The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2015 Edition

by Paula Guran

  “No, I won’t do that,” Emiline says. “You know I won’t do that. Why would you even suggest such a thing, when you know I won’t.”

  Essie shuts her eyes. The room smells of perspiration and dust, talcum powder, tea rose perfume, and the potpourri they order from a shop in Boston. The latter sits in a bowl on the chifforobe: a salmagundi of allspice, marjoram leaves, rose hips, lavender, juniper and cinnamon bark, with a little mugwort thrown in to help keep the moths at bay. Emiline insists on having a bowl of the potpourri in every room in the high old house on River Street. She dislikes the smell of the Manuxet and the fishy, low-tide smells of the bay, whenever the wind blows from the east, and also the muddy odor of the salt marshes, whenever the wind blows from the west or south or north. Essie has never minded these smells, and sometimes they even comfort her, the way the sound of the river sometimes comforts her. But she also rarely minds the scent of the potpourri. Tonight, though, the potpourri is cloying and unwelcome, and it almost seems as if it could smother her, as if it means to seep up her nostrils and drown her.

  Emiline is deathly afraid of drowning, which, of course, is why it was foolishness to suggest that thinking of the river might help her to sleep.

  Essie rolls onto her back once more, and the box springs squeak like a bucket of angry mice.

  “I’m going to buy a new mattress,” she says.

  And, again, Emiline says, “It’s much too hot to sleep.” Then she adds, “It’s very silly, lying here, not sleeping, when there’s work to be done.”

  “Yes, in the autumn, I think I will definitely buy a new mattress.”

  “There’s really nothing wrong with the mattress you have,” says Emiline.

  “You don’t know,” Essie replies. “You don’t have to sleep on it. Sometimes I think there are stones sewn up inside it.”

  “I should get up,” whispers Emiline, and Essie isn’t sure if her sister is speaking to her or speaking to herself. “I could get some baking done. A pie, some biscuits. It’ll be too hot to bake after sunrise.”

  “Em, it’s to hot to bake now. Try to sleep.”

  Then the door creaks open, just enough to admit their striped ginger tom Horace to the bedroom, and Essie listens to the not-quite inaudible padding of velvet paws against the white-pine floorboards. Horace reaches the space between the women’s beds, and he pauses there a moment, deciding which sister he’s in the mood to curl up with. The moonlight coming in through the open window is bright, and Essie can plainly see the cat, sitting back on its haunches, watching her.

  “Well, where have you been?” she asks the ginger tom. “Making certain we’re safe from marauding rodents?”

  The cat glances her way, then turns its head towards Emiline.

  Emiline calls Horace their “tough old gentleman.” His ears are tattered, and there are ugly scars crisscrossing his broad nose and marring his flanks and shoulders, souvenirs of the battles he’s won and lost. The sisters have had him for almost seventeen years now, since he was a tiny kitten, since they were both still young women. They found him one afternoon in the alley out back of the Gilman House, hiding behind an empty produce crate, and Emiline named him Horace, after Horace Greeley. It seemed an odd choice to Essie, but she’s never asked her sister to explain herself. It isn’t a bad name for a cat, and the kitten seemed to grow into it.

  “Well, make up your mind,” Essie says. “Don’t take all night.”

  “Don’t rush him,” Emiline tells her. “What’s the hurry. It’s not as if we’re going anywhere.”

  Downstairs, the grandfather clock in the front parlor chimes midnight.

  And then Horace chooses Emiline. He jumps—a little stiffly—up onto her bed and, after sniffing about the quilt and sheets for a bit, lies down near her knees. Essie feels slightly disappointed, but then the cat has always preferred her sister. She sighs and stares up at the fine cracks in the ceiling plaster, concentrating once again on the soft, wet sound of the Manuxet flowing between River and Paine streets.

  Across from her, Horace purrs himself and Emiline to sleep. After another hour or so, Essie also drifts off to sleep, and she dreams of tall ships and the sea.

  2.

  The brass bell hung over the shop door jingles, and Bertrand Cowlishaw—proprietor of River Street Grocery and Dry Goods—looks up from his newspaper just long enough to note that it’s the elder Miss Babson who has come in. He nods to the woman as she eases the door shut behind her. Though the shades are drawn against the noonday heat, and despite the slowly spinning electric ceiling fan, it’s stifling inside the dusty, dimly lit shop.

