Give me a tour.”

  I kept moving after the Lion Man. I danced, blindfolded, in a Parisian nightclub. I undulated under dimmed lights, moving in a stupor with all those eyes directly on me. My scanty costume itched. I told fortunes in Prague, my face hidden behind a veil. I was no prophet. I couldn’t even see a future for myself but I tried to give solace to the hopeless. London followed with its smog, lamplight, and piecework. I stitched gloves in a garret. I wearied of being treated as if diseased or as a victim. I was backed into an alley by a man with a scalpel. Such a dapper gent to be wreaking havoc on the flesh. I slipped off my specs and gave him a long, hard stare.

  I was no stranger to brutality but the old world was depraved. Time to usher in the new. I sold some of my pearls to ensure comfortable passage. It was a long voyage spent confined to my cabin. The ship bobbed up and down in the swell like a bath toy of the gods. I lay on my bed listening as the water thumped the hull. Poseidon’s heart beat in my ear.

  The Statue of Liberty was as fine as any Titan and it made my heart glad to see her green skin. I slid from the ship into the oily black water, my belongings towed behind me in a sealed oilskin bag. My serpents were limp with hypothermia by the time I crawled onto the banks of the Hudson.

  My hate for Poseidon wouldn’t abate but it grieved me to sell off his pearls, one by one. Each was a lustrous story. They’d fall from Poseidon’s ears, nostrils and mouth whenever we quarrelled. It was his way of getting me to laugh and make up with him.

  Paul and I sat in the atrium of the Frick Museum, chaperoned by an angel. She was an impassive creature carved in marble, her wings folded high on her back. Sunlight flooded through the glass ceiling. The fronds of the ferns were delicate under my fingers.

  “I love it here because it looks like a home, not a stuffy museum.” I remembered the Frick family. A cunning clan of robber barons who’d discovered gentility and art. They’d built this mansion overlooking the park. “I can imagine the Frick women sitting here, gossiping.”

  “You look sad.” Paul was tender voiced.

  Sad for my home that was like this, except that my courtyard was open to the elements so that the mosaic floor glistened underfoot when it rained. Water trickled from the dolphin spouts into the central cistern. I’d sit there with my sisters, Sthen and Euryale, sewing and talking.

  Sthen would play that damn lyre of hers. She was never very good at it. Euryale giggled as she asked, “What’s Poseidon like? Is he more salty than mortal men?”

  Sthen tutted and blushed but listened, breath held for my answer.

  I took Paul to Grand Central Station to view the crowds from the balcony. It was a grand ballet. People moved with such purpose that I felt tired just watching them.

  “Let me show you The Whispering Gallery.”

  I’d read about it but had no one with which to test the theory. I took Paul’s hand and pulled him down the long, low steps. The spot was underground. Not a gallery at all but the junction of four subterranean walkways. The space was marked with four corner pillars that rose to meet at the apex of the tiled dome. I took Paul by the shoulders and put him facing one of the pillars like a child cornered for their naughtiness.

  “Don’t move.” I went to the opposite pillar and spoke to it. “Can you hear me?”

  “That’s amazing.” His voice came back to me. “Can anyone else hear us?”

  “No, the sound transmits from one pillar to the opposite one, across the dome.”

  “You’re beautiful.” It sounded like we were in bed together and he was whispering in my ear.

  “Isn’t the acoustic design fantastic?”

  “Don’t ignore me.”

  “Easy flattery. How many women are you currently trying to seduce?”

  “Just you.”

  “Directness. Good. Are you doing this for money or sport?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Hunting vulnerable women in search of trophies. Will you take my head for your collection?”

  “It’s not your head I’m after. And you’re about as vulnerable as a bag of rattlesnakes”

  “You say the nicest things.”

  “You don’t cut men any slack, do you? Do you forgive or forget anything?”

  I returned home, my tryst with Poseidon in every crevice and pore. There were bloody footprints on my porch as if a battle fresh army had trampled through the house. I followed the trail back to the carnage in the courtyard where I fell to the floor and howled.

