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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  “I suppose I have,” she said. “Now off with you, dear. I’m working.”

  The kitchen still smelled of freshly baked bread. On the counter lay a loaf of bread rolled up in a tea towel, next to a bread knife and a jar of honey. Alia unfolded the towel, cut a heel off the loaf and stuffed it in her mouth. It did nothing to ease the burning in her stomach. She turned the loaf over and cut the other heel off. The crust was crunchy and chewy at the same time.

  She had eaten her way through most of the loaf when Father spoke behind her. He said her name and put a hand on her shoulder. The other hand gently pried the bread knife from her grip. Then her cheek was pressed against his shirt. Over the slow beat of his heart, Alia could hear the air rushing in and out of his lungs, the faint whistle of breath through his nose. The fire in her belly flickered and died.

  “Something’s wrong with Mother,” she whispered into the shirt.

  Father’s voice vibrated against her cheek as he spoke.

  “She’s resting now.”

  Alia and her father went about their lives as the President had told them to: going to work, going to school. The classroom emptied as the days went by. Alia’s remaining classmates brought rumors of families moving to cellars and caves under the city. The streets were almost deserted. Those who ventured outside did so at a jog, heads bowed between their shoulders. There were no displays of panic or violence. Someone would occasionally burst into tears in the market or on the bus, quickly comforted by bystanders who drew together in a huddle around him.

  The radio broadcasts were mostly about nothing, because there was nothing to report. All the scientists and knowledgeable people had established was that the moon didn’t seem to affect the earth more than before. It no longer went through phases, staying full and fixed in its position above the city. A respected scientist claimed it was a mirage, and had the city’s defense shoot a rocket at it. The rocket hit the moon right where it seemed to be positioned. Burning debris rained back down through the atmosphere for half a day.

  As the moon drew closer, it blotted out the midday sun and drowned the city in a ghostly white light, day and night. At sunrise and sundown, the light from the two spheres mixed in a blinding and sickly glare.

  Mother stayed on the balcony in her dressing gown, eye to the ocular. Alia heard Father argue with her at night, Father’s voice rising and Mother’s voice replying in monotone.

  Once, a woman in an official-looking suit came to ask Doctor Kazakoff for help. Mother answered the door herself before Father could intercept her. The official-looking woman departed and didn’t return.

  Alia was still bleeding. She knew you were only supposed to bleed for a few days, but it had been two weeks now. What had started as brownish spotting was now a steady, bright red runnel. It was as if it grew heavier the closer the moon came.

  Late one night, she heard shouts and the sound of furniture scraping across the floor. Then footsteps came down the stairs; something metallic clattered. Peeking out from her room, Alia saw Father in the hallway with the telescope under one arm.

  “This goes out!” he yelled up the stairs. “It’s driven you insane!”

  Mother came rushing down the stairs, naked feet slapping on the steps. “Pavel Kazakoff, you swine, give it to me.” She lunged for the telescope.

  Father was heavy and strong, but Mother was furious. She tore the telescope from him so violently that he abruptly let go, and when the telescope crashed into the wall she lost her grip. The floor shook with the telescope’s impact. In the silence that followed, Father slowly raised a hand. The front of Mother’s dressing gown had opened. He drew it aside.

  Vera.” His voice was almost a whisper. “What happened to you?”

  In the light from the hallway sconce, Mother’s skin was patterned in shades of gray. Uneven rings overlapped each other over her shoulders and arms. The lighter areas glowed with reflected light.

  Mother glanced at Father, and then at Alia where she stood gripping the frame of her bedroom door.

  “It’s regolith,” Mother said in a matter-of-fact voice.

  She returned upstairs. She left the telescope where it lay.

  A doctor arrived the morning after. Father gave Alia the choice of staying in her room or going over to Itti’s. She chose the latter, hurrying over the courtyard and up the stairs to where Itti lived with his parents.

  Itti let her into a flat that was almost completely empty. They passed the kitchen, where Mrs. Botkin was canning vegetables, and shut themselves in Itti’s room. He only had a bed and his box of comics. They sat down on the bed with the box between them.

