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

by Paula Guran

  “Turned out, they didn’t need his help. Could be, they had in the weeks right after they’d arrived. In the time since, they’d figured out a crop they could tend that would keep them in money: marijuana. When Josiah went walking into their camp, that was what he found, row upon row of the plants, set amongst the trees to conceal them. He hadn’t spoken two words to them before one fellow ran up from behind and brought a shovel down on Josiah’s head. Killed him straight away. Hippies panicked, decided they had to get rid of his body. They had a couple of axes to hand, so they set to chopping Josiah to pieces. Once their butchery was finished, they dumped his remains into a metal barrel along with some kindling, doused the lot with gasoline, and dropped a match on it. Their plan was to mix the ashes in with their fertilizer and spread them over their plants. Anything the fire didn’t take, they’d bury.

  “Could be their scheme would’ve worked, but a couple of Josiah’s nephews decided their uncle had been gone long enough and went searching for him. They arrived to what smelled like a pork roast. Hippies ambushed them, too, but one of the brothers saw the fellow coming and laid him out. After that, the rest of the camp went for them. They fought their way clear, but it cost an ear and a few fingers between them.

  “By the time Josiah’s nephews returned with the rest of their menfolk and what friends they could muster, the camp had improved its armament to firearms, mostly pistols, a few shotguns. I figure they were supplied by whoever had partnered in their little enterprise. For the next week, your peace and love crew proved they could put a bullet in a man with the best of them. They favored sneak-attacks—sent a handful of men to the hospital.

  “So you’ll appreciate why I do not share your view of the hippie, and you’ll understand my views, unlike yours, are based in fact.”

  Neither Rachel nor Josh questioned that their visit was over. She picked up her cane. As they stood to leave, however, Josh said, “Grandpa?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Weren’t you already living up here with Grandma in 1968?”

  “I was.”

  “Then how did you know about the Hippie Wars?”

  Grandpa’s chair creaked as he leaned forward. “You think I’m telling stories?”

  “No sir,” Josh said. “I was just wondering who told you.”

  “My cousin, Samuel, called me.”

  “Oh, okay, thank you,” Josh said. “Did you go to Kentucky to help them?”

  Grandpa paused. “I did,” he said. His voice almost light, he added, “Brought those hippies a surprise.”

  “What?” Josh said. “What was it?”

  But their grandfather would say no more.

  4. The Tape (2): Down the Well

  “—the shore of a dried-up lake,” Grandpa was saying. “Looked like an old well, but if you’d dropped a bucket into it, you’d have come up empty. Ventilation shaft, though Jerry thought it might’ve helped light the place, too. He lowered me down, on account of he was a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than I was. Played football at Harvard, was strong as any of the roughnecks. The shaft sunk about fifty feet, then opened out. I switched on my light, and found myself dangling near the roof of a huge cavern. It was another seventy-five feet to the floor, and I couldn’t tell how far away the walls were. The rock looked volcanic, which set me to wondering if this wasn’t an old volcano, or at least, a series of lava tubes.”

  “Was it?” Uncle Jim asked.

  “Don’t know,” Grandpa said. “I was so concerned with what we found in that place, I never managed a proper geological survey of it. I’d stake money, though, that it was the remains of a small volcano.”

  “Okay,” Jim said. “Can you talk about what you found there?”

  “It was a city,” Grandpa said, “or a sizable settlement, anyway. Maybe two-thirds of the cavern had collapsed, but you could see from what was left how the ceiling swept up to openings like the one I’d been lowered through, which gave the impression of enormous tents, rising to their tent poles. Huge pillars that joined ceiling to floor added to the sensation of being under a great, black tent. Iram had also been called the city of the tent poles, and standing there shining my light around it, I could see why.”

  “But how did you know it was a city, and not just a cave?”

