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

by Paula Guran

  Phoebe set the scarf down on the white-washed planks and untied it, laying it flat. Votives anchored each corner. The night was still and when she lit the squat round candles, the wicks barely flickered. The light illuminated the rich colors of the scarf—butter yellow with emerald piping. The glass of wine cast rich ruby shadows.

  She encircled the cake with Mother’s pearls.

  Around the periphery she set the icons of her mother’s life: an unopened pack of Salems; a silver dollar from 1943, Mother’s birth year; the porcelain shepherdess; a deck of bridge cards with the queen of clubs face up; the small stack of photos. Above the scarf, the bundle of letters. Below it, the glass of wine.

  She had just finished arranging everything when the full moon rose above the row of palm trees behind her, a line of white light dancing along the dark water like a path leading to the now-invisible horizon. Phoebe Morris dangled her legs over the gulf and tried to say goodbye.

  Taking a drink of wine, she picked up the silver dollar and turned it over and over in her hand. What should she say? “Safe travels, Mother.” She threw it far out into the gulf. It sank soundlessly and felt like an empty gesture.

  Emptiness. She was at a loss for words. She touched a finger to the soul cake. Prayers. That was the tradition. Beggars said prayers for the souls represented by each cake. She hadn’t prayed in years, wasn’t sure who or what she was praying to, but—She picked up the cake and took a bite. Bitter. Not sweet at all. Well, that was fitting. The spiced cake dissolved in her mouth, crumbly and a little gritty. She washed it down with a sip of wine.

  “Our Father—” she began. No, wrong prayer. This was for Mother. Phoebe sighed and started again. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” It was a psalm, not a prayer, but she knew it by heart. She closed her eyes and recited it slowly.

  Pulling another piece off the cake, she ate it and, after a moment of hesitation, picked up the letters. She read few lines from each of them and thought of all the replies she’d wanted to send back, but had never written. A lifetime of unspoken bravery. “Mother, you never—” she started to say. “Mother, I want—” Her words trickled away into the night air. Even now, the idea of talking back made her stomach tighten. After last night, she half expected Mother to appear, glaring, walking on water.

  Another bite of cake, a sip of wine. Then, hands unsteady, Phoebe struck a red-tipped match against the wood of the dock, smelling a wisp of sulphur, and burned the first letter, holding the monogrammed page by its corner until the flames neared her fingers. The ember-rimmed fragments drifted over the side, hissing when they hit the water. They floated for a few minutes, pale against the darkness, then grew soggy and sank below the surface. She burned the others, one by one.

  She slid the queen of clubs under the edge of the pearls and picked up the deck of cards. It had taken her a while to decide which queen was most evocative. Spades seemed overly wicked, diamonds too Gábor, and hearts just inappropriate. But clubs? Mother was the queen of clubs. Golf club, bridge club, luncheon club, Wellesley Club. A member instead of a mother.

  It was unthinkable to think of her spending eternity without a deck of cards. Like warriors taking their shields to Valhalla. She took another bite of cake, half gone now, and held the deck in both hands.

  Muscle memory kicked in. Without thinking, she divided the cards and began to shuffle. Whirr . . . , snap. Whirr . . . , snap. Her hands jerked at the sound, scattering the cards across the dock. They fluttered and sailed off into the water. Phoebe watched them disappear and picked up the queen of clubs, still lying on the silk scarf. “The queen is dead,” she whispered. She ate a bit of cake and tore the card in half, sweeping the pieces into the sea.

  “I loved you once,” she said. “It hurt. I wanted to be just like you, but I wasn’t good enough.” A long silence until she spoke again.

  “Then, you know what—I left.” Her voice grew stronger. “I survived. I made friends. And somewhere along the way, I realized that being like you was the last thing on earth I wanted.” She drained the wineglass, washing down the final morsel of cake.

  A ragged sob surprised her, doubling her over. For several minutes after, she sat with her arms wrapped around herself, tears running down her cheeks, the wind now cold on her face. Time to go in. She felt a bone-deep weariness and a need for this to be over.

