The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 5

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Cool. It’s a freak show,” says Aidan. “I didn’t know they had those anymore.”

  I don’t think we’re supposed to call them freak shows. Though I know my parents would freak if they knew I was anywhere near one. Too much nudity, too many pathways into the occult.

  The tent is near the back of the carnival, decorated with garishly painted plywood signs and lit by a string of lights at the entrance flap that does little more than cast long shadows, obscuring most of the ads.

  So far, the carnival has been pretty lame. There’s a Ferris wheel, but it costs four dollars to go around a single time—Yves says they must have to pay a fortune for insurance. The hot dogs look ancient and shriveled, and taste more like jerky. The cotton candy is deflated, the funnel cake soggy, and they aren’t selling anything cool like deep-fried Twinkies. I had to beg my parents to let me come too. You see, the fairgrounds back up to the woods, and I’m not allowed anywhere near the woods anymore.

  Maybe if we played some games on the midway it would have been fun, but Aidan pronounced them childlike and insipid, suitable only for jocks and their sheeplike followers, and we all agreed. Except for Yves, in a move clearly designed to recall my collection of bobble-headed monkeys that we’d amassed over several summers spent being childish and insipid at the Skee-Ball range down the shore.

  Yves loves telling cringe-worthy stories about the dumb stuff we used to do, especially since last fall. Most especially whenever he catches me flirting with Aidan.

  “Ewww,” says Marissa, insinuating herself and her bare-midriff top between Aidan and me. “A two-headed cow? Is it, like, alive?”

  “Probably not,” says Yves from behind us. “I bet it’s pickled.”

  I look over my shoulder and wrinkle up my nose at him. Yves’s eyes are dark, framed by even darker lashes that were always too long and full for a boy. His hands are balled up in his jacket pockets and he’s giving me one of those long piercing looks that have been another one of his specialties since last fall.

  Summer refuses to go inside the freak show, citing how inhumane it is to put people with deformities up on display. But a quick glance at the signs out front reveals only one sideshow performer whose “qualities” don’t seem self-inflicted: the wolf-boy. The others are a tattooed man, a sword swallower, and some guy called the human hanger who looks like his claim to carnival fame is dangling stuff from his body piercings. Gross. Maybe my parents have a point. I move down to examine the next sign, and freeze.

  VENOM

  THE WORLD’S ONLY LIVE CAPTIVE UNICORN

  They said it couldn’t be done, but we have one!

  Be one of the few to see this monster . . . and SURVIVE!

  There’s a bad drawing beneath the words, nothing like the blurry photos on the news, or the pictures you’ve seen of the corpses. The unicorn on the sign looks like one from the old fairy books, white, rearing, its mane flying out behind it in artful spirals. Just like a fairy tale, except for the fangs and the blood-red eyes.

  I stumble back and almost trip over Marissa. “A unicorn?” she says. “But it can’t be a real one.”

  “Of course it’s not,” says Aidan. “They’d never be allowed to put it on display. Way too dangerous. It’s probably pickled too.”

  Marissa points at the sign. “But it says it’s alive.”

  “Maybe a fake one,” says Katey, clinging to her boyfriend, Noah. “They have this patented process where they graft the horns of a baby goat together, and it grows up with one horn. Like a bonsai tree. We learned about it in Bio class.”

  I shudder and move away from the tent. Before unicorns came back, people used to do that and pretend it was this gentle, magical creature. No one realized the old stories were lies.

  “Well, that’s totally worth five bucks,” says Aidan. “I want to check it out. A killer unicorn! You know they never caught the one that killed those kids in the woods last fall.”

  “They can’t,” says Noah. “They say no one can catch one, and no one can tame one either. This one has got to be a fake.”

  My arms tangle up, hugging myself to keep out the cold. But it’s a warm spring evening. Nothing like last fall, with its cold gray skies, crisp leaves, bloodcurdling screams.

  Summer shakes her head vehemently. “Yeah, I’m definitely not going in now.”

