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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  All that afternoon, I did not speak.

  When we returned, Annette was called into her grandfather’s private study. Someone had told him about Roy Folkow. Over dinner, Annette’s aunts scolded her in relays: “A shopkeeper’s son,” Olive said, her entire face pursing around the words as if they tasted of vulgarity. Or sour milk. “Really, Annette.” Annette broke and fled the table in tears before the coffee was brought out. The atmosphere did not improve; I claimed a migraine rather than face any after-dinner conversation.

  No mention was made of Sunday trains.

  I lay down on my bed with Letters from the Guillotine, and must have dozed off, for I woke suddenly to the sound of someone tapping on the window. I jolted upright, and for a moment as she stood framed against the night, the light caught Annette Robillard’s eyes and made them glow gold.

  I opened the window, and she said at once, “Mr. Booth, please, you have to help me.”

  “Er,” I said. She was still red-eyed, and I did not like the grim set of her mouth. “With what?”

  “I told Roy I would meet him tonight at the Ussher crossroads, and I can’t, not with everyone snooping. But you could go for a walk.”

  “Your brother told me not to,” I said stupidly.

  “Please,” she said.

  I wondered with a chill if Marcus Justus had confided his plans to her. “What’s wrong?”

  She glanced over her shoulder, at the banked violet clouds and fierce pinprick stars of the night sky. The moon was not yet up. “It’s true,” she said. “The full moon is a chancy time in this part of the world. And I know Roy. He’ll wait.”

  “Are you going to elope with him?”

  “No,” she said. She looked down, pleating the delicate flowered fabric of her dress between her fingers. Then, “Maybe. I don’t know! I don’t want to be stuck here for the rest of my life.”

  “Your grandfather,” I started, still not sure what I was going to say, and she interrupted me.

  “My grandfather is going hunting tonight.”

  “Your grandfather hunts at night?”

  “At the full moon. It’s a family tradition.” She burst out suddenly, savagely, “I hate it! My father was killed on a night-hunt, and Grandfather takes Justin out sometimes, and Aunt Olive and Aunt Christina, and sometimes I feel like I’m just waiting for one of them to die, too! And I’m afraid for Roy.”

  “You think your grandfather would shoot him?” I said. I only wished I found it unlikely.

  “It would be an excuse,” she said, her eyes wide and dark and dreading. “Hunting accidents happen all the time.”

  “And what’s to prevent one from happening to me?”

  “Grandfather doesn’t make mistakes,” she said, so flatly that I could not doubt the truth of it.

  And I knew that Marcus Justus had every reason to view Folkow as, not merely a nuisance, but an impediment. And perhaps . . . perhaps I could tell Folkow that Marcus Justus proposed a marriage between me and Annette. Remembering his earnestness, the worship of Annette so naked in his face, I thought he would be quicker to believe than Annette would herself. And I could not make myself say it to her face: Your grandfather wants you to marry me. Because of a curse.

  “Let me . . . er, that is, I need to get dressed,” I said.

  Annette smiled at me brilliantly, although not quite brilliantly enough to erase the darkness from her eyes, and said, “I’ll get you a flashlight.”

  Annette returned with the promised flashlight mere moments after I had knotted my tie–a futile and ludicrous gesture of respectability, but it made me feel better. She showed me down the back stairs and out through the kitchen, where Sarah Robillard was washing the dishes. She did not notice us.

  “Does your family not keep servants?” I asked Annette, once she had closed the door of the mudroom behind us. I had been wondering all week.

  “No one stays out here who doesn’t have to,” she said and changed the subject briskly. “Now, what you want to do is go around the house and back to the main road. Turn left, and it’s about three miles to the crossroads. There’s a sign there, and it says Ussher, so you’ll know you’re in the right place. And anyway, you’ll see Roy.” She turned the flashlight on and handed it to me.

  I opened my mouth to protest, but realized I had no idea of what to say, nor even quite what I wanted to protest–except the general damnable unfairness of the whole situation, and that was not Annette’s fault.

