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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  “I heard it around. It’s common knowledge, Mom. I was helping Tucker and Hendricks get an acetylene bottle into the back of his rig.”

  She hasn’t heard this tale of massacre. Of course, she hasn’t made many friends in town. At least Mark is coming out of his shell. Despite the black duds and surly demeanor, he enjoys company, especially that of adults. Good thing since there are only half a dozen kids his age in the area. She’s noticed him mooning after a girl named Lilly. It seems pretty certain the pair are carrying on a rich, extracurricular social life via Skype and text . . .

  “Working on English?” She sets aside her magazine and nods at his pile of textbooks and papers. “Need any help?”

  He shrugs.

  “C’mon. Watch ya got?”

  “An essay,” he says. “Mrs. Chandler asked us to write five hundred words on what historical figure we’d invite to dinner.”

  “Who’d you pick? Me, I’d go with Cervantes, or Freud. Or Vivien Leigh. She was dreamy.”

  “Jack the Ripper.”

  “Oh . . . That’s nice.”

  A young, famous journalist drives to a rural home in Upstate New York. The house rests alone near the end of a lane. A simple rambler painted red with white trim. Hills and woods begin at the backyard. This is late autumn and the sun is red and gold as it comes through the trees. Just cool enough that folks have begun to put the occasional log into the fireplace, so the crisp air smells of applewood and maple.

  He and the woman who is the subject of his latest literary endeavor sip lemonade and regard the sky and exchange pleasantries. An enormous pit bull suns itself on the porch a few feet from where the interview occurs. Allegedly, the dog is attack-trained. It yawns and farts.

  The journalist finds it difficult not to stare at the old lady’s throat where a scar cuts, so vivid and white, through the dewlapped flesh. He is aware that in days gone by his subject used to camouflage the wound with gypsy scarves and collared shirts. Hundreds of photographs and she’s always covered up.

  Mrs. Jessica Mace Goldwood knows the score. She drags on her Camel No. 9 and winks at him, says once her tits started hitting her in the knees she gave up vanity as a bad business. Her voice is harsh, only partially restored after a series of operations. According to the data, she recently retired from training security dogs. Her husband, Gerry Goldwood, passed away the previous year. There are no children or surviving relatives on record.

  “Been a while since anybody bothered to track me down,” she says. “Why the sudden interest? You writing a book?”

  “Yeah,” the journalist says. “I’m writing a book.”

  “Huh. I kinda thought there might be a movie about what happened at the Estate. A producer called me every now and again, kept saying the studio was ‘this close’ to green-lighting the project. I was gonna make a boatload of cash, and blah, blah, blah. That was, Jesus, twenty years ago.” She exhales a stream of smoke and studies him with a shrewd glint in her eyes. “Maybe I shoulda written a book.”

  “Maybe so,” says the journalist. He notices, at last, a pistol nestled under a pillow on the porch swing. It is within easy reach of her left hand. His research indicates she is a competent shot. The presence of the gun doesn’t make him nervous—he has, in his decade of international correspondence, sat among war chiefs in Northern Pakistan, and ridden alongside Taliban fighters in ancient half-tracks seized from Russian armored cavalry divisions. He has visited Palestine and Georgia and seen the streets burn. He thinks this woman would be right at home with the hardest of the hard-bitten warriors he’s interviewed.

  “Life is one freaky coincidence, ain’t it though?” She stares into the woods. Her expression is mysterious. “Julie Vellum died last week. Ticker finally crapped out.”

  “Julie Vellum . . . ” He scans his notes. “Right. She cashed in big time. Author of how many bestselling New Age tracts? Friend of yours?”

  “Nah, I despised the bitch. She’s the last, that’s all. Well, there’s that guy who did psychedelic music for a while. He’s in prison for aggravated homicide. Got involved with a cult and did in some college kids over in Greece. Can’t really count him, huh? I’m getting sentimental in my dotage. Lonely.”

  “Lavender McGee. He’s not in prison. They transferred him to an institution for the criminally insane. He gets day passes if you can believe it.”

  “The fuck is this world coming to? What is it you wanna ask me?”

  “I have one question for you.”

