The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Volume 1

by Paula Guran

  The door creaked and swung, until only a thread of light remained.

  Max’s first doctor’s appointment, day twelve. Getting out the door a disaster. Max crying, inconsolable. She stood in the middle of the living room, trying to remember what she didn’t have, but how could she think when the sound of his voice wrenched her mind until she couldn’t think—

  it’s okay just a minute don’t

  what was it—

  cry it’s okay max boy my max my little guy

  sandals she could step into because otherwise she’d have to tie laces and—

  just a minute

  Such a tiny and desolate sound, it was hard to believe, sometimes, that he was human and not some other sort of creature, so enormous were his eyes, and his head, and his thin little arms and legs braided across his body as though he was still enwombed.

  Handbag. No. Phone. Yes. No. Keys?

  max my sweet boy my dear please

  And? Something else. She need—

  baby don’t cry im right here im

  ed her phone. She grabbed the landline and let it ring until she heard it through the basement door, where a faint light shone through the cracks and

  please please max please

  —gaps in the lower wall let daylight arrows through the underground dust.

  please don’t cry

  She opened—

  please please please please please i cant think please

  —the bedroom door and her ears rang with a sudden, miraculous silence, her first numb thought: Is he dead? But his chest still rose and fell. She paused on the threshold, rehearsing all the things that happen to newborns left alone in car seats, then she thought of unpacking him and taking him downstairs and no don’t be crazy hypervigilant he’s fine.

  The ringing. She descended to find her phone on the floor beside the washer. The light was its screen, and she wondered how she hadn’t noticed it falling out of her pocket.

  As she touched the phone, two things happened: Max woke up with a shrill and terrified scream she had not yet heard from him; at the same time, the door at the top of the stairs began to close, and—she could not say where the belief came from—she knew she must reach daylight before it shut or something would happen, down here in the dust. Her skin electrified, her heart accelerating, she sprinted up the stairs.

  Max screamed and screamed and she wondered why they didn’t do something about it, and then she corrected herself, of course they were out, meeting clients. Greg would have rescheduled if he could, he said as he left that morning after doing the five a.m. diaper and carrying Max to her in bed so she could nurse in half-sleep, the two of them drowsy and still but for the deep, hungry pulls he took on her breast.

  So Max was alone up there, poor mite, poor stranger in the vast and terrible world, so why shouldn’t he cry, abandoned by his mother, who was being swallowed by the prehistoric dark of her own basement, though she sprinted up the stairs.

  Three steps from the top, she slapped her hand on the threshold before the latch could catch and as she looked up she thought she saw

  —for a moment—the knob turn but this could not be because there wasn’t anyone upstairs to turn the knob so why was she sprinting up the stairs? The front door was open, though, and gusts of hot, wet air blanketed the room and the AC was running and that was just irresponsible and

  please max stop crying please please i can’t think i can’t think i can’t

  Dislike spread from the basement to the narrow stairs, to the door itself, and to the gap beneath it that sometimes emitted a glow like fireflies. A shrinking part of her mind recognized the dislike was stupid, but nevertheless it grew. She began to hear the evening song of a nighttime cicada, in addition to the sudden fade of fireflies clustered in her peripheral as she loaded the washing machine, insects whose lights drew mates or prey.

  That felt like something she could safely tell Greg. “There’s a cicada in the basement,” she said, coherent after three hours of uninterrupted sleep before the three a.m. feeding. She was sitting up in bed, Max in her lap.

  After a moment, Greg woke and said, “What?”

  “In the basement. A cicada.”

  “Cicadas don’t live in basements,” he said. “Cicadas live in . . . in gardens. Not houses.”

  “I heard one singing. It sounded exactly like evening.”

  “You were probably dreaming,” he said. “I mean, like how you dreamed there was someone upstairs with me. But there’s never anyone upstairs with me.”

  “When did I dream that?”

  But Greg was asleep again.

  “Hallucinations,” the public health nurse had told her, “can actually be a side effect of sleeplessness, hun. Don’t be afraid, but don’t keep it secret, either. Talk to Greg about it if it happens. Ask for help, hun.”

  talk to greg sure hun, she had thought at the time. And the public health nurse had looked at her carefully and said, “Promise me you’ll talk to someone about it. If it happens.”

  That sounded like a trap. One should never admit to hallucinations, Jenny was pretty sure, when one had a newborn. She lectured herself on what correct behavior looked like: Carry on as though you know the high song of the cicada and the luminous and deadly glow of hunting fireflies aren’t there, because they probably aren’t, they’re just artifacts of an exhausted body. Ignore the third person in the house, though you have heard her step and seen her descend the stairs behind Greg. Ignore the fact that she hears Greg say her name—“Jennifer”—and who is he talking to? Has he told on her?

  In the basement, arms full of clean diapers, she saw the not-real thing move parallel with her oh god was it person-shaped now? It hadn’t been person-shaped before. Adrenaline flood, and a new burst of speed on the stairs and she reached the door just as she glanced toward the light, unintended, and saw, yes, a figure racing, also toward the door, but she was faster, she was faster than the yellow-green glide of it, whatever it was. What’s worse for your future as a mother with a history of SSRIs and depression/anxiety: To hallucinate a figure in the basement, or for there to actually be a figure in the basement?

