The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  From the skiff, an outcry.

  At the water’s edge Annalisa stood over Pet, who was on his knees, his hands bound. He still had on his dark blue velvet jacket. She whacked him across the shoulders with her pole and he laboriously got to his feet. Clyde felt divorced from the situation and tracked the progress of a gray tabby as it sneaked near one of the globular bushes, made a sinuous, twisting leap, snatched a bug from mid-air and fell to tearing it apart. Another cat jumped down from the roof, eyed them with middling hostility, and sauntered off. Batista pressed his shoulder against the door of the Mutagenics building and forced it open—the swollen wood made a skreeking noise. After a minute he hunkered down beside Clyde, who asked what he had found inside.

  “A bunch of nothing,” said Batista. “Couple of lab tables and a file cabinet. A door . . . probably leads up into the house.”

  Urged on by Annalisa, Pet came stumbling up from the shingle. Clyde thought of an old Italian vampire movie in which the main vampire had been exhumed from his crypt, a skeleton, but after a starlet’s blood had been drizzled on his fangs, he gradually re-acquired sinew and flesh and skin—Pet appeared to be stuck partway through that process. Annalisa inserted the pole between his ankles, tripped him, and he went sprawling.

  “Crazy bitch!” He wiped sand from his mouth with his coat sleeve. “Think this’ll get you anything?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Annalisa said. “You’re the one with the problem.”

  “I got no problem,” said Pet with a smirk. “Brad and the guys’ll be coming around the bend any minute, and you’ll be on your haunches, begging for a bone.”

  “Watch your mouth!” Clyde had been aiming for belligerence, but the words were so slurred, they came out, “Wushamou.”

  “You don’t know her, pal. She’d go down on a sick monkey if she thought she’d gain an edge.” Pet chuckled. “Remember the tour with Oasis, honey? Man, you guys should have seen her. I told her. . . . ”

  Batista had been juggling some pebbles in his palm—he shied one at Pet, striking him in the chest.

  “It won’t be Brad coming,” Annalisa said. “It’ll be Milly.”

  “Milly?” Pet snorted. “That’s crap! She wouldn’t be involved in something this stupid.”

  No one said anything.

  Pet looked at them each in turn. “What are you people fucking trying to pull?”

  Annalisa sat next to Clyde and asked how he was doing.

  “What’s in those pills you gave me?”

  “Morphine sulfate.”

  Clyde grunted. “I must be doing okay, then.”

  Pet shifted, trying to get comfortable. “This is all about him? This mutt?”

  “Why not?” said Annalisa. “It doesn’t have to be, but sure, let’s make it about him.”

  She rested her head on Clyde’s shoulder. The contact warmed him—he hadn’t noticed that he was cold—and left him feeling dozy. For a minute or ten, the only sounds were the rush of the river and the cats.

  “I’m hungry,” said Batista.

  “Me, too.” Pet propped himself on an elbow. “What say we scrag a few cats and roast ’em? We can have a picnic. Got any mint jelly? I hear roast cat’s great with mint jelly.”

  Annalisa leaned forward, trembling and tense. “You hungry?”

  Uneasiness surfaced in Pet’s face.

  “I said: Are you hungry?”

  That drained-of-life quality she had displayed earlier was back. Clyde had a hunch that she intended to kill Pet and caught at her arm; but she was already moving toward Pet. She strode past him, however, and fumbled with the garden gate; she flung it open, causing consternation among the cats trailing after her, and dug with her hands in the dirt, uprooting two big onions dangling from their stalks.

  She brought them to Pet, pushed them at him. “Eat these.”

  “Fuck you!” He turned away.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said in a wound-tight voice. “They won’t poison you any more than you’ve already been poisoned.”

  An inch of apprehension crept into his defiant expression.

  “That’s right,” she said. “For over a year I’ve been bringing you treats from my garden. If you weren’t afraid of doctors, a checkup might have revealed cancer. You must be riddled with it by now.”

