The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  I saw something unspeakable in one of the rooms I passed and felt no need to look in any of the others.

  The reception room was still empty when I got there. Patience is encouraged in these situations but, you know, fuck it. I decided to break something. There was an exquisite smoked glass figurine resting on top of the piano. I didn’t even pick it up, just swept it away with the back of my hand and listened to it shatter against the parquet floor.

  I hadn’t intended to look, but a rapid skittering caught my eye and I bent down, barely in time to see a tiny something, wretched and limbless, slithering wetly beneath the sofa. I was still crouched down when there was a noise from somewhere behind me, unusually loud for what it most sounded like; the sticky gossamer ripping of a blunder through an unseen spider’s web.

  I stood up quickly, turning around to look. There was still nobody in the room but, though the large picture over the fireplace was intact and undamaged, its central figure was missing.

  “You’re a little older than my usual guests,” the master of the house said from immediately behind me.

  I span back around, very successfully startled. There was nothing overtly threatening about his posture, but he was standing uncomfortably close to me and I wasn’t at all fond of his smile.

  “A little older,” he repeated. “But I’m sure we can find you a room.”

  “I won’t be staying,” I said. My voice was steady enough, but I was pissed off at how much he’d thrown me and pissed off more at how much he’d enjoyed it.

  “You’re very much mistaken,” he said. “My house is easy to enter but not so easy to leave.”

  I understood his confidence. He had a hundred years of experience to justify his thinking that I was one of his usual guests. He could see me, so I had to be dead. Just as most ghosts are invisible to people, most people are invisible to ghosts. But, just as there are a few anomalous ghosts who can be seen by people, so are there a few anomalous people who can be seen by ghosts. And he’d just met one.

  “Do you know what this is?” I said, and brought the tesseract out of my pocket. They’ve been standard issue at the department for the last couple of years. Fuck knows where they get them made, but I have a feeling it isn’t Hong Kong.

  I let it rest in my palm and he looked at it. He tried to keep his expression neutral but I could tell his curiosity was piqued. It always is.

  “What does it do?” he said.

  “Well, it doesn’t really do anything,” I said. “It just is.”

  “And what do you want me to do about it?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just look at it for a while.”

  I gave it a little tap and it slid impossibly through itself.

  The room shivered in response, but I don’t think he noticed. His eyes were fixed on the little cube and its effortless dance through dimensions.

  “There’s something wrong with it,” he said, but the tone of his voice was fascinated rather than dismissive. “I can’t see it properly.”

  “It’s difficult,” I agreed. “Because part of it shouldn’t be here. Doesn’t mean it’s not real. Just means it doesn’t belong in the space it’s in.”

  The metaphor hit home, as it always did. I don’t know why the tesseract works so well on them—I mean, it’s utterly harmless, more wake-up call than weapon—but it’s definitely made the job easier. He looked up at me. His face was already a little less defined than it had been, but I could still read the fear in it. He was smart, though. Went straight for the important questions and fuck the nuts and bolts.

  “Will I be judged?” he said.

  “Nobody’s judged.”

  “Will I be hurt?”

  “Nobody’s hurt.”

  “Will I be—” He stopped himself then, as an unwilled understanding came to him, and he repeated what he’d just said. Same words. Different stress. “Will I be?”

  I looked at him.

  “Nobody’ll be.” I said.

  It was too late for him to fight, but the animal rage for identity made him try, his imagined flesh struggling against its dissolution and his softening arms reaching out for me uselessly.

  “You know who hangs around?” I said. “People with too little will of their own, and people with too much. Let it go. We’re just lights in the sky, and their shadows.”

  “I’ll miss it!” he shouted, his disappearing mouth twisting into a final snarl of appetite and terror.

  “You won’t miss a thing,” I said, and watched him vanish.

  I’d been in there longer than I thought and, as I walked back through the park towards the Hunter’s Lane gate, true night was falling. But it was far from dark. There’d been so many souls in the house, young and old, predator and prey, that the cascade of their dissolution was spectacular and sustained.

