Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5

by Robert Shearman

  That night she couldn’t sleep because she kept hearing someone walk around downstairs, well past the time that her mother’s meds would have knocked her out, walking around and scratching the walls—then she blinked, and Danielle was standing, no, swaying in the doorway with her hideously long nails, whispering come on Tigger I want to show you something.

  The rest of the month’s days and nights and conversations blurred together like water circling a drain that was death: the guttural tunnel through which we all must travel, past stars and moons and planets, into the abyss that takes us apart. The body is nothing. Our world is nothing. But there are other things that linger. And those things grow teeth out there in the dark.

  When the funeral home came to take Danielle away, Tegan actually cried a little. Watching her get loaded up like cargo was painful, and it got even worse when she heard what happened to Danielle at the next house she went to. Bill Lang turned out to be a necrophile. His wife claimed to have no idea. Tegan felt like she’d shipped Danielle off to be raped again. The Langs were barred from taking any future rotations in the communal burden—geez I guess we should all be getting it on with her, the boys at school chortled—but it didn’t matter, because the Langs moved away.

  *

  Two more years passed and things took a bad turn for the Sauers. Emory hurt his knee on the field during his freshman year of college and lost his athletic scholarship when it failed to heal right. Their mother’s fibromyalgia worsened and she had to cut her hours in half. Tegan was now the age that Danielle had been when she committed suicide, and running with a rough crowd. It seemed serendipitous that Emory had to drop out of school and move home, as if to fix things. He was looking more and more like his father. The town was happy to help out the hero who’d brought home a state championship, and in no time he had a job at the nursing home.

  Tegan alone saw the overwhelming sadness in his eyes. It seemed to have gotten worse while he was away. “You don’t need football,” she told him, but he said that wasn’t it. For the first time she could remember, he asked about Danielle.

  Danielle had taken another life, but she was still hungry. Harvey Peters, a God-fearing man, strongly felt that the town should not negotiate with terrorists and that we have all repented more than enough, and so he tried to burn Danielle, then chop her up, and finally dissolve her in acid. Nothing worked, and Tegan figured it was no coincidence that Harvey—or rather, Harvey’s plastic sports watch— was found in his own acid bath. “Karma, baby,” as she told Emory.

  “She’s never going to stop,” he said. “I guess I don’t blame her. It’s not like … ”

  Her head shot up. “What?”

  “It’s not like we ever stopped talking about it. Until she was dead.” Tegan relayed this information to her new clique as they sat in the woods on the outskirts of town, passing around a flask of Old Crow. “I knew it, man,” said Amy Neumann, who was a gothabilly now. “Those fuckers took pictures. They took videos. And they passed that shit around. Probably everybody at that whole high school saw the evidence.”

  “It wasn’t just boys,” said Kit Arnold, the former coroner’s kid. “Girls did it too.”

  “Whatever,” said Amy, flicking her wrist. “My point is: what if she doesn’t want us passing her around forever? What if she really is just trying to kill us all and this stupid burden-sharing, awareness-raising thing just keeps getting in her way? We should all be making like Norma Stein and treating this like the sign from God that it is. She’s a missile. An atomic bomb.”

  “We should help her,” said Zach Zimmermann, who had successfully flunked out of the military boot camp his stepfather put him in. “Help her cross that finish line.”

  Eventually they decided to weaponize her curse by hiding her in Tinker Park, which was where everyone hung out all summer with their pie contests and their picnics and their little league baseball. The idea of her mother and brother dying in an undeserved nuclear blast grieved Tegan, but she soon realized that her mother never made it out of the driveway let alone to Tinker Park, and that Emory was doing double shifts every day at Whispering Pines.

  “Since when do you dye your hair black?” Emory said, stirring dinner. “And why are you hanging with those weirdos? What happened to Gabby Schultz?”

  “Gabby’s dating one of you losers now,” Tegan said, with a bruised note in her voice. She resentfully pulled her hair back into a ponytail. “And I’m not some cheerleader princess.”

