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

by Paula Guran

“No, God, no,” Ma said. Her hair was in her eyes. She clawed it away, looked at the ends, screamed again. “Please don’t let it be true. I told him to be careful. I told him.”

  Zamir’s face was ashen. He said nothing.

  I scrabbled blindly on the dirty floor. The steel cross glinted at me. Pinching the skin of my thighs, I hauled myself up, feeling the world flicker and recede. Zamir was holding Ma’s hand and speaking gently. Your husband went to the Police, he was saying. He reported the Christian boy’s mutilated body. The mullahs didn’t like that. Then someone somewhere discovered an old marriage certificate with your maiden name on it.

  Ma yanked her hand away from Zamir’s. “I killed him,” she whispered. Her fists flew to her chest and beat it once, then again and again. She rushed to the door, she shrieked at the rain, but the night was moonless.

  Bewildered and crying, I thought about the tin box Sadiq hid in the canal when he realized they would be attacked. I thought about dead bodies and festering secrets; of limbs thrashing on a healer’s fingertips; of the young Christian boy who was tortured to death. I thought of how “Daoud” could have been “David” in a different world, such a strange idea, that. Most of all I thought about the way the chicken breast thrummed under the influence of my will, how it kept jerking long after I took my hands away. Would Baba whirl if I touched him, would he dance a final dance for me?

  I wiped my tears. From the crevasse of the night rain blood-black gushed and pawed at my eyes. Then we went in Zamir’s rickshaw to pick up my father’s corpse.

  Someone once told me dust has no religion.

  Perhaps it was the maulvi sahib who taught me my first Arabic words; a balding kind, quiet man with a voice meant to chant godly secrets and a white beard that flowed like a river of Allah’s nur. The gravedigger who was now shoveling and turning the soil five feet away looked a bit like him, except when he panted. His string vest was drenched with sweat, even though the ground was soft and muddy from the downpour.

  Perhaps it was Ma. She stood next to me before this widening hole, leaning on Khala Apee as if she were an axed tree about to fall. Her lips moved silently all the time. Whether she prayed or talked to Baba’s ghost, I don’t know.

  Or perhaps it was Baba who lay draped in white on the charpoy bier under the pipal tree. The best cotton shroud we could afford rippled when the graveyard wind gusted. It was still wet from his last bath. Before they log-rolled him onto his back, the men of our neighborhood had asked me if I wanted to help wash him.

  I said no. My eyes never brimmed.

  Now I let a fistful of this forgiving dust exhaust itself between my fingers. It whispered through, a gentle earthskin shedding off me and upon Baba’s face. It would carry the scent of my flesh, let him inhale my presence. I leaned down and touched my father’s lips, so white, so cold, and a ghastly image came to me: Baba juddering on my fingertips as I reach inside his mouth, shock his tongue, and watch it jump and thrash like a bloodied carp. Tell me who murdered you, I tell my father’s tongue. Talk to me, speak to me. For I am Resurrection and whoso believes in me will live again.

  But his tongue doesn’t quiver. It says nothing.

  Someone touched my shoulder and drew me back. It was Ma. Her mouth was a pale scar in her face. She gripped my fingers tightly. I looked down, saw that she had colored her hand with henna, and dropped it.

  A shiny flaming orange heart, lanced in the middle, glistened on her palm.

  It was dark enough to feel invisible. I left Ma praying in her room and went to Kala Pul.

  Lights flickered in the streets and on chowrangis. Sad-faced vendors sold fake perfumes and plastic toys at traffic signals. Women with hollow eyes offered jasmine motia bracelets and necklaces and the flower’s scent filled my nose, removing Baba’s smell in death. Children fished for paan leaves and cigarette stubs in puddles, and I walked past them all.

  Something dark lay in the middle of the road under a bright fluorescent median light. I raised a hand to block the glare and bent to look at it. An alley cat, a starved, mangy creature with a crushed back. Tread marks were imprinted on its fur; clots glistened between them. A chipped fang hung from one of whiskers.

