The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  When the boxes stopped decomposing along the path, when they survived the sea and bobbed in the backwash and tidal currents until they were swept to open water; when the boxes felt like air in her hands with the substance of their content, she knew she’d found the gate to where she needed to go, at last.

  Her children could tell her no more.

  Opening the gate was her task, alone.

  There was only one more thing she could copy. She positioned boxes one at a time for months inside the cabin at the same distance from the front door as the one she’d found in her old home. Each morning she opened a box, carefully examining the surfaces for changes or messages. Breathing deeply from the air inside the box, it seemed like a trick of changing atmospheric pressure sucked the air out of her lungs. After whispering, then screaming, into the boxes for Justine, Mirabel, and Rey, their names sounded like words spoken in a foreign language.

  The boxes piled high around her, like offerings to the living altar to her children she’d become. There were so many, she couldn’t be certain she’d made them all. It seemed they were appearing on their own, relentless, like an incessant knocking at the door, demanding attention. Accusing. She searched through them all again, day after day, in case one had been changed for her.

  The day came when she knew something more was needed.

  She left notes in the boxes, asking for instructions, pleading for guidance. They appeared to remain unread. She stuffed the boxes with the contents of the altars for her children. Built stick-figure totems representing each child, attaching hair clippings, swatches of clothing, and after kissing each one, whispered for them to let her through, and placed them into boxes.

  When this tactic failed, Samarra sat in the cabin in despair. There was nothing more for her to do. She could only wait, like a beggar at a palace door, and plead to the sky and sea and earth for entry.

  In the cold nights, when she didn’t bother lighting candles, stove or fireplace, she imagined her babies sitting in the darkness, waiting for her, and to pass the time she told the stories she’d given them when they were much younger, a long time ago. They needed her, and she’d failed them, so she had to give them something. Because that was the kind of mother she was.

  And in the old stories, as fresh now in her telling as when she’d first passed them along, as clear in her mind as when she’d set them down on paper and carved them into wood, she recognized Justine, Mirabel, Rey, herself, their story, in the adventures of heroes and the unwinding threads of fatal fairy tales.

  Not everything was as it seemed, she heard herself say, time and again. Witches could be beautiful. Even the strongest had flaws by which they fell. Changelings passed between worlds, forever out of place, looking for the way home.

  Sacrifices were demanded.

  She’d given everything, she told the darkness. There was nothing left.

  But, of course, she knew there was always something left.

  In the morning, she chose a box as perfect as any other she’d made and opened herself to it with a long cut across her wrist. Blood dribbled to stain its walls and pool on the bottom. Then she closed the box, wrapped it in paper and twine, and waited to bury it at her doorstep in the heart of the night. When she was done, the woods were quiet, and no eyes caught the moonlight coming down through the trees.

  She waited as many nights as it took for her to lose her family, and then dug out the hole at her doorstep.

  The box was gone. But the things she found in the hole wrenched her stomach and made her heave and gasp for air.

  Keeping her head turned away, she quickly threw dirt back to cover what kicked and writhed and stared at her with wide, innocent eyes. Faint mewling rose through the loose soil. She slid a nearby stone over the broken ground to keep what was in it from rising. Closed the door. Collapsed to her knees, shivering, surprised to find she was crying cold tears when she pressed the palm of her hand to her face to feel something warm and alive against her skin.

  Samarra’s belly ached. She bled from between her legs, where muscle and tissue throbbed and burned and pulsed with the pain of violation. Or perhaps, deliverance.

  Fairy tale equations circled through her mind. Maybe she should have kept what had been left for her. Cared for and raised them. If only to see what they would become. Maybe they were a part of the equation, a crucial proof of something she did not want to know, but which would resolve the mystery of her own children.

  Perhaps, they were her real babies, returned to her as they’d been taken, preserved for her to nourish and care for when she’d done what was needed for another’s brood.

