The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  Out of nowhere, for the first time in three years, Ricky had the thought that he would like a drink. He was amazed at this thought. He was frightened. Then he was angry.

  “I’m not drivin much farther, Andre. Spit out where we’re going, and it better be nearby, or you can call nine-one-one and I’ll take my chances. I’ll bet you got a longer past with the SFPD than I do.”

  “Damn you! Whip in here, then.”

  This cross street was mostly houses—some abandoned—with a liquor store on the next corner, and a lot of sealife lounging out in front of it. “Pull up into some light where you can see this.”

  They idled at the curb. The people on the main drag were two-thirds of a block behind them, the liquor store tide pool much closer ahead of them. Andre leaned his fanatic’s face close to Ricky. The intensity of the man was an almost tactile experience; Ricky seemed to feel the muffled crackling of his will through the inches of air that separated them. “Here,” hissed Andre. “I’m gonna give you this, just to drive me another coupla miles up into these hills. Look at it. Count it. Take it.” He shoved a thick roll of bills into Ricky’s ribs.

  It was in twenties and fifties and hundreds . . . It was over five thousand dollars.

  “You’re . . . you’re batshit, Andre! You make me cut you to get ten bucks, and now you—“

  “Just listen.” Some people from the liquor store tide pool were drifting their way, and Ricky saw similar movement from Third Street in his rearview mirror. “What I needed,” said Andre, “was money that blood was spilt for—it didn’t matter how much blood, it didn’t matter how much money. Your ten-spot? It’s worth that much to me there in your hand. Your ten-spot and another couple miles in your car.”

  The locals were flowing closer to the Mustang at both ends. Ricky fingered the money. The gist of it was, he decided, that if he didn’t follow this waking dream to its end, he would never forgive himself. “Okay,” he said.

  “Another couple miles in your car,” said Andre, “an one more thing. You gotta come in.”

  “You fuck! You shit! Where does it end with you? You just keep—“

  “You come in, you watch me connect, and you go out again, scott-free, no harm, no strings attached! I gotta bring blood money, and I gotta bring a witness. I lied to you. It wasn’t the ride I needed. It was a witness.”

  A huge shape in lavender running-sweats, and a gaunt one wearing a lime-green jumpsuit, stood beside the Mustang, smiling and making roll-down-the-window gestures. Behind the car, shapes from the main drag were moving laterally out into the street to come up to the driver’s side . . .

  But in that poised moment what Ricky saw most vividly was Andre’s face, his taut narrow face within its weedy ‘fro. This man was in the visionary’s trance. His eyes, his soul were locked upon something that filled him with awe. What he pursued had nothing to do with Ricky, nor with anything Ricky could imagine, and Ricky wanted to know what that thing was.

  Andre said, “Ima show you—what’s your name again?”

  “Ricky.”

  “Ima show you, Richie, the power and the glory. They are right here among you, man, an you don’t even see it! Hell, even these fools out here can see it!”

  The Mustang was surrounded now. From behind it sprouted shapes in crimson hoods, with fists bulging inside gold velvet jacket pockets. Up to Ricky’s door (its window already open, his elbow thrust out, and five K in cash on his lap) stepped two men with thundercloud hair, wearing shades, their cheeks and brows all whorled with Maori tattooing like ink-black flames. A trio of gaudy nylon scarecrows leaned on his hood, conferring, the side-thrust bills of their caps switching like blades. But Ricky also noted that all this audience, every one of them, had eyes strictly for Andre sitting there at his side. Ricky was free to scan all those exotic, piratical faces as though he were invisible . . .

  All their eyes were grave. They showed awe, and they showed loathing too, as if they abhorred something Andre had done, but just as piercingly, longed for his nerve to do it. Ricky realized he had embarked on a longer journey than he’d thought.

  Andre scanned all these buccaneer faces, his fellow mariners of the Hood. A remote little grin was hanging slantwise across his jaw. “Check this out Rocky,” he growled, “an learn from these fools. Learn their awe, man, cause what I’ma show you, up in those hills, is awe.”

