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

by Paula Guran

  Before the third and final section, the tape spat out the phrase, “children of the fang.” Three minutes after that, at the very end of the second side of the second tape, the nonsense came to an end and was replaced by silence. As Rachel was running her finger across the tape recorder’s buttons, Grandpa’s voice said, “What we never could work out was whether the viruses floating around my blood had changed me permanently. Could I pass along my control of the creature to my child, or was it confined to me? How could we know, right? I hadn’t met your ma, hadn’t settled down and started a family, yet.”

  Uncle Jim said, “What do you think, now?”

  “I think we might find out,” Grandpa said, and the tape recorder snapped off.

  Interlude: Grandpa (3): Knife Wants to Cut

  Whether birthday, Christmas, or other celebration such as graduation, the gift Rachel or her brother could expect from Grandpa was predictable: money, a generous amount of it tucked into a card whose saccharine sentimentality it was difficult to credit their grandfather sharing. When they were younger, the bills that slid out of their cards from Grandpa had been a source of puzzlement and occasional frustration to her and Josh. Why couldn’t their grandfather have given them whatever present they’d requested of him, instead of money? In a relatively short time, their complaints were replaced by gratitude, as Grandpa’s beneficence enabled Rachel and Josh to afford extravagances their parents had refused them.

  The exception to this practice occurred on Josh’s thirteenth birthday. After he had unwrapped his gifts from his parents and Rachel, but before he had moved on to their cards, Grandpa said, “Here.” A box scratched across the table’s surface.

  “Grandpa?” Josh said. Whatever was inside the box thwacked against its side as Josh picked it up. Something heavy, Rachel thought, probably metal. A watch? “Buck knife,” Josh read. “Really?”

  “Open it and find out,” Grandpa said.

  Rachel could feel the look her father and mother exchanged.

  The cardboard made a popping sound as Josh tore into it. “Coooooooooool,” he said. Plastic crinkled against his fingers.

  Their father said, “Dad.”

  Grandpa said, “Boy your age should have a knife—a good one.”

  The blade snicked as Josh unfolded it into place. “Whoa,” he said.

  Their father said, “Josh.”

  Grandpa said, “It’s not a toy. It’s a tool. A tool’s only as good as your control of it, you understand? Your control slips—you get sloppy—and you’ll slice your skin wide open. Someone’s next to you, you’ll slice them open. That is not something you want. Knife wants to cut: it’s what it’s made for. You keep that in mind every time you reach for it, and you’ll be fine.”

  Their mother said, “Josh, what do you say?”

  “Thank you, Grandpa,” Josh said, “thank you thank you thank you!”

  Within a week, the knife would be gone, confiscated by Josh’s homeroom teacher when she caught him showing it off to his friends. After a lengthy conference with Mrs. Kleinbaum, their father retrieved the knife, which he insisted on holding onto until the school year was out, his penalty for Josh’s error in judgment. By the time summer arrived, Josh had pretty much forgotten about his grandfather’s present, and if he remembered to mention it to their father, it was not in Rachel’s hearing.

  Before all of this, though, Josh let her hold the gift. The knife was heavy, dense in the way that metal was. Longer than her palm, the handle was smooth on either end, slightly rougher between. “That’s where the wood panels are,” Josh said. On one side of the handle, a dip near one of the ends exposed the top edge of the blade. By digging her nail into a groove in it, she could lever the blade out. As it clicked into place, a tremor ran up the handle. Rachel slid her finger along the knife’s dull spine. About a third of the way from its end, the metal angled down to the tip. “Like a scimitar,” Josh said. She dimpled her skin on the point. “Careful,” Josh said.

  “Shut up,” she said, “I am being careful.” Ready to part her flesh, the blade’s edge passed under her touch. In her best approximation of Grandpa’s voice, she said, “Knife wants to cut.” She folded the knife closed, and handed it back to Josh.

  He laughed. “Knife wants to cut,” he said.

  13. In the Basement (Now): The Thing in the Ice

  Because of Grandpa’s stroke Christmas Eve, neither Rachel nor her parents paid much attention to what they assumed at the time was Josh’s refusal to appear for Christmas. Granted, it had been a few years since he’d last missed a family holiday, but he had spent most of his Thanksgiving visit complaining about the workload required by his doctoral classes (the stress of which their parents had diagnosed as the cause of his blowup with Grandpa). He had a trio of long papers due immediately before Christmas break—not the most work he’d ever faced, but on a couple of occasions on the day before Thanksgiving, he’d alluded to Rachel about a mid-semester affair with a guy from Maine that had crashed and burned in spectacular fashion, leaving him dramatically behind in all his classes. She had offered his backlog of assignments to her mother as the reason for his abrupt departure Saturday afternoon, while Rachel and her parents were braving the crowds at the Wiltwyck mall. His assignments were probably the reason that none of them had heard from Josh the last few weeks, either.