  Zach’s family was up next in the rotation, so he bundled the body into his van with Kit and Amy’s help and they drove it to Tinker Park in the middle of the night. Tegan had volunteered to be the getaway driver at first, but then she thought about college and chickened out. Amy called her a poser pussy and Zach said she’d better not tell, so she conceded to be the look-out perched on top of the playground fort tower. She watched for headlights and dogs and out of the corner of her eye watched as Danielle, looking like a large glow worm in her white sheet, was lowered into a poorly-dug hole. Even after the others scattered, Tegan stayed at her post, listening to owl hoots, halfexpecting the dirt to start shifting and Danielle’s hand to struggle out by her long nails.

  “Don’t you just want to stop?” she whispered, gripping the cold, oily bars. “Be at peace?”

  Wind passed through trees like big water crashing, and she understood: there is no peace.

  Zach’s mother and stepfather freaked out when they realized Danielle was gone. She really was a weapon of mass destruction, because the cops and the firemen and the neighborhood watch searched every house, interviewed every family. It’s very important we find her, they said, it’s possible somebody could get hurt. Amy and Zach laughed about it at the 24/7 McDonald’s, knowing everyone was still going to the now-toxic public lands of Tinker Park, crawling just a little bit closer to their end. Kit didn’t laugh—he was just mad.

  “My mom didn’t do shit to make Danielle off herself,” he said. “My mom was innocent. At least this way some of the people who actually bullied her will pay.” He slurped his Hi-C. “I gotta say, for a guided missile, the bitch has terrible aim.”

  “I don’t think you can aim very well once you’re dead,” said Tegan.

  “I don’t think you care,” added Amy. “Shit! I feel dead right now.”

  But then they brought in police dogs attuned to the scent of Danielle’s old hairbrush to search Tinker Park, and one of the German shepherds dug up Danielle’s shallow grave before running away, whimpering the way dogs do when they come across a much larger predator—at least according to Officer Franke, who had hunted bears in Alaska. Tegan lovingly imagined Danielle as a giant bear, romping over snowy hills, chasing villagers through the tundra.

  Zach took the fall for everything and was shipped off to a new military boot camp, a “wilderness experience” in the Black Hills. Supposedly he became a Satanist there. Amy blamed Tegan for how it all went down and never spoke more than five words to her again. But now all of Iram’s Mill saw Danielle for the loaded gun that she was. After Jamie Walter killed Sara Klein in a drunk driving accident, Sara’s father waited eight months until Jamie had to take in Danielle and then kidnapped both of them on Day 29. He turned himself in on Day 31, having watched Danielle rise like Lazarus and slowly slide toward a bound, drugged Jamie.

  “Wonder how she killed him,” Tegan said as she and Emory watched Mr. Klein being led away on the evening news. Mr. Klein was the only person who had ever seen Danielle’s powers at work, and he looked catatonic. No, more than that. He looked hushed, like all the irrelevant noise that had been the building blocks of his existence had been subdued by … something.

  “Massive retaliatory strike,” Emory replied, lifting the bottle to his lips. In the back corner of the house, their restless mother coughed.

  *

  Tegan got a job as a waitress at Sparrow’s Bar and Grill during her senior year of high school to pay for things like college application fees, and that was how she met Mike Be
rgman, who everyone called Pony. Mike was one of Emory’s ex-teammates, and after he learned her last name, he claimed to recognize her from the linoleum hallways of Iram’s Mill High School.

  “Yeah, yeah, you were friends with Brittany Sommer right?” he said.

  “Not really,” she said, trying to remember if he had ever been to the house with Emory.

  “Aw no? Well, that’s just as well. She’s a bitch anyway.” She smiled a little, because Brittany Sommer was indeed the kind of boss-bitch everyone had to pretend to like. “Say, how’s Mr. Goody Goody Two Shoes doing? How come he never comes out these days?”

  It was odd to think of Emory as a Goody-Goody; he was sullen, impatient, drinking when he wasn’t working. “My mom’s real sick, can’t work much anymore. Em’s gotta work a lot.”

  “Yeah, I hear he’s changing bedpans.” He wrinkled his nose like a rabbit. “Must suck, I’m sorry.”

