Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2

by Nathan Ballingrud

  Maisie looks surprised and chews her coal-colored lips. “That’s a lot more than I expected. You’ll say its name aloud and swear on it? You do that, you can’t lie.”

  “That’s what I just said, ain’t it?”

  Maisie stops taking Dancy’s treasures out of the cigar box and nods her head. “Deal,” she smiles, flashing all those sharp teeth. Her ears have grown to points, and each one has a small tuft of hair at the tip. Behind Dancy, the seraphim makes an awful, ugly noise and beats its wings, but she ignores it. The angel had its chance to help, but it was willing to stand by and let her be eaten and not even raise a finger to help, after all she’s done just because it told her to.

  “I get two riddles,” Maisie says. “You just get the one,” which hardly seems fair. The game’s rigged in the werewolf’s favor.

  Dancy almost doesn’t protest, but then says, “We could have five, instead. Five riddles, and I get two, and you get three. Still, no chance of a tie. Like you said, night’s still young.”

  “Ain’t that young,” the werewolf says, and licks at its lips with a mottled tongue that’s too long for a fourteen-year-old girl named Maisie. “You don’t like the terms, I can always keep the box and eat you right here and now, get it over with.”

  “Fine,” Dancy sighs. “Three riddles, you first,” and then she swears on the name of the seraphim. She says its name aloud, which she’s never done before. This time, she can tell Maisie also hears the thunder, and a trickle of blood leaks from the werewolf’s nose. She wipes it away and grins.

  “God’s own fucking magic,” she says. “And here I thought all I’d won was a free meal and a notch on the bedpost.”

  “You ain’t won nothing yet,” Dancy tells her. Then she reaches out and picks up the red checker. Maisie doesn’t try to stop her. “Your move,” she says to the crimson-eyed girl.

  “I don’t have to tell you, Dancy Flammarion, you lose this first one, and I get the second one right, that’s all she wrote. Won’t be need of a third riddle, it goes that way, will there.”

  “No,” Dancy scowls. “You don’t have to tell me that. Being an albino doesn’t make me stupid.”

  “Just let me think a second.”

  Dancy shrugs and says, “the night’s not that young, Maisie.” She rubs the checker between her thumb and index finger. She smiles, wishing her smile was half so unnerving as the werewolf’s.

  “Then you answer me this, Joan of Arc,” says Maisie, and she recites:

  “Although it never asked a thing

  Of any mortal man,

  Everybody answers it

  As quickly as he can.”

  Dancy shuts her eyes, because sometimes she thinks better that way. She closes her eyes, though maybe that’s not the best thing to do when you’re sitting on a bench with a werewolf who wants and fully intends to eat you. She lets the four lines run over and over again in her head.

  “You don’t know, do you?”

  Dancy opens her eyes and sets the checker back down between them. “A knock at a door,” she says, and the words come out more triumphantly than she’d meant them to come out. Maisie glowers and stares at the gravel and weeds between her bare feet.

  “My turn,” Dancy says, and she already knows the riddle she’s going to ask. She’s known it since she was a little girl:

  “Green as grass, but grass it ain’t.

  White as snow, but snow it ain’t.

  Red as blood, but blood it ain’t.

  Black as ink, but ink it ain’t.”

  “Your grammar’s atrocious,” the werewolf grunts and continues staring at the space between its feet. It repeats the riddle aloud several times. Dancy reaches into the cigar box and takes out her old St. Christopher’s medal. The silver’s tarnished, but she feels better just holding it, because St. Christopher’s the patron saint of travelers, and she’s been traveling for what feels like a very long time. It feels like she’s been traveling her whole life.

  “Don’t know, do you,” she whispers hopefully.

  But Maisie snaps her fingers, her claws snicking together like a pair of scissors. “A blackberry,” Maisie says and raises her head. Her hair’s a lot longer than it was, shaggy and almost not like hair at all. Almost like a mane. “A ripening blackberry. That’s it, right?”

  “Yeah,” Dancy says, then opens her hand and glares at the medal in her palm. First the angel, now a saint that’s supposed to be watching over her, but clearly isn’t. Tonight, she thinks, all Heaven’s gone and turned its back on me.