  And if she and her parents were to be honest with one another, it was likely as well that Josh had opted to give Christmas a pass. After Mom heard the thump and crash on the front stairs and went to investigate, and found Grandpa sprawled halfway down, his breathing labored, the left side of his face slack, his left arm and leg so much dead lumber, the focus had shifted from holiday preparations (which included planning for a possible Round Two between Josh and Grandpa) to whether the old man would survive the next twenty-four hours. Even after the doctors had pronounced Grandpa’s condition stable, and expressed a cautious optimism that subsequent days would bear out, he remained the center of attention, as Rachel and her parents talked through what needed doing at home to accommodate his changed condition, and set about making the necessary calls to arrange the place for him. She left a couple of messages on Josh’s phone, the first telling him to call her, the second, a few days later, informing him of Grandpa’s stroke, and though she was annoyed at his failure to respond, especially once he knew the situation, she didn’t miss the inevitable torrent of self-reproach with which he would have greeted the news—and which certainly would have been worse had he been there with them.

  By Valentine’s Day, what Rachel referred to as her brother’s radio-silence had become a source of worry for their mother. “Do you think he’s still upset about Thanksgiving?” she asked during one of their daily calls. Rachel could not believe that Josh would sulk for this long; although there had been a couple of occasions during his undergraduate years when a particularly intense relationship had caused him to drop off the face of the earth for a couple of months. She phoned his cell, but her, “It’s me. Listen: Mom’s worried. Call her, okay?” betrayed more pique than she intended. But she could not credit the edge to her voice for Josh’s continuing failure to phone their mother. And, despite his assurances that Josh was probably caught up in some project or another, Dad’s voice when she spoke with him revealed his own anxiety. Only Grandpa, his speech slowed and distorted by the stroke, seemed untroubled by Josh’s silence. Both her parents were desperate to drive up to Josh’s apartment, but feared that appearing unannounced would aggravate whatever the situation with him was. Rachel bowed to their none-too-subtle hints, and offered to do so for them.

  Before she could take a taxi to the other side of the city, however, one of Josh’s fellow students at SUNY Albany called her to ask if everything was okay with her brother, whom, he said, he hadn’t seen since he’d left for Thanksgiving vacation the previous semester. He’d left messages on Josh’s cell, but had heard nothing in reply. He’d remembered Josh mentioning a sister at Albany Law, so he’d looked up her number, which
he’d been meaning to call for a while, now. He didn’t want to be intrusive. He just wanted to be sure Josh was okay and knew his friends were asking for him. That conversation was the first of a chain that led to several of Josh’s other friends, then their parents, then the police. By the end of the day, her mother had left her father to watch Grandpa and raced up the Thruway to pick up Rachel and drive to Josh’s apartment, where they were met by Detective Calasso of the Albany PD and a pair of uniform officers. Both Rachel and her mother had keys to the door. Her heart was beating so fast it was painful, not because of what she was afraid they were going to find, but because of what she was certain they were not. The moment the door swung in, the smell that rolled out, dry, cool dust, confirmed her suspicion. During their search of Josh’s small living quarters, the detective and his colleagues discovered two bags of pot, a smaller one in the top drawer of the bedroom dresser, and a larger one sunk inside the toilet’s cistern. Once they’d found the second bag, the tenor of the detective’s questions underwent a distinct change, as Josh went from graduate student in philosophy to small-time drug-dealer. Rachel could hear the narrative Calasso’s line of inquiry was assembling, one in which her brother’s criminal activities had brought him into jeopardy from a client, competitor, or supplier. Best case, Josh had gone into hiding; worst, he’d never had the chance. From the detective’s perspective, she could understand: it was an attractive explanation, that had the virtue of neatly accounting for all the evidence confronting him. Her and her mother’s protests that this wasn’t Josh were to be expected. How often, in such situations, could family members admit that their loved ones were so markedly different from what they’d known? Detective Calasso assured them the police would do everything in their power to locate Josh, but by the time her mother was dropping her back at her apartment, she was reasonably sure the detective deemed the case essentially solved.

  That she would entertain Josh’s claims about Grandpa and what he had locked away in his basement freezer was at first an index of her frustration after four weeks of regular calls to Detective Calasso, during which he never failed to insist that he and his men were working tirelessly to ascertain her brother’s whereabouts. Approximately every third conversation, he would inform Rachel that they were pursuing a number of promising leads, but when she asked him what those leads were, he appealed to the sensitivity of the information. She hardly required a lifetime spent mastering the nuances of spoken expression to recognize that he was bullshitting her. She could believe that Calasso had queried what criminal informants he knew for information on her brother, as she could that his failure to turn up anything substantive would have done little to change his theory of the case. Compared to the plot in which her brother had been assassinated by a rival drug dealer and his weighted corpse dumped in the Hudson, the prospect that the accusations he’d lobbed at their grandfather at Thanksgiving had prompted the old man to some terrible act had the benefit of familiarity.