  Or they might have been an answer to her knocking on the gate to a place in which she was not welcome. A warning.

  A desire she couldn’t name, could never fulfill, fluttered in her heart, and for that moment she experienced what Rey must have felt when he wanted to taste the bread baked on a television show or sing opera at a recording session taped long ago; what Mirabel sought to express with her restless hand; what Justine listened for in her dreams. Samarra also wanted to capture something that always seemed just beyond her reach.

  Standing at the gate she could not cross, a hope rose in her that at least Rey had finally seized the secret machinery he’d been chasing since he was born, and Mirabel’s angel scrawl had broken her story out of its mundane boundaries, and dreams had, at last, delivered Justine’s secret name. They didn’t have to be changelings. They could be angels, risen now to their appointed place, with Samarra left behind to atone for an act she couldn’t remember.

  Or they could all be something else entirely. Even, only, human.

  The knock on the door woke her.

  She lay against the door. Her sleep had been as black as the night embracing her cabin. Confused, she moaned and tasted old blood in her mouth.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” her brother Reynaldo said, from the other said. “We’re too old.”

  Samarra opened the door.

  In the first slivers of dawn, she didn’t find Reynaldo. Only another box, on the stone covering the hole she’d dug.

  The paper wrapping was stained, the twine string rougher than the first she’d found long ago, and wet. A stream of dark, thick liquid crept slowly out from under the box, across the stone, toward her. The sides bulged out unevenly.

  Truths found or lost since her children left suddenly didn’t matter, Samarra realized, because the moment’s truth told her there were always deeper mysteries to solve.

  She stepped forward, reaching for the other box. It had all the weight and mass the first one lacked.

  Samarra opened the other box.

  And didn’t have time to scream.

  About the Author

  Gerard Houarner is a product of the NYC public school system, attended the then-free City College of New York, taking writing workshops under Joseph Heller and Joel Oppenheimer while sneaking into William Burroughs’ hallucinogenic classes. He later attained a couple of Masters degrees in psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University, so he could make a living in the pre-gentrified Lower East Side and Hell’s Kitchen, and near the still ungentrified birthplace of hip-hop in the Bronx. He currently works in a state psychiatric facility by day. For the past and whatever may come in the future for writing, visit www.gerardhouarner.com.

  Story Notes

  “The Other Box” is a good example of why I love dark stories so much more than most “horror” films. If you were pitching this as a movie, the first thing they’d ask would be: “Well, what was in the other box?” They’d also want you to come up with an explanation of where the children went. “So, let’s say they lived on this ancient Indian burial ground . . . ” or “We need a scene with, like, demons that . . . ” or “It was the uncle, right?” Et cetera. And whatever flick eventually was made would have nothing of what this tale has in spades: questions answerable only by your own imagination. And you are scary. (So am I.)

  WHITE CHARLES

  SARAH MON
ETTE

  The crate arrived at the Parrington on a Wednesday, but it was Friday before anyone mentioned it to me. Anything addressed from Miss Griselda Parrington, the younger of Samuel Mather Parrington’s two daughters, was automatically routed to Dr. Starkweather’s office, regardless of whose name she had written on it. I was, in truth, intensely grateful for this policy, for Miss Parrington most often addressed her parcels to me. She felt that we were “kindred spirits”; she considered me the only employee of the museum with the sensitivity and intelligence to appreciate her finds. Considering that she had inherited all of her father’s magpie-like attraction to the outré and none of his discernment, her opinion was less flattering than one might think. I endured some teasing on the subject, though not nearly as much as I might have; in general, the curators’ attitude was one of “there but for the grace of God.” They were even, I think, rather grateful, if not to me precisely, then at least for my existence.

