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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  And Father Keene had looked over at you, you sitting in the corner with your face hidden in shadows, and had felt in his heart that what they said was the truth, and he had thought, wouldn’t it be a shame to bring scandal and more suffering to this family?

  But your Nan hadn’t been out of her head at all. All you had to do to see that was to look into the covered pail where her candle still burned, or to search in vain for the heartbeat that used to pulse under your left breast. Your Nan hadn’t hanged herself because she was out of her mind with grief.

  Your Nan had hanged herself for this: so that this night you could dance a breakdown on The Eagle’s crystal platform, so that you could put your arm through Annie’s and watch the sun come up, knowing that she and the others were going to be all right, maybe. That when she’d told her man, Mick O’Dell, lived over a few streets and worked on the docks, that she was expecting, he’d told her to set the date just as soon she could.

  But you aren’t going to hang around for the wedding. Nothing less lucky than a corpse at a wedding, even one that can dance.

  You and Annie watch the sun rise from the churchyard at Saints Michael and Mary. You have one arm through hers, and in the other, you hold the pail with the candle inside, still burning, and a small bottle of milk.

  Just a bit, you figure, to dowse the candle, and then the rest for Annie to drink, for the coming babby, and you’ll do it yourself. No need to make a murderer out of Annie, no matter her offer, and then you’ll follow your Nan to perdition, so she won’t be without family to help her in her trials.

  You and Annie turn and walk slowly and a bit unsteadily (the worse for drink, both of you) through the churchyard, toward the freshly filled-in grave of your Nan. There’s a small headstone, just her name, Bridget O’Hea, and the years, 1827-1888. You’d been there yesterday to lay flowers. Other than the pink and yellow wildflowers you’d picked on Hampstead Heath, already wilting and going brown by the time you placed them on the grave, there had been nothing.

  But now the flowers you laid yesterday are not wilted at all. They’ve taken root and are blooming. You give them a gentle tug to make sure they’re real, not a trick.

  You and Annie clutch at each other’s waists as you watch an honest-to-God oak tree sprout from the grave, from sapling to full grown in an instant, with a rich canopy of leaves, wreathed in mistletoe. You step forward and run your hand across the rough bark. A large snake coils around the trunk of the oak, several times, and the thing must be yards long.

  You stare for a moment before turning to look at Annie, to see if she’s seeing what you are, or if what is left of your brain is playing tricks on you.

  She steps forward and plucks a leaf from the oak and holds it to her lips in wonder.

  The snake turns its head to look at you, and you find yourself looking into your Nan’s eyes.

  You blink and the snake, the oak, and the mistletoe are gone, but the flowers you brought are still growing from the grave soil. After a moment’s pause, you meet Annie’s eyes and step carefully onto your Nan’s grave.

  You settle yourself against the headstone, and Annie sits next to you. You take the candle, still held in your Nan’s left hand and set it on the ground and pass the bottle of milk to Annie. She begins to pry the cork loose, but you still her hand.

  Instead, you slide the fingers of your Nan’s hand back, and they uncurl as smoothly and gracefully as barley bending in the wind. The candle slips free.

  It begins to burn in earnest then, guttering and smoking like the cheap tallow that it is, but burning more quickly than any candle should have a right to, as if making up for lost time. You have ten, maybe fifteen minutes, at the rate it is going.

  Annie takes your hand, and together you watch the candle burn down.

  Near the end, her grip on your hand tightens, and you close your eyes.

  We have remaining to us two photographs, and only two photographs, of the striking Bryant and May matchworkers. The second photograph is more formal. It is of the official strike committee, and the women in it have done their hair and put on their Sunday best. They are arrayed across a stage, carefully posed in chairs. They seem confident, proud, intent.

  But the first photograph is the more interesting one. It is of seven women standing in front of the Bryant and May factory. Their faces are gaunt, taut, and serious. More than one look a bit dazed, as if unsure of what they have done and what future it will bring them.

  This photograph is famous now. More than that, it has become a symbol of working-class courage and resolve, displayed in the windows of London union offices.

  Two of the seven women have almost certainly been identified by recent scholarship.

  At the leftmost edge of the photo stands a woman half cut out of the picture. We see her left arm, the left half of her body, and most of her head, which she must have turned toward the camera. She is wearing a velvet hat, like some of the other women, and has a fringe of straight hair reaching almost down to where her eyes should be. Her face is nearly impossible to make out. It is a blur. Perhaps she moved as the photograph was being taken, though nothing else is blurred, not her hat, not her hand, not the scarf knotted around her neck, not a hair of her fringe.

  The original print, now lost, belonged to John Burns, the leader of the dockworkers’ strike, who urged his men to remember the matchgirls, who had won their fight and formed a union.

  But her face is gone

  Veronica Schanoes is Assistant Professor in the department of English at Queens College—CUNY. Her fiction has appeared in Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Fantasy, and Strange Horizons. She lives in New York City.

  They talk about the labyrinth of Minos, but that was nothing by

  comparison to this. Just some tunnels with a hornheaded fellow

  wandering lonely and scared and hungry.

