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

by Paula Guran

  She has the tides.

  A dance for three—sun, moon, and earth.

  She can pull the seas, twice daily, and twice monthly her pull is vicious.

  And so she has formed an alliance with those things within the briny waters of the world that would gain a greater foothold upon the land or would merely reach out and take what the ocean desires as her own.

  For the ocean, like the moon, is a wicked, jealous thing.

  Hold that thought.

  Cats, too, have secrets rooted in antiquity and spanning worlds, secret histories known to very few living men and women, most of whom have only read books or heard tales in dreams and nightmares; far fewer have for themselves beheld the truth of the lives of cats, whether in the present day or in times so long past there are only crumbling monuments to mark the passage of those ages. The Pharaoh Hedjkheperre Setepenre Shoshenq’s city of Bubastis, dedicated to the cult of Bast and Sekhmet, where holy cats swarmed the temples and were mummified, as attested by the writings of Herodotus. And the reverence for the Tamra Maew shown by Buddhist monks, the breeds sacred to the Courts of Siam; the Wichien-maat, Sisawat, Suphalak, Khaomanee, and Ninlarat. In the Dream Lands, the celebrated cats of Ulthar, whom no man may kill on pain of death, and, too, the great battle the cats fought against the loathsome, rodent-like zoogs on the dark side of the moon.

  Cats upon the moon,

  Star-eyed guardians whose power and glory has been forgotten, by and large, by humanity, which has come to look upon them as nothing more than pets.

  The stage has been set.

  Here’s the scene:

  All the cats of Innsmouth have assembled on this muggy night, coming together at a designated place within the shadowed, dying seaport at the mouth of Essex Bay, south of Plum Island Sound, and west of the winking lighthouses of Cape Ann. The sun is finally down, and that swollen moon has cleared the Atlantic horizon to shine so bright and violent over the harbor and the wharves, over fishing boats, the meeting hall of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, and over all the gables, balustrades, hipped Georgian and slate-shingled gambrel rooftops, the cupolas and chimneys and widow’s walks, the high steeples of shuttered churches. The cats takes their positions along the low stone arch of Banker’s Bridge, connecting River Street with Paine Street, just below the lower falls of the Manuxet. They’ve slipped out through windows left open, through attic crannies and basement crevices, all the egresses known to cats whose “owners” believe they control the comings and goings of their feline charges.

  The cats of Innsmouth town have come together to hold the line. They’ve come, as they’ve done twice monthly since the sailing ships of Captain Obed Marsh returned a hundred years ago with his strange cargoes from the islands of New Guinea, Sumatra, and Malaysia. Strange cargoes and stranger rituals that set the seaport on a new and terrible path, as the converts to Marsh’s transplanted South Sea’s cult of Cthulhu called out to the inhabitants of the drowned cities beyond Devil Reef and far out beyond the wide plateau of Essex Bay. They sang for the deep ones and all the other abominations of that unplumbed submarine canyon and the halls of Y’ha-nthlei and Yoharneth-Lahai. And their songs were answered. Their blasphemies and blood sacrifices were rewarded.

  Evolution spun backward for those who chose that road.

  And even as the faithful went down, so did the deep ones rise.

  On these nights, when the spiteful moon hefts the sea to cover the cobble beaches and slop against the edges of the tallest piers, threatening to overtop the Water Street jetty, on these nights do the beings called forth by the rites of the Esoteric Order seek the slip past the falls and gain the wetlands and the rivers beyond Innsmouth, to spread inland like a contagion. On these nights, the Manuxet swells and, usually, is contained by the quays erected when the city was still young. But during especially strong spring tides, such as this one of the first night of August 1925, the comingled sea and river may flood the streets flanking the Manuxet. And things may crawl out.

  But the cats have come to hold the line.

  None among them—not even the very young or the infirm or the very old shirk this duty.

