Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5

by Robert Shearman

  She turns slowly, stares at the wall. Surely, she can see me hiding here, just behind the plaster. A small, quaking animal waiting to be gobbled up. She cocks her head and watches the wall, eyes flickering back and forth, nostrils flaring.

  “Little pig,” she says and grunts, reaches her hand toward my hiding place in the wall. I push away from the hole, but the tunnel has closed up even more, and the fur stuff snatches at me. Cold fear clenches my stomach, a grasping, hungry thing.

  “Can you hear it, Mary? You were able to hear it before. Can you hear it now?” she says. From the other side of the wall comes the sound of her raking her fingernails across the plaster.

  “The blood, Mary. I’ve always heard it. Come and see. Come and see,” she says.

  “Please, Momma. You’re scaring me.”

  “Nothing’s wrong, love. Come and see what I’ve brought you.”

  My face is wet when I press my eye to the hole again. Momma stands before me cradling a squirming bundle. She resumes her humming, and a tiny reddened hand reaches out, the fingers flexing.

  “See what it’s given back to me? To us? After all this time, Mary. A daddy. Just like you wanted. A daddy to fix things and to make everything better,” she coos. A gurgling rises from the blankets she clutches to her chest. The sound of drowning. The sound of blood leaking from a cut throat.

  “It’s not a daddy. It’s not. It’s wrong,” I say, and she bares her teeth.

  “What do you know about it, girl? What do you know about the places daddies go? How they rut against you, their stinking meat between your legs? They all come in and go out the same way. Pushed out with the shit and the blood into the dirt, and they always leave. One way or the other. But not this time. It heard me. Heard us. Heard what we wanted, what we needed. And the blood gave back. Everything I’ve poured into this world, it finally gave back. Aren’t you happy?”

  The fur stuff has wrapped itself around my arms, my legs, and it pushes upward, envelopes me like a second skin. I don’t mind any more. It’s like velvet, soft and smooth, and I run my hand over the flesh sprouted new.

  Inside the house, the new daddy cries, and Momma shushes him, brings him to her breast.

  “Hush now. It’ll all be all right. Everything will be all right,” she says. I want to scream at her, to tell her to throw it away, to burn it, to cut it open and pour the blood back into the earth. But the house is in my throat now, the fur pushing further and further down, and I’m so tired.

  Beneath me, the world opens its teeth, stretches its mouth wide as my body splits open, empties itself into the dirt.

  The new daddy sings to me. His voice merging with the heartbeat of the house. The light fades. Blinks out. And I sleep.

  DAVID PEAK

  House of Abjection

  When the father parked his long, black sedan at the bottom of the hill, he saw reflected in the rearview mirror the rambling, vine-choked mansion, its hideous and chipped paint bleakly visible beneath the street’s lone light. He put his hand on the mother’s knee and she immediately stopped her fidgeting beneath the commanding weight of his silver-ringed fingers.

  “If you stay in the car, you’re going to get cold,” the father said to his wife. “We might be in there for half an hour, maybe even an hour, and they’re saying that the night is supposed to get quite cold.”

  The mother sat quiet and still, only slightly turning her head to the side window. Outside, in the early evening dark, the blue and low-hanging leaves of the massive white oak trees shuffled soundlessly. She barely breathed out something like a whispered no.

  “You can’t just sit out here alone and get cold,” the daughter said from the back seat. She turned to her husband, the son-in-law, and did something with her face that made him quickly sit forward and say, “She’s right, mother. If you sit out here alone in the car you’re likely to catch cold.”

  “I won’t run the heat for you,” the father said. He turned the keys and the car’s engine went dumb. “I refuse to leave the keys here in the car. It’s not safe for a woman on this side of town—in this neighborhood. This is not a good neighborhood. It’s unclean, improper.”

  The mother breathed a final, limpid protest and removed her husband’s hand from her knee. “Okay,” she said to no one in particular, “I’ll go inside, but I resent being made to feel scared.”

  It’s important to note here that the daughter had been the one to initially suggest a nighttime drive to the mansion.

