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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  The Volvo’s receding engine merged into the ambient din of the distant motorway, and Howard suddenly felt absurdly isolated, standing in front of the caravan. He looked to the north, towards the refinery where thick white smoke belched incessantly from the chimneys. Howard guessed—wrongly, it turned out—that he would, as Dave had suggested, get used to the smell. Away to the east, the polder stretched flat and unlovely for five miles or so, till the land rose to the big power plant at Rocksavage. To the south lay the motorway, of course, and beyond it the hills of Helsby and Frodsham. Feeling at once hemmed-in and exposed, Howard cast a wistful glance west towards the trees, in which direction Dave’s Volvo had disappeared.

  Within these boundaries of his space lay little enough to capture Howard’s attention. Over by the raised carriageway of the M56 there was a large articulated trailer, detached from its cab, parked at an angle to the eastbound traffic. Howard knew from frequent journeys on the motorway that on the far side of the trailer was painted the slogan CAR BOOT SALES EVERY SUN A.M. JUNCT 12. On the side now visible to him, the side hidden from the traffic, he could see nothing . . . except, as he squinted into the low March sunlight, a couple of men in business suits standing in its shade. Howard guessed they were shaking hands on some new advertising for the side of the trailer: PAY DAY LOANS, perhaps, or WE BUY BROKEN GOLD. He’d been looking at them for a few minutes, drawn to this only sign of activity in all that dead space, before he remembered Dave’s instructions. Dutifully he climbed the steps into the caravan, settled himself in the better-upholstered of the two office chairs, and pulled down the big loose-leaf ledger from its shelf.

  “09.23,” he wrote in the first ruled column, just as Dave had shown him, and in the next: “2 men.” In the wider space to the right he wrote: “Standing by trailer near motorway—” He paused before adding a period. Really, what else could he say?

  His entry lay at the top of a new page. Before leaving, Dave had extracted the preceding few sheets, stuffed them in a manila folder and taken them away with him. On a whim, he leafed back to a tabbed divider with DECEMBER written in underlined capitals. The first entry was “2 / nr. tralor” followed by “3 / same”, then “2 again” over a time period ranging from half-past seven in the morning to just gone nine.

  Howard swiveled in his chair and peered through the back window. There they were, the same two men, barely visible in the shadow. Regular visitors, clearly. But why?

  On the shelf above where the big ledger was kept was a smaller ring-binder. “Have a look in there later on, if you like,” Dave had told him. “Might come in handy to show you the lie of the land, like.”

  Howard, feeling disorientated less than ten minutes into his new job, pulled it down and opened it.

  The contents seemed to be in no particular order. Some entries were handwritten, some word-processed; each page seemed to be an entry separate in itself. The first began didactically, in spaced caps:

  L E A R N T O R E C O G N I Z E T H E M

  You WILL have come across them, even if you didn’t realize it at the time.

  In the motorway services, for example, at off-peak hours of the daytime, or through the lonely stretches of the night. In the cafeterias, the Happy Chefs and Costa Coffees. They’re drawn inescapably to places like these: the margins, the places in between. They can pass for businessmen, commercial travelers, middle management, representatives. Cups of tea grow cold on the table in front of them as they sit, hands folded, apart from everyone. Other customers come and go while they remain—if you stayed long enough, you would notice it, you’d have to.

  You will never see them arriving, nor will you see them leave. Their eyes will never meet your own.

  Another example:

  Next time you buy a daily paper from one of those city newsstands, take special notice of the vendor. Try to fix his face, so that you can describe it later—you won’t be able to, but make the effort anyway. Pay attention, too, to the paper he sells you—read it carefully when you get a chance, compare it to another copy of the same edition. Somewhere in its pages there will usually be a clue.

  They seem at home in cities, as much as they seem at home anywhere. Check out the pavement crowd beneath the would-be jumper on his high ledge. Not all of them are the conventionally anxious or the drearily morbid.

