The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition

by Paula Guran [editor]

  She rounded a barberry bush. A little scream squeezed from behind her hand.

  The stench wasn’t the flowers. It was vivifieds.

  In her path, blocking it completely, stood a white billy goat. He did not breathe or move. His peculiar, tipped-over eyes were motionless, his sideways pupils like twin cracks to the Abyss.

  His belly had burst, and flies looped around his gaping bowels in humming droves.

  Heart pounding, Lindsome backed away. The goat did nothing. Its gaze remained fixed at some point beyond her shoulder. As she watched, bits of its flesh grew misty, then re-solidified. It’s all right, Lindsome told herself. It’s just an old vivified, rotten enough for the soul to start coming loose. It’s so old it doesn’t know what it is or how to act. See? It’s staying right there.

  Push past it. It will never notice.

  Lindsome shuddered. But she was a young lady, and young ladies were always calm and regal and never afraid.

  So Lindsome lifted the hem of her dress, as if preparing to step through a mud puddle, and inched her way toward and around the burst-open creature.

  Its foul-smelling fur, tacky with ichor, brushed the whiteness of her garment. Lindsome closed her eyes and bit her lip, enough to bring pain, and a fly buzzed greedily in her ear. I am not afraid. I am not afraid.

  She passed the goat.

  At the first possible moment, she dropped her hem and sprinted down the path. The thicket thinned out into a place where the trail wasn’t as clear, but she kept going, crashing through brittle twigs and dead undergrowth, prompting vivified birds to take wing. The corpses were poor fliers, dropping as swiftly as they’d risen. One splatted onto a boulder at the edge of the path, hard enough for the stitched-on soul to be shaken loose entirely in a shimmer of mist; the physical shell, without anything to vivify it, shrank in volume like a dried-up fruit.

  The faint trail turned abruptly into a long, empty clearing that stretched back toward the house. The vista had been created with brisk violence: every stubborn plant, whether still verdant or dormant for the season, had been uprooted and lay in careless, half-dried piles, revealing tough, rocky soil. A second path connecting to this space had been widened and its vegetation thoroughly trampled. Lindsome silently blessed the unseen gardener’s vigorous but futile work ethic and, slowing to a breathless, nervous walk, crossed the clearing. Despite the portending stink, there were no vivifieds in sight.

  But as the path resumed, the stench grew stronger yet. Rot and cloying sweetness clogged Lindsome’s nose so badly that her eyes watered and she breathed through her mouth. Young ladies remained calm and regal, Lindsome supposed, but they were also not stupid. Perhaps it was time to turn back.

  The path ended at a set of heavy double doors.

  To be truthful, a number of paths ended at these doors, with at least four distinct trails converging at the edges of the small, filth-caked patio. Lindsome imagined that her great-uncle, along with the unpleasant Chaswick, exited from these doors when making expeditions into the haunted thicket for the few live specimens that must remain. Do they only catch the old and injured, she wondered, or do they murder creatures in their prime, only to sew their souls right back on again?

  Lindsome tried the doors. They opened with ease.

  The revealed space was not some dingy mudroom or rear hall, as Lindsome had expected, but a room so wide, it could have served as a stable were it not for its low ceiling and unfinished back. Instead of meeting a rear wall, the flagstone floor disintegrated into irregular fragments and piled up onto a slope of earth.

  Three long tables ran down the center of the room to Lindsome’s right, the final one disappearing into the total blackness of the room’s far end. The tables were stone, their surfaces carved with deep grooves that terminated at the edges, above stained and waiting buckets.

  Melted candles spattered the tables’ surfaces. There were no windows.

  The stench of the place flowed outward like an icy draft. Lindsome left a door open behind her, held her nose, and took a step inside. Even when breathing through her mouth, the vivified odor was a soup of putrification that clotted at the back of her throat, thick enough to drip into her belly. The sensation was unendurable. Surely that was a stone staircase leading up over the unfinished back wall, into less offensive parts of the house?

  Three steps toward the staircase, Lindsome made the mistake of glancing behind her.