  “Just one?” Her smile is amused, but sharp. It has been honed by a grief that has persisted for more than the latter half of her long life.

  “Just one.” He takes a small recorder from his shirt pocket, clicks a button, and sets it on the table between them. “More than one, of course. But this one is the biggie. Are you ready?”

  “Sure, yeah. I’m ready.”

  “Mrs. Goldwood, why are you alive?”

  Wind moves the trees behind the house. A flurry of red and brown leaves funnel across the yard, smack against the cute skirting. A black cloud covers the sun and hangs there. The temperature plummets. Gravel crunches in the lane.

  The dog growls, and is on its feet, head low, mouth open to bare many, many teeth. The fur on its back is standing in a ridge. It is Cerberus’s very own pup.

  “Oh, motherfucker,” says Jessica Mace Goldwood. She’s got the revolver in her hand, hammer cocked. Her eyes blaze with a gunfighter’s fire as she half crouches, elbows in tight, knees wide. “It’s never over with these sonsofbitches.”

  “What’s happening?” The journalist has ducked for cover, hands upraised in the universal sign of surrender. “Jesus H., lady! Don’t shoot me!” He glances over his shoulder and sees a man in the uniform of a popular parcel delivery service slamming the door of a van and roaring away in a cloud of smoking rubber.

  “Aw, don’t fret. Me and Atticus just don’t appreciate those delivery guys comin’ around,” she says. The pit bull snarls and throws himself down at her feet. She uncocks the revolver and tucks it into the waistband of her track pants. ”So, young man. Where were we?”

  He wipes his face and composes himself. In a hoarse voice he says, “I guess what happened in Alaska doesn’t let go.”

  “Huh? Don’t be silly—I smoked that psycho. Nah, I hate visitors. You’re kinda cute, so I made an exception. Besides, you’re gonna pay me for this story, kiddo.”

  He tries for a sip of lemonade and ice rattles in the empty glass. His hand trembles. She pats his arm and takes the glass inside for a refill. Atticus follows on her heel. The journalist draws a breath to steady himself. He switches off the recorder. A ray of sun burns through the clouds and spotlights him while the rest of the world blurs into an impressionistic watercolor. A snowflake drifts down from outer space and freezes to his cheek.

  She returns with a fresh glass of lemonade to find the journalist slumped in the lawn chair. Someone has placed an ancient state trooper’s hat on his head and tilted it so that the man’s face is partially covered. The crown of the hat is matted with dried gore that has, with the passing decades, indelibly stained the fabric. A smooth, vertical slice begins at the hollow of his throat and continues to belt level. His intestines are piled beneath his trendy hiking shoes. His ears lie upon the table. Steam rises from the corpse.

  Atticus growls at the odors of shit and blood.

  Jessica gazes at him in amazement. “Goddamnit, dog. Now you growl. Thanks a heap.” She notices a wet crimson thumbprint on the recorder. She sighs and lights another cigarette and presses PLAY. Comes the static-inflected sound of wind rushing across ice, of snow shushing against tin, of arctic darkness and slow, sliding fog. Fire crackles in the background. These sounds have crept across the span of forty years.

  A voice, garbled and muted by interference, whispers, “Jessica, we need to know. Why are you alive?” Snow and wind fill a long gap. Then, “Did you cut your own throat? Did you? Are you dead, Jessica? Are you dead, or are you playing? How muc
h longer do you think you have?” Nothing but static after that, and the tape ends.

  Intuition tells her that the journalist didn’t file a plan with his network, that he rolled into the boondocks alone, that when he doesn’t arrive at the office on Monday morning it will be a fulfillment of the same pattern he’s followed countless times previously. The universe won’t skip a beat. A man such as he has enemies waiting in the woodwork, ready to wrap him in a carpet and take him far away. It will be a minor unsolved mystery that his colleagues have awaited since his first jaunt into a war-torn region in the Middle East.

  She can’t decide whether to call the cops or hide the body, roll the rental car into a ditch somewhere and torch it. Why, yes, Officer, the young fellow was here for a while the other day. Missing? Oh, dear, that’s terrible . . .