  For upwards of two hours, the sky was brilliant with lights.

  Like an anniversary. Like a half remembered dream. Like a mystery.

  About the Author

  Peter Atkins was born in Liverpool, England and now lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of the novels Morningstar, Big Thunder, and Moontown and the screenplays Hellraiser II, Hellraiser III, Hellraiser IV, Wishmaster, and Prisoners of the Sun. His short fiction has appeared in such best-selling anthologies as The Museum of Horrors, Dark Delicacies II, and Hellbound Hearts. He is the co-founder, with Dennis Etchison and Glen Hirshberg, of The Rolling Darkness Revue, who tour the west coast annually bringing ghost stories and live music to any venue that’ll put up with them. “The Mystery” comes from Spook City, a three-author collection which featured Atkins alongside his fellow Liverpudlians Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell. A new collection of his short fiction is forthcoming.

  Story Notes

  Other than its fine writing, several things drew me to Peter Atkins’ story: The narrator’s sheer Liverpudlian matter-of-factness about encountering spirits and consequent explanation for them: “People with too little will of their own, and people with too much. Let it go. We’re just lights in the sky, and their shadows.” And the other mystery of the story, one just tossed in: “I . . . brought the tesseract out of my pocket. They’ve been standard issue at the department for the last couple of years . . . ”

  I’ve got a good guess about that tesseract, but I’d like to know more about “the department.”

  VARIATIONS ON A THEME FROM SEINFELD

  PETER STRAUB

  Statement of Theme (from “Bizarro World” Episode):

  One may discover the existence of a parallel world in which the characters and situations of our own are strangely echoed, and experience will demonstrate that this world is not only profoundly unsatisfying, but probably dangerous.

  1

  Three days before his fiftieth birthday, Clyde Mortar, once a Peace Corps volunteer to Mali and ever after officially a faithful servant of USAID and its august parent body, the United States Government’s Department of State, tilted forward over the expansive sink of the master bathroom in his Georgetown row house and examined the ornate little chamber reflected in the bathroom mirror. Everything present and available to be seen echoed back from its proper place: the towels briskly refolded on the towel-rack; the powerful toothbrush erect on its charging stand; on the back of the enamel-white bedroom door, the curving brass hook holding taut the fabric strip sewn just below the collar of a spotless white pajama top; the translucent glass flank and inset door of the spacious shower cabinet. When he canted forward another half-inch, there came into view three of the flat, shining footprints he had left on the floor’s dark blue tiles in the brief journey from shower to sink. Of Clyde Mortar himself, however, nothing at all was to be seen. The image before him in the mirror’s rectangular surface depicted an unusually orderly bathroom empty of humanity, especially as represented by himself. Clyde Mortar—to speak with greater accuracy, OtherClyde—had done a bunk, slipped his traces, downed tools, declared a holiday.

  Had it been the first time his double’s waywardness had prese
nted him with a mirror absent of his reflection, Mortar might well have fainted away, accused himself of vampirism or mental illness, or committed some other indecorous solecism; as it was in fact the fourth time Good Old Clyde, Clydie Boy (to use two of the names by which he liked to be known) had by failing to report to his customary station left but a Clyde-shaped vacancy in his place, Mortar experienced a great deal more of dismay and irritation than shock though of course shock was not altogether avoidable. To a great extent, he understood exactly what had happened and what he had to do to set it right; what he did not and could not know, however, were the depths of Clydie Boy’s grievances, whatever they were, and what, after he had wiggled through the uncomfortably narrow mirror and entered the world he called De Land, he would be forced to do to redress them. Adding to the complexities of the task before him, his careful, inspection of the mirror’s bathroom yielded no hints whatsoever as to where his wayward double might have gone.

  When Mortar had been a child of six, the absent six-year-old Clydie Boy had left at least a small clue to his whereabouts, though the creature’s Primary, his Original, would never have noticed a thing but for the presence, the in fact astoundingly prescient presence, of his footloose Uncle Budgie.

