Year's Best Weird Fiction: 1

by Laird Barron

  Danny and Ray were the final customers to exit Pizza Uno, and they had to duck under the burnished aluminum rolling grille already pulled down to within a few feet of the floor. The corridor outside was dim, all the stores were closed and only a single row of fluorescent panels high above provided illumination. Ray thought again of the derelict bank he had seen downtown just before his blackout and the accident, the lone bulb on a wire that lit it.

  At first neither spoke as they made their unsteady way toward the exit. Then Ray tried to focus and said, “Dude, I can’t believe you didn’t tell me Lisa was down here. To be honest, I feel kind of betrayed.” He kept his eyes on the floor, not Danny, struggling to keep his steps within a single row of tiles.

  He felt Danny turn to him. “You feel betrayed? You know what dude? You always act like Lisa was such an angel, and she wasn’t. You wanna know the truth? Luke didn’t bang her this time, but he already banged her like way back sophomore year. And so did I. A buncha times. Once we had a threesome, some night when you were too busy writin’ one of your damn English papers and we all went to the Roxy without you. It didn’t mean nothin’, you know. We were pretty wasted, anyway. But she made us promise not to tell you because she knew you had this crush on her. Fact is, by then she was already gettin’ tired of waitin’ for you to ask her out. But that’s not the way it went this last time. She just hung out, told us her troubles and stuff, that’s all.”

  Ray opened his mouth to reply, but his tongue had gone numb. The space between them stretched as long as a football field, as if Ray were staring at Danny through the wrong end of a telescope. He didn’t want to believe his friend, but he knew his words were true. He knew it in his guts, he knew it from a dozen tiny suspicions that clicked into place all at once, memories he’d shunted aside. But that was all he was going to learn from his guts, because it was happening again: an elevator shaft opened in his torso and everything inside collapsed down a vast abyss. He thought helplessly of Pound’s line: “But Sordello, and my Sordello?” All at once there were two Lisa’s, and both were lost to him. Now he clung to a ledge in a deep, dark pit as her image receded. The inexorable pattern had begun once more, and all he could do was ride it out. In rapid succession his mind played host to a slideshow featuring his father, his MIA mom, his scant remaining handful of distant aunts, uncles, cousins . . . Lisa. He grasped for each as they faded in turn. None could hold him. He shrank, diminished, dwindled to a pinpoint, a dust speck no Horton could hear in a universe of immense galaxies isolated by stifling, incomprehensible spans of emptiness. There was nothing to hang onto, no one to hold him back from the pull of oblivion. The void sucked him in, crushed him to nothingness. All he was, all his memories, vanished, gone forever. He shuddered and gasped an inchoate syllable with what seemed the last breath in his lungless chest.

  And then, as quickly as it had taken him, the spell began to fade. He found himself gripping the edge of a thick concrete planter with both hands. A plastic tree trunk rose from it, almost as thick as the one he struck on Main. They were just outside of Penney’s. He staggered toward Danny and threw both hands out to shove him. “You fucker!”

  Danny sidestepped with surprising ease, considering how sick he looked. Ray swung a roundhouse punch at him, but Danny caught Ray’s right with his left, ducked under, and slammed him in the stomach. Ray collapsed to his knees and puked a sour stew of pizza chunks and Corona.

  Danny stood above him. “Fuck you man. I try to open your eyes, show you how it really is, and you take a swing at me. You wanna live in a fantasy world, that’s your own problem. You’ll see when the snow melts. Everyone will see. But I’m finished with you here.” And he strutted off into Penney’s.

  Ray fought for breath and spewed his guts out a few more times before he could struggle to his feet. Puke spattered the backs of his hands, and he wiped them on his pants, though those weren’t much better. He checked all round, but saw no one watching him, no customers, no security. He made for Penney’s and the mall exit.

  It wasn’t until he was outside that he felt the sting of the winter wind and realized he’d left his coat behind. Where? In Pizza Uno? No, on that kiosk. Shit. Only a handful of cars remained in the lot, and Danny’s was not among them. Triple-shit. Ray hadn’t anticipated returning to the rear of the mall, but wherever he was going tonight, he was walking, and there was no way he was doing that without his coat. Not to mention his car keys were in the pocket, for what they were worth.

  The mall was empty now. The grille was all the way down outside Pizza Uno and the lights were off. He expected to have to feel his way through the section beyond in total darkness, but a lone panel of fluorescents lit the aperture to the west wing. Others glowed at uneven intervals further down the corridor, hanging exposed from bare steel beams.

