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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  The wolf’s eye shut. It was clearly too tired to bother with him.

  Corlan turned and went away.

  Partly down the stair, every step seemed suddenly to spring upward at his face. Almost fainting he clung to the bannister.

  Outside, within the dark deep of the forest, silence spread its towering wings like an unseen, unheard, non-existent wind.

  In the larder, when he unearthed it, he discovered some pieces of unidentifiable meat, kept cold enough, but unmistakably nibbled by something: just conceivably the band of dead rats lying about. A beggar had no choice. The loaf was the same, somewhat mouthed. And he was stealing too, from the old couple who had, in their way, been helpful. For God’s sake, he must shoot something in the forest. Although, in the vicinity of the schloss he had seen nothing animate, nor made out even the call of birds.

  He found it difficult to think, let alone plan. Inertia, depletion. But he must get out, now, instantly. He sat down on a stool, and rested his head on the wall.

  Corlan was in this position when Teda and Tils came creeping back into the room. They looked at him, he believed, with a kind of bemused contempt.

  But the old woman was polishing some glasses, and Tils put a black, webbed bottle on the table. Uncorking this, he exhumed a blood-black wine.

  Tils beckoned Corlan to the table, where the old woman now placed the nibbled loaf and a gray slab of curious cheese she unwrapped from a cloth.

  Her hands. They appeared as if they had been broken, every bone, then set awry.

  “It is pleasant,” said Tils, “for us to have a little company.” Teda too sat down, though at a slight distance, ready to wait on them. But “Like the days that are gone,” she murmured.

  “But surely,” said Corlan, “those days are still here.”

  “No, no, done forever,” said Tils, drinking deeply.

  It was a fine wine, metallic and strong. Corlan was cautious with it, but beginning to feel it made him rather better. His hands steadied, some focus had come back to his vision and brain.

  “But this is your joke,” he said coldly. “Your nameless master never died.”

  Tils’ head went up. A flash of what—anger? hurt?— for a second ignited in the dullness behind his eyes.

  “Not so. He died.”

  Corlan flung off any restraint with the wine. He too drank deeply. He said, “Perhaps once, long ago. He died then, whoever he was, and is, your master of Veltenlak. After which—once again he was—animate, shall I say.”

  “Ah,” said Teda softly. “Ah.”

  Tils put down his glass and gazed into the wine’s thick residue. “The gentleman means that after death, we rise in spirit.”

  “No, I don’t mean that. I mean your master—I’ll call him for his house, shall I, since you won’t say his name—Herr Veltenlak—is undead. A vampire or some other sort of thing. A ghost even, that preys on humankind without any respect or care, dishonorably, uncleanly, and seldom without unneeded pain. He likes to cause pain. He likes to play, like a cat. Hunting is a sport to him. And men are his quarry. Which must mean that I am, now, I suppose.”

  He waited. What would happen? Tils did nothing But Teda rose and brought the wine and refilled both their glasses, and then sat down again at a distance.

  Dust rushed from the ceiling. A minute scatter of stones dropped with it, clicketing across the table like thrown dice.

  “Veltenlak even devours his own castle,” said Corlan. “He’s eating it up.”

  They did not reply.

  In God’s name, they were not old, but ancient. Tils two hundred, she not far short.

  Well, finish the glass, then get up. Take them, and myself, by surprise. Leave the ruin. God—surely I can?

  By day the undead creature should not be able to follow him. Corlan visualized the resumption of his grueling trek into exile. The desolation that there awaited him. A cloud of weakness unfurled. His eyes darkened.

  As he surfaced from the lapse, he heard Tils begin to speak again, as if from another room.

  “I must tell you, sir, he is gone. I will tell you how and when, and why. You should be told. For some it is no matter. But you—”

  “Because I resist—” Corlan inadvertently broke in.

  “You must hear me out. It was just over one year back, a few months more. When she lost our child—”

  Corlan again interrupted, unable not to. “Who lost a child?”

  “I,” said Teda, in her soft, dead-leaf voice. “My first. Tils’ child, it was. We were only seventeen. It was a terrible thing.”

