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

by Paula Guran

  “Sorry,” he said. “What?”

  “This is kind of weird.”

  “No weirder than having the goddamned thing here in the first place.”

  “Do you think he knows—you know?”

  “That we’ve been fixated on it since we were kids?” she said. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure he’s figured that one out by now.”

  “Could it be some kind of, I don’t know, like a trap or something?”

  “A trap? What the fuck are you talking about? This is Grandpa.”

  “Right,” Josh said, “it is. Are you telling me he’d pass up a chance to teach us a lesson, especially about minding our own business?”

  “You’re being paranoid.” She shoved past him and made her way across the basement. Her cane clacked against the freezer. When her hand had closed on the edge of it, she said, “You want to come over here and tell me what’s in front of me?”

  With the exasperated sigh that had become the trademark of his adolescence, he did. “Move over,” he said, pushing her with his hip. She shuffled to her left. Standing over the open freezer, she found the cinnamon-vanilla-brine combination strong enough to make her cough. “I know,” Josh said, “pretty intense, huh?”

  “What do you see?”

  “Ice, mostly. I mean, there’s a lot of ice in here, a shitload of it. I’d say Grandpa had this thing about two-thirds full of ice.”

  “Well, it is a freezer.”

  “Ha-fucking-ha.”

  “The question is, what has he been using it for?”

  “Storage.”

  “Obviously. Any sign of what, exactly, was being stored?”

  “I—wait.”

  She felt him lean forward, heard ice shifting. “What the fuck?” he breathed.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s like, paper or something.”

  “Let me—” she held out her hand.

  “Here.” He placed a piece of what might have been heavy tissue paper in her palm. She leaned her cane against the freezer and ran her other hand over the substance. Its texture was almost pebbled. It crinkled and bunched under her fingertips. Josh said, “It’s translucent—has a kind of greenish tint. At one edge, it’s brown—light brown.”

  “It’s skin,” she said. “It could be from a plant, I guess, but I think it’s a piece of skin.” She brought it to her face. The cinnamon-vanilla-brine mix made her temples throb.

  “Skin?” Josh said.

  “Like from a snake,” she said, “or a lizard.”

  “What the fuck?” Josh said.

  Rachel had no answer.

  8. The Tape (4): The Carvings

  “—ten disks,” Grandpa was saying, “evenly spaced around the room. Each was a good six feet or so across. They were hung low, only about a foot off the floor. I’m not one for art, but I reckon I could find my way around a museum. The style of these things wasn’t like anything I’d run across before. What was pictured tended more in the direction of abstract shapes—cylinders, spheres, cubes, blocks—than of specific details. The scenes had been carved in something like bas-relief, and incised with the same writing we’d found at the tunnel mouths. I couldn’t decide if it was vandalism, or part of the original design. The letters seemed too regular, too evenly placed to be graffiti, but I’m hardly the expert in such things.

  “Jerry had brought his camera. He’d used up most of his film shooting the main cavern, but had enough left for the disks, so he photographed them.”

  “What did they show?” Uncle Jim asked.

  “Half of them, I couldn’t make heads nor tails of. Maybe if I’d had another few hours to study them, I might’ve been able to decipher them. The hands on our watches were moving on, though, and there was that other tunnel to consider.”

  “How about the ones you could figure out?”

  “There was a picture of a city,” Grandpa said, “although no such city as I’d ever seen, in or out of a book. Great buildings that curved to points, nary a straight line amongst them, like fangs of all different sizes. Another showed that same city—I’m pretty sure it was—destroyed, shattered by an enormous sphere crashing down into it. Third was of a long line of what I took for people, crossing a wide plane full of bones. There was one of another catastrophe, a large group of whoever this had been being trampled by a herd of animals—actually, this disk was a bit confusing, too. The animals were at the lead edge of a mass of triangular shapes that I took to be waves, but whether the animals were supposed to represent a flood, or vice-versa, wasn’t clear to me.

