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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  Beyond the café window, traffic passed on the city road before a backdrop of shops and offices—so many smooth surfaces, cut-outs pressed against a sky of cloud and rain showers. Marion was still talking. He studied her face, the short blond bob she pushed back over her ear from time to time, saw the wedding ring back on her finger.

  “You’re not listening to me,” she said. “You’ve not heard a thing I’ve said.”

  “What? I’m sorry.” He shrugged. “It’s hard,” gesturing to the window, the city scene. “Nothing seems real.”

  He saw hurt in her face. “I didn’t mean—not you, I didn’t mean you.”

  “Yes, you did,” she said. “Yes, you bloody did. Do you know what it was like for me all that time? Not knowing where you were, what had happened, all I had to deal with?” More tears, angry this time. “I lost a year of my life too. Everything stopped. And you can’t even tell me where you were!”

  She tried to stand up and get away but Rider grabbed her hand. The couple sitting at the next table stared.

  “Don’t go,” he said, voice low. “You’re the only real thing. I need you, Marion. I’ll be lost if you go.”

  She stood where she was for a moment, hand pinned to the table. She blinked.

  “Okay,” she said, dropping back to her seat. “Okay, I’ll stay. But you’ve got to help me too. You’ve got to be here.”

  Rider resumed his life, after a fashion. He found a new, if less important job. He worked hard, managed his occasional wayward thoughts and plunging moods. Marion seemed resigned, treated him kindly. Sometimes he wondered if she still met, or merely longed for, the other man, the one who’d briefly taken Rider’s place.

  One feeling never left him—that his true life had stopped the moment he woke up at the side of the road, unwashed, wild-haired. Every day since he made an effort to accept and to appreciate the life he had but it was an effort, a falsehood. Marion wanted a child, and he agreed, but no pregnancy ensued. He sensed this was his failure, that he was dried up and infertile. Some nights, lying awake, he heard Marion crying in the bed beside him, in the dark. She seemed to age quickly over the following years, as though infected by his ruin. He was destroying her chance of a life. When Rider refused the tests and medical interventions, Marion left him, swiftly remarried and conceived. Rider felt only relief. He wished her well.

  He lived alone, through a succession of thin gray days. He bought a motorbike and at the weekends, rode around the country, to the mountains and the coast, the long forest roads. Sometimes, sleeping outside, he’d dream of the wooden church on wheels, Our Lady of Ruins, and wake, as though drunk, desperate to hold onto the image, the tumult of emotion. Each time the memory faded within minutes, leaving him emptier, drained out, lacking substance.

  Seven years. When the snow fell he rode along the forest road to find the place, as he’d done every winter since. Hard to be sure of the exact location: the road was featureless. He relied on intuition, an unreliable tool, waiting for a particular quiver of feeling, a sign in the landscape. He listened to the familiar note of the engine, longing for a breakdown. The road reeled past, the forest stripes of black and white. An image rose in his mind—Marion playing with a child in a bright warm house, a man in the background, familial comforts he’d declined.

  The cold made Rider’s hands and feet ache. Wind stung his face. Ruts of gray ice glistened at the edges of the road. His speed crept to ninety.

  Then he saw it—a splash of blood-red.

  He braked so hard the bike slewed under him, pitching on a skim of ice.

  The bike skidded, on and on, Rider’s leg caught underneath, helmet dragging against the rough asphalt.

  At last, it came to rest in the middle of the road. For several stunned moments Rider lay there, staring up at the strip of cloud between the treetops. The engine died. He smelt petrol, and a vague metallic burning. His leg began to throb.

  “You have to move,” he said. His body didn’t respond but the pain rose a notch.

  “You have to move,” he repeated. Rider pulled himself free. He stood for a moment, stupefied by shock and pain. The winter trees seemed to tilt. He squeezed his eyes shut, gathering strength, and hobbled to the side of the road.

  Rider tugged off the helmet and dropped it in the snow. Blood leaked from his knee through torn leathers but, ignoring the pain, he scanned the tree-line. Where? How far back? He lurched along the road, like a monster, like Caliban, desperate for another glimpse.