  “Mother’s been making preserves for days now,” said Itti.

  Alia leafed through the topmost magazine without really looking at the pictures. “What about your father?”

  Itti shrugged. “He’s digging. He says the cellar doesn’t go deep enough.”

  “Deep enough for what?”

  “For, you know.” Itti’s voice became small. “For when it hits.”

  Alia shuddered and put the magazine down. She walked over to the window. The Botkin’s apartment was on the top floor, and Alia could see right into her own kitchen window across the yard. Her parents were at the dinner table, across from a stranger who must be the doctor. They were discussing something. The doctor leaned forward over the table, making slow gestures with his hands. Mother sat back in her chair, chin thrust out in her Doctor Kazakoff stance. After a while, the physician rose from his chair and left. He emerged from the door to the yard moments later; Alia could see the large bald patch on his head. The physician tilted his head backward and gave the sky a look that seemed almost annoyed. He turned around and hurried out the front gate.

  Father was still in the kitchen when Alia came home. He blew his nose in a tea towel when he noticed Alia in the doorway.

  “Vera is ill,” he said. “But we have to take care of her here at home. There’s no room at the hospital.”

  Alia scratched at an uneven spot in the doorjamb. “Is she crazy?”

  Father sighed. “The doctor says it’s a nervous breakdown, and that it’s brought on some sort of skin condition.” He cleared his throat and crumpled the tea towel in his hands. “We need to make sure she eats and drinks properly. And that she gets some rest.”

  Alia looked at her hand, which was gripping the doorjamb so hard the nails were white and red. A sudden warmth spread between her legs as a new trickle of blood emerged.

  Father turned the radio on. The announcer was incoherent, but managed to convey that the moon was approaching with increased speed.

  Mother’s dressing gown lay in a heap on the chair next to the balcony door. Mother herself lay naked on the balcony, staring into the sky, a faint smile playing across her face. Alia could see the great wide sea across her chest, and the craters making rings around it. All of the moon’s scarred face was sculpted in relief over Mother’s body. The crater rims had begun to rise up above the surface.

  Alia couldn’t make herself step out onto the balcony. Instead, she went down to the courtyard and looked up into the sky. The moon covered the whole square of sky visible between the houses, like a shining ceiling. It had taken on a light of its own, a jaundiced shade of silver. More blood trickled down between Alia’s legs.

  With the burning rekindling in her stomach, Alia saw how obvious it was. It was all her fault, no matter what Father said. Something had happened when she started bleeding, some power had emerged in her that she wasn’t aware of, that drew the moon to her like a magnet. And Mother, so sensitive to the skies and the planets, had been driven mad by its presence. There was only one thing to do. She had to save everyone. The thought filled her with a strange mix of terror and anticipation.

  Father was on the couch in the living room, leafing through an old photo album. He said nothing when Alia came in and wrapped her arms around him, just leaned his head on her arm and laid his long hand over hers. She detached herself and walked up the stairs to the at
tic.

  Mother was as Alia had left her, spread out like a starfish.

  Alia crouched beside her still form. “I know why

  You’re ill.”

  Mother’s bright eyes rolled to the side and met Alia’s gaze.

  “I’ll make you well again,” Alia continued. “But you won’t see me again.” Moisture dripped from her eyes into the crater on Mother’s left shoulder, and pooled there.

  Mother’s eyes narrowed.

  “Goodbye.” Alia bent down and kissed her cheek. It tasted of dust and sour ashes.

  The plain spread out beyond the city, dotted here and there by clumps of trees. The autumn wind coming in from the countryside was laden with the smell of windfallen fruit and bit at Alia’s face. The moonlight leached out the color from the grass. The birds, if any birds remained here, were quiet. There was only the whisper of grass on Alia’s trouser legs, and an underlying noise like thunder. And the moon was really approaching fast, just like the radio man had said: a glowing plain above pressed down like a stony cloud cover. The sight made Alia’s face hot with a shock that spread to her ears and down her chest and back, pushing the air out of her lungs. She had a sudden urge to crouch down and dig herself into the ground. The memory of her mother on the balcony flashed by; her body immobile under the regolith, her despairing eyes. Bravery was perseverance through fear. Alia took another step, and her legs, though shaking, held. She could still breathe somehow.