  Once you learn to recognize them, try this exercise: look very closely at the people around you in the Underground carriage or the bus. The law of averages is adamant on this point.

  Howard looked up from the ring-binder, feeling more confused than ever. Over by the trailer there were now four men in suits.

  On the shelves inside the caravan was a pair of not very good binoculars. Howard spent most of the rest of that morning peering through them, trying to get a better look at the men standing by the trailer. In their ones and twos they came and went, though never while Howard was looking, it seemed. He’d developed a kind of anxiety compulsion about checking both windows, front and rear: there was something going on, he felt sure, along the course of the stream, but the banks were just too high for him to be able to make it out. Perhaps it was nothing more than a black post, uncovered by the tide. A black post, that’s all. But every time he turned away, satisfied or otherwise, from the tidewater creek, it seemed that through the other window there were one or two more of the men, or one or two fewer, over by the trailer.

  Where they came from, why they gathered there, what they were doing . . . Howard could work none of it out. The notion they were coming out of (or going back into) the trailer had occurred to him as the most likely explanation for the first part of it, and he spent several hours trying to catch them in the act. By lunchtime he was only half convinced this might really be the explanation. But even if so, what did it actually explain?

  He set it all down in the ledger, as best he could. As the day wore on into its slow dragging afternoon, and the shadows began to lengthen across the waste land, he pulled down the small ring-binder once more, flipped through it in a search for answers he half-knew would never really come to anything:

  A P A R A D O X

  They inhabit all the absences, the voids unfilled. You would not necessarily expect to see them in churches, but this may be subject to change. Hospitals have always been a favorite place; waiting rooms and reception areas, at all hours. And of course the ocean: the oldest jumping-off point of them all.

  Visit any out-of-season seaside town and stand on the promenade. Look out across the tidal flats, the people who go walking there, mid-mornings, mid-afternoons. Disregard the dog-walkers, the fishermen digging for lugworm, the retired couples with their happy little camper vans. Concentrate on the others—the ones who don’t fit in. Ask yourself this:

  If you were to walk out across the damply rippled sand to the dishwater ebb of the surf—out into the liminal zone—and then look back towards the land, would you see more or less what they see? The shift in perspective, the sudden remoteness that colors all things; imagine it. This is all they know now, anywhere. Imagine how it feels, day in, day out, to patrol these hopeless frontiers; think of the isolation, unyielding, all-encompassing.

  Of course, this will be easier for you to understand, the longer you stay on the job.

  “Yeah, thanks for that,” said Howard aloud. His voice sounded odd in the cramped space inside the caravan; somehow not like his own. For the first time, he wondered how he himself, a small man in a caravan, might appear to a traveler on the motorway glancing out of the car window. That traveler would probably not see anybody over by the trailer—its bulk, its shadow, the angle of its parking; all would serve to render its occupants invisible from the road. All they would see was a man at the window of the caravan, binoculars clamped to his face, the loneliest figure in that lonely landscape.

  Without Howard noticing, the propane heater had run out of fuel. Obviously, he told himself, that was why he was shivering. The replacement cylinders, according to Dave, were in the exterior storage locker. He’d have to go
outside to fetch one.

  Standing in the open doorway, he peered towards the trailer; for the time being, there was nothing to be seen. After a minute’s hesitation, Howard stepped down, moved quickly around to the front, fumbled the locker open, and hauled out the spare cylinder. As he started back towards the door, something—a dark shape, a blur on the periphery—moved quickly out of sight around the further corner of the caravan. Sheer fright made Howard drop the cylinder; it caught his toe painfully, and by the time he’d limped back inside the caravan sweat was standing out on his forehead.

  Over by the edge of the stream, what he’d originally taken for a wooden post sank gradually from his view till it was hidden by the bank.

  After about half-an-hour had passed, thirty minutes of confused and unilluminating internal dispute, Howard felt recovered enough to be able to resume his duties (such as he understood them), checking fore and aft and making the relevant notes. By now the trailer men had reappeared, and he logged their comings and goings, their incomprehensible loiterings, with a fair pretense of detachment. He wondered how easy he’d find it to be blasé about the whole affair once the sun went down.

