The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  At dinner, we didn’t discuss the film as we normally would. No revisiting favorite lines of dialogue, seeking subtleties in the script; no ranking of the performances or nuanced comparisons to films of similar type. Instead, we tore small pieces off store-bought rolls or rearranged silk flowers, their petals dusty in a white ceramic vase. We took turns saying we were hungry, wondering aloud when the minestrone soup would arrive.

  Finally, Helen broached the subject. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I wish I hadn’t sat there.”

  “No need to blame yourself,” I said. “I hadn’t even noticed the guy was blind. And who’d ever expect his wife to describe the whole film for him?”

  “I wish I hadn’t sat there,” Helen repeated.

  That was pretty much all we needed to say about the matter. After the main course, though, when we decided not to stay for dessert or coffee, the waitress took too long to bring our check. In the awkward silence, I weakened and decided to confess. I told her about my curious encounter with the blind man in the lobby.

  Helen shivered, like it was the most frightening story she’d ever heard.

  Let me tell you about a different movie. It’s another romantic comedy, this time about a long-married couple who stop everything so they can take a month to travel the world together. The man is reluctant at first, afraid to fall behind on his work accounts, and it’s not their anniversary or either of their birthdays, and he’s never been that spontaneous anyway. But she convinces him, and she’s already booked the flights, the hotels, the cruise ship, and she’s bought books and brochures and printed off pages and pages of advice from travel Web sites: little restaurants tourists didn’t visit; special tours given only Sunday afternoons, if you know who to ask; “must see” lists for each city, itineraries to fill each day.

  Before they leave, she surprises him with a wrapped package, and it’s a digital camera with lots of storage space, so they can take as many pictures as they want. He’d never believed in photographs, thought taking them distracted from the experience of travel. On previous trips, other tourists were a nuisance with cameras, blocking his view or popping a flash to interrupt the soft calm of natural light. But it’s a thoughtful gift, and he finds out he enjoys it: framing a waterfall or mountain or monument, with her in the foreground, and the fun of checking through the pictures that night in the hotel.

  He had agreed to the trip just to please her, but soon her enthusiasm wins him over, and he ends up loving it. To be a better comedy, though, things need to go wrong: missed connections, bungled hotel reservations; a random “I’ll have that” finger pointed at a menu, and lamb brains arrive at the table, or a five-pound exotic fish with bubble eyes staring up from the plate; or ill-pronounced words to a French street juggler—fou instead of feu, for instance, (“You called him crazy, m’sieu!”)—and hilarious misunderstandings ensue.

  But there’s none of that. Similar things occur, but not often, nothing major. A forgotten toothbrush, rather than a lost passport. She’s a fantastic tour guide, and he loves her more than ever. The trip is unforgettable, revitalizing. Okay, it’s not that great a film: no conflict, no complications. But it’s sweet.

  After the trip, he has the memories, and the pictures. The woman smiles in all of them—leaning against the ship rail during their Hawaii cruise, the Nepali coast in the background; tiny in one corner, hair windswept, with the Grand Canyon vast behind her; at a table outside a Venice cafe, a glass of local vintage raised for the camera, and for him.

  He’s printed all the photos, hundreds of them. He fans a stack, like a cartoon flip-book, and the world rushes behind his wife’s constant, smiling image. The heavy paper stock creates a gust of air, almost like a whisper.

  Bladder cancer, it says. Inoperable.

  Everything had seemed like one of Helen’s fluffy, happy-ending movies. She kept it that way as long as she could.

  The specialists call it bladder cancer, if that’s where the tumor originates, even if the disease spreads to other parts of the body. Helen’s frequent visits to the bathroom were a symptom, but the change happened gradually, and neither of us had noticed. By the time she got the diagnosis, things had progressed too far. Even with radical treatment, the prognosis wasn’t good. When she found out, she decided not to tell me. Instead, she announced, “Let’s take a trip!”