  “Come on,” says Katey. “It isn’t a real one. If it were, it would be on TV, not stuck in some sideshow tent.”

  “Fine,” Aidan says to Summer. “Be lame.” He cocks his head at me, grinning. “Let’s go.”

  If my folks disapproved of body piercings and the occult, then a unicorn was definitely off-limits. Especially for me.

  “Wen?” Yves’s voice comes from way too close. He’s the only one outside my family who knows. “You don’t have to.”

  I turn to him. He’s offering me his hand like we’re still six years old. Like holding his hand will be as simple as it was when we were kids. Like holding him can be as natural as it was last fall. But like I told him then, it was an accident. A mistake.

  I stare at him. He’s holding out his hand like things can ever be the same between us again.

  “Hey!” I call to Aidan and the others. “Wait up.”

  It isn’t a fake.

  I can tell the instant I’m inside the tent, though I can’t even see it yet. But it smells like last fall in here, the weird scent that at the time I thought was someone burning leaves, or plant matter rotting after the October rains.

  The interior of the tent looks like a museum gallery, with a dark, winding path snaking past individual exhibits that stand out like islands of amber red light in the gloom. Noah has already pulled Katey into a dark corner behind the sea serpent bones to make out. I can see them even better inside the blackened tent than I could in the glare of the midway.

  It’s the unicorn that does this to me. Its evil tingles along my nerve endings, waking them, tuning them like a drug so that everything is clearer, stronger, slower.

  The two-headed calf is, in fact, pickled; a fetal calf mutation preserved in a giant tank that glows green to heighten the creep factor. Aidan and Marissa gape at it, then skip over to watch the sword swallower do his thing. I close my eyes and try to push the unicorn out. I’m hot all over, like that time my cousins Rebecca and John and I got into the brandy at Christmas.

  The sword swallower licks the sword from end to end, grinning at us, then leans his head back and lifts the rapier into the air, poising it carefully over his mouth. I watch each inch of it descend into the man’s gullet, see every movement of his neck muscles, every twitch as he fights to suppress his gag reflex.

  The suppressed magic breaks free, loosing within me a painful clarity, every moment of time stretched out to encompass unbearable detail. I can hear Marissa’s heartbeat, quickened because of the sight before her, quickening more when she shivers in disgust and leans against Aidan. Blood pounds in my ears, like that time my cousins Rebecca and John and I bet to see who could hold their breath longest at the bottom of their pool.

  I can even feel the soil beneath my soles, and I let myself be pulled along in my steps like I’m a train car on a track, tugged inexorably toward something that lies in the darkness beyond.

  Like the time my cousins Rebecca and John and I went out to the woods near their house last fall and I watched them die.

  I never should have come in here. It was wrong; I knew that, but I’d wanted to show off for Aidan.

  There’s a woman seated on a metal folding chair in front of a curtain partitioning off the back of the tent. Over the flap is another drawing of a unicorn, rampant red against a black field. She stamps out her cigarette. “You here to see Venom?” she asks. She’s dressed in flowing skirts and a corset, but looks more like a biker babe than a fairy-tale princess.

  “Yes,” says Aidan, behind me.

  “I have to go with you,” says the woman, pulling herself to her feet. “For safety.”

  Marissa stands back. “So
it is real?”

  Aidan rolls his eyes. “Part of the show. Like the sword swallower popping those balloons to show it was sharp.”

  I take a deep breath. And like the sword swallower, this is real. They have a real unicorn back there. Poisonous. Man-eating. We should run. Now.

  The woman holds open the flap and ushers us inside, and the others jostle around me, but I can’t take another step. In my head I hear my cousins screaming. No one here knows, and Yves is still outside. They were two years older than me, seniors at another school. No one knows those kids who were killed by a unicorn were my cousins. No one knows I was there.

  My parents said not to tell. Fewer questions, then, about how I’d survived. Less temptation, then, to explore the evil that dwells in my blood.

  “Coming, Wen?” Aidan asks, and grabs my hand. Something like an electric shock breaks through my thoughts, and I follow him beyond the curtain. There’s a small observation space in front of a sturdy-looking metal grate. Beyond the grate: darkness and a tiny pool of yellow light.