  He got her to give him her number, and then he showed up on St. Patrick’s Day when everything was a mess of broken bottles and green food dye and kept pushing her to drink with his crew. They were chanting Tee-gun Tee-gun Tee-gun and she was outdrinking the older girls with their trying-too-hard eyeliner and she wanted to outdrink the guys too, she wanted to keep pace with Pony Bergman to show how fucking badass she was. Then sometime later, sometime after, they were outside and he wanted to give her a ride home and she was saying she would walk, don’t touch her, she would walk, and he was getting all, oh come on, Sauer, don’t be such a fucking cock tease! and she was throwing up in the parking lot and one of the older girls who smelled like cigarette-apples was holding her hair back while Pony was saying fucking trailer trash and another one of the older girls was shouting into the void, “Did somebody call Emory?”

  She woke up in a polyester backseat and immediately thrashed herself upright, but it was Emory’s truck, and he was driving through what was now rain. He hissed at her to lie down.

  “I’m sorry, Em,” she tried saying, but he was so mad he couldn’t hear her. She passed out to the sound of him muttering profanities to himself like bullets, and had a bunch of dreams she wasn’t sure were dreams of Danielle lying on the floor of the truck, grinning up at her with eyes like black marbles.

  Tegan felt too sick to move for most of the next day, finally stumbling out of bed sometime between three and four in the afternoon. Emory was sitting on the couch staring at the television that he hadn’t turned on, with a beer he hadn’t opened in his hand. Tegan saw herself in the television’s black mirror as she crossed behind him on her way to the sink, where she ran the water extra cold. She needed something to cauterize the shame.

  “I have to talk to you,” Emory said, his voice so flat and steady it didn’t seem to be his.

  Water cooled the taste of burning garbage in her throat, though she could barely keep it down. “I said I’m sorry. You didn’t have to get me.

  I could have walked home.”

  “I have to tell you something.”

  And in that instant, the haze lifted and the darkness withdrew and it was as if all of God’s angels and fallen angels had landed on Earth to announce with trumpets the triumphant arrival of The Truth. And for the first time since she first heard that a girl in high school had committed suicide thirty days after being gang-raped at a party, she realized that The Truth wasn’t something she wanted to hear after all. Chop chop, said Danielle. I want to show you something.

  She actually found herself saying, “wait, wait,” but the distant screeching of fingernails scraping against drywall canceled out her voice.

  Emory didn’t turn his head. “I was there. At the party. In the room. I was taking the video.” Then he sucked in a deep, ragged breath that was halfway to a sob and added, finally spinning around, “But I promise I didn’t touch her!” But by then it was too late, and Tegan was already on the floor, her hands locking behind her head as if in a falling airplane.

  “I was a stupid kid, I made a mistake … ” Brace, brace, brace! Heads down, stay down! “Jon and Matty told me to film it and I didn’t know how to say no … ” Brace for impact!

  “Don’t touch me,” she whispered as his shadow approached.

  “I’m so sorry, Tigger. I fucked up.” He let out a little moan and she could tell that he was in pain and that only made everything that much worse. “I didn’t know how to tell you.”

  But the sin wasn’t hers to forgive, so instead he had just ended everything.

  Tegan decided to attend the most faraway college she got into. She stopped speaking to Emory—no matter how much her mother begged—and she took to cycling again, hard and fast and wicked, and leaving yellow roses on Danielle’s empty grave. She told the ghost that they could switch places, if she wanted. Danielle’s mother was the only other person that ever came to the gravesite, and she left things that she believed her daughter would have wanted: a blank journal and a fountain pen, her stuffed rabbit, her violin, a favorite scarf. Then she would sit for hours on a nearby stone bench in a mismatched jumble of clothes, and sometimes she would give Tegan a mint from the local Italian restaurant, of which she seemed to have an endless supply.

  “Dani wouldn’t wish harm on anyone,” Mrs. Haas said. “That thing haunting this town … it isn’t her. It might look like her. It might have taken her body. But Dani wouldn’t do this.” She meant the five deaths that had followed Danielle down the great universal drain: Mr. Wolf, Dr. Arnold, Norma Stein, Harvey Peters, Jamie Walters. But there had been other deaths too, other calamities both undocumented and incidental: divorces, miscarriages, addictions.

