Year's Best Weird Fiction: 1

by Laird Barron

  Be composed. Be composed. You have planned well. The glass will hold. The glass is good. Oh how now I would give for just a glimpse or touch of my beloved, thigh, face, feet. To be in her embrace, and yet this is selfish selfish selfish. [lurch]

  Is the beast closer? A surgical cut, across the throat, from any of these shards, would be quick, painless, without guilt. No one would blame me for that. No one would blame me for that. No one left to. Oh that day we all spent on the lawn, that day glorious and sun-soaked before it began, and how could I ever give up hope of that again. Let that be what makes me strong. Do I deserve to? Do I deserve? Did I feed it? Did encourage it? [lurch]

  Fear that brings sickness.

  Fear that brings sorrow.

  Fear that inhabits the smallest places.

  Fear that undoes me.

  Fear that makes me ill. Oh my chest. Oh my stomach.

  No lurch disrupted the doctor’s thoughts next. Instead, the white worm of a creature embedded inside of him so many months ago while he slept had awakened, drawn by the cries of the monster outside. As it crunched through tissue and organs, soon there was nothing larger than a fragment of the doctor left, and every single fragment of mirror covered in its entirety with blood so that his once blazing light chamber was now the darkest place in the mansion. Early in the process, the doctor felt a fierce and annihilating joy that made him shout his ecstasy to the heavens. Is that you, my imaginary friend? Late in the process, he managed to whisper, “Where am I?” But he knew where he was, and then he knew no more.

  The doctor’s screams—amplified from his hiding place by the vents, the dumbwaiter, the floorboards, the very pores of the walls—seemed to the lady’s older daughter, kneeling beside a chimney on the roof, to emanate from a mansion in agony. She had chosen this vantage to observe the monster and the growth of the tower. Long ago she had been an amateur biologist familiar with certain types of animal mimicry. Now she crouched with a small telescope aimed at the tower. She could no longer force herself to observe the monster. The stench of it wafted up and made her feel as if she were being smothered in maggot-covered meat no matter how she tried to unsee the atrocity of its form.

  Using the telescope was akin to using the microscope in her make-shift laboratory to examine cells from the strange grass of the lawn: a way to know the truth of things, no matter how uncomfortable. The telescope confirmed that it was all happening again, although only the accounts of others from that time told her anything, really. She had avoided thinking about the implications of her own notes from last year, which were incomprehensible and toward the end written in blood:

  center of the shadow near the marrow might be a door a door a door that in the white shadow there comes a presence that is made of the center of the door that in the window reflects mimics a wall a room but if we were to touch would recoil would we recoil from that the tiny white worm inches and inches cross the floor watch it carefully resurrecting, this extraction is extracted.

  At the far edge of the lawn, the tower had grown pendulous and resembled less a tower now than the upper half of some thick serpent or centipede. It had been birthed by the monster, which had planted a huge, glistening white egg in the crater created by its impact. The tower curved and shook from side to side now while the ragged bird-things circled it, cawing.

  The scientist also followed the cook’s efforts to reach the stream; with the telescope his blunt visage was still recognizable despite the awful softness of his skull. Coming from the tower on his left, the bird-things swooped down at times to tear flesh and gristle from him, returning to toss it onto the top of the tower. Somehow, his excruciating journey seemed important, but the scientist did not know why. She knew only what the writer and doctor had speculated, for she had not been part of the circle. “You did this while I slept?” she had said, enraged that they had taken such a risk. Then retreated to her experiments to keep at bay the feelings of depression and helplessness that ever since threatened to engulf her.

  Below, the monster attacked the mansion again and the mansion screamed and she made observations of a scientific nature to calm her nerves. She dispassionately noted, too, the way the forest to all sides seemed thicker, more impenetrable, and the sky brighter than ever before, and took grim delight in her detachment in recording that “long, fleshy arms have begun to sprout from the sides of the tower.” As she watched, these arms began to snatch the bird-things from the sky and toss them into a gaping pink opening near the top of the tower. “It is feeding itself to grow even larger,” she observed. “And it is now obvious that it is not a tower. I do not believe it is a tower. I do not believe it is a tower.” She had to say it three times to truly believe it. She had no notepad to record these thoughts, and even when she braced her arm against her knee, the telescope shook a little.