  My darling Sthen and Euryale. All Sthen had wanted was for Perseus to notice her. I could see her longing looks at his oiled curls and athlete’s legs. Strutting Perseus and his friends had given both my sisters their full attention all afternoon. Then they’d cut their throats and laid them out with their arms about each other, like sleeping infants. Their hair, always curled and pinned, was loose about their pallid faces. Blood seeped from their wounded necks onto their tattered gowns.

  And all because I said no to you, Perseus. All because you couldn’t have me.

  I ran to Poseidon’s cliff top house. He held me while I screamed and shook. He stroked my hair and the sea below boiled in fury.

  “I want him dead. Kill him for me.”

  “We can’t, my love. Perseus is championed by Athena. On Zeus’ orders.”

  “Since when do you care about Athena? I was one of her temple maidens when you seduced me. On her altar, no less.”

  “Let’s not give her another reason to seek revenge.”

  “You said you hated her. You called her a battle hungry spinster. Why do you care what she thinks?”

  “She’s Zeus’ daughter.”

  “So? You’re Zeus’ brother.”

  “Yes, but Zeus is King of Olympus. There’d be war.”

  “Zeus would go to war with you over Perseus?”

  “Perseus is his son.”

  “Son.” Secrets and nepotism. Zeus, king of philanderers and begetter of bastards.

  “We’ll have revenge but we’ll have to bide our time.”

  “You haven’t seen what they did . . . ”

  “Listen to me, Medusa. I loved your sisters but we can’t do anything. Not yet.”

  You gods are as treacherous as men. You all stick together. Blood, Poseidon, is thicker than your precious water after all.

  So I sought out a goddess where gods had failed me. Hera was Zeus’ queen and consort. I threw myself on the ground before her. Hera shushed her sniggering court with a look and stepped down, dainty footed, from her dais.

  “Poor dear, your sisters must be avenged.” I could see her calculating the gains. A lesson for her errant husband and his illegitimate children. “I commend your loyalty and I think I can see a way. There’s so much anger in those lovely eyes. The price would be very high though.”

  “Anything. I don’t care. Just help me.”

  “Are you sure?” She held my hand, relishing the task ahead. “We poor weak women must do what brave men can’t. I’ll make them afraid to even look at you.”

  Goddesses, as treacherous as women. You should have told me to go home, Hera, and bury my sisters.

  I didn’t care what it cost me. I gloried in what she made of me. A tail replaced my shapely legs. I had snakes instead of locks. Their fangs bit me. I lay on the floor while Hera stepped over my convulsing body. I felt the pain with every heartbeat as waited to become immune. I didn’t mind. I felt alive. Best of all was the fury in my eyes. There was no one I couldn’t petrify.

  It was evening and the summer sky was dark blue and the moon hung low and yellow over the city skyline.

  “That one, there.” I pointed to a basement bar, the high stools and tables just visible from the street.

  We drank whisky from heavy tumblers.

  “You don’t
give much away.” Paul gestured to the barman who refilled our empty glasses. “I know you paint. That you can walk me off my feet. Why’s a girl like you single?”

  “You make it sound like I’m incomplete as I am.” I leant back, letting the whisky drain down my throat. It left a combination of peat and antiseptic in my mouth. I decided to stop sparring. “There was someone once.”

  “What happened?”

  “He let me down.”

  “How?”

  “He sided with his family.”

  “It’s a mistake forcing people to chose. Invariably they never chose you.”

  “Whose side are you on?”

  “See? You’re doing it now. There has to be a side.” Paul snorted into his glass, clouding it up with his breath. “Not everyone has the luxury of choice.”

  I put an ice cube in my mouth and crunched it up.

  “Let’s not talk about the past.” Paul turned his body towards me. “I’ve not seen your eyes. I bet they’re green. The green of glittering emeralds.”

  “Guess again.”

  “Brown, like chocolate.”

  “Nope.”

  “Blue, then. But what shade of blue?”

