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

by Paula Guran

  Other tales say Reverend Lemuel Mason was never a missionary and, devoted husband that he was, rarely left his wife’s side.

  What can be confirmed by public records is Virginia Mason died at a young age. Or, at least, that a stone exists sits on the outmost edge of the churchyard, indicating she was given a Christian burial. Her cause of death is unknown. Some terrible, wasting illness is suspected, as Virginia was little seen by anyone but her husband in her final days.

  Lemuel Mason mourned deeply. Some good folk of his town, when they came upon him unexpected, heard him talking to Virginia, even after she died. On occasion, he was also heard talking to a child, rocking it in his empty arms and singing lullabies.

  Some rumors suggest the desecration of Virginia Mason’s grave. But they are only rumors.

  There are wilder stories still, of Virginia Mason’s body found in a tree, with only scraps of cloth clinging to its bones, and wisps of hair adhering to its skull. The body was found wedged in a crook of the tree, arms and knees raised to wrap around a conspicuous absence, just the size of a child. The remains were discovered three days after Virginia Mason was supposedly buried—not long enough for her to decompose to such a state, if those were indeed her bones.

  Two months after the stone was raised in the churchyard bearing Virginia Mason’s name, words in white chalk appeared upon the tree where the bones were found: Who put Ginnie in the tree?

  Whatever the truth, this is a publicly recorded matter as well, appearing in the local Pottstown newspaper: Three months after Virginia Mason died, Lemuel Mason vanished.

  No trace of his fate was ever discovered. He was never seen again.

  A day before he vanished, the carnival entered town. The day after his absence was noticed, the carnival left town again.

  It’s impossible to tell whether the grainy, black and white image of Lemuel Mason accompanying the news story of his disappearance shows the same man depicted in the black-and-white image of the clown cradling a child’s deformed bones. The greasepaint is too thick. It could be anyone lost in all that whiteness, with black crosses over their eyes.

  Who would even think to compare the pictures? Walter would not, unless his mother had called him to say the name Lemuel Mason, which came to her in a dream. He would not if the paper reporting Lemuel Mason’s disappearance had not also contained a note regarding the “funfair” leaving town.

  The pieces of evidence are connected, Walter thinks. It is not an advertisement; it’s an invitation.

  “It’s coming back,” a voice just behind Walter says.

  He twists around in his chair to hide his startled jump. “What is?”

  The librarian is slender, nervous, like a young colt. Her hands flutter in the direction of the newspapers spread in front him—stories of carnivals, the carnival, as Walter has come to think of it, coming to town and leaving town. The librarian’s hands settle, falling to clasp and twist in front of her.

  “The carnival,” she says. “I’m sure I saw it somewhere.”

  She lifts the top paper from Walter’s pile, the local paper from today, and scans it briefly, frowning, before replacing it.

  “Maybe I imagined it.” The librarian shrugs, but her frown lingers. Her expression is one of someone who has misplaced an object they were holding just a moment ago, an object they could swear they never set down.

  The same finger of dread that touched Walter when his mother called touches him again. He resists the urge to grab the librarian by the shoulders, shake her, and demand she tell him everything she knows about the carnival.

  As evenly as he can, trying on his most disarming smile, Walter Eckert meets the librarian’s eyes and asks, “Would you like to have dinner with me?”

  The third piece of evidence is the oldest thus far. It is not a piece of evidence yet, but as he digs deeper, following tenuous connections and unexplained coincidences, Walter will encounter a glossy, full-color reproduction in a museum catalog, and file it as such.

  The original is under glass at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. It is a shirt found among the grave goods of a nomadic steppe warrior, believed to have lived in the early 1200s, during the time of Ogedei Khan. It is remarkably well preserved. There are words stitched into the fabric, in a jumble of languages, as though each part was stitched by a different hand.