  Pet tried to shrug it off, but he was plainly rattled.

  “Of course you’re such a toxic little freak,” she went on, “could be you just absorb the shit. Maybe it’s actually making you healthier.”

  She paused, as if giving this possibility its due consideration, and then swung the onions, striking Pet in the face, knocking him onto his back. She straddled him and hit him again and again, her hair flying into her eyes. Each blow thudded on bone. He tried to buck her off, but in a matter of seconds his body went limp. She kept on hitting him, taking two-handed swings, gasping with every one, like the gasps she uttered when she made love. The cats nearest her shrank from the violence, wheeling about and scampering off. Clyde yelled for her to stop and, in no particular hurry, Batista went over, threw his arms around her and pulled her away. She resisted, but he was too strong—he lifted her and whirled her about. The onions flew from her hand, bouncing and rolling to Clyde’s feet. They were mushed and lopsided, dirt and speckles of blood clinging to their pale surfaces.

  “Let me go,” she said dully.

  He released her and she gave him a little shove as she stepped away. She walked down to the river and pushed back her hair and stood gazing upstream. Flecks of onionskin were stuck to the blood on Pet’s face. His eyes were shut and the breath shuddered out of him. Clyde couldn’t tell if he was conscious. Batista hovered betwixt and between as if unable to decide with whom to align himself. One of the cats started lapping at the blood on the onions, ignoring Clyde’s halfhearted attempts to shoo it away.

  He called out to Annalisa—she backhanded a wave, a gesture of rejection he chose to interpret as her needing a moment. He felt the morphine taking him as his adrenaline rush faded and he did his best to keep his mind focused. He wanted to comfort her, yet he doubted that she could be comforted or that comfort was the appropriate medicine. He could relate to her outburst of rage against a man who had misused her. Everyone was mad that way; but mad enough to be a poisoner? To delight in secret over another’s slow demise? That required a refined madness, a spiritual abscess that might prove to be untreatable. He drew in a shaky breath and was cold again. The landscape no longer seemed so epic and exotic, humanized and made paltry by her violent excess. Just a bunch of filthy cats, an abandoned building and some cliffs.

  Batista came over and sat down. After a minute or two, so did Annalisa. Clyde draped an arm about her. She relaxed beneath the weight and cozied into him and he let go of his questions, persuaded by the animal consolation of her body. The cats, filling in the open spaces they had vacated, seemed emblems of normalcy, sniffing and shitting, batting at bugs, much in the way the world goes on following the hush created by an explosion, with people scurrying about, engines starting, all the noise and talk and bustle paving over a cratered silence, all the clocks once again ticking in unison.

  The sun was not yet in view, but a golden tide had scrubbed the shadows from the top of the western cliff wall and, as the light brightened, some of the place’s eerie luster was restored. About a half-hour after the beating, Pet sat up. He shot a bitter glance toward Annalisa and lowered his head. His left eye was swollen shut, his forehead bruised. Blood from his nose reddened his lips and chin, and he breathed through his mouth. No one spoke to him. He cast about, as though searching for something to occupy himself; then he lay back down and turned onto his side, facing away from them. Soon afterward the cats retreated, withdrawing swiftly into the underbrush to the south, a cat stampede that left nary a one in sight.

  “Where are they going?” Batista asked.

  Annalisa disengaged from Clyde, wearily lifting his arm away. She said something that sounded like “lurruloo,” and peered
south along the shore. Clyde heard a yowling, a cacophony of small, abrasive voices, and saw a greenish black something slide out of the brush and onto the shingle: the cat killer surrounded by a tide of cats. Whenever it shrank, spreading out into its rotted-cabbage mode, cats leapt onto its “skirts,” clinging to them as it grew tall and spindly.

  “Help me get him up!” Annalisa said to Batista.

