The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Less benefits, little bit more freedom. It’s a trade-off.”

  “Doesn’t sound like so good a deal to me.”

  “That’s your opinion, is it?”

  Carmine gave a dry laugh. “I got to book. Any messages you want sent back?”

  “How’s Roberta and Mary Alonso?”

  “They’re in dyke heaven, I guess. They were married a few weeks back.”

  “No shit?”

  “Milly made a law saying gay marriage is legal. Now she expects all the fruits to flock to Halloween.” Carmine spat off to the side. “Got to hand it to her. She knows how to get stuff done.”

  “She makes the trains run on time.”

  Puzzled by the reference, Carmine squinted at him, then walked around to the driver’s side of the van.

  “Did Helene Kmiec kill her husband?” Clyde asked.

  “How the fuck should I know?” Carmine started the engine.

  “I’m serious, man. It’s bugging me. It’s the only question I have about Halloween I don’t know the answer to.”

  “That’s the only one you got?” Carmine backed out of the parking space and yelled, “Man, did you even know where you were living?”

  Clyde watched until the black speck of the van merged with the blackness of the street, wishing he’d asked after Joanie. He reached for a cigarette, the reflex of an old smoker, and said, “Fuck it.” He walked along the block to a newsstand that was opening up and bought a pack of Camel Wides. Out on the sidewalk, he lit one and exhaled a plume of smoke and frozen breath. Maybe Milly had blown up the entrance to the lurruloo’s caves, sealing them in—maybe that was all she had done. What, he asked himself, would the penalty be for the genocide of a new intelligent species? Most likely nobody would give a damn, just like him. They had their own problems and couldn’t be bothered. He thought about the 57th parallel and what might lie below it, and he thought about Annalisa’s sharp tongue and wily good humor, subsumed beneath a haze of drugs. He thought about a local bar, once a funeral home, that now was painted white inside, every inch and object, with plants in the enormous urns and round marble tables, usually filled with seniors—it troubled him that she liked to drink there.

  “Hey, buddy!” The newsstand owner, an elderly man with a potbelly and unruly wisps of gray hair lying across his mottled scalp like scraps of cloud over a wasteland—he beckoned to Clyde from the doorway and said, “You can smoke inside if you want.” When Clyde hesitated, he said, “You’re going to freeze your ass. What’re you doing out there?”

  Clyde told him, and the old man said, “She’s always late opening on Saturday. Come on in.”

  With Clyde at his heels, the owner walked stiff-legged back inside, took a seat on a stool behind the counter, picked up a lit stogie from an ashtray and puffed on it until the coal glowed redly.

  “Screw those bastards in the legislature telling us we can’t smoke in our own place,” said the owner. “Right?”

  “Right.”

  There must have been a thousand magazines on the shelves: drab economic journals; bright pornos sealed in plastic; hockey, boxing, football, wrestling, MMA, the entire spectrum of violent sport; women’s magazines with big, flashy graphics; People, Time, Rolling Stone; magazines for cat fanciers and antique collectors and pot smokers, for deer hunters and gun freaks and freaks of every persuasion; magazines about stamps and model trains, Japanese films and architecture, country cooking and travel in exotic lands; magazines in German, Italian, French. Clyde had patronized dozens of newsstands in his day, but never before had he been struck by the richness of such places, by the sheer profligacy of the written word.

  “They tell you a man’s home is his castle, but you know how that goes,” said the owner, winking broadly at Clyde. “The little woman takes control and pretty soon you can’t sit in your favorite chair unless it’s covered in a goddamn plastic sheet. But a man’s place of business now, that’s his kingdom. That’s how come I named this place like I did.”

  “What’s that?” Clyde asked.

  The owner seemed offended that he didn’t know. “Kingdom News. People come in sometimes thinking I’m a Christian store, and I tell ’em to check out the name. Herschel Rothstein, Proprietor. I ain’t no Christian. The point I’m making, shouldn’t nobody tell a man he can’t smoke in his damn kingdom.”