  If this were really a movie, that omission makes for a more significant story. We were always a happy couple, but I was especially happy during that month-long vacation. I was happy. I can only imagine what really went on in Helen’s mind, despite those ever-present smiles. Thoughts of aggressive therapy when she returned home; dread of long hospital days, pain still sharp through medicated fog. If she was lucky, maybe, a swift decline.

  The trip wasn’t for her benefit, but for mine. A beautiful, poignant farewell gift. And always, beneath the sweet surface of her romantic comedy, an awful, unnarrated tragedy.

  I hate myself for not noticing it. Helen spared me the knowledge, as long as she could.

  One day near the end, from the intensive care bed that she’d dreaded in silence, she revealed something very strange. I almost wish she hadn’t told me—though I can understand why she needed to. Something else happened that day at the theater, after we sat behind the blind man and his talkative companion. In the ladies’ room, when the film was over, Helen heard that whispered voice again, from the adjoining stall. The voice was clear and directed; Helen knew she was the only one who could hear it. The whisper began at the precise moment when my wife strained and began to empty her bladder. Helen remembered exactly what the voice had said: “It doesn’t hurt. It’s just a minor inconvenience, so you put it off. By the time you get to a doctor, it will be too late.” As she repeated the words, Helen’s voice, weakened by the cancer and the treatments, achieved a perfect, uncanny duplication of the woman’s urgent whisper.

  The hospital seemed instantly more sterile and hopeless and cold. Helen passed away that night, while I was home asleep.

  And now, all my movies are sad. I go to them alone. I want to feel Helen’s presence in the empty seat next to me, embrace those half-conscious signals we always shared in the dark. I want to tap the top of her hand gently, three times.

  Instead, I lean my head slightly to the side. A whispered voice distorts the context of the film, makes the story all about me and my loss. It changes the ending, twists it into something horrible.

  About the Author

  Norman Prentiss recently won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achieve-ment in Short Fiction for the story reprinted in this volume. His first book, Invisible Fences, was published in May 2010. Other fiction has appeared in Tales from the Gorezone, Damned Nation, Postscripts, the Shivers anthology series, and at the Horror Drive-In web site. His poetry is forthcoming in A Sea of Alone: Poems for Alfred Hitchcock and has appeared in Writer Online, Southern Poetry Review, and Baltimore’s City Paper. Essays on gothic and sensation literature have been published inVictorian Poetry, Colby Quarterly, andThe Thomas Hardy Review.

  Story Notes

  Another slice of life story but, unlike O’Nan’s, “In the Porches of My Ears” has a whisper of the uncanny: the blind man’s wife in the ladies’ room. Does that make it fantasy? Or was it merely an odd coincidence? There’s no atmosphere of dread, just a numbing sadness and subtle realization of the darkness lurking in any life. The title, by the way, comes from a well-known tale of horror:

  Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole,

  With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial,

  And in the porches of my ears did pour

  The leperous distilment; whose effect

  Holds such an enmity with blood of man

  That swift as quicksilver it courses through

  The natural gates and alleys of the body,

  And with a sudden vigour doth posset

  And curd, like eager droppings into milk,

  The thin and wholesome blood . . .

  —William Shakespeare, Ham
let, Act 1, Scene V

  THE CINDERELLA GAME

  KELLY LINK

  One day Peter would have his own secret hideaway just like this one, his stepfather’s forbidden room, up in the finished attic: leather couches, stereo system with speakers the size of school lockers, flat screen television, and so many horror movies you’d be able to watch a different one every night of the year. The movie Peter picked turned out to be in a foreign language, but it was still pretty scary and there were werewolves in it.

  “What are you doing?” someone said. Peter spilled popcorn all over the couch.

  His new stepsister Darcy stood in the door that went down to the second floor. Her hair was black and knotted and stringy, and, no surprise, she was wearing one of her dozens of princess dresses. This one had been pink and spangled at one point. Now it looked like something a zombie would wear to a fancy dress party.

  “What are you doing up here?” Peter saw, with fascinated horror, the greasy smears left behind on the leather as he chased popcorn back into the bowl. “Go away. Why aren’t you asleep?”