  Together they hustled Clyde into the building, a wide single room of unpainted concrete, dappled with lichen and reeking of mildew, empty but for lab tables and a filing cabinet, the floors littered with glass and other debris. A recessed black metal door set in the rear wall. They started to lower him to the floor, but he insisted upon remaining upright, propped against one of the tables. Pet scrambled inside as Batista shut the door. Out the window, Clyde saw the creature, utilizing its peculiar means of locomotion, slip along the shingle and come to a halt beside the skiff. Stretched to its full height, seven feet or thereabouts, it reminded him of a bedraggled Christmas tree that had been left out for the garbage and lost its pyramidal form, become lopsided and limp; instead of a plastic star, it was topped off by a glabrous, football-shaped, seemingly featureless head, dark olive in color. A few cats still clung to it, nibbling the fringes of its skin. The ground in its wake was strewn with half-conscious cats—some rolled onto their backs in a show of delight—and others could be seen wobbling off into the brush. The creature’s body rippled, its loose flaps of skin creating a shimmying effect, and it produced a loud ululation, “Lurruloo,” that had the throatiness and wooden tonality of a bassoon, deflating as the last note died—close at hand, now it looked less like a melted cabbage than an ugly green-and-black throw rug with a funny lump at the center. A bloated white cat that bore a striking resemblance to Prince waddled out from behind it and collapsed on its side.

  “All this thing’s doing is getting cats fucked up,” Clyde said, peering around Batista, who was hogging the window. “It’s not killing them.”

  “They love cats,” Pet said. “The cats keep ’em groomed and the lurruloo turn ’em into cat junkies. It’s people they kill.”

  “Because you and those idiot friends of yours were hunting them.” Annalisa spat out the words.

  “Uh-huh, sure. They were carrying peace signs and singing ‘Kumbaya’ before we came along. What do you think happened to the Mutagenics people?”

  “Yeah, what did happen to them?” Batista asked. “Your memoirs are a little blurry on the subject.”

  “There’s more than one of these things?” asked Clyde.

  “Pet stranded them here,” Annalisa told Batista. “They tried escaping through the caves. No one’s sure what happened.”

  “The caves?” said Clyde.

  “What was I supposed to do? Let ’em tell the world about their exciting new species?” Angry, Pet took a step toward her. “It would have been the end of Halloween, man. Soldiers and scientists all over the place.”

  Annalisa banged her fist against the filing cabinet. “If you hadn’t poisoned their environment, you would never have known they were there. They would have never been motivated to visit the surface.”

  “Fuck a bunch of Greenpeace bullshit!” Pet affected a feminine voice: “You realize they’re not animals, don’t you? They steal cats and destroy TV cables. Surely you can see they’re intelligent? They deserve our protection.”

  Pet was reacting, Clyde observed, as if the beating had never occurred, either because he felt equal to Annalisa now that she was onion-less, or because argument was simply a pattern they had developed. For that matter, she was reacting more-or-less the same. It made him wonder if beatings might also be one of their patterns.

  “They don’t like it here!” she said. “Why do you think they only send one up at a time?”

  “If they only send one,” said Clyde, “how can you tell there’s more than one?”

  Pet sniffed. “I don’t fucking care why. But if they keep coming, I’ll give ’em more than chemicals to worry about.”

  “I doubt that,” Annalisa said. “When Milly gets here we’re going have a discussion about them . . . and you.”

  “I’m still betting on Brad.”

  “We tubed Brad. By now some of the others are probably down there with him and Milly has the rest of your thugs doing doggie tricks. You shouldn’t have gotten so tight with your lawyer. She knows all the right buttons to push.”

  “Hey!” Clyde yelled. “Does somebody want to answer my questions?”

  Annalisa looked at him dumfounded, as if she had only just noticed his presence.

  “What you said those about things sending one up at a time?” Batista turned from the window. “There’s three outside now.”

  Pet and Annalisa crowded him out the way.

  “I see one out front.” Annalisa.

  “There’s one . . . behind the fence.” Pet.

  “Where’s the third?”

