The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  It’s a message in a bottle. Messages like that, no one ever expects to get an answer, but we keep sending them off, anyway.

  And Edith removes the stone from the slit in the sand, which then immediately closes, leaving behind no trace that it was ever actually there. She stares at the spot for a moment, comprehending, and then she flings the stone into the sea. There’s no splash; the waves take it back without any sound and without so much as a ripple.

  The circuit has been closed, she thinks, though the metaphor strikes her as not entirely appropriate.

  She looks to the sky, and sees birds wheeling against the curdled clouds. The dream pushes her back into wakefulness, then, and, for a while, Edith lies still, squinting at the half-light of dawn and listening to a woman sobbing softly somewhere in the room.

  5.

  When Edith was seven years old, she saw a mermaid. One summer’s day, she’d gone on a picnic with the aunt and uncle who raised her (after the death of her parents), to the rocky shore below Beavertail Lighthouse on Conanicut Island. There are tidal pools there, deep and gaping clefts opened between tilted beds of slate and phyllite, and in one of them she saw the mermaid. It rose, suddenly, towards the surface, as if lunging towards her. What most surprised her child’s mind was how little it resembled any of the mermaids she’d seen in movies and storybooks, in that it was not a pretty girl with the tail of a fish. Still, she recognized it at once for what it was, if only because there was nothing else it could have been. Also, she was surprised that it seemed so hungry. The mermaid never broke the surface of the pool, but floated just beneath that turbulent, glistening membrane dividing one world from the other.

  I may say that the sea had a daughter, though she has spent every day of her life on dry land.

  The mermaid watched her for a while, and Edith watched the mermaid. It had black eyes, eyes like holes poked into the night sky, and did not seem to have eyelids of any sort. At least, Edith never saw it blink. And then, as abruptly as it had risen, the mermaid sank back into the deep cleft in the rock, leaving behind nothing for a seven-year-old girl to stare at but the sloshing surface of the pool. Later, she told her aunt and uncle what she’d seen, and they both smiled and laughed (though not unkindly) and explained that it had only been a harbor seal, not a mermaid.

  When they got back home that evening, her uncle even showed her a color picture of a harbor seal in one of his encyclopedias. It made Edith think of a fat dog that had learned to live in the ocean, and looked nothing whatsoever like the mermaid that had watched her. But she didn’t say this to her uncle, because she’d begun to suspect that it was somehow wrong to see mermaids, and that any time you saw one, you were expected to agree that what you’d really seen was a harbor seal, instead. Which is what she did. Her aunt and uncle surely had enough trouble without her seeing mermaids that she shouldn’t see.

  A week later, they had her baptized again.

  Her uncle nailed her bedroom window shut.

  Her aunt made her say the Lord’s Prayer every night before bed, and also sewed sprigs of dried wormwood into her clothes.

  And they never went back down to the rocky place below the lighthouse at Beavertail, and always thereafter had their picnics far from the sea.

  6.

  Edith does not doubt that she’s now awake, any more than, a moment before she opened her eyes, she doubted that she was still dreaming. This is not the next tier, nor merely the next painted wooden doll in the matryoshka’s stack. This is the world of her waking, conscious mind, and this time she will not deny that for the sake of sanity or convenience. There has always been too much of lies about her, too much pretend. When her eyes have grown accustomed to the early morning light, she sits up in bed. Sammie is still crying, somewhere in the room, somewhere very close by, and as soon as Edith sits up, she sees her crouching naked on the hardwood floor near the foot of the bed. All around her, the floor is wet. She has her back turned to Edith, and her head is bowed so that her black hair hangs down to the pine floorboards. Edith glances immediately to the little table beside the bed, but the peculiar tear-shaped pebble from Moonstone Beach is gone. She knew that it would be, but she looked anyway. The air in the room smells like a fish market.

