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

by Paula Guran

  “I will, I promise,” she says, her voice faint.

  “Goodbye. God bless you.” I kiss her cheeks as they turn translucent. Even if I survive this night, my bones will be dust by the time she walks the Earth. I don’t even know her name.

  I’m released slowly back to my senses, as if recovering from a faint. Barely a second has passed. Martha is crying my name. She’s heard me collapse, convulsing, and her terror has attracted the matron’s attention. Those are the soles of her slippers I hear, flapping against the steps.

  Martha’s crying falters when she hears me stir, but I grunt at her to keep going as I prop myself up. I tear at my bodice and the damp silk parts easily—fashionable clothes, like fashionable people, aren’t made to withstand much of anything at all. My fingers fumble at the laces of my corset as the matron barks from outside our cells, “What’s going on in there?”

  The laces slither free. I wait behind the door where it’s darkest, wrapping them around my fists into a makeshift garrote. Martha’s listening. She’s not stupid. “There’s summat wrong with Mary,” she wails. “She won’t wake up!”

  Keys jingle. The matron enters, holding a candle aloft. I don’t give her time to clock the bare floor: I throw my crossed hands over her neck and jerk them home. She drops the candle and flails, gurgling. Her elbow drives into my side, cracks a rib, drawing a gasp. But I’m a Belfast girl raised in Liverpool; I can give as good as I get, and right now I’ve got nothing to lose.

  One more squeeze of the garrote and she goes down with a thud.

  Her keys are still dangling from my door. I unlock Martha’s cell and she flies to me, burying her face in my soft belly. “Ah,” I gasp, “not too hard.” Every breath burns and my back aches now without the support of my stays. Unlaced for the first time since I was a young child, my middle’s as cold as a shucked mollusk.

  I stare down the corridor. For a moment, the path to Benjamin is clear. But I can’t draw a painless breath deep enough to shout his name, and anyway, Martha’s shaking her head at me desperately, unsure of her gift, and the matron’s storming toward us, her purple face twisted with rage. I mustn’t have held on long enough. I’ve never tried to strangle anyone before.

  “Get back here, you little bitch!”

  Martha shoves her, giving us room to sprint past and up the stairs, to lock her in behind us. The matron’s ham-sized fists batter the door, but it holds.

  “What now?” Martha says, clinging to me.

  “We get out of here,” I reply, stroking her head, “but I need something first. A letter that I brought with me. Is it still on the doctor’s desk?”

  She nods.

  My heels left twin trails in the dust where the matron dragged me.

  We follow them to their source, the keys jutting between my fingers to make a spiked fist. The doctor’s door is ajar and the room is still. He must have retired for the night. But even here, a faint banging makes its way up from the basement, and even now he may be descending the stairs to investigate.

  I snatch up Missus Walchop’s letter and rifle through the files in his desk, my hands shaking so much I almost can’t pinch out the one I want.

  “Drop them.”

  Martha flinches. The doctor’s blocking the doorway. The barrel of a revolver’s pointing at her head. I pull her behind me as he fires, blasting a hole in the paneling. As precious as we are to him, he’d kill us to cover his tracks? Selfish coward! I grit my teeth and lunge, ready for the bullet to punch through me if it means sparing Martha, but my unexpected offensive sends his second shot wide, the third jams, and by then I’m close enough for a right hook that would make my mother proud. One key skewers his cheek. Another lodges in his eye. The revolver, and the doctor with it, falls to the floor.

  I stand over him, wheezing, with one hand pressed to my rib. His unscathed eye rolls in agony, and when it settles on me I hunker down, baring my teeth in a grin. “You wanted to know what I can do, Doctor? I can see what is yet to pass, and I’ve seen the future for this place—for you. Your work will come to nothing. No one will remember your name. And these”—I hold up the file, the letter—“will ruin you, I’ll make sure of that.” He whimpers. I straighten and take Martha’s hand, and together we leave.