  The words tell a fairy tale about a tame flock of crows and a girl who trained them to do tricks and follow simple commands. Like all good fairy tales, it is laced with darkness of the most brutal kind. The girl, who is only known as the daughter and never given a name, asks the birds to do something for her after she has taught them all the tricks she knows. She asks them to pick the flesh from her mother and stepfather’s living bones.

  The crows obey.

  And, hungry, wicked birds that crows are, once they are done, they devour the nameless girl’s eyes, too. It is not clear whether they do this as punishment, or an act of mercy. After all, who would want to walk around with the image of their parents’ flesh-stripped bones fixed in their skull for the rest of their days? None but the most heartless of creatures, carrying feathers where their hearts should be.

  After the crows swallow the girl’s eyes and everything she has seen, they lead her away. It is never specified where. The story only says that for the rest of her days, the girl made her way through the world by following the sound of her tame birds’ wings.

  No other versions of this fairy tale have ever been found, despite the natural tendency of stories to travel far and wide, much like crows. How it came to be stitched onto the shirt of a steppe warrior, no one can say.

  At the end of the fairy tale there is a date, unfathomably far in the steppe nomad’s future—June 17, 1985.

  “It’s not the same carnival, of course,” the librarian, whose parents named her Marian, thus guaranteeing her future career, says.

  She toys with her salad fork as she speaks. She’s shy, Walter has learned, but he’s also learned the second glass of wine, currently warming her cheeks with a delicate glow, has given her more of an inclination to talk.

  “It’s a carnival. I went to it . . . one . . . when I was little. My father took me, after my mother left.”

  Marian hesitates, and Walter feels as though he should say something, but he doesn’t know what. After a beat, Marian goes on.

  “I don’t remember any of the shows. I must have been really young. All I remember is holding my father’s hand and being convinced we would find my mother at the carnival, and bring her back home.”

  Marian blushes. It’s the most she’s said all night. Walter breathes out, and only then does he realize he’s been holding his breath. He finds himself leaning forward, as though his proximity will draw out more words, but it has the opposite effect. Marian reaches for a breadstick. Breaks it into pieces, but doesn’t put a single one in her mouth.

  Walter leans back, trying not to let his disappointment show. The next thing out of his mouth surprises him.

  “My mother is a psychic,” he says.

  His fingers twitch, and he hides the motion by reaching for his glass. He can’t remember the last time he told anyone, and it’s not what he meant to say. The cynical part of him wonders if he’s manipulating Marian, giving her a piece of himself in order to keep her talking. But why? It’s too late for Charlie Miller and Lemuel Mason. He’s never been one to obsess over unexplained mysteries. Some things simply are, and cold cases don’t pay the bills.

  But December 14, 2015 is still in the future, and there’s a possibility, maybe even a hope that it is in his future. So he has to know.

  Marian raises her head, her expression wary as though she suspects Walter is making fun of her.

  “I’m sorry.” Walter shakes his head.

  Marian’s expression softens.

  “Don’t be.”

  Then, in another move that surprises them both, she reaches across the table and touches his hand. It’s a gentle thing, brief, just a tap of her fingers
along his bones, there and just as quickly gone.

  Guilt comes like a knife. A rift opens in Marian, and Walter sees a wanting in her that goes all the way through. Suddenly, he doesn’t care about the carnival. Suddenly, Walter wants to tell Marian about holding his breath, pressing the phone to his ear and listening as his mother dispensed fortunes. He wants to tell her a true thing, an apology for a deception he’s not even sure he’s made. The need wells up in him, bringing memories so sharp he is there again.

  Rain pats against the window, steaming down and making odd shadows on the wall. Walter clutches the phone, holding his breath, wrapped in a communion his ten year-old mind doesn’t have the language to understand. But he knows, deep in his bones, that he and his mother and his mother’s client are all connected. The rain and the telephone lines make a barrier, separating them from the world. He is essential in a way he can’t explain. If he breaks the connection, if he breathes out and lets on that he’s there, his mother’s prophecies will never come true.