  Sammie, or the thing that now occupies the place in this universe where Sammie used to be, has stopped sobbing and has begun a ragged sort of trilling chant in no language that Edith knows or thinks she’s ever heard. It sounds much more like the winter wind, and like waves rolling against sand, and the screech of herring gulls, than it sounds like human speech. Edith opens her mouth and almost calls out to Sammie, but then she stops herself. The thing on the floor probably wouldn’t answer to that name, anyway. And she’d rather not use any of the names to which it might respond.

  Its skin is the same murky pea green as the vanished stone, and bears all the same marks that were carved into the stone. All the same wounds, each pregnant with significance and connotations that Edith has only just begun to grasp. There is a pentacle—or something almost like a pentacle—cut deeply into each of Sammie’s shoulders, and a vertical line of left-facing swastikas decorates the length of her spine. Wherever this new flesh has been sliced open, it leaks a greasy black substance that must be blood. Below the swastikas, there is the symbol that reminded them both of a Greek ichthus, centered just above Sammie’s ass. Edith cannot help but wonder if Sammie was reborn with these wounds already in place, like birthmarks, or if they came later, not so differently than the stigmata of Catholic saints. Or if maybe they’re self-inflicted, and Edith remembers her own hands in the dream, the sharp claws where her nails had been. In the end, it hardly matters how the marks came to be; the meaning is the same, either way.

  Do you think that was such a good idea?

  It’s a message in a bottle. No one ever expects to get an answer, but we keep sending them off . . .

  “When you’re ready,” Edith says, almost whispering, “I’ll be right here. There’s no hurry. I know how long you’ve been waiting.” Then she lies back down, and turns to face the wall.

  About the Author

  Caitlín R. Kiernan has published eight novels, including Daughter of Hounds and The Red Tree. She is a prolific author of short fiction, and her stories have been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; Alabaster; To Charles Fort, With Love; A is for Alien; and, most recently, The Ammonite Violin & Others. Since 2004, she has also published the monthly ezine, Sirenia Digest, which features her erotica. Caitlín is currently working on her next novel, The Wolf Who Cried Girl. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her partner Kathryn and two cats.

  Story Notes

  Kiernan’s writing has been eliciting admiration for more than a decade. Jeff VanderMeer’s recent desciption fits it as well as anyone’s: “Her unabashedly adult, lush prose recalls some unholy mix of H.P. Lovecraft and Angela Carter.” Although you’ll find Kiernan’s short work in most of the “award-winning-quality” genre anthologies and various periodicals, she also publishes Sirenia Digest, the ezine mentioned above, each month. The PDF journal is packed with vignettes and short stories, and she occasionally slips in an original story that hasn’t been published elsewhere. That’s where I discovered the haunting “The Bone’s Prayer.”

  And, after reading it, I shall forevermore be cautious about what stones I pick up on beaches.

  THE WATER TOWER

  JOHN MANTOOTH

  “There’s an alien in the water tower.”

  Jeremy Posey stood at the front door of Heather’s trailer, dressed in camouflage fatigues, glasses crooked on his sunburned nose. Above him, the sun passed its zenith and hung lazily in the western sky. His dirty-blond hair caught the light and filtered it towards Heather in soft hues.

  “Clyde found it, yesterday, floating right in the tank. I overheard him talking to Ronnie Pearson about it. You know the rooms in our house are thin as paper. He said it was light blue, the color of a vein. Tiny, but a big head. Ronnie
said that made sense cause aliens are smarter than us, but if you ask me, it’s pretty dumb to end up dead inside a water tower.”

  Heather waited, wondering where all this was going. With Jeremy, you never knew. He took the special ed classes in school, but it wasn’t so much that he wasn’t smart or couldn’t learn, it was more that he was just Jeremy. He would never fit in anywhere in life. His older brother Clyde just let him tag along because Jeremy would do his dirty work, like stealing whiskey from their father or sneaking up to Jenny Willoughby’s window to take pictures of her. Heather was Jeremy’s one friend, and even she could only take him in small doses.

  “Anyway,” he said, after he caught his breath. “I thought you might like to see it.”

  “So let me get this straight,” Heather said. “You want me to walk all the way through the woods, clear out to the train tracks to see something dead in a water tower?”