  Nothing. He almost wept with frustration.

  “Where are you?” he yelled. The snowy forest soaked up his voice. He shouted again, choice words. Trees absorbed the sound. Nothing moved. Rider limped away from the road. A trail of blood, chthonic, marked the virgin snow—a perilous choice, to leave the road in the dead of winter, with an injury. He ignored his mind’s sensible advice and proceeded. What did he have to lose?

  His lame leg dragged a rut through the snow. He sweated, though his hands were numb. His thoughts, like thin ice, seemed to break up and drift away. The forest filled him, the black and white of it, the spaces of sky between trees. Then he saw them: splashes of color, saint dolls suspended from branches. He cried out and sank to his knees, oblivious to pain. Above his head the dolls turned on strings embroidered to their heads.

  Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, Saint Perpetua, Saint Sara the Black, Saint Maxentia, Saint Caesaria.

  Rider recited their names from memory, repeated them like a rosary. Sunlight flashed into his eyes. He felt himself falling, finally losing grip. The ground seemed to rise up, banging against his back, his head.

  When he opened his eyes the light had changed and he was moving. Nothing made sense at first: he was still on his back, in the snow, and sliding through the trees. He tried to shift his position, but could not. He was tied and someone was pulling him on a low sled. Late, golden sunshine flooded through the trees.

  “Hey, hello.” He tried to speak but his voice was hoarse. He tasted stale blood. He raised his head as far as he could to see a red cloak, the back of a figure pulling him through the forest. His heart soared; he felt a surge of emotion so powerful he couldn’t breathe. His head dropped back. His body shook.

  Time blurred. When they stopped, night had blacked in the gaps between the trees. A small wooden house stood close by, a lantern burning on the porch. A statue perched on a lintel by the door. The yolky light painted the angles of its female face, robe and outstretched arms. The red-cloaked figure dropped the rope and turned to Rider. Beneath the hood he saw an old woman’s face, shadowed, deeply lined, with hooded eyes. She loosened the straps binding him to the sled and helped him to his feet. Her age belied her strength.

  As they crossed the threshold into the cabin, Rider glanced at the statue.

  “Our Lady of Ruins,” he said. The old woman raised her head. She didn’t smile, precisely: some other more inscrutable expression.

  She tended his leg, and he slept. She fed him some kind of spiced, meaty gruel. Day and night passed through the tiny window above the bed. He smelled wood smoke, the blood and meat of animals, herbs, burnt apples.

  The cabin had one room, a large fireplace along one side, a table with two wooden chairs where the old woman sat sewing dolls, amid shreds of fabric and glittering scraps. Icons covered the walls—too many to count—pieces of wood painted with the depictions of saints, angels and demons, the face of the Virgin. On shelves he saw fragments of statues—marble, granite, painted wood -hands and broken feet, half heads, pieces of wings. Amid these ruins he saw parts of plastic dolls, some sanctified by halos of wire, wings made of birds’ feathers.

  The old woman didn’t speak but in the long winter evenings, sewing or painting, she hummed to herself. At night, dreams like long golden ribbons unraveled in Rider’s mind. He tried to catch hold of them, to follow, but failed.

  After three days Rider sat up in bed. Cloth bandages wrapped his frost-bitten fingers. The old woman was out, the fire low.

  He s
truggled to his feet and stood up, weak and swaying. He crept, hunched like an ancient, across the room to the door and looked out at the forest. Above the treetops he saw the peaks of mountains.

  When the old woman returned, he had revived the fire and was sitting beside it on one of the two chairs. She nodded and smiled to see him up and began preparing a meal—a broth of meat and roots. After they’d eaten the old woman said: “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said. “For a long time. I was afraid you’d never come back.”

  “I searched for seven years,” he said. “The church on wheels, the other people.”

  The old woman picked up one of her dolls. She squeezed its cloth body. “They’re stuffed with ashes, did you know that?” She gave a tiny smile. “Little pouches of ash.”

  “Can I go back?” Rider said. “To the church, to the other place?”

  The old woman shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “So what are you doing here?”

  “Waiting.”

