Year's Best Weird Fiction: 1

by Laird Barron

  It swoops down upon the dark streets like some predatory bird of legend. A tightening of the air itself, a freezing and cracking of atmospheric forces. It keens in your ears like a wailing tea pot, and the wind takes your hat into the night. Fissures in the fabric of space/time erupt along the street. You’ve walked right into the heart of this one. The air splits open not six yards away, and you see another world revealed beyond the throbbing gash.

  It’s green and steaming . . . a jungle like the ones from ancient botanical texts. Colossal lizards feast on one another, tearing flesh, skin, and tendon with terrible fangs. The sounds of their shrieking flows from the vacuity. The gravity of that primeval world pulls at your lapels. If you let it, it will pull you through and your life will wind down in that nameless wilderness. The gears of your legs grind as you pull away from the hovering fissure. The wind screams. You walk against it and pass another vacuity, a rip in existence that pulses and expands, bleeding gravity. Beyond this one you see a night-dark sea and a distant shore lined with luminous towers. Golden-skinned beings sail the waters in skiffs of pale wood. They must see the vacuity from their side as well because their glowing emerald opticals turn toward you as you walk past. The vision dies as the vacuity begins to shrink.

  You stumble into the dying wind as the storm subsides. A dozen more vacuities glimmer in your vicinity. You ignore them. At a meeting of four streets ahead, you see a Clatterpox staring at one of the fissures as it closes completely. Then his round head turns toward you with a fresh burst of vapor and a hissing sound. Is it the same one, who called after you? He stares uncertainly in the post-rabidity calm. You step toward the windows of an all-night merchant on the corner.

  Above the doorway the name HOFFSTEIN’S gleams in torrid blue neon. You walk inside and find yourself hemmed by rows of crowded shelves. The proprietor is a handsome Beatific, but he greets you with a suspicious glare as you approach the display of porcelains. No time to be choosy. You pick the first masculine face on the stand and carry it to the counter.

  “You’re out late, Sir Honore,” says the proprietor. “Some wild party, eh?”

  “Something like that,” you say.

  “Must have gotten a bit rough . . .” He nods toward your busted face.

  You say nothing, avoiding his glare.

  “Anything else?”

  “No,” you say. “Yes . . . a hat. That one.” You pick a simple black topper. It’s been nearly an hour since you awoke in the alley. You must move quicker.

  “Seventeen brilliants,” says the merchant.

  “Put it on my account,” you say. Earlier tonight you emptied your pockets to pay the Doxie.

  “Very well. Have a good morning, Sir Honore.”

  You cast your old face into the store’s dustbin and replace it with this splendid new one.

  New hat sitting firmly on your head, you head back into the street.

  Making for the Steeple Road, you notice a shadowy figure trailing a block behind you. You stop near a pile of metal sculpted into a hideous beast and stare back at the pursuer. A Clatterpox, of course. Now you can hear his hissing, rattling locomotion as he draws nearer. He carries a club or a dark blade in one of his metal fists . . . you cannot tell which.

  Now you run. The Rusted Zone becomes a blur of grey, brown, and dirty neon, and you ache to put it all behind you. The Clatterpox could never move as fast as you. Soon you see the Steeple Gate, and the faces of its stone gargoyles glare at you like old friends. You speak the word of command and the gate opens. On its other side the streets are well-lit with spherical lanterns kept shiny and clean. As the iron gate closes behind you, you realize the Clatterpox might know the command word as well. So you hurry, shuffling between the houses of ornate stone and their lawns of crushed glass until you see the spiked fence of the Keymaker’s estate.

  A great brass bell hangs at the gate, and you hate to ring it so late. Your pocket watch says 4:03 a.m. But it can’t be helped. You ring the bell once. Wait. Again. No lights go on inside the stone mansion. You ring it a third time and notice the front gate is ajar. You pull it open just enough to creep inside. The lawn is immaculate, filled with sculptures of glass and stone in the shapes of skulls, fantastic machinery, and abstract forms recalling the Organic Age. Your shoes sound far too loud as you walk across the crushed glass toward the Keymaker’s door. He will be annoyed to be awakened so late (or so early), but you will offer him whatever price he demands to cast a mold of your chest lock and make a new key before 9:00 a.m. You have little choice. His workshop is attached to the mansion, a domed miniature factory of green stone, possibly jade. Certainly you cannot be the first panicked Beatific who has come to him after hours with a lost key emergency.