  Clyde wondered if the owner and his newsstand might not have been summoned from the Uncreate, perhaps by the same entity that had visited him after his ordeal in the Tubes, so as to pose an object lesson. He had been considering kingdoms in grandiose terms, a place requiring a castle, at least a symbolic one, and great holdings; yet now he recognized that a kingdom could be a small, rich thing, an enterprise of substance somewhere below the 57th parallel. A newsstand, a bar, a fishing camp—someplace quiet and pristine where Annalisa would heal and thrive.

  A young woman dressed in cold weather yuppie gear came in to buy a paper and wrinkled her nose at the smell of the old man’s cigar. He flirted outrageously with her and sent her away smiling, and they sat there, the owner on his stool, Clyde on a stack of Times-Leaders, laughing and smoking and talking about the bastards in the state legislature and the bigger bastards down in Washington, recalling days of grace and purity that never were, forgetting the wide world that lay beyond the door, happily cursing the twenty-first century and the republic in its decline, secure for the moment in the heart of their kingdom.

  About the Author

  Lucius Shepard’s most recent books include The Taborin Scale and a collection, Viator Plus. Forthcoming are a novel, Beautiful Blood and a novella collection, Four Autobiographies. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

  Story Notes

  Wherever you thought this story was going, it’s my bet that it took more unexpected twists and turns in the darkness than you could have possibly dreamed. Only fantasy can offer a writer like Lucius Shepard the freedom to take you on a journey like this one—although few writers can equal his imagination or descriptive chops.

  Halloween Town is a novella—too long to be a short story, too short to be considered a novel. It seems that novella-length works well for many fantasy writers and each year brings a number of notable ones. This novella was published in the esteemed The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, so at least it was widely available. Sometimes novellas are published by specialty presses as pricey hardcovers in limited numbers and only read (until, perhaps, republished in an author’s collection later on) by a relative few. I’m thrilled to have the space to be able to showcase this and the other longer pieces in this anthology.

  THE LONG, COLD GOODBYE

  HOLLY PHILLIPS

  Berd was late and she knew Sele would not wait for her, not even if it weren’t cold enough to freeze a standing man’s feet in his shoes. She hurried anyway, head down, as if she hauled a sled heavy with anxiety. She did not look up from the icy pavement until she arrived at the esplanade, and was just in time to see the diver balanced atop the railing. Sele! she thought, her voice frozen in her throat. The diver was no more than a silhouette, faceless, anonymous in winter clothes. Stop, she thought. Don’t, she thought, still unable to speak. He spread his arms. He was an ink sketch, an albatross, a flying cross. Below him, the ice on the bay shone with the apricot-gold of the sunset, a gorgeous summer nectar of a color that lied in the face of the ferocious cold. The light erased the boundary between frozen sea and icy sky; from where Berd stood across the boulevard, there was no horizon but the black line of the railing, sky above and below, the cliff an edge on eternity. And the absence the diver made when he had flown was as bright as all the rest within the blazing death of the sun.

  Berd crossed the boulevard, huddled deep within the man’s overcoat she wore over all her winter clothes. Brightness brought tears to her eyes and the tears froze on her lashes. She was alone on the esplanade now. It was so quiet she could hear the groan of tide-locked ice floes, the tick and ping of the iron railing threatening to shatter in the co
ld. She looked over, careful not to touch the metal even with her sleeve, and saw the shape the suicide made against the ice. No longer a cross: an asterisk bent to angles on the frozen waves and ice-sheeted rocks. He was not alone there. There was a whole uneven line of corpses lying along the foot of the cliff, like a line of unreadable type, the final sentence in a historical tome, unburied until the next storm swept in with its erasure of snow. Berd’s diver steamed, giving up the last ghost of warmth to the blue shadow of the land. He was still faceless. He might have been anyone, dead. The shadow grew. The sun spread itself into a spindle, a line; dwindled to a green spark and was gone. It was all shadow now, luminous dusk the color of longing, a blue to break your heart, ice’s consolation for the blazing death of the sky. Berd’s breath steamed like the broken man, dusting her scarf with frost. She turned and picked her way across the boulevard, its pavement broken by frost heaves, her eyes still dazzled by the last of the day. It was spring, the 30th of April, May Day Eve. The end.