  Where the crunching drive gives way to soft moss, I hear light footsteps ahead and hold my breath, but it’s only James, praise God. I can smell the grouse and lamp oil on him. He must sense more than see the ruin of my bodice and corset, revealing the thin, secret shift beneath, because he passes me his coat without comment, tells me instead how my cries for help echoed over the moor and that he couldn’t bear to go home still hearing them.

  And of Martha, he says, “Who’s this?”

  “That can wait.” I groan, leaning heavily against him. “Take me to the magistrate. Or the nearest lawman who’ll hear me out.”

  Martha turns her face up to mine. “What’re you gunna do?” Missus Walchop’s letter and a broken contract press against my side.

  I look up at the dark bulk of Rannings. My employer, if she’ll still be my employer after this, with all her hollow frivolities, will have to damn well wait.

  If you’re still in there, Benjamin, you better hold on.

  “I’m going to tear it down. Tear it all down.”

  “Good God.” Broad hands stroked her face, wiped away strands of wet hair. “You rang the bell, didn’t you? Good girl, clever girl, I heard you, I’m here now.” Merritt tried to rub warmth into her numb legs, her feet, so rough it hurt.

  “Stop,” Anne mumbled. She’d seen a hypothermic man die from such rubbing. “Your coat.”

  “Easy, easy. All right.” He wrapped her in his coat, damp but still warm from his body and better than nothing. He scooped her up with a grunt and carried her out of the bell tower.

  “There’s . . . something . . . something I need to tell you—”

  “Whatever it is can wait, darling. Over here! I’ve got her!”

  The groundsman’s cart pulled up outside the church, escorted by police in shimmering waterproof cloaks. Merritt laid her inside and wrapped her in dry blankets, tried to pour warm tea into her mouth. She spluttered when the cart began to move.

  “I can see ghosts,” she told him while he mopped her chin.

  “Don’t talk nonsense,” he said.

  “It’s true. My parents thought I had a—a nervous disorder. When we met, I’d just come back from the hospital. Shock treatment. It didn’t help. Nothing does.” She had his full attention. She licked her lips. “Penshaw must have seemed a pretty sort of place to you, but for me it was a prison. The more anxious I felt, the more I hallucinated. I thought it would stop when we left, but it’s been worse.”

  There it was, the look of disgust she’d been so afraid of. She reached for his hand but he wrenched it away. “It’s dead people I see, Merritt, dying people, all the time. I think they’re ghosts. They have messages for me, things they want me to do—”

  “Stop,” he snapped. “If you want to be free of me, just say so.”

  “Telephone my parents, they’ll tell you everything.”

  He glared at her. Anne gripped the blankets. The moment was slipping its tracks in a way she hadn’t expected.

  “Are you trying to get back at me for this morning? Am I not the husband you hoped for, after that? Can you not stand a little real life?”

  “Says the man who drinks because he can’t bear his own grief!” Too late, the words were said. She could see she’d hurt him.

  The cart jolted and suddenly the dark pit in her stomach opened, the gorge rising in her throat. They were approaching the foundations of Rannings, where everything felt rotten. Anne flung off the blankets and jumped out of the cart before Merritt or the policemen could stop her. She ran through the rain and mud until she found the epicenter, the ugly heart of it all. There, she began digging with her hands. The arms of the dead pushed up around her like daisies. “I know,” she told them, “it’ll be over soon.”


  “Stop, Anne! Stop this!” Merritt shouted as he jogged toward her, lost his footing. “You’ll catch your death!”

  “Will you just listen to me for once?” she flung back. “Dig, for God’s sake!”

  Merritt watched helplessly as she scraped out great clots of mud. Policemen surged past him, hands reaching out to grab her, when her fingernails broke against something hard. She’d uncovered a crescent of discolored bone, a tiny pelvis. They hauled her away, but the bone lay stark against the black sludge, glowing in the light from the crisscrossing torch beams.

  Seventeen skeletons in total. The deepest at eight feet, the shallowest at just three.

  Rannings was forced to close immediately, so they settled the bill and drove north to Middlesbrough that night, before the press descended upon the area to seek out her photograph. Anne stayed briefly at the hospital. The nurses said she was lucky to be alive.