  Ray picked his way down the aisle from one oasis of light to the next. He had not gone far before flashes of maybe-movement began to register in his peripheral vision: more of the long shadows. They never approached him head on—instead they pulsed over and over at the corners of his sight, independent of the angles of the overhead lights and showing no conformity to objects on the floor. He tried to focus on his feet, ignoring the dark streaks that crisscrossed each other and rose up the walls, the hollow echoes from the plywood panels he trampled, the way the plastic sheeting over empty storefronts rippled without any breeze. Just keeping his feet together and moving forward dizzied him, and his stomach still threatened.

  His worst fear was that when he arrived at the kiosk, his coat would be gone, but he saw it from a good distance off, resting almost right beneath the final flickering light panel. At last—his ordeal was almost at an end. Just grab the coat and strike a fast pace back to the exit. Maybe Danny would be waiting for him after all. Of course he would be: he wouldn’t leave Ray stranded. The coat was here, and Danny would be outside, parked at the curb with the heater running. It was all gonna be OK.

  Ray was only a few yards from the kiosk when the buzzing of the fluorescents overhead cycled to the level of an angry hornet swarm, and the panel shut off altogether with a loud pop. He held his breath, straining his ears, but heard only the rippling of plastic. Yet it was not completely dark. To his right, a rectangular panel glowed softly from behind the plastic curtain that spanned an empty steel frame. Black on yellow, six letters: “eyelab.” It was the twin of the one on the pole outside, only this one didn’t move. It hung in place, pressed against the milky membrane as if straining to be born.

  The overhead lights clicked back on. At once, Ray recognized the streaks of shadow everywhere, clearer than before. He turned to stare at one on his left, and this time, instead of shifting, it rolled up—rolled up and rose—contracted toward him, no longer a shadow, but a hunched figure wrapped in foul, uncertain rags. Shadows on either side underwent the same transformation, at least a dozen, and began to shuffle toward him. He gasped in drunken shock, but he was so close to his coat now. He could get it and get out before the gray figures reached him. They were slow, and Danny would be waiting outside.

  Ray stumbled up to the kiosk and stretched his arm toward the coat, not wanting to approach any closer than necessary. In his mind’s eye he saw with absolute clarity the gaunt, discolored limb that would whip across the counter and clutch his wrist, filthy jagged nails piercing his skin, but it never came, and with one lightning motion, he jerked his own hand toward his coat and gripped it by the collar. The instant his fingers closed on the fabric, he took half a dozen quick steps backward, never taking his eyes off the kiosk, and thus fell directly into the uncovered pit behind him. He hadn’t heard the plywood cover move.

  One sharpened spike of rusted rebar drove straight through his right kidney, and Ray would have screamed if another hadn’t pierced the back of his neck and pinned his tongue flat in his mouth. Before the light clicked off again, he caught one brief glimpse of the gray, eyeless faces leaning over him. Then they climbed down in the darkness and slid t
he plywood back in place.

  Anne-Sylvie Salzman

  * * *

  FOX INTO LADY

  Anne-Sylvie Salzman is a French writer and the co-editor of the magazine Le visage vert. As a translator, her many authors include Mary Shelley, Kris Saknussemm, Lord Dunsany, Fritz Leiber, Arthur Machen, Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Sax Rohmer, Iain M. Banks, Jim Shepard, L. Frank Baum, Herman Melville, Henry Darger, and Willa Cather. Prior publications in French include two novels—Au bord d’un lent fleuve noir (Joëlle Losfeld, 1997) and Sommeil (José Corti, 2000)—as well as a short story collection, Lamont (Le Visage vert, 2009). It is available in English in the collection Darkscapes (Tartarus Press, 2013). A second collection of stories, Vivre sauvage dans les villes (also available in Darkscapes) was recently published by Le Visage vert. Her novel Dernières nouvelles d’Œsthrénie is forthcoming from Dystopia Workshop this fall.

  Keiko is lying in the grass of the narrow garden, her head against the cement wall, her mind a blank, when she is seized again in the pit of her stomach, in the place where, she imagines, her ovaries are located, or perhaps her Fallopian tubes, she doesn’t know which, by incomprehensible pangs of pain. They come and go, and have been twisting in this part of her body, soft and defenseless, since the small hours of the morning. Feeling her abdomen with both hands Keiko detects a growth the size of an apricot which rolls beneath her fingers and which appears half an hour later (she has fallen asleep again and re­awakened) palpably larger.

