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

by Paula Guran

  * * *

  There were enough of them now that they were a proper brood. Food stores had dwindled to dregs. Though the seagulls brought them fish daily, some of which they ate, some of which they smoked for future rations, they wished for more meat and more flour for cakes and biscuits. They needed more clothes, more shoes, more horses. They’d used what they could of what was available at the house, and to get more, they’d have to leave the cocoon of wellbeing that was the farmstead.

  Sully, knowing the local territory the best, drew up a plan to help them secure not only more supplies, but permanent safety. It was a plan of blood, for that was the thing she knew best.

  Ziza had called this place their home, but what was a home if it could be scooped out from under them at any moment? If someone else could come and take the papers? If whenever any of them needed anything, they had to live in fear of discovery by the townsfolk who wouldn’t look well on a former slave and other dark folk occupying a property in a white family’s name?

  It was no way to live, and if it was Sully’s last deed on this earth, she’d make the killing of the Missus and her family worth more than just her own peace of mind—because it hadn’t even garnered her that. Sully was a lost cause, but these folks could be happy here if she made it into a proper dwelling for them. Ziza could be happy.

  “I’ll do this alone,” Sully said as she explained her plan to others. She would raise an army, an army of revenants.

  Liza Jane shook her head. “Don’t talk nonsense.” She had a strong island accent that Sully loved. She’d stayed up many nights listening to Liza Jane’s tales about how she had escaped her plantation as a teenager and lived most of her remaining years as a pirate on a ship called the Red Colossus. “We are brave,” she said. “We’ll do whatever you say.”

  Miles nodded his head and so did Bethie. Nathaniel, looking sage with his gray hair and knowing eyes, said, “You will never be alone again, Miss Sully.”

  So be it.

  For several weeks, they raided the nicest wagons that passed by along the main roads, stealing their supplies, bringing the drivers and passengers back to the farmstead for Sully to kill. For each body disposed of in this way, Sully birthed a ghost. She numbed to the agonizing pain of labor and let herself be comforted by Ziza’s vast knowledge. She spoke of a goddess named Artemis who watched over young girls, unwed women, wild animals, the wilderness. “You could be like her, don’t you think?” said Ziza.

  Sully was laid up in bed where she’d spent the last several weeks. The constant birthing had worn her to bone. The killing, too, hurt. “Army or not, I can’t do this anymore,” said Sully, worried she’d disappoint Ziza, but Ziza only nodded and took Sully’s hand in hers, kissing several times so tenderly, like no woman was supposed to do to another. It made Sully shiver.

  “I think we’ve got enough now anyway for your plan to work. There’s twenty-six of us in all,” Ziza said. She dipped a cloth into a bowl of hot water and pressed it to Sully’s head. “I’ll fetch Miles and tell him he can go into town to start the next phase.”

  The plan was for him to tell the sheriff about all the murdered folk at the farmstead, and when the sheriff led his troops here, they’d mount a full-on attack on their home territory. Take them by surprise. They didn’t know how great their number was. They didn’t know what weapons they’d raided, what traps they’d set. “We’ll be able to take over the town and make a fortress of it. We’ll be safe, and we’ll make a place where others can be safe, too,” said Ziza, squeezing Sully’s hand tight in reassurance.

  Sully wept in Ziza’s arms. She didn’t know where the tears came from or why they fell. Everything was going her way. Having killed twenty-six and birthed twenty-six, the count was even. She didn’t have to fear another tumultuous labor.

  “I’ll stay here with you as long as you want,” said Ziza, that warm smile that was always there shining brightly at Sully.

  “You should go help. I want you to go,” said Sully. “You been here the longest. You’re the one who can lead them.”

  Ziza’s smile began to waver as she worried her bottom lip. “I’ll go,” she said, “but you stay right up in here, you understand? If you leave, there’s a chance you could get caught in the cross fires. You might kill someone by mistake and then have to bring another back. Your body needs rest.”

  It was dark when Ziza finally went and the sheriff came with his cavalry. Sully let herself drift in and out of consciousness. She awoke to the sound of shots firing. She saw the spark of a blaze.