  “So, this one, she’s the bitch of the litter. She’s all do or die. You better stew on it long and hard.” And then Maisie says:

  “Red in the valley,

  Red on the hill.

  Feed it, live it will.

  Water it, it will die.

  This is true, and not a lie.”

  This time, Dancy doesn’t shut her eyes. Maisie’s a lot more wolf than girl now, her face become a muzzle, her legs the long, powerful hindquarters of a beast. There’s only deeper shades of night waiting in back of Dancy’s eyelids, and it’s bad enough sitting across from the monster as it is, with only moonlight. The sun’s hard on her skin, and she’s rarely wished for sunrise. But she wishes for it now, even though it’s still hours away.

  “How do I know you’re gonna keep your promise,” she says. “I gave you insurance, but you didn’t give me nothing but your word.”

  “Then my word’s all you got, Snow White. You know the answer or don’t you?”

  “You didn’t set a time limit,” Dancy replies, then repeats the riddle aloud. “Red in the valley, red on the hill …”

  “That’s what I said,” Maisie says, only she sounds more like she’s growling now than talking.

  Dancy ignores her. She knows the wolf is a deceitful, wicked demon, that it’s only trying to distract her, trip her up, make it harder for her to concentrate. “Feed it,” she continues, “live it will. Water it, it will die.”

  “This is true, and not a lie,” the werewolf growls, then makes a noise that Dancy supposes is meant to be a laugh, if wolves could laugh.

  A minute more comes and goes. Then five, and ten. Then Maisie (if she still is or ever was a Maisie) growls, “Times up.”

  “No,” Dancy says. “We didn’t set a time limit.”

  “We didn’t not set a time limit, and I’m bored and hungry, and I say time’s up. You don’t know the answer, and sitting here all damn night long ain’t gonna help you conjure up the right answer.” There’s finality and a faint hint of exasperation in the creature’s gruff voice, and Dancy knows there’s absolutely no point trying to reason with it. Maisie never intended to let her live. The riddles were nothing but a game of cat and mouse.

  “Yeah,” Dancy says, sparing another quick glimpse at the angel. “You win the game.” She’s pretty sure she’s never seen the seraphim half so angry before. When she looks back at the werewolf, it’s gotten up off the bench and is standing on its hind feet. It towers over her, grown at least a yard taller while they traded riddles. The girl’s clothes hang in shreds from the lean, ribsy body.

  “Looks like you don’t get enough to eat,” Dancy tells the wolf and points at its ribs.

  “Tonight I will,” it sneers, and saliva drips from its mouth and spatters on Dancy’s duffel bag. “Tonight, I get a feast.”

  Dancy nods, gripping the St. Christopher’s medal as tightly as she can. “What big eyes you have,” she says, then flips the medal like it was a quarter, and it strikes the werewolf squarely in its right eye. There’s a sizzling sound, and the smell of burning pork. A second later, there’s a soft pop when the monster’s eye boils and bursts. It howls, a howl that’s nothing but pain and anger, and it clutches at its face, trying to brush away the smoldering talisman seared into its flesh.

  “Wasn’t even halfway sure that was gonna work,” Dancy mutters, and she leans over and draws the carving knife from the green canvas bag. The blade shines dully in under the moon.
“Thought maybe that was just in books.”

  Maisie lunges for her then, its steaming jaws open wide as the gates of any hell, its left eye blazing and nothing but a scorched black pit where its right had been. Dancy swings the knife, her sword, opening the werewolf’s throat from ear to ear, slicing through jugular and carotid arteries, through muscle and larynx, cutting all the way to the bone. The blade lodges firmly in a vertebra, and as Maisie, gurgling, stumbles backwards, the knife’s yanked from Dancy’s hand with enough force that she loses her balance and falls hard on her hands and knees.

  “It’s a fire, puppy,” she says, not caring whether or not the beast can hear her. “The answer’s a fire.”