  A LUNAR LABYRINTH

  Neil Gaiman

  We were walking up a gentle hill on a summer’s evening. It was gone eight-thirty, but it still felt like midafternoon. The sky was blue. The sun was low on the horizon, and it splashed the clouds with gold and salmon and purple-gray.

  “So how did it end?” I asked my guide.

  “It never ends,” he said.

  “But you said it’s gone,” I said. “It isn’t there any longer. What happened to it?”

  I had found the lunar labyrinth mentioned online, a small footnote on a website that told you what was interesting and noteworthy wherever you were in the world. Unusual local attractions: the tackier and more handmade the better. I do not know why I am drawn to them: stoneless henges made of cars or of yellow school buses, polystyrene models of enormous blocks of cheese, unconvincing dinosaurs made of crusted powdery concrete and all the rest.

  I need them, and they give me an excuse to stop driving, wherever I am, and to talk to people. I have been invited into people’s houses and into their lives because I wholeheartedly appreciated the zoos they made from engine parts, the houses they had built from tin cans and stone blocks then covered with aluminum foil, the historical pageants made from shop-window dummies, the paint on their faces always flaking off. And those people, the ones who made the roadside attractions, they would accept me for what I am.

  “We burned it down,” said my guide. He was elderly, and he walked with a stick. I had met him sitting on a bench in front of the town’s hardware store, and he had agreed to show me the site that the lunar labyrinth had once been built upon. Our progress across the meadow was not fast. “The end of the lunar labyrinth. It was easy. The rosemary hedges caught fire and they crackled and flared. The smoke was thick and drifted down the hill and made us all think of roast lamb.”

  “Why was it called a lunar labyrinth?” I asked. “Was it just the alliteration?”

  He thought about this. “I wouldn’t rightly know,” he said. “Not one way or the other. We called it a labyrinth, but I guess it’s just a maze . . . ”

  “Just a
mazed,” I repeated.

  “There were traditions,” he said. “We would only start to walk it the day after the full moon. Begin at the entrance. Make your way to the center, then turn around and trace your way back. Like I say, we’d only start walking the day the moon began to wane. It would still be bright enough to walk. We’d walk it any night the moon was bright enough to see by. Come out here. Walk. Mostly in couples. We’d walk until the dark of the moon.”

  “Nobody walked it in the dark?”

  “Oh, some of them did. But they weren’t like us. They were kids, and they brought flashlights, when the moon went dark. They walked it, the bad kids, the bad seeds, the ones who wanted to scare each other. For those kids it was Hallowe’en every month. They loved to be scared. Some of them said they saw a torturer.”

  “What kind of a torturer?” The word had surprised me. You did not hear it often, not in conversation.

  “Just someone who tortured people, I guess. I never saw him.” A breeze came down toward us from the hilltop. I sniffed the air but smelled no burning herbs, no ash, nothing that seemed unusual on a summer evening. Somewhere there were gardenias.

  “It was only kids when the moon was dark. When the crescent moon appeared, then the children got younger, and parents would come up to the hill and walk with them. Parents and children. They’d walk the maze together to its center and the adults would point up to the new moon, how it looks like a smile in the sky, a huge yellow smile and little Romulus and Remus, or whatever the kids were called, they’d smile and laugh, and wave their hands as if they were trying to pull the moon out of the sky and put it on their little faces.

  “Then, as the moon waxed, the couples would come. Young couples would come up here, courting, and elderly couples, comfortable in each other’s company, the ones whose courting days were long forgotten.” He leaned heavily on his stick. “Not forgotten,” he said. “You never forget. It must be somewhere inside you. Even if the brain has forgotten, perhaps the teeth remember. Or the fingers.”

  “Did they have flashlights?”

  “Some nights they did. Some nights they didn’t. The popular nights were always the nights where no clouds covered the moon, and you could just walk the labyrinth. And sooner or later, everybody did. As the moonlight increased, day by day—night by night, I should say. That world was so beautiful.

  “They parked their cars down there, back where you parked yours, at the edge of the property, and they’d come up the hill on foot. Always on foot, except for the ones in wheelchairs, or the ones whose parents carried them. Then, at the top of the hill, some of them’d stop to canoodle. They’d walk the labyrinth, too. There were benches, places to stop as you walked it. And they’d stop and canoodle some more. You’d think it was just the young ones, canoodling, but the older folk did it, too. Flesh to flesh. You would hear them sometimes, on the other side of the hedge, making noises like animals, and that always was your cue to slow down, or maybe explore another branch of the path for a little while. Doesn’t come by too often, but when it does I think I appreciate it more now than I did then. Lips touching skin. Under the moonlight.”

  “How many years exactly was the lunar labyrinth here before it was burned down? Did it come before or after the house was built?”

  My guide made a dismissive noise. “After, before . . . these things all go back. They talk about the labyrinth of Minos, but that was nothing by comparison to this. Just some tunnels with a hornheaded fellow wandering lonely and scared and hungry. He wasn’t really a bull-head. You know that?”

  “How do you know?”

  “Teeth. Bulls and cows are ruminants. They don’t eat flesh. The minotaur did.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “People don’t.” The hill was getting steeper now.