  Essie and Emiline Babson’s tom Horace is here, as is shopkeeper Bertrand Cowlishaw’s plump calico Terrapin. The three tortoiseshell kittens have scrambled out from beneath Frank Buckle’s front porch to join the ranks. All four of Annie Phelps’ cats—Darwin and Huxley, Mary Anning and Rowena—are here, and a place of honor has been accorded Mister Bill Bailey, the heroin addict Ephraim Asher Peaslee’s enormous Maine Coon. Bill Bailey has led the cats of Innsmouth since his seventh year and will lead them until his death, when the burden will pass to another. All these have come to the bridge, and five score more, besides. The pampered and the stray, the beloved and the neglected and forgotten.

  By the whim of gravity, the three bodies have aligned, sun, moon, and earth all caught now in the invisible tension of syzygy, and within an hour the Manuxet writhes with scaled and slimy shapes eager and hopeful that this is the eventide that will see them spill out into the wider world of men. The waters froth and splash as the deep ones, hideous frog-fish parodies of human beings, clamber over the squirming mass of great eels long as Swampscott dories and the arms of giant squid and cuttlefish that might easily crush a man in their grip. There are sharks and toothsome fish no ichthyologist has ever seen, and there are armored placoderms with razor jaws, believed by science to have vanished from the world æons ago.

  Other Paleozoic anachronisms, neither quite fish or quite amphibians, beat at the quay with stubby, half-formed limbs.

  The conspiring moon is lost briefly behind a sliver of cloud, but then that obstructing cataract passes from her eye and pale, borrowed light spills down and across the Belgian-block paving running the length of River and Paine, across all those rooftops and trickling down into alleyways. And there are those few, in this hour, who dare to peek between curtains pulled shut against the dark, and among them is Annie Phelps, distracted from her reading by some noise or another. She sees nothing more than the water growing perilously high between the quays, and she’s grateful she has nothing of value stored in the basement, not after the flood of’18, when she lost her entire collection of snails and mermaids’ purses, which she’d unwisely stored below street level. But she sees nothing more than the possibility of a flood, and she reminds herself again how she should move to some village where there would be crews with sandbags out on nights like this. She closes the curtain and goes back to her books.

  Two doors down, Mr. Buckles sits near the bottom of the stairs, his 12-gauge, pump-action Browning across his lap. He carried the gun in France, and if it was good enough to kill Huns in the muddy trenches it ought to do just damn fine against anything slithering out of the muck to come calling at his door. The shotgun is cocked, both barrels loaded; he drinks from his bottle of bourbon and keeps his eyes open. Even in the house he can smell the stench from the river, worse times ten than it ever is during even the hottest, stillest days.

  On Banker’s Bridge, Bill Bailey glares with amber eyes at the interlopers, as they surge forward, borne by the tide.

  Farther up the street, Essie Babson looks down at the river, and she sees nothing at all out of the ordinary, despite what she plainly hears.

  “Come back to bed,” says Emiline.

  “You didn’t hear that?” she asks her sister.

  “I didn’t hear anything at all. Come back to bed. You’re keeping me awake.”

  “The heat’s keeping you awake,” mutters Essie.

  “Have you seen Horace?” Emiline wants to know. “I couldn’t find him. He didn’t come for his dinner.”

  “No, Emiline. I haven’t seen Horace,” says Essie, and she squints into the night. “I’m sure he’ll be along later.”

  Bill Bailey’s ears are flat against the side of his head. The eyes of all the other cats of Innsmouth are, in this moment, upon him.

  Above his store, Bertrand Cowlishaw lies in his bed, exhausted from a
long, hot afternoon in the shop, by all the orders filled and the shelves he restocked himself because Matthew was in and out all day, making deliveries. Bertrand drifts uneasily in that liminal space between waking and sleep. And he half dreams about a city beneath the sea, and he half hears the clamor below the arch of Banker’s Bridge.

  Bill Bailey tenses, and all the other cats follow his lead.

  Something hulking and only resembling a woman in the vaguest of ways lurches free of the roiling, slippery horde, rising to her full height, coming eye to eye with the chocolate Maine Coon.

  Its eyes are black as holes punched in a midnight sky.