  His stepsister said, “Dad says I’m not allowed to watch scary movies.” She’d holstered a fairy wand in the pocket of her princess gown. The battered tiara on her head was missing most of its rhinestones.

  You are a scary movie, Peter thought. “How long have you been standing here?”

  “Not long. Since the werewolf bit the other lady. You were picking your nose.”

  It got better and better. “If you’re not allowed to watch scary movies, then what are you doing up here?”

  “What are you doing up here?” Darcy said. “We’re not supposed to watch television up here without an adult. Why aren’t you in bed? Where’s Mrs. Daly?”

  “She had to go home. Somebody called and said her husband was in the hospital. Mom hasn’t come back yet,” Peter said. “So I’m in charge until they get home. She and your dad are still out on their we-won’t-go-on-a-honeymoon-we’ll just-have-a-mini-honeymoon-every-Monday-night-for-the-rest-of-our-lives special date. Apparently there was a wait at the restaurant, blah blah blah, and so they’re going to a later movie. They called and I said that Mrs. Daly was in the bathroom. So just go back to bed, okay?”

  “You’re not my babysitter,” his stepsister said. “You’re only three years older than me.”

  “Four and a half years older,” he said. “So you have to do what I say. If I told you to go jump in a fire then you’d have to jump. Got it?”

  “I’m not a baby,” Darcy said. But she was. She was only eight.

  One of the movie werewolves was roaming through a house, playing hide and seek. There were puddles of blood everywhere. It came into a room where there was a parrot, reached up with a human-like paw, and opened the door of the cage. Peter and Darcy both watched for a minute, and then Peter said, “You are a baby. You have over a hundred stuffed animals. You know all the words to all the songs from The Little Mermaid. My mom told me you still wet the bed.”

  “Why are you so mean?” She said it like she was actually curious.

  Peter addressed the werewolves. “How can I explain this so that someone your age will understand? I’m not mean. I’m just honest. It’s not like I’m your real brother. We just happen to live in the same house because your father needed someone to do his taxes, and my mother is a certified accountant. The rest of it I don’t even pretend to understand.” Although he did. Her father was rich. His mother wasn’t. “Okay? Now go to bed.”

  “No.” Darcy did a little dance, as if to demonstrate that she could do whatever she wanted.

  “Fine,” he said. “Stay here and watch the werewolf movie then.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Then go play princess or whatever it is you’re always doing.” Darcy had a closet with just princess dresses in it. And tiaras. And fairy wands. And fairy wings.

  “You play with me,” she said. “Or I’ll tell everyone you pick your nose.”

  “Who cares,” Peter said. “Go away.”

  “I’ll pay you.”

  “How much?” he said, just out of curiosity.

  “Ten dollars.”

  He thought for a minute. Her grandparents had given her a check for her birthday. Little kids never knew what to do with money and as far as he could tell, her father bought her everything she wanted anyway. And she got an allowance. Peter got one now too, of course, but he’d knocked a glass of orange juice over on his laptop and his mom said she was only going to pay for half of what a new one would cost. “Make it fifty.”

  “Twenty,” Darcy said. She came over and sat on the couch beside him. She smelled awful. A rank, feral smell, like something that lived in a cave. He’d heard his stepfather tell his mother that half the time Darcy only ran the water and then splashed it around with her hands behind a locked door. Make-believe baths, which was funny when you thought about how much she worshipped Ariel from The Little Mermaid. When Darcy really took a bath she left a ring of grime around the tub. He’d seen it with his own eyes.

  Peter said, “What does this involve, exactly?”

  “We could play Three Little Pigs. Or Cinderella. You be the evil stepsister.”

  Like everything was already decided. Just to annoy her, Peter said, “For a lousy twenty bucks I get to be whoever I want. I’m Cinderella. You can be the evil stepsister.”

  “You can’t be Cinderella!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re a boy.”

  “So what?”

