Year's Best Weird Fiction: 1

by Laird Barron

  I smiled at the bravado in his voice and watched him walk away. Then I remembered Eldon’s request, and so I sauntered up the road, to the large building that housed an artistic studio that was shared by members of the community. I did not care for the arrogant artist whom Eldon had named, but I knew his craftsmanship was exceptional, and so I entered the building and watched its few inhabitants at work. I was surprised to see that Arthur was working on a canvas rather than devoting his masculine hands to the sculptor’s task; and as I gazed at his painting on its easel my curiosity was piqued, for the ebony beast that was gradually revealed in its dark surroundings seemed familiar. The artist ignored me as I stepped to him until I bent to stroke the piece of paper that had been thumb-tacked to the canvas. When Arthur spoke to me, his voice was low and haunting in its effect.

  “They spill like patches of liquid shadow from their realm of fabulous darkness, and they esteem our adoration as our wonder-struck faces are reflected on their smooth blankness.” I uncurled the piece of paper, which proved to be an image of a fantastic fiend. It was winged and faceless and incredibly lean; indeed, there was almost something sinister in its sinewy and compact form, and in its stance, which bespoke of incredible strength. Unpinning it from the canvas, I lifted the rectangular piece of paper to the overhead light and saw that it was indeed a photograph from life.

  “Eldon has been swallowed by the Hungry Place. His last request was that you make a marker to his memory.”

  “Ah,” the other fellow uttered, “do we know his birth date? No matter, we shall record the day of—well, one cannot quite call it extinction, from what we know of our fate beneath the Sesquan sod. You were there?”

  “Yes.”

  Arthur tilted his head and regarded me queerly. “I’ve heard about you, Hobbs. You like to dwell in the dangerous places. I’m told that you’ve actually ascended Mount Selta and swam in one of its sequestered pools.”

  “There’s only one pool, inside a cavern of crimson rock. Yes, I found it curious, that a mountain with so white an exterior should have scarlet walls within. But you’ve journeyed yourself,” I countered, holding up the snapshot. “You’ve found a way into the dreamlands.”

  He laughed. “No. The gaunts may be summoned if one knows the art. They love the light of our plump moon on their rubbery hide, and to feel the reflection of our faces on the surface beneath their horns.” He noticed my expression and laughed again. “You’re beguiled, Hobbs, and so you should be. The entire idea of a dreamland is hypnotic. How did such a realm come into existence? Is it formed of mortal dreaming, or is it the weave-work of some elder gods? Can we enter it as phantoms only, leaving behind our husks of flesh and bone? The night-gaunts are decidedly physical, and yet one senses that they are elementals of nightmare. So many scrumptious questions, so few boring answers.”

  I touched my free hand to the canvas on which the oblique silhouette of the depicted creature swam in gathered shadow. “Is this in preparation for a work in stone? I thought sculpting was your forte.”

  “No, this is just an idea I had. I’ll give it to you once it’s finished. You obviously have some kind of affinity with night-gaunts. You should see your face, Jonas—you’re caught. Maybe they’ll lure you to their ghoul-haunted woodland and let you cross over.”

  I didn’t know how to answer him, for something in his words, and in the image on canvas, had indeed “caught” my imagination. He smiled at me as I opened my mouth to reply, and then he laughed out loud when the words caught in my throat. I had given the artist my message from the man who had been sifted through the cemetery loam, and my errand thus accomplished I made my escape. Night’s wind had picked up considerably, and I raised my hands to push hair from my eyes; and I saw that I still held Arthur’s photograph of his perplexing model, the silhouette of which looked different in the moonlight. Pushing the print into my pants pocket, I scanned the sky at the place where Marceline had conjured forth the horde of winged night-beasts, and then I followed the road away from Sesqua Town, toward a wooded area. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw the moon as an enormous disc just over the twin-peaked mountain.

  I entered the silent woodland, escaping wind and starlight. The place seemed preternaturally hushed, and of a sudden some lines from a poem by Wilde oppressed my memory:

  “To outer senses there is peace,

  A dreamy peace on either hand

  Deep silence in the shadowy land,

  Deep silence where the shadows cease.”

