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

by Paula Guran

  Inside the room a musician who looked not unlike Gershwin sat at a baby grand and played the sketches that would become An American in Paris.

  The suite was set up as a speakeasy where audience members bought drinks, leaned on furniture, listened but also watched. Evangeline shimmered before them, exchanged a long kiss with the silver flapper. All eyes were on the two and Gershwin played a slow fox trot. As they danced he turned from the piano, looked to the audience as though asking if they saw what he did.

  When theatergoers from the hall began to crowd into the room, Evangeline floated through a bedroom door and her maid closed it. When people opened it to follow her, they found the room was empty and the door on the opposite wall was locked.

  Some at that point would realize that the sixth floor was a diversion, a place to spend money and waste time that would have been better spent up in the penthouse or downstairs where a murder was brewing.

  Sonya brought Keri/Evangeline down to the third floor where her next scene would be. The maid character didn’t appear again in Sleep Walking. “I feel like I should stay with you,” she said, and opened the door.

  Keri grasped her arm, looked into her eyes and said, “You’ve done enough. You’re wonderful.”

  The next day Sonya was setting up antique wooden folding chairs in Studio Mac on the third floor. She said, “I wish my part was bigger. I want to be in every minute of this play. I know that’s how actors feel.”

  Rosalin believed the intensity could possibly be of use. “The Big Arena is a savage place, run for the very rich and full of the superfluous young. Most of them will never find something larger than themselves as you are doing. It takes a certain kind of personal sacrifice to fully achieve this. But it will live in others’ memories.”

  Three

  In New York it was shortly before midnight of Halloween 2060. Over the years, this holiday had surpassed New Year’s Eve as the city’s expression of its identity. Especially at times like this when the legendary metropolis was short of cash and looking for some new idea to carry it forward.

  In the Angouleme it was time for a special midnight show. Playgoers entered Sleep Walking through the lobby. From there they either went up the stairs, waited for the elevators, or just looked for a place to sit while getting acclimated. Rosalin had managed to exploit the lobby’s disreputable, fallen majesty. It was a place made for loitering. Upstairs each floor was set in a different decade. The lobby celebrated the entire sordid past. Here, a cluster of 1960s rent boys lingered in the shadows next to the main staircase and several 1900s ladies of the evening in big hats and bustles stood near the ever-vacant concierge desk.

  Jeremy Knight waited in a side doorway of the building. At exactly five minutes after the final stroke of twelve he got the one-minute signal, walked a few feet down the sidewalk to the front of the hotel, and was flanked by security.

  They threw open the doors and Knight/Jacky entered the lobby: tall and wire-thin, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, his blond hair in a ponytail down almost to his ass.

  Knight was irritated as he always was at this moment by the sight of Jacoby Cass, who, with his speech about the God-given nineteenth century being finished, was making a grand exit with his party. A few patrons tried to follow but found themselves blocked by Jackson and company.

  Jeremy Knight marveled at the number of scene-stealing opportunities Cass, the shameless ham, had managed to insert into the script.

  Knight surveyed the crowd. The show was booked solid for the Halloween weekend. Advance sales were another matter and his guts turned cold whenever that crossed his mind. So he didn’t think about it.

  In fact, Cass’s distraction allowed Knight to be through the crowd before they were aware of him. He turned then to face them and they saw Jacky Mac—couturier, poet, playwright—in a classic outfit of his own design: V-shaped, slim-waisted jacket; bell-bottom trousers; a wide tie with bright pop art flowers that looked like faces. Jacky Mac had been known to wear miniskirts and silver knee boots, but not on this occasion.

  On cue, the public elevator’s doors opened. Customers hesitated as always about getting on board because of the legends surrounding the place.

  Of Jeremy Knight it had been written, “He was born to wear a costume; put him in anything from a 1940 RAF uniform to a pink tutu and he is transformed.” He despised the description but had found that in roles like this an actor grabbed inspiration wherever it could be found.

