The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  Amy. The man knew where Amy was. Ben stared for a second at the strange face and then kicked back the covers and reached for his jeans, pulling them over his underpants, tugged on his T-shirt and squeezed his feet into his trainers.

  His stomach in his mouth, he leaned forward to open the window further to climb out when he paused. “Can I bring something to give to Amy?”

  The idea seemed to amuse the man, who licked a trickle of blood from his front teeth. “Certainly. You can try. No harm. But be quick.”

  Unsure of whether he was dreaming or not, the surreal reality of the vanished man too much to really think about, Ben crept out of his room and across the dark corridor. Guiding himself by memory and habit, he stole into his sister’s abandoned bedroom and grabbed the heart shaped box from beside her bed. He ripped the pendant out, enjoying the coolness of it against his skin.

  Opening his own door, he feared and hoped that the man had vanished again, expecting to see only the night looking back at him from the window. How would he feel? Relieved? Disappointed?

  But the grinning face was still there, framed by the familiarity of his bedroom, and Ben held the pendant up. “Will I be able to give this to her?”

  The man shrugged. “Don’t know if it’ll get there. We’ll see.” The grin stretched. “Now come.” He held up the machete. “Time, time, time.”

  Ben stared at the sharp metal; long, wide and fierce. How could he have forgotten about the knife? That’s not a knife. It’s a fucking machete. He swallowed hard. As yet, the man hadn’t tried to hurt him. But so far, ever since he’d appeared on the edge of the field, nothing about this man had seemed normal. “You go ahead. I’ll follow you.”

  Pausing on the windowsill, he smelt the dried wood and faded paint and felt the rush of twelve years of existence flooding over him. I’ve had enough. I’m getting out of here. Maybe this was it. The end. Maybe he’d never come back. Maybe by the next day he’d be rotting somewhere with Amy, lost and soon forgotten. He let the thought play in his head for a moment and then thought of Bracknell, Mum, and Mrs. Cooper, and he realized that he didn’t much care either way. But he did care about Amy. He needed to know about her. Swinging his legs over the side, for the second time that day he followed the man that strode ahead of him.

  This time it was different. Every so often the man with the knife would turn around and grin, checking Ben was following, and Ben would raise a hand and wave and they would continue in silence, cutting their way through the silent town. It wasn’t long before they were crossing the field in the exact same line the man had taken and Ben wondered if the ghosts of he, Cath, and Wrighty of the afternoon were somewhere ahead of him, sprinting in panic, stuck in the afternoon heat, no cool of the night for them.

  He strode on, the flash of white from the man’s legs and the shine of the metal in the moonlight his only torch. He knew every inch of the ground of this town, had lived it, fallen and fought in the dust of it for all his life, and his feet carried him confidently at the swift pace the man was setting.

  Before long they came to stop at the base of the tree, this time Ben standing side by side with the man. What would happen now? Would the man vanish again? The real and the unreal, the seen and the unseen blurred in his head.

  The man was still grinning as he pointed into the branches with the machete. His gums were rivers of blood now, some escaping into the creases by his mouth, looking like a parody of an old woman with too much lipstick on. It didn’t seem to bother him though. Was he dying? Were they all just dying?

  “You climb first.”

  Ben stared at him, the question in his head tumbling out before he could check it. “Are you sick? Do you have cancer?”

  The breeze lifted the thick hair that was more silver than it had been at Ben’s window. “I’ll be better when we get there.”

  Ben looked up at the tree, knowing he was going to climb it whatever the man said or did. And knowing that when he got up there, he would vanish. One way or another. Just like the man had this afternoon. He ran his fingers over the rough bark feeling its life singing in his soul. “What do you need the knife for?” His finger dug in, finding a tentative hold.

  “To open the door. To get us there.”

  One foot gripping the tree, he pulled himself upwards, enjoying the way the ancient tree felt as he gripped it. “And where is ‘there’ exactly?” He looked down at the man who carefully pushed him up with his free hand, full of strength despite his appearance. Ben disappeared into the branches but the man’s response was clear.