  Without further ceremony, she pried off the plastic lid and tilted the gold canister toward the water. “Goodbye, Vibby,” she said. A small vortex of gray dust swirled away. Phoebe angled the can down and poured out the rest of the ashes, watching in stunned surprise as the small yellow measuring cup tumbled out and bobbed on the waves.

  “Oh, no.” A gingery bile rose in her throat. “No, no, no.”

  The cup disappeared from view. She looked down at the canister in her hands as the significance of what she’d done began to sink in.

  “I’ve eaten Mother,” she said.

  Not even in a metaphysical way, like the body of Christ that was actually a cracker. She had actually consumed bits of her mother.

  Phoebe didn’t scream. She sat for a very long time, oddly calm. Shouldn’t she be horrified, disgusted? She tried to summon those feelings and found them missing. Maybe she was in shock? Likely. Shock was rather pleasant. She finally felt the kind of tranquil acceptance she’d hoped this ritual would bring her. Closing her eyes, she lay on her side, her cheek against the rough wood of the dock, her mind drifting farther and farther with each rhythmic swell of the waves.

  When she woke again, the full moon was high in the starlit sky and the candles had all gone out. Phoebe sat up slowly, light-headed, her body leaden. She tried to stand, legs all pins and needles. Minutes passed. Soon she would gather up the objects that remained, damp from the sea and the night air, and return them to the basket. She smoothed a hand over the silky scarf and picked up her pearls.

  With a little half-smile, she reached behind her neck and fastened the clasp with a practiced click.

  “Mine,” she said.

  ELLEN KLAGES is the author of three acclaimed historical novels: The Green Glass Sea, which won the Scott O’Dell Award and the New Mexico Book Award; White Sands, Red Menace, which won the California and New Mexico Book Awards; and Out of Left Field, which won the Children’s History Book Prize. Her short fiction has been translated into a dozen languages and been nominated or won multiple Hugo, Nebula, Locus, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards. Klages lives in San Francisco, in a small house full of strange and wondrous things.

  GLASS EYES IN PORCELAIN FACES

  JACK WESTLAKE

  Imagine waking up each morning and wondering who will have changed. Imagine that being the first thing you think of as you wake. As you get out of bed. As you shower, dress, eat breakfast. As you walk out the door and head to work. Imagine what it’s like to get on the tube, scanning the packed carriage for a too-perfect face, for a pair of eyes more vacant than all the others. Imagine seeing such a face on the head of someone whose name you don’t know, but who you recognize from your commute at the start of each day. Someone you always nod to, and who always nods back as you both sway and jolt with the movement of the carriage, acknowledgment that never develops into conversation. Imagine seeing them one morning—this morning—like usual. Now imagine that their face has changed, apparently overnight. It’s a doll’s face. Near-white porcelain, with wide blue eyes made of glass. Imagine how it feels, knowing that only you can see this. Imagine they look at you. Imagine how it feels when, despite the change, despite them not being them anymore, they nod at you like usual.

  This is what my life has become.

  At the office building I do my best to avoid the concierge, but it’s no good—you have to pass the main reception desk to get to the lifts. I keep my head down and try to dissolve amongst the other gray-or-blacksuited staff passing through the foyer. I feel the concierge’s eyes on me. He was one of the first to change.

  Once I’m at the lifts I glance in his directi
on, but he’s facing forward, talking to a woman who’s standing at the desk. From this angle you can see the neat line where his porcelain face meets his actual flesh, just in front of the ear. The porcelain gleams beneath the overhead lights. I think about that seam where cold white meets living skin, and I wonder if the skin dips beneath the porcelain or if it’s the other way around—what’s on top and what’s lurking underneath. Maybe it’s neither. Maybe the two simply meet and fuse together, somehow. I’ve never got close enough to any of them to really see.

  The lift’s doors open and I go in with the others. We pack ourselves in like tinned meat. As the doors begin to roll shut, the woman appears, putting her hand out to stop them. Her face has changed now, it’s porcelain, and her eyes are hard and dark like polished stones.

