The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  About the Author

  Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically acclaimed novels, The Secret History of Moscow and The Alchemy of Stone were published, respectively, in 2007 and 2008. Her next novel, The House of Discarded Dreams, is coming out in late 2010. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen’s Universe, Dark Wisdom, and Clarkesworld, as well as numerous anthologies, including Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone. She is also the editor of anthologies Running with the Pack (2010) and the World Fantasy Award-winning Paper Cities (2008). Visit her at www.ekaterinasedia.com.

  Story Notes

  Sedia often offers a “different” viewpoint in her fiction, which means the reader makes interesting new discoveries. Here, in this universe, death means black nothingness—except to the inhabitants of this enchanted town. So “to eke out another few years” as a “deader” seems preferable. As the narrator says: “The deaders’ town was a nice place . . . we didn’t realize how lucky we were to have them—to become them.”

  THE CREVASSE

  DALE BAILEY & NATHAN BALLINGRUD

  What he loved was the silence, the pristine clarity of the ice shelf: the purposeful breathing of the dogs straining against their traces, the hiss of the runners, the opalescent arc of the sky. Garner peered through shifting veils of snow at the endless sweep of glacial terrain before him, the wind gnawing at him, forcing him to reach up periodically and scrape at the thin crust of ice that clung to the edges of his facemask, the dry rasp of the fabric against his face reminding him that he was alive.

  There were fourteen of them. Four men, one of them, Faber, strapped to the back of Garner’s sledge, mostly unconscious, but occasionally surfacing out of the morphine depths to moan. Ten dogs, big Greenland huskies, gray and white. Two sledges. And the silence, scouring him of memory and desire, hollowing him out inside. It was what he’d come to Antarctica for.

  And then, abruptly, the silence split open like a wound:

  A thunderous crack, loud as lightning cleaving stone, shivered the ice, and the dogs of the lead sledge, maybe twenty-five yards ahead of Garner, erupted into panicky cries. Garner saw it happen: the lead sledge sloughed over—hurling Connelly into the snow—and plunged nose first through the ice, as though an enormous hand had reached up through the earth to snatch it under. Startled, he watched an instant longer. The wrecked sledge, jutting out of the earth like a broken stone, hurtled at him, closer, closer. Then time stuttered, leaping forward. Garner flung one of the brakes out behind him. The hook skittered over the ice. Garner felt the jolt in his spine when it caught. Rope sang out behind him, arresting his momentum. But it wouldn’t be enough.

  Garner flung out a second brake, then another. The hooks snagged, jerking the sledge around and up on a single runner. For a moment Garner thought that it was going to roll, dragging the dogs along behind it. Then the airborne runner slammed back to earth and the sledge skidded to a stop in a glittering spray of ice.

  Dogs boiled back into its shadow, howling and snapping. Ignoring them, Garner clambered free. He glanced back at Faber, still miraculously strapped to the travois, his face ashen, and then he pelted toward the wrecked sledge, dodging a minefield of spilled cargo: food and tents, cooking gear, his medical bag, disgorging a bright freight of tools and the few precious ampules of morphine McReady had been willing to spare, like a fan of scattered diamonds.

  The wrecked sledge hung precariously, canted on a lip of ice above a black crevasse. As Garner stood there, it slipped an inch, and then another, dragged down by the weight of the dogs. He could hear them whining, claws scrabbling as they strained against harnesses drawn taut by the weight of Atka, the lead dog, dangling out of sight beyond the edge of the abyss.

  Garner visualized him—thrashing against his tack in a black well as the jagged circle of grayish light above shrank away, inch by lurching inch—and he felt the pull of night inside himself, the age-old gravity of the dark. Then a hand closed around his ankle.

  Bishop, clinging to the ice, a hand-slip away from tumbling into the crevasse himself: face blanched, eyes red rimmed inside his goggles.

  “Shit,” Garner said. “Here—”

  He reached down, locked his hand around Bishop’s wrist, and hauled him up, boots slipping. Momentum carried him over backwards, floundering in the snow as Bishop curled fetal beside him.

  “You okay?”

  “My ankle,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “Here, let me see.”

  “Not now. Connelly. What happened to Connelly?”