  The sensation is so real and overwhelming, Walter can scarcely breathe. Here and now, he is still holding his breath, listening to the whisper of words down the line. It terrifies him. He swallows deep from his glass, washing the memories away. They’re too big. He tamps the impulse to speak down, far, farther, until it is gone.

  He will not ask Marian about her father, or the hitch in her breath when she said the word mother. He will not tell her about his own life. And with this decision, a new impulse wells up in Walter, one he knows he will not be able to resist. Before the night is through, he will show Marian something terrible; he will make her afraid.

  Because he is afraid.

  For years, his job has shown him how easily people can fall apart—friendships, relationships, even all alone. Humans are fragile. If he opens himself to Marian, if she opens herself to him, they will become responsible for each other, and that isn’t something Walter wants or needs. And, paradoxically, he is afraid precisely because he isn’t responsible for anyone and no one is responsible for him. December 14, 2015 is in the future, but what if it isn’t in his future? What if he isn’t essential and never was, only an observer, trapped on the outside?

  Marian looks at him strangely and Walter realizes his hand is shaking. He sets his glass down, regrettably empty, and reaches for his water instead, swallowing and swallowing again. Even so, his throat his still parched when he speaks.

  “Do you know anything about the Miller family? They lived in this area back in the 70s. They disappeared.”

  As he says it, Walter knows it is the wrong thing to say. Something indefinable changes, a thread snaps. Marian tucks her hands back in her lap. Her shoulders tighten.

  “My neighbor, Mrs. Pheebig, knew them.” Marian looks at her hands, her voice edged. “She’s ninety-one.”

  “Does she have any theories about what happened to them?”

  “No.” Marian has barely touched her pasta, twirling and twirling the noodles around her fork. Her plate is a minefield of pasta-nests, cradling chunks of seafood, surrounded by rivers of sauce.

  “Mrs. Pheebig told me everyone in the neighborhood suspected the parents were abusive, but no one said anything because people just didn’t talk about that sort of thing back then. I don’t understand how anyone could stay quiet about something like that.”

  Marian finally lifts her head, and it’s almost like an accusation. In the rawness of her gaze, Walter finds it difficult to breathe. The terrible thing coming for him, for both of them, is almost here. Walter’s head pounds. He looks at Marian, and she’s nothing human.

  She’s running ahead of him. Her eyes are inkwells. Her skin the finest kind of paper. The whorls of her fingerprints smell of the dust particular to libraries, the spines of books, the rarely touched yet time-stained cards of the archaic catalog, bearing the immaculately typed numbers of the Dewey decimal system. She is a prophet, an oracle. Somewhere, buried deep in her bones, are the answers to all his questions.

  Because it had to be one or the other, kindness or cruelty, Walter reaches out to catch Marian before it’s too late.

  “Can I show you something?”

  Marian puts her head to one side, considering. For a moment, Walter has the sense of her looking right through him, knowing he’s dangerous, and weighing risk against reward.

  “All right.” Marian reaches for her purse.

  The bill settled, they walk two blocks to Walter’s office. He flicks the lights off, switches the projector on, and watches Marian watching the film. Walter doesn’t know what he expects, what he wants—a companion, someone to share the burden? Confirmation that he isn’t mad, someone to say, yes, I see it too? His pulse trips, watching the play of light reflected in Marian’s eyes. Despite the horror on the screen, her expression doesn’t change. She says nothing. Only her fingers curl, tightening where she leans against Walter’s desk. But even as her fingers tighten, she leans forward slightly, waiting.

  This is it, Walter thinks, without ever knowing what it might be. The air shifts, and for just a moment the scent is salty-sweet, popcorn and candy apples, and it tastes like lightning.

  Whatever it is sweeps past him, leaving the after-taste of electricity on his tongue. The date flashes across the screen, and Marian’s expression finally changes. Her mouth makes an O, and she raises a hand to cover it.

  “What . . . ?” Walter says. And “No.” He reaches for her, but it’s too late. When Marian brushed his knuckles, that was the moment to take her hand.

