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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  Scores of waiting eyes watched her.

  The wall of bodies began to moan, hundreds of bastard vocalizations from bastardized throats that had long ago forgotten how to speak. Pulpy flesh surged forward against bars and railings, jaws unhinging, the sound rising like the discordant sirens of an army from the Abyss.

  Beneath them, Lindsome began a keening of her own, tiny and devoid of reason.

  She did not know how she stepped to that far corner, where the future nightmares waited, but step she did, into a forest of burning candles. Some had toppled over onto the floor, frozen in sprays of wax. Some had melted into puddles, now aflame. The plentiful light showed all the tanks and that long, black curtain pulled fully back.

  The giant tank on the bottom, as long as two men laid end to end, was drained, empty, and open.

  The moaning grew. Lindsome’s keening grew into a wail, though she could not hear it, only watch as her feet pointed her around and sent her across the basement and up the stone steps.

  The door at the top was already open.

  Lindsome’s wail squeezed down into words, screamed loud enough to tear her throat as thorns will tear a dress. “Uncle Albion!”

  Someone emitted a distant, ringing scream.

  Lindsome couldn’t breathe. She stumbled through the first floor, gasping, her uncle’s name a mere whisper on her wide-open lips.

  She found a door that Chaswick had forbidden, the door to the other basement-cum-laboratory. Or rather, she found the space where the door should have been. Both door and molding had been torn away.

  The steps led down into pure blackness.

  “Uncle,” Lindsome gasped. Outside, lightning flickered, and Lindsome saw four steps down. Dark smears daubed the floorboards. Further within, the glitter of metal and broken glass.

  A bloody handprint on the wall.

  The scream came again, an animalistic screech of distilled and mortal terror. Lindsome backed away from the stairs. Her legs quaked too much to run now.

  She walked to the grand staircase. A painful flash of lightning illuminated the entire house—the puddles of ichor through which Lindsome trod, the monstrous gouges in the wood and wallpaper on either side of her, the gaslamps torn from their mounts.

  The mental image of a tiny fist, its knuckles bumping the inside of a tank as long as two men laid end to end.

  Lindsome found Chaswick on the staircase. He had ended up like the billy goat outside, his stomach torn open, his entrails tangled in the shattered spindles of the banister.

  “Linds . . . ” One of his hands, slimy and bright, pawed at the banister.

  She stared at him.

  “Up . . . ” Chaswick whispered. “Up . . . ” His head twitched in the direction of the second floor. “If you . . . love . . . then up . . . ”

  Lindsome’s head nodded. “Yes, Mister Chaswick,” her mouth said.

  His gaze clouded. The room flickered, as if under a second touch of lightning, and the pools of blood below him flashed into a sizzle.

  Lindsome blinked, and Chaswick was gone. In his place, a pile of clothing lay tossed against the spindles, commingled with heavy black ghostgrease.

  Somehow, Lindsome was running.

  Sprinting, even. Up the stairs. “Uncle Albion!” she cried, and realized that she could speak again, too. Yet again, Lindsome heard that scream, that inhuman terror.

  “Albion!” someone else called. Emlee, the gaunt old housekeeper. Third floor. The devastation continued up the staircase.

  “Get out!” Her uncle. Alive. “Go!”

  “No—not when—” A crash.

  “Run, damn your miserable old hide! If ever you loved me as I loved you, Albion, then run!”

  And that scream. That Ghost-forsaken scream.

  Lindsome ran, up and up and out, tripping over shredded carpet, torn-down paintings, shattered vases and urns. From around a corner came a ghastly crunch, then booms and bangs, the sound of something mighty hurtling down a staircase.

  “No, Marilda!”

  Lindsome rounded the corner. The servants’ staircase lay before her, walls half-ripped asunder, ichor on the steps.

  Lindsome took them one flight down. At the bottom lay the housekeeper’s clothes, black with ghostgrease.

  “Uncle!” Lindsome wailed. “Uncle, where are you? We have to hide!”

  His bedroom. Outside in the hall. Uncle Albion’s door was open.

  So was the door next to his, the one that had looked rusted shut.

