Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5

by Robert Shearman

  —and pulled back. He couldn’t feed the beast, if this was what it needed. He couldn’t, and yet no tennis roll had ever look as soft and as perfectly firm as Amir’s licked-clean cheek. It was plump as a quail’s breast, and it smelled like ghee. He leaned in once more and fitted his teeth into the thin, soft flesh just above Amir’s jaw. He pressed in, his crushed nose breathing in the savory warmth of his Uncle’s skin: the scent of freshly fried pholourie. Amir’s blood seeped into his mouth, washed in along his gums.

  “Amir!”

  Harry pulled away from his Uncle’s face and wiped the blood off his lips. Abed came hurtling back down the road with Bhauji. She was a small woman who wore a purple-flowered headscarf that flapped at the nape of her neck as she hurried to keep pace. She was out of breath from running, and her words came through in spitracked sobs:

  “He done vex those mill men now!”

  She dropped to the ground. Amir seemed to be coming to himself again; his right eye blinked open when he heard her say his name.

  “Come here, boy,” Bhauji said to Harry.

  “Come on!” Abed implored. He pulled at his Uncle’s hand, trying to get him to sit up. “Help us get him up!”

  But Harry could go no nearer. It was not the pain that stopped him, not the beast’s razor-toothed insistence that he return to the man’s broken body. It was the shame. It was the taste of Amir’s sweat and blood and spit still lingering in his mouth and the pleasure that came of tasting it. He couldn’t tell if it was the beast’s pleasure or his own.

  “I’m sorry,” Harry said, backing away. “I’m so sorry.”

  He started running in the direction Bobby had gone to look for the nurse. The storm was all above them now; the rain started with slow but heavy drops that cratered the dirt road. It started coming faster, harder, and he turned and was running along the river, back to the piers. He didn’t think about where he was going; the beast kept him from that. It had started growing inside him, swelling his small stomach, pushing into the surrounding blood vessels and yellow fat. It crowded his lungs and his breaths brought less and less relief with each step but he still kept running until he came to a pier where some fishermen were untying their boat, readying to set off.

  “Hey!” Harry called, but his voice was lost as the rain crescendoed. He knew one of those fishermen—they were Arawak, and one was Alice’s eldest brother. He ran to the end of the pier. “Hey!”

  But the men were already pushing off, their boat’s small motor kicking into life.

  Harry looked back. Provenance was behind him: the nurse and the ferryman he didn’t know; Abed and Bobby and Bhauji, who he hardly even recognized; Amir, broken, bleeding. Beyond them was the compound, where Father and Mother were probably starting to worry, if they’d even noticed he was gone.

  Harry heeled his shoes off, took off his pants, and jumped into the Demerara.

  The beast howled. It ripped at soft, pink tissue; it sunk its teeth into flexing muscle; it wrapped its long tongue around his spongy lungs and squeezed. It did not stop to heal him.

  Harry swam with the current. He tasted the blood that was coming up from his throat, but he could not see it as it mixed with the murkbrown water that filled his mouth. He couldn’t see where he was going for all the rain—it was driving now, cutting—but he knew the Arawak were somewhere downriver.

  He swam until he couldn’t anymore, until the pain shuttered his vision blue and black. His muscles burned and his knotted stomach cramped and distended in ways he had never felt before. The water was starting to come over his head now; the silt stung his eyes and he felt himself begin to go under. So he turned onto his back and simply floated. The rain filled his mouth, and washed his dark blood out toward the sea.

  A light broke the beat of the rain. The curved bottom of a boat came into view, and an Arawak man bent over the edge and reached a hand down. Harry took it; the boat tipped and righted as he scrambled on board and the hands of six and eight men pulled at his sodden clothes, his chilled skin.

  The men spoke amongst themselves in their native tongue, and then—

  “Where you from, boy? Where is your home?”

  Here, in the middle of the river, Harry approached a place beyond pain. He wiped the blood and snot off his lips, and swallowed his senseless, ocean-deep craving.