  “The picture that was most interesting was the one set over the tunnel out of the room. At its center, there was a person—or, what was supposed to be a person—and, at all four points of the compass surrounding him, there was another, smaller person, maybe half his size. Seemed to me there was more writing on this disk than the others, concentrated between the fellow in the middle and his four satellites. Jerry said it might be a representation of their gods, or their ancestors, or their caste system—which was to say, just about anything.”

  “Did you explore the other tunnel?” Jim said. “Of course you did. Did you find anything?”

  Grandpa laughed. “I guess you know your old man, don’t you? Jerry would’ve been happy to return, said we’d already found plenty. We had, and I wasn’t too sure of our lights, but by God did I want to find out what lay at the end of that other tunnel. Told Jerry I’d go, myself, which I would’ve; though I was betting on him not wanting to be left alone. He didn’t, but he made me promise we’d turn around the second our lights started to go.

  “The tunnel out of the chamber was the exact copy of the one that brought us to it. For another couple hundred feet, it slanted down and to the left. The darkness wasn’t any darker here than it had been at any point since we’d started our descent, but I found myself estimating how far below the surface we’d come, and that number seemed to make the blackness thicker.

  “We issued into a room that was pretty much identical in size and shape to the one we’d left. Only difference was the tombs along the walls.”

  9. A Familiar Debate

  “Suppose everything Grandpa told Uncle Jim on that tape—suppose it’s true.”

  “What?” Rachel said. Her bed shifted and complained as Josh lowered himself onto it. She closed the textbook her fingers had been trailing across. “Are you high again? Because if you are, I have the LSAT to prepare for.”

  “No,” Josh said, the pungent, leafy odor he’d brought with him a clear contradiction of his denial. “I mean, I might’ve had a little grass to chill me out, but this is serious. What if he was telling the truth?”

  With a sigh, Rachel placed her book on the bed. “Do I have to do this? Are you really going to make me run through all the problems with what’s on that tape?”

  “They were in the Empty Quarter,” Josh said, “the Rub’ al Khali. There’s all kinds of crazy shit’s supposed to be out there.”

  “Actually,” she said, “that point, I can almost believe. Apparently, there are some famous caves not too far from where they were, so why couldn’t they have discovered another? And why couldn’t it have been inhabited? If there was a cave-in, and the desert came pouring through the ceiling, there’s your Atlantis of the sands legend.”

  “So—”

  “But. This would have been an archaeological find of historic significance. It would have made his friend Jerry’s career. He would have been famous, too. You don’t think two young guys wouldn’t have publicized the shit out of something like this?”

  “Ah,” Josh said, “but you’re thinking in twenty-first century terms. They couldn’t snap a picture with their phones and upload it to Facebook, while verifying their coordinates with their personal GPS’s. They had to do things the old-fashioned way, which meant returning for additional photos and a survey of the location.”

  “By which time,” she said, “there had been not one, but two week-long sandstorms, and the terrain had b
een entirely changed.”

  “It’s the desert. There are sandstorms all the time.”

  “I’m sure there are, which begs the question: how did they find a map to guide them there, in the first place?”

  “Maybe it was a star map.”

  “Then why couldn’t they find their way back?”

  “Okay, so it was dumb luck they found the place. There are still the pictures they did take.”

  “Most of which,” she said, “were ruined by some kind of mysterious radiation they’re supposed to have encountered underground. What could be developed is—apparently—so generic it could be anyplace.”

  Josh paused. “What about the egg?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Why not?”

  “Why—because extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”

  “There’s the freezer,” Josh said, “and its locks.”

  “That’s hardly—”

  “Remember the piece of skin we found in it?”

  “You don’t think that was Grandpa fucking with us?”

  “We hadn’t found Jim’s tape in the attic, then. What would have been the point?”

  “I said: to fuck with us.”

  “I don’t know,” Josh said.

  “I do,” Rachel said. “Our grandfather is not keeping a pet monster in the freezer in the basement.”

