The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012

by Guran, Paula

  “I take responsibility for this,” I said to Catherine as we stood beside Jonathan’s hospital bed. “My job was to protect him. I failed.”

  “You didn’t know about the bodyguard.”

  “I should have. That too is my job. We are both to conduct a proper survey—”

  “If Jon didn’t find out about him, there’s no reason you would.”

  I fell silent. Stared down at Jonathan, still unconscious after surgery to staunch the internal bleeding. I snuck looks at Catherine, searching for some sign that she would secretly have been relieved by his death. I’d seen none.

  She claimed to love him. She did love him. I could still work with this.

  “It’s becoming so much more dangerous,” I murmured. “There have always been accidents, but it is so much harder to keep an isha safe these days.”

  “Accidents? This—this hasn’t happened before, has it?”

  I kept my gaze on Jonathan.

  “Amrita.”

  I looked up slowly, then hesitated before saying, “The council has assured me that the rate of injury on my missions is far below that of most.”

  “Rate of injury?” Her voice squeaked a little. “I’ve never heard of an isha being seriously injured. You mean things like sprained ankles and bruises, right?”

  I said nothing.

  “Amrita!”

  Again, I looked up. Again I hesitated before speaking. “There have been . . . incidents. Jonathan’s great-uncle’s car accident, it was . . . not an accident. That was the story the council told the family. And there have been . . . others.” I hurried on. “But the risk with me is negligible, compared to others.”

  Which didn’t reassure her in the least.

  I said nothing after that. I had planted the seed. It would take time to sprout.

  A week later, Jonathan was still in the hospital, recovering from his injuries. I had not yet returned to my apartment—once I entered, I wouldn’t be able to leave. Catherine had to retrieve my food and drink from the refrigerator. She didn’t like that, but the alterative was to sentence her only helpmate to prison until Jonathan recovered.

  The day before he was due to come home, Catherine visited me in the guest room.

  She entered without a word. Sat without word. Stayed there for nearly thirty minutes without a word. Then she said, “Tell me how to release you.”

  We had to hurry. The only way to free me without Jonathan’s consent was while he was unable to give consent.

  We withheld his fever medication until his temperature rose. While befuddled by fever—and a few of my illusory tricks—he parted with the combination to his safe.

  I retrieved what we needed, and fingered the stacks of hundred-dollar bills, but I took none. I had no need for them.

  “Are you sure this is what you want?” Catherine asked as I prepared the ritual. “They say that when a rakshasi passes to the other side, there is no afterlife. This is your afterlife. There’ll be nothing else.”

  “Peace,” I said. “There will be peace.”

  She nodded. My death was, after all, to her benefit, meaning the council would not judge her or Jonathan as harshly as if they’d freed me.

  I drew the ritual circle in sand around Jonathan’s bed. I lit tiny fires in the appropriate locations. I placed a necklace bearing one half of an amulet around my neck, and the other around his. I recited the incantations. Endless details, etched into my brain, the memories of my kind, as accessible as any other aspect of my magic, but requiring Jonathan’s assistance. Or the assistance of his bodily form—hair to be burned, fingernails to be ground into powder, saliva and blood to be mixed with that powder.

  Finally, as Catherine waited anxiously, I injected myself with the mixture. The ritual calls for it to be rubbed into an open wound. I’d made this modernized alteration, and Catherine had readily agreed that it seemed far less barbaric.

  Next I injected Jonathan. Then I began the incantations.

  Jonathan shuddered in his sleep. His mouth opened and closed, as if gasping for air. Catherine grabbed his hand.

  “What’s happening?” she said.

  “The bond is breaking.”

  Now I shuddered, feeling that hated bond tighten, as if in reflexive protest. Then slowly, blessedly, it loosened.

  Catherine started to gibber that something was wrong. Jonathan wasn’t breathing. Why wasn’t he breathing? His heartbeat was slowing. Why was it slowing?