  “Please,” he said, “please let me come with you.” Then, louder, so the rain would not silence him: “I don’t have a home.”

  *

  The rainy season will come to an end, as it must: the rivers recede, the land dries, and the lungfish bury themselves. They open their gasping mouths and tunnel into the cool mud where the sun will not touch their earthbrown skin. They sleep these long months curled tight, swaddled in a film of their own dried mucus, their bodies slowly decaying as their muscles and fat are consumed to nourish what little is left to nourish.

  Some will die like this.

  But the rains will come again—with a brutal crack like the sky cleft open—and the land returns to itself: the rivers swell, the swamps fill, and the dirt is gorged, sated. The lungfish wake as their cauls dissolve, and they thrash themselves free of the clay. As they writhe their slick bodies across the storm-soaked land they are so consumed by hunger, by the nerve-deep need to return to the water, they will not remember that they had ever lived before.

  CLAIRE DEAN

  The Unwish

  One step inside and Amy knew there was something she’d forgotten. She heaved her rucksack over the threshold and counted the carrier bags she’d lugged up from the Co-op in the town. Four, which was right. There might not be enough wine, though. With the front door key between her teeth—metallic tang on her tongue—she dragged the bags inside and stopped. The room hadn’t changed at all. She’d been eleven when they last stayed here.

  She’d never been back. How could it have changed so little in twenty years? She placed the key on the table and heaped the bags beneath it. Her boots were caked with mud. She tiptoed towards the kettle rather than battle with the filthy laces to get them off.

  She cradled her tea on the bench by the front door. The river was insistent in her ears, though it was hidden by the trees. The opposite valley-side shifted with the wind, the trees forming an agitated creature that could not rest. The wood of the bench had warmed in the spring sunshine, but clouds were collecting now. A narrow path beside the cottage climbed to the road. She watched for the arrival of her sister and parents. They’d have to leave their cars further up the hill and carry everything down. A goldfinch perched on the gate for just a breath before lifting off again. She’d reached for her phone to take a picture, but the moment had gone. She couldn’t get a signal to send it to him anyway. And he’d be here before too long. They could sit on the bench together. The goldfinch might return.

  Her cup was empty but still warm. She let it rest against her collarbone. She picked up her phone again and read through their last messages: “Can’t wait to see you tomorrow x,” she’d sent from the village. “See you soon,” he’d replied. No kiss. She tackled her laces and dirt powdered the flagstones. There was a hole in her left sock. It was a good job she’d worn that pair today. She left her boots beneath the bench and headed inside to unpack.

  Her parents would take the main bedroom in the front. Should she claim the other decent-sized one? Sara had it when they’d stayed here as kids. They’d fought over it but Sara won, as always. Amy had ended up in the tiny room off the kitchen downstairs. Dad said it was like having her own den. But there was another room upstairs, she realised now. She pushed open the door at the end of the hall.

  How had she forgotten it? It was single-sized, but a double bed and narrow set of drawers had been squeezed in. Blue blankets on the bed lapped against the window wall. Beech leaves pressed against the glass and green light filled the room. She climbed up onto the bed and unlatched the window, letting the sounds of leaves and the river into the room. Sara could keep the big room. It would be cosy in here when he arrived.
She emptied all her clothes out of her rucksack onto the bed. Ordinarily, she’d leave them balled inside her bag and extract them as she needed them, but she didn’t want him to see she was messy. She folded her creased T-shirts and the two lace nighties she’d brought. Maybe she should have brought pyjamas as well.

  She’d be cold that night in bed alone. She kept her stuff to one side in the drawers, leaving space for him. She put her washbag on top and then hid it back in her rucksack. He didn’t need to see all that crap. Lying on the bed she tried to imagine him into the room. His arms around her. She read his last text over and over. Why had there been no kiss?

  *

  “Bolognese, really?” Sara set her grey leather weekend bag down on the table.

