Best of British Fantasy 2018

by Jared Shurin

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  The man absently reached up and patted the nose of the nearest beast. Alphronz raised a hand, meaning to warn the fellow that he risked losing his fingers, but the werehorse accepted the contact, emitting a soft whinny of pleasure.

  The fellow finally answered Alphronz’s question. “Because I said they should stay home today.”

  A shiver passed from Alphronz’s shoulders to the base of his spine. He turned to step into the carriage, wanting to be gone. But the small man touched his arm and he found himself turning back.

  “That’s an interesting ring,” the man said. “May I see it?”

  Alphronz would have said no, but the quiet words were accompanied by a beckoning gesture, at which the ring that was Yaffrik left Alphronz’s finger and made its way to the other’s outstretched palm. He weighed it then lifted it and peered through the opening.

  “Ah,” he said, “a juvenile athlenath.” He looked at Alphronz through the circle of dark metal. “It’s not happy, you know. Indeed, it seems cruel to keep the poor thing in bondage.”

  He passed his hand over the ring, said some soft words Alphronz could not make out. The ring dissolved into a column of black and grey smoke that tipped ominously toward Alphronz, but the small man waved his hand again and said, “No. Go back to your home.”

  The smoke began to revolve like a miniature tornado, then suddenly shrank in size as if racing off into an immense distance. In moments, it was gone.

  With its disappearance, the werehorses became a pair of squirrels and the carriage the barrow Jarndycek used to haul root vegetables from his garden to the storage cellar. The little animals scampered toward the nearest tree where they took up positions from which they could keep an eye on Alphronz, chittering to each other.

  Alphronz wanted to flee, but found his feet somehow glued to the ground.

  “Well,” said the little man, “that takes care of the athlenath’s unhappiness. Now what to do about mine?”

  “You’re unhappy?” Alphronz said. He sensed far colder depths opening beneath him.

  The fellow was changing. He grew taller, older, much more formidable. His eyes became as hard as agate.

  “Oh, very,” said Hildefranch the Ineffable.

  Alphronz burst into tears. But there was no one to hand him a half-penny.

  The Small Island

  Heather Parry

  There has been a blight about this island. Grain has ceased growing; livestock no longer breeds. Fields lie flat and the hills are barren, devoid of new life. As the last of the mature animals are slaughtered and rationed out, the future holds a horrifying uncertainty.

  The people are reaching desperation. Angry seas have kept them from the mainland for too long. Each time they send out a boat, its crew comes back terrified – or worse, it sinks while still in view. Those remaining are afraid to try again. And so, for the first time in a hundred years, they are looking to the smaller island, the one that sits between them and the vast nothingness of ocean. None of those alive have ever dared consider that other place, so passionately did their grandparents tell them of its inhabitants, of witches and sorcerers and the worshipping of the carnal and the eating of flesh; of the unnatural forces that keep the small spit of land, green and lush and teeming with generations, closed off from the rest of the world. But now, faced with the grey death of their own futures, the promise of the lushness and the greenness and the sheer life of that other place is overwhelming the fear.

  Aboard the boat, the youngest and strongest of the community’s men tie knots and plug leaks. Though it creaks beneath the weight of its small crew and rocks with the gentlest wave, it is the best they have. They hammer wood to wood, pull and secure tarpaulin. The others stand at the tiny harbour and watch them as they work.

  It is ready, the captain-of-sorts announces to his uncertain crew. It’s time.

  A girl runs forward. She is a creature somewhere between a child and a woman, the only thing on the island still flourishing amongst the decline. She has heard the tales of black magic and they excite her, speak to the otherness she has always felt inside. Tired of watching nature wilt and wither, she wishes to see women with their hands in soil, forcing trees to grow. She thinks of the women in the stories, the power of their will. The way they were said to embody a strength that terrified people for miles around and kept men from their shores for decades. She is going with them.