  The four of them had spent the afternoon at the county fair, where the seemingly endless tractor pull had brought down stubborn clouds of all-encompassing blue smoke, swallowing whole the mud-streaked grandstand and dulling the streaked red lights of the carnival rides. The smell of the smoke was sweet and it was everywhere. The old woman calling the bingo numbers in the pavilion at the end of the fairground hacked her way through the penultimate game of blackout. Unsupervised children stalked one another in thuggish groups, playing “Jack the Ripper.” Although the father’s patience with his son-in-law had grown strained toward the end of the day, they’d all gotten along rather well, which wasn’t necessarily abnormal.

  Originally constructed in the late 1800s, the mansion had first functioned as an inn, serving the laborers of the area’s once-booming coal industry. Running a brothel, however, had proved significantly more lucrative, and so the owners, French immigrants, a husband and wife with the surname of Kristeva, had ingratiated themselves with the local peace keepers, offering steep discounts in exchange for their turning a blind eye. By the turn of the century, the mansion was well-known as a place of ill-repute. It’s said that several unspeakable atrocities were committed within its walls.

  No one knows how or why, but eventually the house went vacant; it stayed that way for decades.

  Only recently, there was talk that the mansion had reopened its doors, this time as a spooky haunted house—a tourist attraction designed for the purpose of entertainment. And so this is how the daughter had come up with her idea. She resented being made to feel like she was missing out on something others were talking excitedly about. “Spooky tours are given throughout the night,” she said. “Everyone is talking excitedly about it.” The father, who almost always deferred to the wishes of his daughter, said it sounded like fun. The daughter’s husband agreed.

  Only the mother declined and yet she’d had no real choice in the matter. “Maybe I’ll just wait in the car,” she’d said, to which, for the time being, no one had said anything further.

  When they arrived at the front door of the mansion, a handwritten sign above the buzzer read, “Press me and wait.” The father did as instructed and a shrill bell could be heard from within the house. “I guess we just wait here then,” he said. “That’s what the sign says to do.” The daughter made a face that clearly conveyed impatience and the father shrugged sheepishly in response.

  Within a few moments, a metal slot in the center of the door slid open, showing two slightly squinted eyes. “How many in your group?” a woman’s voice said, her accent French, thick.

  “There’re four of us,” the daughter’s husband said, barely finishing his sentence before the slot slid shut. The door opened and swung wide, revealing a drab, wood-paneled hallway, its lights dimmed and the runner an awful, faded red.

  The father motioned for his wife, his daughter and her husband, to enter before him. When they were all inside, cramped together, the door closed, and there stood the woman who’d spoken to them. She was dressed in black, and though she was obviously quite young her face was heavy with make-up.

  Something about the color of the rug reminded the daughter of her menses—more importantly that she was a few days late. She felt a cramp in her gut; instantly a white-hot line of sweat stippled her upper lip. Although she desperately wished to not be pregnant, she was unable to articulate this to herself. The thought that her cramps were actually an impending bowel movement brought on by the rich foods she’d consumed at the county fair—the eleph
ant ears and pulled pork, fudge sundaes and lemon crushes—slightly calmed her sudden panic. Her skin would react poorly to the sugar, the grease, and this too caused her great concern. She’d have to find a restroom during the tour, she decided.

  “Please,” said the woman with the French accent, “find your way into the drawing room and have a seat. Your host will be with you shortly. He’s finishing up a tour of the house with another group at the moment.” Then, almost as if it were an afterthought, she said, “My name is Julia.” With that she disappeared into the shadows down the hall, the floor-boards squeaking softly beneath her steps.

  In the drawing room, the father sat alone on a loveseat opposite a television set of some vintage. The daughter and her husband sat together arm in arm on an adjacent—and also quite old—fainting couch. The mother chose to stand in the far corner, her clutch held tightly in both hands.

  “How funny,” the daughter’s husband said, inspecting the fainting couch. “There’s a small plaque here that says this very couch belonged to Freud. I’ll be.” He turned to his wife’s father. “You think that could be true, Father?”