  The woman lifts a whistle on a chain hanging around her neck and blows a low, warbling note. Beyond the bars the unicorn steps into the light. Or actually, it hobbles. It’s a small one, not like the kind that killed Rebecca and John. Each of its cloven hooves is encircled with heavy metal clamps, and they are chained, left to right, front to back, so the unicorn can take only tiny steps. The front leg irons connect to a Y-shaped metal pole ending in another metal clamp securing the beast’s neck. Thus chained, it can only hold its head out straight, the better for us to admire its goatlike face and long corkscrew horn.

  The unicorn is enormously fat. Underneath a coat of sparse, wiry white hair, its belly distends almost to its knobby knees. Patches of its coat are bare, and in the bald spots I can see scabs and even open sores, like it’s been chewing itself.

  The unicorn’s watery blue eyes glare at each of my friends in turn. Its mouth opens in a snarl, revealing pointed yellow fangs and unhealthy-looking gums. It growls a low, bleating growl at Noah and Katey, at Marissa and Aidan. And then it turns to me.

  Its pupils dilate, its mouth closes, and then it moves toward the bars.

  We all jump back.

  “Venom!” yells the woman. The unicorn’s horn scrapes the bars. It bends its knees now, struggling to lower its head in the confines of the irons, bleating as the edges of the neck brace scrape against its skin.

  “Venom!” the woman screams. “Get back. Now!” The unicorn does not obey.

  My friends take another big step back toward the curtains. “Lady…” Aidan says. I can hear their heartbeats pounding away. But I can’t take my eyes off the unicorn.

  The monster limps and stumbles, trying to put one knee on the ground and then the other, constrained by its bonds, never breaking eye contact with me, never letting go of the pleading look in its eyes.

  The woman snaps to and turns to me. “You.”

  I blink as she grabs my arm. The unicorn stops what it’s doing and begins growling again.

  “You’re one of us,” she hisses at me.

  Oh, no.

  “Lady, get your monster under control,” Aidan says. The unicorn bangs against the grate, and the bars bend under its weight.

  Under her weight, I realize at once. It’s a female.

  “Who are you?” the unicorn wrangler asks, and her grip tightens. She’s so strong. Insanely strong.

  But so am I. I yank my arm loose, then fly back through the curtains, mindless of her shouts or my friends’ shock or the soundless pleas of the unicorn. I run with speed I haven’t felt since last fall. Speed that meant I was the only one who got away when that unicorn attacked my cousins and me on the trail. Speed that those people from the Italian nunnery mentioned when they came to my parents’ house to explain to us that I’m something special when it comes to unicorns. I draw them in like unicorn catnip. I’m immune to their deadly venom. I’m capable of hearing their thoughts. When I’m around them, I’m blindingly fast and scarily strong. And I, unlike most of the people on the planet, have the ability to capture and kill them, if properly trained.

  They said they had a place to train girls with powers like mine. They called us unicorn hunters. My parents kicked them out. My father said they were papists at best and exploiters and magicians at worst, and there was no way he was letting me get anywhere near a unicorn. After all, we’d already seen what those monsters had done to Rebecca and John.

  I flee with this inhuman speed through the twisting paths of the sideshow tent and break through the flaps into the benign neon night. And the first thing I see, when the moon stops spinning in the sky and the sense of unicorn fades, is that Yves and Summer are sitting on a bench in the shadows, and they’re kissing.

  Yves gives Summer a ride home, which means I’m sitting in the back. He turned sixteen last summer, which makes him almost a year older than the rest of our crowd. I choose the seat behind the driver’s side, so I can’t see Yves in the mirror, even if I wanted to. Summer chatters the whole way, splitting her monologue between the two of us, and I wonder what she thinks of me, and of the rumors about me and Yves. When we arrive at Summer’s house, Yves gets out of the car and walks her to her front door, and I stare as hard as I can at the moon. It seems to take a really long time for him to get back. He doesn’t move to put the car in gear.

