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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  “Listen to this,” David called from the living room.

  Sam dropped his cold pizza on a dirty plate and carried it to the living room. David had one of Kurricke’s notebooks open on his lap. They’d been searching the journals while watching the tapes, reading to one another the most intriguing excerpts.

  David waited for Sam to sit, then read:

  “Eat not of the blood,” said Yahweh to His people. “For the blood is the life.”

  It is forbidden fruit, this eating of flesh and blood. Yet Christ gave His to the disciples, and they drank of it. He gave them His flesh, and they ate that, too.

  We know what happened to those wretches in the Garden of Eden when they ate what they ought not have. And we know what happened to the disciples when they feasted on their Christ. But what if He had eaten of their flesh? What if He had tasted their blood?

  I have read that true evil is the forceful attempt to ascend to a higher plane. Was this not Lucifer’s sin, and all those angels deceived by him? It was, God’s throne being as high above the angels as the angels are above Man. He stormed Heaven to take what was not his, and his punishment was terrible. For him, and for us. The same can be said of those in Babel and their offensive tower.

  The message is clear: to ascend is forbidden.

  But what of ascension as a gift? Is it not what Christ promises His believers? A place in a higher world? A position for which we are not suited as we are, but for which we must be groomed. The fruit that must be had is the same as it ever was. The blood is the life. Eat of the flesh. Become more like Me.

  If true evil is striving for ascension where it is not permitted—what, then, is true goodness? It must be the reverse: a willing descent. This also is in keeping with the Christian mythology. Did not the Christ descend to us from a higher world? And was it not deemed good? He did, and it was.

  This is my blood: drink of it.

  This is my body: eat of it.

  These symbols are more than metaphor. They are the reality. And the rules must be the same regardless of the direction one travels. The fruit is the blood is the life.

  And so her elevation is good. It is my gift to her.

  As for my descent—she has no blood, but she has flesh, or something like it. Will it suffice?

  We shall see.

  Stripped of appetite, Sam dropped his plate of untouched pizza on the coffee table. “I can’t do this anymore tonight.”

  David glanced at his watch. “I want to go down again,” he announced. “Tomorrow.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “We should take more pictures. Collect evidence. I’ll bring up some samples.”

  “Samples? Of what? Evidence of what?”

  “You want people to think you’re crazy?”

  “No.”

  “So we take pictures. We document.”

  Sam rubbed his face.

  David pulled a thick wallet from his back pocket. Sliding out the folded check Sam had given him earlier, he tore it in half and put the pieces on the coffee table. He tapped them with two fingers.

  “We shouldn’t stop now,” he said. Then he pushed up from the couch, one of the magician’s notebooks in hand. “You mind if I take a couple of these with me? I probably won’t sleep anyway.”

  Sam waved his permission.

  At the door, David looked back. “Listen, I’m not trying to tell you what to do, okay? But I don’t think you should stay here tonight. It doesn’t seem safe.”

  It only took a moment for Sam to tick off every friend he had in the area, none of whom he wanted to call at midnight to admit he was frightened to spend the night alone.

  “Sleep at my place,” David offered. “My couch is big.”

  Sam hesitated.

  “I have beer,” David added.

  Sam laughed despite himself. “I’ll be fine. Go on, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Early, okay?” David said.

  “Early,” Sam agreed.

  Sam ventured down the long hall to the master bedroom only to retrieve a blanket and pillow, which he dragged back to the couch. He felt safer there, and thought it must be the proximity to the refrigerator that made it seem so.

  At 2:15 a.m. his phone buzzed.

  “I thought you might still be awake,” David said.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Listen to this: he used the winch.”

  Sam put his feet on the floor and his forehead in his palm.

  “The winch in the garage,” David continued. “And the pulleys. He lowered—get this—a grappling hook on the end of a chain. He left it down there for days at a time. He was trolling.”

  Sam heard pages rustling over the line.

  “Then he caught Evelyn,” David said. “She got tangled up in the chain. She wasn’t Evelyn at first though—she was just a bunch of hard clay shaped like a person. He only named her Evelyn later. Are you hearing this?”

  “Have you been up all night?”

  “I don’t sleep much.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s all. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “I do. But maybe stop reading until tomorrow.”

  “Right,” David said. Then hung up.

  Knowing he wouldn’t sleep again, Sam inserted a tape, then went to the kitchen for a glass of milk and whatever pizza remained. He was eating hard crusts when Kurricke’s familiar voice spoke from the living room.

  “This one stops it,” the magician said. “I’ve showed you this before. You know how this works.”

  Sam spit a mouthful of crust into the trash and went to the doorway. The television showed a steady shot of the basement and the open hatch.

  Kurricke shuffled into view, only it wasn’t the magician Sam had come to recognize. This man’s hair had fallen out in patches. His skin was waxen, and he moved stiffly, every step an effort.

  Positioning himself beside the hatch, he turned toward the camera. It became immediately apparent that something was wrong with his face. His muscles were rigid, the skin nearly perfect in its smoothness. Holding up his hands, he displayed fingers sealed together.

  There he stood a long moment, his intent forgotten. Then he pawed at the buttons of his shirt with useless hands.

