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

by Paula Guran

  “—INCOMING, get the shit downstairs, before those sons of bitches bring this whole fuckin’ place down around our goddamn—”

  (ears)

  Three hits, Goss thought, or maybe two and a half; it was hard to tell, when your head wouldn’t stop ringing. What he could only assume was at least two of the trucks had gone up right as the walls came down, or perhaps a shade before. Now the top half of the temple was flattened, once more indistinguishable from the mountainside above and around it, a deadfall of shattered lava-rock, bone-bricks and fossils. No more missiles fell, which was good, yet—so far as they could tell, pinned beneath slabs and sediment—the storm above still raged on. And now they were all down in the well-room, trapped, with only a flickering congregation of phones to raise against the dark.

  “Did you have any kind of plan when you came here, exactly?” Goss asked Camberwell, hoarsely. “I mean, aside from ‘find Seven congregation site—question mark—profit’?”

  To which she simply sighed, and replied—”Yeah, sort of. But you’re not gonna like it.”

  “Try me.”

  Reluctantly: “The last couple times I did this, there was a physical copy of the Liber Carne in play, so getting rid of that helped—but there’s no copy here, which makes us the Liber Carne, the human pages being Inscribed.” He could hear the big I on that last word, and it scared him. “And when people are being Inscribed, well . . . the best plan is usually to just start killing those who aren’t possessed until you’ve got less than seven left, because then why bother?”

  “Uh huh . . . ”

  “Getting to know you people well enough to like you, that was my mistake, obviously,” she continued, partly under her breath, like she was talking to herself. Then added, louder: “Anyhow. What we’re dealing with right now is two people definitely Inscribed and possessed, four potential Inscriptions, and one halfway gone . . . ”

  “Halfway? Who?”

  She shot him that look, yet one more time—softer, almost sympathetic. “Open your mouth, Goss.”

  “Why? What f—oh, you gotta be kidding.”

  No change, just a slightly raised eyebrow, as if to say: Do I look it, motherfucker? Which, he was forced to admit, she very much did not.

  Nothing to do but obey, then. Or scream, and keep on screaming.

  Goss felt his jaw slacken, pop out and down like an unhinged jewel-box, revealing all its secrets. His tongue’s itch was approaching some sort of critical mass. And then, right then, was when he felt it—fully and completely, without even trying. Some kind of raised area on his own soft palate, yearning down as sharply as the rest of his mouth’s sensitive insides yearned up, straining to map its impossibly angled curves. His eyes skittered to the well’s rim, where he knew he would find its twin, if he only searched long enough.

  “Uck ee,” he got out, consonants drowned away in a mixture of hot spit and cold sweat. “Oh it, uck ee.”

  A small, sad nod. “The Terrible Eshphoriel,” Camberwell confirmed. “Who whispers in the empty places.”

  Goss closed his mouth, then spat like he was trying to clear it, for all he knew that wouldn’t work. Then asked, hoarsely, stumbling slightly over the words he found increasingly difficult to form: “How mush . . . time I got?”

  “Not much, probably.”

  “ ’S what I fought.” He looked down, then back up at her, eyes sharpening. “How you geh those scars uh yers, Cammerwell?”

  “Knowing’s not gonna help you, Goss.” But since he didn’t look away, she sighed, and replied. “Hunting accident. Okay?”

  “Hmh, ’kay. Then . . . thing we need uh . . . new plan, mebbe. You ’gree?”

  She nodded, twisting her lips; he could see her thinking, literally, cross-referencing what had to be a thousand scribbled notes from the margins of her mental grand grimoire. Time slowed to an excruciating crawl, within which Goss began to hear that still, small voice begin to mount up again, no doubt aware it no longer had to be particularly subtle about things anymore: Eshphoriel Maskim, sometimes called Utukku, Angel of Whispers . . . and yes, I can hear you, little fleshbag, as you hear me; feel you, in all your incipient flowering and decay, your time-anchored freedom. We are all the same in this way, and yes, we mostly hate you for it, which only makes your pain all the sweeter, in context—though not quite so much, at this point, as we imitation-of-passionately strive to hate each other.

  You guys stand outside space and time, though, right? he longed to demand, as he felt the constant background chatter of what he’d always thought of as “him” start to dim. Laid the foundations of the Earth—you’re megaton bombs, and we’re like . . . viruses. So why the hell would you want to be anything like us? To lower yourselves that way?

