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

by Paula Guran

  I thought, I’m going to see what I see when I sit there. See how I feel. I wasn’t sure if she was right or not. Had I lived, yet? Was Mario right, and I’d feel fulfilled after sitting in the corner? Would I come out knowing what to do with my life?

  I’d wanted to try for a long time, had been tempted to send my friends in when we were younger, just to freak them out. But it had never happened.

  I sat down on the chair in the Nursery Corner and began to rock.

  Within moments, I heard music, but so faint it was like an echo. The smell of soap, age and toilets lifted and it was dusty, mostly, outside road dust, pollen and, I thought, frying bacon. We had bacon twice a year at the home, on Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day. It made them cry every time. “It’s like the old days, going back,” one told me, “it’s as if all the rest of my life hasn’t passed yet.”

  I could still feel the press of wood against my arms, the scratch of wool from the blanket on my leg, the soft give of the cushion, but what I saw was far different.

  Lit by bright sunlight, shaded by ancient oak trees, the two buildings sat low and long in lush, green lawn. One painted red, the other yellow, even at a distance I could see they were well maintained.

  My feet were bare and as I walked towards the buildings (because where else would I go?) the softness of the lawn tickled my soles and I began to run, filled with a sense of pure joy the like of which I had never felt before. The sun was so bright my eyes teared up.

  The sound of laughter, and voices chanting, the smell of baking bread and of rich, red roses led me on. Children played on swings and slides and as I watched a boy fell off and sat in the dirt, dusting himself off. One girl seemed to hurt her arm badly and if I hadn’t seen the other children helping her, would have run over.

  I reached the red building. A sign by the door said, St. Lucia’s School with the motto beneath: There is a Light at the End of the Tunnel and I thought, This is the school I would have loved to go to.

  I pushed the door open.

  “There you are, Jessie!” It was a girl I didn’t know but who seemed familiar. She had clear blue eyes and her cheeks were flushed. “Come on, come and play. We have to do Maths soon, yuck, but we can play for a while.”

  She took my hand and led me to a vast playroom. Many other children were there, and they all looked up at me and smiled. “It’s Jessie!” they said, as if I was a long-lost friend. They seemed happy but, on closer inspection, some had marks around their wrists, bruising around their eyes. All of them looked tired.

  My new friend led me to sit among the toys. Robots, hoops, pirate costumes. Sharing Is Caring a handwritten sign said.

  I wondered why the children would welcome me, an adult, so delightedly, then realized that I, too, was a child. Was I eight? Six? My father was alive, then, and I wondered if I could find a phone and call him, just to hear his voice, see if he was sorry.

  There were no phones, though. No television, no computers.

  In the corner sat a large beanbag, jellybean print. The small table beside it had a box of jellybeans and some tweezers next to it. I wanted one of those jellybeans, wanted to have the taste of sugar, the memory of home. My friend stopped me. “That’s Mario’s. He’ll give you one if you wait till he gets here.”

  Time passed. I don’t know how long. I slept. I ate. There was custard, hot dogs, there were cheese sticks and there were beautiful peaches. I watched the others playing and sometimes joined in. Sometimes they would stand in one place for hours as if waiting. Or they played skip rope for hour after hour after hour, tears running down their cheeks as their arms tired. They didn’t respond when I told them they should stop, have a rest. My cat was there, young again, chasing butterflies and purring so loudly you could hear her in the other room. She didn’t know me, though. She wouldn’t sit on my lap.

  Sometimes I would rock on my heels and remember; there is another place. Not this one. I knew that in that place, people had to be shaken awake, physically carried out of the Nursery Corner, and I wondered if anyone would do it for me.

  They did, at last. My own mother, giving me a poke in the Nursery Corner.

  On my lap was the banana I had been holding when I sat in the chair and it was rotten, after being a perfect piece of fruit. “You’ve had a good nap!” Mum said, as if I’d been gone only moments. “You look so peaceful I barely wanted to wake you. But I need to sit Mrs. Allan down. She’s a bit agitated.”