  “He fell off—”

  With a metallic screech, the sledge broke loose. It slid a foot, a foot and a half, and then it hung up. The dogs screamed. Garner had never heard a dog make a noise like that—he didn’t know dogs could make a noise like that—and for a moment their blind, inarticulate terror swam through him. He thought again of Atka, dangling there, turning, feet clawing at the darkness, and he felt something stir inside him once again—

  “Steady, man,” Bishop said.

  Garner drew in a long breath, icy air lacerating his lungs.

  “You gotta be steady now, Doc,” Bishop said. “You gotta go cut him loose.”

  “No—”

  “We’re gonna lose the sledge. And the rest of the team. That happens, we’re all gonna die out here, okay? I’m busted up right now, I need you to do this thing—”

  “What about Connell—?”

  “Not now, Doc. Listen to me. We don’t have time. Okay?”

  Bishop held his gaze. Garner tried to look away, could not. The other man’s eyes fixed him.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Garner stood and stumbled away. Went to his knees to dig through the wreckage. Flung aside a sack of rice, frozen in clumps, wrenched open a crate of flares—useless—shoved it aside, and dragged another one toward him. This time he was lucky: he dug out a coil of rope, a hammer, a handful of pitons. The sledge lurched on its lip of ice, the rear end swinging, setting off another round of whimpering.

  “Hurry,” Bishop said.

  Garner drove the pitons deep into the permafrost and threaded the rope through their eyes, his hands stiff inside his gloves. Lashing the other end around his waist, he edged back onto the broken ice shelf. It shifted underneath him, creaking. The sledge shuddered, but held. Below him, beyond the moiling clump of dogs, he could see the leather trace leads, stretched taut across the jagged rim of the abyss.

  He dropped back, letting rope out as he descended. The world fell away above him. Down and down, and then he was on his knees at the very edge of the shelf, the hot, rank stink of the dogs enveloping him. He used his teeth to loosen one glove. Working quickly against the icy assault of the elements, he fumbled his knife out of its sheath and pressed the blade to the first of the traces. He sawed at it until the leather separated with a snap.

  Atka’s weight shifted in the darkness below him, and the dog howled mournfully. Garner set to work on the second trace, felt it let go, everything—the sledge, the terrified dogs—slipping toward darkness. For a moment he thought the whole thing would go. But it held. He went to work on the third trace, gone loose now by some trick of tension. It too separated beneath his blade, and he once again felt Atka’s weight shift in the well of darkness beneath him.

  Garner peered into the blackness. He could see the dim blur of the dog, could feel its dumb terror welling up around him, and as he brought the blade to the final trace, a painstakingly erected dike gave way in his mind. Memory flooded through him: the feel of mangled flesh beneath his fingers, the distant whump of artillery, Elizabeth’s drawn and somber face.

  His fingers faltered. Tears blinded him. The sledge shifted above him as Atka thrashed in his harness. Still he hesitated.

  The rope creaked under the strain of additional weight. Ice rained down around him. Garner looked up to see Connelly working his way hand over hand down the rope.

  “Do it,” Connelly grunted, his eyes like chips of flint. �
�Cut him loose.”

  Garner’s fingers loosened around the hilt of the blade. He felt the tug of the dark at his feet, Atka whining.

  “Give me the goddamn knife,” Connelly said, wrenching it away, and together they clung there on the single narrow thread of gray rope, two men and one knife and the enormous gulf of the sky overhead as Connelly sawed savagely at the last of the traces. It held for a moment, and then, abruptly, it gave, loose ends curling back and away from the blade.

  Atka fell howling into darkness.

  They made camp.

  The traces of the lead sledge had to be untangled and repaired, the dogs tended to, the weight redistributed to account for Atka’s loss. While Connelly busied himself with these chores, Garner stabilized Faber—the blood had frozen to a black crust inside the makeshift splint Garner had applied yesterday, after the accident—and wrapped Bishop’s ankle. These were automatic actions. Serving in France he’d learned the trick of letting his body work while his mind traveled to other places; it had been crucial to keeping his sanity during the war, when the people brought to him for treatment had been butchered by German submachine guns or burned and blistered by mustard gas. He worked to save those men, though it was hopeless work. Mankind had acquired an appetite for dying; doctors had become shepherds to the process. Surrounded by screams and spilled blood, he’d anchored himself to memories of his wife, Elizabeth: the warmth of her kitchen back home in Boston, and the warmth of her body too.