  “Wait,” he says.

  Marian is past him, her shoulder striking his so he’s off-balance. He follows just in time to see the cab door slam.

  There are puddles on the street, reflecting stoplights and neon and the night smells of freshly departed rain. The cab pulls away in a cloud of exhaust and ruby-burning headlights. The faint sigh of a calliope hangs in the air. Walter raises his hand, but the cab doesn’t slow. What was he thinking? What has he done?

  Walter returns to the library the next day. He asks after Marian, and the young man at the desk presses his lips into a thin line before telling Walter Marian isn’t here today. But he cuts his eyes toward the frosted glass office door without meaning to as he says it, so Walter scribbles a note on the back of an old circulation card, before shoving it into the young man’s hands.

  “Just give her this for me, will you?”

  It’s only two words: I’m sorry. Walter stations himself at a table, surrounding himself with books and drifts of paper. After twenty-three minutes, Marian emerges. She is polite, but closed. She brings him books, helps him find articles buried deep in the archives room, but doesn’t linger. He watches her, but the wild creature of paper skin and inkwell eyes has vanished. Slipped around a corner. Disappeared. Gone.

  Perhaps he imagined it all. Perhaps he’s made a fool of himself and hurt a woman who wanted nothing more than a friend.

  “Marian. About last night . . . ” he says, as she lays a heavy tome of town records beside him.

  “There’s nothing to talk about.” Marian’s lips press into a thin line identical to the one worn by the young man behind the desk when Walter asked after Marian. Is there a school that teaches librarians that expression?

  Walter’s hand hovers in the space between them. He lets it drop even before Marian turns. The subject is closed.

  Confused, uncertain, Walter retreats behind his own wall. Stories of the disappeared and unexplained surround him like birds coming to roost, like carnival tents rising from the ground.

  There is the story of three men and seven women vanishing from their retirement home, leaving in their wake doctors and nurses who can only speak backward from that moment on.

  There is the story of an opera, performed only once, telling of the beheading of St. John at the request of Salome. The lead singer walked off the stage halfway through the final act and was never seen again. The lighting rig above the orchestra pit detached while the baffled audience was still trying to sort out whe
ther the departure was part of the show, and the conductor was instantly killed.

  There is a bone pit in Pig Hill, Maryland. An ossuary in Springfield, New Hampshire. The entire town of Salt Lick, Indiana, which, in 1757, simply disappeared.

  Walter studies. He combs news articles, conspiracy websites, birth and death records. He consults any and every source he can. He doesn’t know whether he’s chasing something, fleeing something, or trying to hold something back.

  Walter dreams, and sometimes he’s trying to catch Marian, sometimes he’s trying to outpace her, and sometimes, he’s running scared.

  This is what Walter Eckert knows from the research he’s done: There are never any advertisements of the carnival coming to town. There are only stories reporting where it once was before it vanished, packed up, moved on.

  This is what Walter Eckert knows deep in his bones: If you are not invited, you cannot attend. You will not be invited unless you would give up anything, everything, to have the carnival steal you away.

  This is what Walter Eckert doesn’t know: Does he want it badly enough?

  From January 1983 to May 1985, Melissa Anderson, one of the top accountants at Beckman, Deniller & Wright, quietly embezzled nearly two million dollars from her employers and their clients. On the sixteenth of June 1985, Beckman, Deniller & Wright received notice of an impending IRS audit.

  On the seventeenth of June, Melissa took the elevator to the thirty-fourth floor of her office building, and climbed the fire stairs to the roof. She removed her jacket and folded it neatly by the door. She slipped off her shoes and placed them beside her jacket. In her stocking feet, she climbed onto the building’s ledge. The wind tugged her blouse and hair. She looked down at the traffic on Market Street below.

  In that moment, she could conceive only of the fall. Her muscles forgot how to turn around, walk to the door, descend the stairs. Elevators didn’t exist. If she wanted to get back down, she’d have to jump. And she was terribly afraid.