  I kept my eyes closed, ignoring her cries, and her tugs on my arm, until at last, the bond slid away. One last deep shudder and I opened my eyes to see the world as I hadn’t seen it in two hundred years. Bright and glimmering with promise.

  Catherine was shrieking now. Shrieking that Jonathan’s heart had stopped.

  I turned toward the door. She lunged at me, crutches falling as she grabbed my shirt with both hands.

  “He’s dead!” she cried. “It’s supposed to be you, not him. Something went wrong.”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing went wrong.”

  She screamed then, an endless wail of rage and grief. I picked her up, ignoring her feeble blows and kicks, and set her gently in a chair, then leaned her crutches within reach.

  She snatched them and pushed to her feet. When I tried to walk away, she managed to get in front of me.

  “What have you done?” she said.

  “Freed us. Both of us.”

  “You lied!”

  “I told you what you needed to hear.” I eased her aside. “I do not want annihilation. I want what I was promised—a free life. For that, I need his consent, and the council to provide the necessary tools. There is, however, a loophole. A final act of mercy from an isha to his rakshasi. On his deathbed, he may free me with his amulet and that ritual.”

  “I-I don’t—”

  “You will tell the council that is what happened here. The poison I injected is the one we’ve used many times on our targets, undetectable. The council will believe Jonathan unexpectedly succumbed to his injuries.”

  “I will not tell them—”

  “Yes, you will. Otherwise, you will be complicit in his death. And even if you manage to convince them otherwise, you will forfeit this house and all that goes with it. It is yours only if he dies and I am freed. They may contest that, but even if they do, you will have already removed the contents of his safe. I left everything for you.”

  That was less generous than it seemed. For years, I’d been taking extra from our targets and hiding it in my room. I would not leave unprepared. I was never unprepared.

  Now that the bond was broken, there was nothing to stop me from entering and exiting my apartment, and taking all I had collected. I passed Catherine and headed for the door.

  She was silent until I reached it.

  “What will I do now?” she said.

  I glanced back at her. “Live. I intend to.”

  He does not know if what he is doing is right or wrong, mad or sane. But he knows he cannot live with his wife’s ghost any longer . . .

  Why Do You Linger?

  Sarah Monette

  “Why do you linger?” he asks the empty room.

  Dust motes fall through the dim shaft of sunlight from the window, and there is no answer.

  When he goes downstairs, his wife is standing on the landing. The jingle sticks in his head—standing on the landing, standing on the landing—as he walks down the stairs toward her. Her eyes are dark, solemn; she watches him with neither reproach nor forgiveness.

  He stops two steps up from the landing, unable to walk into the aura of cold that surrounds her. She looks at him, unsmiling, and turns to walk downstairs. Before she reaches the bottom, she fades into nothing.

  She has been dead for three months.

  She died suddenly, without warnings or omens or the sense of foreboding which he thought later he ought to have felt. Simply, one afternoon, he came home and found her lying dead in the foyer, her keys fallen like bones from her hand. She had been dead for
three or four hours, the paramedics said. No cause of death was ever determined.

  After the funeral, he drove home through the fog to the empty, dusty, desolate house. As he walked up the stairs to the door, he thought he saw his dead wife watching him through the front window. But when he opened the door, she was not there.

  Some months before she died, lying in bed in the flat painted blackness of their bedroom, grown hostile with weeks of silence, as they lay not facing each other, each in their separate pocket of cold, she said, “Do you love her?” And after another silence, so hard and cold that it could have been used to preserve a beautiful, fragile corpse, like the death of love, he said, “No.”

  He thought she sighed, a tiny noise like a rose shedding its petals. But she did not ask the next question, the obvious question.

  Do you love me?

  Now that she is dead, she comes to him at night, her body naked, translucent, as cold and elusive as mist. She straddles him, her face twisted into an animal snarl of need, an expression he never saw on her face when she was alive. She cannot touch him; her fingers disappear into his body without the slightest effect. He is frightened at first, then repulsed, then aroused as he was never aroused by her in the sixteen years of their marriage. Night after night, she comes to him with her fierce, cold, insatiable need; night after night he couples with the frigid air, climaxing against nothing so that his semen spatters shockingly hot across his stomach.