  Without missing a beat, Jacky Mac stepped backwards into an elevator and seemed amused by the audience’s fear. “Oh, it’s safe!” He somehow murmured and shouted in the same breath. “And if it begins to fall, just do as I do: flap your arms and fly!”

  From the elevator doorway, Mac gazed at the manikins in the corner, saw something, and nodded. The audience watched fascinated as one of the figures, dressed in leather and a blood red kerchief stepped out of the shadows and walked unsmiling into the car. “I was crucified just now by his glance,” Jacky announced as The Killer joined him and the door closed.

  Alone, without an audience to overhear them, Jeremy and Remo, the young actor who played The Killer, didn’t exchange a word. Each got off on a different floor, and over the next hour made rehearsed appearances in dark halls and bright interiors.

  Forty minutes into the play, Jeremy Knight/Jacky Mac listened to Gershwin’s piano and heard Nance’s death scream. Ten minutes after that he did a huge double take when he passed the ghost of Evangeline on the tiresome seventh floor where it was always 2010 and the well-lighted halls were lined with display windows offering overpriced Sleep Walking souvenirs. Coming down the servants’ stairs five minutes later, he passed Sonya trudging up carrying costumes. He smiled and she looked at him as wide-eyed as any fan.

  Halloween week was great. Capacity crowds were willing and able to laugh and scream at every performance. On the third floor of the Angouleme two weeks later, at about an hour and twenty minutes into Sleep Walking, Knight/Jacky climbed onto the small stage in the Mac Studio and felt the difference.

  The Studio included a large performance space with sixty chairs set up. At the Halloween midnight show all seats had been taken and many more patrons stood or sat on the floor. Halloween had been a triumph. But it’s in the weeks between holidays that hit shows are revealed and flops begin to die.

  Jeremy Knight had that in mind as he pirouetted on the stage. He estimated thirty people in the seats. And this included The Killer, always the first to arrive. Remo was also Jeremy Knight’s understudy. He sat down front with his legs stuck out so far his booted feet rested on the stage. A little knowledge of history and one would be reminded of Jacky Mac’s fatal tastes.

  The under-capacity crowd bothered Knight. But he told himself that any audience of any size was fated to be his. And the people at these performances who sat on antique wooden folding chairs were willing extras.

  They were drawn to the Studio by the sounds and the lights flashing through the open double doors. Or they were told not to miss this by friends who had seen Knight/Jacky perform this monologue, one-man play, stand-up routine, whatever you wanted to call it. Jacky Mac’s writing was out of copyright and Cass had lifted big chunks of it for a play within a play called A Death Made for Speculation.

  Jacky leaned over the front of the stage, hummed a few bars of music, and said in a husky voice, “I’d thought of coming out in an evening gown and doing a Dietrich medley. But I’ve seen the way women look at me when I do drag. It’s the look Negroes get when a white person sings the blues. So I’m here to fulfill a secret dream. I’m playing a guy.”

  Rosalin had taken liberties with the decor but 1970 was a hard moment to exaggerate. Jacky’s loft had been described and shown in articles, books, and documentary footage. Like Warhol’s Factory, it was iconic. On the walls and above mantelpieces were mirrors, which at certain angles turned into windows looking into other rooms. In those rooms doll automata played cards, a mechanical rogue and his partner cavorted, and
one or both might look your way, indicate you were next.

  “When I was young,” Jacky Mac said, “I tried to make myself look beautiful. Later I tried to make myself look young. Now I’m satisfied with making myself look different.”

  In the lawless 1960s, the Angouleme Hotel was almost as famous as the Chelsea across town. When it was sold as co-op apartments and lofts Jacky bought most of the third floor of the building with the proceeds of his clothing line and his performance art. Jacky Mac was not, of course, his real name, which was boring and provincial Donald Sprang.

  For Jeremy Knight the task was making something as ordinary as homosexuality feel as mysterious, hysterical, and dangerous as Jacky had found his life to be. A brief film clip existed of Jacky Mac working out some of this material in the Studio, performing for an audience of friends in just this manner.