  She must have seen something of what I felt in my face, for she said suddenly, “Thank you—thank you so much, Mr. Booth. And here. For your buttonhole.” She caught my lapel before I could evade her and tucked something in my buttonhole, although I could not see it clearly.

  “Wolfsbane,” she said; her laugh was uneasy—not the bright ripple of the daylight hours. “Local people grow it to keep away those wolves I mentioned.”

  “It’s, er, quite poisonous,” I said dubiously.

  “So don’t eat it,” she said. Her laugh sounded better that time. She might have kissed my cheek then, but I turned away before I was sure that was her intention and did not let myself look at her again.

  She could never be my bride.

  I reached the road without difficulty—and without running into any other Robillards, which was what I had chiefly feared. I turned left, as Annette had directed me, and started walking.

  The moon rose shortly thereafter, a vast bright disk. It was, I thought, the Hunter’s Moon, as the autumn equinox was a month gone. I remembered that the Hunter’s Moon was also called the Sanguine Moon, and I walked a little faster.

  But I could not walk very fast, even trying to hurry. The road was not in good repair—as I had noticed Monday afternoon, jouncing in Justin Robillard’s trap—and I did not have the aid of familiarity. Even with the flashlight, I fell twice; the second time, I knocked the air out of my lungs, and it was some little while before I was able to continue. I told myself it was ridiculous to be anxious—as the wide white moon rose higher in the sky—but I could not rid myself of a feeling of urgency, a feeling that Annette was right, that Roy Folkow was doomed unless I could get to him in time.

  Ridiculous, I said again, more firmly, and tried to walk faster all the same.

  Even walking as fast as I could, it took me nearly an hour, but finally, I crested a slight rise and saw a crossroads. I did not see anyone waiting there, but Folkow might have decided to sit down–or he might sensibly have chosen to wait in concealment. I picked my way down the hill as quickly as I could.

  The flashlight and moonlight together let me read the sign, which did indeed say USSHER. “Folkow?” I called, not loudly.

  There was no response.

  Annette had been so certain that Folkow would wait for her—I wondered if perhaps I had somehow reached the crossroads ahead of him. I turned in a circle, slowly, to see if there were any signs of movement on the other branches of the road. There was nothing. I stepped cautiously toward the side of the road, in hopes of finding somewhere to sit; regardless of whether Folkow had not waited or had not yet arrived, I wanted at least to rest for a few moments before I started back to Belle Lune—or perhaps, in defiance of Justin Robillard, struck out for the nearest town or human habitation. But I had not reached the verge when the smell struck me: blood and excrement, both nauseously fresh.

  I wished, desperately and pointlessly, to be anywhere other than where I was. Then I took another step, the flashlight leading the way, and I found Roy Folkow.

  He was dead, and he had not been shot.

  He had been . . . I leaned closer and then had to turn away and fight not to vomit. He had been disemboweled, and I thought he had been partially eaten, as well. And it had happened very recently.

  Annette had laughed at the stories of wolves, but what else could have done this?

  The howl came as if in answer, a long rising ululation that sounded like grief. It did not seem close, which was barely any comfort at all. I could not stay out here with Roy
Folkow’s corpse and a wandering predator, and there was nothing closer than Belle Lune. I had to go back.

  I looked at the Hunter’s Moon, the Blood Moon; I looked at the flashlight Annette had given me. I wondered if I would break my neck trying to run.

  I did run, at least part of the way, but I was still a good half-mile from Belle Lune when the horizon began to show blood-red and I smelled smoke.

  “No,” I said, barely more than a whisper. “Oh, no.”

  But denial made no more difference to the truth than it ever does. Belle Lune was burning.

  I ran faster, recklessly, and that I did not break my neck is astonishing. I was limping by the time I came down Belle Lune’s driveway, blisters scraping raw on both feet and my left ankle throbbing from yet another fall.