  “Nowhere.”

  Finding a seat on the largest branch, the sweet smell of leaves and wood almost smothering him, he looked down confused. “Nowhere? How can we go nowhere? Nowhere isn’t a place.”

  The machete was between the man’s teeth again and as he pulled himself up, wrapping himself round a thick branch opposite, Ben could see where it had sliced into the corners of his mouth. When he took it out he laughed, a coppery sound, real and true and yet so very different from anything Ben had ever heard.

  “Yes. The Nowhere.” He glanced around at the leaves that caressed him. “This is The Somewhere. There is The Nowhere. It’s the same but very different. You’ll see. Sometimes things from The Somewhere find themselves in The Nowhere. Car keys, toys, people.” He laughed more gently this time. “Sometimes we bring them. Like you.”

  Nothing and everything was making sense. The world was stumbling for its feet in his head. “And Amy’s there?”

  The Nowhere man nodded. “She talks about you all the time. She wants to see you. She came in a dream and she couldn’t get back.” He was twitching slightly and Ben could see that whatever was going to happen, wherever they were going, the stranger was eager to get there. He needed to get there. The skin and the blood told Ben that.

  The familiar smell of the night, of his sleeping home filled his nostrils. “Will I be able to come back?” Wrighty. Cath.

  An almost invisible shrug. “Some can. Some can’t. Who knows?”

  Mum. Ben thought of her mean eyes, wheezing breath and the oxygen tank and Mrs. Cooper. He thought of two vanished children, two empty bedrooms and her dying alone. “Will she still be here when I get back?” He didn’t need to say who. He had a feeling that the Nowhere man knew a lot more than he was letting on.

  “She’ll still be here. Maybe not the same, but still here. If you get back.” Lifting the machete the Nowhere man stopped grinning. “Are you ready?”

  Shutting his eyes, Ben took a deep breath, gripped the necklace, and nodded.

  For a moment the silence of the night was disturbed by the rustling in the tree. From somewhere in its branches a pendant tumbled and hit the ground, and then the old life settled, the balance restored, to sleep until morning.

  About the Author

  Sarah Pinborough is the author of six horror novels and her first thriller, A Matter of Blood, was released by Gollancz (U.K.) in March 2010, and is the first of The Dog-Faced Gods trilogy. Her first YA novel, The Double-Edged Sword, will be out under the name Sarah Silverwood later this year. Pinborough was the 2009 winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story, and has three times been short-listed for Best Novel. She has also been short-listed for a World Fantasy Award and her novella The Language of Dying was nominated for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award.

  The Nowhere Man was the seed of Pinborough’s YA trilogy The Nowhere Chronicles. Written under the name Sarah Silverwood, the first book, The Double-Edged Sword, was published in September 2010.

  Story Notes

  Pinborough presents us with a fine example of “disquieting” fiction. A boy whose sister has gone missing and whose dying mother is more monstrous than maternal teeters on the brink of adolescence with full knowledge he will soon lose his last meaningful connections. Ben is as alone as any lost explorer of the unknown. Being Somewhere can mean you are really Nowhere.

  THE BONE’S PRAYER

  CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

  The
sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper;

  I cannot quite make it out. ~ Annie Dillard

  1.

  She has been walking the beach all afternoon, which isn’t unusual for days when she cannot write. And there have been several dry days now in a row, one following wordlessly after the next. A mute procession of empty hours, or, worse still, a procession of hours spent carefully composing sentences and paragraphs that briefly deceive her into thinking that the drought has finally passed. But then she reads back over the pages, and the prose thuds and clangs artlessly against itself, or it leads off somewhere she has not the time or the skill or the inclination to follow. She has deadlines, and bills, and the expectations of readers, and all these things must be factored into the question of whether a productive hour is, indeed, productive.

  It becomes intolerable, the mute procession and the false starts, the cigarettes and coffee and all those books silently watching her from their places on the shelves that line her office. And, so, she eventually, inevitably, goes to the beach, which is not so very far away, hardly an hour’s drive south from the city. She goes to the beach, and she tries very hard not to think of what isn’t getting written. She tries only to hear the waves, the gulls and cormorants, the wind, tries to take in so much of the sand and the sky and the blue-green sea that there is no room remaining for her anxieties.