  The stench inside was unspeakable. Lindsome fell to the carpet and vomited, despite her empty stomach, hard enough for bile to dribble over her lips. Vivified. An ark of freshly vivified. They had to be stacked to the ceiling, packed like earth in a grave.

  But when she looked up, all she saw were briars.

  Roses. Thousands upon thousands of roses. Fresh, dried, rotting, trampled, entire bushes of them, as though a giant had uprooted them and brought them in here.

  They were woven into a gigantic nest.

  In the center sat Thomlin. His eyes were rolled up, showing nothing but white. He grasped his knees to his chest and rocked, like all those windblown, yawning doors, moaning like that wall of rotting flesh. A frothy river of drool dribbled down his chin.

  Lindsome did not speak to him. It was clear that Thomlin would never speak again.

  The siren song of that inhuman scream rang out, and Lindsome ran out into the hall. She called her uncle’s name, shouted it, even, but received no answer.

  She ran into his room, searching. The knobs of a rope ladder lay bolted into his windowsill.

  “Uncle!” Lindsome peered over the sill. The ladder still wobbled from a recent descent, trailing down into a tight copse of saplings. Lindsome scrambled down. “Uncle Albion! Wait!”

  Lightning cut her shadow from the air. The boom that answered split the sky, a rolling bang that made Lindsome squeal and cover her ears. In seconds, its echoes vanished under static, the sound of a million gallons pouring down. Lindsome was immediately soaked. The tatters of her dress slapped at her legs as she ran, and so heavy was the downpour, Lindsome couldn’t see.

  The path became slick. Lindsome slipped and went sprawling, face-first, and a fallen branch tore a gash in her arm. Lindsome screamed and rolled aside, curling around her wound, blinded by rain and tears.

  Get up.

  The thing will get you. Get up!

  Weeping, squeezing her arm, Lindsome struggled to her feet. She stumbled along a trough of mud. She ripped off a strip of her soaked dress and tried to tie it around her wound to protect it.

  A vivified hunting dog lumbered past, Cook’s sodden apron hanging from its jaws.

  The sky lit up again, illuminating a great gash in the thicket. Uprooted plants, unearthed rocks, and crushed branches paved the way. How dare anyone keep working in the shadow of such horrors? Lindsome yelled for her uncle, for the gardener, for someone and anyone as she stumbled down that fresh avenue, arm throbbing and poorly tied scrap of dress soaking through with red.

  No creature hindered her. The fleeing vivifieds had disappeared.

  Instead came roses. Thicker and thicker still, the tangled walls burst with roses, like puddles of gore on a battlefield. She moved in a forest of them, boughs bending to enclose the path overhead, their stink so strong not even the downpour could erase it. It was black beneath the boughs, black and dripping. Torn-off petals dribbled down between the branches, sticking to her hair, her hands, her face.

  The tunnel turned and opened.

  Not even the looming branches of this deadly forest could cover a space so large. The clearing was a pit of trampled thorns and bowed-in walls, canes of briars thrashing in the gusts, petals smeared everywhere like a violent snowfall. It stank of roses and death, water and undeath, and though naked sky arced above this grove of wreckage, the light was not strong enough for Lindsome to understand the pair of shapes that waited at the far end.

  But then the lightning came.

  It
s brilliance bore down, and Lindsome understood even less, though what she saw burned itself into her vision with the force of a dying sun. One was large, impossibly large. A mountain of fur and rot, waiting on trunk-thick limbs, bearing eyes that knew—even if the throat could not speak, even if those ghastly hands could not move with the mastery and grace that memory still begged for.

  And one was small. The size of two men, laid end to end.

  Lindsome did not know that she kept screaming. There was only feeling, a single feeling of eclipsing terror so hot she felt her own soul struggling to tear free. The pain in her arm disappeared. She felt neither cold nor wet. Only this searing moment, as the small one rolled in its nest of thorns and flailed, as though its soul had never learned to walk.

  The mountain of rot took a step forward, until it towered protectively over the wriggling thing below.

  It reached out a hand toward Lindsome.

  The eclipse reached totality. Lindsome went down, her heartbeat a ringing roar.

