Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2015

by Nino Cipri

  “Lola,” Kathy pulled me up and whispered to me. “He said to me, when we were kids, ‘I’m going to put a baby in you and it’s going to be special, like me and Dad,’ as if I had nothing to do with it. I can’t stand him touching me. When I felt you moving inside me, I was terrified you’d be a squirming snake, but you were mine. I’d do anything to get him away from us and Ami. I was the one who told the police.”

  Uncle. Father. Any wonder that I’m monstrous?

  “Kenny’s always been wrong. He thought it was from Dad, although he never saw him do it. It’s from Mum. It drove her mad, holding it in. She nearly turned when she had her stroke. I have to know, can you do it too?”

  “What?”

  “We can’t waste time. Can you turn into,” she hesitated, “a snake?”

  “Yes.” I couldn’t meet her gaze.

  “Good. Do it as soon as I leave.” She opened the window. “Go out through the bars. Will you fit?”

  “I don’t know if I can. I’m not sure that I can do it at will.”

  “Try. Get out of here.”

  Panic rose in my chest. “What about you?”

  “I’m going to do what I should’ve done a long time ago.” She showed me the paring knife in her back pocket and then pulled her baggy sweater back over it. It must’ve been all she had time to grab. “I won’t be far behind you.”

  “What if you’re not?”

  “Don’t ask stupid questions,” she paused, “I’m sorry for not being stronger. I’m sorry for not getting you away from here.”

  “Kathy,” Kenny’s voice boomed from the corridor, “time for bed.”

  After she left I heard the key turn in the lock.

  * * *

  I went through the drawers and wardrobe. Kenny had filled them with clothes. I didn’t want to touch anything that had come from him. There was nothing that I could use as a weapon or to help me escape.

  I’d not changed since the time I’d bitten Jade. I lay down, trying to slow my breathing and concentrate. Nothing happened. The silence filled my mind along with all the things he would be doing to Kathy.

  I dozed, somewhere towards early morning, wakening frequently in the unfamiliar room. I missed Tallulah beside me in the bed we’d shared since childhood. I missed her warmth and tangle of hair.

  When Kenny let me out it was late afternoon.

  “Where’s my mum?”

  “Down here.”

  There was a chest freezer in the basement. Kenny lifted the lid. Kathy was inside, frozen in a slumped position, arms crossed over her middle. Frozen blood glittered on the gash in her head and frosted one side of her face.

  Kenny put his hand on my shoulder like we were mourners at a wake. I should’ve been kicking and screaming, but I was as frozen as she was.

  One of Kathy’s wrists was contorted at an unnatural angle.

  “She betrayed me. I always knew it, in my heart.” He shut the lid. “Now it’s just you and me, kid.”

  He took me up through the house, to the room at the back with the double doors. There were dozens of tanks that cast a glow. Some contained a single serpent, others several that were coiled together like heaps of intestines.

  “My beauties. I’ll start breeding them.”

  There were corn snakes, ball pythons, ribbon snakes, though I had no names for them back then, all of which make good pets. I stopped at one tank. He had a broad head with a blunted snout.

  “Ah, meet Shankly.” Kenny put his hand against the glass. “He was hard to come by. They’re called cottonmouths because they open their mouths so wide to show their fangs that you see all the white lining inside.”

  The cottonmouth must have been young. I remember his olive green colour and the clear banded pattern on his back, which he would lose as he got older.

  “Are you special, Kathy?”

  “I’m Lola.”

  “Yes, of course you are. Are you like me?”

  “I’m nothing like you. Leave me alone.”

  “I’ll look after you. Like you’re a princess. You’ll want for nothing. And you’ll look after me because that’s how it works.”

  “Don’t fucking touch me.”

  Kenny pressed my face against the tank. Shankly showed me his pale underbelly as he slid towards me.

  “Be afraid of him,” Kenny nodded at the snake, “he still has his fangs. I’ll make a mint from his venom.”

  Shankly climbed up a branch in his tank and settled there.

  Kenny pushed me down with one hand and undid his belt buckle with the other.

  “I’m your daughter.” It was my last defence.

  “I know.”

  Then he put his forked tongue in my mouth.

  * * *

  I couldn’t move. The place between my legs was numb. I’d already tried sex with a boy from college. I knew what it was about. We’d fumbled and fallen in a heap in the bushes by the old boating lake one afternoon. It wasn’t an experience to set the world alight but it was satisfactory enough.

  This wasn’t just a sex crime, it was a power crime. Kenny wanted my fear. I shrunk into the distant corners of myself trying to retreat where he couldn’t follow. His orgasm was grudging, delivered with a short, gratified moan.

  Afterwards he sat with his trousers open, watching me like he was waiting for me to do something. I was frozen. I’m not sure I even blinked. That was how Kathy must have felt, forever stuck in that single moment of inertia and shock that kept her in the same spot for a lifetime. She was right. She should have run while she had the chance. Fuck her mother. And Ami, for all the good she’d done her.

  Kenny stood up. I thought, It’s going to happen again and then he’s going to dump me in the freezer. Instead, he went upstairs, his tread heavy with disappointment.