  With a glance every few minutes or so towards the windows, front and rear (it was pretty much force of habit by now), he returned to the ring-binder, in the forlorn hope that it might all suddenly fall into place, everything he’d seen, everything he’d read, all he’d experienced in the course of this weirdest of days.

  D E F I N I T I O N S

  Remember, these are not the dead and buried, the loved ones taken to the graveyard in rented limousines and wept over for a season while their flowers rot on the bare turned earth. These are different. Nobody grieves for them. The majority are not even missed.

  Nor yet should you think of them as zombies—but then, it has always been easier to say what they aren’t, than what they really are. To see them clearly, to see them for what they are, we need to look beyond those categories we understand.

  What these unfortunates have in common, it seems safest to say, is the experience of lessening. The drip-drip-drip of psychic diminution. The attenuation of the psyche. Call it what you will. They are drained, one and all, at the most profound and fundamental level. Months, maybe years of unremitting reduction . . . till the day, long after they’d become oblivious to the whole process, on which they reached the tipping-point and passed over, unnoticed, unmourned. A day on which they did not go home.

  And in this way they were given over to the margins, to the space around the edge of things. In this way, they became the sort of creatures for whom these places—these inhospitable thresholds they’re forever on the verge of crossing—might have been invented.

  Though there was no author’s name, no way of telling who’d written these strange pages, Howard felt fairly sure it hadn’t been Barry. Nor yet Dave, he suspected: in fact, he wondered whether Dave had spent much time at all in the caravan when not dropping people off or picking them up. He didn’t seem the type, thought Howard; and then wondered whether this meant that he himself might be that very type. He didn’t really want to think about it at this stage; what it would say about the terminal poverty of his choices, were he to be the type of person who could actually be said to belong here, in this shabby gas-stinking caravan, with night falling over the Cheshire plain, the shadow of the trailer deepening, helping to conceal whatever might be hiding within it.

  With an involuntary body-length shudder, he turned a page of the ring-binder and read on:

  D A R K N E S S

  Some, the newly translated perhaps, are drawn to certain houses in the night. While the occupants are asleep they move in close, position themselves outside the unlit curtained windows and press their faces to the panes, as if—though it’s pointless to ascribe to them any motives we would recognize—some memory of refuge, of belonging might move in them still. Why these houses? Why these feelings? Who can say? We could assume the houses evoke in them something like nostalgia; probably we’d be wrong. All we really know is that there they are, leaning in against the glass, resigned, unwearied, still and noiseless in their vigils.

  Occasionally, it has been observed, tears will leak from their wide unblinking eyes, and sometimes in the morning the low-angled sunlight will catch the impressions of their faces on the pane. Hundreds of times you’ve seen these marks. Now you know what causes them.

  Howard closed the ring-binder sharply. Already it was too dark to see outside: the fluorescent tubes above his head served only to cast his own white-faced reflection back at himself. There was an hour to go still before Dave might come to pick him up. Would it be better with the lights switched on, or off?

  For the life of him he couldn’t decide.

  Steve Duffy has written/coauthored five collections of weird short stories. Tragic Life Stories, The Five Quarters, The Night Comes On (all From Ash-Tree Press), and his most recent, The Moment of Panic (PS Publishing). His work also appears in a number of anthologies published in the UK and the US. He won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Story, was shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award in 2009, and again in 2012.

  “My final act,” the magician said. “Into the heart of the matter.

  To the core of it. We have worlds to create.”

  DARK GARDENS

  Greg Kurzawa

  Sam bought the foreclosure on Enfield at auction, sight unseen. He assumed its history would be questionable, but as the plan was to gut, remodel, and resell—history was irrelevant. Not until the day he took possession did Sam learn the previous owner had been a semi-professional magician, stage name of Kurricke. The magician had vanished after living in the two-bedroom ranch for seventeen years, leaving spoiled milk in the refrigerator, dishes in the sink, and all the tools of his trade in unlocked trunks.

