The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  “I could just about hear the thunder in that,” said Baker to my horror as Jerrolt finished and the snug clock chimed. Straightaway Fernly Asham and Michael Cleft got up and went out. I hurried to the scullery with my tray of bottles and began to wash and wash, waiting for the fiercest storm to break over our heads.

  Which it did not. Thank heaven, I thought, something has got in the way of it and we must wait another several nights. I have been sweating on nothing; the coats are still in their rows, the hall and yard are empty and cold as always.

  But no, the key was where I had told Grinny to leave it. And walking up home, the town was different. The secrets gusted about the streets with the leaves and litter, thick enough in the air to choke me.

  Run along home, Wholeman had said. No, lad—when I’d protested—you done a fine night’s work. Like some kind of little steam engine you are, getting through them bottles. The rest can wait’ll tomorrow.

  But no one will be here tomorrow to do them, I almost said, then went obedient home.

  There I found my mam pacing. She scooped me up and squeezed me. “While I have arms to do this,” she said.

  “Did it all happen, then?” I said, hardly believing, into her black hair. “Did you all do?”

  Out from under the table she pulled the bag, and from it she tugged a coat-edge, very thick and smooth, dark, with not a lot of freckle. She unslid the whole skin and held it up beside herself by the hood, the exact height, though the ragged face-holes were nothing like my pretty mam. The closed air of our front room soured and went salty.

  “Do you remember it, from back then?” I held the slithery skin to my lips; it seemed to defy my bottlewashed fingers to purchase on it and feel it properly.

  “No,” she said. “but it smells of me and mine, very distinct. Let’s get on, then.” She fell to whispering. “Everyone else is gone, Daniel, hours ago.”

  Close she came and folded the coat, the ragged-faced floppy person, down to bag size. “Slippery thing,” she said flusteredly, as the sleeves misbehaved. Surely that smell would be smelt, out in the street where we carried it? Surely someone would stop us: Neme Mallett, what are you out for, this time of night? And what do you think you have there, that can only be one thing? And pluck the bag from my fingers, open it and bring the trouble down on our heads.

  “There, done.” She met my eyes and huffed. “Let us shut up and follow, then.”

  Off we went, coated but unbuttoned. She took my hand once we were out on the street, and hers was cold and tight.

  “I do love him,” she said to the cobbles, to the passing front steps. “I am breaking his heart.”

  “He ought never have caught you, Mam,” I said severely. I didn’t want to think of Dad. “None of them ought. They should have left you in your home.”

  I thought she smiled down on me out of the stars, but the light was not good and her hair shadowed her face, she might have winced just as easy.

  Down slippy-slop we went, the wind skirling and twiddling around us, caught in the narrow ways. Every now and again a strong breath from the sea would push at our faces, smelling green and live and massive. When that happened, Mam would almost run a few steps, as if the sea were summoning her more peremptory.

  The water was rucked-up and difficult looking between the moles. I thought I saw seal-heads awaiting, a couple, but when I looked again they were not there. They may have been only wave-shadows, mistakes of my eyes, wishings perhaps if I but knew what I wished.

  “Come-come.” Mam let go my hand and preceded me down the steps to the beach. I hurried after her, frightened and not knowing why but needing to be right by her for my own peace.

  We ran out from the wall, the town hunkering behind us, its eyes tightening the skin of my back. Out across the scraping pebbles we went, impatient water smashing its hands at the edge of them, the wind frothing and flapping our hairs at our ears.

  Let us run home, I would have said, and all go on as before. But she knelt before me and her face in the moonlight was clear—alight as the moon, it was—and I was too busy admiring the clean arches of her eyebrows to voice my doubts.

  “Step in,” she said and then I was preoccupied, wasn’t I, with fitting myself—

  for truth, I had grown a tiny bit since she sewed the thing—into the sheepskin suit. I gasped but did not complain as she tied and tied me into it, and then she pulled the ragged hood-mask down over my face and it was as if she sewed my mouth shut and my chin to my chest. I stood there with my neck pulled into an ache behind, my little sounds nothing against the sea’s impatience.

