Year's Best Weird Fiction: 1

by Laird Barron

  “Sir Honore,” she greets you, her voice that of a high-bred Beatific. You would never guess she was a mind harlot if you met her on an avenue in the Good Hills. “So glad you could make it.”

  You sit the chest of brilliants at her feet. You don’t bother to return her greeting, or to remove your hat. She deserves no respect from you.

  The Clatterpox opens the lid of the chest and looks inside. He nods his bulky head, and the Doxie reaches inside her cleavage. She produces the brass key that means your life. She offers it to you in the palm of one white-gloved hand.

  “Why?” you ask, taking the key from her. You need to wind your gears soon, but you have about two hours left. And you must know . . . if she will tell you.

  As the Clatterpox lifts the chest in its metal arms, she reaches to caress its grimy cheek.

  “You would not understand, Honore.”

  “I doubt that I will,” you say. “But I’ve paid a heavy price. I deserve an explanation.”

  The Doxie smiles and turns her amber lenses toward you again. “I did it for my lover,” she says.

  Your neck gears nearly slip. “You love this Clatterpox?”

  “Yes,” she says. “So you do know the concept of love . . .”

  “I am well versed in matters historical, Madame. As well as the poetic arts.”

  She nods, the morning light glinting off her delicate nose. “But do you know that love is real? Have you ever felt it?”

  “You mock me.”

  “No, Honore,” she says. “Not at all. Extort yes, but never mock. I, too, am a Beatific.”

  “Your behavior suggests otherwise.”

  “We are this way, you and I, only because we could afford the process.”

  The process. Beatification. You recall it, three centuries past. A rite of passage, your father called it. The shedding of useless organic bulk, everything but the all-important brain, center of the living intellect.

  “Beatification is open to anyone,” she reminds you. “Anyone who can pay a Surgeon’s fees.”

  She looks at the Clatterpox Flux again, and he seems to smile, though his iron jaw will not permit such an action.

  “You did this for him. . .” you say it for her, accepting the preposterousness of it. “You wish to Beatify him . . . so you two can be together.”

  “You are wise, Honore,” she says.

  “It is . . . abominable,” you say.

  “According to whom?” she asks. “Once Flux’s living brain rests inside a Beatific body, he will be no different than you or I. We really cannot thank you enough, Sir Honore.”

  She turns to walk away with her Clatterpox lover and your stolen brilliants, and you want to say something. A last comment or condemnation . . . but your mind is blank. You squeeze the brass key in your hand, taking comfort from its firmness.

  The Doxie’s head erupts like a burst lantern. A shower of porcelain shards, silver fragments, and brain tissue assaults your waistcoat and shirt. The Clatterpox drops the chest and it cracks open, spilling brilliants across the muddy ground.

  You stand there numb, paralyzed by shock and confusion, as the black-coated gendarmes rush into the plaza, leaping from walls and gates. Bone-divers scamper from their illegal habitations and climb the walls like pale spiders. The gendarmes carry pistols and rifles, one of which has ended the Doxie’s life.

  The enforcers turn their clustered opticals toward the Clatterpox. The rusted monstrosity falls to its knees before the dead Doxie, cradling her headless corpse. Inside the open hollow of her neck, gears and springs pop and grind into stillness. The Clatterpox pulls something from his side . . . a key that he inserts between her sculpted breasts. The gendarmes believe it a weapon and begin firing. You leap to the ground to avoid the hail of bullets. Lying there, so close to the Doxie and her lover, you watch him turning her heart-key, trying to restart her life. But her head is ruined, her brain—the center of all life functions—spread across the ground, a litter of shredded blue flesh. Yet why is there is no blood or cranial fluid? Her Beatific brain wasn’t alive at all. The organ was dried . . . congealed . . . preserved.

  Is every Beatific brain like hers—nothing but dead, decayed flesh?

  The implications of this question run through your mind yet refuse to take root.

