The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  Spooz’s stern expression dissolved into a grin. “I can’t keep this up. Congratulations, man.”

  Baffled for the moment, Clyde said, “What are you talking?”

  “You’ve been jumped in. This was like your initiation. The council accepted you last week.”

  “You’ll be on probationary status for six months,” Joanie said. “But it’s more-or-less a done deal.”

  Brad and Spooz both shook his hand, and Joanie gave him a hug and a kiss with a little extra on it, and people came over from the bar to congratulate him. Clyde kept saying happily, “I can’t believe you guys were just busting my chops. You fuckers had me going there!”

  Carmine, who apparently had taken a real dislike to him, waited until the crowd around Clyde had dissipated to offer a limp handshake. “Don’t get giddy,” he said, putting his mouth close beside Clyde’s cheek. “Things might not work out for you here.”

  Walnuts are Halloween’s chief export, its only source of income (apart from the occasional tourist and the post office, which does a bang-up business once a year, stamping cards and letters) and are prized by connoisseurs in the upper world for their rich, fruity flavor, a flavor derived from steeping in the ponds south of town known as the Dots—three of them, round as periods, they create an elision interrupting the erratic black sentence of the Mossbach. Recently there have been complaints that the walnuts are no longer up to standard. The mulberries and plants that, dissolved into a residue, suffuse the walnuts, imbuing them with their distinct taste, no longer fall from the sky crack in profusion; and neither do the walnuts fall so thickly as they once they did, plop-plopping into the water like a sort of wooden hail. Nowadays the townspeople are not above importing mulberries and certain weeds and even walnuts, and dumping them into the ponds, a practice decried by connoisseurs; yet they continue to pay the exorbitant prices.

  Each morning Clyde would pole his skiff (something more difficult to do than it would appear) from the north end of town, where he had found temporary living quarters, to the Dots. He recalled how it had been going to work in Beaver Falls, steering his pickup past strip malls with gray snow banked out front, his seat littered with half-crushed cans and fast food garbage, pieces of bun, greasy paper, a fragment of tomato, a dead French fry, the heater cooking it all into a rotten smell, while the idiot voices of drive-time America yammered and puffy-faced, sullen, half-asleep drivers drank bitter coffee, listening to Howard Stern and Mancow Muller, trying to remember the gross bits with which to amuse their friends . . . and he contrasted that with the uncanny peace of going to work now, gliding downstream beneath the still-darkened seam of sky, the only sound that of his pole lifting and planting, inhaling the cool, damp smell of the river mixed with fleeting odors of fish death and breakfasts cooking and limeflowers (a species with velvety greenish-white blooms peculiar to Halloween, sprouting from the dirt and birdlime that accumulated on the ledges), and occasionally another skiff coming toward him, the boatman saluting, and his thoughts glided, too, never stressed or scattered, just taking in the sights, past the simple, linear houses spread out across the rock walls like anagrams and scrambles, the blurred letters of the neon signs flickering softly in the mist, the lights at the end of spidery docks glowing witchily, haloed by glittering white particles, and once he reached the Dots, shallow circles of crystalline water illuminated in a such a way as to reveal their walnut-covered bottoms (yet not enough light to trouble him), he would put on waders and grab a long rake and turn the walnuts so as to ensure they received the benefits of immersion on all sides equally.

  Between fifty and sixty men and women joined him on the morning shift and he became friendly with several, and friends with one: Dell Weimer, a blond, overweight transplant from Lake Parsippany, New Jersey, where he had managed a convenience store. Dell had recently finished a short stretch in the Tubes, the geological formation that served as Halloween’s main punitive device, and would say nothing about it other than that it was “ . . . some evil shit.” He was forthcoming, however, about the rest of the town in which he had lived for six years.

  One morning Dell straightened from his labors and, as he was wont to do, clutched his back and began grousing about the job. “Fuck a bunch of walnuts,” he said on this occasion. “Here we are breaking our butts for nothing!”

  Clyde asked him to explain, because he had been led to believe the town depended on the walnuts, and Dell said, “Ever hear of Pet Nylund?”