  “Don’t stay up too late, pet.”

  I think I was waiting for something too, when I should’ve been searching for something sharp to stick between his ribs. I couldn’t summon anything; I was still too deep inside myself.

  I was colder than I’d ever been before, even though the summer night was stifling. The room felt airless despite the window being wide open and butting up against the grille. Sometimes, when Georgia’s away, I feel that cold.

  Get up, get up before he remembers you and comes back down for more.

  “Lola.” A voice carried through the window.

  It was Tallulah, a pale ghost beyond the glass. Her mouth was moving as she clutched at the bars.

  I turned my face away, in the childish way of if I can’t see her, then she can’t see me. I didn’t want her to see me like this. It occurred to me that she might have been a witness to the whole thing. I turned back but she’d gone, so I closed my eyes.

  I should’ve known that Tallulah would never leave me. The snakes swayed in their tanks, enraptured. Tallulah was long and white, with pale yellow markings. Slender and magnificent. She glided over me and lay on my chest, rearing up. I couldn’t breathe because she took my breath away. I could feel her muscles contracting and her smooth belly scales against my bare chest.

  Get up, get up, or he’ll come down and find her like this.

  Are you special?

  Her tongue flicked out and touched my lips. I had no choice. I had to do it, for her. There was the rush of lubricant that loosened the top layer of my skin. The change was fast, my boyish body, with its flat chest and narrow hips perfectly suited to the transformation.

  I crawled out of my human mantle. Moulting was good. I shed every cell of myself that Kenny had touched.

  * * *

  Both Tallulah and I are unidentifiable among my extensive research of snakes, bearing properties of several species at once. We made a perfect pair for hunting. The pits on my face were heat sensitive, able to detect a variation of a thousandth of a degree, feeding information into my optic nerves. I saw the world in thermal. Kenny’s heart was luminous in the dark. I slid up the side of his bed and hovered over his pillow. Tallulah lay beside him on the ma
ttress, waiting.

  Look at your princesses, Kenny. See how special we are.

  Kenny snored, a gentle, almost purring noise.

  It’s a myth that snakes dislocate their jaws.

  I opened my mouth as wide as I could, stretching the flexible ligament that joined my lower jaw to my skull. I covered his crown in slow increments. He snorted and twitched. I slipped down over his eyes, his lashes tickling the inside of my throat. He reached up to touch his head.

  Tallulah struck him, sinking her fangs into his neck. He started and tried to sit up, limbs flailing, which was a mistake as his accelerating heartbeat sent the venom further around his circulation.

  Trying to cover his nose was the hardest part, despite my reconfigured mouth. I thought my head would split open. I wasn’t sure how much more I could stomach. Not that it mattered. I wasn’t trying to swallow him whole. A fraction more and I was over his nostrils completely.

  There was only one way to save himself. I recognised the undulations he was making. I could feel the change on my tongue, his skin becoming fibrous. I had to stop him. I couldn’t imagine what he’d become.

  He was weakening with Tallulah’s neurotoxins, slumping back on the bed, shaking in an exquisite fit. He’d wet himself. I stretched my flesh further and covered his mouth and waited until long after he was still.

  * * *

  I woke up on the floor beside Tallulah. We were naked. My throat and neck were sore. The corners of my mouth were crusted with dried blood. We lay on our sides, looking at one another without speaking. We were the same, after all.

  “How did you find me?” I was hoarse.

  “I had to wait until Ami went out. I found the house details in her bedroom drawer. I didn’t have any money so I had to get a bus and walk the rest of the way. I’m sorry that I didn’t get here sooner.”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  Tallulah picked up our clothes and then our skins which lay like shrouds. It was disconcerting to see how they were moulds of us, even down to the contours of our faces.

  “I’ll take these with us. We can burn them later.”

  I went upstairs. I edged into the darkened room as if Kenny might sit up at any moment. He was a purple, bloated corpse with fang marks in his neck. I fumbled with the chain around his neck, not wanting to touch him.

  “Where’s Kathy?” Tallulah asked.

  I told her.

  “Show me.”

  “No, I don’t want you to remember her like that.” I seized Tallulah’s face in my hands. “You do know that she didn’t mean what she said, about you not belonging with us? She was trying to protect you.”

  Tallulah nodded, her mouth a line. She didn’t cry.

  “We have to bury her.”

  “We can’t. Tallulah, we have to get out of here. Do you understand? Ami will come for you when she realises you’ve gone. There’s something else.”

  I put my hand in the cottonmouth’s tank. It curled up my arm and I lifted it out, holding it up to my cheek. He nudged my face.

  “Lift out the bottom.”

  Tallulah pulled out bits of twisted branch and foliage, then pulled up the false base. She gasped. Out came bundles of notes and cloth bags. She tipped the contents out on her palm. More diamonds than I could hold in my cupped hands.

  We loaded the money into Kenny’s rucksack and tucked the diamonds in our pockets.

  “What about the snakes?”

  We opened the tanks and carried them outside. I watched them disappear into the undergrowth. Except for Shankly. I put him in a carrier bag and took him with us.