  “Miss?”

  Something struck the front of her thighs with brisk force. Lindsome grunted.

  “Miss?”

  “Leave her. She’s a woodcutter’s child, innit? Girl a’ the woods?”

  “In woods like these? Not on yer hat. An’ look at her bleedin’ arm, ye piece-wit. That’s no small hurt. Miss?”

  Lindsome opened her eyes. She was lying on her side in the sodden leaves, at the edge of a nameless road. The earth smelled good, of dirt and wind and water, and the branches of the bare trees overhead swayed and knocked in the bleak sunshine.

  Two men stood over her, one holding the reins of a pair of horses. The other held a staff, with which he rapped Lindsome’s thighs again.

  Lindsome’s eyes went to the horses. They were the horses of poor men, witless, subpar animals bought for cheap with zero cost of upkeep: vivifieds.

  Lindsome began to cry.

  One of the men mounted, and the other placed Lindsome at his comrade’s back. She clung to his coat and sobbed as they rode out of the deserted wood.

  They asked her questions, but Lindsome did not answer. They rode to the low town of Hume and deposited her on the steps of the orphanage, where kinder, cleaner, better-dressed men and women asked her the same things, but Lindsome only wept. She did not protest when they steered her inside, bathed her, tended her arm, dressed her in worn but clean things, and gave her a bowl of oatmeal and honey. She hardly ate half before falling dead asleep at the table, and barely noticed when a pair of strong, gentle arms lifted her up and placed her upon a cot.

  The streets of Hume were buried in the snow of the new year before Lindsome spoke a single word.

  She had to tell them something. So Lindsome, in the course of explaining who she was and that she did in fact have living parents who might someday appear to fetch her, decided to say that the household of her Great-Uncle Albion had succumbed to a foolish but gruesome accident. He had planned to perform a stitching experiment on a pack of wolves that were not yet dead, Lindsome claimed, and the rest of the household, making heated bets on whether this holy grail of vivology was in fact possible to obtain, had gathered in the laboratory to watch. Lindsome had been spared from the ensuing tragedy because she did not care about the bet and had been playing outside, alone. The constable’s men, who went to Apsis House to investigate as soon as the spring thaw came, found evidence to corroborate her story. The interior of Apsis House was torn apart, as if indeed by a pack of infuriated wolves, and not a trace of anyone living could be found.

  The spring after that, Lindsome’s parents returned, refreshed from travel but baffled and scornful of the personal and legal complications that had evolved in their absence. At the conclusion of the affair, the judge gave them the property deed to Apsis House. They wanted to know what on Earth they were supposed do with such a terribly located, wolf-infested wreck, and told Lindsome that she would have it, when she came of age.

  The day she did, Lindsome attempted to sell it, but nobody could be persuaded to buy. She couldn’t even give it away. The deed finally sat unused in a drawer in her dressing table, in a far-away city in her far-away grown-up life, next to the tin of cosmetic power she used to cover up a long, ugly scar upon her arm. Her husband, to whom she never told the entire truth, agreed that the property was probably worthless, and never suggested that they visit Long Hill or take any action regarding Apsis House’s restoration. Nor did their three daughters, once they were grown enough to be told the family legends about mad Uncle Albion, and old enough to understand that some things are best left where they fall.

  And besides—now that Lindsome knew what it was to have and love a child, she couldn’t bear to interrupt what might still move up there, within that blooming forest of thorns. If they were both intact, still, the least Lindsome could do was give them their peace; and if they were not, Lindsome could not bear the thought of finding one of them alone, endlessly screaming that desperate, lonely scream, until however long it took for Albion’s sturdy handiwork to unravel.

  As Chaswick had said, Uncle Albion was a brilliant man.

  It could take a very long time.

  KJ Kabza has sold over fifty stories to venues such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nature, Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Buzzy Mag, Flash Fiction Online, and many more. He’s been anthologized in The Best Horror of the Year, The Best of Every Day Fiction, and The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. For updates on and free fiction, follow him on Twitter @KJKabza and peruse www.kjkabza.com.