  Now the tower sang to the monster battering the mansion, and the monster seemed unable to resist the melody. The singing intensified and the scientist wished she had cotton to stuff in her ears, for the song was so sweet and light and uplifting that it was like an atrocity in that place, at that time. And especially now against the extreme quiet of the mansion, for the screams had stopped. Finally. “It’s nothing like last year.”

  The monster, swaying in a drunken fashion, came closer and closer to the tower, trying to break away, unable to break away from its song. Until, finally, within the unbroken circle of fact that was the telescope’s lens, the indescribable beast curled up at the base of the tower. The tower was cooing now, almost as if in reassurance, and the scientist’s fascination at this muffled her terror . . . even though she could hear wet, thick sounds on the stairwell that led to the roof . . . and a snuffling at the locked door directly behind her.

  The tower, still cooing, stretched impossibly tall, lunging up into a sky beginning to bruise in anticipation of dusk. It leaned over to contemplate the monster below with something the scientist thought might be affection. With incredible speed and velocity, it dove down to pierce the monster’s brain. The monster flailed and brought its legs up to struggle, to push out the dagger of the tower, but soon this effort became half-hearted, then ceased altogether. A flow of gold-and-emerald globules rose up through the tower’s darkness from the monster. The farther these globules rose, the more transparent they became, until the tower had assimilated them entirely and was as dark as before.

  The monster lay husked. The tower grew taller and wider. The mansion beneath the scientist grew spongy and porous, and a kind of heartbeat began to pulse through its many chambers. But the scientist observed none of the things. The tower’s song and the piercing of the monster’s brain had pierced the telescope, too. The telescope, grown strange and feral and querulous, had punctured her eye on its way to her brain, and as she lay there and the tower ate the monster, so too the telescope made a meal of her. Satisfied, the white worm behind the door retreated.

  Dusk came over the land. An impossibly large, impossibly purple-tinged moon sent out a blinding half-light across the wandering grass, the mansion, and the tower. The cook had finally reached the lip of the river bank, and in some instinctual way recognized this small victory, even though the remains of his head were twisted above by happenstance to look back across the lawn.

  The mansion had become watchful and its upper windows gleamed like eyes. The corners of the mansion had become rounded so that it squatted on powerful haunches, poised to spring forward on four thick legs. The cook was unsurprised: he had argued for months that the mansion had been colonized by something below it, rising up, and the walls had begun to even seem to breathe a little. But they had laughed at him. “It’s like last year,” he said, although he could not really remember last year . . . or why the fish had looked so strange.

  At a certain hour, the tower began to stride toward the mansion, and the two joined in a titanic battle that split the air with unearthly shrieks: solid bulk against twisty strength. Around the two combatants, their tread shaking the ground,
the grass rippled with phosphorescence and from the forests beyond came the distant calls of other mighty beasts.

  The remains of the cook found no horror in the scene. The cook was beyond horror, all fast-evaporating thought focused on the river that had been the site of his happiest memory—a nighttime rendezvous with his lover. As they lay beside each other afterwards, the contented murmur in his ear of a line of a poem. “No other breather. . . .” This memory tainted only by the pain of remembering his lover’s reaction when he had slid into bed that last time, after having been so reduced by the white worm that had sprung at him from the walls of the kitchen.

  So he slid and pushed, still hopeful, losing more flesh and tissue and bone fragments, down the bank of the river, and by an effort of will he managed to whip his head around to face the water. There, through his one good eye, the cook saw his lover and the little girl and the lady of the house and the doctor and the maid and the butler, the lady’s two young cousins, and the scientist . . . they lay at rest at the bottom of the river. Waiting with open, sightless eyes. He had a sudden recollection of them all sitting around a table, holding hands, and what came after, but then it was gone gone gone gone, and he was sliding down into his lover’s embrace. The feel of the water was such a balm, such a release that it felt like the most blissful moment of his entire life, and any thought of returning home, of reaching home, vanished into the water with him.