  “And how are you today, Miss Babson,” he says, then turns his attention back to the front page of a two-week old edition of the Gloucester Daily Times. Bertrand is old enough to remember when it wasn’t so hard to get newspapers from Gloucester and Newburyport, and even as far away as Boston, in a timely fashion. He’s old enough to remember when the offices of the Innsmouth Courier were still in business, and also he remembers when it quietly folded amid rumors of threats from elders of the Esoteric Order, of which it had frequently been openly critical.

  “A bit out of sorts, Bert,” she replies. “Emiline and me, we’re having trouble sleeping again. It’s the heat, I suppose. You’d think it would rain, wouldn’t you? I can’t recall such a dry summer.” And then she picks up a can of peaches in heavy syrup and stares at the label a moment before setting in back on the shelf.

  “Hot as Hades,” Bertrand agrees, “and dry as a bone, to boot. You got a list there, Miss Babson?”

  She tells him yes, she certainly does, and takes her neatly penned grocery list from a pocket of her gingham dress. It’s written on the back of a letter from a cousin who moved away to Gary, Indiana, several years ago. Essie goes to the counter, stepping around a barrel of apples piled so high it’s a marvel they haven’t spilled out across the floor, and she gives the envelope to Bertrand.

  “I confess, we haven’t had much of an appetite,” she tells the grocer. “And neither of us wants to cook, the house being as terribly hot as it is.”

  While Bertrand examines the list, Essie steals a glance at his newspaper, reading it upside down. The headline declares SCOPES FOUND GUILTY OF TEACHING EVOLUTION, and there’s a photograph of William Jennings Bryan, smug and smiling for the press. Farther down the page, there’s an article on a coal strike in West Virginia and another on the great-grandnephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. Essie Babson tends to avoid news of the world outside of Innsmouth, as it never seems to be anything but unpleasant. In all her forty years, she’s not traveled farther from home than Ipswich and Hamilton, neither more than six miles away, as the crow flies . . .

  “Let’s see,” says Bertrand, as he gathers the items from her shopping list and places them in a cardboard box. “Condensed milk, icing sugar, one can of lime juice, baking powder, raspberry jam, a dozen eggs, a can of lima beans. We do have some nice fresh blueberries, as it happens, if you and—”

  “No, no,” she tells him. “Just what’s on the list, please.”

  “Very well, Miss Babson. Just thought I’d mention the blueberries. They’re quite nice, for baking and canning.”

  “It’s really much too hot for either.”

  “Can’t argue with you there.”

  “You’d think,” she says, glancing again at the July twenty-second Gloucester Daily Times, “people would want to be properly educated, in this day and age. Even in Tennessee, you’d think people wouldn’t put up such a ridiculous fuss over a man just trying to teach his students science.”

  “Folks can be peculiar,” he says, reaching for a box of elbow macaroni. “And I when it comes down to religion, people get pigheaded and don’t seem to mind how ignorant they might look to the rest of the world. Five cans of sardines, yes?”

  “Yes, five cans. Emiline and I enjoy them for our luncheon. And soda crackers, please. Mother and Father, they were Presbyterians, you know. But they prided themselves on being enlightened people.�
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  “Folks can be very peculiar,” he says again, adding an orange tin of Y & S licorice wafers to the cardboard box. “And we are talking about Tennessee, after all.”

  “Still,” says Essie Babson.

  Just then, Bertrand Cowlishaw’s fat calico cat—whose name is Terrapin leaps from the shadows onto the counter, landing silently next to the cash register.

  Terrapin isn’t as old as Horace, but she isn’t a youngster, either. Bertrand has been known to boast that she’s the best mouser in all of Essex County. Whether or not that was strictly true, there’s no denying she’s a fine cat.

  “And what about you, Turtle,” says Essie Babson. “Has the weather got you out of sorts, as well?” She always calls the cat Turtle, because she can never remember its name is actually Terrapin.

  The cat crosses the counter to Essie, walking over Bertrand’s paper and the smug newsprint portrait of William Jennings Bryan. Terrapin purrs loudly and gently butts Essie in the arm with its head.

  “Well, then I’m glad to see you, too.”