  When he opens his eyes, his wife is staring at him, her face as cold and unreadable as moonlight.

  Knowing she will not answer, he asks, “Why do you linger?”

  Her face does not change; she gets off him and walks to the window. As her hand reaches out toward the curtain, she dissolves into the darkness.

  When he wakes in the mornings, the house is filled with a sourceless, wordless singing. He does not recognize the tune, but he knows his wife’s voice. Some days he pretends to ignore it; other days he searches the house fruitlessly from top to bottom. Always the singing dies away just before noon.

  He has not seen the young woman since the day before his wife’s death. When the phone rings, he lets the machine pick up and erases the tape unheard.

  A week after the funeral, he came in from shopping and found his wife’s keys lying on the floor of the foyer, exactly where they had fallen from her hand when she died.

  He wondered for a terrible moment if they had lain there all along, if he had been stepping over them without seeing them for more than a week. Carefully, he put down the grocery bag, as if it contained eggshells and wine glasses instead of frozen pizzas and a six-pack of beer. And then he remembered watching his wife’s body being taken out of the house, her keys in his hand, his fingers clenching so tightly that the shapes of the keys imprinted themselves in his palm. And then, blindly, automatically, he had taken them into the kitchen, opened the drawer in which his wife kept her wooden spoons and serving utensils, and dropped the keys in as if they were a dead bird.

  He knelt down beside his grocery bag. He reached out, slowly, as if the keys might startle and bite him. When he touched them, they were icy cold, so cold they hurt his fingers.

  Before her death, he became accustomed to her watching him, her eyes shadowed and grave. She did not accuse him; only that once did she even question him. Merely, she watched, and in the silence that built up around them layer after layer, like lacquer concealing and preserving once-living wood, he heard the question she did not ask: why are you still here? If she had asked, he would not have been able to answer her, and thus he was angered by her refusal to ask, by her silent, passive watchfulness. He said nothing himself, feeling obscurely and angrily that it would be a sign of weakness, cowardice, to offer a defense when none had been asked for. He told himself that it was her responsibility to ask, that if she wanted to know, she would say something, and even came to believe, in a strange, inarticulate way, that the silent misery in the house was her fault, that because she would not ask, he could not answer, and his own guilt was lost in his resentment of her failure to be angry.

  Sometimes now, waking in the thin early light to the sound of his wife singing, he wonders if it was the silence that killed her, if she drowned beneath its weight like a diver caught in the wreckage of a ship. Silence can kill; he knows that now. He can feel her silence killing him an inch at a time.

  He got rid of all his wife’s things less than a month after her death, abandoning them in an undifferentiated mass to a consignment store. He hired a cleaning service to go through the house from top to bottom, ridding it of her dust, imbuing the air with the scents of cleaning products she had never used. But when he came back to the house that night, after eating at a restaurant to which he had never taken his wife, her car keys were on the foyer floor again, in exactly the same place, strung on the key chain he had thrown out over a week previously. And they were cold.

  He walks through the house as the sunlight turns to puddles of gold on the floor. He finds their wedding picture face down on the mantelpiece and takes it out of its frame. In the back of the bedroom closet, he finds one of her scarves, overlooked when he was frantically bagging her clothes. He takes a pillowcase that she had particularly liked, pale blue embroidered with garlands, and puts the scarf and the picture into it. Finally he goes back downstairs and picks up her keys from the corner of the foyer, where he had kicked them the last time they appeared.

  He does not know if what he is doing is right or wrong, mad or sane. But he knows he cannot live with his wife’s ghost any longer, and the mad dream-logic of the haunted tells him that he must get her to speak to him before he can be free of her. Her death and her silence and her ghost are entangled in his mind like strands of beads: beads of grief, beads of anger, of pity and fear and guilt.