  Mrs. Allan winked at me. “See you there,” she said.

  I stepped away, feeling shaky, but with a deep sense of peace.

  “Did you like my school?” Mario asked. He sat closer to me than he normally would, as if our relationship had changed.

  “I had a pretty weird dream.”

  “Not a dream. Ask all of them.” He waved at the room, all the old people and, I thought, the wall of the dead, all the photos of long-gone and recently departed. I walked along the wall until I found her, my new friend. A woman who’d lived with us for only two months before she died of an infection. I remembered her as being a great lover of the Nursery Corner. I remembered her clear blue eyes.

  There were others, too; they played as children, fell, sang, learned, ate as children in that other place.

  “A little piece of you with me forever,” Mario said. “In my place, waiting for me, with all the others. I don’t take it all. Just a glimmer, an echo, a hint.”

  He was a hypnotist, and he had finally managed to crack me. I backed away from him, my eyes downcast. I knew I could clear my head of him, and of that place, that I would not be diminished by it.

  I also knew I wanted my mother to get rid of him. That he shouldn’t be among these people.

  “You didn’t say if you liked my school. It’s an exact replica of the one that burnt down.”

  “It was fine. Quite lovely, actually. No sign of flames, or burning.”

  He had tears in his eyes. “Thank you. Thank you. None of them ever remember.”

  I thought of the patients, how much emptier they seemed. He thought he stole very little but I thought he stole the last of them. He took any dreams they had of their own heaven and made them vanish completely.

  Mum wouldn’t get rid of him. She said he made her happy and this was true; he adored her, treated her like a princess. He adored her so much, he never asked her to sit in the Nursery Corner. He never tried to take that part of her.

  She’d stand there sometimes, saying, “Sit! When do I have time to sit?” and he’d say, “On the toilet!” and she’d screech with laughter at this.

  I asked him what he was creating that place for; what was the point. “Filling it up again salves my conscience.”

  Because children had died in the fire; I’d looked that up. The lights had failed and they had stumbled in the darkness. Handprints were found; you could see them online. Tiny handprints, some of them, along a hallway leading to a storage cupboard. A dead end. “And I will live there forever, one day. When the place is full.”

  “It is full,” I said, although I knew perfectly well the walls rang with silence and that there was room for hundreds more. “Seriously, you couldn’t fit anyone else in there and have it still be nice to live there.”

  “Did they talk about me when you were there? Ask about me? Because when I’m there . . . well. You see how people are with me here. You see how much people love me.”

  At that moment, he lost all that made him loveable; his humor, his cleverness, his confidence. He exuded a desperate lonely neediness I hated to be around.

  In the Nursery Corner, the whole world revolved around him. “Yes,” I said. “They talked about you a lot. Laughing, you know, like people do here when they mention your name, because you’re funny.”

  My neck hurt when I awoke the next day. I rubbed it as I walked the ward, and the residents nodded at me. “Sore neck? Sore neck? There will be more.”

  In the end, he rocked himself to death. He left a note, saying he was ill and not able to cope with
the pain, and he said he was sorry, and that he loved us all.

  I wondered if the old men had stepped in to defend us again; if they had killed another predator for me. But I had to accept that this was not the case, that Mario Laudati had chosen to go and therefore had won.

  After Mario died, the residents tried sitting in the Nursery Corner and it made them angry. They got nothing out of it, rocking rocking rocking with no transformation, no good feeling. I thought, Good. I’ll burn it all, the carpet, the chair, cushion, blanket. Then his school will burn again, and we’ll be free of him.

  My bonfire achieved nothing.

  Over the years the Nursery Corner sat empty. It lost its glow and all feeling. Mum did, too. She turned the age many of them were when they went in, and she knew, she was absolutely sure she did not want to be among them. I took her to live with me and my family; this was inevitable and worked well for all of us.

  I never told her about the sudden pains, the aches, the unexplained twinges. I never told her it meant that Mario was playing with me, in the school, that he was making me skip rope, or eat chili, or climb a tree, that he was wanting more from me that I would ever have given him here, on the other side. She had no aches and pains of her own, not really, until she caught pneumonia at ninety-two. She went quickly after that.