  And sometimes it even works.

  Today is a Saturday near the end of winter, and there are violent gusts off the sound that bite straight through her gloves and her long wool coat. Gusts that have twice now almost managed to dislodge the fleece-lined cap with flaps to keep her ears warm. Thick clouds the color of Wedgwood china hide the sun and threaten snow. But, thanks to the inclement weather, she has the beach all to herself, and that more than makes up for the discomfort. This solitude, like the breathy rhythm of the surf, and the smell of the incoming tide, is a balm. She begins at Moonstone Beach and walks the mile or so south and west to the scatter of abandoned summer cottages at Greenhill Point. Then she walks back, following the narrow strip of beach stretching between Block Island Sound and the low dunes dividing the beach from Trustom Pond.

  The estuary is frozen solid, and when she climbs the dunes and stares out across the ice, there are flocks of mallards there, and Canadian geese, and a few swans wandering disconsolately about, looking lost. In the summer, the land around the salt pond is a verdant tangle of dog roses, poison ivy, greenbriers, and goldenrod. But now it is ringed by a homogenous brown snarl, and the only sign of green anywhere in this landscape are a few spruce trees and red cedars, dotting the southern edge of the forest to the north.

  She turns back towards the sea and the cobble-strewn sand. It doesn’t seem to her that the sea changes its hues with the season. Today, it wears the same restless shade of celadon that it wears in June, quickly darkening to a Persian blue where the water begins to grow deep, only a little ways out from shore. Ever shifting, never still, it is her only constant, nonetheless. It is her comfort, the sight of the sea, even in a month as bleak and dead as this.

  She begins gathering a handful of pebbles, meaning to carry them back towards the dunes and find a dry place to sit, hopefully somewhere out of the worst of the wind. This beach is somewhat famous for the pebbles that fetch up here from submerged outcroppings of igneous stone, earth that was the molten-hot core of a mountain range millions of years before the coming of the dinosaurs. Here and there among the polished lumps of granite are the milky white moonstones that give the beach its name. She used to collect them, until she had a hundred or so, and they lost their novelty. There are also strands of kelp and bladderwrack, the claws and carapaces and jointed legs of dismembered crabs and lobsters, an occasional mermaid’s purse—all the usual detritus. In the summer months, there would be added to this an assortment of human jetsam—water bottles, beer cans, stray flip flops, Styrofoam cups, and all manner of plastic refuse—the thoughtless filth that people leave behind. And this is another reason that she prefers the beach in winter.

  She has selected six pebbles, and is looking for a seventh (having decided she would choose seven and only seven), when she spots a small, peculiar stone. It’s shaped like a teardrop, and is the color of pea soup. The stone glistens wetly in the dim afternoon light, and she can clearly see that there are markings etched deeply into its smooth surface. One of them looks a bit like a left-facing swastika, and another reminds her of a Greek ichthus. For a moment, the stone strikes her as something repulsive, like coming upon a rotting fish or a discarded prophylactic, and she draws her hand back. But that first impression quickly passes, and soon she’s at a loss even to account for it. It is some manner of remarkable artifact, whether very old or newly crafted, and she adds it to the six pebbles in her hand before turning once more towards the frozen expanse of Trustom Pond.

  2.

  It’s Friday evening, two days after her trip from Providence to the beach. Usually, she looks forward to Friday’s, because on Friday nights Sammie almost always stops by after work. Sammie is the closest thing she has to a close friend, and, from time to time, they’ve been lovers, as well. The writer, whose name is Edith (though that isn’t the name that appears on the covers of her novels), is not an outgoing person. Crowds make her nervous, and she avoids bars and nightclubs, and even dreads trips to the market. She orders everything she can off the Internet—clothing, books, CDs, DVDs, electronics—because she hates malls and shopping centers. She hates the thought of being seen. To her knowledge, psychiatrists have yet to coin a term for people who have a morbid fear of being looked at, but she figures antisocial is accurate enough. However, most times, she enjoys having Sammie around, and Sammie never gets angry when Edith needs to be left alone for a week or two.