  A small pause came in this last idea’s wake, not quite present, yet too much there to be absent, somehow: a breath, perhaps, or the concept of one, drawn from the non-throat of something far infinitely larger. The feather’s shadow, floating above the Word of God.

  It does make you wonder, does it not? the small voice “said.” I know I do, and have, since before your first cells split.

  Because they want to defile the creation they set in place, yet have no real part in, Goss’s mind—his mind, yes, he was almost sure—chimed in. Because they long to insert themselves where they have no cause to be and let it shiver apart all around them, to run counter to everything, a curse on Heaven. To make themselves the worm in the cosmic apple, rotting everything they touch . . .

  The breath returned, drawn harder this time in a semi-insulted way, a universal “tch!” But at the same time, something else presented itself—just as likely, or un-. Valid as anything else, in a world touched by the Seven.

  (Or because . . . maybe, this is all there is. Maybe, this is as good as it gets.)

  That’s all.

  “I have an idea,” Camberwell said, at last, from somewhere nearby. And Goss opened his mouth to answer only to hear the angel’s still, small voice issue from between his teeth, replying, mildly—

  “Do you, huntress? Then please, say on.”

  This, then, was how they all finally came to be arrayed ’round the well’s rim, the seven of them who were left, standing—or propped up/lying, in Hynde and Katz’s cases—in front of those awful wall-orifices, staring into the multifaceted mosaic-eyes of God’s former Flip My Universe crew. ’Lij stood at the empty southeastern point, looking nervous, for which neither Goss nor the creature inhabiting his brain-pan could possibly blame him. While Camberwell busied herself moving from person to person, sketching quick and dirty version of the sigils on them with the point of a flick-knife she’d produced from one of her boots. Lao opened her mouth like she was gonna start crying even harder when she first saw it, but Camberwell just shot her the fearsomest glare yet—Medusa-grade, for sure—and watched her shut the fuck up, with a hitchy little gasp.

  “This will bring us together sooner rather than later, you must realize,” Eshphoriel told Camberwell, who nodded. Replying: “That’s the idea.”

  “Ah. That seems somewhat . . . antithetical, knowing our works, as you claim to.”

  “Maybe so. But you tell me—what’s better? Stay down here in the dark waiting for the air to run out only to have you celestial tapeworms soul-rape us all at last minute anyways, when we’re too weak to put up a fight? Or force an end now, while we’re all semi-fresh, and see what happens?”

  “Fine tactics, yes—very born-again barbarian. Your own pocket Ragnarok, with all that the term implies.”

  “Yeah, yeah: clam up, Legion, if you don’t have anything useful to contribute.” To ’Lij: “You ready, sound-boy?”

  “Uhhhh . . . ”

  “I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ ”

  Done with Katz, she swapped places with ’Lij, handing him the knife as she went, and tapping the relevant sigil. “Like that,” she said. “Try to do it all in one motion, if you can—it’ll hurt less.”

  ’Lij looked dubious. “One can’t fail to notic
e you aren’t volunteering for impromptu body-modification,” Eshphoriel noted, through Goss’s lips, while Camberwell met the comment with a tiny, bitter smile.

  Replying, as she hiked her shirt up to demonstrate—“That’d be ’cause I’ve already got one.”

  Cocking a hip to display the thing in question where it nestled in the hollow at the base of her spine, more a scab than a scar, edges blurred like some infinitely fucked-up tramp stamp. And as she did, Goss saw something come fluttering up behind her skin, a parallel-dimension full-body ripple, the barest glowing shadow of a disproportionately huge tentacle-tip still up-thrust through Camberwell’s whole being, as though everything she was, had been and would ever come to be was nothing more than some indistinct no-creature’s fleshy finger-puppet.

  One cream-brown eye flushed with livid color, green on yellow, while the other stayed exactly the same—human, weary, bitter to its soul’s bones. And Camberwell opened her mouth to let her tongue protrude, pink and healthy except for an odd whitish strip that ran ragged down its center from tip to—not exactly tail, Goss assumed, since the tongue was fairly huge, or so he seemed to recall. But definitely almost to the uvula, and: oh God, oh shit, was it actually splitting as he watched, bisecting itself not-so-neatly into two separate semi-points, like a child’s snaky scribble?