  I will not go quickly. I’m in no hurry. Because I know where I’m going.

  Back to school.

  Bram Stoker nominee and Shirley Jackson Award-winner Kaaron Warren has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, and Fiji. She’s sold almost two hundred short stories, three novels (the multi-award-winning Slights, Walking the Tree, and Mistification) and five short story collections including the multi-award-winning Through Splintered Walls. Her latest short story collection is The Gate Theory. Kaaron is a Current Fellow at The Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, where she is researching Robert Menzies, Sir William Ashton, and the Granny Killer, John Wayne Glover. The resulting crime novel should see print in 2016. You can find her at kaaronwarren.wordpress.com/ and she Tweets @KaaronWarren

  Magic versus metal, mindless beast versus cunning hunter, masked enemy versus bold warrior . . .

  Water in Springtime

  Kali Wallace

  I woke in the darkness. My mother was leaning over me.

  “We have to leave,” she said. Her breath was warm on my face.

  The scent of dried flowers and wood-smoke drifted after her. She had spent the night by the fire, singing for a young mother and her sickly child. The child had not survived. Few did, in winter. Its skin was veined with rust-dark lines, its eyes hot with fever. There was nothing my mother could do but ease its pain. It would not be wise for us to linger.

  We wrapped ourselves in stolen furs and filled our packs with stolen food. It was not the first time we had slunk in the night.

  The ground was frozen and uneven, treacherous beneath the snow. There were no stars. Low, dark clouds had been hanging over the valley for days. The trees were laced with ice, but in that hollow, at least, they were still alive. The dead infant with its rust-veined skin was the only sign the blight had reached this far, but scouts who ventured south, darting into the mountains like nervous birds, claimed it was overtaking the forests.

  I did not speak until we were well away from the camp. “Where are we going?”

  My mother stopped but did not look at me. She removed a glove from one hand and reached for the trunk of a tree. The swarm burst from her fingertips in a shower of blue, clinging to her hand as marsh flies to cattle.

  We had traveled the length of the continent, from the sea in the north to these southern mountains, across deserts and swamps, through forests with trees so tall entire villages swayed in the branches, and everywhere we went, my mother’s swarm was a novelty. People called her a witch, but quietly, when they thought she would not hear. She always laughed. It was never a kind laugh. Some were awed; some were frightened. Children were always delighted. They tried to catch the bright specks in their hands, giggling at the cool tickle on their skin, begging my mother to show them what her magic could do.

  My mother closed her hand. The swarm vanished.

  “South,” she said. “Into the mountains.”

  We followed a road so ancient it was a wound in the forest floor. The crumbling embankment was as high as my shoulder, and the exposed roots were tainted with red-orange rust. The scouts had not lied. The blight was spreading. In places sharp blades of metal and chunks of broken rock jutted from the black soil, mere suggestions of what the iron skeletons had been before they fell: wolves with teeth like daggers, birds with too many wings and too long claws, hulking bulls with curved horns. They might have been monstrous once, malformed nightmares raging in battle, but now they were sorry old things caught in root cages and rotting away to dust.

  There were no doubt human bones in the ground as well, but I saw none. It had been a very long time since the invaders and their metal beasts had swept north over the mountains. They were little more than legends now, stories shared by old women around campfires while children huddled at their feet. In the best stories, the oldest and grandest adventures, the mountain clans had repelled the invaders with the help of mysterious sorcerers who cast spells of befuddlement on the armies. They had tricked the metal beasts into attacking themselves and forced the hidden invaders to reveal their true forms. Recreating those great battles was a favorite game among the clan children. Magic versus metal, mindless beast versus cunning hunter, masked enemy versus bold warrior. It was as much fun to play the invaders—lurching, ill-formed, insect-like in their awkwardness—as it was to play the defenders.