  “Wait.” Corlan stood. The chair screaked along the stone floor. The wine kept him upright. “Say to me again the age at which you lost your child—last year.”

  “Why, at seventeen, he and I both. We were very young.”

  “Christ,” said Corlan. “Oh, Christ on his cross. Why are you lying to me? You’re lunatics. Or I am.”

  “She says the truth,” said Tils. “Be calm, sir. I’ll tell you. There is nothing else to do.”

  Tils at no point named the Lord of Veltenlak.

  At no juncture, even by letting a few words slip, did Tils describe the physical appearance, the age, the manner or personality of his master. Tils did not protest or imply that his master had been noble, or kind, or even wronged.

  Tils outlined only what, according to Tils, had gone on one year and two months in the past.

  However, he started his narrative with these sentences:

  “We were not unhappy. The schloss was mighty, built many centuries. Everything of the best. And the woods full of game. There was a lake with fish, and swans, and wild duck would come. Five wells there were in the yards, each with pure sweet water. And the cellar of the most wonderful. This wine I brought from there. It was laid down in the time of the last true king. It tastes of steel and gold. There are others that taste like rubies and black currants, and white wines like apples and honey and silver.”

  We belonged to the estate, you will understand. Our parents had worked the fields, or with the livestock or vines . . . ”

  They were thought fit, Tils and Teda, to serve in the house. And then they were married. He married them, their master, as was usual. It was a nighttime wedding. A great many other servants, of course, worked in the house. There was a lot to do. But the tasks of Tils and Teda were not menial and always there was good food and drink, shelter and luxury. They felt themselves inexorably secure. The power and might, worldly (and otherwise) of their master, hovered over them always, the pinions of a giant eagle.

  And then. Ah, then.

  One evening late in autumn there was a strange, thick, greenish sunset, and out of this ominous twilight a column of riders advanced with, walking before them, iron figures in the black robes of priests.

  Not many ever came to the castle. The stronghold lay in a wild region, and had, too, a dark reputation that for a great while had safeguarded it. It must seem the master, freely and supernaturally, could range where he wished after prey. (Though Tils did not specify this, it was inherently indicated. For how else did the predatory being nourish himself. Corlan had inferred the servants themselves were never troubled. Probably the vampire assumed some animal shapeshift or semblance. Or grew invisible. Of such talents the undead were capable, in legend. And Corlan himself was now preyed on by an element irresistible and unseen, detectable only by the hideous results despair.)

  When the procession of priests and horsemen pressed up from the forest, the castle grew alert and uneasy.

  Night was imminent, and although Tils did not stress that his master was most active between sun fall and rise, Corlan had concluded it would be so. And therefore the visitors, whatever their nature or intention, must wish to meet with him.

  Were the humans in the house really afraid? Despite their serfdom and inbred loyalty, their faith in their lord’s powers, they were.

  They had some cause.

  In an era of monsters, the arm of the Church that rallied to deter them
was militant, obdurate. Sadistic. Fire to fight with fire.

  “We are, you see, like infants before them. The aristocracy and the priests, equally,” said Tils. “Both hold a sword above our heads. We cannot deny, must not withhold. Yet he—was like our father. And these ones were—” Tils paused.

  It was Teda, his ancient young wife, who whispered the single phrase. “Like the Devil,” she said. “Like the Devil.”

  The priestly crusaders thrashed their way into the master’s chamber, high up in the König Ragen, a tower which, a month after these events, collapsed and crashed through into the body of the house, just missing the great hall—as if it had tried, yet failed, to crush the heart out of the place.

  “Above us we heard them at work. Something was done. Even he could not evade them—”

  Corlan thought, How not? He was the bloody Devil, not they. But he did not now interrupt.

  It appeared the soldiers and the priests got hold of the Master of Veltenlak. Held down with and by some form of alternate sorcery, in this case named Godfulness, they stripped and flayed him. Undead, yet he was alive enough to feel.

  “We heard his cries, terrible shrieking. It was not fear,” said Tils in sorrowful pride. “He feared nothing. It was only agony.”