  The girl’s mother knows better than to protest; the crew, however, wave their hands in a no, point her back to her mother. The captain shushes them. Though the hardiest on the island, they’re still weak and hungry and wasting away. Thinking of coal mines and dangerous gases, he ignores the further protestations of his men, extends a hand to the girl, and brings her aboard. A life jacket is handed to her. She straps it on and sets herself down at the front of the boat.

  The crossing is difficult and strained by the same indignant seas that have kept them from the mainland. But the distance is much shorter. They could have done this journey many times before. They did not.

  There is no port on the smaller island. No harbour nor jetty. A vast beach is their only welcome. They navigate the rocks and take the boat into the shallow waters. Two of the younger men move to haul their bodies out of the boat and into the sea, but the captain blocks their path with his outstretched arm.

  Wait.

  They look up across the sand and over the grass and up to where the village begins, where houses hundreds of years old still stand with thatched roofs. They look to the buildings beyond – the small church and the meeting hall. They see not a single movement; not a breath.

  Why don’t you jump ashore and scout? the captain says to the girl. Why don’t you take a wee run up that beach and tell us what you find?

  They drop her into the water and tell her to swim to shore, a tester, a little yellow bird without her cage. She makes it to the sand and runs from the water, over dunes and up the gentle incline. She goes willingly, an adventurer.

  The fields are empty. Among the buildings, she finds nothing but death. People that have dropped seemingly in an instant. Bodies at desks and in kitchens, bodies intertwined and bodies alone.

  She runs back to the water, the sand moving under her feet, and finds that the boat is further out than it was before.

  A plague, she says. There is nobody here left alive.

  The captain hauls the anchor back into the boat. Paddles slip into the water and they begin their escape. The girl runs forward, made slower by the sea.

  You’ll have breathed it in, says a man. You’ll have caught it.

  Another says: We can’t let you bring it back.

  Then there is silence. Silence from her and from the men who leave her. Silence because there’s nothing to say.

  She stays among the dunes for three days, shivering and starving and clinging to hope, running up to the village only to drink water from the well. As she pulls up the bucket, she peers into the darkness, looking for the witches she was promised, searching for the forces that transform one thing into another. There is nothing but silence and stillness, no movement at all. On the fourth day, staring out over the waves, she accepts that no boat is coming. She makes her home among the dead.

  She steps around their bloated forms, pink foam escaping from their noses and parted lips. She searches their houses for what might sustain her. It is a week before the canned foods and pastes and butter and cream run out. Then another of stomach cramps and the rotten corpses of rats and snails. Of chewing the straw from roofs and hallucinations of beef. Of glances at the reddening, rictal bodies scattered about, as if abandoned in an abattoir.

  It is the twenty-first day of her abandonment when, free of tears and resolute, she takes a handsaw from a tool shed and slices the bicep off the largest man she can find. Those that have fallen outside are colder and better preserved. She is so hungry she barely thinks of the morals. She builds a fire and rubs the muscle with salt and sits
it to smoke and cook and become delicious.

  She devours it within minutes. She feels human again. She sleeps full.

  The brightness of the day wakes her. She strips naked and heads down to the water, her bathtub, and takes herself into the frigid sea. She runs hands over skin and goose pimples and feels a swelling under her fingers. From elbow to shoulder she has grown; not on both sides. Only one. She brings her arms out of the water and flexes the left. The bicep rises, strong and round and firm. She grasps it with her other hand. She grins.

  There are two dozen dead outside the croft buildings and tiny homes. With her new strength, she uses her left arm to flip them over, to uncurl them from their poses, to tear them from one another. She appraises them. Blood has pooled; teeth and nails drop from fingers and gums. Yet each body has its own benefits. A pair of round buttocks, large feet, strong shoulders. She first takes the lips of a woman lying by a well. A knife will do for this; two slices and it’s done. She fries them up with oil in a pan. They slip down with ease, and she sleeps.

  The next morning, her face is heavier. She finds a cracked mirror. There they are, full and red and hers.