  “Jack?” she says to the hissing leaves. Her hand is at her neck, caressing the scar that defines her existence. “Nate? Are you out there?”

  The sun sets and night is with her again.

  Three years, six months, and fifteen days before Dolly Sammerdyke is eviscerated and dropped down a mineshaft, where her bones rest to this very day, she tells her brother Tom she’s moving from Fairbanks to Eagle Talon. She’s got an in with a woman who keeps the books at a shipping company and there’s an opening for an on-site clerk. Tom doesn’t like it. He lived in the village during a stretch in the 1980s when his luck was running bad.

  “Listen, kid. It’s a bum deal.”

  “Not as if I have a better option,” she says.

  “Bad place, sis.”

  “Yeah? What’s bad about it? The people?”

  “Bad people, sure. Bad neighborhood, bad history. Only one place to live in Eagle Talon. Six-floor apartment building. Ginormus old tenement. Dark, drafty, creepy as shit. It’s a culture thing. People there are weird and clannish. You’ll hate it.”

  “I’ll call you every week.”

  Dolly calls Tom every week until her death. He doesn’t miss her calls at first because he’s landed a gig as a luthier in Nashville and his new girlfriend, an aspiring country and western musician, commands all of his attention these days.

  Did the Final Girl do it? Was it this person or that? You can only laugh at the preposterousness of such conceits. You can only weep. As the omniscient narrator of some antique fairy tale once declaimed: Fool! Rub your eyes and look again!

  You will never die—nothing does.

  From the journal of Nathan E. Custer as transcribed from the original text by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Anchorage:

  I’ve never told anyone the whole truth about Moose Valley, or this recurring dream I’ve suffered in the following years. Probably not a dream; more of a vision. Nonetheless, for clarity’s sake, we’ll go with it being a dream. The dream has two parts. The first part is true to life, a memory of events with the tedious details edited from the narrative.

  In the true-to-life part of the dream, Michael Allen and I are playing dominoes in the dim kitchen of my old place in Moose Valley. I’d seen him standing in the yard, a ghostly shape in the darkness, and had invited him to come out of the weather without thinking to ask why he was lurking.

  It is fall of ’93, around four in the morning. He’s winning, he always wins at these games—pool, checkers, cards, dominoes— although everybody likes him anyway.

  Allen has only been in town for a few months. An ex-Army guy, so he’s capable, with an easy smile and a wry wit. Long hair, but kempt. Keeps to himself for the most part in a one-room cottage by the river. He’s passionate about Golden Age comic books and the poetry of James Dickey. I was in the cottage for maybe five minutes once. Dude kept it to a minimum and neat as you please. Gun oil scent, although no guns in view. Yeah.

  He pockets my last eleven dollars with a shrug and an apologetic grin. Says, Thanks for the game, and pulls on his orange sock cap and stands. I turn away to grab a beer from the icebox, hair of the dog that bit me, and the bullet passes through my skull above my ear and I’m on the floor, facedown. He squeezes the trigger again and I hear the hammer snap, a dud in the chamber. Or he hadn’t reloaded from slaughtering the Haden family across the street. We’ll never know. Anyway, I’m unblinking, unresponsive, paralyzed, so he leaves me for dead. The front door slams and sunlight creeps across the tiles and makes the spreading blood shiny.

  The second part of the dream is a fantasy cobbled and spliced from real events. I have a disembodied view of everything that happens next.

  Allen slips down to the launch and steals a rubber raft. He lets the flow carry him downstream. He’s packed sandwiches and beer, and has a small picnic. God, it’s a beautiful day. The mountain peaks are white with fresh snow, but the lower elevations are yet green and gold. The air is brisk, only hinting at the bitter chill to come. A beaver circles the raft, occasionally slapping the water with its tail. The crack is like a gunshot. Allen chuckles and scans the eggshell-blue sky from behind a pair of tinted aviator glasses.

  The current gradually picks up as it approaches a stretch of falls and rapids. A black dot detaches from the sun and drops toward the earth. Allen unlimbers the 30.06 bolt-action rifle he’s stowed under a blanket. His balance is uncertain and the first round pings harmlessly through the fuselage of the police chopper. He ejects the empty and sights again, cool as the ice on the mountains, and this will be a kill shot. The SWAT sniper is a hair quicker and Allen is knocked from the raft. He plunges into the water and sinks instantly. The raft zips over the falls and is demolished.