  “Not a monster,” Josh said, “a new species.”

  “An intelligent dinosaur?”

  “It’s not—that’s like calling us thinking monkeys. It’s what the dinosaurs developed into.”

  “Again—and this is ignoring a ton of other problems with your scenario—what you’re describing would have been—I mean, can you imagine? A living example of another, completely different, rational creature? Grandpa and Jerry would have been beyond famous. Yet we’re supposed to believe Grandpa raised it, himself?”

  “They wanted to study it. They thought it would be better for them to observe and document its development.”

  “Which neither of them had any training for,” Rachel said. “And, once more, where’s the data they’re supposed to have accumulated?”

  “Presumably, Jerry lost it, sometime before his heart attack.”

  “How incredibly convenient, on both counts.”

  “Anyway, from what I can figure, it isn’t as if the thing is all that smart.”

  “Does it matter? You do not keep an earth-shaking scientific find on ice in the cellar of your house in upstate New York. Shit,” she added, “why are we even having this conversation?”

  “It’s Uncle Jim,” Josh said.

  “What about him?”

  “I’ve been thinking about him running away—the timing of it. Near as I can tell, he and Grandpa sat down to record that tape about a month before Jim split.”

  “And?”

  “Well—do they sound like they aren’t getting along?”

  “No,” Rachel said, “but that doesn’t mean anything. This could have been the calm before the storm.”

  “Not according to Dad. The way he tells it, everything was fine between Uncle Jim and Grandpa and Grandma right until he left.”

  “You have to take what Dad says about Uncle Jim with a chunk of salt. It’s safe to say he was a little jealous of his baby brother.”

  “What I’m getting at,” Josh said, “is maybe Uncle Jim saw what was in the freezer. And maybe he didn’t like it. Maybe he freaked out.”

  “So he ran away?”

  “Could be. Could also be, he never left the house.”

  “What—the thing ate him?”

  “Maybe it was an accident,” Josh said. “He figured out how to unlock the freezer while Grandpa wasn’t there. Or Grandpa was there, but Jim got too close. Or—what about this?—Grandpa turned the thing loose on Jim because he was threatening to tell people about it, go public.”

  “That’s pretty fucked-up,” Rachel said. “Grandpa’s an asshole who’s committed some acts that are, to put it mildly, of questionable morality, but that doesn’t mean he’d sic his pet monster on his child.”

  “It would explain why Jim disappeared so completely, why he’s never been found.”

  “As would a less-elaborate—and –ridiculous—narrative. Not to mention, weren’t you sitting beside me during his family-comes-first lectures? Remember cousin Julius Augustus, the terrible things you do for your kin?”

  “Family loyalty cuts both ways. If Jim set himself against the family, then he’d be liable for the consequences.”

  “Seriously? Are you sure this paranoid fantasy isn’t about Grandpa and you?”

  “Don’t laugh. You honestly believe that, if Grandpa thought I was harming the family, he wouldn’t take action?”

  “ ‘Take action:’ will you listen to yourself? He’s an old man.”

  “With a very powerful weapon at his command. You don’t need to be too strong to fire a gun.”

  “Jesus—okay, this conversation is over. I have to get back to studying.” As Josh raised himself from the bed, Rachel added, “Occam’s razor, Josh: the simplest answer is generally the right one.”

  “If I’m right about what’s in that freezer,” he said, “then this is the simplest answer.”

  Interlude: Dad and Mom

  Neither of Rachel’s parents cared to discuss her grandfather at any length. In her father’s case, this was the residue of an adolescence complicated by the loss of his brother and mother, and an adulthood spent in a career for which his father showed a bemused tolerance, at best. In her mother’s case, it was due to her father-in-law’s decades-long refusal to be won over by her efforts to achieve anything more than a tepid formality. Mom had been enough of a hippie in her youth for Rachel to have a sense of the root of Grandpa’s coldness to her; on a couple of occasions, however, she had hinted to Rachel that her uneasiness around her husband’s father had to do with more than his disdain for her lifestyle. There was something she thought she had seen—but it was probably all her imagination. Rachel wasn’t to say anything to her grandfather, or he’d accuse Mom of having had a flashback, or worse, of having been tripping. Rachel tried to coax her mother into describing what she had seen, but she refused to be drawn.