  She takes calf muscles and long fingers and hefty gluteals. She takes daintier ears and wide forearms and breasts twice the size of hers. She pops out two gelatinous masses, barely clinging to their shape, from the corpse of a child. The next day, when she wakes, she has the blue-grey eyes she’s always wished for.

  She is strong. She is powerful. She can run and bend and move and lift and swim just as she wants to. She spears fish from the still-living seas, and grasps eels, and holds her breath to dive for scallops. She hears the absence of her people every day, but she no longer cares.

  One day, she shears a cock from the groin of every dead man. She lines them up, five in total, and imagines them turgid. She looks for girth and length and erectile tissue. She swallows one whole, holds back a retch, and goes to sleep with a smile on her face.

  She wakes, excited, with a hot urgency at her groin. It protrudes from just above her vulva. She thinks of the things she always thinks of at night, and it grows bigger and swells and brings sheer delight. She has chosen well. She is perfect.

  The boat comes after three months. She hears it from the hillside. Wrapped in blankets to hide her new form, she strides down to the beach where they sit many yards from the shore. They are afraid, again. She lets them speak.

  We need you, says the captain. We want you back. We can’t handle the shame. There is one word that he does not say, and she notes it.

  Go home, she thinks. I am happy here. But she does not say it. Instead, she runs her gaze over sturdy hands and firm hips and brows that sit heavy over eyes.

  There is life here, she says. Things growing. Things that have sustained me. Come and see.

  She waits a while. They do as she tells them. She takes them one by one around corners, into dark rooms, to show them something. She wrings their necks, smashes their skulls with rocks, stabs their chests with cold pokers. She picks over flesh and sinew and muscle and marrow, then waits for the next boat to come and rescue her.

  She takes the parts that she wants and leaves the rest to rot.

  A Gift of Tongues

  Paul McQuade

  His hands swallow mine when he speaks. Ich liebe dich. And I can’t reply, can’t say what I want to say – I am still on Chapter 7: Politics. Unable to respond, I smile. This is how the relationship goes: we muddle along, half-understanding. Nods, smiles, and laughter fill the gaps.

  The smile has communicated something. He puts a box in my hands. The gold ribbon slips its knot, coils and falls along the table, swimming into the dark below. The red crêpe crackles like dead leaves.

  There is a box inside the box. The second made of glass. The light refracts as it emerges, hiding its contents in white light. Only when I cover it with my hands can I see what is inside: a long slab of meat. Pink, glistening.

  “Eine Zunge,” he says. Chapter 3: Anatomy. He has bought me a tongue.

  It is winter in Berlin. The sun, cloud-veiled, only deepens the city’s shadows. The shadows press up against the buildings, the strange music of the city pours along the streets. Sigh of bus doors, percussion of the U-Bahn. People walk, not hearing, but feeling its movement. Couples crowd the bridges of the Spree, lip-to-ear, whispering secrets the river shelters in its long exhale.

  Thöre tries to strike up conversation on the S-Bahn. It is late afternoon, the cabin filled with people on their way to the Grunewald. I stand on tiptoe and speak into his ear, so that other passengers cannot hear my kauderwelsch German. Small hairs glance against my lips; white arms soft as peach fuzz carry my words deep into his skull.

  Kauderwelsch. Gibberish. Gobbledygook.

  My German is comprised of Thöre, a textbook, and the lessons that my work makes the new transplants take. Once a week, for an hour and a half and full pay, we sit in a meeting room and talk. Situational German. Please-and-thank-you’s. Polite conversation for business lunches. We look forward to working with you. No one takes it seriously. Sometimes when we go out, the other new-starts speak entirely in English, even when ordering, not bothering with so much as a cursory danke or bitte. There is something exciting about this. Something rebellious. I expect someone to snap, to swear, to tell them to speak German, the way I had seen the French do in Paris. I hold my breath and wait.

  No one says a thing.