  Blue as the deepest part of the ocean. That’s what Poseidon, god of all the seas, said to me when we made love. I’d forgotten that.

  Oh, Poseidon, you were running water in my hands.

  “Do you want to see them?”

  My dirty, yellow eyes.

  “Oh, yes.”

  Paul reached out to remove my glasses but I stopped him.

  “Not here. Let’s go to your place.”

  My courtship with Poseidon had been steeped in miracles. Marvels were mundane. He took my hand and we dived into the sea, encased in a bubble he’d made. I could breathe despite the fathoms that fell away. I could see the swirling surf above me when I looked up. Poseidon’s kingdom was below. Jellyfish pulsed and throbbed. Rays flapped their fins like wings. Sharks stared at us as they patrolled. We were engulfed in a shoal of silver darts that went as quickly as they came.

  There was a huge door set in the ocean floor.

  “What’s that?”

  “A jail. It’s a prisoner that I guard for Zeus.”

  “Who is it?”

  “The Kraken.”

  The Kraken was a titan from the start of time who had dared to challenge Zeus. The Kraken appeared at the bars, having heard his name. All I could see was a giant eye. The rest of him was lost in the watery gloom. I smiled in sympathy and raised a hand. The eye blinked back.

  “I didn’t bring you down here to flirt with him,” Poseidon chided. “I wanted you to see the water. It’s just like your eyes. The darkest shade of blue that the ocean can possibly be.”

  Kissing was a distant memory that I associated with gods, lion men, and calamity. Kissing Paul was discovering kissing anew. It reminded me of what I’d put away. Poseidon, a god among the waves but just like any other man in bed. Demanding to worship and to be worshipped in return.

  “Come upstairs with me,” Paul clutched my hand, “please.”

  We started to undress in the hall in his flat, amid the unpacked boxes. Paul’s shirt lost its shape as he dropped it to the floor, unable to withstand the world without him. I traced the crookedness of his collarbones with my fingertips. The smattering of coarse hair on his chest.

  “Where’s your bedroom?” I said between kisses.

  “There.” He indicated a room behind me with a flick of his eyes. I walked backwards, leading him to it. I pulled my blouse over my head and threw it on a chair. Then I saw the picture Paul had hung over his bed. The canvas dominated the room. A fantasy within a Rococo-style frame.

  It was one of mine. A self-portrait of sorts. I’d sent it to the gallery as soon as it was finished as I couldn’t bear to look at it. I’d remade the city as Arcadia with Bryant Park at its heart. The grass was deep and lush. Trees had conquered concrete and glass. Poseidon and I were postcoital in this idyll. That was clear, not just from our nudity but glow. My head rested on his chest. His arm was around me. He looked down at my head of snakes and yellow eyes like I was the loveliest woman in the world. “Don’t you recognize me, Medusa?”

  “Poseidon.”

  “I’ve been searching for you. I wasn’t even sure you were still alive but when I saw the painting I knew I’d found you.”

  “Well, now you have. What do you want?”

  “Forgiveness.”

  “That won’t help my sisters.”

  “Nothing will help your sisters. It would help us though.”

  “I was just a plaything to you.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Neither’s life. You taught me that.”

  “I loved you. I still do. Why else do you think I’m here?”

  I looked out of the window. Distant lights winked at me.

  “It’s too late. I’m tired. A tired, old murdering hag.”

  “And I’m a washed up, has-been deity.”

  “What became of Perseus?” I surprised myself. I couldn’t recall when I’d last thought of him. He’d evaded me.

  “Hera chose Perseus’ bride as a sacrifice. She demanded the Kraken be released to do the deed. The Kraken was more interested in Perseus,” Poseidon gave me a wry smile. “The Kraken liked you. He was glad to oblige.”

  I should’ve known to leave the gods to slug it out with one another I felt no satisfaction at the thought of Perseus fixed by the Kraken’s slow blinking eye or dangling from its mouth.

  I felt nothing.

  “Do you really want to see me? See me as I am now?”