  But all that was gone.

  Now, when he let his mind wander, it went to dark places, and he found himself concentrating instead on the minutiae of these rote tasks like a first-year medical student. He cut a length of bandage and applied a compression wrap to Bishop’s exposed ankle, covering both ankle and foot in careful figure-eights. He kept his mind in the moment, listening to the harsh labor of their lungs in the frigid air, to Connelly’s chained fury as he worked at the traces, and to the muffled sounds of the dogs as they burrowed into the snow to rest.

  And he listened, too, to Atka’s distant cries, leaking from the crevasse like blood.

  “Can’t believe that dog’s still alive,” Bishop said, testing his ankle against his weight. He grimaced and sat down on a crate. “He’s a tough old bastard.”

  Garner imagined Elizabeth’s face, drawn tight with pain and determination, while he fought a war on the far side of the ocean. Was she afraid too, suspended over her own dark hollow? Did she cry out for him?

  “Help me with this tent,” Garner said.

  They’d broken off from the main body of the expedition to bring Faber back to one of the supply depots on the Ross Ice Shelf, where Garner could care for him. They would wait there for the remainder of the expedition, which suited Garner just fine, but troubled both Bishop and Connelly, who had higher aspirations for their time here.

  Nightfall was still a month away, but if they were going to camp here while they made repairs, they would need the tents to harvest warmth. Connelly approached as they drove pegs into the permafrost, his eyes impassive as they swept over Faber, still tied down to the travois, locked inside a morphine dream. He regarded Bishop’s ankle and asked him how it was.

  “It’ll do,” Bishop said. “It’ll have to. How are the dogs?”

  “We need to start figuring what we can do without,” Connelly said. “We’re gonna have to leave some stuff behind.”

  “We’re only down one dog,” Bishop said. “It shouldn’t be too hard to compensate.”

  “We’re down two. One of the swing dogs snapped her foreleg.” He opened one of the bags lashed to the rear sledge, removing an Army-issue revolver. “So go ahead and figure what we don’t need. I gotta tend to her.” He tossed a contemptuous glance at Garner. “Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to do it.”

  Garner watched as Connelly approached the injured dog, lying away from the others in the snow. She licked obsessively at her broken leg. As Connelly approached she looked up at him and her tail wagged weakly. Connelly aimed the pistol and fired a bullet through her head. The shot made a flat, inconsequential sound, swallowed up by the vastness of the open plain.

  Garner turned away, emotion surging through him with a surprising, disorienting energy. Bishop met his gaze and offered a rueful smile.

  “Bad day,” he said.

  Still, Atka whimpered.

  Garner lay wakeful, staring at the canvas, taut and smooth as the interior of an egg above him. Faber moaned, calling out after some fever phantom. Garner almost envied the man. Not the injury—a nasty compound fracture of the femur, the product of a bad step on the ice when he’d stepped outside the circle of tents to piss—but the sweet oblivion of the morphine doze.

  In France, in the war, he’d known plenty of doctors who’d used the stuff to chase away the night haunts. He’d also seen the fevered agony of withdrawal. He had no wish to experience that, but he felt the opiate lure all the same. He’d felt it then, when he’d had thoughts of Elizabeth to sustain him. And he felt it now—stronger still—when he didn’t.

  Elizabeth had fallen victim to the greatest cosmic prank of all time, the flu that had swept across the world in the spring and summer of 1918, as if the bloody abattoir in the trenches hadn’t been evidence enough of humanity’s divine disfavor. That’s what Elizabeth had called it in the last letter he’d ever had from her: God’s judgment on a world gone mad. Garner had given up on God by then: he’d packed away the Bible Elizabeth had pressed upon him after a week in the field hospital, knowing that its paltry lies could bring him no comfort in the face of such horror, and it hadn’t. Not then, and not later, when he’d come home to face Elizabeth’s mute and barren grave. Garner had taken McReady’s offer to accompany the expedition soon after, and though he’d stowed the Bible in his gear before he left, he hadn’t opened it since and he wouldn’t open it here, either, lying sleepless beside a man who might yet die because he’d had to take a piss—yet another grand cosmic joke—in a place so hellish and forsaken that even Elizabeth’s God could find no purchase here.