  Behind him, under stars forever strange, the tower and the mansion fought on.

  OTHER NOTABLE WORKS OF WEIRD FICTION

  “Vivian Guppy and the Brighton Belle,” Nina Allan, Rustblind & Starbright

  “Americca,” Aimee Bender, Slate

  “The Sweet Virgin Meat,” Kola Boof, Exotic Gothic 5

  “The Vast Impatience Of The Night,” Mark Fuller Dillon, In a Season of Dead Weather

  “Oubliette,” Gemma Files, The Grimscribe’s Puppets

  “Rocket to Hell,” Jeffrey Ford, Tor.com

  “The Man Who Escaped His Story,” Cody Goodfellow, The Grimscribe’s Puppets

  “Diamond Dust,” Michael Griffin, The Grimscribe’s Puppets

  “Baba Makosh,” M.K. Hobson, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “Interstate Love Affair,” Stephen Graham Jones, Three Miles Past

  “Mother of Stone,” John Langan, The Wide Carnivorous Sky & Other Monstrous Geographies

  “The Cave,” Sean F. Lynch, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “Hideous Interview with Brief Man,” Nick Mamatas, Fiddleblack

  “In the Darkest Room in the Darkest House on the Darkest Part of the Street,” Gary McMahon, For the Night is Dark

  “The Design,” China Mieville, McSweeney’s 45

  “All Your Faces Drown in My Syringe,” Ralph Robert Moore, Black Static 37

  “Black Hen a La Ford,” David Nickle, In Words, Alas, Drown I

  “The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger,” Yoko Ogawa, Revenge

  “The House on Cobb Street,” Lynda Rucker Nightmare Magazine

  “How I Met the Ghoul,” Sofia Samatar, Eleven, Eleven

  “The Painted Bones,” Kelly Simmons Unlikely Story Issue 6

  “Touch Me With Your Cold, Hard Fingers,” Elizabeth Stott, Nightjar Press

  “Abyssus Abyssum Invocat,” Genevieve Valentine, Lightspeed Magazine

  “The Fox,” Conrad Williams, This is Horror

  “On Murder Island,” Matt Williamson, Nightmare Magazine

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Foreword by Michael Kelly. Copyright © 2014 by Michael Kelly.

  “Introduction: We Are For the Weird” by Laird Barron. Copyright © 2014 by Laird Barron.

  “The Nineteenth Step” by Simon Strantzas. Copyright © 2013 by Simon Strantzas. First published in Shadows Edge, edited by Simon Strantzas, Gray Friar Press.

  “Swim Wants to Know If It’s As Bad As Swim Thinks” by Paul Tremblay. Copyright © 2013 by Tremblay. First published in Bourbon Penn #8.

  “Dr. Blood and the Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron” by A.C. Wise. Copyright © 2013 by A.C. Wise. First published in Ideomancer Vol. 12, Issue 2.

  “Year of the Rat” by Chen Qiufan, translated by Ken Liu. Copyright © 2013 by Chen Qiufan. Translation copyright © 2013 by Ken Liu. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2013.

  “Olimpia’s Ghost” by Sofia Samatar. Copyright © 2013 by Sofia Samatar. First published in Phantom Drift #3.

  “Furnace” by Livia Llewellyn. Copyright © 2013 by Livia Llewellyn. First published in The Grimscribe’s Puppets, edited by Joseph S. Pulver Sr., Miskatonic River Pres..

  “Shall I Whisper to You of Moonlight, of Sorrow, of Pieces of Us?” by Damien Angelica Walters. Copyright © 2013 by Damien Angelic Walters. First published in Shock Totem #7.

  “Bor Urus” by John Langan. Copyright © 2013 by John Langan. First published in Shadows Edge, edited by Simon Strantzas.

  “A Quest of Dream” by W.H. Pugmire. Copyright © 2013 by W.H. Pugmire. First published in Bohemians of Sesqua Valley.