  “For one thing, the entrance I’d used. We took that as a pretty clear indication that someone had known about the place and used it for something. Could’ve been a garbage dump, though—right? We found proof. Around the perimeter of the cavern, smaller caves had been turned into dwelling-places. There were clay jars, metal pots, folded pieces of cloth that fell apart when we touched them. A few of the caves led to even smaller caves, like bedrooms. There was evidence of fires having been kept in all of them. Plus, most of the walls had been written on. I didn’t know enough about such things to identify it, but Jerry said it resembled some of what he’d seen on digs down in Dhofar.”

  “You must have been pretty excited,” Jim said. “I mean, this was a historic find.”

  “It was,” Grandpa said, “but we weren’t thinking about that. Well, maybe a little bit. May have been some talk about an endowed chair at Columbia for Jerry, a big promotion for me. Mostly, we were interested in the tunnels we saw leading out of the cavern.”

  5. Family History

  Officially, Grandpa had been retired from the oil company since shortly before Rachel’s birth, when a series of shrewd investments had vaulted him several rungs up the economic ladder. His money had covered whatever portion of Rachel’s appointments with a succession of retinal specialists her father’s teachers insurance did not, and he had paid for all of the specialized schooling and instruction she had required to navigate life with minimal vision. To Rachel’s mother, in particular, her grandfather was a benefactor of whose largesse she was in constant need of reminding. To Rachel, he was a sharp voice which had retained most of the accent it had acquired growing up among the eastern Kentucky knobs, when a talent for math and science had allowed him to escape first to the university, then to the world beyond, working as a geologist for the American oil companies opening the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. The edge with which he spoke matched what he said, which consisted in almost equal parts of complaint and criticism—a rare compliment thrown in, as her father put it, to keep them on their toes.

  According to Dad, his father had tended to the dour as far back as he could remember, but the tendency had been locked into place after Uncle Jim had run away from home at the end of his junior year in high school. Jim had been the brains of the brothers, a prodigy in math and science like his father before him. He tried not to show it, Dad said, but Grandpa favored his younger son, seemed genuinely excited by Jim, by his abilities, kept saying that, once Jim was old enough, there were things he was going to show him . . . When they realized Jim had left home without a note or anything, the family was devastated. The police had conducted a lengthy investigation, which had included multiple interviews with each member of the family, but which had led nowhere. Grandma was heartbroken. Dad had no doubt the pain of Jim’s departure lay at the root of the heart attack that killed her the following year. Grandpa was overtaken by bitterness, which his wife’s death only deepened. Dad had already been away at college, and so had missed a lot of the day-to-day pain his parents had suffered, but for a long time, he said, he had been angry at his missing brother. Jim had given no hint of anything in his life so wrong as to require him abandoning it, and them, entirely. Later, especially after he’d met Mom, Dad’s anger had softened. Who knew what Jim had been going through? Still waters run deep and all that.

  Jim’s disappearance, combined with Grandma’s death—not to mention, the blossoming of his stock portfolio—had set Grandpa on the path to retirement, a destination he had reached in the months before his first grandchild appeared. As far as Dad could tell, it had been years since the old man had been happy with his job. Every other week, it seemed, he was complaining about the idiots he worked with, their failure to r
ecognize the need for bold action. Dad had never been much interested in his father’s problems at work, and while Jim had been more (and genuinely) sympathetic, Grandpa had said he couldn’t explain it to his second son, he was too young. Dad supposed it was a wonder his father had stayed at his job as long as he had, but the pay was good, and he had responsibilities. After his principle obligation shrank from three members to one, however, he was free to play out the scenario he’d probably imagined a thousand times, and tender his resignation.

  Grandpa’s retirement had been an unusually active one. Several times a year, sometimes as often as once a month, he hired a car to take him and several large cases down to one of the metropolitan airports, JFK or LaGuardia or Newark, from which he boarded flights whose destinations were a survey of global geography: Argentina, China, Iceland, Morocco, Vietnam. Asked the purpose of his latest trip by either of his grandchildren, he would answer that he’d been called on to do a little consulting work, and if they were good while he was gone, he’d bring them back something nice. Any attempts at further questions were met by him shooing them out of whatever room they were in, telling them to go play. He was usually away for a week to ten days, although once he was gone for a month on a trip to Antarctica. While he was abroad, Rachel missed his presence in the house, but her missing him had more to do with her sense of a familiar element absent than any strong emotion. Neither her father nor her brother seemed much affected by his absence, and her mother was clearly relieved.