  I didn’t know my right hand was on it until I saw my fingertips curve. They pressed into the carcass like metal probes seeking, seeking. I didn’t even need to feel for a point. In death, the creature’s entire body was an enormous potential ready to be evoked.

  I met the cat’s gaze. Lifeless eyes reflected the traffic light changing from green to red. I discharged.

  A smell like charred meat, like sparks from metal screeching against metal, rust on old bicycle wheels. The creature arched its spine, its four legs locking together, so much tension in its muscles they thrummed like electric wires. Creaking, making a frothing sound, the alley cat flopped over to its paws and tried to stand.

  It lives, I thought and felt no joy or satisfaction.

  Blood trickled from the creature’s right eye. It tried to blink and the left eye wouldn’t open. It was glued shut with postmortem secretions.

  My hand was hurting. I shook it, brought it before my eyes, looked at it. A large bulla had formed in the middle of the palm, blue-red and warm. Rubbing it gently, I got up and left, leaving the newly risen feline tottering around the traffic median, strange sounds emitting from its throat as if it were trying to remember how to mewl.

  Deep inside the Christian muhallah I waded through rubble, piles of blackened bricks, and charred wood. I stood atop the destruction and imagined the fire consuming rows upon rows of these tiny shacks. Teetering chairs, plywood tables, meal mats, dung stoves, patchworked clothes—all set ablaze. Bricks fell, embers popped, and shadow fingers danced in the flames.

  I shivered and turned to leave. Moonlight dappled the debris, shadows twisted, and as I made my way through the wreckage I nearly tripped over something poking from beneath a corrugated tin sheet.

  I stooped to examine the object. It was a heavy, callused human hand, knuckles bruised and hairy like my father’s. Blood had clotted at the wrist and formed a puddle below the sharp edge of the tin.

  A darkness turned inside my chest; rivers of blood pounded in the veins of my neck and forehead. I don’t know how long I sat in the gloom, in that sacred silence. Head bowed, fingers curled around the crushed man’s, I crouched with my eyes closed and groped for the meat of the city with my other hand’s fingertips. I felt for its faint pulse, I looked for its resurrection point; and when the dirt shivered and a sound like ocean surf surged into my ears, I thought I had found it.

  I stiffened my shoulders, touched the dead man’s palm, and let the current flow.

  The hand jerked, the fingers splayed. A sigh went through the shantytown. Somewhere in the dark bricks shifted. The ruins were stirring.

  Something plopped on the tin sheet. I looked down. Fat drops of blood bulged from between my clenched knuckles. I let the dead hand go (it skittered to a side and began to thrash). I opened both of my fists and raised them to the sky.

  A crop of raised, engorged bullas on my palms. One amidst the right cluster had popped and was bleeding. The pain was a steady ache, almost pleasant in its tingling. As I watched, blisters on the left palm burst as well and began to gush. Dark red pulsed and quivered its way down my wrists.

  Trembling, I crouched on my haunches and grasped the dead man’s convulsing limb with both hands. I closed my eyes and jolted the Christian muhallah back to life. Then I sat back, rocking on my heels, and waited.

  They came. Dragging their limbs off sparkling morgue tables, slicing through mounds of blessed dirt, wrenching free of rain-soaked grass, my derelict innocents seized and twitched their way across the city. I rose to my feet when they arrived, trailing a metallic tang behind them that drowned the smell of the jasmine. Metal rattled and clanged as my last finally managed to crawl out from under the tin sheet and joined the ranks of the faithful.

  I looked at them one last time, my people, faces shining with blood and
fervor. Their shredded limbs dangled. Autopsy incisions crisscrossed the naked flesh of some. Blackened men, women and children swaying in rows, waiting for me. How unafraid, joyous, and visible they were.

  I raised my chin high and led my living thus on their final pilgrimage through this land of the dead.

  Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani writer resident in Florida. He reads Sufi poetry, likes long walks, and occasionally strums naats on the guitar. His fiction has been nominated for the Nebula and Bram Stoker awards. His work has appeared in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, The Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Tor.com, and The Apex Book of World SF among other venues. In December 2014, Malik led Pakistan’s first speculative fiction workshop in Lahore in conjunction with Desi Writers Lounge and Liberty Books.