  “The Krakatoan” by Maria Dahvana Headley. Copyright © 2013 by Maria Dahvana Headley. First published simultaneously in The Lowest Heaven, edited by Anne C. Perry and Jared Shurin, and Nightmare Magazine, July 2013.

  “The Girl in the Blue Coat” by Anna Taborska. Copyright © 2013 by Anna Taborska. First published in Exotic Gothic 5, Vol. 1, edited by Danel Olson.

  “(he) Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror” by Joseph S. Pulver Sr. Copyright © 2013 by Joseph S. Pulver Sr. First published in Lovecraft eZine #28.

  “In Limbo” by Jeffrey Thomas. Copyright © 2013 by Jeffrey Thomas. First published in Worship the Night.

  “A Cavern of Redbrick” by Richard Gavin. Copyright © 2013 by Richard Gavin. First published in Shadows & Tall Trees #5.

  “Eyes Exchange Bank” by Scott Nicolay. Copyright © 2013 by Scott Nicolay. First published in The Grimscribe’s Puppets, edited by Joseph S. Pulver Sr.

  “Fox into Lady” by Anne-Sylvie Salzman. Copyright © 2013 by Anne-Sylvie Salzman. First English-language publication in Darkscapes.

  “Like Feather, Like Bone” by Kristi DeMeester. Copyright © 2013 by Kristi DeMeester. First published in Shimmer #17.

  “A Terror” by Jeffrey Ford. Copyright © 2013 by Jeffrey Ford. First published at Tor.com, July 2013.

  “Success” by Michael Blumlein. Copyright © 2013 by Michael Blumlein. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nov./Dec. 2013.

  “Moonstruck” by Karin Tidbeck. Copyright © 2013 by Karin Tidbeck. First published in Shadows & Tall Trees #5.

  “The Key to Your Heart Is Made of Brass” by John R. Fultz. Copyright © 2013 by John R. Fultz. First published in Fungi #21.

  “No Breather in the World But Thee” by Jeff VanderMeer. Copyright © 2013 by Jeff VanderMeer. First published in Nightmare Magazine, March 2013.

  COPYRIGHT

  Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 1 copyright © 2014 by Laird Barron & Michael Kelly

  Cover artwork copyright © 2014 Santiago Caruso

  Cover design copyright © 2014 Vince Haig

  Interior design, typesetting, layout © 2014 Samantha Beiko & Michael Kelly

  Foreword © 2014 Michael Kelly

  Introduction © 2014 Laird Barron

  “The Nineteenth Step” © 2013 Simon Strantzas

  “Swim Wants to Know If It’s As Bad As Swim Thinks” © 2013 Paul Tremblay

  “Dr. Blood and the Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron” © 2013 A.C. Wise

  “Year of the Rat” © 2013 Chen Qiufan

  “Olimpia’s Ghost” © Sofia Samatar

  “Furnace” © Livia Llewellyn

  “Shall I Whisper to You of Moonlight, of Sorrow, of Pieces of Us?” © 2013 Damien Angelica Walters

  “Bor Urus” © 2013 John Langan

  “A Quest o
f Dream” © 2013 W.H. Pugmire

  “The Krakatoan” © 2013 Maria Dahvana Headley

  “The Girl in the Blue Coat” © 2013 Anna Taborska

  “(he) Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror” © 2013 Joseph S. Pulver Sr.

  “In Limbo” © 2013 Jeffrey Thomas

  “A Cavern of Redbrick” © 2013 Richard Gavin

  “Eyes Exchange Bank” © 2013 Scott Nicolay

  “Fox into Lady” © 2013 Anne-Sylvie Salzman

  “Like Feather, Like Bone” © 2013 Kristi DeMeester

  “A Terror” © 2013 Jeffrey Ford

  “Success” © 2013 Michael Blumlein

  “Moonstruck” © 2013 Karin Tidbeck

  “The Key to Your Heart Is Made of Brass” © 2013 John R. Fultz

  “No Breather in the World But Thee” © 2013 Jeff VanderMeer

  EPub Edition AUGUST 2014 ISBN: 978-0-98131-776-2

  Printed in Canada