  “Nice to see you too,” Amy said.

  “Is that mince organic at least? You know, turkey mince is so much better for you.” Sara leaned over the pan and sniffed. “I’ll cook tomorrow night. Are Mum and Dad here yet? Mum, Dad, hellooo!”

  Amy stabbed the mince with the spatula, trying to separate the claggy brown clumps.

  “They’re not here yet,” she said. “And when’s what’s-he-called-again arriving?”

  “Aidan will be here tomorrow night. He couldn’t get time off today.”

  Sara raised her eyebrows and lifted her bag off the table. “I really don’t know why we had to come back here.”

  “Dad wanted to come. Mum said he was insistent about it.” Amy turned back to the mince as her sister pounded up the stairs. She tipped a tin of tomatoes into the pan and attempted to liquidise them with a potato masher. She sloshed a little red wine into the pan and more into her glass.

  When her parents finally burst through the door in a flurry of bags and arms and kisses, the bottle was empty.

  Sara picked it up. “Do we have recycling here?” she said. “Sorry we’re late,” Mum said. “Your Dad got us lost.”

  “I didn’t get us lost. They’ve changed the road layout up in the village.”

  “You got us lost.” Mum upended her handbag on the table and retrieved her tablets from a mound of tissues.

  “Let us get the bags for you,” said Sara. “Let’s go and get comfy and light a fire. Do you remember how Amy used to hide the wood so we couldn’t burn it? She said it screamed. Amy, can you take all the bags upstairs?”

  *

  Amy hadn’t bought dessert. She never had dessert at home.

  Didn’t wine count as dessert? Apparently not. They were already dangerously close to the end of the second bottle and Sara had barely touched her glass.

  Mum started to clear the plates. “It doesn’t matter. I couldn’t eat another thing anyway.”

  “Pasta can sit so heavily, can’t it, Mum?” Sara said. “I’ll go out in the car and find the nearest Waitrose tomorrow. Get us properly stocked up.”

  “Shall we play a game?” Dad headed off into the snug as Mum began to clear the plates.

  The Scrabble set still had old score sheets inside. People had made a palimpsest of them over the years. Sara pored over them. “See I won,” she said finally. “I always got the triple word scores.”

  “You were older than me,” Amy said, looking over her shoulder at the sheet.

  “I’m still older than you. It’s not an excuse for losing.” “Actually, who’s K? It looks like they won,” Amy said. “That’s someone else’s game.”

  Amy lifted a battered Trivial Pursuit box down from the shelf. “There were pieces of pie missing when we last played this.”

  “You replaced them with beech nuts you’d all collected,” Dad said. Now there were just the empty pies. Amy put the lid back on the box.

  “So you’ll have to face me at Scrabble,” Sara said, dishing out the tiles on the coffee table.

  Dad pushed his back. “Actually, just you two play. I’m happier watching.”

  Mum came through from the kitchen, glass in hand, and pulled a Danielle Steel novel from the shelf. She crumpled into the armchair and took another of her tablets with the last of the wine. “I probably read this last time,” she said. “Good job I never remember how things end.”

  There were other books on the shelf: a Ruth Rendell, some hardbacked Dickens, a couple of Catherine Cooksons. “Do you remember that book that was here, full of weird fairy tales?” Amy said. “It was small, had a brown cover. There was that horrible story about the cat mother in it and—”

  “No,” Sara said as she placed five tiles on the board. “T.R.I.C.K., with the K on a double letter score. That makes 16.”

  Amy placed an O beneath the C. If only she had a W. She added a D instead. “C.O.D. That’s 6,” she said.

  Dad stood up. “I’ve left the map in the car.”

  “Well you don’t need it now,” Mum said without looking up from her book. “We’re here.”

  “I’d like to have a look at it. See what’s going on with those roads in the village.”

  “Get it in the morning.”

  “It’ll only take a minute.” He was already getting his boots on.