  When Alia could no longer see the city behind her, a lone hill rose from the plain. It was the perfect place. She climbed the hill step by slow step. The inside of her trousers had soaked through with blood that had begun to cool against her skin, the fabric rasping wetly as she walked. At the top of the hill, she lay down and made herself stare straight up. Why did they always describe fear as cold? Fear was searing hot, burning a hole through her stomach, eating through her lungs.

  She forced out a whisper. “Here I am,” she told the moon. “I did this. Take me now, do what you’re supposed to.”

  Alia closed her eyes and fought to breathe. The muscles in her thighs tingled and twitched. The vibration in her chest rose in volume, and she understood what it was: the sound of the moon moving through space, the music of the spheres.

  She had no sensation of time passing. Maybe she’d fainted from fear or bleeding; the sound of footsteps up a hillside woke her. She opened her eyes. Mother stood over her, the terrain across her body in sharp relief against the glowing surface above. The whites of her eyes glistened in twin craters. She held the broken telescope in one hand.

  “Go home.” Mother’s voice was dull and raspy.

  Alia shook her head. “It’s my fault. I have to make everything okay again.”

  Mother cocked her head. “Go home, child. This isn’t about you. It was never about you. It’s my moon.”

  She grabbed Alia’s arm so hard it hurt, and dragged her to her feet. “It was always my moon. Go home.”

  Mother didn’t stink anymore. She smelled like dust and rocks. Her collarbones had become miniature mountain ranges.

  Alia pulled her arm out of her mother’s grasp. “No.”

  Mother swung the telescope at her head.

  The second round of waking was to a world that somehow tilted. Alia opened her eyes to a mess of bright light. Vomit rose up through her throat. She rolled over on her side and retched. When her stomach finally stopped cramping, she slowly sat up. Her brain seemed to slide around a little in her skull.

  She was sitting at the foot of the hill. Over her, just a few meters it seemed, an incandescent desert covered the sky.

  The moon had finally arrived.

  Afterward, when Father found her, and the moon had returned to its orbit, and the hill was empty, and everyone pretended that the city had been in the grip of some kind of temporary collective madness, Alia refused to talk about what happened, where Mother had gone. About Mother on the top of the hill, where she stood naked and laughing with her hands outstretched toward the moon’s surface. About how she was still laughing as it lowered itself toward the ground, as it pushed her to her knees, as she finally lay flat under its monstrous weight. How she quieted only when the moon landed, and the earth rang like a bell.

  Karin Tidbeck lives and works in Malmö, Sweden. She’s published prose and poetry in Swedish since 2002, with publications in journals like Jules Verne-magasinet and Lyrikvännen. Her English publication history includes Weird Tales, Tor.com, Lightspeed, and the anthologies Steampunk Revolution and The Time Travelers Almanac. Tidbeck’s stories have appeared in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2013, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2014, and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One. Tidbeck’s 2012 short story collection Jagannath won the Crawford Memorial Award in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Tiptree Award and World Fantasy Award. One of the stories, “Augusta Prima,” won the SF & Fantasy Translation Award.

  Among the shadows between the pillars, a man wielding a narrow,

  curved sword fought silently—desperately—valiantly—for his life . . .

  THE GHOST MAKERS

  Elizabeth Bear

  The faceless man walked out of the desert at sunset, when the gates of the City of Jackals wound ponderously closed on silent machinery. He was the last admitted. His kind were made by Wizards, and went about on Wizards’ business. No one interrogated him.

  His hooded robe and bronze hide smoked with sun-heat when the priest of Iashti threw water from the sacred rivers over him. Whether it washed away any clinging devils of the deep desert, as it was intended, who could have said? But it did rinse the dust from the featureless oval of his visage so all who stood near could see themselves reflected. Distorted.