  It was only once he left the Lagoon that he realized how

  good he’d had it there . . . the murky bottom where he’d nested

  among the drifting fronds of plants . . . the hidden

  channel that led to his underground lair . . .

  THE CREATURE RECANTS

  Dale Bailey

  During breaks in shooting, the Creature from the Black Lagoon usually rests in a pond on the studio back lot and dreams of home. The pond isn’t much even as ponds go. It’s maybe four feet deep at its deepest point and a hundred yards or so around, an abandoned set carved out of the scorched southern California earth for some forgotten film or other: cattails and reeds and occasionally a little arrow of ripples when a dry breeze skates across the surface. Not even a fish if he’s feeling peckish. Which he often is. The catering is suspect at the best of times, and it’s even more so when you’re accustomed to a diet of raw fish and turtle flesh prized living from the shell.

  This is Hollywood.

  “Don’t expect too much,” Karloff had advised him over sushi not long after he’d arrived, full of ambition and optimism, and Lugosi, strung out on morphine and methadone by the time the Creature made the scene, had been even more blunt. “They vill fuck you every time,” he’d said in that thick Hungarian accent. The both of them typecast by their most famous roles. The Creature had assumed he could beat the odds, but on those blazing afternoons in the pond, now and again scooping up handfuls of water to moisten his gills, he’d begun to reconsider. The water was unkind, perpetually casting his reflection back at him: the bald, barnacle-encrusted skull, the eyes sunk beneath shelves of armored bone, the frills of tissue encasing the gills around his neck. Not what you would call leading-man material.

  To think, he’d once been the king of his little world—the vast, dark Lagoon, overhung with the boughs of enormous trees, and the mighty Amazon itself, where anacondas slithered through the algae-clotted water, caiman slid into the flood without a splash, their tails lashing, and catfish the size of Chevrolets trolled the mossy bottom. Not to mention the jungle, humid, rank, and festering, clamorous with the chitinous roar of millions of insects. And here he was in southern California instead, spending his days in waist-deep water and sleeping his nights in an oversized bathtub in a crummy apartment.

  Such are the Creature’s thoughts when a member of the crew—it’s Bill, a gopher who’s trying to break into the
biz as a lighting tech—walks down to the pond to tell him that Jack’s finished setting up the next shot. It’s time for the Creature to come back up to the set and stagger around the deck of the Rita—not even a real boat, just a cheap mock-up in one of the soundstages on the Universal lot—and menace Julie Adams for another hour or so. She’s a real scream queen, Julie, the genuine article, but she’s nice enough in real life; she even walks down to the pond to chat once in a while between set-ups. They’re all nice enough. Even Jack’s okay, though he’s always badgering the Creature to focus on his motivation when the Creature has enough trouble just hitting his marks. To tell the truth, the Creature’s heart isn’t in it anymore, but he’s signed a deal with Universal, and his agent—who rarely returns his calls anyway—tells him there’s no way to break the contract.

  So the Creature hauls himself out of the pond, and tramps back up to the soundstage, trying not to think about the fact that he could decapitate Bill with a single stroke of his taloned hand. Trying not to think that at some level he wants to.

  It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.

  You never know happiness until it’s gone, that’s the way the Creature figures it. The present always seems like a mess. It was only once he left the Lagoon that he realized how good he’d had it there. In Hollywood, he recalls its dark waters with longing. Sometimes at night, his head pillowed on the bottom of his brimming bathtub and his webbed feet slung over either side to brush the peeling vinyl floor, he even dreams of it. How perfect it seems now, the murky bottom where he’d nested for hours among the drifting fronds of plants he cannot name and the hidden channel that led to his rocky underground lair. Armored with scales and impervious to jaguar and piranha alike, the Creature had hunted both the overgrown shores and the black fathoms, snatching spider monkeys screaming from their roosts and feasting on the great fish that slipped through the Lagoon’s sulfurous depths. He recalls even his isolation with melancholy regret. What had seemed like loneliness—he’d never known another of his kind—now seemed like autonomy, and when the boat that spelled his expulsion from paradise had first steamed into the lagoon he had approached it with a curiosity that now seemed like folly.