  * * *

  There are days when I wake and I can’t remember who I am, like a disorientated traveller who can’t recall which hotel room of which country they’re in.

  I’m hurt that Georgia didn’t want me to collect her from the airport.

  There’s been a delay. I won’t get in until late. Go to bed, I’ll get a cab.

  I wished now that I’d ignored her and gone anyway instead of lying here in the dark. The harsh fluorescent lights and the near empty corridors of the airport are preferable to the vast darkness of our empty bed.

  Not going is a stupid test with which I’ve only hurt myself. I’ve resolutely taken her consideration for indifference. I want her to be upset that I wasn’t there, as if she secretly wanted me there all along.

  See, I confuse even myself.

  The front door opens and closes. I should get up and go to her. She comes in, marked by the unzipping of her boots and the soft sound of her shedding clothes.

  Love isn’t just what you feel for someone when you look at them. It’s how they make you feel about yourself when they look back at you.

  Georgia is the coolest, most poised woman that I know. We’re older now and our hearts and flesh aren’t so easily moved but I still wonder what she sees when she looks at me.

  “Do you love me?” It’s easier to ask it with the lights off and my head turned away from her.

  Everything about us is wrong. We’re lovers, sisters, freaks.

  She answers in a way that I have to respond to. I glide across the floor towards her and we become a writhing knot. We hunt mice in our grandiose pile and in the morning we are back here in our bed, entwined together in our nest.

  When we wake again as human beings she says, “Of course I love you, monster.”

  When we shed the disguises that are Georgia and Eliza, and then the skins that are Lola and Tallulah, we are monsters. Fabulous beasts.

  About the Author

  Priya Sharma is a doctor who lives in the UK. Her short stories have appeared in several magazines including Black Static, Interzone, Albedo One, and On Spec. She’s been reprinted in Paula Guran’s Best Dark Fantasy and Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best Horror Volume 4. You can sign up for email updates here.

  Copyright © 2015 by Priya Sharma

  Art copyright © 2015 by Jeffery Alan Love

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  I was a little sad to take down the huge old beech, a wolf tree three times as large as anything else around. Most likely, it stood there when the woods were fields—a marker between properties or just a spot for the cows to graze out of the sun—and it had remained after the farmers left and the fields gave way to forest once again. It seemed a shame, somehow, to cut it down, but it was dying, and besides, a tree that size was worth more than a cord of firewood.

  By the next winter I had it cut, stacked, and dried inside my shed, but it was buried near back, behind three other rows, and it wasn’t until January that I’d burned enough of the other wood to actually get at it. That’s when a strange thing started happening.

  At first, I thought I was imagining it. I’d go out to the shed in the morning, and the stack of wood would look lower, as though someone had come in the night to steal the logs. It seemed crazy: Who would drive a mile down my rutted driveway in the middle of the night just to make off with an armload of firewood? I told myself I was imagining it. But when you rely on wood to cook your food, to keep you warm, to stop the pipes from freezing, you know how high your pile is, almost down to the last log, and someone, I decided after three more days of this, was taking my wood.

  I caught him the next night. I stayed up late, waiting inside until full dark, then pulling on my coat and boots to go stand guard. It was cold enough that the snow squeaked. The stars were knife-sharp. I waited with my hands stuffed in my pockets, shivering and feeling foolish. I was about to head inside when I heard him coming, huffing and cursing an
d muttering as he made his way up out of the woods, struggling through the deep drifts toward my shed.

  It was obvious at once that he was a goblin. I’d never seen one, of course. They weren’t supposed to be real, but what other creature is greeny-brown, pointy-eared and knobbly-fingered, barely taller than my knee? I watched, amazed, as he hopped up on the stack of wood, dragged a single log off the top, and headed off back into the snow, dragging his spoils behind him. I’d never noticed his tracks, but then, it had been snowing off and on for days, and the wind had been blowing to beat the band.

  I’d planned to confront the thief, but instead I found myself following him out into the woods. The moonlight through the pines was bright enough to see by, and it was easy to follow the goblin. The log—almost as big as he was—slowed him down. He carried it on his humped little shoulder, mostly. Sometimes it would slip off and drop into the snow. He’d dig it out, kick at it irritably for a while, then pick it up again, forcing his way deeper into the forest.

  The slashes of shadow and moonlight made everything look strange. I lost my bearings for a while, but when we finally started climbing up a gradual hill, all at once I knew exactly where we were. And I knew where we were going.

  There, at the crest of the rise, like a round wooden table poking through the snow, was the stump of the great old beech tree. And there, piled in front of it, was my firewood, dozens of split logs arranged in some sort of insane scaffolding. I watched from the woods as the goblin entered the small clearing, approached his hoard of firewood, and, with surprising care, placed the fruits of his latest thievery on top. It was an oddly reverential gesture, after all the kicking and the cursing.

  Another night I might have waited longer, watched more, tried to understand what was happening. Despite the long walk, however, I was cold, and tired, and as the goblin turned away from his pile, heading back for another log, I stepped from the shadows.

  “Why are you taking my wood?” I asked, somewhat mildly, given that I was the one who had been wronged.