  Camberwell gave it a flourish, swallowed the resultant spit-mouthful, then said, without much affect: “Yeah, that’s right—‘Gallu-Alu, the Terrible Immoel, who speaks with a dead tongue . . . ’ ” Camberwell fluttered the organ in question at what had taken control of Goss, showing its central scars long-healed, extending the smile into a wide, entirely unamused grin. “So say hey, assfuck. Remember me now?”

  “You were its vessel, then, once before,” Goss heard his lips reply. “And . . . yes, yes, I do recall it. Apologies, huntress; I cannot say, with the best will in all this world, that any of you look so very different, to me.”

  Camberwell snapped her fingers. “Aw, gee.” To ’Lij, sharper: “I tell you to stop cutting?”

  Goss felt “his” eyes slide to poor ’Lij, caught and wavering (his face a sickly gray-green, chest heaving slightly, like he didn’t know whether to run or puke), then watched him shake his head, and bow back down to it. The knife went in shallow, blunter than the job called for—he had to drag it, hooking up underneath his own hide, to make the meat part as cleanly as the job required. While Camberwell kept a sure and steady watch on the other well-riders, all of whom were beginning to look equally disturbed, even those who were supposedly unconscious. Goss felt his own lips curve, far more genuinely amused, even as an alien emotion-tangle wound itself invasively throughout his chest: half proprietorially expectant, half vaguely annoyed.

  “We are coming,” he heard himself say. “All of us. Meaning you may have miscalculated, somewhat . . . what a sad state of affairs indeed, when the prospective welfare of your entire species depends on you not doing so.”

  That same interior ripple ran ’round the well’s perimeter as ’Lij pulled the knife past “his” sigil’s final slashing loop and yanked it free, splattering the frieze in front of him; in response, the very stones seemed to arch hungrily, that composite mouth gaping, eager for blood. Above, even through the heavy-pressing rubble-mound which must be all that was left of the temple proper, Goss could hear Journee-Zemyel swooping and cawing in the updraft, swirled on endless waves of storm; from his eye’s corner he saw Hynde-whoever (Arralu-Allatu, the Terrible Ashreel, Eshphoriel supplied, helpfully) open one similarly parti-colored eye and lever himself up, clumsy-clambering to his feet. Katz’s head fell back, spine suddenly hooping so heels struck shoulderblades with a wetly awful crack, and began to lift off, levitating gently, turning in the air like some horrible ornament. Meanwhile, Lao continued to grind her fisted knuckles into both eyes at once, bruising lids but hopefully held back from pulping the balls themselves, at least so long as her sockets held fast. . . .

  (Ekimmu, the Terrible Coaib, who seeds without regard. Lamyatu, the Terrible Ushephekad, who opens the ground beneath us.)

  From the well, dusty mortar popped forth between every suture, and the thing as a whole gave one great shrug, shivering itself apart—began caving in and expanding at the same time, becoming a nothing-column for its parts to revolve around, an incipient reality fabric-tear. And in turn, the urge to rotate likewise—just let go of gravity’s pull, throw physical law to the winds, and see where that might lead—cored through Goss, ass to cranium, Vlad Tepes style, a phantom impalement pole spearing every neural pathway. Simultaneously gone limp and stiff, he didn’t have to look down to know his crotch must be darkening, or over to ’Lij to confirm how the same invisible angel-driven marionette hooks were now pulling at his muscles, making his knife-hand grip and flex, sharp enough the handle almost broke free of his sweaty palm entirely—

  (Namtaru, the Terrible Yphemaal, who stitches what was rent asunder)

  “And now we are Seven, without a doubt,” Goss heard that voice in his throat note, its disappointment audible. “For all your bravado, perhaps you are not as well-educated as you believe.”

  Camberwell shrugged yet one more time, slow but distinct; her possessed eye widened slightly, as though in surprise. And in that instant, it occurred to Goss how much of herself she still retained, even in the Immoel-thing’s grip, which seemed far—slipperier, in her case, than with everybody else. Because maybe coming pre-Inscribed built up a certain pad of scar tissue in the soul, in situations like these; maybe that’s what she’d been gambling on, amongst other things. Having just enough slack on her lead to allow her to do stuff like (for example) reach down into her other boot, the way she was even as they “spoke,” and—

  Holy crap, just how many knives does this chick walk around with, exactly?