  A sad, tragic case closes.

  The fact is, Allen survives for a few minutes. He is a tough, passionless piece of work, a few cells short of Homo sapiens status, and that helps him experience a brutal and agonizing last few moments on the mortal plane. He is sucked into a vortex and wedged under and between some rocks where he eventually suffocates and drowns. This is a remote and dangerous area. The cops never recover the body.

  Small fish nibble away his fingers, then his face, then the rest of it.

  Laird Barron was born and raised in Alaska, did time in the wilderness, and raced in several Iditarods. Later, he migrated to Washington State where he devoted himself to American Combato and reading authors like Robert B. Parker, James Ellroy, and Cormac McCarthy. At night he wrote tales that combined noir, crime, and horror. He was a 2007 and 2010 Shirley Jackson Award winner for his collections The Imago Sequence and Other Stories and Occultation and Other Stories and a 2009 nominee for his novelette “Catch Hell.” Other award nominations include the Crawford Award, Sturgeon Award, International Horror Guild Award, World Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award, and the Locus Award. His first novel, The Croning, was published in 2012; his latest collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, was published last year. Barron currently resides in Upstate New York and is writing a novel about the evil that men do.

  “You know what it’s like—they’ve got me on a clock back at the office.

  Can we get back to this Banshee you mentioned?”

  POSTCARDS FROM ABROAD

  Peter Atkins

  The house was nothing special, just another Liverpool semi-detached, one of those blink-and-there’ll-be-ten-more-of-the-fuckers types of places. If you don’t have a Granny who lives in one, you’ve got a mate who does, know what I mean?

  There were a lot of them strung along the half-mile drag of Woolton Road as it fled Wavertree for pastures snootier, most of them dating from the dull and deco-free end of the nineteen-thirties. This one hadn’t even kept the stained glass fanlights that were one of the few things that gave them any character at all, but at least it didn’t have a name—you know, Dunroamin or something equally witty—so there was that.

  I rang the bell and waited and, eventually, the front door swung open. The look that the little old lady in the hall gave me once she’d blinked away the glare of the sunlight was neither suspicious nor welcoming, just mildly surprised as if she thought her life had long ago run out of visitors.

  “Morni
n’, luv,” I said. “I’m from the Council.” Which is lower middle class for Open Sesame.

  “Oh,” she said, as if already worried she’d done something wrong. “You’d better come in.”

  She stepped back, ushering me past her into the hall. It was narrow, of course, and made narrower halfway down its length by the stairs that led up to the bedrooms. I stopped before reaching any of the doors to the downstairs rooms and turned back to her, figuring I needed to do me bit for civic responsibility. “You know,” I said. “You really should ask to see some identification before you let someone in your house.”

  “Why?” she said. “Are you a murderer?” Very deadpan. Not even a twinkle in the eyes. I liked her.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not a murderer.”

  “And you’ve not come to read the meter, have you?”

  “I’ve not, luv. No.”

  “Then you must have come about the Banshee,” she said. “Kettle’s boiling. Go and sit down.”

  I hadn’t reckoned to be out in the field when the day’d started. Morning had found me down by the Pier Head getting slapped around by a nasty wind off the Mersey as I made my way to the Liver Buildings.

  Like a lot of government jobs these days, mine didn’t really need me to show up at the office—even the paperwork can be done via telecommute and, given the nature of the department, anything that didn’t draw attention to our existence was considered a score—but I’d been told to come in for a face-to-face with a visiting Higher Grade up from London.

  We’re on the seventh floor of the Liver Buildings and, while there’s no specific rule about not using the big flashy main entrance that fronts the river, the standing policy is keep your fucking heads down whenever possible and so we’re encouraged to enter through one of the various smaller side entrances, all of which have the benefit of relative anonymity. I like the one opposite the India Buildings because there’s a lift right the other side of it that doesn’t get as stop and starty as those in the main bank in the front lobby.