  She goes back into the house. The passage from light to shade makes her heart falter. Everything is green within and the interior of the house seems to her tapestried in a huge net. She thrusts her finger into the net, chokes with disgust, then pulls herself together. These specks moving before her eyes, these trembling limbs, they are nothing. Once in the bathroom she has already recovered her spirits—low as they are at this end of a summer in which the wind has never ceased, or the bad news. She is leaning on the rim of the bathtub when another sharp pain catches her. She sits on the floor panting. An iron tube is passing through her pelvis, from the labia to the uterus. A sudden spurt from this scorching passage of hot black blood, clots that the tormented girl could almost squeeze in her fingers to break them open; then in the thickness of the discharge there is formed something with a head and limbs. “Lick it, lick it,” says an instinct which Keiko in her terror cannot hear; “it is the fruit of your belly.”

  Keiko washes it clean in the hand-basin. It is a little animal with brown fur, the size of a mole, and its eyes are not yet open. Pensively she washes the private parts between her legs while the little creature mews in the basin. What is she to do? What to make of this blood-smeared apparition? Keiko opens the bath taps, fills the tub to the brim with water that is rather tepid than hot, and lies down in it. At the end of an hour of lassitude she finds the misshaped birth still alive at the bottom of the basin, and trying to escape from it by means of paws with transparent claws. Before her sister can return—the two girls are sharing the house, which had been the home of their dead parents—Keiko has time to find in the downstairs lumber-room a box in which to shut the animal away; her idea is to let it die of hunger. Then she waits for her sister, sitting in the drawing room with the television switched off, and sees in her mind’s eye the animal’s tiny mouth, its eyes protruding beneath lids still gummed together, its soft ears. The sun enters through the top of the window and falls slanting on the floorboards. When it reaches the foot of the wall her sister returns and wakes Keiko who has fallen asleep, her back to the television, and has dreamed fitful disturbing dreams of landscapes with towering rocks that scraped the low-flying hunting aeroplanes.

  Night comes. Keiko goes down to see if the creature is dead. It is not. Lying in a corner of the box it trembles when Keiko touches it, yet appears to have grown bigger. Returning to her bedroom Keiko feels fear. The newfound gaze of the beast, limpid and black, sticks to her heels, and climbs back up her leg to the damp nest from which it emerged.

  Her sister is asleep, her right hand over her breast. Very softly she snores; from time to times her lips sketch a mimic sucking. Keiko looks at her as she sleeps. Terror so grips her muscles that she is without power to move. For a moment she imagines that she is no more than a skin stretched over a huge, formless, palpitating amoeba. The skin bursts; Keiko returns to protozoan disorder. Neither in the next few days nor in those that follow does Keiko tell her sister of this creature so unex­pectedly come into the world. The box is hidden in a cupboard off the hall which her sister, Keiko thinks, will never open. Nor does she speak to anyone else of this unnatural birth. The desire is not lacking—but the words?

  The first day, having left the house without so much as visit­ing her beast in its infancy (‘If only it would die!’) Keiko is gripped at midday by a nameless panic. Her sister will have found the animal, she will have taken it to the vet, the appari­tion will have been registered officially. “But this little monster,” says Keiko grasping her hair in both hands, “this blood-sucking witchling wants our skin.”

  Her sister has done no such thing. Returning at lunchtime in a state of collapse Keiko takes her beast from its box. It has gained strength. Its fur, softer now, is growing out light red. It has no teeth as yet; nor, so far as Keiko can tell, has it any inclination to cry.

  Keiko returns to the garden. The sky is uncertain. The crea­ture, probably, is puling and twisting in the darkness of the cupboard, far from the woman who gave it birth. Keiko likewise is restless. She would like to go to bed, to sleep—no, she goes out again to work. In the street she stops, a dart planted under her heart. What is the beast doing in the dark? What is in its mind? How is it nourishing itself? Has it perhaps crept back unobserved to its nest, and is it devouring Keiko from within?

  The second night of her strange calamity Keiko falls asleep numb with fear. Her sister is away in Yokohama till the end of the week. In the hall close to the cupboard where the creature is living out its agony there hangs a smell of sweat turning to gangrene. But Keiko, terrified of finding the creature more vigorous, provided now with claws and teeth, will not open the door. She cooks spaghetti, sits up late watching television, allows a dark languor to turn her bowels to water; then goes out, vacillating, into the garden, breathes the air, puts off the moment of going to bed. The moment comes all the same. And Keiko wakes up in the middle of the night, a weight on her chest, in her mouth a taste of tainted food. By the light of her bedside lamp she sees on the skin of her ankles and calves the marks, hardly darker than the surface of her skin, of the greedy lips of the creature now launched at last upon the world.