  I met Thöre on one such outing. The new staff, two managers, one of the company lawyers. A bar in the east, street level, light spilling out over Soviet high-rises. We sat in our corner with Bavarian wheat beers, suspended safely in a cloud of English. It was the lawyer who disturbed our seclusion, standing up to shout in German across the bar. A man came over. They hugged, kissed – once on each cheek – and he joined us, taking a seat between the lawyer and me. A couple of half-hearted waves and quiet hellos from my compatriots, and the conversation closed over his entrance. The man and the lawyer turned to each other to talk amongst themselves.

  When the lawyer popped to the bathroom, the man leaned across and asked if I spoke German. His breath felt alive against my cheek, and under the reek of bar bodies, he smelled of sea salt and coriander. Emboldened by the Weissbier, I tried to remember all those meeting-room conversations. The beer made things smoother. I tried to introduce myself.

  “You speak Kauderwelsch,” he said, in English. “But it’s cute.”

  The lawyer returned and they went back to talking in German, though the man – Thöre, he said his name was, Thöre as in Thor – looked at me while the woman talked in his ear, smiling a deep, knowing smile.

  When I stepped through the door of my apartment later that night, I pulled out the miniature German-to-English dictionary a friend had bought me as a goodbye present, and looked up what Thöre had said to me.

  Kauderwelsch. Noun, neuter.

  When I forget the word I want, when a phrase is beyond me, coiled slyly on the tip of my tongue, close as the tail end of a dream, Kauderwelsch is there, waiting in the space where the other words should be.

  The train comes to a stop. Thöre leans down.

  “We’re here,” he says, his mouth covering, for a moment, the entirety of my ear. He takes my hand and leads me out into the forest of the Grunewald.

  “It is a very simple operation,” the doctor explains in English. “You don’t even have to be put under full anaesthetic. In fact, the results are far better if the procedure is performed in twilight sleep.”

  I hold the boxed tongue in my lap. It seems drier now, under the clinic lights. Smaller. Frightened. I wonder if this is a sign that it is sick, like a dog’s nose.

  “And afterwards, I’ll be able to speak German?” I ask.

  “Faultlessly.”

  Thöre takes my hand in his.

  The doctor lists side-effects, reiterating after each how safe the operation is, how unlikely it is that I will suffer anything other than the pure joy of bypassing years of study. “Strange
things, tongues,” the doctor says. “I have to say, it’s really quite a wonderful gift your boyfriend has bought you. Your new tongue will open doors.”

  “What about my old tongue?” I ask.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he replies. “We take care of everything.”

  Thöre squeezes my hand and looks into my eyes. He mouths the words: Ich liebe dich.

  Still unsure what to say, I nod.

  “Excellent,” the doctor says. “A nurse will be along in a moment to get you prepped. Just sign here.”

  The pen makes a scratching sound, like an animal trying to escape.

  “I can’t wait,” Thöre tells me while we wait for the nurse. “I’m finally going to be able to talk to you.”

  “We talk all the time,” I say.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t,” I insist.

  “You will,” he replies.

  The first present Thöre bought me was a flat white, the second a textbook. We met at a café near my work. The conversation a series of starts and stops. Almost not quites. When he talked for anything longer than a sentence, slowing down to make sure I could make him out, I let the words pass over me like water. I examined the curve of his jaw, how the stubble didn’t quite reach his cheeks, the way the sunlight through the window made one eye wolf-yellow. When he asked me about myself, I responded as best I could. I knew the questions from class, but couldn’t remember the right answers, only what other people had said. I told him I had a brother when I have two. That one brother is older when I am the oldest. That I am eight and twenty instead of twenty-eight. He smiled at each mistake, chin in hand.

  “I bought you something,” he said

  He slid an oblong of brown paper along the tabletop. I wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t have, that it was nice of him, that I would repay the favour by buying him a drink. But I didn’t know how. Instead I unwrapped the package, dumbly.