  Sam wanted none of it: not the costumes and stage props in the second bedroom, nor the closets full of dresses, shoes, and wigs. The winch and stand in the basement might have been saleable, but the wicker trunk of journals and 8mm tapes was utterly worthless. He had no use for the mannequins in the attic—some upright on stands, some dismembered and crated. Stage paraphernalia had no place in his investment strategy. Sam made drastic inroads that first weekend, hauling the magician’s junk down from the attic and out through the garage. Without ceremony, he resigned everything to the rented dumpster occupying the driveway.

  His plans didn’t change until Monday afternoon, when he rolled up an oil-stained carpet in the basement and uncovered the hatch.

  Ascending from the basement Monday evening, Sam went to the garage looking for the wicker chest he’d wrestled out earlier that morning. This, he dragged back into the house and parked in front of the dark green couch, which he’d already decided would be the last thing to go—immediately after the 32-inch Magnavox. Settling on the couch, he unfastened the latches and lifted the lid.

  Composition notebooks and 8mm tapes. Tucked to one side was a Sony hand-held camera wrapped it its own cables, and on top of everything, a 4x6 photograph in a thin pewter frame. Sam lifted the picture out to study it more closely.

  Professionally done, the photograph captured a mismatched couple. She: young and pretty, seated on a chair with hands in her lap, her expression somewhat bewildered. He: presumably the magician Kurricke, standing behind her, his hand on the bare skin between shoulder and neck. He was perhaps fifty. His hair, going to gray, looked unaccustomed to the comb. Here was a man who couldn’t iron a shirt, who’d forgotten how to knot a tie. He grinned at the camera with an excited, boyish charm, thrilled at his own good fortune.

  The woman was too young to be the magician’s wife or lover, Sam decided. A daughter, maybe. But his fingers on her throat were too possessive—too intimate for that relationship. Her skin was perfect, smooth and cream-colored, her hair a flossy brown silk utterly at odds with her skin type. To Sam, her beauty seemed inviolate, although there was something unusual in her posture. It didn’t look, Sam thought, as though she’d applied her o
wn makeup.

  Sam set the frame aside.

  A cursory inventory of trunk’s remaining contents revealed that the notebooks were neither numbered, nor dated. Similarly, the tapes were loose and unlabeled. Feeling certain that something left behind by the magician would explain the hatch, Sam chose a notebook off the disordered pile. Opening it to the middle, he read:

  How God must detest us. How revolting to Him our helplessness and stupidity.

  Hitler exterminated the crippled and the weak for no better reason than that they were crippled and weak. Even though he too was human—a bag of flesh no different than those he gassed. How much greater the divide between us and God? How much more profound His hatred of us?

  Why should the suffering of the weak evoke hatred?

  I heard a story about a boy who crushed the head of a wounded dog because it hadn’t the decency to die. I understand now that it wasn’t the piteous animal’s misery he sought to end, but his own. How miserable then is God, watching us flail about, blind and bleating, in His dark garden? We are ignorant of our own ignorance, rolling and stamping over all His creation.

  How are any of us still alive?

  Sam closed the book and once more took up the photograph. This time, he slid it from its frame and turned it over.

  To E.—Love J.

  “J. Kurrick,” Sam said. “What happened here?”

  He lifted out the hand-held Sony camera and its bundle of cables. It was time to watch a tape.

  Kurricke the magician, in white shirt and glittering black vest, takes the stage of what appears to be a high school gymnasium. The camera records from behind a sparse audience; the quality of the tape is poor. The magician brandishes scarves, hoops, and giant playing cards for an audience that hardly acknowledges him. The constant murmur of peripheral conversations obscure his sad jokes. Occasionally, an adolescent face leans in from the side to leer into the camera.