  Jeremy caught the odd, fluid near-dance of Jacky Mac, which he’d learned from old videos. On the walls Hendrix, Joplin, and DayGlo acrylic nude boys and girls melted into a landscape of red and blue trees. A light show played intermittently on the ceiling. Deep yellow blobs turned into crisp light green snakes, which drowned in orange, quivering jelly. The color spectrum dazed the eye.

  Knight/Jacky leaned forward to show a once-angelic face now touched with lines and makeup and asked, “Why do men over thirty with long hair always look like their mothers?”

  On cue, The Killer down front swallowed a few pills, stood up, pulled a bottle from his back pocket, spat out, “Faggot” at Jacky and walked toward the door while taking a long slug. In the old-fashioned manner, Jacky Mac liked his partners rough. It would be the death of him.

  The audience watched the long, slow exit. Wrist limp, Jacky Mac gestured after him. “We have the perfect relationship. I pretend he doesn’t exist and he pretends that he does.”

  It wasn’t just the costume; Jeremy Knight had absorbed every bit of the lost manner and voice of someone society hated for what he was. Ninety years later it was hard to convey. For a few years in his teens Jeremy had been Jenna Knight, making the change because boys in school got neglected and there was an advantage to being a boy with the mind of a girl.

  Each day Knight felt closer to Jacky’s alienation. Saw it intertwine with his own fear of falling off a very small pedestal and back into the vast, penniless crowd in the Big Arena.

  The Killer stopped at the door and yelled, “IT’S YOUR TURN NOW, BITCH!” at somebody no one could see.

  Jacky glanced his way, turned back to the seats and found everyone staring wide-eyed. “Dear me, are the snakes growing out of my head again? That Medusa look was so popular once upon a time!” He peered at the crowd and remarked half to himself, “Judging by your faces, I’ve turned you all to stone. Forgive me. My mother always said . . . ”

  But few were listening. All eyes were on a figure in silks floating past the stage humming “Beautiful Dreamer” under her breath, while the audience whispered her name.

  Cass had invented a liaison in this hotel between a self-destructive artist and the ghost of a legendary suspected murderess. The character Jacky was haunted by Evangeline decades after she had died of an overdose.

  Once he caught sight of her he seemed to forget the audience completely and followed her out of the room. When audience members came after them, they found a locked door.

  But the room into which the two had gone was Jacky’s legendary mirrored bedroom. The ceiling, an entire wall, even the floor in places reflected the room and its outsize bed. One wall was a two-way mirror. Jacky was always aware of this, as were some of his bedmates.

  The Sleep Walking audience flocked around the glass, saw silhouettes dance in semi-darkness as Jacky tried to trap Evangeline or she ensnared him. One shadow seemed to pass through another. One or the other always had a back to the audience and both whispered so none outside could hear.

  “How’s the gate tonight?” she asked.

  “Seventy percent for this show, about the same for the midnight show,” he said.

  “Shit,” she said. “It’s going to fold.”

  “Needs a third act,” he said. “I have my eye out for especially unstable repeat patrons.”

  “A third victim,” she said. “Rosalin’s got one but Sonya scares me.”

  He shook his head. “She’s harmless.”

  “A suicide might do,” Keri said.

  “I volunteer my understudy, Remo.”

  “Silly, understudies don’t want to die; they want to kill the leads.”

  Through the glass the two heard, “Where are you, faggot? Fucking the ghost girl?” The Killer had returned.

  Jeremy Knight took a deep breath and walked out of the bedroom. “Let’s talk, one faggot to another. I’m the terrible secret: the herpes sore on the ten-inch cock, the skunk at the tea dance, the troll without the decency to hide under the bridge. I’m the one who’s here to call you sister, to tell you . . . ”

  In Sleep Walking The Killer emptied the pistol into him just as had happened in real life. Audience members screamed. Keri always stayed for this and always had to stop herself from crying. Then she’d slip out for her big scene with Nance.