  The house cannot help him; the house is complicit in her silence. He walks out the back door, leaving it open.

  The hill slopes down from the house toward a stand of birch trees. It has taken him longer than he realized to find the things he needs; the golden light is deepening to dusk, purple gloaming creeping out from the trees and the shadow of the house.

  He builds a fire halfway down the hill, working quickly but carefully. It takes him three tries to light it because his hands are shaking. He kneels by the fire, choosing a position where he can see the house without turning his back on the birch trees. His wife loved the birches, and he feels them watching.

  He gives the scarf to the fire first, then the photograph. They burn quickly; he watches his own face blacken and disappear. Then, although he knows they will not melt, he throws her keys in the fire. And he asks again, desperately, “Why do you linger?”

  He sees movement and looks at the house. She comes out the back door and walks down the hill toward him and the fire. In the dusk she glows faintly, like moonlight.

  He stands up as she approaches, curbing his desire to run from her, and asks again, “Why do you linger?”

  She says nothing, and her face does not change.

  “Damn you,” he cries, “answer me!”

  She stands and looks at him and does not speak.

  He takes a step toward her before he remembers that she is dead and he cannot touch her. He says, “Please. You have to let me go.”

  He sees the anger flare in her eyes, sees the snarl she wears when she comes to him at night. She opens her mouth and cries in a terrible, thin, inhuman voice, “You were all that I had!”

  He flinches back from her, from her black, boiling, dead pain. “You were all that I had, so how can I let you go? All that I had,” she cries, “all that I had.”

  But she is fading; all her power was in her silence. He can see her beginning to tatter, her substance drifting away upward like smoke. She stretches out her hands toward him, but they are already dissolving. “All that I had,” she cries, her voice faint and distant like the wind in the birch trees, and then she is gone. He can feel her absence like a throbbing pain in the bones of his skull and hands, and kno
ws that he is free of her at last.

  Numbly, methodically, he puts out the fire, using the garden hose to be sure the last lingering spark is extinguished. He gets the shovel and his work gloves from the shed and digs a hole; he puts his wife’s keys in the pillowcase and drops the pillowcase in the hole. He shovels the ashes and earth back over the pillowcase and tamps the whole thing down carefully.

  He replaces the shovel, gloves, hose. Full dark is almost here. He walks back into the empty, dusty, silent house, and shuts the door behind him.

  Why do you linger?

  There was power in those stories, in seeing them slide up against one another like cards in a poker hand you know will win the pot.

  Vampire Lake

  Norman Partridge

  Part One: Rumson’s Saloon

  They heard the bounty killer an hour before they saw him. Out there in the desert night. Playing that harmonica of his, though the sounds that came out of it weren’t anything you’d call music. But he kept at it, and the racket carved the desert sands like Lucifer trenching a brimstone field with his pitchfork. A man who could raise that kind of hell with a harmonica was a man who could unsettle a room full of other men.

  And that’s why the customers sitting in Rumson’s saloon did the things they did. Some slapped coin to the bar and made their exits. Others ordered up and drank more deeply, which pleased the barkeep. Still others unbuckled their gunbelts as the man with the harmonica drew nearer. They rolled leather studded with sheathed bullets around holstered Colts, and they stowed those weapons far from reluctant hands.

  Outside, the harmonica had grown silent. The creak of saddle-leather put a crease in the night. Then footsteps sounded across plank boards, and the bounty killer came through the batwings of Rumson’s place.

  He wore a patched coat the color of the desert, and he was dragging a man on a chain. One yank and the bounty killer bellied up to the bar. The gunman set his harmonica on the nicked pine surface. No one noticed the blood on the tarnished instrument, not with the poor skinny bastard trussed up in chains and padlocks crouching at the killer’s feet. As far as the occupants of Rumson’s saloon were concerned, that was the hunk of misery worth looking at, not a bloodstained Hohner that blew sour even on days that were sweet.