  “Molasses? I don’t see it on the list, but—”

  “Oh, yes please. I must have forgotten to write it down.”

  Essie scratches behind Terrapin’s ears, and the cat purrs even louder. Then, apparently tired of the woman’s affection, she retreats to the register and begins washing her front paws.

  “Horace,” says Essie, “has been acting a little odd.”

  “Maybe it’s the full moon coming on,” replies Bertrand. “The Hay Moon’s tonight. The tide’ll be high.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Animals, you know, they’re more sensitive to the moon and the tides and whatnot than we are.”

  “Maybe,” Essie says again, watching the cat as it fastidiously grooms itself.

  “Well, I’m pretty sure I have everything you needed. If you’re absolutely certain I can’t interest you in a pint or two of these blueberries.”

  “No, that’s all, thank you.”

  Bertrand Cowlishaw brings the box to the counter, and Essie checks it over, checking it against her list to be certain nothing’s been overlooked. The cat meows at Bertrand, and he strokes its back and waits patiently until Essie is satisfied.

  “I’ll have Matthew bring these around to you just as soon as he gets back,” the grocer tells her. “He had a delivery over on Lafayette, but he shouldn’t be long.” Matthew Cowlishaw is Bertrand’s only son. Next year, he goes away to college in Arkham to study mathematics, astronomy, and physics, which has always been the boy’s dream, and Bertrand has reluctantly given up his own dream that Matthew would one day take over the store when his father retired. His son is much too bright, Bertrand knows, to spend his life selling groceries in a withering North Shore seaport.

  “When it’s cooler,” Essie Babson says, “I’ll bake some sugar cookies and bring some around to you. I will, or I’ll have Emiline do it. She needs to get out more often. But it’s much too hot to bake in this heat. It surely won’t last much longer.”

  “One can only hope,” replies Bertrand. He licks the tip of his pencil, tallies up her bill, and writes it down in his ledger book. He rarely ever uses the fancy new nickel-plated machine he bought last year from the National Cash Register Company in Dayton, Ohio. It is noisy, and the keys make his fingers ache.

  Essie gives Terrapin a parting scratch beneath the chin, and the cat shuts its eyes and looks as content as any cat ever has.

  “You take care,” says Bertrand Cowlishaw.

  “Just hope we get a break in this weather,” she says, then leaves the shop, and the brass bell jingles as the door opens and swings shut behind her. Bertrand goes back to his newspaper, and Terrapin, having gotten her fill of humans for the time being, leaps off the counter to prowl among the aisles and barrels and bushel baskets.

  3.

  Frank Buckles sits in his rocking chair on the front porch of his narrow yellow house on River Street, sweating and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and drinking the bootlegged Canadian whisky he buys down on the docks near the jetty. He stares at the green-black river flowing between then grey walls of the granite-and-mortar quay walls built half a century ago to contain it and keep the water flowing straight down to the harbor, a bulwark against spring floods. The river glistens brightly beneath the summer sun. He dislikes the river and often thinks of selling the house his grandfather built and getting a place set farther back from the Manuxet. Or, better yet, moving away from Innsmouth altogether, maybe all the way up to Portland or Bangor. Sometimes, he thinks he wouldn’t stop until he was safely in the Maritimes, where no one had ever heard of Innsmouth or Obed Marsh or the Esoteric fucking Order of Dagon. But he isn’t going anywhere, because he lacks the resolve, and what few tenuous roots he has, they’re here, in this rotting town the outside world has done an admirable job of forgetting.

  Lucky them, thinks Frank Buckles, as he shakes out a fresh line of Prince Albert, then licks the paper and twists it closed. He lights the cigarette with a kitchen match struck on the side of his chair, and for a few merciful seconds the smell of sulfur masks the musky stink of the river. It isn’t so bad up above the falls, back in the marshes towards Choate and Corn and Dilly Islands, where the waters are broad and still. When he was young, he and his brother Joe would often spend their days in those marshes, digging for quahogs and fishing for white perch, steelhead, and shad.

  Back there, away from the sewers that spill into the Manuxet below the falls, it was easy to pretend Innsmouth was only a bad dream.