  2

  “Budgie,” originally Budgen Mortar, Clyde’s father’s older brother, a man of wandering habits, no fixed abode, and an impenetrable temperament, timed his lengthy visits precisely to the maximum period his brother’s wife found it possible to tolerate his company. This period generally worked out to be within the two-to-three week range.

  It so fell out that in the manner of children everywhere little Clyde responded not as his parents wished, negatively, but entirely in reaction to his Uncle Budgie’s treatment of him, which although sometimes forgetful tended toward a grave kindly courtesy, as though the young Clyde happened to be a small Asian potentate who had dropped in on a ceremonial round of visits.

  And it was with exactly such a kindly courteous gravity that Uncle Budgie met his six-year-old nephew’s stricken approach to the Mortar family kitchen, for it was in that room they took their family breakfasts, at nine o’clock of the mid-fifties Saturday morning when his nephew’s reflection first failed to make its scheduled post-urination appearance in the mirror of the upstairs family bathroom.

  And it was Uncle Budgie’s kind and grave courtesy, the very gravitas of his courteous kindliness, that led the stricken boy to edge near to his uncle instead of his mother or father, who in fact, had barely noticed his entrance, and to Budgie alone describe the terrifying phenomenon of the failure of the top of his head, all at the time that was ordinarily visible to him, to appear in the mirror above the sink in the upstairs bathroom.

  “You, too, hmmm?” observed the sympathetic uncle, and arranged a rendezvous, five minutes hence, upstairs.

  And, “Oh, you, hmmm?” spoke the OtherClyde, when tracked down to the soda fountain where the prominent drawing of a yummy hamburger visible in an Archie comic visible just beyond the reflected bathroom door had directed the Primary and Original. Budgie had gently lifted him above the sink and guided him, outstretched hands exploring first, through the mirror’s suddenly vaporous surface. “The drugstore, boy, the drugstore,” Budgie had whispered a moment before young Clydie passed through entire, and so it had been: the drugstore, boy, the drugstore down on the corner of 44th and Auer, that’s where he found his rhyme.

  In a cluttered little corner or alcove of this same drugstore, six-year-old Clyde had noticed a forlorn little girl with a sallow face and dust-colored hair nibbling a paper-cone cornet of cotton candy that appeared to have been rained upon, briefly.

  Ever after, Clyde Mortar thought of this other world as De Land ob Cotton.

  3

  After the first time followed three others: at ages thirteen (a rebellion on behalf of principle, quelled by Mortar’s promise to enjoy long, probing philosophical discussions with himself in front of the very same bathroom mirror); twenty-two (Peace Corps, the bleak northern reaches of Mali; disappeared to escape the perpetual sandstorms by dozing off under a truck belonging to a sadistic tribal chief); thiry-five (Beirut, even dicier, and turned on a bribe: a long search through the bazaars of flesh merchants officially Not to Be Visited, Not Ever, and resolved only by the young officer of the United States Government’s Department of State agreeing to surround his bed on at least two sides, plus the surface overhead, with mirrors, that Clydie Boy might enjoy actual sex for a change.) The increasingly cautious and circumspect man Mr. Mortar had become detested the growing seediness of these unwelcome encounters with De Land ob Cotton.

  After the first time, Uncle Budgie had pledged him to silence. This silence he kept, along with others.

  His initial wife, Evelyn, the one who buggered off like the mirror-self, asked, “Clyde, are you in the CIA, really?”

  His brother said, “Clyde, the other day Dad and I were saying that you travel so much and we can never figure out what you’re doing, we think you’re in the CIA. Are we right?

  A girl of no consequence said, “Clydie-baby, just tell me the truth for once, okay? Are you one of those god-damned spooks?”