  Miss Parrington’s packages were inevitably accompanied by letters, sometimes quite lengthy, explaining what she persisted in referring to as the provenance, although it was no such thing. “I found this in a lovely antique shop in Belgravia that Mimi showed me,” conveyed no useful information at all, since nine times out of ten she neglected to provide any further clues to Mimi’s identity, and on the tenth time, when we managed to determine that “Mimi” was Sarah Brandon-Forbes, wife of the eminent diplomat, a polite letter would elicit the response that Lady Brandon-Forbes had never been in any antique shop in Belgravia in her life. The bulk of Miss Parrington’s letters described, lavishly, what she believed the provenance to be, flights of fancy more suited to a romantic novelist than to even an amateur historian. But the letters had to be read and answered; Dr. Starkweather had been emphatic on the subject: they were addressed to me, therefore it was my responsibility to answer them.

  It was perhaps the part of my job I hated most.

  That Friday, when I found the letter in my pigeonhole, I recognized Miss Parrington’s handwriting and flinched from it. My first instinct was to lose the letter by any means necessary, but no matter how tempting, it was not a viable solution. Dr. Starkweather saw through me as if I were a pane of glass; he would not be fooled by such an obvious lie. There was, therefore, neither sense nor benefit in putting off the task, unpleasant though it was. I opened the envelope then and there, and read the letter on the way back to my office.

  It was a superbly representative specimen, running to three pages, close-written front and back, and containing absolutely no useful information of any kind. She had been at an estate sale—and of course she neglected to mention whose estate—she had recognized the name Carolus Albinus as someone in whom her father had been interested, and thus she had bid on and purchased a job lot of fire-damaged books, along with a picture she was quite sure would prove when cleaned to be an original Vermeer. She had not so much as opened the crate in which the books were packed, knowing—she said coyly—that I would prefer to make all the discoveries myself. But I would see that she was right about the Vermeer.

  I propped my throbbing head on my hand and wrote back, thanking her for thinking of the museum and disclaiming all knowledge of seventeenth-century Dutch painters. I posted the letter, dry-swallowed an aspirin, and returned to the round of my usual duties. I gladly forgot about Miss Parrington’s crate.

  I should have known better.

  On the next Tuesday, I was standing in Dr. Starkweather’s office, helplessly watching him and Mr. Browne tear strips off each other over a casus belli they had both already forgotten, when we were startled by a shriek from the direction of the mail room. Dr. Starkweather raced to investigate, Mr. Browne and myself close behind, and we found Mr. Ferrick, one of the junior-most of the junior curators, sitting on the floor beside an open crate, his spectacles askew and one hand pressed to his chest.

  “What on Earth?” said Dr. Starkweather.

  Mr. Ferrick yelped and shot to his feet in a welter of apologetic half-sentences.

  “Are you all right?” said Mr. Browne. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mr. Ferrick. “I was opening the crate and something—it flew into my face—I thought—” He glanced at Dr. Starkweather’s fulminating expression and sensibly did not explain what he had thought.

  A closer look at the crate caused my heart to sink, in rather the same way that reading the Oedipus Tyrannos did. “Is that, er, the crate from Miss Parrington?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Ferrick, puzzled.

  “Oh good God,” said Dr. Starkweather in tones of utmost loathing, probably prompted equally by Miss Parrington and me.

  “She said she, er . . . that is, she didn’t open the crate. So it probably—”

  “A bit of straw,” Dr. Starkweather said, seizing a piece from the floor and brandishing it at us. “You’ve heard of the boy who cried wolf, Mr. Ferrick?”

  “Yes, Dr. Starkweather,” Mr. Ferrick said, blushing.

  “Good God,” Dr. Starkweather said again, more generally, and stormed out, Mr Browne at his heels already girding himself to re-enter the fray.

  I saw an opportunity to let Dr. Starkweather forget about me, and stayed where I was. Mr. Ferrick edged over to the crate as if he expected something else to leap out at him; it was with visible reluctance that he reached inside.

  “What did you think it was?” I said.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “The, er, whatever it was that flew into your face. What did you think it was?”