  I wandered into deeper gloom, into a dreamy peacefulness. Although the place was dark, my vision had adjusted to my surroundings, and cool verdant shade soothed my eyes. As I marched along the path I could feel the photograph in my pocket as an entity near my inner thigh. My fancy dwelt on the fabulous creature, the night-gaunt of dreamland; and as I imagined it I held my arms aloft, as if perhaps I could sense the other realm with fingertips, for certainly its air would be of a different chemistry. I sought the essence of that incorporeal aether with my mind as my mouth hungered to gulp it, deeply.

  I sensed another occupant of woodland, and looked about me until I saw the ghostly silhouette, the lissome outline, the phosphorescent eyes. Young Cyrus reached out to me with anxious hands, which I clutched. “It’s insane to be out here alone at this hour. What the hell are you about?”

  “I seek the dreamlands.”

  He shook his head ruefully. “Damn, you’re crazy. Come on, let’s return to town.”

  “No. Hang you, boy, I’m being called, compelled to find that other sphere. It summons me just as surely as Sesqua Valley once did.”

  “Jonas, you’ve been bewitched by magick, that is all. You’ve been staring too deeply into arcane lore, your eyes have drunk too deeply of sigils and schema. The beast of Sesqua Valley has corrupted you. I know too well that shimmer in your eyes, which is the sign of an intoxicated soul. I’ve witness it on Simon’s lunatic eyes many times. Your quest is folly, my friend. You could never find the dreamlands.”

  I grabbed his coat by the shoulder and shook him. “How do you know? What’s to hinder me?”

  He leaned closer to me, and I could smell the fragrant valley on his inhuman hide. “You lack the required innocence,” he stated simply, in his quiet voice.

  “You’ve been there.” I had a sudden hunch, and by his air of false nonchalance I knew that I had struck a note. “You’ve been to the dreamlands—you know the way. Admit it.”

  He shrugged and grinned. “I admit nothing. No, I’ve never been there, never set physical foot in that outrageous terrain.”

  I studied his bestial face. “But you’ve dreamed of it, and have been linked thereto.”

  “I’ve never dreamed, fool. It’s not something we do, not easily. You think you can teach me with your fiendish ways to behave in a mortal way; but I am a child of Sesqua Valley, and we are not easily tainted by your insect race.” I knew he wasn’t being completely honest with me, and I did not blink as I stared accusingly. “Oh hell, follow me.” Surprised, I watched him trot toward a second pathway and vanish from sight. I rushed after him, tripping over small shrubs and almost losing balance. Something tickled my sense of play, and I chuckled gleefully. Running through the woods reminded me of my childhood, when every summer was spent chasing through the mammoth woods of a lakeside park. I would sometime build small altars of twigs within those woods and dance around them; or oft times I would merely recline on supple and aromatic earth and daydream. Some pocket of my soul ached to stop and lay upon this earth—and dream. How dare the child of shadow say that I lacked innocence? At that moment I felt a purity of soul.

  The woodland opened up as some gargantuan shape arose before me, and I watched Cyrus dig his fingers into the sharply sloping soil of a colossal mound that rose above the moon-drenched trees. Happily, I scampered up the slope in pursuit of my crony, not resting until I reached the mound’s apex. Cyrus sat on the ground, and as I knelt beside him I look
ed behind me and saw that Mount Selta was far behind us. Distant hills surrounded us, as did the spreading woods.

  “There,” Cyrus whispered as he pointed to a far-off district; and there was an element in the tone of his voice that greatly affected me, an ache of longing, an aspect of sadness coupled with bewitchment. “Do you see the place where shadows cease, that region of verdant mist that captures moonbeams? Oh, it’s so beautiful. How awesome it would be, to cross the barrier and stride its arcane turf!” He looked at me with impatience in his eyes. “Come on, use your arcane senses. Although we can never visit it, we can see it manifested.”