  Sele. That was not, could never have been him, Berd decided. Suicide had become a commonplace this spring, this non-spring, but Sele would never think of it. He was too curious, perhaps too fatalistic, certainly too engaged in the new scramble for survival and bliss. (But if he did, if he did, he would call on Berd to witness it. There was no one left but her.) No. She shook her head to herself in the collar of her coat. Not Sele. She was late. He had come and gone. The diver had come and gone. Finally she felt the shock of it, witness to a man’s sudden death, and flinched to a stop in the empty street. Gaslights stood unlit in the blue dusk, and the windows of the buildings flanking the street were mostly dark, so that the few cracks of light struck a note of loneliness. Lonely Berd, witness to too much, standing with her feet freezing inside her shoes. She leaned forward, her sled of woe a little heavier now, and started walking. She would not go that way, not that way, she would not. She would find Sele, who had simply declined to wait for her in the cold, and get what he had promised her, and then she would be free.

  But where, in all the dying city, would he be?

  Sele had never held one address for long. Even when they were children Berd could never be sure of finding him in the same park or alley or briefly favored dock for more than a week or two. Then she would have to hunt him down, her search spirals widening as he grew older and dared to roam further afield. Sometimes she grew disheartened or angry that he never sought her out, that she was always the one who had to look for him, and then she refused. Abstained, as she came to think of it in more recent years. She had her own friends, her own curiosities, her own pursuits. But she found that even when she was pursuing them she would run across Sele following the same trail. Were they so much alike? It came of growing up together, she supposed. Each had come too much under the other’s influence. She had not seen him for more than a year when they found each other again at the lecture on ancient ways.

  “Oh, hello,” he said, as if it had been a week.

  “Hello.” She bumped shoulders with him, standing at the back of the crowded room—crowded, it must be said, only because the room was so small. And she had felt the currents of amusement, impatience, offense, disdain, running through him, as if together they had closed a circuit, because she felt the same things herself, listening to the distinguished professor talk about the “first inhabitants,” the “lost people,” as if there were not two of them standing in the very room.

  “We lost all right,” Sele had said, more rueful than bitter, and Berd had laughed. So that was where it had begun, with a shrug and a laugh—if it had not begun in their childhood, growing up poor and invisible in the city built on their native ground—if it had not begun long before they were born.

  Berd trudged on, worried now about the impending darkness. The spring dusk would linger for a long while, but there were no lamplighters out to spark the lamps. In this cold, if men didn’t lose fingers to the iron posts, the brass fittings shattered like rotten ice. So there would be no light but the stars already piercing the blue. Find Sele, find Sele. It was like spiraling back into childhood, spiraling through the city in search of him. Every spiral had a beginning point. Hers would be his apartment, a long way from the old neighborhood, not so far from the esplanade. He won’t be there, she warned herself, and as if she were tending a child, she turned her mind from the sight of the dead man lying with the others on the ice.

  Dear Berd,

  I cannot tell you how happy your news has made me. You are coming! You are coming at last! It seems as though I have been waiting for a lifetime, and now that I know I’ll only have to wait a few short weeks more they stretch out before me like an eternity. Your letters are all my consolation, and the memory I hold so vividly in my mind is better than any photograph: your sweet face and your eyes that smile when you look sad and yet hold such a melancholy when you smile. My heart knows you so well, and you are still mysterious to me, as if every thought, every emotion you share (and you are so open you shame me for my reserve) casts a shadow that keeps the inner Berd safely hidden from prying eyes. Oh, I won’t pry! But come soon, as soon as you can, because one lifetime of waiting is long enough for any man . . .