  Merritt sat by her bedside, and when she had the strength to sit up, they talked frankly at last. Neither had married for love. They’d symbolized something to each other—escape for her, lost time for him—and they hadn’t looked any deeper than that because there was nothing more they wanted to find.

  “Was this a mistake?” he asked.

  At a loss, she turned her palm upward and he grasped it gently.

  He looked so broken, though there was no alcohol on his breath. She bit her lip and twisted her wedding band, still loose. It came off readily with only the slightest resistance at the knuckle, and she held it out to him, scuff marks and all.

  They looked at each other for a long time, the bustle of the ward filling the silence. “It’s either divorce or annulment,” he said at length. “Both options leave you high and dry. I assume you don’t want to go back to Kent?”

  “Never,” she whispered.

  They watched the nurses on their rounds for a while. Somewhere, a voice on the wireless was relaying every gory detail of the unfolding scandal. Anne requested it be turned off, but the silence was somehow worse.

  “I wondered . . . Have you—could you—my brothers?”

  She smiled sadly, expecting the question. The hope. “Perhaps. Truly, I don’t understand how this works.”

  Merritt rubbed his cheeks. “I can’t promise to be a good husband, Anne, but I can listen, I can do that. We rushed into this, but we needn’t rush out of it. And maybe someday, we’ll understand it together.”

  The hospital discharged her the next day. Anne waited on a bench while Merritt brought the motorcar around, the breeze blowing her hair into her eyes. She tucked it behind her ear and caught the eye of an old man across the street. He nodded to her and crossed the road, the morning newspaper tucked under his arm. He favored his right leg.

  Without the Rannings’ uniform, she hardly knew him. The porter.

  When he reached her, he smiled with more gums than teeth. “You look just like Mary said you would. I’m sorry if I gave you a scare, before.”

  Anne stood to meet him, her jaw slack. Of course. A boy with a limp. “Are you—?”

  “She found me, in the end, like. Well, Martha did. That was her gift.”

  In a daze, Anne extended her hand and he shook it warmly. “How is this possible? You must be over a hundred years old.” With a glance at his bad leg, she said, “I suppose it can’t be a war wound, then?”

  He patted his thigh. “Not from the war you’re thinking of, but I got plenty of those, too. I fit right in.” He untucked the newspaper and showed her the front page. The headline declared Rannings’ reputation to be in tatters. “Mary would’ve wanted me to thank you for this in person, like. We tried our best, but it couldn’t happen yet because you hadn’t happened yet, or something; she always explained it better. After she died, I had to come back and see it through by myself, hard as it was. Thank God it’s done.”

  “She died?”

  “Aye, as do we all, I hope,” he said, and then laughed at her shock. “But don’t worry: She held on a bloody long time. Saw in the new century. You must’ve just missed each other.”

  He handed her a small photograph, folded so much that the very center had worn away. In it, an elderly woman reclined on a sunbed, caught in a blurry roar of laughter. Her bathing suit and style of her hair placed her sometime in the early twenties, and the beach could have been anywhere, but Anne liked to think it was Kent.

  The motorcar came purring around the corner and stopped at the curb. Merritt slung his arm across the back of the seat. “Anne, is this chap bothering you?”

  Benjamin flipped the photograph over. There was an address written on the back. “Look me up next time you’re in Bootle,” he said with a wink, then he turned up his collar and walked on. Anne watched him go, quite breathless, until Merritt tooted the horn and made her jump. She strode to the motorcar and got in. “He wasn’t a journalist, you know.”

  “Can’t be too careful.” He pulled into the traffic. “Well, shall we start over?”

  “I don’t know where to begin.”

  He sucked on a cigarette. “My parents’ house is over two hours away.”

  Anne smiled. She rolled down the window to let out the blue smoke and let in the sounds of the city, and rested her chin in one hand. She gripped the photograph tight with the other. She’d do it properly, this time. She’d tell him everything. No more secrets; no more shame. Bold, like Mary.