  4

  De Land ob Cotton had rolled a long way downhill since Mortar had been obliged to stalk his double through the honky-tonks and bordellos of the Other Beirut. Then, the degenerates and lowlifes who had taken so great an interest in his progress had at least maintained a respectful distance, and what he glimpsed of the world beyond the forbidden quarter seemed only a bit seedier and run-down than the one in which he led his already deeply doubled life. Now, everything in De Land seemed poisoned. In the real-world Washington, DC, an all-night café where, in the gloom and chiaroscuro of a high-walled rear booth, he had garroted a man at the time named Pluckrose had been unsavory enough, but nothing like the leprous ruin inhabited by smear drunken shadows who were now tracking his progress past its filthy windows. All traces of gaiety and high life, of cigarette holders and lowslung cars with detachable ragtops had departed, leaving streets flecked with garbage and dark, tough stains that looked like blood. Bullet holes and ricochet chips. scarred the brick walls. Most of the windows he saw were broken or boarded. Wearing the protective, Ninja-like garb of black trousers, black sweatshirt, a black cap, and sunglasses, and in his right front pocket carrying the faithful garrote, Mortar still felt unreasonably threatened, as if Clydie Boy might at any second launch himself, .9mm in hand, from one of the darkened doorways lining the dreary street.

  Of course he would not. His mirror-self had merely drifted into despair or a half-hearted rebellion, not into a crazed homicidal hostility. As far as Mortar knew, that never happened. How could it? In the first place, whatever would these poor creatures do without their masters?

  On a search such as Mortar’s, instinct, “gut feeling,” is the best guide possible, and after a half-hour of aimless wandering through the littered, brick-strewn, ever-slummier streets of De Land, he discovered that his wandering had not been aimless after all, for only a short distance from De Land’s grim, rat-infested Dupont Circle, he had come to rest on the cracked sidewalk before a tenement with crumbling steps leading up to a peeling door badly out of plumb. With every cell in his body our hero knew that Clydie Boy, Good Old Clyde, lived in the ugly rat-trap before him. The question of how long the fellow had been stuck in this hovel and the issue of what had brought him to this pass were mysteries to which Good Old Clyde’s Primary and Original was completely indifferent.

  Mortar wondered what he would have to do to get into the building, and was just concocting a variation upon a scheme he had used some years before in Caracas when he placed his hand experimentally on the rough surface of the peeling door and felt it yield before him, scraping the ground as it swung inward. He stepped inside. Feathers and broken bits of white tile lay like dust on the floor of the little lobby. His target lived, of course, on the fifth floor, way at the top. Where else, but the place it would cost him most effort to reach? Otherwise, th
e building struck him as almost empty. Then for the first time it occurred to Clyde Mortar that his double may have seen him as he stood deliberating on the sidewalk.

  Up and up Mortar climbed, step upon step, unworried, meeting no one and hearing no voices genuine or broadcast as he toiled upward. When at last he had attained the fifth floor, he paused panting and wheezing, confident in the supposition that no one but Good Old Clyde lived in the building. His fieldwork days were long behind him, but he still knew how to draw an inferential conclusion.

  He knocked on an ugly door; his own voice called out, Come in, Clyde, and when he did so, he detected motion behind him and heard the lock click shut.

  Calmly, he turned and regarded OtherClyde, who as ever in these odd moments appeared both to resemble him exactly and to be at least twenty percent more handsome than himself. The double was holding a long knife in his hand, the grip flat in his hand and the sharp side of the blade facing up.

  “You won’t need that,” he said.

  I’ve been thinking about us.

  The double moved closer, forcing Clyde to walk backwards toward the center of the room. In his eyes was a handsome flare of passionate determination that had now and again surprised Clyde Mortar when he came upon it in his mirror.

  “There is no us,” Clyde said.

  Oh yes, there is. Just look at things from my perspective.

  “I need you to put down the knife,” Clyde said.

  I need you to hand over the garrote.

  Clyde pulled the instrument from his pocket and gripped its handles, pulling the wire taut. “This little thing?”

  The blade flashed up, and without Mortar feeling any sense of motion or pressure whatsoever, the separated halves of the wire flopped down like loose strings.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you want?” Clyde asked. “I’m sure we’ll be able to work out a reasonable agreement.”

  There is something I want, Clyde. OtherClyde moved closer, then closer again. I’ll be happy to tell you what it is.