  The house blazed, flames seeming to lean out of every window. There was no possibility of a heroic dash inside, even if I had been capable of it; there was no “inside” left, and the idea of survivors seemed entirely impossible. Either they had already gotten out or they were already dead. And those valueless books were nothing but ashes.

  I stood by the dark water of the Mirror, feeling, if I am honest, more bewildered than anything else. There were no neighbors that I knew of, and it was ten miles or more into town. I did not know where the horse was, nor the trap, and even if I had known, I had not the first idea of how one went about putting the two together. I supposed, finally, dimly, that I ought to circle the house and see if any of the Robillards was there—perhaps in the back garden? Perhaps the back of the house had not burned as quickly as the front? But I was still standing stone-like when I heard the howl again.

  I knew it was the same creature, although I do not know how I knew. And it sounded much closer than it had at the crossroads. I told myself that wild creatures avoided fire, and that Belle Lune was surely a fire that even the most ferocious and bloodthirsty beast would fear, but I did not find myself convincing. If it was closer, and if it was coming this way, I needed either shelter or a weapon. I remembered there was a gardener’s shed in back of the house; if it did not provide one, it might provide the other, and in any event, I had to look for survivors, even if I believed it utterly futile.

  I skirted the burning house carefully, trampling through the flowerbeds rather than get too close.

  There was no one behind Belle Lune. Unless Marcus Justus had indeed gone out hunting, the entire Robillard family was almost certainly destroyed. I wondered, as I fought the warped door of the shed, how they could all have been trapped. No one had been asleep when I had left; they had all still been on the ground floor. How could it have sprung up so quickly that not one of them made it out? Sarah Robillard had been fewer than twenty feet from the back door, and although she was deaf, she could smell smoke as easily as any hearing person.

  The shed provided: a pair of rusty secateurs which I decided dubiously would be even less use as a weapon than my pocket knife; a ladder which did me no good at all; a rake missing half its tines; and a shovel. The shovel at least had a broad iron blade and was sturdily constructed. I felt a fool carrying it as I completed my circle around the house, but I comforted myself with the thought that at least, as a weapon, it was one I could use as well as anyone else.

  I had been hoping, mostly without articulating the idea, that by the time I made it to the front of the house, someone would have shown up: a Robillard, or a neighbor, or a police officer. Someone who would know what to do, someone who could take responsibility for this burning house and the dead bodies presumably inside it, not to mention the dead body at the Ussher crossroads. There was no one standing in front of the house—rationally there was no reason to expect otherwise—and I was conscious of a strong desire simply to sit down and weep with exhaustion and fear and uselessness.

  But before I either gave into that desire or chose a more constructive course of action, the howl rose for the third time, and it had not died away when something came bounding down the driveway and stopped barely ten feet from me, where it crouched and panted, great heaving breaths like sobs.

  It was not, quite, a wolf. It was like a wolf, but it was much too large, and its legs did not bend in the correct directions. Its front feet, where it had braced itself against the gravel, were lumpish and misshapen, but I could not mistake the fingers—the torn fingernails, the bloody knuckles. When it raised its head to howl again, I saw the blood staining its muzzle and throat and chest. I also saw that the muzzle was too short for a wolf, the teeth too flat. And when it lowered its head and looked at me, I saw that its eyes were not a wolf’s eyes.

  It opened its mouth, tongue lolling, and said, “Kill me.”

  The voice was harsh and unpleasantly thick, as if the creature were on the verge of choking, but the words were unmistakable.

  I fell back a step; I could hear my own breathing, too fast and sharp.

  “Kill me,” the creature repeated, and I watched as it lurched upright. It seemed almost unable to balance, the grotesque hands flailing against the air.

  I realized that it was wearing the remains of Annette Robillard’s flowered dress, and my legs folded under me. My knees hit the ground with a jolt that clacked my teeth together painfully, but I could only stare at the monster in Annette’s dress, the monster that had killed Roy Folkow—the monster that wanted to die.