  The gendarmes’ bullets bounce off the Clatterpox’s iron body, or create holes like ruptured pustules. He turns the heart-key again and again, heedless of their assault. Eventually, they stop shooting and approach him on foot. The vapors from his vents and exhaust pipes flow black and heavy now. They tear him away from the Doxie’s corpse and secure his arms with titanium shackles.

  You start to rise, but two tall gendarmes lift you sharply to your feet. One of them stares at you with his cluster of opticals, nine blue-green lenses bright with the caress of dawn.

  “Sir René Honore?” the gendarme asks through some mouth aperture hidden below his high collar.

  You nod, still too stunned to speak.

  “By order of the Tribune, you are under arrest.”

  “What? I have done nothing. I was blackmailed . . .”

  “We understand,” says the gendarme, his anterior opticals already scouring the rest of the plaza. “To blackmail a Beatific is a High Crime. As is the paying of any funds to blackmailers. You broke the law. You will face justice.”

  You watch as they gather up the body and assorted remains of the Doxie and cast her into the Well of Bones. You know she will fall for several minutes before she reaches the bottom. There she will lie among the antediluvian bones, until perhaps some bone-diver gathers up her parts to sell as scrap. All that is left of her are the shards of an exquisite face, a few slivers of porcelain lying in the mud.

  The Clatterpox Flux wheezes and coughs as they drag him away.

  The gendarmes leave the brilliants lying trampled in the muck. Mere bits of colored glass beneath their notice.

  You remember what the elder stone face said about the jewels, and you laugh as they lead you out of the plaza and into the rust.

  You’re still laughing when they haul you before the veiled Tribune on his high bench, and later when they drag you across the stone bridge and deep beneath the walls of the crumbling palace. In the endless dark of the labyrinth, your laughter draws nameless things closer.

  Soon you will join your ancestors on the wall of the sunken vault.

  A laughing face of stone.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  * * *

  NO BREATHER IN THE WORLD BUT THEE

  Jeff VanderMeer’s most recent fiction is the NYT-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), all released in 2014. The series has been acquired by publishers in 16 other countries and Paramount Pictures/Scott Rudin Productions have acquired the movie rights. His Wonderbook (Abrams Image), the world’s first fully illustrated, full-color creative writing guide, won the BSFA Award for best nonfiction and has been nominated for a Hugo Award and a Locus Award. A three-time World Fantasy Award winner and 13-time nominee, VanderMeer has been a finalist for the Nebula, Philip K. Dick, and Shirley Jackson Awards, among others. His nonfiction appears in the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. VanderMeer has edited or coedited twelve fiction anthologies and serves as the co-director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen SF/fantasy writing camp located at Wofford College. Previous novels include the Ambergris Cycle, with nonfiction titles including Booklife and The Steampunk Bible. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, the noted editor Ann VanderMeer.

  The cook didn’t like that the eyes of the dead fish shifted to stare at him as he cut their heads off. The cook’s assistant, who was also his lover, didn’t like that he woke to find just a sack of bloody bones on the bed beside him. “It’s starting again,” he gasped, just moments before a huge black birdlike creature carried him off, screaming. The child playing on the
grounds outside the mansion did not at first know what she was seeing, but realized it was awful. “It’s just like last year,” she said to her imaginary friend, but her imaginary friend was dead. She ran for the front door, but the ghost of her imaginary friend, now large and ravenous and wormlike, swallowed her up before she had taken ten steps across the writhing grass.

  From a third floor window, the lady of the house watched the girl vanish into the ground, the struggling man become an indecipherable dot in the sky. Then nothing happened for a time, and she said to the dust, to her long-dead husband, to the disappeared daughter, to the doctor who now lived somewhere in the walls: “Perhaps it’s not happening again. Perhaps it’s not like last year.” Then she spied the disjointed red crocodile walking backwards across the lawn: a smear of wet crimson against the unbearable green of the finger-like grass. The creature’s oddly bent legs spasmed and trembled as it lurched ahead. No, not a crocodile but a bloody sack of human flesh and bones crawling toward the river at the edge of the property. Was it someone she knew? Of course it was someone she knew.