  Through the eyeholes I watched her as well as I could, for though she was being indecent there was such joy in it, such spirit, I could not but follow her every move, privileged to see. White she emerged out of her scratchy land-clothing, out of its wrinkles and seams.

  “Ah!” She flung her drawers up on the pebbles, and she was animal within, all flesh and fur uncluttered by all those trappings.

  Next she took up the coat-bag, drew out the coat, wrestled it open and slid it on. All of a sudden the air was cold and thick as water. I gasped inside my dry leather mask, and my flatted hair crawled.

  She did not don the coat like any man-garment; rather, she began, and then the thing sank upon and encompassed her, clung on close, clung to its own edges around her. Clap and clop and zip, it went, and snick, and then she fell, from standing foot-fins together, straight into the wavelets, where she was now seal, and flang herself down towards the deeper water.

  She turned and there was enough of her left that I could not refuse to follow, so I too fell and floundered through the curdled cold air and into the sea through its foamy edge. There the water, and the magic, overtook me, and what was seal of me supplanted what was boy, and I ceased to think and to intend or decide, in any way that makes sense in a story, but only followed my mam, crying after her into our dark world, all alive to the tides now and temperatures, to the bubbling trail of her that I sought and followed with my whiskers, to the depths and wonders and fellows and foes disposed on all sides of us, and before us, and below.

  I will not tell you much about that time. It is not the kind of thing that can be caught in words, human words out of our subtle mouths: sunlight shafting into the green; the mirrory roof; the women racing ahead through the halls of the sea, the cathedrals; boat bellies, and the mumble and splash of man-business disturbing the water above; the seal-men, the sea-men, spun light as wooden tops by the delicate tail, pressing out the water behind them, impelling their bulk forward, upward, outward— It is very much like flying, through a green air flocking with tiny sunlit flecks of life.

  Seal-men I found to be very like our dads on land, all possessiveness and anxiety, patrolling the borders of the clan. When we went up on a beach, they must always be seeing other seal-men off, coming back blown and bloodied. It seemed a savage way of work to me, this knocking of heads together. Sometimes me and my fellows had a play at it, but it were two rubber heads bouncing off each other, no teeth and no purpose, and the mams laughed lounging around us.

  And then there were those sister-seals, our size but not fighters, but only slipping alongside us through the sun shafts, blinking beside us through the roof of the world, into the windy air and the rasp of breath in both of ours’ opening nostrils. Those whiskery sea-maids, the ones with the spell on them to keep them seals, to keep them safe from human men. Like animate seeds or stones, they moved, like bullets leaping through the water, like weed undulating away along the tide or teasing your face with a leaf-end.

  I don’t know how to tell you. Seal feelings are different from human ones, seal-affections, seal-ties with other seals. The best I can do is overlay a skin of man-words on the grunt and urge and song and flight and slump of seal-being.

  Our mams belonged better here than they ever had belonged above. Our mams found their wings, is how you might put it. Our mams did not glory or revel or make any particular celebration, but only slipped back to rightness
, went back about their business. The bulk of our mams was not beautiful as a man sees beautiful, but to seal-eyes their beautiful black teardrops of being fell fast, flew fast, twisted through the home depths.

  The sea was at our ears and against our sensitive faces, all its cavities and their echoes like a giants’ city, this castle, that market and that cluster of tiny homes. Braided through, it was, with tidal temperatures, underlain with colder harder depths, with darkness-fish and the skeletons that fell out of everyone’s feeding. Here above we were a multitude, in ranks of size and ferocity; I cannot explain to you, if you are a fisherman, the beauty and panic of a shining mass of herded fish, the whole school flashing back and forth looking for the no-way-out among my darting fellows, the topmost swimming out into the air in their terror.