  He paused within and he lowered the hood of his homespun robes to lie upon his shoulders. The gates made the first sound of their closing, a heavy snap as their steel-shod edges overlapped and latched. Their juncture reflected as a curved line up the mirror of the faceless man’s skull. Within the gates, bars as thick as a man glided home. Messaline was sealed, and the date plantations and goats and pomegranates and laborers of the farms and villages beyond her walls were left to their own devices until the lion-sun tinted the horizon again.

  Trailing tendrils of steam faded from the faceless man’s robe, leaving the air heavy with petrichor—the smell of water in aridity—and the cloth over his armored hide as dry as before. His eyeless mask trained unwaveringly straight ahead, he raised his voice.

  “Priest of Iashti.” Though he had no mouth, his voice tolled clear and sonorous.

  The priest left his aspergillum and came around to face the faceless man, though there was no need. He said, “You already have my blessing, O Gage . . . of . . . ?”

  “I’d rather information than blessings, Child of the Morning,” said the Gage. The priest’s implied question—to whom he owed his service—the faceless man left unacknowledged. His motionlessness—as if he were a bronze statue someone had draped in a robe and left inexplicably in the center of the market road—was more distressing than if he’d stalked the priest like a cat.

  He continued, “Word is that a poet was murdered under the Blue Stone a sennight since.”

  “Gage?”

  The Gage waited.

  The priest collected himself. He tugged the tangerine-and gold dawn-colored robed smooth beneath his pectoral. “It is true. Eight days ago, though—no, now gone nine.”

  “Which way?”

  Wordlessly, the priest pointed to a twisting, smoky arch towering behind dusty tiers of pastel houses. The sunset sprawled across the sky rendered the monument in translucent silhouette, like an enormous, elaborate braid of chalcedony.

  The faceless man paused, and finally made a little motion of his featureless head that somehow still gave the impression of ruefully pursed lips and acknowledgement.

  “Alms.” He tossed gold to the priest.

  The priest, no fool, c
aught it before it could bloody his nose. He waited to bite it until the Gage was gone.

  The Gage made his way through the Temple District, where great prayer-houses consecrated to the four major Messaline deities dominated handfuls of lesser places of worship: those of less successful sects, or of alien gods. Only the temple to the Uthman Scholar-God, fluted pillars twined about with sacred verses rendered in lapis lazuli and pyrite, competed with those four chief temples for splendor.

  Even at dusk, these streets teemed. Foot traffic, litter bearers, and the occasional rider and mount—mostly horses, a few camels, a mule, one terror-bird—bustled through the lanes between the torchbearers. There were soldiers and merchants, priests and scholars, a nobleman or woman in a curtained sedan chair with guards crying out “Make way!” The temples were arranged around a series of squares, and the squares were occupied by row upon row of market stalls from which rose the aromas of turmeric, coriander, roses, sandalwood, dates, meat sizzling, bread baking, and musty old attics—among other things. The sweet scent of stitched leather and wood-pulp-and-rag paper identified a bookseller as surely as did the banner that drifted above his pavilion.

  The faceless man passed them all—and more than half of the people he passed either turned to stare or hurried quickly along their way, eyes fixed on the ground by their shoes. The Gage knew better than to assign any quality of guilt or innocence to these reactions.

  He did not stay in the temple district long. A left-hand street bent around the temple of Kaalha, the goddess of death and mercy—who also wore a mirrored mask, though hers was silver and divided down the centerline. The temple had multiple doorways, and seemed formed in the shape of a star. Over the nearest one was inscribed: In my house there is an end to pain.

  Some distance behind the temple, the stone arch loomed.

  At first he walked by stucco houses built cheek to cheek, stained in every shade of orange, red, vermilion. The arches between their entryways spanned the road. But soon the street grew crooked and dark; there were no torchbearers here. A rat or two was in evidence, scurrying over stones—but rodents went quickly and fearfully here. Once, longer legs and ears flickered like scissors as a slender shadow detached itself from one darkness and glided across the open space to the next: one of the jackals from which Messaline took its epithet. From the darkness where it finished, a crunch and a squeak told of one scurrying at least that ended badly for the scurrier.