The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012

by Guran, Paula

  A place, she thought, very much like her.

  The built-in bookshelves in the Florida room sagged. (She’d never known that a den could be called a Florida room, but so it was, and so she did.) The floorboards creaked and trembled on the back porch, sodden from summer rainfall. And she would need to lay down new tiles in the kitchen right away, because the brooding mud-brown flooring put her in a bad mood from the time she first fixed her morning coffee.

  But there would be boys at the school, strong and tireless boys, who could help her mend whatever needed fixing. In her experience, there were always willing boys.

  And then there was the lake! The house was her excuse to buy her piece of the lake and the thin strip of red-brown sand that was a beach in her mind, although it was nearly too narrow for the beach lounger she’d planted like a flag. The water looked murky where it met her little beach, the color of the soil, but in the distance she could see that its heart of rich green-blue, like the ocean. The surface bobbed with rings and bubbles from the hidden catfish and brim that occasionally leaped above the surface, damn near daring her to cast a line.

  If not for the hordes of mosquitoes that feasted on her legs and whined with urgent grievances, Abbie could have stood with her bare feet in the warm lake water for hours, the house forgotten behind her. The water’s gentle lapping was the meditation her parents and Mary Kay were always prescribing for her, a soothing song.

  And the isolation! A gift to be treasured. Her property was bracketed by woods of thin pine, with no other homes within shouting distance. Any spies would need binoculars and a reason to spy, since the nearest homes were far across the lake, harmless little dollhouses in the anonymous subdivision where some of her students no doubt lived. Her lake might as well be as wide as the Nile, protection from any envious whispers.

  As if to prove her newfound freedom, Abbie suddenly climbed out of the tattered jeans she’d been wearing as she unpacked her boxes, whipped off her T-shirt and draped her clothing neatly across the lounger’s arm rails. Imagine! She was naked in her own backyard. If her neighbors could see her, they would be scandalized already, and she had yet to commence teaching at Graceville Prep.

  Abbie wasn’t much of a swimmer—she preferred solid ground beneath her feet even when she was in the water—but with her flip-flops to protect her from unseen rocks, Abbie felt brave enough to wade into the water, inviting its embrace above her knees, her thighs. She felt the water’s gentle kiss between her legs, the massage across her belly, and, finally, a liquid cloak upon her shoulders. The grade was gradual, with no sudden drop-offs to startle her, and for the first time in years Abbie felt truly safe and happy.

  That was all Graceville was supposed to be for Abbie LeFleur: new job, new house, new lake, new beginning. For the week before summer school began, Abbie took to swimming behind her house daily, at dusk, safe from the mosquitoes, sinking into her sanctuary.

  No one had told her—not the realtor, not the elderly widow she’d only met once when they signed the paperwork at the lawyer’s office downtown, not Graceville Prep’s cheerful headmistress. Even a random first-grader at the grocery store could have told her that one must never, ever go swimming in Graceville’s lakes during the summer. The man-made lakes were fine, but the natural lakes that had once been swampland were to be avoided by children in particular. And women of childbearing age—which Abbie LaFleur still was at thirty-six, albeit barely. And men who were prone to quick tempers or alcohol binges.

  Further, one must never, ever swim in Graceville’s lakes in summer without clothing, when crevices and weaknesses were most exposed.

  In retrospect, she was foolish. But in all fairness, how could she have known?

  Abbie’s ex-husband had accused her of irreparable timidity, criticizing her for refusing to go snorkeling or even swimming with dolphins, never mind the scuba diving he’d loved since he was sixteen. The world was populated by water people and land people, and Abbie was firmly attached to terra firma. Until Graceville. And the lake.