  At length they smashed the master’s jaw, poured boiling mercury into his throat and guts, struck all his bones to shards, and at last, in the hour before dawn, smote off his head with a consecrated sword. After which, there in the upper room, they burned his body.

  “There was no smell of flesh,” said Tils. He waited, courteously.

  Teda spoke; this was her cue? “Only the odor of fire.”

  Then she got up and tottered out of the kitchen, away into the house.

  Tils said, “We lost our baby seven hours later. All the other women in child here lost the fruit of their wombs, through that day, and the next night.”

  Nevertheless, the priests examined everyone yet living. Every servant must parade before them, and even the part-dead aborted women were carried roughly in. Each was stripped bare, as he had been, perused for blighted marks, given a crucifix to kiss. A few had signs, abnormal birthmarks or warts, or else were too shocked and frightened to embrace Christ on his cross. All of these were shot, slung together in a heap by the lake, and also burned.

  Tils and Teda, along with twenty others judged clean, merely simpletons, were allowed to exist. When at last the invaders went away, the castle was left much as it had been.

  As autumn waned to winter, and after the König Ragen fell down, a huge lethargy replaced the terror and confusion. When winter commenced, all the house began, in slight or dramatic, always persistent ways, to disintegrate. Birds died and spun from the sky. The swans perished, and the fish, and the lake turned foul, and in another summer’s heat dried up. Just as did all the courtyard wells. Trees nearby began to fail. In the farther forest things died, plants, beasts. The very light grew sickly. Of the castle retainers many determined to leave. None succeeded in getting far. They would sink down, often less than thirty meters from the walls, and never again climb to their feet.

  “But I stayed where I was, and she, my Teda, with me. Each day was, and is, to us like a year, so long, so reasonless, so barren, so sad. We have aged, I think? Yes, I think so. In fourteen months she and I, we have aged more than five decades. But we do not go away, you see. Do you see, young gentleman? Nothing does go. Even the wolf that he tamed, the wolf our master called Hris for the pagan god of sunset, even he remains. How strong he must be, the wolf. But he can no longer hunt. We feed him milk and a little blood. But the last cow is dead, since yesterweek. And there is so little in a rat.”

  Corlan closed his eyes. He saw images of fire and heard a sort of thunder, miles off. An earthquake followed.

  Tils was shaking him.

  “What?” said Corlan vaguely.

  “Did you hear me, sir? Did you hear what I must say?”

  Corlan came back. “You’re more than fifteen years my junior,” said Corlan spitefully, “and a slave. Don’t put your damned hands on me. I heard all you said. And now I’ll depart this cursed and stinking hole.”

  “You will never depart,” said Tils. “Only through death, perhaps not even then. Some nights,” said Tils, “I hear them weeping still, in the walls, the others.”

  “And what about him, your Herren—” snarled Corlan, grabbing the ancient man—seventeen, eighteen?—by his corded throat, “does he weep? or does he visit in his doubly undead state, and sink in his teeth?”

  “He is done, sir,” said Tils, as if the fingers that gripped his windpipe were straws—perhaps they were. “He is over.”

  Letting go, Corlan said quietly, “He’s eating everything up. You, your aged wife, the wolf, the rats, the plaster and the stone. How can such a carnivorous force be dead?”

  “Oh sir,” said Tils. And now tears ran out of his eyes that seemed themselves mostly fashioned of water, “sir—sir—it is not him. He was the strength of this house, its vitality—its soul. No, no, it is—” Tils stared beyond Corlan, beyond the castle, the forest, stared and stared, seeing in horror and anguished acceptance what was not there at all. “It is,” Tils concluded, “his absence. All that is left—the emptiness—without him. The hollow. The nothingness. The vacant pit. That is the vampire. That is the thing which feeds.”

  Three: The Night

  An eagle swept out from the König Ragen, as the masonry cascaded downwards. Its wings filled heaven, darkness, without a spark of light. The captain jumped to his feet. Beyond the door the occluded sky was swarming, not into black but white. Snow, not stonework, fell.

  How long now had he slept here, the fool? (The old man was gone. The fire was out.)