  10. The Tape (5): Visions of the Lost World

  “—eight sarcophagi,” Grandpa was saying. “That was what it looked like, at first. Huge stone boxes, ten feet long by four high by four deep. Cut from the same stone as the tunnels and the chambers. Six of them set around one side of the room, the remaining two opposite. It appeared the tombs had been turned over, because the front of each was open. Full of what we took for rocks, smooth, oblong stones the length of a man’s hand, all a speckled material I didn’t recognize. We circled the room, and it seemed every last one of the stones was cracked, most from end to end. I picked up one to inspect. Lighter than its size, almost delicate. Surface was tacky. I aimed my light into the crack, and saw it was hollow. I replaced it, and chose another one. It was empty, too, as were the others I checked. I moved onto the next stone box, and the one after that, and all the stones I examined were the same, fragile shells that stuck to my fingers. Not until I lifted a rock that hadn’t split all the way—and which was heavier than the others—and shone my light into it did the penny finally drop. These weren’t stones. They were eggs. The stone containers weren’t sarcophagi. They were incubators. This wasn’t a mausoleum. It was a nursery.”

  “What?” Uncle Jim said. “What was in there? What did you see?”

  “Broke the shell, myself,” Grandpa said. “Shouldn’t have, wasn’t anything like proper procedure, but what was inside that egg . . . ”

  “What?” Jim said. “What was it?”

  “Conditions in the chamber had preserved the creature it contained well enough for me to make out the pattern on its skin. It was dried out, more like paper than flesh and bone. Guess you could say I found a mummy, after all. Curled up in the half-shell I was holding, it put me in mind of an alligator, or a crocodi
le. The body and tail did, anyway. Head was something else. For the size of the skull, the eye was huge, round, like what you find in some species of gecko. Its brow, snout, flowed together into a thick horn that jutted beyond the end of its lower jaw. Damnedest looking thing, and when I studied its forelimbs more closely, I noticed the paws were closer to hands, the toes fingers.”

  “No way,” Jim said.

  “Boy, have you ever known me to lie to you?” A warning edge sharpened Grandpa’s question.

  “No sir,” Jim said. “So what was it? Some kind of pet lizard?”

  “Not by a long shot,” Grandpa said. “I was holding in my palm the withered remains of one of the beings who had carved out the very room in which we were standing.” During the pause that followed Grandpa’s revelation, Rachel could feel her vanished uncle’s distant desire to call her grandfather on his bullshit vibrating the silence; apparently, however, Uncle Jim had decided to water his valor with discretion. Grandpa went on, “Of course, I didn’t know this at the time. I assumed the thing I’d found was another lizard, if a strange one. There were a couple more mummified creatures in amongst the eggs in this box, and something even more important: a single, unopened egg, its outside sticky with a coat of the gel that had been left on the others. I wrapped the unbroken egg with the utmost care, and placed it in the bottom of the rucksack I’d worn. Beside it, I packed the three dried-out creatures, along with a sampling of a half-dozen empty eggs. Wasn’t anything else we could take as proof we’d been here, but I figured this was better than nothing.

  “The trip back to the main cavern, then to the surface, then to the camp, was uneventful. Jerry and I talked about what we’d found, what it might portend for us. We agreed not to say anything to anyone until he’d developed the pictures he’d taken and we’d found someone we could trust to examine the things in my rucksack. Neither seemed as if it would take long—a week or two at the outside—and once we were in possession of evidence we could show someone, we didn’t think we’d have any difficulty locating a sponsor who would reward us generously for leading a second, larger and better-equipped, expedition to Iram.