  An immense shadow began to grow around the unfortunate person like a black pool of blood. This puzzled her, until she realized some vast creature was plummeting down from an immense height toward the lawn. Raw misshapen pieces of the behemoth began to rain down, outliers of the body itself. Within seconds, it would descend, whole. The crawling bag of bones redoubled its efforts, seeming aware of the danger, frantic to avoid being caught in that impact. Now the lady of the house could not contain her fear any longer. She turned and ran, intending to flee down the stairs and seek shelter in basement. But something wide and white and cut through with teeth reared up out of the darkness and bit her in half, and then quarters, and then eighths, before she could do more than blink, blink rapidly, and then lie still, the image of the crawling man still with her. For awhile.

  In the basement, waiting for the lady’s return, a furiously scribbling man sat at a desk. He did not look up once; beyond the candlelight things lurked. As his mistress fell to pieces above him, the man was writing:

  Time is passing oddly. I feel as if I am sharing my shadow with many other people. If I look too closely at the cracks in the wall, I fear I will discover they are actually doors or mouths. There’s something continually flitting beyond the corner of my eye. Something she tells me that I don’t want to remember. Flit. Flit . . . . No. Tilt. Tilt, not flit. Tilt.

  He stopped for a moment to restore his nerve because a certain mania had entered his pen . . . and he didn’t know who he was writing to. The child? The doctor? God? Something white and terrible waited in the shadows, its movements like the fevered wing-beats of a hundred panicked thrushes crushed into the semblance of a body. With an effort, he continued:

  The tilt is a gap. The gap is the cracks becoming corridors when I look away, and yet there no way out. This ends well only if I can be in two places at once. But if other people are using my shadow, isn’t that a kind of door as well? Can I use my own shadow as a window? Can I escape?

  A mighty crash and thud shook the mansion, as if something enormous had landed on the lawn. Dust and debris cascaded down on the man writing. A distant rattling cry came that did not bear thinking about. He looked up from his work for a second, thought, It’s happening again, just like the doctor warned, but continued writing, as if the words might be the spell to undo it all.

  . . .or is it just an inkling? Inklings are like questions that haven’t been answered yet: by the time we ask them, we’re being swallowed by the doors they open. And all that’s left at the end, after the question’s answered, is the shadow, haunting us. The man looked up one more time, and now his own pale shadow leered up and curled monstrous across the wall, the desk, the candle, and the rictus of his face.

  “It’s just an inkling, an inkling!” he screamed, but still his own pale shadow took him, teeth glittering cold in the chilly room in the bowels of the mansion where no other thing stirred, or should have stirred, and yet sometimes did. No words, soothed the shadow, as if it made a difference. No words. I’m happening again. I’ll always happen again. But the shadow was him, and he could not tell where his writing ended and the shadow began.

  On the first floor, the maid had fallen to her knees at the impact of the monster from above hitting the lawn. Now it tore into the grass as it bounded forward. It hit the side of the mansion like a battering ram so that the chandeliers cascaded and crashed all around like brittle glass wedding cakes, shards splintering across the floor and beads rolling with a heavy clunk under chairs and sofas. The thing shrieked out words in a language that sounded like dead leaves being stuffed into a gurgling fresh-cut throat. But she kept her grip on the shotgun she had taken from the study cabinet. “It won’t be like last year,” she shouted, although “last year” was something horribly vague in her memory. “It’s too soon!” She shouted it to the house, to the lady of the house, to the man in the basement who had come to document everything the doctor had wanted to do, a very long time ago. I will not blame the child.