  —bringing up the second of a matched pair, trigger already thumbed, blade halfway from its socket. Tucking it beneath her jaw, point tapping at her jugular, and saying, as she did—

  “Never claimed to be, but I do know this much: Sam Raimi got it wrong. You guys don’t like wearing nothin’ dead.”

  And: That’s your plan? Goss wanted to yell, right in the face of her martyr-stupid, fuck all y’all snarl. Except that that was when the thing inside ’Lij (Yphemaal, its name is Yphemaal) turned him, bodily—two great twitches, a child “walking” a doll. Its purple eyes fell on Camberwell in mid-move, and narrowed; Goss heard something rush up and out in every direction, rustle-ruffling as it went: some massive and indistinct pair of wings, mostly elsewhere, only a few pinions intruding to lash the blade from Camberwell’s throat before the cut could complete itself, leaving a shallow red trail in its wake.

  (Another “hunting” trophy, Goss guessed, eventually. Not that she’d probably notice.)

  “No,” ’Lij-Yphemaal told the room at large, all its hovering sibling-selves, in a voice colder than orbit-bound satellite-skin. “Enough.”

  “We are Seven,” Eshphoriel Maskim replied, with Goss’s flayed mouth. “The huntress has the right of it: remove one vessel, break the quorum, before we reassemble. If she wants to sacrifice herself, who are we to interfere?”

  “Who were we to, ever, every time we have? But there is another way.”

  The sigils flowed each to each, Goss recalled having noticed at this freak-show’s outset, albeit only subconsciously—one basic design exponentially added upon, a fresh new (literal) twist summoning Two out of One, Three out of Two, Four out of Three, etcetera. Which left Immoel and Yphemaal separated by both a pair of places and a triad of contortionate squiggle-slashes; far more work to imitate than ’Lij could possibly do under pressure with his semi-blunt knife, his wholly inadequate human hands and brain.

  But Yphemaal wasn’t ’Lij. Hell, this very second, ’Lij wasn’t even ’Lij.

  The Mender-angel was at least merciful enough to let him scream as it remade its sigil into Immoel’s with three quick cuts, then slipped forth, blowing away up through the well’s centre-spoke like a backwards
lightning rod. Two niches on, Katz lit back to earth with a cartilaginous creak, while Lao let go just in time to avoid tearing her own corneas; Hynde’s head whipped up, face gone trauma-slack but finally recognizable, abruptly vacated. And Immoel Maskim spurted forth from Camberwell in a gross black cloud from mouth, nose, the corner of the eyes, its passage dimming her yellow-green eye back to brown, then buzzed angrily back and forth between two equally useless prospective vessels until seeming to give up in disgust.

  Seemed even angels couldn’t be in two places at once. Who knew?

  Not inside time and space, no. And unfortunately—

  That’s where we live, Goss realized.

  Yes.

  Goss saw the bulk of the Immoel-stuff blend into the well room’s wall, sucked away like blotted ink. Then fell to his knees, as though prompted, only to see the well collapse in upon its own shaft, ruined forever—its final cosmic strut removed, solved away like some video game’s culminative challenge.

  Beneath, the ground shook, like jelly. Above, a thunderclap whoosh sucked all the dust away, darkness boiling up, peeling itself away like an onion till only the sun remained, pale and high and bright. And straight through the hole in the “roof” dropped all that was left of Journee-turned-Zemyel—face-down, from a twenty-plus-foot height, horrible thunk of impact driving her features right back into her skull, leaving nothing behind but a smashed-flat, raw meat mask.

  Goss watched those wing-lungs of hers deflate, thinking: she couldn’t’ve survived. And felt Eshphoriel, still lingering, clawed to his brain’s pathways even in the face of utter defeat, interiorly agree that: It does seem unlikely. But then, my sister loves to leave no toy unbroken, if only to spit in your—and our—Maker’s absent eye.

  Uh huh, Goss thought back, suddenly far too tired for fear, or even sorrow. So maybe it’s time to get the fuck out too, huh, while the going’s good? “Minish” yourself, like the old chant goes . . .

  Perhaps, yes. For now.

  He looked to Camberwell, who stood there shaking slightly, caught off-guard for once—amazed to be alive, it was fairly obvious, part-cut throat and all. Asking ’Lij, as she dabbed at the blood: “What did you do, dude?”