  Soon after she began her nightly wading, which gradually turned to dog-paddling and then awkward strokes across the dark surface, she began to dream about the water. Her dreams were far removed from her nightly dipping—which actually was somewhat timid, if she was honest. In sleep, she glided effortlessly far beneath the murky surface, untroubled by the nuisance of lungs and breathing. The water was a muddy green-brown, nearly black, but spears of light from above gave her tents of vision to see floating plankton, algae, tadpoles and squirming tiny creatures she could not name . . . and yet knew. Her underwater dreams were a wonderland of tangled mangrove roots coated with algae, and forests of gently waving lily-pads and swamp grass. Once, she saw an alligator’s checkered, pale belly above her, until the reptile hurried away, its powerful tail lashing to give it speed. In her dream, she wasn’t afraid of the alligator; she’d sensed instead (smelled instead?) that the alligator was afraid of her.

  Abbie’s dreams had never been so vivid. She awoke one morning drenched from head to toe, and her heart hammered her breathless until she realized that her mattress was damp with perspiration, not swamp water. At least . . . she thought it must be perspiration. Her fear felt silly, and she was blanketed by sadness as deep as she’d felt the first months after her divorce.

  Abbie was so struck by her dreams that she called Mary Kay, who kept dream diaries and took such matters far too seriously.

  “You sure that water’s safe?” Mary Kay said. “No chemicals being dumped out there?”

  “The water’s fine,” Abbie said, defensive. “I’m not worried about the water. It’s just the dreams. They’re so . . . ” Abbie rarely ran out of words, which Mary Kay knew full well.

  “What’s scaring you about the dreams?”

  “The dreams don’t scare me,” Abbie said. “It’s the opposite. I’m sad to wake up. As if I belong there, in the water, and my bedroom is the dream.”

  Mary Kay had nothing to offer except a warning to have the local Health Department come out and check for chemicals in any water she was swimming in, and Abbie felt the weight of her distance from her friend. There had been a time when she and Mary Kay understood each other better than anyone, when they could see past each other’s silences straight to their thoughts, and now Mary Kay had no idea of the shape and texture of Abbie’s life. No one did.

  All liberation is loneliness, she thought sadly.

  Abbie dressed sensibly, conservatively, for her first day at her new school.

  She had driven the two miles to the school, a red-brick converted bank building in the center of downtown Graceville, before she noticed the itching between her toes.

  “LaFleur,” the headmistress said, keeping pace with Abbie as they walked toward her assigned classroom for the course she’d named Creativity & Literature. The woman’s easy, Southern-bred tang seemed to add a syllable to every word. “Where is that name from?”

  Abbie wasn’t fooled by the veiled attempt to guess at her ethnicity, since it didn’t take an etymologist to guess at her name’s French derivation. What Loretta Millhouse really wanted to know was whether Abbie had ancestry in Haiti or Martinique to explain her sun-kissed complexion and the curly brown hair Abbie kept locked tight in a bun.

  Abbie’s itching feet had grown so unbearable that she wished she could pull off her pumps. The itching pushed irritation into her voice. “My grandmother married a Frenchman in Paris after World War II,” she explained. “LaFleur was his family name.”

  The rest was none of her business. Most of her life was none of anyone’s business.

  “Oh, I see,” Millhouse said, voice filled with delight, but Abbie saw her disappointment that her prying had yielded nothing. “Well, as I said, we’re so tickled to have you with us. Only one letter in your file wasn’t completely glowing . . . ”

  Abbie’s heart went cold, and she forgot her feet. She’d assumed that her detractors had remained silent, or she never would have been offered the job.

/>   Millhouse patted her arm. “But don’t you worry: Swimming upstream is an asset here.” The word swimming made Abbie flinch, feeling exposed. “We welcome independent thinking at Graceville Prep. That’s the main reason I wanted to hire you. Between you and me, how can anyone criticize a . . . creative mind?”

  She said the last words conspiratorially, leaning close to Abbie’s ear as if a creative mind was a disease. Abbie’s mind raced: The criticism must have come from Johanssen, the vice-principal at Blake who had labeled her argumentative—a bitch, Mary Kay had overheard him call her privately, but he wouldn’t have put that in writing. What did Millhouse’s disclosure mean? Was Millhouse someone who pretended to compliment you while subtly putting you down, or was a shared secret hidden beneath the twinkle in her aqua-green eyes?