  “You left it all behind?”

  “All?” she said. “The other, other place? The world? The nothing.”

  “Ruins,” Rider said.

  “Yes. Ruins.”

  They lapsed into silence. The fire crackled. Beyond the window, snow fell, blown flakes swirling in lantern light.

  “So you wait,” Rider said. “Maybe you’ll wait in vain.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “So what? There’s nothing else—only waiting. I pass the time, walking in the forest—making dolls, the pictures.”

  Rider’s thoughts flew briefly to the road, the motorbike, to Marion. Might he have waited with her, after all? Would time with Marion have offered more pleasing distractions? The idea lasted only a moment. The other world had gone. Here, at least, he would wait on the threshold of his dream, with someone who knew what he’d seen.

  When the fire had burned down they went to bed, lying side by side. The old woman gently took his bandaged hand in hers and touched the gold ring on his thumb.

  “Tell me what you remember,” she said. “What did you see?”

  “Hundreds of keys hanging on a fig tree,” he said.

  She squeezed his hand, not hard enough to hurt, but tears filled his eyes and one leaked, burning, on his face.

  “I remember,” she said.

  The scene rose up in Rider’s mind, a memory so bright and charged his heart seemed to swell and shine beyond the narrow confines of his body. He shook with pleasure. The tears ran over his cheeks.

  “I could paint it,” he said, like a boy. “A picture.”

  Rider felt her tremble, the brush of her long, old-woman’s hair on his shoulder. He touched her forehead, where he’d seen the old red scar.

  The wind moaned in the cabin’s crevices. He stared into the glittering dark.

  Sarah Singleton is an award-winning writer of fiction for adults and teenagers. Her first novel, The Crow Maiden, was a finalist for the IAFA William L. Crawford Fantasy Award and her eight novels for young adults, published by Simon & Schuster, include Century, which won the Booktrust Teen Award 2005, the premier award for YA fiction in the UK. Her short stories have been published in magazines and anthologies including Interzone, Black Static, Time Pieces, and Spectrum SF. She was a journalist for many years and now works as a teacher of English literature and language at a secondary school in Wiltshire, England—county of ancient forests, chalk downlands, standing stones, long barrows and white horses.

  They inhabit all the absences, the voids unfilled . . .

  THE MARGINALS

  Steve Duffy

  They picked up Howard from the bus stop in town, early in the morning of his first day.

  “Bit of a change for you, then, off to work with the rest of ’em?” said the driver, a thickset shaven-headed man in his fifties. His voice was incongruously mild and affable; it took Howard a while to process the statement and decide that it wasn’t any sort of dig.

  “I’ve been doing bits and bobs,” he said, with the air of injured defensiveness that had become more or less habitual since he’d left college and signed on the dole.

  “Not like this you haven’t,” said the man in the back seat.

  Howard caught a glimpse of him in the rear-view mirror, and decided to address himself to the driver.

  “I suppose you’ve done this for a while, then,” he said.

  “Ooh, a good while now,” agreed the driver. “I’m Dave. That’s Barry in the back, he’s leaving us, aren’t you, Barry?”

  “Too right,” Barry said flatly. “Is that a Wetherspoons? You can drop me here.”

  Dave seemed surprised. “You off, then? Aren’t you going to give me-laddo the talk or anything?”

  “Talk?” Barry was halfway out of the back door before the car had come to a full halt. He had to stoop to Howard’s wound-down window to reply. “What ‘talk’ is that, then? You mean tell him about the job, what he’s signed up for? Tell him what goes on, like? Where’s the point in that? You tell him now, he’d laugh in your face. Even when he’s done it, he won’t understand it. Look at me. I’ve done it the best part of six months and I still don’t understand fuck all, I don’t. I can tell him that if you’d like.” He thrust his head into the passenger window, causing Howard to recoil slightly. “Get that, did you, mate? Fuck, all. There you go, consider yourself up to speed.”

  “Righto,” Dave said to the sound of Barry’s door slamming shut behind him. “Phew. Well, so much for Barry. He’s moving on, like I say.” He considered a while, while around him the high street traffic honked and swerved. “I think the best thing to do’s just to take you there and show you the ropes meself, so to speak. There’s some of them little Scotch eggs in the glove compartment, help yourself.”