  “Sounds familiar.”

  “You know. The rock star guy.”

  “Yeah . . . yeah! My ex used to liked his stuff. Real morbid crap.”

  “He’s born and raised in Halloween.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Yeah, he lives here when he’s not in L.A. I’ll show you his place. He bought up all the land around the gorge—he must own a fucking million acres. He invested heavy in energy and bioengineering stocks about thirty years ago and the stock went through the roof.”

  “Bioengineering. Tinkering with genes and all that?”

  “Right. He had his own company come down in here . . . Mutagenics, I think their name was. They were doing experiments south of the Dots, flushing shit into the river. Don’t eat nothing come out of that river, son, ’less you want to grow gills.” Dell paused to work out a kink. “Like I was saying, they flushed their chemicals so they washed away underground. The Mossbach goes subta— . . . you know.”

  “Subterranean.”

  “Yeah, right. God only knows what’s growing down there. The Mutagenics people couldn’t leave fast enough, so you know some bad shit happened. But even though the water here’s okay, the fishies got that poison in ’em and there is some weird-looking stuff in that river. Anyhow, Pet’s worth billions, so he endows the town. Now the town’s a billionaire, too. Nobody’s got to work, except for Nylund struck a deal with the council. In return for the endowment, people have to live like always until after he dies. He doesn’t want to watch the place change and he knows the money’s bound to change it. After he’s gone, he don’t give a damn about what happens, but for now we got to bust our behinds.” Dell winced and rubbed his back again. “If he shows his face around here, I might do us all a favor and off the son-of-a-bitch.”

  That night in the Sub-Café, Clyde asked Joanie, with whom he was having a thing, if the Pet Nylund story was true.

  “Who told you? Dell, I bet,” she said. “That lazy bastard’s going to wind up back in the Tubes.”

  She told the bartender that she was going on break and hustled Clyde out onto the pier that fronted the bar. The mist was thick and, although he heard people laughing out on the water, he couldn’t see past the end of the pier. Eight or nine skiffs were tied up to the pilings; the current made them appear to nudge against each other with ungainly eagerness, like pigs at a trough.

  “You’re not supposed to know any of that stuff until you’re off probation,” Joanie said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because knowing about it might make you unmotivated.”

  “There’s no reason to think it’ll make me less unmotivated five months from now.”

  Joanie cast about to see if anyone were within earshot. “It’s all about the benefits, see. They kick in once you’re a citizen. Retirement, full medical . . . and I mean full. They’ll even pay for a tummy tuck, anything you want. Nylund thinks if the probationers knew, they wouldn’t get into the spirit of the town. They’d just be faking it.”

  The water slurped against the pilings, as if a big something had given them a lick.

  “Dell mentioned this company, Mutagenics.”

  “You don’t want to be talking about that,” said Joanie, affecting a sober expression. “And don’t you even think about going south of the Dots. We got this one idiot who goes south a lot, but one day she’s going to turn up missing. Happens eventually to everybody who pokes their nose down there.”

  “So what’s up with that?”

  “If I could tell you, I’d
probably be missing. I don’t go there. Ever. But don’t talk about it, okay? With Dell or anyone . . . except with me. I don’t want you getting in trouble. With me . . . ” She threw a stiff punch to the point of his shoulder. “You’re already in trouble.”

  “Ow! Jesus!” He grabbed her and pulled her against him. He squeezed and her breath came out in a trebly oof. Her eyes half-closed and she ground her hips against him. The mists swirled and thickened, sealing them off from the Sub-Café, until only a vague purplish flickering remained of the sign.

  “Ouch,” Joannie said.

  Ms. Helene Kmiec, the widow of Stan Kmiec, former head of the town council, was (at thirty-six) a relatively young woman to have endured such a tragedy, and this perhaps explained her emotional resilience. Since her husband’s death eight months ago in a boating accident south of the Dots, she had taken a succession of lovers and started a new business involving the use of a webcam and bondage gear (this according to Dell, who further stated that Ms. Kmiec, a petite blonde with, in his words, “trophy-sized balloons,” could give him a spanking any old time she wanted). She also took in boarders. The remainder of her time was devoted to the care and feeding of the town’s sole surviving cat, a Turkish angora named Prince Shalimar who had survived for five and a half years, considerably longer, it was believed, than any other cat in Halloween’s shadowy history.