  They’ve been mistaken for sisters, despite the fact that they really don’t look very much alike. Sammie is two or three inches taller and has striking jet-black hair just beginning to show strands of gray. Edith’s hair is an unremarkable dishwater blond. Sammie’s eyes are a bright hazel green, and Edith’s are a dull brown. Sammie has delicate hands and the long, tapered fingers of a pianist, and Edith’s hands are thick, her fingers stubby. She keeps her nails chewed down to the quick, and there are nicotine stains on her skin. Sammie quit smoking years ago, before they met.

  “Well, it was just lying there on the sand,” Edith says. “And it really doesn’t look all that old.”

  “It’s a rock,” Sammie replies, still peering at the peculiar greenish stone, holding it up to the lamp on the table next to Edith’s bed. “What do you mean, it doesn’t look old? All rocks look old to me.”

  “The carving, I mean,” Edith replies, trying to decide if she really wants another of the stale madeleines that Sammie brought with her; they taste faintly of lemon extract, and are shaped like scallop shells. “I mean the carving in the rock looks fresh. If it had been rolling around in the ocean for any time at all the edges would be worn smooth by now.”

  “I think it’s soapstone,” Sammie says, and turns the pebble over and over, examining the marks on it. “But I don’t think you find soapstone around here.”

  “Like I was saying, I figure someone bought it in a shop somewhere and lost it. Maybe it was their lucky charm. Or maybe it didn’t mean anything to them.”

  “It feels funny,” Sammie says, and before Edith can ask her to explain what she means, Sammie adds. “Slippery. Oily. Slick. You know?”

  “I haven’t noticed that,” Edith says, although she has. The lie surprises her, and she can’t imagine why she didn’t just admit that she’s also noticed the slithery sensation she gets whenever she holds the stone for more than a minute or two.

  “You should show it to someone. A geologist or an archeologist or someone who knows about this stuff.”

  “I honestly don’t think it’s very old,” Edith replies, and decides against a fourth madeleine. Instead, she lights a cigarette and thinks about going to the kitchen for a beer. “If I took it t
o an archeologist, they’d probably tell me the thing was bought for five bucks in a souvenir shop in Misquamicut.”

  “I really don’t like the way it feels,” Sammie says.

  “Then put it down.”

  “Is that supposed to be a Jesus fish?” Sammie asks, pointing to the symbol that reminded Edith of an ichthus.

  “Sort of looks like one,” Edith replies.

  “And this one, this one right here,” Sammie says and taps the nail of her index finger against the stone. “That looks like astrology, the symbol for Neptune.”

  “I thought it was a trident, or a pitchfork,” Edith sighs, wishing Sammie would put the stone away so they could talk about something else, almost anything else at all. The stone makes her uneasy, and three times in two days she’s almost thrown it into the trash, so she wouldn’t have to think about it or look at it anymore. “Can we please talk about something else for a while? You’ve been gawking at that awful thing for half an hour now.”

  Sammie turns her head, looking away from the stone, looking over her left shoulder at Edith. She’s frowning slightly, and her neatly waxed eyebrows are furrowed.

  “You asked me what I thought of it,” she says, sounding more defensive than annoyed, more confused than angry. “You’re the one who started this.”

  “It’s not like I meant to find it, you know.”

  “It’s not like you had to bring it home, either.”

  Sammie watches her a moment or two longer, then turns back to the tear-shaped stone.

  “This one is a sun cross,” she says, indicating another of the symbols. “Here, the cross held inside a circle. It’s something else you see in astrology, the sign for the earth.”

  “I never knew you were into horoscopes,” Edith says, and she takes a long drag on her cigarette and holds the smoke in her lungs until she begins to feel dizzy. Then she exhales through her nostrils.

  “Why does it bother you?” Sammie asks.