  “Kill me,” it begged again, taking a lurching, staggering step toward me. I scrambled up again, because I was too terrified to stay on the ground. If I did not kill it, it seemed all too likely that it would kill me—I did not think it was approaching me in order to lay its head in my lap like the unicorn of legend. But how I could possibly kill it with only a shovel?

  I thought that it tried to say, “Kill me,” again, but the words garbled into a roar even as its legs bunched under it, and it sprang.

  I swung the shovel. It was purely instinctual, and I think my eyes were closed, but the shovel-blade connected with some part of the creature’s body, for the blow jarred in my shoulders, and I heard the creature yelp. Moreover, it did not rip my throat out; although I felt the heat and force of its body passing near mine, it did not touch me.

  My eyes came open, and I spun to face it. It had its back to the fire now, which I suspected was a bad thing for me, and it had its head lowered, its eyes glinting yellow up at me, the way Justin Robillard’s eyes had glinted. It looked more like a wolf now, and I did not think it would ask me to kill it again.

  I wondered—if I could keep my eyes open the next time it leapt, could I land a solid enough blow on its head to knock it unconscious? It seemed my only, though vanishingly unlikely, hope. I tightened my grip on the shovel and tried to watch for the creature to spring.

  A voice cried behind me, “Down!”

  I am afraid it is not due to any good sense that I obeyed. I was so startled that in trying to turn to see who was behind me, I lost my balance and fell, very nearly ending up in the Mirror.

  The shotgun blast sounded utterly like the end of the world.

  It was some moments before, ears ringing, winded, I managed to pick myself up. When I did, I saw Marian Robillard, in a nightgown dyed lurid red by the flames, kneeling beside the creature’s body. I edged a little closer and saw that the body, rent and broken and dead, was Annette.

  Marian did not turn, although I saw by the way she stiffened that she knew I was there. After a moment, she said, “It was a family curse.”

  “Lycanthropy?” No wonder Marcus Justus had been so carefully reticent.

  “Yes. As far back as they could trace their genealogy, Robillards have been werewolves. Sometimes only one in a generation, sometimes all of them. It skipped Sophia in my husband’s generation, and I prayed—dear God how I prayed—that it would skip Annette.”

  “Sarah was a werewolf?” I said stupidly.

  “They were beasts, but they were not loveless,” Marian said. “There is no other reason I can think of that Marcus Justus would not have sent her to a proper school for the deaf. But he
could not take the chance—the curse could hit them at any age from nine to twenty-nine—and, of course, it turned out he was right. She started changing when she was barely twelve.”

  Marcus Justus’ “night-hunts” took on a dreadful new dimension. “What happened to your husband?” I asked.

  “A better question is, what didn’t happen to me?” she said. She stood and turned to face me, and I saw that it was not the fire dyeing her nightgown red. She was covered in blood. “Sooner or later, every werewolf turns against the person he loves. Or she loves.” She glanced down at her daughter’s body. “Marcus Justus’ mother was killed by his father when he was a tiny boy. Marcus Justus killed his wife—none of her children would ever talk about her, do you know that? And Patrick tried to kill me.”

  “He failed,” I said; it was half a question.

  “He was a strange man,” Marian said. “He armed me—gave me a Bowie knife as a wedding present and told me always to have it by my bed at the full moon. And I did. When the monster broke down my door, I fought it, and I won. And I killed my husband.”

  The corners of her mouth lifted in a tiny, distant smile. “Marcus Justus was furious. I begged him to let me take the children away—I have always thought, since I learned of the curse, that it must be something in the situation of Belle Lune that brings it, some poison in the water or the soil. He refused utterly, warned me that if I tried, I would be hunted down—and Marcus Justus and his daughters were a formidable hunting pack, make no mistake, Mr. Booth. I begged him again, when Justin turned, to let me try to save Annette, but he told me it was too risky. He told me he thought Annette might not be a werewolf anyway.”

  I remembered Marcus Justus saying calmly, It won’t keep the curse from afflicting her, of course, and I knew he had lied to his daughter-in-law. He had known full well that Annette was a werewolf. It seemed the only one who had not known was Annette herself.