  “How should I know?” the father said curtly, feigning an intense interest in his wrist watch. He had very little patience for his daughter’s husband—the man who’d ripped his little girl from his life—and did his best not to speak to him beyond brief exchanges of necessary information.

  The walls of the drawing room were cluttered with bric-a-brac. There were dozens of spooky masks, battered instruments with broken necks, wild and tangled strings, timeworn posters for silent horror films. A nylon rope hung from a light fixture in the center of the ceiling, tied in a noose.

  “Lovely,” the daughter said, staring at the rope. And then the room suddenly went dark.

  The tube television flicked on, flooding the room with silver light. The thick glass screen looped an over-scanned black-and-white image of the drawing room, the father sitting on the loveseat, his daughter and her husband on the fainting couch, and the mother, his wife, standing in the corner. The image of the drawing room was suddenly wiped clean of its inhabitants, the grain of the film altered, as the room was devoured by decay. It came on as heavy layers of drifting dust, settling into the crevices of the furniture, forming sloping piles where the walls met the floor.

  Abruptly, the screen’s harsh light pulled into itself, a small gray dot, and then the room fell into total darkness. It had to have been some clever optical effect, the son-in-law thought, a filter placed over security footage, overexposed images acid-burnt and half-eaten by ravenous dust.

  And then the television was on again, shedding rapid-fire images one after another: an obese man on the toilet, his genitals hidden by the lip of the bowl; a cat vomiting; gulls pulling flailing and panicked crabs from oceanic whitecaps; an erect and stubby cock, its urethra glistening a compact pearl of pre-seminal fluid; a stallion mounting a mare; the corpse of a rabbit succumbing to decay, swarmed by insects and picked clean, its crumpled and greasy bones piled loose in the long blades of grass.

  In the corner of the room, near the mother, a lamp buzzed metallic like an alarm clock in a cartoon. The loveseat the father sat on pneumatically lurched forward before hissing back to the floor. All the lights turned on and then off, buzzing. A junked cuckoo clock mounted on the wall hatched a baby-beaked bird, its wired wings flapping.

  To everyone’s immense relief, the room went dark—and silent— once more. The mother was overcome with the unmistakable feeling that someone had just brushed past her. “Someone just brushed past me,” she said, surprised by the eerie calmness of her voice. “There’s someone else in the room with us.”

  A flashlight clicked on in the center of the room, its yellow beam illuminating a face from below, its features freakish and contorted and orangish pink. Although it was somewhat difficult to discern details, the face—seemingly floating there in mid-air—appeared to belong to an elderly man with wild hair. His mouth hung open; his eyes were shut. The room went silent with the collective vacuum of held breath.

  The lights turned on—the ghoulish face of the old man filling out and suddenly growing a somewhat hunched, disheveled body, arms and legs and all—and the daughter, once again, clapped her hands.

  “Amazing,” she said. “Where must he have come from?” “Thank you for choosing to spend your evening with us,” the man in the center of the room said, clicking off the flashlight and lowering it, his thick French accent rendering his words near unintelligible. “My name is Louis-Ferdinand.” At this, Louis-Ferdinand did something of a bow, sweeping his hand to his side. “I will be your host for the next hour, personally leading you through our awful home.” He giggled before he continued.

  “They say,” Louis-Ferdinand said, scanning the room, leering, “that a man’s home is his castle, no? Well, I happen to believe that my home is not only a castle, but a fortified castle. What do I mean by that, you ask? Aren’t all castles, by definition, fortified? By that, of course, I mean that the walls of this castle cannot crumble. I exert total control over my domain and everything within it. How is this different from a prison, you ask? And the answer, unfortunately, is that for you tonight this house will be no different from a prison.”

  Louis-Ferdinand then proceeded to deliver an oral history of the mansion, occasionally pausing for dramatic effect after a particularly horrific anecdote. During this telling, the room would occasionally plunge into darkness. It was a cheap trick, perhaps, but upon being repeated three or four times, its effects became profoundly disturbing to the son-in-law, who grew increasingly conscious of the sound and speed of his breathing, the uncomfortable heat of the blood coursing through his hands, the horrifying idea that anything could be lurking about in that darkness, in all that nothingness. He desperately wished to get on with the tour—and out of this stuffy, cramped room. A wave of nausea brought the acidic sting of bile into his throat when he caught himself thinking that, perhaps, there was nothing beyond the walls of the drawing room—endless and infinite nothingness.