  *

  An hour later, and Dancy’s dragged Maisie’s naked body into the woods behind the bus stop. Dead, she became nothing but a fourteen-year-old girl again, so she wasn’t all that heavy. Dancy covered her decently with magnolia and sycamore leaves and with branches torn from bushes. She figured the coyotes and wild dogs, maybe coons and feral pigs and whatever else sniffed out the corpse, would do the rest. Now, she’s back at the bench, wiping the blood from her knife and she holds the cigar box tucked under one arm. All her treasures are safe inside it again, everything but the St. Christopher’s medal, which melted away to nothing. The seraphim has gone, took its leave the moment she killed the werewolf that meant to kill her, and Dancy knows it won’t ever be back. It said not one word as it departed in a veil of flame and smoke, but there wasn’t anything it might have said she didn’t already know. It plays by the rules, laws older than the universe, and she’s sure there’s always someone else willing to do its bidding.

  “That’s only fair and right,” she says, and slips the knife back into the duffel bag. “I was scared. I didn’t want to die, not here. Not tonight. So, I went and took your name in vain. I spoke your name, used your name, then cheated. I’m not gonna say it ain’t fair. I knew better.”

  But Dancy Flammarion’s never been on her own before, and that part frightens her almost as much as Maisie did. On the road alone and no shelter in a storm, and no angelic host to tell her where to go and what to expect when she gets there. She’s already done so much damage that every speck of evil, every fiend for hundreds of miles around, knows her name. They whisper it in their hiding places, and make plans for her undoing. And if she needed proof that the hunter has become the hunted, the werewolf was precisely that. She doesn’t need to be told twice.

  There’s a rumble, and for just half a second, there’s hope it might be the seraphim. That maybe her sin wasn’t so unforgivable, after all. But then she sees the headlights of the Greyhound bus moving towards her through the deserted town. Dancy stares up at the night sky for a moment, all the stars, the empty space between the stars, and the moon that must have been the girl’s goddess, but couldn’t be bothered to save her. Any more than the angel could be bothered to save Dancy. As the bus pulls to a stop, raising clouds of dust and grit, she shoulders her heavy duffel bag and waits for the door to swing open.

  RICH LARSON

  –

  The Air We Breathe is Stormy, Stormy

  IN BALTIC WATERS, gnashed by dark waves, there stood an old oil platform on rusted legs. It was populated as rigs always are, by coarse men young and strong whose faces soon overgrew with bristle and bloat. Cedric was one of these.

  He’d fled his father in New Zealand, then a pregnant girlfriend in Perth, arriving on the rig with insomniac eyes and an inchoate smile and a bank account in need of filling. In the pocket of his dull blue coverall, he carried an old Kindle with a spider-webbed screen and a Polaroid photograph of Violet when she was still slim and still laughed.

  His days were filled by the slow geometry of pipefitting, the bone-deep clank of machinery, the shrieks and swoops of soot-stained gulls. At night, when the running lights cast wavery orange on the black water and a sea-breeze scoured at the omnipresent stench of oil, Cedric thought the rig was not so bad. At night he read Moby Dick and anything else vaguely nautical. At night, Violet was blurred beautiful by the webcam window, distended curve of her stomach cropped neatly away, and he nearly loved her again.

  Some nights, Cedric stayed up top for hours to watch the starless sky and the ink-black sea. Dregs from this or that leak shimmered around the derrick’s legs. Scabs of tangled plastic bobbed between them. Some nights, Cedric thought he saw a shape moving in the water, but he knew all fish had fled long ago.

  Long months stacked on months, and the weekend before the fresh crew was brought in, everyone shattered themselves on whiskey hidden under bunks and coke stashed in jacket linings. Cedric copped a dime-bag of weed from Biggs, who wore Arsenal gear religiously but was otherwise sound, and sawed himself a bong from an empty 2litre.

  Biggs stayed for a few hoots, then it was only Cedric and the gurgle of bong-water, the gasp-catch of a held lungful, the electronic melody of a Skype dial tone. Any day now, love, Violet said, when she appeared. Cedric nodded blearily, leaking smoke from chapped lips. She showed him, then, and it was impossibly pale and round and sized like the moon.

  Cedric cut the line, because that was more merciful, wasn’t it, than telling her he would go anywhere but back to her in Perth. He clumped up top, through drinking songs and flitting cards and eruptions of laughter. He went to the rail with his head full of helium. The icy pitch was thick, thick below him.