  The entire front wall, lined floor to ceiling with cages and bars, bore an unliving library of vivifieds, every creature too large for its pen. Stoats stood shoulder-to-shoulder with badgers and owls, and serpents had no room to uncurl in their tiny cubes. Rabbit fur commingled with hawk feathers. Paws tapped and noses twitched, and bodies lurched gently from side to side, but that great wall of shifting corpses, scales and hide and stripes, made no sound. Each rotting throat was silent.

  Three hundred pairs of eyes watched Lindsome, flashing yellow and green, white and red. She fell into a table, hitting her shoulder against the stone.

  Get up. Run away. She daren’t breathe. You silly fool. The ground was sloping outside. Remember? This is a basement.

  You cannot be here.

  A door squealed open. A trickle of light dribbled down the steps.

  Lindsome dove away from the table and behind the staircase’s concealing bulk.

  The door at the top opened fully. Candlelight flowed down the steps now, making hundreds of vivified eyes sparkle. “The sea lion, I think,” said a voice. It was papery and thin, like a flake of ash that would crumble at the barest touch. “At the far end.”

  “Really, Albion,” said Chaswick, stepping down onto the flagstones. He held high a five-branched candelabrum, his shadow stretching behind him. “We’re overpreparing, don’t you think?”

  “Oh no, not hardly.” An old, old man shuffled in Chaswick’s wake. His head, wreathed in a wispy halo of white and framed by sizeable ears, seemed bowed under the weight of constant thought across many decades. His knobby fingers would not stop undulating, like twin spiders in a restless sleep. “One last test, before Thursday. I’m certain that a Kell Stitch at the brain stem, instead of a Raymund, will surprise us.”

  Chaswick’s back heaved in a sigh. “I maintain that the original protocol would have sufficed. The first time around—”

  “I was lucky,” interrupted the man. “Very, very lucky. That ghastly knot was nothing but shaking hands and fortunate bungling. And besides—” He sighed, too, but instead of deflating, the exhalation appeared to lift him up. “Think of the advances, Chaswick. The discoveries I’ve made since then. How all these newer elements might work in concert—well. We cannot be too careful. I don’t have to tell you what’s at stake.”

  The two men moved into the blackness of the room’s far end. The candelabrum revealed that the distant third of the wall was hidden behind a heavy black curtain.

  “Of course, Doctor Dandridge,” said Chaswick.

  “The sea lion,” Dr. Dandridge repeated.

  Chaswick passed the candelabrum to his superior. When he turned to grip the curtain, Lindsome noticed what he was wearing.

  Waders?

  The curtain hissed partway aside upon its track. The candlelight fell upon tanks, tanks and tanks and tanks, each filled with an evil, yellowing liquid. Each held a shrunken animal corpse, embalmed. The lowest third of the wall was but a single tank, stretching back behind the half-closed curtain.

  A great, bloated shadow rolled within.

  Chaswick knelt by a tank on the second shelf, obscuring the monstrosity below. He fitted a length of rubber hose to a stopcock at the bottom of the tank, then ran the hose along the floor and out the open door. “Door’s blown loose again. That useless Thomlin—I’ve asked him to fix the latch thrice this week. I swear to Ghost, I’d stick him in one of the tanks myself if he weren’t a man and would leave behind anything more useful than ghostgrease.”

  Chaswick returned and opened the stopcock. The end of the hose, limp o
ver the edge of the patio, dribbled its foul load into the weeds. The large corpse within the tank settled to the bottom as it drained, a limp, matted mess. Chaswick did something to the glass to make it open outward, like the door to an oven.

  He gathered the dead thing to his chest and stood. Ichor ran in rivulets down his waders. “I don’t mean to rush you, but—”

  “Of course.” Candelabrum in tow, Dr. Dandridge shuffled back to the stairs. “I’ll do my best to hurry.”

  They ascended the steps, pulling the light with them and the squealing door shut.

  Lindsome fled outside. After that chamber of horrors, the sticking burdock, Raven’s Kiss, and cruel thorns of the sunlit world were the hallmarks of Paradise.