  6. The Tape (3): The Tunnels

  “—two kinds,” Grandpa was saying. “There were four tunnels leading out of the main chamber. Big enough for one, maybe two folks to walk along side-by-side. They led off to smaller caves, from which further tunnels branched to more caves. Jerry was for investigating these, trying to map out as much of the place as time would allow.”

  “But you wanted to look at the other tunnels?” Uncle Jim said.

  “There were two of them,” Grandpa said, “one next to the other. Each about half as tall as the first set: three and a half, four feet. Much wider: eight, maybe nine feet. More smoothly cut. The walls of the taller tunnels were rough, covered in tool marks. The walls of the shorter tunnels were polished, smooth as glass. To me, that made them all sorts of interesting. While Jerry sketched the layout of the main cavern, I got down on my hands and knees and checked the opening of the short tunnel on my right. Straight away, when I passed my light over it, I saw it was covered in writing. That brought Jerry running. The characters were like nothing either of us had seen before, and Jerry, in particular, had seen a lot. Had the tunnel’s surface not been so even, you might have mistaken the writing for the after-effect of a natural process, one of those times Mother Nature tries to fool you into believing there’s intent where there isn’t. The figures were composed of individual curved lines, each one like a comma, but slightly longer. These curves were put together in combinations that looked halfway between pictures and equations. We checked the tunnel on the left, and it was full of writing, too, the same script—though whatever it spelled out seemed to differ from tunnel to tunnel.

  “Thing was,” Grandpa went on, “while the shorter tunnels had the appearance of more recent construction, they had the feel of being much older than their counterparts. Sounds strange, I guess, but you do enough of this work, you develop a sense for these things. To Jerry and me, it was obvious that some amount of time had passed between the carving of the two sets of tunnels, and whichever came first, we were sure a long time separated it from the second. What we had was a site that had been occupied by two different—two very different groups of people. We crept into each of the shorter tunnels about ten feet, and right away, felt the floor sloping downwards. The tunnel on the right veered off to the right; the tunnel on the left headed left. I think it was that decided us on exploring these tunnels, first. The taller tunnels appeared to be carved on approximately the same level. The shorter ones promised a whole new layer, maybe more. We flipped a coin, and decided to start with the one on the right.

  “We didn’t get very far. No more than fifty feet in, the tunnel had collapsed. If it had been our only option, we might have searched for a way around it. As it was, we had another tunnel to try, so we crawled out the way we’d come and entered the tunnel on the left.

  “Our luck with this one was better. We followed the passage down and to the left for a good couple of hundred feet. Wasn’t the most pleasant trip either of us had taken. The rock was hard on our hands and knees, and it had been a spell since we’d done much in the way of crawling. We had our lights, but they didn’t seem that much in the face of the darkness before and behind us, the rock hanging above us. I’m not usually one for the jitters, but I was happy enough to see the end of the tunnel ahead. Jerry was, too.

  “The room we emerged into was round, shaped like a giant cylinder. From one side to the other, it was easily a hundred feet. Dome ceiling, twenty feet overhead. Across from where we’d entered was another tunnel, same dimensions as the one that had brought us here. I was all for finding out where that led, but Jerry stopped to linger a moment. He wanted to have a look at the walls, at the carvings on them.”