  He shouldered his door open, and thrust himself up onto the sidewalk. He towered just as tall as the giant in lavender sweats, but he was narrow as a reed. Yet his voice fairly boomed:

  “Yo! Alla you! Listen up! Looka here! Looka me! You all wanna see something? Wanna see something about something besides shit!? See something real, just for a change? See the ice-cold, spine-crawlin, hair-stirrin truth? Looka here! Looka here, at the power! Looka here! Looka here, at the glory!”

  Ricky scanned all the dark faces that ringed them round, and every eye was locked upon that wild gaunt man in his rapture, who now, with a powerful shrug, shouldered off his nylon jacket. It flopped down on the sidewalk with a slither and a sigh, and lay there on the concrete like a sloughed cocoon. He stretched the fabric of his T-shirt, displaying it to every locked-on eye.

  Rickey’s angle was still too acute to let him decipher exactly who it was who “ruled.” But all these encircling faces, they seemed to know. They shared a vision of awe and terror and . . . something like hope. A frosty hope, endlessly remote . . . but hope. Ricky realized that there prevailed on these mean streets a consensus of vision. He clearly saw that all these eyes had seen, and understood, a catastrophic spectacle beyond his own imagining.

  Andre barked, hoarse and brutish as a sea-lion, “Jus look at me here! I have gone up to see Him, and I have looked through His eyes, and I have been where He is, time without end! An I’m here to tell you, all you dearly beloved mongrel dogs of mine, I’m here to tell you that it’s consumed me! My flesh, and my time, have been blown off my bones, by the searing winds of His breath! I’m not far off now from eternity! Not far off from infinity now!”

  The raving seer then hiked up his T-shirt to his chest. What Ricky, from behind, saw there, was like a blow to his own chest, an impact of terror and dizziness, for Andre’s thorax on its left side was normal, gauntly fleshed and sinewed, but along its right side, his spine was denuded bone, and midriff was there none, and just below his hoisted shirt-hem, a lathed bracket looped down: a fleshless rib, as clean and bare as sculpture . . .

  His rapt audience recoiled like a single person, some lifting their arms convulsively, as in a reflex of self-protection, or acclaim . . .

  Ricky dropped the Mustang into gear, and launched it from the curb, but in that selfsame instant Andre dropped into his seat again, and slammed his door, and so he was snatched deftly away, as if he were a prize that Ricky treasured, and not a horror that Ricky had been trying to flee.

  Moonsilvered, lightless blocks floated past, yet Ricky never took his eyes from the gaunt shape whose T-shirt he could now, uncomprehending, read: CHTHULU RULES.

  Somehow he drove, and, shortly, pulled again to a more deserted curb, and killed the engine. On this block, a sole dim streetlight shone. Half the houses were doorless, windowless . . .

  He sat with only silence between himself and a man who had, at the least, submitted to a grave surgical mutilation in the service of his deity. Ricky looked into Andre’s eyes.

  That was the first challenge, to establish that he dared to look into Andre’s eyes—and he found that he did dare.

  “For all you’ve lost, “Ricky said, queasily referencing the gruesome marvel, “ . . . you seem very . . . alive.”

  “I’m more alive than you will ever be, and when I’m all consumed, I’ll be far more alive, and I will live forever!”

  Ricky fingered the little bale of cash in his hand. “If you want me to go on, you have to tell me this. Why do you have to have a witness?”

  “Because the One I’m gonna see wants someone new to see Him. He doesn’t wanna know you. He wa
nts you to know Him.” In the darkness, Andre’s polished eyes seemed to burn with this thing that he knew, and Ricky did not.

  “He wants me to know him. And then?”

  “And then it’s up to you. To walk away, or to see him like I do.”

  “And how is that? How do you see him?”

  “All the way.”

  Ricky’s hand absently stroked the gearshift knob. “The choice is absolutely mine?”

  “Your will is your own! Only your knowledge will be changed!”

  Ricky slipped the Mustang into gear, and once more the blue beast growled onward. “Take a right here,” purred Andre. “We going up to the top of the hills.”

  It was the longest “couple miles” that Ricky had ever driven. The road poured down past the Mustang like time itself, a slow stream of old, and older houses, on steepening blocks gapped by vacant lots, or by derelict cottages whose windows and doors were coffined in grafittied plywood.