  “Something around here likes cats a leetle too much,” she said to Clyde on the occasion of their first meeting. “People claim to have seen it, but this is all they’ve come up with.”

  She handed Clyde a photocopied poster with an artist’s rendering of a raggedy Rorschach inkblot looming over a cat and underneath it the words:

  REWARD!!!

  For Information Leading to the Capture of

  Halloween’s Cat Killer

  Beneath that was Ms. Kmiec’s contact information.

  “It’s not much to go on,” Clyde said, and tried to hand back the poster. Ms. Kmiec told him to hang onto it—she had plenty more.

  “The damn thing’s fast,” she said. “Fast and sneaky. Hard to get a handle on its particulars. At least that gives you a general idea of its size.” She studied the picture. “It’s nailed damn near every cat in town for the past forty years, but it’s not getting Princey.”

  “You think it’s the same one’s been doing it all that time?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “It comes around here, I got something for it. One or many, old or young, that sucker’s going down.”

  “Why don’t you get a dog?”

  “Dogs get taken by things in the river. Cats have the good sense to stay clear of the water.”

  They were sitting together on a sofa in her cramped, fourth-floor living room, a ten-by-eight foot space with a door that connected to a corridor leading to the house next door. Its cadmium yellow walls were dense with framed photographs, many of them shots of Ms. Kmiec in various states of undress, and the largest depicting her arm-in-arm with the late Mr. Kmiec, a pudgy, white-haired gent whose frown lines and frozen smile implied that such an expression did not come easily to his face. In this photograph she wore an ankle-length skirt, a cardigan, and a prim, gone-to-Jesus expression, leaving the impression that she had stepped away from the sexual arena before her time, an error since corrected. The skirt and the cardigan had been replaced that day with a gold dressing gown loosely belted over a skimpy black latex costume.

  “There’s one thing we should get straight before you move in,” she said. “For the record, I did not kill my husband. You may hear talk that I did . . . ”

  “I’m not big on gossip,” Clyde said, avoiding looking at her for fear he might see the truth of her statement—the light in the room was brighter than he would have liked.

  “ . . . but I didn’t. Stan was a chore and we didn’t always get along. There’s times now I still resent him, but he was a good guy at heart. He was always helping me with my projects. Matter of fact, he was helping me out the day he died. We were down south looking for the cat killer and something snaked over the side of the skiff and took him under. Wasn’t a thing I could have done. People say if I’d loved Stan, I would have gone in after him. Maybe there’s some truth to that. I did love him, but Stan was twenty-six years older than me. Maybe I didn’t love him enough.”

  She inched forward on the sofa, reached out her hand and touched Mr. Kmiec’s image on the wall opposite. She seemed to be having a moment and Cliff waited until she had leaned back to ask what she had meant by “something snaked over the side.”

  “South of the Dots there’s a lot of strange flora and fauna,” she said. “We don’t know half what’s there. Don’t you be going down that way until you get acclimated.” She patted his knee. “We wouldn’t want to lose you.”

  A masculine wail of distress floated up from below and Ms. Kmiec jumped to her feet. “Oh, damn! I forgot about him! Here I am chattering away and . . . I don’t know what I’m thinking about!” She fingered out a key from the pocket of her robe and passed it to Clyde. “I have to take care of something. Can you show yourself up? It’s the eighth floor.”

  Clyde said, “Sure,” and scrunched in his knees so she could get past.

  “Now I put you right above the Prince’s room,” she said as she stood in the open door, a section of the gorge’s granite wall visible behind her. “I know you’re bound to have company, and I don’t care about that. But I made certain the bed in that room is extra stable, because the Prince hates sharp noises. So if the headboard comes loose and starts banging, or whatever, do your best to fix it temporarily and I’ll get someone in to do repairs ASAP. All right?”