  “Don’t go easy on this group,” Millhouse said as when they reached Room 113. “Every jock trying to make up a credit to stay on the roster is in your class. Let them work for it.”

  Sure enough, when Abbie walked into the room, she faced desks filled with athletic young men. Graceville was a co-ed school, but only five of her twenty students were female.

  Abbie smiled.

  Her house would be fixed up sooner than she’d expected.

  Abbie liked to begin with Thomas Hardy. Jude the Obscure. That one always blew their young minds, with its frankness and unconventionality. Their other instructors would cram conformity down their throats, and she would teach rebellion.

  No rows of desks would mar her classroom, she informed them. They would sit in a circle. She would not lecture; they would have conversations. They would discuss the readings, read pages from their journals, and share poems. Some days, she told them, she would surprise them by playing music and they would write whatever came to mind.

  Half the class looked relieved, the other half petrified.

  During her orientation, Abbie studied her students’ faces and tried to guess which ones would be most useful over the summer. She dismissed the girls, as she usually did; most were too wispy and pampered, or far too large to be accustomed to physical labor.

  But the boys. The boys were a different matter.

  Of the fifteen boys, only three were unsuitable at a glance—bird-chested and reedy, or faces riddled with acne. She could barely stand to look at them.

  That left twelve to ponder. She listened carefully as they raised their hands and described their hopes and dreams, watching their eyes for the spark of maturity she needed. Five or six couldn’t hold her gaze, casting their eyes shyly at their desks. No good at all.

  Down to six, then. Several were basketball players, one a quarterback. Millhouse hadn’t been kidding when she’d said that her class was a haven for desperate athletes. The quarterback, Derek, was dark-haired with a crater-sized dimple in his chin; he sat at his desk with his body angled, leg crossed at the knee, as if the desk were already too small. He didn’t say “uhm” or pause between his sentences. His future was at the tip of his tongue.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, interrupting him. “How old did you say you are, Derek?”

  He didn’t blink. His dark eyes were at home on hers. “Sixteen, ma’am.”

  Sixteen was a good age. A mature age.

  A female teacher could not be too careful about which students she invited to her home. Locker-room exaggerations held grave consequences that could literally steal years from a young woman’s life. Abbie had seen it before; entire careers up in flames. But this Derek . . .

  Derek was full of possibilities. Abbie suddenly found herself playing Millhouse’s game, noting his olive complexion and dark features, trying to guess if his jet-black hair whispered Native American or Hispanic heritage. Throughout the ninety-minute class, her eyes came to Derek again and again.

  The young man wasn’t flustered. He was used to being stared at.

  Abbie had made up her mind before the final bell, but she didn’t say a word to Derek. Not yet. She had plenty of time. The summer had just begun.

  As she was climbing out of the shower, Abbie realized her feet had stopped their terrible itching. For three days, she’d slathered the spaces between her toes with creams from Walgreens, none helping, some only stinging her in punishment.

  But the pain was gone.

  Naked, Abbie raised her foot to her mattress, pulling her toes apart to examine them . . . and realized right away why she’d been itching so badly. Thin webs of pale skin had grown between each of her toes. Her toes, in fact, had changed shape entirely, pulling away from each other to make room for webbing. And weren’t her toes longer than she remembered?

  No wonder her shoes felt so tight! She wore a size eight, but her feet looked like they’d grown two sizes. She was startled to see her feet so altered, but not alarmed, as she might have been when she was still in Boston, tied to her old life. New job, new house, new feet. There was a logical symmetry to her new feet that superseded questions or worries.

  Abbie almost picked up her phone to call Mary Kay, but she thought better of it. What else would Mary Kay say, except that she should have had her water tested?

  Instead, still naked, Abbie went to her kitchen, her feet slapping against her ugly kitchen flooring with unusual traction. When she brushed her upper arm carelessly across her ribs, new pain made her hiss. The itching had migrated, she realized.