  Only after his death was Jacky Mac described as “The Kit Marlowe of this bedraggled city.” The press didn’t get into the details of his life. The murderer was never identified, never caught.

  Business did pick up for Christmas/New Year. But January brought bad weather and bad box office. On the last performance that month Rosalin stood several steps above Sonya, looking down at her as she said, “This show needed something that would get the Big Arena talking about us and not the thousand other entertainments available. That never happened. We’re posting closing notices next week. All my work wasted. I hope you enjoyed your brief time on stage.”

  Sonya’s eyes glistened. Rosalin recognized tears. They had talked about suicide. But heights bothered the stupid girl, guns were a mystery. Rosalin had thought to bring a knife.

  Finale

  The show’s final scene was actors playing detectives, questioning the audience members as they filed out of the Studio after Jacky Mac’s death.

  And down the hall, Edwin Lowery and Evangeline Nance went at each other in hoarse ghost whispers. “Oh finally, my daughter, you will have no more to do with that sodomite!” Anger is never hard for actors to achieve in a failing production.

  Keri was scared and irritated. Sonya, like a rat deserting a sinking ship, hadn’t shown up that evening to get her through the dwindling crowd. She screeched, “So unlike the midnight visits to my room when I was still a child! Let us talk about pederasty and hypocrisy!”

  Playgoers, still a bit ensnared by the drama they’d just witnessed, kept pointing them out to the actors/police who would look but be unable to see the ghosts.

  “And that reminds me, dear Father . . . ” Evangeline started to say, when there was a long, piercing and—Keri realized—quite heartfelt scream.

  “That sounds very authentic!” said Jacoby Cass in his own voice and with a look of hope in his eyes.

  Actor/cops and audience members stared down the hall. The Killer was running toward them with tears in his eyes and the prop gun still in his hand, babbling. “ . . . in the elevator . . . opened the door . . . blood . . . ”

  Jeremy Knight/Jacky Mac arose from the floor of the Studio to discover what the commotion outside was about and was stunned when Remo/The Killer threw himself sobbing into his arms.

  City police found Sonya holding open the faded gold door of the elevator. She’d knocked Rosalin down and stabbed her multiple times. The surveillance tape showed it all. She’d even looked up and waved.

  When they hustled her out of the hotel and into a police car, Sonya yelled to the crowd, “She wanted me to die, wanted somebody else to die. But her work was over and the play must go on!”

  A reporter asked Cass, “City officials think the production can open again in another few days. Do you believe it’s safe for theatergoers?”

  Jaco
by Cass had heard from Inspector Chen that the authorities regarded this as a murder that could have taken place anywhere. The elevator, though, would need to be thoroughly inspected and his supervisors would accompany him.

  Cass anticipated a flurry of green handshakes but knew Sleep Walking Now and Then was booked solid for at least the next six months. He told the reporter, “Yes. Notice that at no time was the life of any patron threatened!”

  “Is the place haunted?” Keri Mayne was constantly asked.

  Leaving the building the night of the murder, she had felt Rosalin’s presence in the lobby and wondered if her death was her greatest piece of theatrical design. Until then Keri hadn’t thought much about spirits. “Yes,” she always said. “And I’m dedicating each of my future performances to the ghosts.”

  Seeing Jeremy Knight and Remo arrive at a party as a couple, a social blogger asked, “Does this feel like your on-stage relationship?”

  Remo shook his head. Jeremy stopped smiling for a moment and said, “Yes.”

  As a foreign correspondent put it, “The Big Arena was made for moments like this.”

  Richard Bowes is nominated for a 2015 Nebula Award. His most recent novel, Dust Devil On a Quiet Street was on the 2014 World Fantasy and Lambda Awards short lists. He has published six novels, four story collections, over seventy short stories and has won two World Fantasy Awards, as well as Lambda, Million Writers, and IHG awards. Recent and forthcoming appearances include stories for The Doll Collection, Tor.com, XIII, Farrago’s Wainscot, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Uncanny, Interfictions, and In the Shadow of the Towers: Speculative Fiction in the Post-9/11 World.