  In 2017, G. V. ANDERSON won a World Fantasy Award with her professional debut, “Das Steingeschöpf.” Since then, she has won a British Fantasy Award and had her work selected for anthologies such as Best of British Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019. Her short stories can be found in Strange Horizons, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and elsewhere. She lives and works in Dorset.

  CONVERSATIONS WITH THE SEA WITCH

  THEODORA GOSS

  In the afternoons, they wheel her out on the balcony overlooking the sea. They place her chair by the balustrade. Once there, the queen dowager waves her hand. “Leave me,” she says, in a commanding voice. Then, in the shrill tones of an old woman, “Go away, go away, damn you. I want to be alone.”

  They, who have been trained almost from birth to obey, leave her, bowing or curtsying as they go. After all, what harm can come to her, an old woman, a cripple? They do not call her that, of course. One does not call a queen dowager such things. But their mothers and fathers called her that long ago, when she was first found half-drowned on the sea shore—the crippled girl.

  “A poor crippled girl,” they whispered, incredulous, when the prince emerged from her room and told his father, “I’m going to marry her. She saved my life in the storm. She has no name—not as we have names. I’ll call her Melusine.”

  Elsewhere in the castle, the king, her son, is issuing orders, perhaps about defending the northern borders, perhaps just about the education of the young prince, his heir. The queen is walking in the garden with her ladies-in-waiting, gathering roses. The young princess, her granddaughter, has stolen into the garden, where she is playing by the water-lily pool with her golden ball. In a moment, it will fall in. She has always been fascinated by water. She takes after her grandmother—her fingers are webbed. There are delicate membranes between each finger.

  In the chapel, the former king, her husband, lies in his grand tomb of black-veined green marble. Next to it is another tomb, where she will someday lie. Now, it is empty like a promise unfulfilled. She knows it is there—she can feel it patiently waiting, and she knows it will not have to wait much longer. After all, did she not exchange five hundred years of life in the sea for one human lifetime? Once she lies beside him, completely surrounded by stone, she will have left the sea permanently at last.

  But she is not thinking of that now. She is waiting for company.

  She does not have to wait long. Soon after they leave—the servants, who have lives about which she knows nothing, about whom she thinks no more than she would of the white foam on a wave—the sea witch rises.<
br />
  “Greetings, princess,” says the witch. That, at least, is the closest we can get in translation, for she speaks the language of the sea, which is not our language. In the air, it sounds strange and guttural, like the barking of seals. In the water, it is higher, more melodious, like the song of the sleek gray dolphins that sometimes visit our waters. It carries far.

  “Greetings, witch,” says the queen dowager. It is obvious, from her tone, that this is an honorific. “How goes it beneath the water?”

  And then the sea witch tells her: all is well at court. Her eldest sister is a beloved queen. There have been storms along the southern coast, causing shipwrecks. Which is good—that stretch of the coast was suffering from over-fishing, and this will keep the fishermen away for a while. The whales that were trapped in the main harbor of the capital city have returned to the open sea. When Melusine became queen, it was forbidden to harm a whale, and her son continues that tradition. Her middle sister’s second child has recently emerged from his father’s pouch. The sea-folk, although mammalian, reproduce like sea-horses: a child, once born, is deposited in the father’s pouch and emerges only to suckle its mother’s breast until it can fend for itself. The sea is a dangerous place. The sea-folks’ children must be strong to survive.

  “And how is your throat?” asks the sea witch. “Have you tried the poultice I recommended?” It is made of seaweed, boiled down into a paste.

  “Better,” says the queen dowager. “But I feel death coming close, witch. Coming on human feet, soft and white and tender.”

  “May it not come for a few years yet,” says the sea witch. She herself will likely live for another hundred years. “Who will I talk to after you are gone?”

  The queen dowager laughs—the situation is, after all, ironic. And then she puts her hand to her throat, because it aches.

  Two old women—that is what they are. Two old women who have lost the ones they loved, whom the world has left behind. All they have now is these conversations. Do not pity them. They get more enjoyment out of these talks than you imagine.