  They began to wind, and a rising sense of peril woke in Ricky. He was charging up into the sinister unknown! There was just too much missing from this man’s body! You couldn’t lose all that and still walk around, still fight with knives . . . could you?

  But you could. Just look at him.

  The houses thinned out even more, big old trees half-shrouding them. Dead cars slept under drifts of leaves, and dim bedroom lights showed life just barely hanging on, here in the hungry heights.

  As they mounted this shoulder of the hills, Ricky saw glimpses of other ridges to the right and left, rooftop-and-tree-encrusted like this one. All these crestlines converged toward the same summit, and when Ricky looked behind, it seemed that these ridges poured down like a spill of titanic tentacles. They plunged far below into a thick, surprisingly deep fog that drowned and dimmed the jeweled python of the Hood.

  Near the summit, their road entered a deepening gully. At the apex stood a municipal watertank, the dull gloss of its squat cylinder half-sunk in trees and houses.

  “We goin to that house there right upside the tank. See that big gray roof pokin from the trees? The driveway goes down through the trees, it’s steep an dark. Just roll down slow and easy, kill the engine, an let me get out first an talk to her.”

  “Her?”

  Andre didn’t answer. The road briefly crested before plunging, and Ricky had a last glimpse below of the tentacular hills rooted in the fogbank—and rooted beyond that, he imagined, more deeply still into the black floor of the Bay, as if the tentacles rummaged there for their deep-sunk food . . .

  “Right there,” said Andre, pointing ahead. “See the gap in the bushes?”

  The Mustang crept muttering down the dark leafy tunnel, just as a wind rose, rattling dry oak foliage all around them.

  A dim grotto of grassy ground opened below. There was a squat house on it, so dark it was almost a shadow-house. It showed one dim yellow light on the floor of its porch. A lantern, it looked like. A large dark shape loomed on one side of this lantern, and a smaller dark shape lay on the other.

  Ricky cut his engine. Andre drew a long, slow breath, and got out. Leaves whispered in the silence. Andre’s feet crackled across the yard. Ricky could hear the creak of his weight on the porch-steps as he climbed them, halfway up to the two dark shapes and their dim shared light. And Ricky could also hear . . . a growly breathing, wasn’t it? Yes . . . A slow, phlegmy purr of big lungs.

  Andre’s voice was a new one to Ricky: low and implacable. “I’m back again, Mamma Hagg. I got the toll. I got the witness.” Then he looked back and said, “Stand on out here . . . what’s your name again?”

  Ricky got out. How dangerous it suddenly seemed to declare himself in this silence, this place! Well, shit. He was here. He might as well say who he was. Loudly: “Ricky Deuce.”

  When he’d said it, he found his eyes could suddenly decipher the smaller dark shape by the lantern: it was a seated black dog, a big one, with the hint of aging frost on his lower jaw, and with his red tongue hanging and gently pulsing by that frosted jaw. The dog was looking steadily back at him, its tongue a bright spoon of greedy tissue scooping up the taste of the night . . .

  It was not the brute’s breathing Ricky had heard. It was Momma Hagg’s, her voice deep now from the vault of her cave-like lungs:

  “Then show the toll, fool.”

  Andre bent slightly to hold something towards the hound. And above his bent back, the woman in her turn became visible to Ricky. Within a briarpatch of dreads as pale as mushrooms, her monolithic black face melted in its age, her eyes two tarpools in this terrain of gnarled ebony. The shadowy bulk of her body eclipsed the mighty chair she sat in, though its armrests jutted into view, dark wood intricately carven into the coils and claws and thews of two heraldic monsters. Ricky couldn’t make out what they were, but they seemed to snarl beneath the fingers of Momma Hagg’s immense hands.

  The dog’s tongue was licking what Andre held up to it—Ricky’s tenspot. The mastiff sniffed and sniffed, then snorted, and licked the bill again, and licked his chops.

  “Come on up,” said Momma. “The two of you.” The big woman’s voice had a strange kind of pull to it. Like surf at your legs, its growl dragged you towards her. Ricky approached. Andre mounted to the porch, and Ricky climbed after him. He had the sensation with each step up that he entered a bigger and emptier kind of space. When he stood on the porch, Momma Hagg seemed farther off than he had expected. From her distance wafted the smell of her—an ashen scent like the drenched coals of a bonfire that had included flesh and bones in its fuel. The dog rose.