  Corlan lurched about the kitchen. He felt drunk, as if he had been drinking for days, as once in youth he had, ill with drink yet needing it more. The bottle though was used up. No doubt he had finished it.

  He knew he must go up through the House of Veltenlak, and take himself to the small door in the larger one. He must undo it, or beat it down. It was straightforward. One proviso: he must not, at any time, sit, must not even lean on a wall or against any upright thing—post, pillar—

  Staggering along the corridors, the snow hitting his head like omissions of life. The passages were longer now. Miles of them. They were catacombs. It was a library shelved and paved with the dead. Bones and tiny corpses stacked everywhere, shriveled remains of beetles, spiders, mice, a slender lizard like a lady’s fan, close-folded . . . there had been a dance, the music drifted in his ears, a gorgeous girl in a white lace gown—no, forget the girl, and the music. A dead rat lay on its back—step over. Look, the vast pillar was ahead—Christ help me—wake me up—

  Abruptly he was stumbling into the colossal hall.

  Absence, not presence.

  It is the Void that is the vampire. It is the Void which feeds—

  Corlan cried out, a crazed battle-scream he had heard other men give when hit by blade or shot, crumpling over, ending—

  I won’t end here.

  Nothing is worse than this, whatever it is. I can survive the winter earth, the heartless forest. Or if not, I can die out there.

  They were seventeen, eighteen, the man, the woman. He believed it, and how they had decayed.

  The great tower crashing down. The house giving way when the central support of supernatural life was extracted.

  The black eagle of Nothingness filling up the sky. The Night.

  Too much of the bloody night—

  But the Night was there with him. Finally it showed, unmasked its faceless face.

  It must be exactly here, just beyond the hall and the passages, just where—somehow—now he found himself. Instead of debris, for a moment he had the impression of the ghosts of walls that had once risen solid as mountains, but they were gone and a crater replaced them, as if the full moon had been thrown down an struck the spot. But what fell was the king Tower. And now, it was Nothingness. Corlan stoo
d on nothing and nothing surrounded him, and all things faded from him. He was blind and deaf and dumb. Even his mind lost its voices and its pictures. All erased. And yet—he felt, without sensation, the painless fangs fasten on him, eating him up. The void had hunted him for sport and now the void was feeding, and he was its feast. It had been much simpler with him, obviously, in his human misery, having lost everything. Easy prey—he had believed his life was over already. And here he was in life, in the midst of death, beyond which lay only total annihilation. Let go. Give in. Softly merge with Nothing, and be nothing.

  Perhaps no man can strive against a demon, the vampire or the ghoul. But mankind its very self enters the dangerous world already under orders, each a warrior, to resist the Enormous Nihil of the abyss. How else would any of us live five minutes?

  Years and continents away a crazed voice was bellowing. No denial, for the abyss was all Denial. Instead an assent. Yes! bellowed the voice. YES.

  In the center of the hall, while he was flailing and bellowing unintelligibly, Corlan’s foot slithered over some mess on the floor—bones, stones—And as he careered and swerved to save himself, he found he had come about to confront the staircase that rose up to the wreckage of floors above.

  At the staircase top something stood. It was the ancient ruined wolf.

  How heavy was its head. The ruff of fur seemed to weigh it down like a collar of lead. One golden eye, filmed to stagnant treacle, staring. The other stayed shut.

  Damn the wolf. It was the monster’s familiar. Like the moronic servants, Tils and Teda, stuck here like dying flies in gray jam—No—it was fodder, as they were, of Nothingness—

  The wolf put down one paw toward a lower step. Then drew it back, as if afraid of treading in freezing water.

  Corlan swayed with fatigue. He flung his arms about his own body in a ludicrous attempt to keep himself upright. If you fall down you will lie here till Judgment Day. Longer. You will be nothing.

  “Hris,” he called out to the wolf. Why? But the wolf had remained alive, if only barely, and maybe, just as he did not, it did not want to be consumed, but had not itself been able to fathom a route of escape. It did not grasp what it must fight . . . was Corlan the only one who could? None of the others had wanted to . . . even he—even he—