  The front doors are hanging open and a single lantern burns somewhere inside. Something is not quite right here. The estate is not large, but the nearest neighbor is several hundred yards away. Perhaps someone out there heard you ring the gate-bell, or perhaps not. But the front door should not be open.

  You almost stumble over a lump of metal at your feet. A two-headed canine lying on its side. A lean body of iron and bronze covered in fuzzy, elastic skin. Both its necks have been broken, and the inner workings of its guts have been torn out. A scattered mess of cogs and gears litters the foyer.

  You walk cautiously toward the dim light, already knowing what you will find. Ahead lies the parlor where the Keymaker keeps his bookshelves. You were here twelve years ago for a party honoring his fourteenth decade of service. You remember his great easy chair, where he sat and entertained his guests with stories of his youth. Now you slip into that curtained room and see him sitting in the same chair, dressed in a satin night-robe. The lantern flickers unsteadily on the table beside him. He is headless, his body reclining on the cushioned velvet, gloved hands resting on his lap. His head lies a few feet away, fractured porcelain cheek against the burgundy carpet. Scattered bits of copper and wire spill across his chest and lap. Once again fear steals your ability to move.

  The Keymaker is dead.

  You press your ear to his breast, but you hear no mechanized whirring, no clicking of cogs or sighing springs. The lantern oil burns low; this happened hours ago. You know his brain has died inside that severed skull. He is gone.

  You stumble backwards until you fall into the soft embrace of a couch.

  The Keymaker was not a true Beatific . . . he did not inherit his title . . . he worked to earn it. He was a laborer, basically. He had no fortune or noble lineage. But he was a man of honor. And he was the only man who could save your life.

  A noise breaks the silence of the dead man’s study. Something heavy, moving on the terrace. No, in the foyer. You glance around for a weapon, an exit, something, anything . . . an ancient cutlass hangs on the wall, blade eaten by rust. You pull it down and brandish it, fists wrapped around the hilt. You have no idea how to fight with blade or pistol.

  The sound moves nearer. Heavy footsteps. Now the hissing of steam through a vent.

  You remember the sound of the Clatterpox following you, and sure enough he stands in the doorway of the parlor. A terrible thing of corroded iron, leaking pistons, purple vapors, and swiveling joints. He stares at you with his flat grey opticals. His mouth is a horizontal slit, dividing round chin from oval head. He sighs at you . . . no, it’s the sound of hot air leaking from his heart-furnace. The grill of his chest emits orange light where the anthracite burns hot.

  “Honore,” he says, voice flat like the ringing of tin. “We have something you want.”

  Now you recognize the weapon he carries in his left hand.

  It is your walking stick with the bronze toad head.

  “Who are you?” You wave the useless cutlass at the Clatterpox like some protective talisman. But you know it offers no protection.

  “My name is Flux.”

  “You’re with the Doxie.”

  “Yes.”

  “You ass
aulted me and stole the key to my heart.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  The Clatterpox shrugs its rusted shoulders. Something pings inside its whirring guts.

  “Because you have wealth. We need it.”

  “Extortion . . . the device of cowards.” Your words sound brave. But terror swims in your chest cavity, runs along your plastic skin like spilled oil.

  “That may be..but we have your brass key. We want a hundred-thousand brilliants. Bring them to the Well of Bones at sunrise. Or we will drop your key in the well and you will never find it. You’ll wind down. Your brain will rot and die.”

  You consider this. Your ancestral fortune is vast. You won’t miss a hundred thousand brilliants. Besides, there are no other options.

  “You . . . you killed the Keymaker.”

  “Of course,” says the Clatterpox. “Don’t be late.” He thumps across the foyer and out into the courtyard, then beyond the gate and down the road into the Rusted Zone.