  I strained to see what he could perceive, but it was not to be. A sob of frustration caught inside my throat. Suddenly, the boy’s hand combed through my hair, and then it wound through strands and tugged me to him. I felt his tender kiss upon my eyes. He leaned away from me as I looked again. I saw the eerie region. “The forests of dreamland,” I sighed. Oh, the ache I knew within the pit of my being. I raised one hand as if it might somehow touch the other realm, and the sight of that hand held in the air reminded me of another hand, one that was beautifully black. Memory grew keen, queerly so, and I saw within its depths the movement of Marceline’s hand, as she made weird gesticulations to the sky. I remembered exactly the formation of her fingers.

  “What are you doing?”

  I smiled but did not look at him, for my eyes were enchanted by remote movement. They rose, sleek and silent, from the outlying mist, dark patches of rubbery blackness that caught the sheen of moonlight on their immortal flesh. I stood to greet them as they sallied toward the mound, and I raised my hands to their horrendous beauty as they encircled me in the air. One member of the horde floated to me and hovered just above the ground on which I quaked. I thrilled at the movement in the air that issued from the noiseless flapping of its fantastic wings, at the rich smell of its ghastly inky flesh. As it hovered close before me rich moonlight fell upon its facelessness, and on that slate of jet I saw a vague reflection of my visage. I welcomed the clawed hands that reached for me, and shouted maniacal hilarity as I was fiendishly tickled. My lunatic laughter seemed to attract others of the flock, and soon I was being lifted off the mound, held by hands that tormented me with their touch. I did not look down as someone shouted my name, and soon I could sense nothing but the alchemy of aether that was kissed by the movement of membranous wings. Laughing, I sucked in the alchemical air, as I was taken to the other place and ushered into a realm of dream.

  Maria Dahvana Headley

  * * *

  THE KRAKATOAN

  Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the dark fantasy/alt-history novel Queen of Kings, and the internationally bestselling memoir The Year of Yes. With Neil Gaiman, she is the New York Times-bestselling co-editor of the monster anthology Unnatural Creatures, benefitting 826DC. Her Nebula and Shirley Jackson award-nominated short fiction has recently appeared in Lightspeed, Apex, Nightmare, The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, Subterranean Online, Glitter & Mayhem and Jurassic London’s The Lowest Heaven and The Book of the Dead. It’s anthologized in the 2013 and 2014 editions of Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Fantasy & Science Fiction, Paula Guran’s 2013 The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. Upcoming are Magonia, a young adult skyship novel, from HarperCollins, and The End of the Sentence, a novella co-written with Kat Howard, from Subterranean. She grew up in rural Idaho on a survivalist sled-dog ranch, spent part of her 20’s as a pirate negotiator in the maritime industry, and now lives in Brooklyn in an apartment shared with a seven-foot-long stuffed crocodile. Twitter: @MARIADAHVANA Web: www.mariadahvanaheadley.com

  The summer I was nine, my third mother took off, taking most of the house off with her. The night she left, I found my dad kneeling on the floor in front of the open refrigerator, and he looked at me for too long. He was supposed to be at work.

  “What’s wrong?” I finally asked, though I didn’t want to know.

  “No one’s in charge of you,” my dad told me. “No one’s in charge of anything. Haven’t you learned that yet?”

  The cold fell out of the fridge like something solid, and I edged closer, hoping it’d land on me and cling. I was still vulnerable to the possibility that one of the mothers would work out.

  “Alright then,” my dad said. He left the ice cream out on the counter, along with the contents of his pocket: three charred sticks, one of them short, two of them long, and a list of dead stars, as in celestial, his specialty.

  Then he went to work, driving in the dark up the spiral road to his job at the observatory. It was one of the great mysteries of the heavens that my father had been married three times. He only looked up, and he was awake all night. Each of my mothers had complained about this, and eventually I picked up some things about which direction you should be looking, and which hours you should be keeping if you wanted a woman to stay with you. I practiced eye contact. I practiced sleeping.

  I ate the entire carton of Neapolitan, beginning with the chocolate. I visited the top of my father’s closet, removed five Playboy Magazines, and read them. I considered my three mothers, and compared them favorably to the naked women. I turned on the TV, and then turned it off. She’d taken the rabbit ears from the top, and now all we got was static. She’d taken the doorknob too. It was made of purple glass. When you put your eyeball up to it and looked in, it was like you’d arrived on Mars. I’d gotten a black eye that way, when she opened it accidentally into my face. Getting out of the house now required kicking and a coathanger pushed through the hole where the knob had been, and by the time I arrived outside, it was seven AM.