  “D.E.U.X.” Sara placed each tile with emphasis.

  “You can’t have that,” Amy said.

  “Of course I can. And the X is on a triple letter score, so that’s 28 for me.”

  Amy shuffled her tiles about as though it would make a difference to how useless she was at seeing words in the random letters. The fire guttered as cold air flooded the room. Dad mustn’t have shut the door properly. Amy shuffled her tiles again. What was she going to do with two Fs? “I’ll go with Dad,” she said.

  “Thanks, sweetheart,” Mum said. “Well, I’ll come too then,” Sara said.

  “Good girls.” Mum sipped her wine and went back to her book.

  *

  Bluebells held on to the twilight. Tree branches reached up into the falling dark. Amy walked quickly, until the air was sharp in her chest, but there was no sign of Dad.

  “So are you sure it’s going to work out with this one?” Sara said from behind her.

  Amy focused on trying to follow the lighter stones that made the path.

  “Because you’re not getting any younger. And after Gareth … ” Sara let the memories out in a studied exhalation. The same way she used to blow smoke rings when they were teenagers and leave them to hang in the air.

  “Mum said he’s married,” she said.

  “He’s been separated for a long time. They’re getting a divorce.”

  “But he’s still married?”

  The stones were all mud-slick now. Amy stopped looking for the path and just kept heading upwards. They had to reach the road at some point. And Dad. How could he have got ahead so fast?

  “So what is it he’s doing that couldn’t be put off?”

  “He had to work. I already told you that. Where’s Richard anyway?”

  “Closing a deal. The partners needed him there. Anyway, he’s arranged a special meal for Mum and Dad at The Cottingdale when they come to stay with us at the end of the month. We’ll have a lot to celebrate.”

  “Great,” Amy said. There was a scuttering overhead as birds swapped places on the branches. She stopped.

  “It’s only the birds, Amy. God you’re still scared of everything.”

  “In that fairy tale book there was a story where all the leaves were really birds and they flew down all at once and trapped the children. And they had to live for years in a house of wings. Do you remember?”

  Sara overtook her. “Come on, we’re never going to catch up with Dad.”

  “And there was that story about the sisters. They were trying to collect wishes from … was it from a tree? Do you remember?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “But that one was your favourite. You made us act it out. There was a hollow tree down by the river … I’d completely forgotten about it until now, but there was a tree down there that we used to hide things in.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “There were three sisters and the eldest—”

&n
bsp; “You’re making things up again,” Sara said.

  A shuffling and cracking ahead announced their father. In the last light he could have been a badger, stooped in his worn grey coat.

  “I left a … I left something in the car. Went up to get it,” he said.

  He didn’t have anything in his hands.

  *

  The morning was cold against her shoulder. Amy huddled under the blankets and watched shadow leaves flitter on the wall. Tomorrow she’d get to wake up beside him. It was worth having to put up with a few days of Sara for that. She hadn’t actually spent a whole night with him yet. He said it was too difficult to get to work from her house. When he rolled out of her bed before midnight to retrieve his clothes the extra space was crushing. The smell of him never lasted long enough on her pillows.

  She couldn’t hear anyone else up. She dressed and crept down-stairs. The front door was wide open. Dad’s boots were gone. She headed out down the hill. The bluebells were still the colour of twilight. The river sounded heavy and urgent in the trees, drowning out any birdsong.

  Dad was on the small stone bridge, curled over its side, staring down into the water. She watched as he turned, then crouched to the ground, crossed to the other side of the bridge and rushed back to his starting position like a creaky old automaton.

  “Morning, Dad,” she said. The dank mouth of the bridge held ferns and boulders and old bricks tumbled until their corners were gone. The water that frothed through it all looked more like bitter. She pressed her fingers into the moss growing on the stone, expecting it to be cool and damp, but it was warm and dry.

  Dad scrabbled for more leaves. One, two, three, he let them go. “You always enjoyed playing this with your sisters,” he said.