  Slam the door. Max still asleep in the blessed normalcy of a Tuesday afternoon. When Greg asks how you are, nod and nod and nod because he’s already worried that you’re crazy with love and sleep deprivation.

  Incidents accumulated: She found her keys on a rock on the far side of the basement; she found a cicada’s exuvia in her sock drawer; more footsteps upstairs from the two of them but there weren’t two of them there was only one, just Greg, and she had to confirm that fact repeatedly lest she slip and say, You two were pacing a lot today, are you guys worried about something? And “Jennifer” spoken in low tones, like a secret. The public health nurse had said there were things to watch for, like emotional lability, and a feeling of disconnection from the child, but that was not the case. The public health nurse had told stories about women so exhausted, hun, by the bottomless, unforgiving need of the newborn, who asks all and gives nothing, that they disintegrated. That was silly, though, since Max gave everything in the weight of his strong little body in her arms, the comfort he found in her skin.

  The public health nurse never suggested other possible problems, like doors that rattled unaccountably, and too many footsteps overhead. So if you are thinking of things to hide from your husband, consider hiding this:

  First, she was in the hospital waiting for the next contraction which, despite the epidural, still surfaced into pain and she thought, I won’t survive it, not this one. She tried to tell them this, but they only encouraged her to breathe just breathe through it, and she was hung with drips and needles and Max was far away, in a glass box under a heat lamp, and she wasn’t allowed to touch him because the doctor said, Stop, madam. Don’t you know what you are? Don’t you know what you could do to him? he asked. Do you know what polar bears do to their young in times of stress? Is this not a time of stress, hun?

  She struggled up, her breast
s full and aching. Greg was out. The third was upstairs, useless, waiting for something but who knew what, and Max was crying, but his voice was muffled as though by shut doors, and as she stood, she realized the sound was coming from the basement. She threw open the door and pelted down the stairs. He was lying on the floor, unblanketed, and around him the cicadas sang and the daytime fireflies lit and darkened and lit again.

  But what flickered between them? What shadow intervened? No moment lost, she picked him up and he fit close to her, resting his cheek against her breast. And then—afraid as she was—she decided that Max would not be got, not by monsters, nor the green glow of the fireflies, not by any of it.

  It wasn’t until wakefulness arrived—halfway through a diaper change, as she washed his little face and dressed him in clean clothes— that she considered it was the first time they, it, or she had moved Max.

  “Everything okay while I was gone?” Greg asked, his keys dropping in the dish, his shoes off. Max asleep across her chest where she sat, too far from lamps to turn them on, thinking of a twilit, firefly world.

  “Yes.” Say it calmly, like it’s true.

  “You sure?”

  “Sure. Sure.” Smile, because why would anything be wrong?

  Greg sat on the footstool beside her. He did not turn on the lights, which was good of him.

  “Because we should think about how things are going. About whether you need to talk to someone.”

  “I’m talking to you.”

  “Because there’s nothing to be ashamed of.” She said nothing. “If you need to talk to someone. That’s what the public health nurse said, right?”

  You know what they’ll do, Jenny, if they find out about you. You must be very careful to not talk about how you found your son in the basement, crying, and you don’t know how he got there. Which is why you are very careful not to let on about the third person, the one you hear sometimes, moving around upstairs. Which is why you are careful to remember what the right words are:

  “I’m fine, Greg. I’m better than fine. I’m so happy to have him.”

  Greg just looked at her and she asked herself: What would a regular-type person say? She added: “But I should probably sleep more.”

  But what was that? There, in the corner of her eye, rising through the dark? What coalesced in black, betrayed only by a flicker at the curtain’s edge, where light seeped in from the street?

  A woman—her hair drifting, her feet dragging in the air. One blink and she formed. Another blink—

  there by the window—

  there by the bed—

  there a hand—

  there, reaching toward Max who in his sleep still braided his arms and legs across his body—

  launched Jenny from the bed, so she brushed the shadow hand of the thing as it—she?—bent over the bassinet, where he was breathing his sweet, milky breath, so deeply asleep he might have returned to that familiar and original darkness within her body. She lifted him and ran for the door.

  She might also have been screaming, her throat felt like it, but she couldn’t tell yet. She felt the cold on her back, damp like a basement in summer—

  She collided with Greg, who stood in the bedroom doorway, and struggled against him, her arms wrapped around Max, who was weighty with sleep in her arms, his silky head knocking against her collarbone where she held him. She could hear him breathing, feel his warmth against her chest and belly, and she felt—against her back—the cold dark of the room from which she fled. Get out. It might already be too late.

  She staggered. She heard a woman scream.

  Toward the street. Away from the back bedroom and its overhung alleyway of darkness, where branches were fingers, and leaves were hands, and the quick-skittering rats occupied their muddy kingdoms, running from basement to basement and over the garbage of recycling day.

  But Greg’s arm barred the door.

  “Jen, Jen.” The room flooded so bright she was blind. “You’re asleep.”