  That’s how quickly it can happen.

  She squeezes in, apologizing as she does so, maneuvering awkwardly until she’s standing right beside me. Her voice is normal, just sounds like it’s coming from behind a mask. But it’s not a mask. It’s her face, now.

  I ring Abigail at lunchtime and ask her what’s she’s doing. She’s still at the flat—I didn’t wake her when I left—and she’s getting to work on her latest article, the deadline for which is Friday. I ask her if she thinks she can get it done in time and she says absolutely. I envy the confidence, the certainty she holds inside herself. Being around her is like standing in a warm light. She talks about the article, and I let her words tumble into my ear and take up space in my head, temporarily submerging all my thoughts and worries about the doll-faced people.

  I haven’t told Abigail about them.

  What I fear most is that one morning, I will wake up and Abigail’s face will be cold and hard, and her eyes will no longer be real.

  The commute home takes longer than usual because after my first stop, where I need to switch to a different train, the service has been interrupted. The sign says there’s a bus replacement, but from experience I know it’ll be quicker just to walk.

  I emerge from the underground into the black evening. Everything is dark versus light. Chiaroscuro. Cars, buses, streetlights, shop fronts—swells of light and color like oil slicks on dark water.

  In fifteen minutes I’m at the edge of the city center, heading toward the part of town where our apartment is. The road is all takeaways and small shops, a hair salon, a butcher’s. Most are closed already, while several are vacant altogether. Battered FOR SALE signs jut out above doorways, flexing in the wind.

  A homeless man sits huddled in the entrance of an abandoned kebab house. He’s got a sleeping bag clutched around himself, and there’s cardboard laid out under him like a carpet, a tattered rucksack by his side. I see all of this on my approach along the pavement, and as I get closer I make a point of looking straight ahead. He sees me coming and with a croak he asks if I’ve got any change. I keep walking, keep looking forward.

  But something catches my eye as I pass. Something makes me look. A glimpse in my periphery.

  I stop and go back to him. He holds out his hand, but what I’m looking at is his face—the smooth swells and curves of the porcelain, at how the wide glass eyes seem a little bloodshot, like someone’s painted tiny red flecks on to them with a fine brush.

  “What you lookin’ at?” he says.

  I stare. “When did this happen to you?”

  “Homeless since I was fifteen,” he mumbles.

  He continues to talk, but I’m not listening. I’m reaching out and touching the porcelain with my fingertips. It’s cold like I imagined. There are hairline cracks all over it like you might see on very old china.

  “The fuck you doin’?”

  He clutches my wrist and his other hand comes up as if to hit me, but I grab it. Something feels odd about that hand, the way it feels against my palm. As I wrench my wrist from his grip and stagger back, I see it. The hand I’d been holding is made of plastic. I’d always assumed it was just their faces. I’d never noticed their hands.

  The homeless man sees my expression and starts to laugh. The porcelain doesn’t move. Then he pulls the plastic hand from the wrist and waves it at me.

  “False hand, mate,” he’s saying, cackling. He throws it at me and I stumble away up the road.

  “Yeah that’s right,” he shouts after me. “Keep going, fuckin’ weirdo, before I cut your hand off and all.”

  But then I turn back. The street is empty apart from us and an idea has formed in my head. Beneath his sleeping bag he moves as if about to get to his feet, but I stride up too quickly and clasp his head between my hands. He cries out, swatting my left arm weakly with his remaining hand. With my fingertips I feel for the place where the porcelain ends and the skin starts, just in front of his ears. I find it and run my fingertips along the seam. I try to look but he’s squirming too much. He’s shouting now, bellowing.

  “Take it off,” I hiss. “I’m sick of this, just fucking take it off—”

  I try to prize the porcelain away, try to get some purchase with my fingernails along the fault line. He jerks forward and headbutts me in the abdomen and, winded, I stagger backward, my fingertips bloody. He’s getting to his feet, and somehow his blank white face has morphed into a grimace. The eyes are angry. He takes a step toward me and I run.