  Ephraim Asher Peaslee floats, coddled in the gentle, protective arms of Madame Héroïne; after a long hour of pleading, he’s been permitted to reenter the White Lands, where neither the sea nor the moon nor their demons may ever come. He isn’t aware that Bill Bailey no longer sits near the cranberry velvet chaise lounge.

  And the radio is like wind through the branches of distant trees, wind through a forest in a place he but half recalls, He is blissfully ignorant of the rising river and. the tide and the coming of the deep ones and all their retinue.

  The scaled thing with bottomless pits for eyes opens its mouth, revealing teeth that Annie Phelps would no doubt recognize from the jaw she found on the shingle. Dripping with ooze and kelp fronds, its hide scabbed with barnacles and sea lice, the monster howls and rushes the bridge.

  And the cats of Innsmouth town do what they have always done.

  They hold the line.

  They cheat the bitter moon, with claws and teeth, with the indomitable will of all cats, with iridescent eyeshine and with a perfect hatred for the invaders. Some of them are slain, dragged down and swallowed whole, or crushed between fangs and gnashing beaks, or borne down the riverbed and drowned. But most of them will live to fight at the next battle during New Moon spring tide.

  Bill Bailey opens the throat of the black-eyed beast that once was a woman who lived in the town and cared for cats of her own.

  Mary Anning is devoured, and Annie Phelps will spend a week searching for her.

  One of the kittens from beneath Frank Buckles’ front porch is crushed, its small body broken by flailing tentacles.

  But there have been worse fights, and there will be worse fights again.

  And when it is done and the soldiers of Y’ha-nthlei and Dagon and Mother Hydra have all been routed, retreating to the depths beyond the harbor, beyond the bay, when the cats have won, the survivors carry away the fallen and lay them in the reeds along the shore of Choate Island.

  When the sun rises, there is left hardly any sign of the invasion, or of the bravery and sacrifice of the cats. Some will note dying crabs and drying strands of seaweed washed up along River and Paine streets, but most will not even see that much.

  The day is hot again, but by evening rain clouds sweep in from the west, and from the windows of the Old Masonic lodge on New Church Green the watchers watch and curse. They say their prayers to forgotten gods, and they bide their time, patient as any cat.

  The New York Times recently hailed Caitlín R. Kiernan as “one of our essential writers of dark fiction.” Her novels include The Red Tree (nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards) and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Bram Stoker Award, nominated for the Nebula, Locus, Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Mythopoeic awards). In 2014 she was honored with the Locus Award for short fiction (“The Road of Needles”), the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story 2014 (“The Prayer of Ninety Cats”), and a second World Fantasy Award for Best Collection 2014 (The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories). To date, her short fiction has been collected in thirteen volumes. Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume Two) is forthcoming in 2015. Currently, she’s writing the graphic novel series Alabaster for Dark Horse.

  It was nothing to brood upon, this slow doom that the earth or fate or the God he did not believe in had inflicted upon them . . .

  The End of the End of Everything

  Dale Bailey

  The last time Ben and Lois Devine saw Veronica Glass, the noted mutilation artist, was at a suicide party in Cerulean Cliffs, an artists colony far beyond their means. That they happened to be there at all was a simple matter of chance. Stan Miles, for whom Ben had twice served as best man, had invited them to his beach house to see things through with his new wife, MacKenzie, and her nine-year-old daughter Cecilia. Though the Devines had no great enthusiasm for the new wife—Stan had traded up, was how Lois put it—they still loved Stan and had resolved to put the best face on the thing. Besides, the prospect of watching ruin engulf the world among such glittering company was, for Ben at least, irresistible. He made his living on the college circuit as a poet, albeit a minor one, so when Stan said they would fit right in, his statement was not entirely without truth.

  They drove down on a Sunday, to the muted strains of a Mozart piano concerto on the surround sound. Ruin had lately devoured most of the city and it encroached on either side of the abandoned interstate: derelict cars rusting back to the elements, skeletal trees stark against a gray horizon, an ashen, baked-looking landscape, though no fire had burned there. In some places the road was all but impassable. They made poor time. It was late when they finally pulled into the beach house’s weedy gravel driveway and climbed out, stretching.