  At seven o’clock, some unseen, stentorian timepiece tolled the hour. Lindsome, who had elected to spend the rest of the afternoon in the library in a fort constructed from the oldest, fattest, dullest (and surely therefore safest) books she could find, reluctantly emerged to search for the dining room.

  The murmur of voices and clink of silverware guided her steps into a room on the first floor nearly large enough to be a proper banquet hall. Only the far end of the long table, near the wall abutting the kitchen, was occupied. A fire on the wall’s hearth cast the head of the table in shadow while illuminating Chaswick’s disdain.

  “You are late,” Chaswick said. “Don’t you know what they say about first impressions?”

  Lindsome slunk across the floor. “I’m sorry, Mister Chaswick.”

  From the shadows of a wingback chair, the master of the house leaned forward. “No matter,” said Dr. Dandridge. “Good evening. I am Professor Albion Edgarton Dandridge. Our meeting is well. Please pardon me for not arising; I’m an old man, and my bones grow reluctant, even at the welcome sight of a face so fresh and kind as yours.”

  Lindsome had not expected this. “I . . . thank you, sir.”

  “Uncle Albion will do. Come, sit, sit.”

  Opposite Chaswick, Lindsome pulled out her own massive chair with some difficulty, working it over the threadbare carpet in small scoots. “Thank you, sir. Our meeting is well.”

  Chaswick snorted. “Mind her, Doctor. She’s got a streak in her.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt it. Comes from my side.” The old man smiled at her. His teeth were surprisingly intact. “Are you making yourself at home, my dear?”

  Lindsome served herself a ladle-full of shapeless brown stew. “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t mumble,” said Chaswick, picking debris from his teeth with his fingernails. “It’s uncouth.”

  “I am delighted that you’re staying with us,” continued Dr. Dandridge. Outside of the nightmarish basement, he looked ordinary and gentle. His halo of hair, Lindsome now saw, wandered off his head into a pair of bedraggled dundrearies, and the fine wrinkles around his eyes made him look kind. His clothes were dusty and ill-fitting, tailored for a more robust man at least thirty years his junior. She could not imagine a less threatening person.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Uncle. I am dear old Uncle—” Dr. Dandridge coughed, a dry, wheezing sound, and put an embroidered handkerchief to his mouth. Chaswick nudged the old man’s water glass closer. “Albion,” he managed, taking a sip from the glass. “Thank you, Chaswick.”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “And how is your papa?”

  Lindsome did not want to think of him, arm in arm with Mama, strolling up the pier to the great boat and laughing, his long legs wavering under a film of tears. “He is very well, thank you.”

  “Excellent, excellent. And your mama?”

  “Also well.”

  “Good, good.” The doctor nibbled at his stew, apparently unfazed by its utter lack of flavor. “I trust that the staff have been kind, and have answered all of your questions.”

  “Well . . . ” Lindsome started, but Chaswick shot her a dangerous look. Lindsome fell silent.

  “Yes?” asked Dr. Dandridge, focused on teasing apart a gravy-smothered nodule.

  “I was wondering . . . ” dared Lindsome, but Chaswick’s face sharpened into a scowl. “ . . . about your work.”

  “Oh!” said Dr. Dandridge. His efforts on the nodule of stew redoubled. “My work. My great work! You are right to ask, young lady. It is always pleasing to hear that the youth of today have an interest in science. Young people are our future, you know.”

  “I—”

  “The work, of course, builds on the fundamentals of Wittard and Blacke from the thirties, going beyond the Skin Stitch and into the essential vital nodes. But unlike Havarttgartt and his school (and here’s the key, now), we don’t hold that the heart, brain, and genitals, aka the Life Triad, are the necessary fulcrums. We hold—that is, I hold—that is, Chaswick agrees, and he’s a very smart lad—we hold that a diversified architecture of fulcrums is key to extending the ambulatory period of a vivified, and we have extensive data to back this hypothesis, to the extent where we’ve produced a curve—a Dandridge curve, I call it, if I may be so modest, ha-ha—that illustrates the correlation between the number of fulcrums and hours of ambulatory function, and clearly demonstrates that while quality of fulcrums does indeed play a role, it is not nearly so prominent as the role of quantity. Or, in layman’s terms, if you stitch a soul silly to a corpse at every major mechanical joint—ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, wrists—you’ll still get a far better outcome than you would had you used a Butterfly Stitch to the heart itself! Can you imagine?”