  The days were long and unformed; the seasons beckoned us, then pushed us away behind them; stars rode over us, and moons in their boatishness and bulbousness; towns were a crust at the edge of our world’s eye and people were mites that crawled there. If I saw my father in that time, I don’t recall it, or recognizing any man of Potshead—or woman, because Messkeletha was still there for a long while, and Trudle stayed all that time, and is still here now.

  I don’t recall particularly the landscape of our island, not above its rocks or above the beach-sand that as men we called Crescent Corner. As the sea to men, beyond the point that they can see bottom, becomes only the plumblined depths full of loves and livelihoods, so to seals the heights become only wastes of dry blaring light from which weather and occasional dangers descend.

  I felt no pull to the land; I barely knew that I knew the land; I barely thought; I didn’t feel the way a person feels. I only was, following flurries of instinct, flurries of friends and of fish.

  “It happened by accident,” says my dad. “Shorten Thomas found it out, enraging ’cross an ice floe one winter—all those cold nights without light nor woman will set a man to clubbing. Only he was using a hacker-pick that sealers have, cutting them, you see. Well, he was in a fine way—up to his ears in hotpunch too, no doubt. And he says it like this, that he turned at the end of the crowd of them, and weeping and looking back down the path of his butchery he saw a boy—all long and lanky, he says, much like you were extracted as, Dan’l. Writhing on the ice, he said, just like a seal does, only not managing to move as they do, for he was not built the same. And when the boy realizes, up onto hands and knees he goes, and quick as he can but clumsy—because he has forgot, in all that time, how to progress such a body—he crawls for the edge of the ice.

  “Shorten went after him, calling: ‘Boy, boy! What is your name?’ But not fast enough, and the boy gets to the rim and looks back once, and falls in, all messy like an accident, not like seals do, like a brine-drop back into the ocean. And of course there drowns, doesn’t come up even the once, for all Shorten’s pleading. The cold catches him, and his first breath of the North Sea, and all that is left to Shorten is a few bubbles among the bobbing ice.”

  “He looked around, you say, the boy?”

  Dad shakes his head. “You press Shorten on that, he will break and blub at you like you charged him with holding the boy’s head under. He says he was all emotional, and you all look the same, you boys. He says he couldn’t tell, that he might even have been looking his own Vernar in the eye and not known, the boy would have grown so much. But it might have been any of you, any of the ones we’ve not recovered yet: Snow, or Toll Hardy, Harold Roman, or the Gormlin twins who knows?” In the windowlight my dad is worn and clean; even the smoke from his brier-pipe is clean and white as his hair. Evening is coming; that light is cool, gray-blue. I am glad of the fire against its lack of cheer.

  “So, then,” he begins into the crackling silence with the sea behind it.

  “Yes.” The light fades on his face even as I watch, all crags of frail flesh.

  “Well, he is struck horrorful with the thought he may have butchered other sons, he says, but mainly he’s wondering, How did I cut that seal, to free the boy inside? And he goes back and finds the skin—and this is not hard among six-seven slaughtered beasts, because it has all shrunk and thinned, don’t you know. It’s one of those wee coats, you see, that your mams made to spirit you away in. Wi’ the hoods, you remember? All of rabbit or lambskin.”

  I nod. “They stank to be inside, and were so tight. We had to put them on there in the shallows, else we were trapped tight in them, unable to walk, and too big for them to carry as well as their own coat.”

  “And Shorten sees that with this pick he’s managed to cut, neat as a tailor, all the front stitches down the middle, so as to open the thing just like the coat that it is, and out has come the boy. And he brings the skin home and tells the tale, and we’re all there handling this wee coat and weeping, like it were a holy relic, a roomful of grown men brought to nothing by this garment, all of us trying to recognize our wife’s hand in the stitching, all of us desperate to see it, yet not to see it, so as not to lose hope of our son.”

  There is a slight crack in his voice on that last word, and I look up in time to see him surprised, and embarrassed, and straightaway recovered. “So then the hunt was on, every man for his boy,” he says almost jovial, lifting pipe and paws and letting them drop to his blanketed lap, a fleck of ash stirred out of the bowl by the movement and falling beside.