  I thought, there are no torturers, not any longer. And I was not a real torturer. But all I said was, “How high were the bushes that made up the maze? Were they real hedges?”

  “They were real. They were high as they needed to be.”

  “I don’t know how high rosemary grows in these parts.” I didn’t. I was far from home.

  “We have gentle winters. Rosemary flourishes here.”

  “So why exactly did the people burn it all down?”

  He paused. “You’ll get a better idea of how things lie when we get to the top of the hill.”

  “How do they lie?”

  “At the top of the hill.”

  The hill was getting steeper and steeper. My left knee had been injured the previous winter, in a fall on the ice, which meant I could no longer run fast, and these days I found hills and steps extremely taxing. With each step my knee would twinge, reminding me, angrily, of its existence.

  Many people, on learning that the local oddity they wished to visit had burned down some years before, would simply have gotten back into their cars and driven on toward their final destination. I am not so easily deterred. The finest things I have seen are dead places: a shuttered amusement park I entered by bribing a night watchman with the price of a drink; an abandoned barn in which, the farmer said, half a dozen bigfoots had been living the previous summer. He said they howled at night, and that they stank, but that they had moved on almost a year ago. There was a rank animal smell that lingered in that place, but it might have been coyotes.

  “When the moon waned, they walked the lunar labyrinth with love,” said my guide. “As it waxed, they walked with desire, not with love. Do I have to explain the difference to you? The sheep and the goats?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The sick came, too, sometimes. The damaged and the disabled came, and some of them needed to be wheeled through the labyrinth, or carried. But even they had to choose the path they traveled, not the people carrying them or wheeling them. Nobody chose their paths but them. When I was a boy people called them cripples. I’m glad we don’t call them cripples any longer. The lovelorn came, too. The alone. The lunatics—they were brought here, sometimes. Got their name from the moon, it was only fair the moon had a chance to fix things.”

  We were approaching the top of the hill. It was dusk. The sky was the color of wine, now, and the clouds in the west glowed with the light of the setting sun, although from where we were standing it had already dropped below the horizon.

  “You’ll see, when we get up there. It’s perfectly flat, the top of the hill.”

  I wanted to contribute something, so I said, “Where I come from, five hundred years ago the local lord was visiting the king. And the king showed off his enormous table, his candles, his beautiful painted ceiling, and as each one was displayed, instead of praising it, the lord simply said, ‘I have a finer, and bigger, and better one.’ The king wanted to call his bluff, so he told him that the following month he would come and eat at this table, bigger and finer than the king’s, lit by candles in candleholders bigger and finer than the king’s, under a ceiling painting bigger and better than the king’s.”

  My guide said, “Did he lay out a tablecloth on the flatness of the hill, and have twenty brave men holding candles, and did they dine beneath God’s own stars? They tell a story like that in these parts, too.”

  “That’s the story,” I admitted, slightly miffed that my contribution had been so casually dismissed. “And the king acknowledged that the lord was right.”

  “Didn’t the boss have him imprisoned, and tortured?” asked my guide. “That’s what happened in the version of the story they tell hereabouts. They say that the man never even made it as far as the Cordon Bleu dessert his chef had whipped up. They found him on the following day with his hands cut off, his severed tongue placed neatly in his breast pocket and a final bullet hole in his forehead.”

  “Here? In the house back there?”

  “Good Lord, no. They left his body in his nightclub. Over in the city.”

  I was surprised how quickly dusk had ended. There was still a glow in the west, but the rest of the sky’ had become night, plum-purple in i
ts majesty.

  “The days before the full of the moon, in the labyrinth,” he said, “They were set aside for the infirm, and those in need. My sister had a women’s condition. They told her it would be fatal if she didn’t have her insides all scraped out, and then it might be fatal anyway.

  Her stomach had swollen up as if she was carrying a baby, not a tumor, although she must have been pushing fifty. She came up here when the moon was a day from full and she walked the labyrinth. Walked it from the outside in, in the moon’s light, and she walked it from the center back to the outside, with no false steps or mistakes.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She lived,” he said, shortly.

  We crested the hill, but I could not see what I was looking at. It was too dark.

  “They delivered her of the thing inside her. It lived as well, for a while.” He paused. Then he tapped my arm. “Look over there.” I turned and looked. The size of the moon astonished me. I know it’s an optical illusion, that the moon grows no smaller as it rises, but this moon seemed to take up so much of the horizon as it rose that I found myself thinking of the old Frank Frazetta paperback covers, in which men with their swords raised would be silhouetted in front of huge moons, and I remembered paintings of wolves howling on hilltops, black cutouts against the circle of snow-white moon that framed them. The enormous moon that was rising was the creamy yellow of freshly churned butter.

  “Is the moon full?” I asked.

  “That’s a full moon, all right.” He sounded satisfied. “And there’s the labyrinth.”

  We walked toward it. I had expected to see ash on the ground, or nothing. Instead, in the buttery moonlight, I saw a maze, complex and elegant, made of circles and whorls arranged inside a huge square. I could not judge distances properly in that light, but I thought that each side of the square must be two hundred feet or more.