  Lost, Lindsome stared at her plate. She could feel Chaswick’s smug gaze upon her, the awful look that grown-ups use when they want to say, Not so smart now, are you?

  “And furthermore,” Dr. Dandridge went on gaily, setting down his fork and withdrawing a different utensil from his pocket with which to attack his clump of stew, “we have discovered a hitherto unknown role of the Life Triad in host plasticity. Did Chaswick explain to you about our chimeras? The dogs with souls of finches, and the blackbirds with the souls of chipmunks, and in one exceptional case, the little red fox with the soul of a prize-winning hog? Goodness, was I proud of that one!” The old man laughed.

  Lindsome smiled weakly.

  “It is upon the brain, you see, not the heart,” Dr. Dandridge went on, “that the configuration, amount, and type of stitches are key, because—and this is already well known in the higher animals—a great deal of soul is enfleshed in the brain. You may think of the brain as a tiny little seed that floats in the center of every skull, but not so! When an animal is alive, the brain takes up the entire skull cavity. Can you imagine? Of course, the higher the animal, the more the overall corpse shrinks at the moment of death, aka soul separation, due to the soul composing a greater percentage of the creature. This is why Humankind (with its large and complex souls) leaves no deathhusk, or corpse, at all—nothing but a film of ghostgrease. Which, incidentally, popular doggerel will tell you is absent from the deathbeds of holy people, being that they are so very above their animal natures and are one hundred percent ethereal, but goodness, don’t get me started about all that ugsome rot.”

  Dr. Dandridge stopped. He frowned at his plate. “Good grief. What am I doing?”

  “A Clatham Stitch, looks like,” said Chaswick gently. “On your beef stew.”

  “Heavens!” Dr. Dandridge put down his utensil, which Lindsome could now see was an aetherhook. He removed what looked like a monocle made of cobalt glass from a breast pocket, then peered through it at his plate. “There weren’t any souls passing by just now, were there? The leycurrents are strong here in the early winter, dear Lindsome, and sometimes the departed souls of lesser creatures will blow into the house if we have the windows open. And when that happens—”

  The lump of beef quivered. Lindsome dropped her fork and clapped a hand to her mouth.

  From beneath the stew crawled a beetle, looking very put out.

  Dr. Dandridge and Chaswick burst into guffaws. “A beetle!” cried the old man. “A beetle in the stew! Oh, that is
precious, too precious for words! Oh, how funny!”

  Chaswick, laughing, looked to Lindsome, her eyes saucer-wide. “Oh, come now,” he said. “Surely you see the humor.”

  Dr. Dandridge wiped his eyes. The beetle, tracking tiny spots of stew, crawled off across the tablecloth at speed. “A beetle! Oh, mercy. Mercy me. Excuse us—that’s not a joke for a young lady at all. Forgive me, child—we’ve grown uncivilized out here, isolated as we are. A Clatham Stitch upon my stew, as if to vivify it! And then came a beetle—”

  Lindsome couldn’t take it anymore. She stood. “May I be excused?”

  “Already?” said Chaswick, still chuckling. “No more questions for your great-uncle, demonstrating your very thorough interest in and understanding of his work?”

  Lindsome colored beneath the increasing heat of her discomfort. This remark, on top of all else, was too much. “Oh, I understand a great deal. I understand that you can stitch a soul to an embalmed deathhusk instead of an unpreserved one—”

  Chaswick stopped laughing immediately.

  “—even though everybody knows that’s impossible,” said Lindsome.

  Chaswick’s eyes tightened in suspicion. Dr. Dandridge, unaware of the ferocity between their interlocked stares, sat as erect as his ancient bones would permit. “Why, that’s right! That’s absolutely right! You must have understood the implications of Bainbridge’s supplemental index in her report last spring!”