  There was always movement in the Nursery Corner; more so at night when the floor flickered with shadow as if there were candles, but there were none . . .

  The Nursery Corner

  Kaaron Warren

  Now that I am old myself, with grandchildren, one dead husband and a lover of twenty years, I feel odd twinges of pain that cannot be explained by anyone but myself. I know that somewhere in the Nursery Corner Mario Laudati is playing a game with a part of me I will never get back.

  It was no secret that my father died violently.

  “He was under the table and it was like a fountain,” I told everyone at school. “Blood gushing up and banging under the table and coming back on top of him. He was so covered in blood, he kept slipping out of the ambulance men’s hands.”

  I squeezed my hands together. The other kids all thought I was fascinating, anyway. I lived in a bigger house than any of them, and my mum worked in the old people’s home there, and I always had stories to tell. I was popular because I took them stuff from the home, like little sugars and soaps. I took them hand lotion and packets of biscuits. They didn’t mind the old-people’s home stink, but I tired of it, and I kept clothes at a friend’s place, wanting the smell of the place off me, out of my hair. I used a highly perfumed shampoo my mother didn’t approve of, it’s so bloody expensive, just use the home stuff, my mother said, because everything we had was taken from the home. Shampoo, soap, biscuits. Chips, sometimes, frozen meals, medicine, plates, glasses. I hated the supply cupboard, though. The old people would corner me and try to hug me, they’d make me hold their teeth, they’d make me hold their dry, weak hands.

  I didn’t miss my father. He’d been away a lot, mining (and yes, I had a nice collection of rocks but I didn’t know what any of them were) and when he was home he was nasty to be around. Falling asleep, drunk, under the kitchen table. I’d sit there, eating my cereal before school, his snores shaking my bowl, his stink making me ill. Only the cat sitting on his chest, enjoying the rise and fall, could make me smile.

  He wanted us to move to Far North Queensland, so he didn’t have to fly in fly out. He wanted us to be with him, up among the dust and rocks, where women and children stayed home unless they went to the movies on Saturday night or sometimes shopping.

  Mum talked to the patients, not really thinking they’d understand, needing someone to vent to. “He really expects me to pack this in? Move up north, live in a tin shed? What’s Jessie supposed to do? She needs good schooling, lots of friends,” her voice strong, full of courage.

  “God’s country, this,” one of the old men said, but many Australians say that about their hometown. Our quiet Sydney suburb was pleasant enough, but God’s country? That was pushing it.

  Dad didn’t like what he overheard, and I slept with my pillow over my ears and my cat curled up against my cheek because I hated the shouting.

  Mum was cheery the next day, with bruises up her arms, one on her chin, one on her throat, and it was the same every time he came home.

  We smiled through it, and I hardly ever saw her cry, but even at six years old I knew this was not how things should be.

  She had a job to do though; looking after them and me and she did it so well we all adored her.

  The compos mentis old people gossiped together. I learnt most of what I know from listening in. The old men were the ones who decided. You wouldn’t think they could manage it, and no one else believed it, but it was them. He was weak and pathetic, snoring under the table like he did, bottle spilt out beside him and it was a simple matter, they told me, to slit the bastard’s throat. They left the knife in his hand and it would have taken a family member to push for a real inquiry, and that didn’t happen.

  These men had been to war. They’d killed before. They told me all this from the age of six, competing to horrify me with stories, giving me nightmares about the enemy begging for mercy, and watching souls rise like steam.

  They saved us from my father, and I was always kind to old men because of it.

  After Dad was buried, Mum signed a four-year contract to manage the home, and there was a little party to celebrate. The gossipers said she got it because the owners felt sorry for her, but no one seemed to care what the reason was. I was happy. I liked it there most of the time, with the old people being kind to me when they remembered who I was and when I was too fast for their grab hands, and where my mother felt confident and safe.