  Jeremy smiled. He had a good one, and when he did it at just the right time, Heather always liked him, always wanted to root for him. “I got a feeling about this,” he said. “This could be big. But we’ve got to beat Ronnie and Clyde out there. Summer school lets out in like an hour. They’ll go to Clyde’s house to drink for awhile.” He glanced at the sky. “I’d say we’ve got until dark.” Reaching into the pocket of his shorts, he pulled out a slim, silver camera. “Digital. If this is what I think it is, I’m going to have pictures to prove it.”

  “And what do you think it is, Jeremy?”

  His grin widened. “An alien, of course.”

  Heather laughed. Not at him exactly. No, his enthusiasm was revved too high for that. She laughed because she wanted to go, well she wanted to get out from under the same roof where she had spent the better part of a long, hot summer trying to avoid her mother and especially the men that came over in the afternoon.

  She looked at Jeremy, his big smile still plastered across his face. Someone had given him a bad haircut. Probably Jeremy himself, considering he barely had enough money most of the time to get a roast beef sandwich at Hardees, and his dad didn’t believe in personal grooming. Despite all this, something was right about Jeremy. It was hard to say what, exactly, but it was there. She knew it.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll go. But I want my name on any pictures you take. It would be nice to beat the Barrows to the punch.”

  “Barrows?”

  “Ronnie and Clyde.” Jeremy frowned like he sometimes did in class when he didn’t understand. “Never mind,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Heather had no sooner said the words when an old blue truck spun its tires out on the road and turned down the worn gravel drive leading to her trailer.

  Heather’s mother appeared framed behind the kitchen window, a silent face next to the smudged glass. Heather saw her take a drag of her cigarette and watch the truck roll toward the house. She did not look in Heather’s direction.

  At a certain point, somewhere past the junkyard, out beyond the little pond that, over the years, had been used to dump the things even the junkyard didn’t want, the woods changed. But not just the woods. The things in the woods changed as well. Artifacts from a different world slowly began to appear: remnants of a car buried under kudzu vines; a pile of beer bottles so old the labels had faded into obscurity, bled white by the long sun; a pair of trousers, half buried in the mud. A plow had lain too long in the sun and turned a fleshy white so it appeared to Heather like a skeleton, wooden arms stiff and outstretched, grasping for something just out of reach.

  “There’s a whole world back here,” Heather said.

  “Yeah, my dad told me about it once. The water tower, these ruins, all of it was once a town. I forget the name.”

  “What happened?”

  Jeremy shrugged. “Don’t know. I guess folks went in for trailer parks and electricity. No power out here. But it’s got something else.” He looked around. “Soul. Yeah. It’s got soul.”

  Heather smiled.

  “What? You know what I mean. You’ve been to places before that suck the soul right out of you before, right? Like the trailer park where you live. No soul. Soul sucking, but no soul. Except when it rains. Everyplace has got soul then.”

  Heather grinned. Jeremy was right. This place did have soul. On their left, a creek weaved between the trees. A wooden fence leaned precariously over the water, one of its poles dangling free and occasionally dipping into the slight current. A snapping turtle lay sunning itself on a moss covered rock, and overhead the tall pines swayed mysteriously, giving Heather a pleasing touch of vertigo each time she looked up.

  She saw how this might have been a community. The structures, little more than vine-covered ruins, were sinking deeper into the earth with each passing year. The homes had been burned, the walls inside black and raw. Inside the least damaged, Heather found bedding and clothes and some dirty magazines.

  “This is where David Masters and Jessica McKissick used to come,” Jeremy said. “Me and Ronnie used to climb that tree—” He pointed at a tall, leaning oak. “—and watch them. They put on a hell of a show. At least until she got pregnant.”

  “Jessica McKissick? I didn’t know she was pregnant.”

  “She was. Then she wasn’t.” Jeremy leaned over close to Heather and whispered, “I think she had an abortion, or maybe just got rid of it.”

  “Did her parents know?”