  Just as the son-in-law’s discomfort was becoming unbearable, the lights came on, seemingly taking Louis-Ferdinand off-guard. “Quoi?” A small, hidden door opened in the wall behind the mother, and Julia, ducking low through the archway, came quickly into the room, her heavily shadowed eyes wide with fear.

  She barked something harsh in French, something that went against the naturally fluid contours of the language, which quickly shushed Louis-Ferdinand. Then, turning to the group, she said, “I am so sorry to interrupt, but I feel the need to let you all know that there is some news in the area. There has been some atrocities. People are dead— perhaps many. It is horrific. These crimes, they occur one town over and I have just heard that the person who committed these crimes—a well-dressed gentleman, according to preliminary reports—has been witnessed as stalking around the shadows near this very house.”

  The father turned to his daughter and said, “Darling, isn’t this just fiendishly clever?”

  To this, the daughter clapped her hands. “Oh yes,” she said. “Brilliant.” In an exaggerated voice she said, “Perhaps this maniacal fellow is lost somewhere in this spooky old mansion, just waiting to jump out of the dark and scare us.”

  Louis-Ferdinand set his flashlight on the mantle behind him. “S’il vous plait, mes amis,” he said, turning back to face everyone, “this is not part of the tour. Ce n’est pas a joke.”

  “Well of course he’s going to say that,” the son-in-law said, laughing. “It’s all in the name of verisimilitude, isn’t that right?” He winked at Louis-Ferdinand.

  The Frenchman was visibly repulsed by the son-in-law’s attempt at non-verbal communication. He turned and took a few quick strides across the room, standing near the door that led into the hallway. “The chateau is quite old and has many windows,” he said, addressing the entire room. “I must ensure that they are all locked, that the castle remains fortified. This place is larger than you could imagine and filled with m
any astuces—unnamable things.” With that, he left the room and disappeared into the bowels of the mansion.

  Julia lit a cigarette and leaned against the wall. She took a long drag—performing a highly practiced French inhale—and crossed her arms. If she was concerned, her face did not betray it. She seemed to be staring at a memory, through the very walls of the house, staring at something miles away.

  Time passed, it’s impossible to say exactly how much. The guests, understandably, grew quite restless. “

  Listen, Julie—” the father said.

  “Julia,” Julia said, her voice stern. “My name is Julia.” She stood up straight, dropped what was left of her cigarette to the floor and crushed it with the heel of her black leather boot.

  “Listen, Julia,” the father said, seemingly unembarrassed by his faux pas or perhaps oblivious of Julia’s scorn, “do you have any idea when your father might be coming back? We’ve already been waiting for … ” He looked down, with great interest, at his wrist watch. “Well, we’ve been waiting for quite a long time.”

  Julia laughed. “My father?” she said. “Louis-Ferdinand? No, vous vous trompez. Louis-Ferdinand is my lover.” She covered her mouth with her curled fingers, a behavior she hadn’t entertained since she’d been a young girl in school, hiding her gossipy giggles from her teachers. She pointed a long finger at the father’s daughter and her eyes went wide, surprised to be singled out in such a crude manner. “Just like she is your lover, correct?”

  The daughter gasped. Her husband noted his wife’s reaction out of the corner of his eye, though he kept his face angled toward Julia and did his best not to convey anything other than the kind of boredom that stems from familiarity. The father’s face turned blood red, or so thought his daughter, who was once more reminded of her unpunctual menses. When the father spoke, he spoke slowly. “That is my daughter,” he said. “And that,” he continued, motioning toward his wife, who remained standing near the wall, holding her clutch, also with a carefully studied look of familiar boredom on her face, “is my love—” here he stopped himself short, “that is my wife.”