  “Help me,” he said, looking up at the camera.

  Giving up on the buttons, the magician advanced until he moved out of the shot. For a long while there was only the sound of rustling clothing, labored breathing, and urgent whispers.

  When Kurricke hobbled back into view he was naked. His skin everywhere was glossy and hairless. He had lost his sex. He—or someone—had fixed a weighted belt around his hips.

  “My final act,” the magician informed the camera as he knelt beside the hatch with difficulty. “Into the heart of the matter, yes? To the core of it. I will—if I am able—return. We have worlds to create.”

  Tipping forward, Kurricke disappeared with a muted splash.

  Barely breathing in the resulting silence, Sam watched the onscreen hatch. Something bumped the camera, and Sam jumped, having forgotten that someone else watched with him. He sat forward, waiting to see if she would show herself. The camera shifted again, lifted off its support. The basement leaned and whirled, then blackness.

  Sam paused the tape and sat in the quiet half-light of the living room. A board creaked in a back room. A window rattled. Sam got up to make sure the door to the basement was shut securely, then retreated back to the couch. He wanted to be gone from the house, but the distances seemed too great, the empty spaces between himself and everywhere else too threatening. He started the tape rewinding, and pulled the blanket up to his chin. He told himself he would wait for dawn, then leave and never come back, but he was asleep before the tape reached the beginning. He woke briefly when it started again. The glow from the television, coupled with the gentle click and whir of the camera, offered comfort, so he muted the volume and let it play.

  Somewhere in a half-dream, a door opened.

&nbs
p; She was standing near the television when Sam woke, transfixed by Kurricke’s old familiar act playing out in silence. Her wig was crooked, her dress backward and inside-out. Sam’s first thought was that someone had reclaimed limbs from the dumpster and assembled the parts in his living room as a horrid joke. Then she moved.

  Sam threw off his blanket and scrambled over the back of the couch. He quelled his panic as she turned her whole body to face him.

  Her time away from the magician had been unkind to her. Peels of thick skin had dried, cracked, and were curling from her face and arms. Her eyes were something out of a taxidermist’s kit. With rusted effort, she bent an arm to waist-level, and aimed it toward the television by rotating her upper body. Her head tilted to one side in a mechanical gesture of inquiry.

  “He’s gone,” Sam said.

  Her eyes remained on the set, following Kurricke as he capered about throwing colored scarves into the air. Reluctant to draw her attention again, Sam watched her watching the magician. She was not quite still; her arms moved in tiny increments, as though desiring to mime Kurricke’s abundant gestures.

  “You’re Evelyn,” Sam said.

  Her head twisted toward him. Her mouth, which Sam had thought hardened shut, parted to emit a throaty choking. She lifted both arms in a gesture of supplication. Her fingers were fixed together, her wrists immobile. Arms thus raised, she lurched forward.

  It was 6:00 a.m. when David’s Jeep swung onto the quiet street and threw itself into the driveway. Sam rose from where he had been sitting on the curb across the street and went to meet him.

  “What happened?” David asked as he stepped down from the Jeep,

  They found Evelyn’s body at the bottom of the basement stairs. One of her arms had broken off, and her left leg was folded back at the knee. Using her one arm, she had dragged herself a few feet toward the closed hatch. Now, her hand scrabbled feebly at the floor, and her legs moved with the futile motions of a crushed animal. At the sound of footsteps on the stairs, Evelyn lifted her head to emit strangled, tongueless glottals. If they were efforts to communicate, her capacity to speak was more primitive than her body.

  Standing over her, Sam felt himself beginning to loathe her for being so wounded, for clinging to life in a place she’d never belonged, for this suffering that made him feel he had done her some terrible wrong. He hated her for needing so much, and for being so far beyond help. He looked up to see David still on the top stair.

  “I’m going to need your help,” Sam warned him. He went to plug in the standing halogens, and garish light crushed back the shadows. When he pulled up the hatch, Evelyn began to make different sounds, a high keening broken by abrupt consonants and sharp barks. He went back to stand over her with David, where he saw that she was trying to touch the diver’s sandaled feet.

  They could see into her torso from where her arm had broken off at the shoulder. She was full on an airy, sponge-like webbing. She would be light. Sam didn’t really need help at all. He just didn’t want to do it alone.

  He took Evelyn under the shoulders, and waited for David to lift her legs. She was still twisting weakly when they fed her through the hatch. She listed, her dress fanning out to tangle her remaining limbs. In slow, dreamlike turns she he moved. An arm rose from the water, trailing the sopping fabric of her dress like weeds. Sam couldn’t tell, but she seemed to be grasping for the ledge.

  He fetched a shovel to hold her under.

  Long after she had sank into blackness, Sam remained, unsure of what to expect next. After a while, he closed the hatch and spun the handwheel until it locked. He wiped his face on his sleeve. When he turned to thank David—to tell him that he should leave now, and not come back—he found himself already alone.

  In the days that followed, Sam read each of Kurricke’s notebooks. He ordered them chronologically as best he could, then read them again. He studied them. In time, he began to understand what Kurricke had done right, and where he had gone wrong. He learned from the magician’s mistakes, and resolved not to repeat them.