  She paused in the bright fluorescent lighting to peer down at her rib-cage, and found her skin bright red, besieged by some kind of rash. Great, she thought. Life is an endless series of challenges. She inhaled a deep breath, and the air felt hot and thin. The skin across her ribs pulled more tautly, constricting. She longed for the lake.

  Abbie slipped out of her rear kitchen door and scurried across her back yard toward the black shimmer of the water. She’d forgotten her flip-flops, but the soles of her feet were less tender, like leather slippers.

  She did not hesitate. She did not wade. She dove like an eel, swimming with an eel’s ease. Am I truly awake, or is this a dream?

  Her eyes adjusted to the lack of light, bringing instant focus. She had never seen the true murky depths of her lake, so much like the swamp of her dreams. Were they one and the same? Her ribs’ itching turned to a welcome massage, and she felt long slits yawn open across her skin, beneath each rib. Warm water flooded her, nursing her; her nose, throat and mouth were a useless, distant memory. Why hadn’t it ever occurred to her to breathe the water before?

  An alligator’s curiosity brought the beast close enough to study her, but it recognized its mistake and tried to thrash away. But too late. Too late. Nourished by the water, Abbie’s instincts gave her enough speed and strength to glide behind the beast, its shadow. One hand grasped the slick ridges of its tail, and the other hugged its wriggling girth the way she might a lover. She didn’t remember biting or clawing the alligator, but she must have done one or the other, because the water flowed red with blood.

  The blood startled Abbie awake in her bed, her sheets heavy with dampness. Her lungs heaved and gasped, shocked by the reality of breathing, and at first she seemed to take in no air. She examined her fingers, nails and naked skin for blood, but found none. The absence of blood helped her breathe more easily, her lungs freed from their confusion.

  Another dream. Of course. How could she mistake it for anything else?

  She was annoyed to realize that her ribs still bore their painful rash and long lines like raw, infected incisions.

  But her feet, thank goodness, were unchanged. She still had the delightful webbing and impressive new size, longer than in her dream. Abbie knew she would have to dress in a hurry. Before school, she would swing by Payless and pick up a few new pairs of shoes.

  Derek lingered after class. He’d written a poem based on a news story that had made a deep impression on him; a boy in Naples had died on the football practice field. Before he could be tested by life, Derek had written in his eloquent final line. One of the girls, Riley Bowen, had wiped a tear from her eye. Riley Bowen always gaze
d at Derek like the answer to her life’s prayers, but he never looked at her.

  And now here was Derek standing over Abbie’s desk, on his way to six feet tall, his face bowed with shyness for the first time all week.

  “I lied before,” he said, when she waited for him so to speak. “About my age.”

  Abbie already knew. She’d checked his records and found out for herself, but she decided to torture him. “Then how old are you?”

  “Fifteen.” His face soured. “ ’Til March.”

  “Why would you lie about that?”

  He shrugged, an adolescent gesture that annoyed Abbie no end.

  “Of course you know,” she said. “I heard your poem. I’ve seen your thoughtfulness. You wouldn’t lie on the first day of school without a reason.”

  He found his confidence again, raising his eyes. “Fine. I skipped second grade, so I’m a year younger than everyone in my class. I always say I’m sixteen. It wasn’t special for you.”

  The fight in Derek intrigued her. He wouldn’t be the type of man who would be pushed around. “But you’re here now, bearing your soul. Who’s that for?”

  His face softened to half a grin. “Like you said, when we’re in this room, we tell the truth. So here I am. Telling the truth.”

  There he was. She decided to tell him the truth too.

  “I bought a big house out by the lake,” she said. “Against my better judgment, maybe.”

  “That old one on McCormack Road?”

  “You know it?”

  He shrugged, that loathsome gesture again. “Everybody knows the McCormacks. She taught Sunday school at Christ the Redeemer. Guess she moved out, huh?”