  My dad was sleeping at the observatory. There were bunks. The astronomers were like vampires, slinking around under the closed dome until the sun went down, at which point they swarmed out to look at their sky. My dad had once referred to the solar system as My Solar System. He seemed to consider himself the sun, but he was not, and if he didn’t know that, I did.

  We lived at the bottom of Mount Palomar, where the spiral road started. If you stayed on our road, you’d eventually make it to the observatory, a big white snowball of a building on the top of the mountain, and inside it, a gigantic telescope. The observatory, with its open and shut rotating roof, was like a convertible car and the astronomers were teenagers in love with black holes. Their sky made me miserable. I wanted humans. There weren’t many of them on the mountain, and my options were limited. I rarely went up. I went down, if I was going anywhere, and that day I went to Mr. Loury’s house.

  Mr. Loury’s wife had, two years earlier, gone into the Great White Yonder. That was what my second mother, the hippie one who’d thought that astronomy and astrology were the same thing, had said about it. I don’t think she’d ever seen Jaws. I didn’t know what a Yonder was, and so in my mind, Mr. Loury’s young wife dove into the mouth of not just a great white shark, but a megalodon, every night for months. Then she got chewed up, and at the end she looked like canned spaghetti. My second mother hadn’t had much patience for a year of me retching over ravioli. I was pretty sure that was why she’d left.

  Mr. Loury, with his attempt at a handlebar mustache and his short-sleeved button downs, with his sadness, was a human fender bender. I couldn’t stay away from his property. Normally I paced the perimeter, feeling his woe, but today, I had woe of my own and it entitled me to trespass.

  He was sitting on his front steps drinking a beer when I arrived, and I sat down beside him, like this was something I did every day. My face was on-purpose sticky with ice cream, and it was beginning to acquire a furry stubble of dust. I was no longer nine years old, but a grown man in misery. My third mother was the one with whom I’d long been significantly and hopelessly in love.

  “Hey, buddy,” Mr. Loury said. Not kid. This was progress. “Want a beer?”

  I took one. No one was in charge. It was known by men the world over. There was comfort in the shared understanding.

  Mr. Loury was an astronomer
like my dad, or he had been, until his firing due to an attempted sabotage of the telescope. I didn’t know the details, and didn’t care, beyond the thrilling fact of sirens making their way in slow frustration up the curve of the mountain. He’d been to jail. Again, this called to me. It seemed he never slept. I never slept either. I stayed up all night reading, and during the day, I patrolled the mountain, checking for aberrations. I felt like I’d know them when I saw them.

  Together, we watched the goings on of the spiral road, first a rangy cat patrolling, and then Mrs. Yin, our local ancient peril, driving too fast downhill in her Cadillac. I didn’t question the fact that it was seven in the morning and he was drinking already. It seemed reasonable. Some people drank coffee. Others drank beer. I was, I decided, a beer drinker. At last, Mr. Loury stood up, and looked at me for a moment, seemingly noticing for the first time that I was a kid. He waved his hand slightly. I thought he might be getting ready to send me home.

  “My third mother moved to Alaska last night,” I told him. “She’s not coming back.”

  “My wife died,” he told me. “That’s like Alaska, but more.”

  I wanted to ask about the Great White Yonder, but I was worried he’d tell me too much, and so I didn’t. I couldn’t afford another summer of nightmares, the mouth of the shark opening and showing its chewed food like a cafeteria bully gone gigantic.

  “Want to help me with a project?” Mr. Loury said. “A dollar an hour. Yardwork.”

  “If it’s lawnmower,” I said, negotiating. “I charge by the square foot.” Lawnmowers weren’t safe for me. My toes begged to be run over. There was a deathwish in me. One of my ears had been the recipient of eleven emergency room stitches. Hidden under the skin of my right knee, there was a jagged piece of gravel that seemed to have become permanent.