  She set up special places for me here and there. A windowshelf with knickknacks, like a snowdome from Darwin, which made us all laugh because snow in Darwin! And puzzles carved from rainforest wood. And there was a bookshelf with a secret stash of lollies. And a place she called the Nursery Corner, which had a soft blanket, toys and some of my pictures pinned to the wall. It was a dull place, really, and none of the children who came to visit sat there. Mostly they hunched near the exit, trying not to look at the residents.

  Things happened I would never tell a soul about. The bodily fluids that seemed to appear out of nowhere, and the evil things they’d say, some of them. Bile spewing out of their mouths, telling me awful things a child shouldn’t know. We took the people other places rejected. Reform School for the Elderly, my mother joked.

  She started to bring in entertainers for the patients, and I could invite friends along and often the room would be filled with children sitting on the floor, the buzz of them making the place so much brighter, so much further from death.

  Mostly the entertainment was awful. The old people didn’t mind it except Aunt Em, who hated everything.

  “You can call me Aunt Em,” she said when she first moved in, as if hoping a friendly name would soften her edges. Nasty woman with pursed lips disapproving all the time as if she thought life doled her out something wrong, as if everyone around her was wrong. She liked me most of the time, though.

  I avoided the entertainment when I could. Elderly magicians. Singers, dancers. There was nothing wrong with being old, but these people had always been crap.

  The musicians in particular were tragic. They played slow music, the old people clapping out of time, vague memories lapping at them of what it used to be like to listen to music. To dance. To be moved by the notes. Some wept and instantly forgot why they had wet cheeks.

  Doesn’t it take you back, they said. Listening to songs from fifty years ago. Doesn’t it just! Remember that as clear as a movie.

  Some remembered nothing, or were stuck in a single moment in time.

  “Wasn’t that marvellous?” the residents would say afterwards, as if they’d seen the Bolshoi Ballet.

  All the entertainers flirted with my mother. “Look at Matron blushing,” because they wanted more work and she was charming. Even as a kid I knew that, and she was at last free of Dad’s rules, his disapproval and his desire she be nothing but a cipher for him.

  Mum rarely got someone back twice.

  That changed when I was about twelve and Mario Laudati appeared, with a magic chest of goodies, bright clear eyes, a warm, strong handshake. He had one earring; a flashing LED light.

  He said, “I’m an all-rounder. Take a tape measure and you’l
l see. One hundred centimeters all the way around. Can’t get much rounder than that!”

  They loved him, including Mum. He was a bit older than she was. Save me a chair, he said, I’ll be moving in here before long, clapping his hands, bright and breezy, and they all chuckled because clearly he would never be old enough to sit with them, unmoving for hours. He was so lively, hopping from toe to toe.

  He made me nervous, thinking he wouldn’t like me. He asked odd questions, as some adults do, trying to disconcert me.

  “Is this place haunted? Any nasty ghosts I should know about?” he asked me.

  I nodded. Thinking on the spot, I said, “It’s haunted by all the people they’ve killed.”

  He laughed. “Are there many?”

  I counted on my fingers, holding them up like a child in kindergarten showing how old she is. I looked sideways to see if he found me funny and he was smiling, a big, genuine grin I wanted to see all the time.

  He set me up in the front row to be his assistant. It was all about light and dark.

  Somehow he seemed to have control over our electricity because the power went out, leaving him in the dark, standing with a swinging lantern. The old people were quiet; was it the first time ever? He walked around us, telling a story I can’t remember, making cats appear in the shadows, and children playing with a hoop. “There I am!” Aunt Em said. “That’s me with my hoop!” and others clamored to be the one.

  If it wasn’t hypnotism, it came very close.

  For a moment, between the flickering lights, I saw him with a different face. He looked like a teenager, like one of the boys I admired at school, perhaps. The ones on the train my mother would tug me close to avoid. She seemed to think teenagers were the worst things on earth and would have kept me locked up if it would stop me becoming one. She didn’t accept that some of the old people she looked after were worse. Mr. Adams, with his hysterical scratching. Martha Jones, who could shift from a quiet mouse to a woman so filled with fury she tore the throat open of a patient one time. These were not the only ones.