  The porch took too long to cross as they followed the hound. His bright tongue lolling like a casually held torch, with just one back-glance of one crimson eye, the brute led them through a wide, doorless doorframe, and into a high dark interior that gusted out dank salty breath in their faces.

  A cold gray light leaked in here, as if the fog that had swallowed the Hood had now climbed the hills, and its glow was seeping into this gaunt house. They trod a rambling, unpartitioned space, the interior all wall-less, while the outer walls were irregularly recessed in alcoves, nooks and grottos. In some of these stood furniture, oddly forlorn, bulky antique pieces—an armchair, a settee, an escritoire crusted with ancient papers. These stranded little settings—like fossils of foregone transactions whose participants had blown to dust long since—seemed to mark the passage of generations through this rambling gloom.

  Ricky had the disorienting sense they had been trekking for a long, long time. He realized that the stranded furniture had a delicately furred and crusted profile in the gray light, like tide pool rocks, and a cold tidal scent touched his nostrils. Realized too, that here and there in those recesses, there were windows. Beyond their panes lay a different shade of darkness, where weedy and barnacled shadows stirred, and glinted wetly . . .

  And throughout this shadowy passage, Ricky noted, on every stretch of wall he could discern, wooden wainscottings densely carved. The misty glow put a sheen on the sinuous saliences of this dark chiselwork, which seemed to depict bulbous, serpentine knots of tail and claw and thew—or perhaps woven Cephalopodia, braided greedy tentacles, and writhing prey in ragged beaks . . .

  But now the walls had narrowed in, and here were stairs, and up these steep, worn stairs the hound, not pausing, led them. The air of this stairwell was slightly dizzying. The labor of the black beast climbing before them seemed to pull the two men after, as if the beast drew them in an executioner’s tumbrel. They were lifted, Ricky suddenly felt, by a might far greater than theirs, and Andre, ahead of him, seemed to shiver and quake in the flux of that dire energy. It gave Ricky the sensation of walking in Andre’s lee, and being sheltered by his body from a terror that streamed around him like a solar wind.

  From the head of the stairs, a great moldy vacancy breathed down on them. They emerged into what seemed a simpler and far older structure. High-beamed ceiling, carven walls . . . it was no more than a grand passage ending at a high dark archway. The floor
planks faintly drummed, as if this was a bridgeway, unfoundationed. That great black arch ahead . . . it was inset in a wall that bowed. A metallic wall.

  “The tank!” said Ricky. It jumped out of him. “That’s that big water tank!”

  The Hound halted and turned. Andre too turned, gave him eyes of wild reproof, but the Hound, raising to Ricky his crimson eyes, gave him a red-tongued leer, gave him the glinty-pupiled mockery of a knowing demon. This look set the carved walls to seething, set the sculpted thews rippling, limbs lacing, beaks butchering, all brutally busy beneath their fur of dust . . .

  The Hound turned again, and led them on. Now they could smell the water in the great tank—an odor both metallic and marine—and the hound’s breathing began to echo, to grow as cavernous as Mamma Hagg’s had been. Within that archway was a blackness absolute, a darkness far more perfect than the gloom that housed them. As they closed with it, the hound’s nails echoed as on a great oaken drum above a jungle wilderness. The beast dropped to its belly, lay panting, whining softly. The two men stood behind.

  Within the portal, a huge glossy black surface confronted them, a great shield of glass, a mirror as big as a house. There they were in it: Ricky, Andre, the hound. The brightest feature of their tiny, distorted reflection was the bright red dot of the hound’s tongue.

  Andre paused for a few heartbeats only. Then he stepped through the arch, with an odd ceremonial straightness to his posture. He gestured and Ricky followed him, seeing, as he did so, that the aperture was cut through a double metal wall that showed a cross-section of struts between.

  They stood on a narrow balcony just within the tank, and felt a huge damp breath of the steel-clad lake below them, and gazed into the immense glass that was to afford them their Revelation of the Power and the Glory . . .