  In the space of a week, however, the Grandpa’s-monster-theory, as she christened it, went from absurd to slightly-less-than-absurd, which, while not a huge change, was testament to the amount of time she’d spent turning it over in her mind, playing devil’s advocate with herself, arguing Josh’s position for him. Her dismissal of the story Grandpa had told Uncle Jim was based in her assumption that he and his friend, Jerry, would have been sufficiently competent to take full advantage of the opportunities with which their supposed discoveries presented them. What if they hadn’t been? What if they hadn’t known how to exploit their findings? After all, why should they have? Especially if they couldn’t trace their way back to the place? And say, for the sake of argument, that Grandpa had come into care of . . . something, something fantastic. Who was to say he would have turned it over to a zoo, or university? It wouldn’t have been the most sensible course of action, but, as her favorite professor did not tire of reminding her, logical, self-consistent behavior was the province of bad fiction. Actual people tended to move in ways that, while in keeping with the peculiarities of their psychology, resembled more the sudden shifts in course typical of the soap opera.

  Which meant, of course, that her younger brother could have had a secret life as a drug dealer. And that their grandfather could have been keeping an unimaginable creature in enforced hibernation in the basement. The impossibility of what she was considering did not stop her from making a couple of discrete inquiries among her closer friends as to the possibility of acquiring a set of lock picks and being instructed in their use. This proved remarkably easy. One of those friends had a friend who earned extra cash as a stage magician whose skill set included a facility with opening locks. For the price of a couple of dinners, the magician was happy to procure for Rachel her own set of tools and to teach her how to employ them. She wasn’t certain if she was one hundred percent serious about what she appeared to be planning, or if it was a temporary obsession that had to work itself out. The entirety of the bus ride to Wiltwyck, she told herself that she was not yet positive she would descend to the basement. That her parents were away for the afternoon and Grandpa still of limited mobility meant no more than it meant. She managed to keep that train of thought running for the taxi ride from the bus station to her parents’ house. But once she had let herself in the front door, hung up her coat, and slid the soft bag with the lock picks in it from her pocketbook, it seemed pointless to continue pretending there was any doubt of her intentions. She listened for Grandpa, his home health aide, and when she was satisfied there was no one else on the first floor, set off sweeping her cane from side to side down the front hall, towards the basement door.

  In no time at all, she was resting the cane against the freezer. How many times had she been here, sliding her hands along the appliance’s edge until they encountered each of Grandpa’s locks? Always with Josh maintaining a steady stream of chatter beside her. Now, the only sound was the low hiss of her palms over the freezer’s surface, the click of metal on metal as she found a lock and tilted it up. How long ago had Grandpa switched entirely to padlocks? It made what she was about to do easier. She placed the lockpick bag on top of the freezer, rolled it open, selected her tools, and set to work.

  The locks unclasped so easily, it was almost anticlimactic. Half-anticipating an additional security measure she’d missed, Rachel searched the freezer lid. Nothing. She put the opened locks on the floor, returned her tools to their bag and put it beside the locks, and braced her hands against the lid. After all these years, to be . . . There was no point delaying. She pushed upwards, and with the pop of its rubber seal parting, the lid released.

  A cloud of cinnamon, vanilla, and brine enveloped her. She choked, coughed, stepped away from the freezer. Her eyes were streaming, her nose and tongue numb. She bent forward, unable to control the coughs that shook her lungs. So much for secrecy: if Grandpa had been unaware of her presence in the house previously, she’d just advertised it. Still coughing, she returned to the freezer and plunged her hands into it.

  Ice cubes heaped almost to its tops rattled as her fingers parted their frozen geometry. She moved her hands back and forth, ice chattering and rattling. There was a click, and the freezer’s motor whirred to life. When had Grandpa loaded all this ice in here? Funny to think that not once had she and Josh asked that question.

  Her fingertips brushed something that wasn’t ice. She gasped, overcome with sudden terror that she had found her brother, that Grandpa had flipped out, murdered him, and used the freezer to hide the body. Even as her heart leapt in her chest, her not-completely-numb fingers were telling her that this wasn’t Josh. It was an arm, but it was shorter than her brother’s, the skin weird, pebbled. She followed it to one end, and found a hand with three thick fingers and a thumb set back towards the wrist. A claw sharp as a fresh razor protruded from each of the fingers.

  Nausea roiled her stomach. She withdrew her hands from the ice and sat down hard on the basement floor. Her head was pounding. She pressed her cold palms to eit
her side of it. Somewhere in the recesses of her brain, Josh crowed, “See? I told you!” Her pulse was racing. She felt hot, feverish. The floor seemed to tilt under her, and she was lying on it. She could not draw in enough breath. Her body was light, almost hollow. She was moving away from it, into darkness that gave the sensation of movement, as if passing through a tunnel. She

  14. Affiliation

  opened her eyes to light. Brilliance flooded her vision. She gasped, and heard it at a distance. She jerked her hands to her face, but found her arms weighted with something that rattled and rustled as she tried to move them. Her entire body was covered in the stuff. Panic surged through her. She thrashed from side to side, up and down, the medium that held her snapping and cracking as it shifted around her. There was something wrong with her arms and legs. They were sluggish, clumsy. The brightness before her eyes resolved into shapes, triangles, diamonds, blocks, jumbling against one another. With a crash, her right arm broke free of its confinement. Her hand flailed on the rough surface of the material. She braced her forearm against it, and pushed her head and shoulders into the air.