  You lay the ancient sword down at the Keymaker’s feet. There is no time to mourn for him. The sun will rise in less than two hours.

  You run along the winding avenues of the Good Hills, ignoring the stone domiciles of your fellow Beatifics. Rarely do any lights glow in the oval windows at this rude hour. You dash north, heading toward your manor house, and the fractured moon rises above the palace of the Potentates at the top of the great hill. Its crumbling walls and crenellated towers are older than the Urbille itself, and large enough to house a second city, which according to rumor, it does. The Potentates live inside its walls of mossy stone, and not even Beatifics are allowed to sully its precincts with their presence. Once per year the Potentates emerge for the Parade of Iniquities, carried by clockwork horses through the streets of the Urbille, wrapped in their dark robes and chains of gold, their bulbous heads veiled, the dark shadows of their opticals scanning the populace in silent judgment. They are terribly tall, the Potentates, hence the immensity of their stone citadel. Rumors speak also of the labyrinth below that towering fortress . . . a dungeon into which only the most evil and unrepentant of lawbreakers are cast. You imagine the Doxie and her murderous Clatterpox cast into that dark maze, pursued by terrible ancient things.

  The Honore Estate lies three miles from the outer wall of the great palace. You reach it an hour before sunrise and race through your front doors toward the sealed portal that guards the lower vaults. Once the house was full of servants, semi-organic toadlings imported from stabilized vacuities. They kept the manse from disintegrating and the cobwebs from accumulating. Now, many years after Siormah wound down and left you, your outer garden is a hideous collection of weeds and vine. Your walls are clammy and the stone crumbles a bit more each year. You often sit here, in the heart of your inherited power, and contemplate the transitory nature of things. At times you can almost feel the pillars and the stone slabs of your walls decaying slowly into blackened sand. Stone is no more permanent than metal. You realized this long ago. Your stone mansion will one day collapse, as will all the Beatific dwellings, and eventually the stone palace itself will tumble down upon the bloated skulls of the Potentates. Will anyone still be alive when that day comes?

  At the bottom of the spiral stair you speak the Word of Lineage and the round vault door swings open. Inside a hung lantern lights itself automatically and a world of clashing colors fills the chamber. The floor is hidden under pile after pile of brilliants, precious stones in all the shades of ruby, amber, emerald, topaz, sapphire, violet, opal, and diamond. Here is the great fortune that your ancestors built. And on the four walls of this chamber, emerging from the grey stone in bas-relief, are the faces of those ancestors.

  Your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather, and a dozen more, going back a thousand years to the last Organic Age. Their opticals open and stare at you with flame-bright lenses. Somehow, as you wade into the room and begin scooping brilliants into an iron chest, their stone lips move and they speak in whispering voices. You try to ignore them, you know their cruel wisdom. You’ve long passed the days when you would come down here for advice. You learned eventually that your ancestors were just as ignorant of the world as you. Their accumulation of wealth and title was their only virtue.

  “What are you doing, René?” asks the stone face of your father.

  “You fool!” seethes your grandfather’s visage. “Wasting our wealth again!”

  “I need this . . . all of it,” you say, not bothering to meet their radiant opticals. “Leave me alone.”

  “Leave him alone, he says!” Your father again. “Still haven’t learned to respect your elders?”

  “What are you doing?” asks another face, some older predecessor. Each succeeding member of the family lived longer than the one who came before. “What could be so costly?”

  “I’ve lost the key to my heart!” you shout, overcome by strange emotions. “I have to buy it back.”

  “By all the Gods That Never Were,” swears your grandfather’s face. “That old scam again. You are being taken for a rube, boy.”

  Another stone face speaks, someone from terribly far down the line of ages.

  “All of these stones are worthless, you know,” says the face. “Bits of worthless glass. The Potentates manufacture these by the million.”

  “Nonsense!” says your father’s visage. “Their worth is what made us a great family.”

  “No, he is right,” says another ancient face. “The last true jewels were lost ages ago. This is all fakery. Our wealth is an illusion.”