  Interlude: Grandpa (2): Cousin Julius and the Charolais

  As a rule, Grandpa did not interfere with their parents’ disciplining of them. Any decision with which he disagreed would be addressed via an incident from his own experience which he would narrate to Rachel and Josh the next time he had them upstairs. For Rachel, the most dramatic instance of this occurred when she was twelve. Seemingly overnight, a trio of neighborhood girls her age, previously friendly to her, decided that her lack of vision merited near-constant mockery. While she had been able to conceal the upset their teasing caused her from her parents, Josh had witnessed an instance of it in front of their house and immediately decided upon revenge. Rather than attacking the girls then and there, he had waited a few days, until he could catch one of them on her own. He had leapt from the bushes in which he’d been concealed and swung his heavy bookbag at the side of her head. The girl had not seen him, which had allowed him to escape and attempt the same tactic with another of the girls the following day. After what had happened to her friend, though, this girl was prepared for Josh. She raised her shoulder to take the brunt of his swing, then pivoted into a punch that dropped him to the sidewalk. As black spots were dancing in front of his vision, the girl seized him by the hair and dragged him into her house, where she turned him over to her shocked mother. During the ensuing rounds of phone calls and parental meetings, the girls’ cruelty to Rachel was acknowledged and reprimanded, but the heaviest punishment descended upon Josh, who was grounded for an entire month.

  In the aftermath of this incident, the mixture of embarrassment, anger, and gratitude that suffused Rachel received a generous addition of anxiety the next afternoon, when Grandpa descended to the first floor to request her and Josh’s presence in his sitting room. The two of them expected a continuation of the lectures they had been on the receiving end of for the last twenty-four hours—as, Rachel guessed, did their parents, who released them into their grandfather’s care with grim satisfaction. Despite her belief that Josh hadn’t done anything that bad—and that there was no reason at all for her to be involved in any of this—the prospect of a reprimand from Grandpa, who had a talent for finding the words that would wound most acutely, made her stomach hurt. If only she could leave Josh to face the old man himself—but her brother, stupid as he was, had acted on her behalf, and she owed him, however grudgingly, her solidarity. Swinging her cane side-to-side, she followed Josh up the stairs to the second floor and passed along the halls with their faint smell of bleach to Grandpa’s sitting room and the smoky couch. She collapsed her cane and sat beside Josh. Maybe Grandpa would finish what he had to say and turn them loose quickly.

  She recognized the tinkle of glass on glass that came from one of the six-packs of old-fashioned root beer that their grandfather sometimes shared with them. The pop and sig
h of a cap twisting loose confirmed her intuition that he was going to sit in front of them and drink one of the sodas as he lectured. The second pop and sigh, and the third, confused her. Was he planning to consume all three of their root beers? The floor creaked, and cold glass pressed against the fingertips of her right hand. She took the bottle, its treacly sweetness bubbling up to her nostrils, but did not lift it to her mouth, in case this was some sort of test.

  Grandpa seated himself, and said, “The two of you are in a heap of trouble. It’s your parents’ right to raise you as they see fit, and there’s naught anyone can say or do about it. It’s how I was with my boys, and I won’t grant your Dad any less with you. Joshua, they don’t take too kindly to you walloping this one girl and trying for the other, and Rachel, they’re tarring you with some of the same brush in case you had anything to do with putting your brother up to it. These days, folks tend to take a dim view of one youngster raising his hand against another. Especially if it’s a girl—your Dad would say I’m wrong, times’ve changed, but rest assured: if those had been two boys you’d gone after, the tone of the recent discussions you’ve been involved in would have been different.

  “I can’t intervene with your parents, but there’s nothing that says I can’t have a few words with you. So. When I was a tad older than the two of you, I went everywhere and did everything with my cousin, Julius Augustus. Some name, I know. It was the smartest thing about him. I expect your folks would call him ‘developmentally delayed’ or somesuch. We said he was slow. He was four years older, but he sat through ninth grade with me. It was his third time, after two tries at the grade before. He’d wanted to quit school and find a job, maybe on his uncle’s farm, but Julius’s dad fancied himself an educated man—which I guess you might have guessed from the names he loaded on his son—and he could not believe a child of his would not possess the same aptitude for learning as himself. Once I’d moved on to tenth grade and Julius had been invited to give ninth another try, his father relented, and allowed him to ask his uncle about that job.