  She shrugged out of her robe and tossed it onto the arm of the sofa and started down the ladder, seeding Cliff’s brain with an afterimage of pale, shapely legs and swelling breasts restrained by narrow, shiny strips of rubber. A second later her head popped back into view.

  “If you want, look in on the Prince. He loves new people.” Her brow furrowed, as if trying to recall some further instruction; then she brightened and said, “Welcome to Kasa Kmiec!”

  The eighth floor was a room with a half-bath added on. Within a ten-by-twelve space, it contained a captain’s bed with shelves in the bottom, a wicker chair, bookshelves and a TV niche built into the walls, a stove and sink, and small refrigerator. It was as cunningly crafted as a ship’s cabin, with every inch of space utilized. Initially Clyde felt he might break something whenever he moved, but he adapted to his new quarters and soon, when lying on the bed, he began to have a sense of spaciousness.

  He enjoyed sitting in the wicker chair after work with the lamp dialed low, vegetating until his energy returned, and then he would turn the light on full. He had discovered that he liked being smart when alone, liked the solitary richness of his mind, and he would sketch plans for the house he intended to build after he got off probation; he would read and speculate on subjects of which he had been unaware prior to the accident (Indian influences on Byzantine architecture, the effects of globalization upon Lhasa and environs, et al.); but always his thoughts returned to the town where he had sought refuge, whose origins no one appeared to know or question, whose very existence seemed as mysterious as the nation of Myanmar or the migratory impulses of sea turtles. He had supposed—unrealistically, perhaps—that the people of Halloween would have a clearer perspective on life than did the people in Beaver Falls; but they had similar gaps in their worldview and ignored these gaps as if they were insignificant, as if by not including them in the picture, everything made sense, everything was fine. He had hoped the town would be a solution, but now he suspected it was simply another sort of problem, more exotic and perhaps more complex, one that he would have to leave the light on a great deal in order to resolve if he hoped to get to the bottom of it.

  When he heard the winch complain, the chain slithering through the pulley, signs that Joanie was on her way up in the elevator that operated above the fifth floor, he would dim the lamp so he would be un
able to perceive the telltales that betrayed the base workings of her mind and the fabrication of her personality. She understood why he did this—at least he had explained his troubles—but it played into her appreciation of herself as an entry-level girlfriend, and she often asked if she wasn’t pretty enough for him, if that was why he lowered the lights. He told her that she was more than pretty enough, but she grew increasingly morose and would say she knew they were a short-term thing and that he would someday soon find someone who made him happy, as would she, and it was better this way—this way, when the inevitable happened they would stay friends because they had been honest with each other and hadn’t gotten all deluded, and until then, well, they’d have some fun, wouldn’t they? Even in the half-dark, he realized it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, that her low self-esteem foredoomed the relationship. Understanding this about her, having so much apperception of the human ritual, dismayed him and he would try to boost her spirits by telling her stories about his life topside (the citizens of Halloween referred to other parts of America as “topside” or “the republic”) or by mocking Mrs. Kmiec’s cat.

  Beside the bed was a trapdoor that had once permitted egress to the floor below, but now was blocked by a sheet of two-inch Plexiglas—a plastic cube had been constructed within the old wooden room for the protection of its sole inhabitant, a fluffy white blob with a face and feet. When Clyde first opened the trapdoor, Prince Shalimar had freaked out, climbing the walls, throwing himself at the inner door; now, grown accustomed to Clyde and Joanie peering at him, he never glanced in their direction. The place was a cat paradise filled with mazes upon which to climb, scratching posts, dangling toys, and catnip mice. Infrequently the Prince would swat at one or another of the toys; now and then he would chew on a catnip mouse; but a vast majority of his time was spent sleeping in a pillowed basket close to his litter box.

  “It’s not even a cat anymore,” Joanie said one evening as they looked down on the Prince, snoozing on his pillow. “It’s like some kind of mutant.”