  On the third day of our journey, I spotted delicate white flowers blooming from the eyes of an iron skull. Frosthands, the clansmen called them, for they had small, fat petals like a child’s fingers. In the stories, a single frosthand petal ground into tea was enough to poison any impostor from the south. The first sip, said the old women, would strip away the invader’s disguise, and the second would close his throat and stop his heart.

  That was another favorite game of the clan children: to pluck a petal and place it on your tongue, to cough and gag and laugh as your friends raced away shrieking.

  “Mother,” I said. She was, as always, several paces ahead. “Frosthands. It’s nearly spring.”

  My mother did not look back. “It happens every year. Stop wasting time.”

  I plucked a flower from the skull and rolled the soft green stem between my fingers. It was this way wherever we traveled, whatever the season. Long roads carried us from blight to plague to fever, whispered rumors leading us across the world, and always my mother was silent as a frozen lake when we were alone. She was formal but polite with strangers; they thought her stiff and strange and foreign. When asked about her homeland, she smiled thinly and agreed to whatever they chose to believe. Sometimes she changed her face to match their expectations, darkened her skin or made herself pale, became tall or short or fat or thin with a subtle twitch of her hand and a pass of the swarm. More often she didn’t bother. In truth nobody cared where she came from. The healing songs she traded for food and shelter were valuable and rare, and the quick blue swarm was a wonder.

  “You needn’t worry,” the old women said to me, when they noticed me at all. There were old women everywhere we went, their faces lined with the same creases, their eyes lit with the same laughter, their gray hair twisted in the same plaits beneath the same scarves. As a child I had coveted their smiles, empty but still more than my mother offered, but I found no comfort in their tolerance as I grew. “You haven’t a bit of her strangeness in you,” said the old women, and they meant it kindly.

  It was more true than the old women knew. I could not alter my face or the color of my skin. I could not make my hair curl or my arms lengthen. I was as pale as sand and slight as a child. I had small hands, small feet, no breasts, and my hair was a dirt-brown bird’s nest tangle. I could not sing or heal. I could not dress wounds
and I did not know which herbs to mix into which medicines. Strangers mistook me for a boy. My mother rarely corrected them.

  Worst of all, I could not draw a swarm from my fingertips, no matter how often I lay awake in the darkness, hidden beneath my blanket, rubbing my fingers together and yearning.

  I dropped the frosthand blossom and ran to catch up.

  We followed the battlefield road until dusk. Weak snow turned to rain, and the ground churned into a sticking, sucking mud. As the sun set behind the clouds, we scrambled up the embankment, using a cage of iron ribs as a ladder, and turned into a forest of sweet-scented pines and chalky aspens. There was no trail. My mother’s swarm, pale and restful, ringed her like a crown in the twilight. Without it I would have been lost.

  Somewhere nearby, hidden by the towering trees, a river flowed. Its roar was muffled, but I felt it in my throat and the tips of my fingers.

  We made camp in a cradle of blight-reddened roots. The pines were large but sickly, flecked with shards of metal and veins of rust, branches weakened and cracking. Aside from the rumble of the river, the forest was silent. There were more felled metal beasts beneath the soil than there were living creatures in the underbrush.

  I dug into my pack to find a water skin, but my mother stopped me. “No. You stay here.”

  “I was only going for water.”

  My mother’s eyes were pale and unblinking. She flicked her tongue between her lips, snake-like and quick. Whatever she tasted in the air made her frown. “Your sisters were never this stupid. Stay away from the water. Tonight of all nights, Alis, do as you’re told.”

  She left, boots kicking up the moldering remains of fallen needles.

  I was too stunned to call after her. My mother used my name rarely and spoke of my sisters even less. They were dead, all of them. I didn’t even know their names.

  My mother’s pack was lying at the base of the tree. I folded it open to find our food. We had been traveling too quickly to hunt, but our supply of stolen meat and bread would soon be gone. I set aside three knives tucked in leather sheaths, a twist of thin rope, a handful of metal arrowheads. The food was at the bottom, and with it a bundle of dirty cloth I had never seen before.