  Jeremy shrugged. “I doubt it. Ronnie and me and David, of course. We might have been the only ones. I could tell because she started wearing big sweaters and jackets and stuff. Anyway, once that happened, the show stopped.”

  “It’s just hard to believe. How she could get pregnant and hide the whole thing from her parents,” Heather said. She was intrigued, especially by how a girl could get pregnant, have the baby, and her parents never be the wiser. “So, she got rid of it?”

  Jeremy shrugged. “She doesn’t have a baby anymore. My brother saw her a few weeks ago. He said she definitely wasn’t pregnant.”

  Heather thought of her mother, perpetual drink in one hand, half-smoked cigarette in the other. Thought of her mother’s long face, always so blank and uncurious, always ready to speak without thinking, to criticize without understanding who she criticized.

  Heather tried to picture herself pregnant. Tried to think of how it would feel to have a life growing inside her, kicking and turning and needing. Would her mom notice? Possibly not. Weeks might go by without interaction between them. If Heather put a little more effort into it, she could go forever without her mother seeing her.

  The last time Heather saw her father was two years ago, at the end of sixth grade. Because her mother wouldn’t take her, Heather had saved the money for cab fare and traveled down to the VA where her father lived full time. He’d been in the Gulf War and had come back with shrapnel embedded in the back of his neck and spine, but that wasn’t why he was off.

  According to her mother, it was just his crazy gene kicking in.

  “What happened to him,” her mother had said shortly after he was committed, “will happen to you one day, too.”

  Heather, only eleven, wanted to know why.

  “DNA.”

  “Huh?”

  “The stuff in your blood that makes you, you. You’re a Watson, Heather. You’ve got the same genes as your father. I should have known when I married him, his elevator would eventually get stuck.” She breathed out a long column of smoke, watching it drift lazily across the room. “Just like his father and his father before him.”

  Heather didn’t see her father as crazy. In fact, she considered him—had considered him—the sanest person she knew time. Sure there had been moments when he seemed different, at odds with the world, but that was what made him special to Heather. They were alike in that way.

  When she was nine, he’d taken her to Disney World, just the two of them. He told her she was a princess, just like the real ones.

  “Real ones?” she’d said.

  “Cinderella, Snow White, Sleepin
g Beauty. All of them. You’re a princess too.”

  “But they’re not real, Daddy.”

  He smiled, surveyed the park, as if to spot one in order to prove his point. At that moment, the park seemed deserted, forlorn almost, in the twilight of the late afternoon. His smile dissipated, turned to a look of confusion. He touched her shoulder.

  “You’re going and going until one day you find there’s no where to go.”

  She waited, her nine-year-old mind, spinning, trying to make connections that were not there.

  “You look in the mirror. You realize the person looking back is you. That’s when it falls apart.”

  Heather said nothing. His smile came back. “Hey,” he said, “a princess.”

  Heather followed his gaze, but she saw only the long shadows of the sun falling across the park.

  The last time she’d seen him, at the VA, he had said nothing at all. He looked past her, his gaze fixed on the wall behind her, where a dark, mud-colored stain, possibly blood, had resisted all efforts to clean it. Her father’s lips moved soundlessly. He might have been praying. Or cataloguing all the ways such a stain might have ended up on the wall. He might have been reading some secret language in that stain, some otherworldly alphabet only he knew. Maybe, Heather would know it too, one day. This was what she liked to think when she thought about her father. He wasn’t crazy. Instead, he had uncovered the secrets of the world, lifting the veil over them and finding himself stunned to silence by what he had found.

  A house appeared, shimmering in the distance, its eaves dripping with Spanish moss, its front door stripped bare of paint, the color of flesh. The yard, if you could call it that, was a mess of trash and weeds, all tangled together with the undergrowth, which to Heather seemed to creep forth from the trees like sentient fingers searching for something to touch.

  The smell was of man, not trees.

  “Better steer clear,” Heather whispered. She knew there were meth labs out here. And crack houses. And other places that stopped being anything except dead ends. Dying places.