  And there: a gleaming face, ivory-white. Cedric thought to call for help, thought the drifting body was crew drunk and toppled overboard, but the face made no sound, only blinked oil-black eyes, and so he knew he was imagining it. He went back below with his feet heavy as stones.

  In the morning, Cedric found the operations coordinator and told him he needed an extension on his contract. The OC listened through a hard liquor hangover as Cedric badgered, Cedric argued, and in the end he agreed so he’d be left to his silence and Tylenol. The old crew pushed off. Fresh crew came in. Cedric had an empty bunk in his room, and he found a new dealer for weed—none of Biggs’ laced shit, either.

  Skype slipped off into angry emails, then nothing at all. Cedric worked hard during the day, building aches into every part of his body, and stayed up most of the night. He read Auden and then anything else vaguely elegiac. It made the dark sea friendlier.

  Then, one night, he saw her. She was adrift, flotsam, pale limbs splayed like a starfish, hair ebbing tendrils around her head. Cedric had never seen a corpse, only dreamed one, and he found the sight paralyzed him. Then she revolved in the water and began pulling languid strokes towards the rig.

  Cedric watched with needles up his neck, wondered dimly if he should try to fish her out with a lifebuoy. Her face was angled towards his now and he recognized her wide liquid eyes. Cedric eased himself over the barrier and onto the rungs of a maintenance ladder, swearing when his palms stung against the cold metal. He climbed lower; she swam closer, smooth strokes, no drowning man’s flail.

  Are you alright, he croaked to her. He scuttled down until the dark water licked his waders and realized he’d left the lifebuoy. She was right below him now, treading in place and staring at him with eyes deep as the well. Are you alright, he said again, because he had nothing else to say.

  Cold was the word that tumbled off her lips. She reached; he reached, to her hand of slick rubber. She was impossibly light as he lifted her up the ladder, as if every one of her bones was hollow, but she clung to his back with fierce fingers. Her naked weight shivered against him.

  On deck, Cedric shrugged out of his thermal and handed it over.

  She watched the bunched fabric for a moment, then slipped it slowly, clumsily, over her head. As she pulled her wet black hair from this side of her neck to the other, Cedric realized she was beautiful. Bee-stung lips, immaculate skin, that bone structure that begged him to touch her.

  There was no doctor on the rig. Cedric knew there was a former EMT, and a half-dozen men with First Response, but there was no doctor and he felt, deeply, that if he passed her on
to anybody else he would never see her again. He almost didn’t hear her when she said, I need some sleep.

  I would, too, Christ. Cedric helped her to the door and dragged his card through the mag-lock. The iron stairwell was empty. Her feet slapped wetly on the way down to his cabin; Cedric hoped nobody was up to hear it. Sleep here, he told her, clearing his Acer and a tangle of laundry off the bottom bunk. Sleep here and I’ll call for someone.

  She plunged into the mattress, strings cut. Cedric watched the slack line of her spine, the curve of her ass, and thought thoughts. His porn bored him lately and Violet’s last webcam teasing was months removed. In his head he slipped into the bunk with her and she grabbed at him with those fierce fingers, with her lips and teeth.

  Her breathing evened. Cedric reached for the handset, thinking maybe the company man, maybe his OC, but stopped when he saw the webbing stretched taut between her long fingers. He knelt close, studying a tracery of blue veins like canals.

  When her dark eyes flicked open, he jumped. She smiled with gray needle teeth. Then Cedric blinked, and her teeth were Crest-commercial white again, and when he looked at her hand the slim fingers were unbound. Piss off, she whispered, closing her eyes.

  Three hours on, in a raw red dawn, she had not vanished and Cedric had not much moved. It wasn’t until his phone rattled out 5:45 AM on the dresser that he roused. His body dressed on automatic; his mind was still numbed.

  Stay here, Cedric said to her snores, and he went to work. The new crew knew Cedric as the quiet type; today he was dead silent in thought. He’d seen her before, he was sure of that now. Faded on Biggs’ weed, sick from a strange sort of fear, he’d seen her face peering up from the black water.

  When they breaked for food, Cedric half-walked, half-jogged back down to his cabin. The hallucination was lounging on his bottom bunk, brushing crumbs of granola bar off the sleeve of his thermal. She looked up as he entered.