  She gets out of bed, rigid from head to foot. The animal is not in her bedroom. It has escaped out of the cupboard, that is all, that is as much strength as it has acquired. Keiko searches for it all through the house, cupboards, attic, under the furni­ture, and in the little garden. The beast has returned, Keiko prays, suddenly furious, to its foul beginnings. Through the hour that follows, seated in the chair she often leaves leaning against the wall of the house, she listens to the thunder of the motorway and the stray sounds of the neighbourhood. Two or three houses away a raucous discussion breaks out between students; some­where else they are trying to start a car; a small dog yaps. Keiko recalls how her elder brother (he has been in the north for two years) went out into the garden to sleep under just a blanket. “It was a starry sky,” thinks Keiko, “a night that no one could fear.” Vain memories; the fear returns even though the sky is clear and the garden small and without hiding-places. Keiko sees passing shadows denser than they should be. Going back into the drawing room she seats herself before her mother’s shrine and addresses to her a useless prayer. What can she, dead as she is, do against this beast that is now on the loose? Keiko looks at its scratches on her legs; no, the beast is not in the land of the dead.

  Perhaps it has been run over by a car, or perhaps, this is her secret hope, it has drowned in the sewers. Her sister is bac
k from Yokohama. The marks fade away. Keiko spends a night at the Hotel Vukuran in a red bedroom with her lover, who is a divorcé living in Kamakura. But although he strokes the under­side of her breasts and works upon her tenderly, Keiko bites her lips and weeps tears of misery when his back is turned. The passage of the beast has seared what for the time being she calls her inner parts. From the window of the room nothing can be seen except one of the walls surrounding the commercial centre, and to the right of it, the end of a neon sign which Keiko deciphers and reconstructs as “Tobacco Baruder”. “The beast knows, it smells the fire,” thinks Keiko, squeezing her legs, “it knows where to find me.” The question keeps recurring: has the creature come back to rest in the girl’s womb? Is it not consum­ing her in an evil feast, inch by inch?

  “I have hurt you,” whispers the man, seeing Keiko arched up, with her veins standing out. “It’s not that at all”, Keiko would have liked to say, shrugging her shoulders and breathing slowly to calm the frantic beating of her heart. She stays silent. The man, not without uneasiness, takes her in his arms again. She suffers less this second time. The man, as is their usual custom, goes off to take the early train, leaving her asleep. At about seven o’clock, before going to work, she spends a long time washing her pubis and the lips of her vagina. She strives with the aid of a mirror to see what has been scorched. Nothing. Then the creature, whether it has ventured to creep back into Keiko or is leading a half-wild existence in the marginal areas about the town, falls slowly into oblivion.

  Comes November. Keiko returns home one evening by Meguro, along the river which laps coldly against its enclosing walls. She looks at the movement of the water under the trees. Her fear returns, she could not say why. The river flows unbroken. She halts on the bridge, and her eyes sweep round in search of what can have awakened a fresh alarm. She enters the supermarket at the station to buy octopus and instant noodles; then takes the metro with her anxiety unabated, though it is still broad day­light. Her sister being again in Yokohama the house is empty and dark. Keiko switches on a light in every room and mortise-locks the door, something she ordinarily does not think to do. For the last four months she has been carrying a child of which the man from Kamakura is the father. She learnt this only this morning; he does not yet know. In point of fact she asks herself with an increasing melancholy if she has to tell him. Not that she is afraid he will cease to love her; rather, she thinks as she enters the garden, it is of the child that she is afraid. What will it be? At the bottom of the garden, which is bordered by three gloomy cedars, the darkness, into which she stares unthinkingly, causes her to tremble. She is now swimming in a sea of anguish which tosses and batters her. The darkness of the night is streaked with threatening lights. Waiting in shadow, more and more distinct, is a creature with the form of a fox—a vixen, rather, for its limbs are slender and its muzzle delicate. And this animal, the moist smell of which comes now to Keiko’s nostrils, growls and whimpers, and in the middle of its inarticulate cry pronounces with horrible distinctness the word “Mother”. Keiko puts out her hand towards the beast, motions angrily to drive it away. The word is repeated. She bolts into the house, slides shut the glass door and slams down the catch. The beast approaches. Keiko can see only the depths of its eyes shining with a yellow-orange light on the other side of the glass. She draws the curtain and sits with her face towards the animal she can no longer see. It scratches at the door and whines; then ‘Mother’ in a voice that is thick and inhuman.