  “What do you think it is, then?” Tegan asked.

  “Their guilt,” said Mrs. Haas, widening her eyes as if it was the most obvious answer in the world. She was looking over the crests of the headstones at clouds roiling like sea serpents. “When I was a little girl there was a monster in the lake near where I lived. Lake Bodéwadmi. My grandparents used to say that it wasn’t conjured up from the tears of the families that had lost someone in that lake, but from the tears of the families that had never known such a loss.”

  Then she popped a mint in her mouth and tightened her scarf under her chin and shambled away.

  *

  If Danielle Haas really didn’t want to be forgotten, she succeeded. Her message spread far and wide. Amy Neumann moved to Herrod City and showed a collection of oil paintings called Long Live the Queen, substituting Danielle’s face into iconic images of famous queens: Elizabeth I, Antoinette, Victoria, Hatshepsut. Brittany Sommer started a community mentorship program through her sorority called Danielle’s Angels and franchised it around the country. Kit Arnold wrote a well-received memoir dedicated to his mother called The Girl in the Morgue.

  The New York Times came and did a story on Iram’s Mill and the town’s “unique manifestation of collective guilt,” though it ended up implying that they were all insane, and when 20/20 came calling, the mayor said no. Religious groups came to investigate Danielle as an incorruptible, but her coffin would seal shut whenever they tried to see her. Eventually the town established a memorial in Tinker Park, a six-foot-tall granite statue of a young girl releasing a dove. “Dani loved this town,” Mrs. Haas said at the unveiling ceremony, eyes sparkling with happy tears, but for everyone else hers was a smothering blanket, a rib-crushing embrace.

  Tegan was assisting a psychological study on conformity and the “cruelty contagion”—her professor nicknamed it Asch II Milgram, but she privately called it The Danielle Project. She had not been home for four years; she had spent her breaks reading Hannah Arendt and John Rawls in silent dorms. But then funding for Asch II Milgram got pulled, and she got an email from Gabby saying that her family was up next on the Danielle rotation, and as everybody in Iram’s Mill knew, families had to come together to care for Danielle. Danielle is the force that gives us meaning, Tegan wrote in her diary as she curled on a window seat of a Greyhound, groggy in the half-light, Danielle is the reason for the season.

  Iram
’s Mill seemed to have shrunk, hardened like vines freezing into brick. She expected to see their surly old neighbor sitting in his lawn chair, yelling, how could you leave your poor mother?—but his house was dark, and a for-sale sign was staked into the dead grass.

  “He kicked the bucket a couple months ago after a turn with Danielle. One time he came over at one a.m., saying she was trying to scratch his eyes out. There ought to be an age limit.”

  Emory was standing on the front step. He looked gaunt, at least for the former Johnny Football Hero, but was still wearing a faded shirt that marked him PROPERTY OF IRAM’S MILL HIGH SCHOOL ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT. She was surprised that the town hadn’t taken better care of him. But he had never tried to ride his reputation, and now there were younger boys, tawny and tall, who could throw balls and win games and bring glory.

  “Didn’t anybody go and stay with him?” she asked.

  “I did. She didn’t kill him. He died after.” He tilted his head. “It’s good to see you.”

  Danielle arrived the next day, like a Christmas package from a long-lost relative. They put her in the living room and lit candles and dusted her coffin regularly. It was important to be respectful.

  Tegan managed to keep a clinical distance from her family at first, but then their mother fell on a patch of ice and broke her femur, and as she slept on morphine in the backseat of Emory’s truck, Emory told Tegan about a dream. “I’m trying to teach you how to drive a stick. And then we start fighting, and you get mad and jump out of the car. So I get out and I start chasing you, but you’re running so damn fast I can’t ever catch you. Then suddenly I look around and I realize I’m in the middle of the ocean, and I can’t even see the land, and I always get this thought like, if I just dive to the bottom I’ll find the road again. Of course I never do.”