  She would make for the street, through the house and past the door to the basement from which this thing had emerged, she thought. She would stop a car and escape. But as she pushed past Greg to make for the front door, he stopped her, checking her into the wall, and though her arms held Max tightly, Greg was stronger and she felt Max lifted, then gone, and she wailed again as Greg fled from her to the other side of the room, saying, “He’s still asleep. That’s insane, he’s still asleep.”

  That was wakefulness: “I’m sorry I’m sorry. Give him back!”

  “This is why we don’t co-sleep,” Greg said in a funny, brittle voice. “The way you were screaming, I don’t know how he could sleep through that. But he’s okay. He’s okay.”

  This time remained unspoken.

  After that, they kept him upstairs, sleeping on the floor beside Greg while he tried to work, and the other one watched. When he cried, she sat, immobile, listening, thrumming with love. Greg brought him down every two hours to nurse. When he latched, his sleepy fists pressed against her breast, tears leaked from her eyes and she felt almost okay for a moment. Greg, equally exhausted, said, “You need to sleep.”

  Yes, they agreed, you must sleep. But she could only sit in the darkness and listen for Max’s cries while Greg and the other one walked the floor. And outside the day turned to night and day again and she could not sleep, just wait for dusk and the hour of cicadas and fireflies, and emerge in the nearly cool evening before she took up her place at the foot of the stairs.

  “There are fireflies in the basement now,” she said when he emerged from his office, Max motionless in his arms. “I saw them when I was doing laundry.”

  “There aren’t any fireflies in the basement. You need to sleep.”

  She shouldn’t have told them about the fireflies that was just stupid because after the firefly comment they must have made an executive decision, and then the public health nurse showed up.

  The public health nurse told her she needed extra support, hun. They agreed, and all three of them stood in a circle around her where she lay on the couch, the duvet pulled up to her chin, and the curtains drawn, and the hot wind of a thunderstorm rising, fistfuls of rain clouding the glass.

  “Let me hold him,” she pleaded, “please let me hold him please.”

  She was smart, though, she didn’t say there were three of them. She pretended there were only two.

  “It can’t hurt,” one of them said, a woman. “She’s just tired. And a little bit crazy.”

  “It’s safe enough now,” the public health nurse agreed. “We’ll just give her a minute.”

  So they let her hold him and then she cried and cried, and her tears soaked the top of his little head, and he was crying, too, so they said, “You need to sleep.”

  She went to bed, but she could only lie there and listen for Max, and imagine him curling against her chin and across her chest, his vital body in rest or hunger, in wakefulness or confusion. She should sleep, even if there were fireflies in the basement, because that was the only way back to Max.

  When she wakes up, the house is full of thin newborn wails and she thinks, Greg must have fallen asleep. She is clear-headed for the first time in years.

  She walks through the house and thinks Max’s sweet, velvety head might be resting on the floor, or across Greg’s lap, and she thinks: I feel so much better, I’ll go get him. So she pads barefoot while outside the window the cicadas are singing, and the fireflies hunt through the gardens and greens of the neighborhood, and no one but her in all the world is awake. But she stops at the foot of the stairs because the basement door is ajar, and she can hear Max clearly now. She does not stop to think why Max might be down there, nor why they would leave him alone in the night that way, because Greg is a good father. As she descends to Max’s voice, her arms ache for him.

  Something flickers past her as she reaches the foot of the stairs, where Max is lying on the earth. She crouches to pick him up and he stops crying, while overhead drifts the thi
ng she saw in her peripheral vision—woman-shaped, like a wobbly reflection in a mirror of old glass or a nighttime window. There. Gone.

  She looks up to the top of the stairs and sees them—Greg, and Jennifer, and Max—gathered as though for a family photograph. Then the door closes with a soft, incontestable click.

  “I’ve got you,” she says to Max—the real Max—who is still asleep, “we’re safe now,” but that lasts only a moment before he evaporates from her arms, and she is alone.

  When Max was a month old, they liked to talk about that first night, how they were afraid to sleep so they just sat awake wondering how they were possibly allowed to take him home, terrified of what might happen if they stopped watching him breathe, even for a minute. Jennifer remembered the night, but had a niggling feeling about it, as if those early hours of love and pain happened to someone else, as if Fentanyl had built a wall inside her more permanent than the anesthesiologist intended. She didn’t mention the feeling to Greg—not after the worry of those first weeks, before she started sleeping again.

  (When the nurse removed her epidural, she felt something twitch out of her spine. She was shocked at how tiny it was, translucently flexible like the cilia of undersea creatures, residing, temporarily, within her body, the slow-dripping source of poison and stillness that might—how could she think that?—have left some fragment inside her.)

  From the basement she hears them talking, Greg and the Other One. She hears them argue and tease and sing to one another. She hears Max’s cries coalesce into vowels, then consonants, then syllables, then words, then sentences, then demands, then questions, then knock-knock jokes, then discourses. She hears him thump down the stairs to wash his soccer uniform and she is happy that he brushes past her in the dark, pausing, sometimes, to listen to the incongruous song of cicadas, even in winter.