  There could be no God in such a place.

  Just the relentless shriek of the wind tearing at the flimsy canvas, and the death-howl agony of the dog. Just emptiness, and the unyielding porcelain dome of the polar sky.

  Garner sat up, breathing heavily.

  Faber muttered under his breath. Garner leaned over the injured man, the stench of fever hot in his nostrils. He smoothed Faber’s hair back from his forehead and studied the leg, swollen tight as a sausage inside the sealskin legging. Garner didn’t like to think what he might see if he slit open that sausage to reveal the leg underneath: the viscous pit of the wound itself, crimson lines of sepsis twining around Faber’s thigh like a malevolent vine as they climbed inexorably toward his heart.

  Atka howled, a long rising cry that broke into pitiful yelps, died away, and renewed itself, like the shriek of sirens on the French front.

  “Jesus,” Garner whispered.

  He fished a flask out of his pack and allowed himself a single swallow of whiskey. Then he sat in the dark, listening to the mournful lament of the dog, his mind filling with hospital images: the red splash of tissue in a steel tray, the enflamed wound of an amputation, the hand folding itself into an outraged fist as the arm fell away. He thought of Elizabeth, too, Elizabeth most all, buried months before Garner had gotten back from Europe. And he thought of Connelly, that aggrieved look as he turned away to deal with the injured swing dog.

  Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to do it.

  Crouching in the low tent, Garner dressed. He shoved a flashlight into his jacket, shouldered aside the tent flap, and leaned into the wind tearing across the waste. The crevasse lay before him, rope still trailing through the pitons to dangle into the pit below.

  Garner felt the pull of darkness. And Atka, screaming.

  “Okay,” he muttered. “All right, I’m coming.”

  Once again he lashed the rope around his waist. This time he didn’t hesitate as he backed
out onto the ledge of creaking ice. Hand over hand he went, backward and down, boots scuffing until he stepped into space and hung suspended in a well of shadow.

  Panic seized him, the black certainty that nothing lay beneath him. The crevasse yawned under his feet, like a wedge of vacuum driven into the heart of the planet. Then, below him—ten feet? twenty?—Atka mewled, piteous as a freshly whelped pup, eyes squeezed shut against the light. Garner thought of the dog, curled in agony upon some shelf of subterranean ice, and began to lower himself into the pit, darkness rising to envelop him.

  One heartbeat, then another and another and another, his breath diaphanous in the gloom, his boots scrabbling for solid ground. Scrabbling and finding it. Garner clung to the rope, testing the surface with his weight.

  It held.

  Garner took the flashlight from his jacket, and switched it on. Atka peered up at him, brown eyes iridescent with pain. The dog’s legs twisted underneath it, and its tail wagged feebly. Blood glistened at its muzzle. As he moved closer, Garner saw that a dagger of bone had pierced its torso, unveiling the slick yellow gleam of subcutaneous fat and deeper still, half visible through tufts of coarse fur, the bloody pulse of viscera. And it had shat itself—Garner could smell it—a thin gruel congealing on the dank stone.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, Atka.”

  Kneeling, Garner caressed the dog. It growled and subsided, surrendering to his ministrations.

  “Good boy, Atka,” he whispered. “Settle down, boy.”

  Garner slid his knife free of its sheath, bent forward, and brought the blade to the dog’s throat. Atka whimpered—“Shhh,” Garner whispered—as he bore down with the edge, steeling himself against the thing he was about to do—

  Something moved in the darkness beneath him: a leathery rasp, the echoing clatter of stone on stone, of loose pebbles tumbling into darkness. Atka whimpered again, legs twitching as he tried to shove himself back against the wall. Garner, startled, shoved the blade forward. Atka’s neck unseamed itself in a welter of black arterial blood. The dog stiffened, shuddered once, and died—Garner watched its eyes dim in the space of a single heartbeat—and once again something shifted in the darkness at Garner’s back. Garner scuttled backward, slamming his shoulders into the wall by Atka’s corpse. He froze there, probing the darkness.