  This was a still-living place. They could hear the distant sigh of breakers beyond the house, an enormous edifice of stacked stone with single-story wings sweeping back to either side of the driveway. The sharp tang of the ocean leavened the air. Gulls screamed in the distance and it was summer and it was evening, and in the cool dusk the declining sun made red splashes on the narrow windows of the house.

  “I thought you’d never get here,” Stan bellowed from the porch as they retrieved their luggage. “Come up here and let me give you a kiss, you two!” Stan—bearded, stout, hirsute as a bear—was as good as his promise. He delivered to each of them a scratchy wet smooch square on the lips, pounded Ben’s back, and relieved Lois of her suitcase with one blunt-fingered hand. Ghostlike in the gloom, and surprisingly graceful for such a large man, he swept them inside on a tide of loose flowing white silk, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck to reveal corkscrews of gray hair.

  He dumped their baggage in an untidy pile just inside the door, and ushered them into a blazing three-story glass atrium. It leaned rakishly over the dark, heaving water, more sensed than seen, and Ben, as always, felt a brief wave of vertigo, a premonition that the whole house might any moment slide over the cliff and plummet to the rocky white beach below. Ceiling fans whispered far above them. Two Oscars for Production Design stood on the mantle, over a fireplace big enough to roast a boar.

  Stan collapsed into a low white sofa, and waved them into adjoining seats. “So the last days are upon us,” he announced jovially. “I’m glad you’ve come.”

  “We’re glad to be here,” Ben said.

  “Any word from Abby?” Stan asked.

  Abby was Stan’s ex-wife—Ben’s first stint as best man—and just hearing her name sent a spasm through Ben’s heart. When the dust from the divorce settled, Stan had gotten the beach house. Abby had ended up with the house in the city. But the last of the city was succumbing to ruin even as they spoke. A gust of sorrow shook Ben. He didn’t like to think of Abby.

  “Ruined,” Lois said. “She’s ruined.”

  “Ah, I knew it. I’m sorry.” Stan sighed. “It’s just a matter of time, isn’t it?” Stan shook his head. “I am glad you decided to come. Really. I’ve missed you both.”

  “And how’s MacKenzie?” Lois asked.

  “She’ll be down any minute. She and Cecy are upstairs getting ready for the party.”

  “Party?”

  “Every night there’s a party. You’ll enjoy it, you’ll see.”

  A moment later, MacKenzie—that was the only name she had, or admitted to—descended
the backless risers that curved down from an upstairs gallery. She was a lithe blonde, high breasted, her face as pale and cool and unexpressive as a marble bust. She wore the same shimmering silks as her husband; and nine-year-old Cecy, trailing behind her, lovely beyond her years, wore them as well.

  Ben got to his feet.

  Lois pulled her shawl tight around her shoulders as she stood. “MacKenzie,” she said, “it’s been too long.”

  “It’s so good to see you both again,” MacKenzie said.

  She brushed glossy lips against Ben’s cheek.

  Lois submitted to a brief embrace. Afterward, she knelt to draw Cecy into her arms. “How are you, dear?” she asked, and Ben, though he despised cliché, uttered the first thing that came into his head.

  “My how you’ve grown,” he said.

  Yet his life had in some respects been a cliché. His poetry, while not without merit, had broken no new ground—though perhaps there was no new ground to break, as he sometimes told audiences at the small colleges that sought his services. Poetry was an exhausted art, readers a dying breed in a dying age, and he’d never broken through anyway. His verse was the stifled prosody of the little magazine, his life the incestuous circuit of the MFA program, and he had occasionally succumbed to the vices such an existence proffered: the passing infidelity, the weakness for drink and drug.

  His marriage had weathered storms of its own. If Ben did not entirely approve of Stan’s decision—he had loved Abby, and missed her—he could understand the allure of novelty, and he was not immune to the appeal of MacKenzie’s beauty. Perhaps this accounted for the tension in their suite as he and Lois dressed for the party, and when they departed, descending the cliff-side steps to the beach, sensing her discontent, Ben reached out to take her hand.