  In April of ’18, both he and his brother were drafted, and they were sent off to the French trenches to fight the Huns. Joe died less than five months later in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, blown limb from limb by a mortar round. The very next week, at the Battle of Blanc Mont Ridge, Frank lost his left foot and his right eye, and they shipped what was left of him back home to Massachusetts. Joe’s remains were buried in Lorraine, in the American cemetery at Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, in a grave that Frank has never seen and never expects to see. That his brother was killed and he was mangled only weeks before the end of the war to end all wars is a horrible irony that isn’t lost on Frank. And now, seven years have gone by, and both his mother and father have passed, and Frank spends his days sitting on the porch, drinking himself numb, watching the filthy river roll by. He spends his nights tossing and turning, lying awake or dreaming of murdered men tangled in barbed wire and of skies burning red as blood and roses. Sometimes, he sits with a shotgun pressed to his forehead or his mouth around the muzzle, but he hasn’t got that much courage left anywhere in him. He wonders if there would be time to smell the cordite before his soul winked out, if he would taste it, how much pain there would be in the split second before this brains were sprayed across the wall. He has a stingy inheritance that might or might not be enough to see him through however many years he’s left to suffer, and he has the narrow yellow house on River Street. Sometimes, he sobers up enough to do odd jobs about town.

  Frank exhales a steel-gray cloud of smoke, and the breeze off the river immediately picks it apart. The breeze smells oily, of dead fish and human waste; it smells of rot.

  This is Hell, he thinks. I’m alive, and this is Hell. It’s an old thought, worn smooth as the cobbles along the breakwater.

  “Is it better to be a living coward,

  Or thrice a hero dead?”

  “It’s better to go to sleep, my lad,”

  The Colour Sergeant said.

  One of the three tortoiseshell kittens—two female, one male—that have recently taken up residence beneath his porch scrambles clumsily up the steps and mews at him. It can’t be more than a couple or three months old. He has no idea where the kittens came from, whether they were abandoned by their mother, or if the mother were killed. She might have gotten a belly full of poison left out for the rats. She might have perished under the wheels of an automobile. It could have been a hungry dog, or she might have run afoul of the tribes of half-feral boys that roam the
streets and alleys and the wharves, happy for any opportunity to do mischief or cruelty that comes their way. It might simply have been her time. But it hardly matters. Now, the kittens live beneath the porch of his narrow yellow house.

  The first is followed by a second, and then the third, the brother, comes scrambling up. The trio is thin and crawling with fleas. The little tom has already lost an eye to some infection or parasite. To Frank, that makes him a sort of comrade in the great shitstorm of the world. Frank has been told that a male tortoiseshell is a rare thing.

  “What’s it you three want, eh?” he asks them, and they loudly mewl in tandem. “That so?” he replies. “Well, people in Hell want ice water, or so I’ve heard.” One of the tortoiseshell girls parks herself between his boots, and she begins playing with the tattered laces. When the kittens first showed up, he seriously considered herding them all into an empty burlap potato sack from the pantry, putting a few stones in there to keep them company and weight it down, then dropping the sack into the river. It’s what his father would have done with the strays. But the thought passed almost as soon as it had come. Frank Buckles knows he’s a sorry son of a bitch, but he’s not so heartless that he’d send anything to its death in those foul waters.

  He scratches at the stubble on the chin he hasn’t bothered to shave in days and stares down at the kitten. Ash falls from his cigarette, but it misses the cat.

  “Yeah, okay,” he says. “How about you moochers just give me a goddamn minute.” Then he gets up and goes inside the dark house. The kittens all line up at the screen door, waiting and watching for Frank’s return. After only five minutes or so he comes back with a third of a tin of Holly-brand canned salmon and a chipped china saucer. He empties what’s left into the dish and gives it to the hungry kittens.

  They fall upon it with as much ferocity as any cat has ever shown a fish, living or dead. In only a few moments the saucer is licked clean.

  “Greedy little shits,” Frank mutters, tossing the empty tin at the Manuxet before sitting back down in the rocker. The chair was built by his paternal grandfather, as a gift to his grandmother, before he signed up with the 8th Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, left his pregnant wife behind, and marched off to die at the hands of a pro-succession mob in Baltimore, on the ninteenth day of April, 1861. His great-grandfather made many chairs and cabinets and tables, and sometimes Frank Buckle wonders where they’ve all gone, how many have survived the sixty-four years since the man’s untimely death.