  “Oh. I’ve been spending too much time in Entomology,” he said with a grimace. I waited while he lifted out a book so blackened with smoke that it was impossible to say what color the binding had originally been. “It looked like a spider,” he said finally, tightly. “An enormous white spider. But Dr. Starkweather was right. It was just straw.”

  “Make out an inventory,” I said, “and, er, bring it to me when you’re done.” And I left him to his straw.

  Mr. Ferrick’s inventory included several works by Carolus Albinus, one by the alchemist Johann de Winter, three by the pseudonymous and frequently untruthful Rose Mundy, and a leather-bound commonplace book evidently compiled by the owner of the library—a deduction which would have been more satisfying if he had signed his name to it anywhere. One of the Carolus Albinus books was rare enough to be valuable even in its damaged condition: the 1588 Prague edition of the De Spiritu et Morte with the Vermeulen woodcuts said to have driven the printer mad. The rest of them were merely good practice for the junior archivists. I heard from Mr. Lucent, who was friends with Mr. Browne’s second in command Mr. Etheredge, that the “Vermeer” was no such thing and was sadly unsurprised. The crate and straw were both reused—I believe in packing a set of canopic jars to be shipped to San Francisco—and that was that. Another of Miss Parrington’s well-meaning disasters dealt with.

  Except that the night watchmen, a pair of stalwarts named Fiske and Hobden, began to complain of rats.

  “Rats?” said Dr. Starkweather. “What nonsense!”

  The rest of us could not afford to be so cavalier, and even Dr. Starkweather had to rethink his position when Miss Chatteris came to him on behalf of the docents and announced that the first time one of them saw so much as a whisker of a rat, they were all quitting.

  “But there have never been rats!” protested Mr. Tilley, the oldest of the curators. “Never!”

  Hobden and Fiske, stolid and walrus-mustached and as identical as twins, said they could not speak to that, but Mr. Tilley was welcome to tell them what else the scuttling noises might be.

  Mr. Lucent rather wistfully suggested getting a museum cat and was promptly shouted down.

  Dr. Starkweather grudgingly authorized the purchase of rat-traps, which were baited and set and caught no rats.

  Mr. Browne was denied permission to purchase a quantity of arsenic sufficient—said Miss Coburn, who did the calculations—to poison the entire staff.

  Frantic and paranoid inventory-taking
revealed no damage that could be ascribed to rats, although Decorative Arts suffered a species of palace coup over an infestation of moths in one of their storerooms and our Orientalist, Mr. Denton, pitched a public and monumental temper tantrum over what he claimed was water damage to a suit of bamboo armor. Mr. Browne took advantage of the opportunity to start a campaign to have the main building re-roofed. Dr. Starkweather chose, with some justification, to take this as fomenting insurrection, and the rats were forgotten entirely in the resultant carnage.

  Except by Hobden and Fiske—and by me, although that was my own fault for staying in the museum after dark. I was writing an article which required the consultation of (it seemed in my more despondent moods) no less than half the contents of my office. Thus working on it at home was futile, and working on it during the day was proving impossible, as the inventories were bringing to light unidentifiables overlooked in the last inventory, and everyone was bringing them to me. The puzzles and mysteries were welcome, but I had promised this article to the editor of American Antiquities nearly six months ago, and I was beginning to despair of finishing it. Being insomniac by nature, I found the practice of working at night more congenial than otherwise, and the Parrington was blessedly quiet. Fiske and Hobden’s rounds were metronomically regular, and they did not disturb me.

  And then there was the scuttling.

  It was a ghastly noise, dry and rasping and somehow slithery, and it was weirdly omnidirectional, so that while I was sure it was not in the office with me, I could never tell where in fact it was. It was horribly intermittent, too, the sound of something scrabbling, and stopping, and then scrabbling again. As if it were searching for the best vantage point from which to observe me, and the night I had that thought, I went out to the front entrance and asked the watchman if they had had any luck at ridding the museum of rats.