  Again the monster smashed up against the mansion. Unpleasant chortles and meaty sounds smashed down through her ears, tightened around her heart, her lungs. She stood with an effort and headed back to the study. The study window was occluded by a huge, misshapen blue-green eye ridged with dark red. The monster. She brought the shotgun to her shoulder, braced for the recoil, and fired. The monster blinked and bellowed but the shots did not fall hot into its corona. Instead, the shotgun barrel curled around to sneer at her. A flash of white. From behind something wet and unpleasant slapped her head from her neck. For longer than she would have thought, as her head rolled across the suddenly slippery floor, the maid saw the eye and the great bulk behind it withdraw from the window, and then, for a moment, the searing blue sky beyond and a black tower around which flew hideous bird-like shapes. “It’s different than before,” she wanted to say—to the butler, to the lady of the house, to the young writer in the basement who had become her lover—but that impulse soon faded, along with everything else.

  Earlier that day, the maid had argued with the butler, for the butler had seen the eyes of the dead fish move while in the kitchen and knew better than to fight. He had retreated to the huge coffin abandoned near the huge back doors to the mansion when the lady of the house had decided on the mercy of cremation for her husband instead. To either side lay the twin cousins, age twelve, all three waiting for it to be over. “Surely it will be over soon,” one twin whispered into the watchful silence. “It was over last year very quickly,” the other twin said in a hopeful tone. But neither twin could tell the butler exactly what they thought had happened last year. The butler knew, and had avoided the doctor ever since, but it made no difference now.

  As they lay there, the coffin expanded into a limitless night, and at the edges grew terrifying fangs until the coffin was a gigantic mouth, forever contracting until the fangs were too sharply close. The butler lost his nerve and though he told the twins to close their tear-streaked eyes as he prepared to escape, still they saw all that happened next. As one they burst from the coffin—and through the back doors of the mansion, seeking the grass, the limitless sky, the verdant forest beyond. But the monster lay in wait, had opened its huge mouth to cover the door, and they in their headlong rush were crunched down, heads pulped, before even one of them could do more than think, “It’s much, much worse than before.”

  The doctor received tell-tale glimmers of the butler’s demise from his secret compartment in the walls at the heart of the mansion. Skilled in both medicine and the arcane arts, he had spent a year of disturbing visions, secret guilt, and hysterical mania building a place of mirrors meant to repel the uncanny, breaking almost every piece of glass in the house to capture the shards and position them with glue and nail. Each mirror piece reflected some fragment of another, so that from all sides, using cunning angles, he could glimpse moments of what was happening elsewhere. The doctor saw a hint of th
e cook turned to quivering meat, a scintilla of the cook’s lover carried off, a suggestion of the girl betrayed on the lawn, and all of the rest. Now he stood quite silent and still in his narrow chamber of bright fragments, lit by a lantern, sweat dribbling down his face, arms, and chest.

  Many quick-darting thoughts passed through the doctor’s mind, reflected in the rapid blinking of his eyes. The flow of these thoughts was interrupted only by the continued siege of the mansion by the monster outside. Each lurch changed his focus.

  Did I make the pieces small enough? Did I make it impossible for them to see me, or do they see all of me now? Why would this happen to me who did nothing out of sequence or step? No one should endure this, and yet almost all of them are dead and they did nothing except the writer who carried on with both the maid and the lady of the house, but how would this concern it? How I wish I had never used a bone saw or performed surgery. It makes this all so much worse because [lurch]

  She was kinder than anyone I knew to tell me what to expect, that poor child, and perhaps I should have indulged her about her friend but I am a man of science too and how could I and now I wonder if her friend was indeed a manifestation or simply a terror in her mind and that I should have ergo ego ego . . . should have conducted an exorcism while I could rather than recommend a psychiatrist a séance to her mother but her mother was so nice to me and so concerned and there was no way to tell that creating a circle might [lurch]

  Was that a sound? Was that a noise other than whatever is outside? How can I tell? I cannot tell a sound beyond that sound. How hellish it is to be trapped within one’s mind for even an instant without recourse to another person. How like a hell and all the thoughts that come pouring out and [lurch]