  “You staying back there? Am I your chauffeur?”

  I kick the back of his seat.

  “What was the unicorn like?”

  “Real.” I say, and then, to keep him from asking anything else, “What was Summer’s tongue like?”

  Yves peels out.

  As soon as Yves pulls into his driveway, I open my door and tumble out, unsteady because the car is still moving. I sprint across his lawn, jump over Biscuit, old Mrs. Schaffer’s annoying yellow cat, and am halfway up my front walk before I hear the engine die, before he shouts at me.

  “Wen! Wait, Wen, we should talk about this!”

  And then I’m inside my house, and I can’t hear him yelling anymore, and I can’t see the moon, and most of all, I can’t feel that unicorn calling out to me from all the way across town.

  That’s the part I still don’t get, after I’ve knocked on my folks’ door to say good night and changed into my pajamas and said my prayers and gotten into bed. Because if I’d done like those Italian nuns had asked, if I’d gone off with them, I’d have trained to be a unicorn hunter. A unicorn killer.

  But there was no mistaking that unicorn. She wanted my help. Did she want me to kill her? I could easily believe that living in captivity, confined day and night by all those chains, might be unbearable. Was that what she wanted? A mercy killing?

  I punch my pillow down and pull the covers over my head to protect my eyes from the moonlight, which seems so much brighter now than it did at the carnival. Just stop thinking about the unicorn. Just stop.

  For six months I lived in fear of waking up one morning and finding a whole herd of monsters in my backyard, such was my power to draw their evil down on me. But now that I’ve met another unicorn, now that I know what it is to have one near, I understand. I recognize what it feels like now. I just have to overcome it. The trick is to think of something else. Something pleasant.

  So I imagine I’m kissing Aidan, that he is touching my back the way he touched my hand in the tent tonight. It’s probably not the right image, though, because the only experience I have kissing anyone is with Yves, last fall. And instead of feeling Aidan’s long blond hair between my fingers, I am feeling Yves’s dark, wiry curls; I’m feeling Yves’s full lips against mine; I’m hearing Yves whisper my name, just like he did last fall, like instead of grabbing him by the shoulders and kissing him I’d waved my arms and conjured lightning out of a blue sky.

  I’m glad for Summer. I really am. I want Yves to find a girlfriend and forget about trying to go out with me. I want him to forget about kissing me, even if it was his first kiss as well. And I want to forget too.
r />   I want to forget it all.

  Yves isn’t waiting for me at my locker on Monday morning. He and Summer spend lunch canoodling at the far end of the table. Which is fine by me. Less fine is that Marissa hangs off Aidan all through the food line and arranges the seating so he’s nearest her and farthest from me at lunch. Plus, they only want to talk about their current events class. Apparently the government napalmed some unicorn-infested prairie out West somewhere to try to control the spread of the monsters. It didn’t work.

  “The pictures on the news didn’t look anything like that thing we saw at the sideshow,” says Aidan. “Maybe it was a fake.”

  I keep my mouth filled with coleslaw. Least fine of all is that the unicorn has been calling to me all weekend. Even in church on Sunday. I almost told my parents, but I was too scared by what they’d say. Like maybe if I still feel it, it’s because I haven’t been trying hard enough to banish this evil from my heart.

  I can feel it tugging on me now.

  “Of course it was a fake,” says Marissa. “Everyone knows that unicorns can’t be captured.”

  “Everyone knows a lot of things,” Noah points out. “Like how you can’t kill them with napalm. But then they also show unicorn corpses on the news. Who killed them, and how?”

  I dare to look up then, and I notice that Yves is focusing on me. Only we know who is really killing unicorns, and I swore Yves to secrecy last fall.

  Right before I kissed him.

  Katey shudders and pulls the crusts off her sandwich. “Fake or not, it was scary. Unicorns are awful—the ones on the news, the little fat one at the fair—doesn’t matter. I hope whoever is killing them gets that one in the woods. The one that killed those kids last fall.”