  Darcy seemed to have no answer to this. She examined the hem of her princess dress. Pulled a few remaining sequins off, as if they were scabs. Finally she said, “My dad says I have to be nice to you. Because this is really my house, and you’re a guest, even though I didn’t invite you to come live here and now you’re going to live here all the time and never go away unless you die or get sent away to military school or something.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Peter said, feeling really annoyed now. So that was his stepfather’s plan. Or maybe it was his mother, still working out the details of her new, perfect life, worrying that Peter was going to mess things up now that she’d gotten it. He’d gone in and out of three schools in the last two years. It was easy enough to get thrown out of school if you wanted to be. If they sent him away, he’d come right back. “Maybe I like it here.”

  Darcy looked at him suspiciously. It wasn’t like she was problem free, either. She went to see a therapist every Tuesday to deal with some “abandonment issues” which were apparently due to the fact that her real mother now lived in Hawaii.

  Peter said, “I’m Cinderella. Deal with it.”

  His stepsister shrugged. She said, “If I’m the evil stepsister then I get to tell you what to do. First you have to go put the toilet seat down in the bathroom. And I get to hold the remote and you have to go to bed first. And you have to cry a lot. And sing. And make me a peanut butter sandwich with no crusts. And a bowl of chocolate ice cream. And I get your Playstation, because Cinderella doesn’t get to have any toys.”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Peter said, when she seemed to have finished. He grinned at her. My what big teeth I have. “I’m going to be the evil Cinderella.”

  She bared her teeth right back at him. “Wrong. Cinderella isn’t evil. She gets to go to the ball and wear a princess dress. And mice like her.”

  “Cinderella might be evil,” Peter said, thinking it through, remembering how it went in the Disney movie. Everybody treated Cinderella like she was a pushover. Didn’t she sleep in a fireplace? “If her evil stepsister keeps making fun of her and taking away her Playstation, she might burn down the house with everyone in it.”

  “That isn’t how the story goes. This is stupid,” Darcy said. She was beginning to sound less sure of herself, however.

  “This is the new, improved version. No fairy godmother. No prince. No glass slipper. No happy ending. Better run away, Darcy. Because evil Cinderella is coming to get you.” Peter stood up
. Loomed over Darcy in what he hoped was a menacing way. The werewolves were howling on the TV.

  Darcy shrank back into the couch. Held up her fairy wand as if it would keep her safe. “No, wait! You have to count to one hundred first. And I’ll go hide.”

  Peter grabbed the stupid, cheap wand. Pointed it at Darcy’s throat. Tapped it on her chest and when she looked down, bounced it off her nose. “I’ll count to ten. Unless you want to pay me another ten bucks. Then I’ll count higher.”

  “I only have five more dollars!” Darcy protested.

  “You got fifty bucks from your grandparents last weekend.”

  “Your mom made me put half of it into a savings account.”

  “Okay. I’ll count to twenty-three.” He put the werewolf movie on pause. “One.”

  He went into all the bedrooms on the second floor, flicking the light switches on and off. She wasn’t under any of the beds. Or in the closets. Or behind the shower curtain in the show-off master bathroom. Or in either of the other two bathrooms on the second floor. He couldn’t believe how many bathrooms there were in this house. Back in the dark hallway again he saw something and paused. It was a mirror and he was in it. He paused to look at himself. No Cinderella here. Something dangerous. Something out of place. He felt a low, wild, wolfish delight rise up in him. His mother looked at him sometimes as if she wasn’t sure who he was. He wasn’t sure, either. He had to look away from what he saw in the face in the mirror.

  Wasn’t there some other fairy tale? I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down. He’d like to blow this house down. The first time his mother had brought him over for dinner, she’d said, “Well, what do you think?” In the car, as they came up the driveway. What he’d thought was that it was like television. He’d never seen a house like it except on TV. There had been two forks at dinner and a white cloth napkin he was afraid to use in case he got it dirty. Some kind of vegetable that he didn’t even recognize, and macaroni and cheese that didn’t taste right. He’d chewed with his mouth open on purpose, and the little girl across the table watched him the whole time.