  Sele’s apartment was in a tall old wooden house that creaked and groaned even in lesser colds than this. Wooden houses had once been grand, back when the lumber was brought north in wooden ships and the natives lived in squat stone huts like ice-bound caves, and Sele’s building still showed a ghost of its old beauty in its ornate gables and window frames. But it had been a long time since it had seen paint, and the weathered siding looked like driftwood in the dying light. The porch steps moaned under Berd’s feet as she climbed to the door. An old bell pull hung there. She pulled it and heard the bell ring as if it were a ship’s bell a hundred miles out to sea. The house was empty, she needed no other sign. All the same she tried the handle, fingers wincing from the cold brass even inside her mitten. The handle fell away from its broken mechanism with a clunk on the stoop and the door sighed open a crack, as if the house inhaled. It was dark inside; there was no breath of warmth. All the same, thought Berd, all the same. She stepped, anxious and hopeful, inside.

  Dark, and cold, and for an instant Berd had the illusion that she was stepping into one of the stone barrow-houses of her ancestors, windowless and buried deep under the winter’s snow. She wanted immediately to be out in the blue dusk again, out of this tomb-like confinement. Sele wasn’t here. And beyond that, with the suicide fresh in her mind and the line of death scribbled across her inner vision, Berd had the sense of dreadful discoveries waiting for her, as if the house really were a tomb. Go. Go before you see . . . But suppose she didn’t find Sele elsewhere and hadn’t checked here? Intuition was not infallible—her many searches for Sele had not always borne fruit—she had to be sure. Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness. She found the stairs and began to climb.

  There was more light upstairs, filtering down like a fine gray-blue dust from unshuttered windows. Ghost light. The stairs, the whole building, creaked and ticked and groaned like every ghost story every told. Yet she was not precisely afraid. Desolate, yes, and abandoned, as if she were haunted by the empty house itself; as if, having entered here, she would never regain the realm of the living; as if the entire world had become a tomb. As if.

  It was the enthusiasm she remembered, when memory took her like a sudden faint, a shaft of pain. They had been playing a game of make-believe, and the game had been all the more fun for being secreted within the sophisticated city. Like children constructing the elaborate edifice of Let’s Pretend in the interstices of the adult world, they had played under the noses of the conquerors who had long since forgotten they had ever conquered, the foreigners who considered themselves native born. Berd and Sele, and later Berd’s cousins and Sele’s half-sister, Isse. They had had everything to hide and had hidden nothing. The forgotten, the ignored, the perpetually overlooked. Like children, playing. And for a time Sele had been easy to find, always here, welcoming them in
with their bits of research, their inventions, their portentous dreams. His apartment warm with lamplight, no modern gaslights for them, and voices weaving a spell in point and counterpoint. Why don’t we . . . ? Is there any way . . . ? What if . . . ?

  What if we could change the world?

  The upper landing was empty in the gloom that filtered through the icy window at the end of the hall. Berd’s boots thumped on the bare boards, her layered clothes rustled together, the wooden building went on complaining in the cold, and mysteriously, the tangible emptiness of the house was transmuted into an ominous kind of inhabitation. It was as if she had let the cold dusk in behind her, as if she had been followed by the wisp of steam rising from the suicide’s broken head. She moved in a final rush down the hall to Sele’s door, knocked inaudibly with her mittened fist, tried the handle. Unlocked. She pushed open the door.

  “Sele?” She might have been asking him to comfort her for some recent hurt. Her voice broke, her chest ached, hot tears welled into her eyes. “Sele?”

  But he wasn’t there, dead or alive.

  Well, at least she was freed from this gruesome place. She made a fast tour of the three rooms, feeling neurotic for her diligence (but she did have to make sure all the same), and opened the hall door with all her momentum carrying her forward to a fast departure.

  And cried aloud with the shock of discovering herself no longer alone.

  They were oddly placed down the length of the hall, and oddly immobile, as if she had just yelled Freeze! in a game of statues. Yes, they stood like a frieze of statues: Three People Walking. Yet they must have been moving seconds before; she had not spent a full minute in Sele’s empty rooms. Berd stood in the doorway with her heart knocking against her breastbone, her eyes watering as she stared without blinking in the dead light. Soon they would laugh at the joke they had played on her. Soon they would move.