  In the entrance hall of my apartment building, I use the light to inspect my fingers. I’m uninjured. The dried blood is his, from when I tried to work my fingertips between the seam where porcelain met flesh. I wonder about infections. I wonder if that’s how the change happens. If it gets into you through a cut or ingestion or in the air you breathe. But I catch myself, make myself stop. This is how you lose it, I tell myself. This is how you end up wearing gloves and a face mask to work, how you end up washing your hands every five minutes, how you end up locking yourself in the flat and taping up the windows and doors and never going out. This is how you lose your mind.

  Abigail knows something is wrong. She’s made spaghetti Bolognese, and we’re eating at the table when she takes a sip from her wineglass and asks me about it. I pretend to chew although there’s nothing in my mouth. I am weighing up whether I should tell her or not.

  “Have you noticed how people are different these days?” I say eventually in my best calm, conversational voice.

  “How do you mean?” she says.

  I make a point of gazing into the middle-distance over her shoulder. Beyond the balcony window, the city’s all points of light. The red dots of an airplane blink on and off as it makes its way across the darkness.

  “Just different,” I say. “Have you?”

  “Can’t say I have,” she replies. Another sip of wine. It’s starting to stain her lips. “You need to relax. You work yourself up so much. I don’t want you spiraling again.”

  Abigail goes for a shower after dinner while I do the washing up. I submerge the white plates into the warm water, and as they disappear under the suds they suddenly don’t feel like plates any more. I imagine they are the faces of the changed, and I am drowning them. I would like very much to drown them all. Maybe then it would stop.

  I hear Abigail come out of the bathroom and make her way into the kitchen. Behind me, she opens a cupboard to get another wineglass. She’s drinking more lately, and I wonder if it’s me who is causing it.

  When I turn around to get the tea towel, I cry out. Abigail’s face is off-white, nearly featureless, all her freckles gone. Her cheeks shine bright white beneath the kitchen’s spotlights. No, I’m saying, over and over, no no no—

  Abigail’s gripping my upper arms, looking into my eyes. “Darren,” she’s saying, “it’s just a face mask. Darren. Darren, calm down.”

  Later, in bed, I tell Abigail that I am sorry. I have drunk the rest of the wine with her, and we’ve started another bottle. We are both a little drunk. I apologize again, and she tells me not to. I roll toward her and bury my face into the curve where her neck meets her shoulder, and I tell her how scared I am that one day I’ll wake up and she’ll be diff
erent. Abigail whispers that she won’t be different. She says about going to see a doctor. Maybe I need medication again. And that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that. I tell her it’s different this time. I tell her I’m scared. She strokes the back of my head and says, “Shh, shh.”

  The tube is a sea of porcelain the next morning. I am surrounded by a hundred pale faces. I am trapped in a carriage filled with dolls.

  Even the posters and billboards in the city center have changed. It’s like someone came and replaced the real ones during the night. Huge white faces peer blankly down, empty eyes the size of hubcaps.

  I worry if Abigail is safe, although they’ve never been violent. No more violent than people usually are, anyway.

  I’m the only normal person left at work. In the restroom I splash cold water on to my face. Every time I look up at the mirror I expect to see one of them behind me, maybe with a carving knife raised high, ready to bring it down between my shoulder blades. Of course, this doesn’t happen. One of them comes in and uses the urinal, washes his hands and asks me how’s it going. Then he leaves, whistling. It might have been Richie. It’s hard to tell when they all look so similar.

  Back in the office I stare at the side of Emma’s head. I know it’s Emma because her desk is the next one over from mine, and it’s her mug on the desk by the mouse. Emma has a small birthmark on her cheek, normally. It’s in the rough shape of a triangle, no bigger than a penny. I am trying to see if her new face has it, too. After a while, Emma sighs and spins her chair so she’s facing me.

  “Why are you staring?” she says.

  “Sorry.”

  “You’ve been doing it for ages. It’s weird.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” she says. “Just stop. Okay?”