  I was born again and I came out crying—a lot of us did, they say. There never was such a race as the seals for mawking and mowing. I came out crying into a driving rain, and all sounds hurt my ears, rain-hiss on the decks and hatches and the sealers’ celebrations: “Daniel Mallett! Welcome back to the world, boy!” They lifted me into the confusion and there with my big bony shoulders pulling my ragged coat apart up the back I stood and choked and took their embraces, that each was like an assault on me but which I did not rebuff. I had not the strength; I had forgot how to use arms.

  They laid me down on the deck; it was not comfortable. Some man had put a rope-coil under my head for pillowing and it pressed in hard enough to hurt. I was accustoming myself—and it was difficult—to the frontwaysed eyes seeing two things for every one and putting them together. My bony body was less massy than before; how could it be so much heavier? Everything was heavier around me, glued to the deck; the men as they moved must cling to it; anything that fell must roll or slide to any lower point.

  Around me was airy noise, every movement light and startling, every contact a concussion, throwing out more noise. Unpredictable, to no rhythm, they moved and swore and fumbled, the men of my town, of my land-world, and the sea-birds stuttered in the sky. And I was glued here myself, to these coat-remnants beneath me, pressed to the damp wood by this blanket, its heavy knots of sea-grass. All the wind could do was push the damp hair back and forth on my brow; it could not lift and return me to the water; it could not lift even this knotted knitted thing, that held the little left of my warmth around me in the absence of my seal-flesh.

  It was an ill-making dream, and the men came by, smiling and patting me, to console me for it, all the way home. They asked me nothing; they did not expect me to speak, out of this strange-packed mouth, out of this flat face with its new framework of jaw. They muttered and crooned, and as the sky went on and the illness, their noises slipped together, interlocked into items of sense. Welcoming me, they were, welcoming me back; their words were all about their gladness and our preciousness, their sons’. They were changed men from the ones I was beginning to remember.

  “You’ll be heavy to yourself awhile,” said one, over the grinding of the boatside into the jetty, over the hard explosions of sound in my back, in the back of my head. He lifted the weed-blanket off me, and I waited to fly up into the air. But I did not. I lay helpless.

  They hooked my arms over two men’s necks and taught me walking, across the deck all cluttered with box and bolt and reel; across the frail plank that was all that kept me from a dirty corner of water, a corner of my home below. And to the land, locked unmoving, the je
tty standing firm against the water that slapped and fought it below. My feet dragged and my legs attempted rescuing them—how was I to support myself and balance, on these two stalkish things? The men had put a shirt on me and trousers but still the foreign knees swung and braced below my poor-focusing eyes, my heavy head. I knew that they belonged to me, but I could not see how ever I was to control them.

  My father was brought down the street to me, but I did not see him, only heard clomping boots and men saying, “See, Dominic? There he is!” And then a voice out of years ago, out of my bones, saying, “Is that him? Is that my Daniel? Are you sure?”

  Then space opened before me and I heaved up my head. Some boots swam there and his familiar belt-buckle, and then the rest of him was there, sharp-edged and astounding, his big hands out wide at me and in between them his awakening face.

  “Dan’l,” he said, and “Dad,” I said, and even words were heavy here, all burdened with the years, and my head sagged again and there was nothing but wet greeny-black-blue cobbles ringed by boot-toes and marveling men.

  “Here, let me take him,” said my father to the man at my right, and they un-hooked and re-hooked me and I seemed to walk worse than ever, leaning onto him with my head swung fast into his shoulder.

  “You will be fine, my boy,” he said. “Fine and good.” And he held me up and walked me. A splash appeared a brighter blue on his shirt and I had not known it was raining, or he was crying, and I tried to say, I did not know what, that I knew him, that I was surprised, that I was sorry, that I had found my way somehow into this strange, long, wrong-grown body—but all I could manage for the moment was seal-cries, that said nothing, that had to say everything for me.