  The light from the window was suddenly blotted out. Pet and Annalisa backed away, and Clyde found himself looking into a maw of glistening, grayish meat that overspread the window screen. The lurruloo made a squelching noise—its flesh convulsed and it sprayed a thick, clear liquid onto the mesh, which began to yield a thin white smoke.

  “Jesus Christ! That’s acid!” Batista said. “Can it squeeze through there?”

  “It’s not real strong,” said Annalisa. “It’ll take at least ten, fifteen minutes to eat through the mesh.”

  With a sprightly air, Pet produced a prodigious key ring bearing a couple of dozen keys and shook them so they jangled. “Don’t sweat it, man. I got this covered.”

  He crossed the room to the black door, fiddled with the keys, and unlocked it. Clyde continued to be fascinated by the lurruloo. Its insides were as ugly as a raw mussel, pulsing and thickly coated with juice. An outer fringe of its skin was visible at the bottom of the window—it was lined with yellowish hooks of bone not much bigger than human teeth that bit into the concrete.

  Beyond the door a cramped spiral stair had been carved out of the rock. Though Batista helped him, ascending the stair started Clyde’s leg throbbing again. Annalisa offered another pill, but he turned her down, wanting to keep his head clear. Opening off the stairs was a space twice the size of a normal room in Halloween, furnished with a pool table, a red-and-inky blue Arabian carpet, and a teak sofa and chairs upholstered in a lustrous red fabric splotched with mildew. The black metal walls were figured by a rack half-full of cues, an erotic bas relief and two louvered windows that striped the room with light, items that completed a modernistic take on American Bordello. Clyde lowered himself carefully onto the sofa, Pet sprawled in a chair, and Batista hung by the door. Annalisa climbed the interior stair, which corkscrewed up through the ceiling at one end of the room, returning after a brief absence carrying a pair of lace panties. She dropped them in Pet’s lap and sat beside Clyde.

  “I thought you quit using this place,” she said.

  Pet smiled—there were still traces of blood on his teeth. He tossed the panties onto the floor.

  “You’re such a shithead,” she said.

  “What do you care?”

  “I don’t care . . . but it pisses me off, you lying to me.”

  “It wasn’t me, okay. It must have been one of the guys.”

  “You promised me nobody. . . . ”

  “What is it with you two?” Clyde pushed himself up against the sofa cushion and looked at Annalisa. “You just tried to kill him. Hell, you’ve been trying to kill him for a year! And now you’re upset because he’s lying?”

  “I told you, it’s complicated,” she said weakly.

  “Naw, this isn’t complicated. This is deeply twisted!” Clyde inched away from her in order to get some separation. “We’re in trouble here, and you two are carrying on like it’s Days of our Lives.”

  Annalisa’s eyes filled. “We’re not in trouble. The lurruloo can’t climb metal.”

  “Great! Good to know. But that doesn’t an
swer my question. I. . . . ”

  “How’s this for an answer, tough guy?” Pet kicked the bottom of Clyde’s left foot.

  His eyes shut against the pain, Clyde heard a noise as of metal under stress and seemed to feel the room shift. Annalisa screamed and fell against him. Pet squawked and there was thudding noise, followed by Batista cursing. When he opened his eyes, he saw the room was at a severe tilt. Batista lay on the floor, rubbing his head. Pet still sat in his chair, gripping both arms, a confused, wizened monkey in a blue velvet jacket. Boosting herself up, Annalisa walked downslope to the nearest window and peered through the vents.

  “God,” she said. “There must be fifty of them outside.”

  Batista joined her at the window. “I thought you said the acid wasn’t strong. It must be eating through the brackets.”

  “They had to have done most of the damage beforehand.” She glanced at Pet. “Not intelligent, huh?”

  The room sagged downward again.

  “We’ve got to get higher.” Pet headed for the stairs.

  “Not a smart idea,” said Batista. “If they weakened these brackets, they might have done the ones higher up, too. You want to fall from forty feet? Sixty feet?”