  A mirror stood against the wall, waiting to be hung. I knelt before it. Poseidon joined me so that we were penitents before ourselves. I unwound my headscarf and took off my spectacles.

  “This is me. I’ve nothing left, not even looks.”

  “There’s still love. Life. We still have those.” A pearl dropped from his nostril and rolled to a standstill on the far side of the room. Then another. A third spilled from his mouth. More from his ears. They fell, a percussion of pleading, as they bounced across the wooden floor. “You’re beautiful to me. You always will be.”

  We were reflected in the mirror. A man with a crooked nose and a trimmed brown beard, speckled with silver. A woman with a sinuous coil of dark hair lying over one shoulder. Eyes, blue. The darkest shade of blue that the ocean can be.

  “You see? Beautiful.”

  “Yes,” I answered in wonderment, “yes, I am.”

  Priya Sharma lives in the UK where she works as a doctor. Her short stories have been published by Interzone, Black Static, Albedo One, and Tor.com, among others. Her work has been reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror and The Best Horror of the Year. She is writing a novel set in Wales, which is taking a long time as she writes longhand with a fountain pen and then types it up very slowly.

  Once she knew he had noticed the oddness, she started covering up the truth—as if she was afraid he might discover her secret.

  FORGET YOU

  Marc Laidlaw

  She came into his life the way his cats crept into his lap. One day he was alone, had been alone for years, his life and his home empty of anyone but himself and a few friends who didn’t visit all that often anyway. And then at some point he realized she had been there for a while, in his house, in his bed, in every part of his life, having accomplished the transition so subtly that he could never say exactly when or how it had occurred.

  He ran his hand along her cheek in a swift caress, brushing the line of her jaw as he tucked the one stray lock behind her left ear as he often did, and said, “How did we find each other?”

  “Oh, you,” she said, with that look, as if the question were another of their habitual endearments. “You’re sweet.”

  He traced her other cheek, looked deep into her right eye, then her left, having memorized the stained glass kaleidoscope pattern of her irises so clearly from this practice that he could
see them easily when he closed his own eyes.

  “No,” he said, “I’m serious. How?”

  She laughed without a sound, just an exhalation, and mirrored the movement his hands were making, cupping his face in her own palms.

  “Just lucky, I guess,” she said. “Me, I mean.”

  “Of course, me too, I just . . . ”

  She kissed him, and he thought, Well, that’s one difference between her and the cats.

  He asked his friends, when he thought of it, in the very infrequent moments when she was not with him. “How did we meet?” he asked. And they laughed because it was such an odd question that they knew he was setting them up for some kind of joke. And when he said, “No, I’m serious,” they grew serious too, and took on a puzzled, questioning tone. “Uh . . . you’re asking us? You guys have been together longer than we’ve been friends.”

  He went through his photographs, the digital images first, looking farther and farther back through the files, and she was in them all, and he could remember now how she had been there at the time. Beyond a certain point there were no more photos, but that was because of a huge lightning storm, when they’d gone a week without power and his computer had been fried, with everything on it lost. So of course there were no digital photographs from the years before that. He found a box in the closet full of older prints and negatives, in envelopes date-stamped by the pharmacies and photobooths where he had dropped them off to be developed. And it was something of a relief to see that she was not in any of these. He could clearly recall how alone he had been then, but he still could not remember how she’d come into his life. One thing was becoming clear though: It was getting harder to remember life without her. Soon he feared that he would not be able to remember a time when she had not been with him.

  He dug out a photograph of himself alone and put it in his pocket to keep with him as a reminder. It was a self-portrait he had taken, just a solitary photo of himself alone in the kitchen looking out the window as if at the emptiness of his life, which had been very empty then. This image had always seemed to him to capture the essence of his loneliness, and looking at it now made him wistful and sad, even nostalgic. He kept taking it out and looking at it, trying to remember how it had ended. Her arrival must have come about sometime in the age of deleted images when everything was uncertain. But when he asked his friends about it, to try and zero in on a date, he couldn’t convince them that he wasn’t teasing them somehow. And when he started asking her, she began to take offense.