  They drove on in silence, more or less, till the business parks and industrial estates gave way to the wide flat fields of the Cheshire plain. The day was sunny, mild for March, and with Dave’s window rolled down the car was filled with the sweet loamy smell of fertilized farmland. After a while, Howard caught the first whiff of what lay up ahead.

  “You getting that, are you?” Dave must have seen his nose wrinkle. “It’s alright, you get used to it after a while. I don’t hardly notice it at all, now, me.” Chuckling, he rolled the window up.

  At the junction with the motorway, Dave took an unmarked turn off the roundabout that led to a five-bar gate, beyond which lay a farm lane that ran parallel with the motorway.

  “Do us a favor,” Dave said, unhooking a big bunch of keys from his belt. “It’s that one there, look, the Chubb with the bit of blue tape on it.”

  Howard undid the padlock and opened the gate. Closing it behind him he felt an odd little shiver run up the back of his neck.

  On their right was the raised bank of the motorway; away to their left ran an evil-looking stream, a tidewater branch of the Dee estuary, and beyond it the refinery. The track, fringed with wasted hedgerow, led them through scrubby uncultivated fields that had all but reverted to marshland. The stink of the refinery was getting stronger and stronger.

  A couple of miles down the track, Howard was beginning to appreciate the weird isolation of the place. The cars and lorries up on the motorway were, to all intents and purposes, as far removed from them as the airplanes scratching contrails across the bright spring sky. Across the mudflats and the stream, the refinery, an abstract of metal piping and brick chimney, looked so unfamiliar as to be almost alien, the space-age architecture of a moon base. Howard had heard the place was largely automated; more than anything it looked abandoned, a relic of the industrial age left behind to perplex some band of post-apocalyptic refugees. Not for the first time, he wondered whether he’d done the right thing in answering the advertisement in the newsagent’s window.

  “This is us, then,” Dave said, indicating ahead.

  With a sinking feeling, Howard saw what lay at the end of the dirt track. “What, the caravan?”

  “Home away from home.” Dave braked to a halt on a wid
e waste patch in front of the static caravan. When he turned the engine off, the silence took Howard almost by surprise. For a few seconds, the two men sat in the front seats and said nothing. Then Dave nudged Howard and said, “Okey-doke, let’s get you started.”

  The keychain came into play once more. “It’s a Chubb again, see, but the black tape this time,” Dave explained, popping the padlock that secured the caravan door. “Upsy-daisy, there we go. Door shuts like so—” and he shot home the bolt on the inside. “Now, let’s have the fire on, shall we? Gets a bit damp in here otherwise, bit parky.”

  While Dave lit the propane heater, Howard took stock of his new workplace. There was a sort of counter or low shelf made of plywood, running around two sides of the caravan; there was a fold-out bunk bed; there were a couple of office chairs, one from the typing pool, one from middle management, both having seen better days. There was a gray metal filing cabinet, and on top of it a large industrial clamp lamp with a reel of extension cable.

  “I left the generator running,” Dave was saying, “you can turn that off if the noise gets on your nerves, but you want to make sure it’s on again well before it gets dark, ’cos that’s your only electricity, see?” He reached up, tapped the twin fluorescent tubes above his head. “Gonna need your light there, later on.”

  “You’ll be back before it gets dark, though, won’t you?”

  “Oh, I should think so,” Dave said, not wholly reassuringly. “Right, well, let me see. Talk you through it. Blimey. Okay, well, here goes, then—”

  Watching Dave’s aging Volvo out of sight across the flats, Howard found himself prey to a mixture of emotions. There was tedium, or more accurately the anticipation of tedium, which to be fair had been predictable from the get-go. There was the nagging conviction that here was a waste of a third-rate degree in media studies, and by extension the life it had been expected to transform. Over and above these things, though, he hadn’t expected to feel quite so lonely; nor, all things considered, quite so apprehensive. Not knowing why he felt these things didn’t really help—quite the opposite, in fact.