  One day he read:

  The hatch was never necessary. Egress can be found anywhere. There have always been so many other ways: paintings and music and books. Books, most of all. There are doors to be found everywhere, and where they do not already exist, we create them. We engender worlds so blithely, then abandon them to their own misery. We care so little because it is not we who suffer for our recklessness.

  I have heard it argued that God became human so that none could accuse Him of being unsympathetic to His own creation. He walked a mile, as they say. What must we become, then, to understand Him? Where does our mile begin, and where end? God descended, and still loved. Is the same required of us?

  We accuse God of neglect, but are we kinder to our own creations? Or to any living thing unfortunate enough to find itself subject to our dominion? We hypocrites shake our fists at Heaven. But if we had a world to create, and a people to rule, could we do better?

  Sam closed the journal and looked at its frayed cover. He had been using the picture of the magician and Evelyn to keep his place, but removed it now. “I can do better than you, J. Kurricke,” Sam said. He ripped the photograph in half, keeping only Evelyn.

  David returned to the house on Enfield three weeks later. The rented dumpster was gone, and the lawn unkempt. No one answered his knocking. The garage door complained at being opened, but the door to the house had been left unlocked.

  “Sam!” he called.

  Getting no answer, David stepped inside, and his shoe squelched on waterlogged carpet. He noticed then the sagging ceiling and the water-blistered walls. The air was dense with moisture. On the magician’s trunk, David found a composition notebook bloated with water damage. Two-thirds of the pages were filled with script ruined by water. Only the final page remained legible.

  The Outsider had been gone many years when the children of the village began telling stories of a tall stranger living beside the river. He had eyes full of light, and charmed them with gifts of honeycomb and pearls. The men and women of the village—search as they might—could find no trace of him, and soon understood that they would not until he willed it.

  Every night of that vibrant summer, Evelyn went alone to the riverbank to wait for him, until one evening she arrived to find him emerging from the shallows. His shoulders were like the bull’s, and his eyes like the stars. His smile was kind.

  “You are Evelyn,” he said to her.

  “And by what name do I call you, Master?”

  “Here, you will know me as Samael.”

  Evelyn knelt before him.

  Samael took her fragile chin in his hand and turned her face upwards. “You were but a girl when I left.”

  “But I am a woman now, Samael.”

  And so Samael became her king, and she his queen. In time, he shared with her all the wonders of that world, which were his to command.

  Greg Kurzawa studied theology before stumbling into an information technology career. His work has appeared in Interzone, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. He has a passable impression of Gage Kurricke, with whom he coauthored the bleak fantasy novel, “Gideon’s Wall.” He can be found online at gregkurzawa.com.

  Do whatever you need to survive.

  Do whatever you need to be free.

  RAG AND BONE

  Priya Sharma

  I leave Gabriel in the yard and go into town, taking my bag with the vials of skin and bone, flesh and blood, my regular delivery to Makin. The Peels are looking for body parts.

  I love the grandeur of The Strand. High towers of ornate stone. The road’s packed with wagons and carts. Boats choke the river. The Mersey is the city’s blood and it runs rich. Liverpool lives again.

  I can hear the stevedores’ calls, those kings of distribution and balance, whose job it is to oversee the dockers loading the barges. The boats must be perfectly weighted for their journey up the Manchester Ship Can
al. Guards check them to ensure no unlicensed man steals aboard. Farther along, at Albert Dock, there’s a flock of white sails. The Hardman fleet’s arrived, tall ships bringing cotton from America.

  The Liver birds keep lookout. Never-never stone creatures that perch atop the Liver Building where all the families have agents. I keep my eyes fixed on the marble floor so that I don’t have to look at the line of people desperate for an audience. Peels’ man has the ground floor. The Peels’ fortune came from real estate, small forays such as tenements at first, but money begets money. They took a punt when they redeveloped Liverpool’s waterfront, a good investment that made them kings of the new world.

  The other families have managers on other floors, all in close proximity as nothing’s exclusive, business and bloodlines being interbred. The Hardmans are textile merchants, the Rathbones’ wealth was made on soap, of all things, while the Moores are ship builders.

  The outer offices contain rows of clerks at desks, shuffling columns of figures in ledgers. A boy, looking choked in his high-necked shirt, runs between them carrying messages. No one pays me any mind.

  Makin’s secretary keeps me waiting a full minute before he looks up, savoring this petty exercise of power. “He’ll see you now.”

  Makin’s at his desk. Ledgers are piled on shelves, the charts and maps on the walls are stuck with pins marking trade routes and Peel territories.

  “Have a seat.” He’s always civil. “How did you fare today?”

  “A few agreed.”

  I hand him the bag.

  “They’re reluctant?”

  “Afraid.”

  There are already rumors. That the Peels, Hardmans, Rathbones, and Moores, these wealthy people we never see, are monstrosities that live to a hundred years by feasting on Scousers’ flesh and wearing our skins like suits when their own get worn out. Their hands drip with diamonds and the blood of the slaving classes. They lick their fingers clean with slavering tongues.

  Makin taps the desk.

  “Should we be paying more?”