  You scrape more armloads of the brilliants into the chest, hurrying. To stay in this chamber too long will drive you mad. Don’t listen to their babble. They are liars and fools. And they are dead.

  “René,” says another nameless face of stone. “All wealth is an illusion. When you join us you will understand.”

  “Join us,” says another face. “You are so close already.”

  “Join us,” says another, through stone lips.

  “Shut up!” you shout.

  The faces grow still, but their fiery opticals stare at you.

  You close the chest of brilliants, heft it to your shoulder, and leave the vault. The door slams closed behind you like the thunder of a collapsing empire.

  You race up the stairs and check your pocket watch.

  Less than an hour until sunrise.

  You run out the front door, cross the overgrown courtyard, and head down the hillside.

  Early risers are lighting their lanterns as you pass the gates of Beatific mansions.

  Once through the Steeple Gate you head into the Rusted Zone, directly toward the Well of Bones, clutching the chest in your tireless arms, a precious ransom of a hundred-thousand worthless brilliants.

  Along the Avenue of Copper Lungs you nearly stumble into a fizzleshade as it manifests in a haze of wispy hair and antique clothing. It stares at you with transparent opticals, pleading for help. They always want the same thing . . . the completion of unfinished business. Something left undone before they perished.

  Please. . .this one moans . . .my name is Enri. . .I left two children behind when I died. Will you find them and tell them about my hidden gold?

  “You died three-thousand years ago,” you mutter, shuffling along under the weight of your burden. “Your children are long dead, too.”

  The phantom follows you, blinking in and out of existence, losing its purchase in the living world.

  Pleeaaaasssse. . .it wails. The children will starve! You must help me. I bled to death in this gutter. . .don’t leave them alone.

  “Piss off!” you shout, a stab of guilt in your clicking chest.

  Behind you the fizzleshade blinks into nothingness.

  The light of pre-dawn limns the corroded skyline with an amber glow. The exact shade of the Doxie’s opticals. You scurry along the streets of twisted metal, avoiding crowds of Clatter
pox on their way to the factories. Gendarmes in black trenchcoats and stove-pipe hats patrol the streets now. Their faces are clusters of optical lenses, swiveling in multiple directions at once, observing the early morning activity, always alert for anything out of the ordinary.

  Suddenly you realize that you are out of the ordinary. You are exactly the kind of anomaly the gendarmes look for as they enforce the laws of the Urbille: a lone Beatific carrying a heavy chest through the pre-dawn rust. And if that chest were to be inspected, a fortune in brilliants. You walk quietly now, hoping to avoid their attention. If there were time, you might tell them of your blackmailers’ plot and let the Potentates’ justice fall upon the Doxie and her confederate. But by the time they investigated your claims the sun would rise, your heart-key would be lost forever, and you would be dead.

  No other course now but the Well of Bones.

  You rush past steaming grates, the crooked frames of aluminum huts, and cross a bridge painted with the sigils of feuding Clatterpox gangs. Luckily, at this hour only working citizens will be up and about.

  There it is. The walled plaza containing the Well of Bones. You walk through the open gate, glad there are no guards here. Who would care to guard a worthless pit of bones? This place is haunted by the lowest of scavengers, those who climb the sheer walls of the pit for miles deep and crawl back up with a bag of bones to sell for a few copper bits, or trade for drugs. Bone used to be highly valued in the Urbille, but nobody wants it anymore. It is a relic of the organic times.

  Now you stand before the great pit, among the piles of scrap metal and the crude huts of bone-divers. There is no time to think about how completely vulnerable you are in this place because the sun has broken the jagged horizon, and you see the Doxie and her Clatterpox enter the plaza.

  She moves gracefully across the muddy scrapyard, as out of place as yourself. Today her fine gown is green, the color of damp moss. Her black hair is a tall oval, secured with a spiral of copper wires. Her face is the one you remember: superb with its tiny red lips, arcing painted eyebrows, and the delicate curve of perfect cheeks. Her opticals glimmer at you, although with malice or amusement you cannot say. The Clatterpox named Flux shambles beside her, filling the air with his noxious exhalations.