  Their entire property had been booby-trapped, sharpened branches primed to raise up and stab any person or horse who tried to get through. Sully heard their cries of pain.

  When the night grew more silent, she stumbled out of bed and into a pair of old boots. She walked down the stairs and out the front door. She saw Miles running toward her, a hand on top his head to keep his floppy sun hat from falling off.

  “Miss Sully,” he called, out of breath. With only the moon as light, she couldn’t see whether he was injured or if his clothes were stained with blood.

  “They’re all dead,” he said then whooped and laughed and ran up to her to give her a hug. She patted his back and told him to go inside and wash his face. It seemed like a big-sisterly thing to tell a boy.

  Sully walked to the barn where the weapons for slaughter were kept, where she used to sleep. Inside was the blade she’d used to kill the Missus. She felt nothing as she touched it, neither relief nor rage. Any memories she had associated with the event sat inside her unrecalled. The battle with the townspeople had been won, but Sully couldn’t answer why that mattered.

  There existed a depth of loneliness so profound that once experienced, no matter how briefly, trust in life could not be restored. Sully took a knife and stabbed it in her gut just above her uterus then carved a large circle around the organ. She removed it from her body and dug a shallow grave with her hands, buried it there as she bled out. When she died, at least the others might be able to use the etherworld that had made her uterus into a portal.

  “Sully!” she heard. “Sully!”

  She had a feeling she was already gone, that she was hearing Ziza call her from the other side. There it was, that feeling Ziza described. Drowning.

  Sully was cold and heavy, and she felt her body struggle to lift itself up. After a few seconds of trying, she gave up.

  “No, no, no, no, no, no,” said Ziza, grasping Sully’s body, her voice fading until it was all gone.

  Sully wanted to say sorry, but she didn’t know words anymore. Was time passing? Was she wrapped in rope? Was the feeling of dying eternal? All these thoughts came as nightmare visions as she glided through a fog.

  Forever passed by, then—

  Sully felt heat. She felt water. She felt something squeezing her, choking her nearly.

  Sully was being born.

  She opened her eyes to find herself on a patch of dirt, Ziza above her.

  “Oh, my Sully,” Ziza said. She kissed Sully’s face, a hot streak of tears wetting Sully’s cheeks.

  “I don’t understand,” said Sully. She looked around and smelled the air. It felt as if no time had passed. The scent of gunpowder poisoned the air.

  “You were born again through your own womb,” Ziza said, face stunned into a bewildered frown. She’d never looked so shaken. “You were only gone a minute. Then I heard the earth crying. I dug it up and there you were.”

  Miles came and tossed a blanket over Sully. A young man named Dominic carried her to her bed. Others doted on her. They brought her medicine. They brought her food. When the initial commotion of her birth had passed, she asked all but Ziza to go.

  Sully expected her to say something like, “What makes you think I don’t want to go, too,” or, “Like I want to be here with your fool ass,” but she hummed to herself in the rocking chair in the corner of the room.

  What bothered Sully most about Ziza’s relentless happiness was that it was not the resu
lt of obliviousness, naivete, or ignorance. It was a happiness that knew pain and had overcome it.

  “How come you smile so much?” Sully asked.

  Ziza walked to the edge of Sully’s bed and took a seat, her bottom a few inches from Sully’s feet. “Just always been like that,” she said.

  “I don’t know how to feel nice.”

  “You’re not a nice-feeling kind of person. I suppose that’s not who you’re meant to be. That’s all right. I like you mean and crotchety,” said Ziza.

  “In another life I could’ve been sweet. I could’ve been just as happy and sweet as you, had it been different. Had everything been different. Had the world been different,” Sully said, wiping a stray tear from the corner of her eye.

  “We’re already on our second lives. I don’t think there’s anything different,” said Ziza.

  Sully held a pillow tight to her chest. “I’m bored of hurting,” she said. She thought of the ancestors she’d vesseled and brought back to life with the baptizing waters of her womb’s amniotic fluid. With Ziza, she’d cultivated a small sanctuary for them on this farm, a sanctuary that would grow to include the nearby town. But it was not enough. She needed the whole world for them.

  Before, Sully thought it was her lack of want for anything that made her feel so shapeless and void, but her relief at seeing Ziza upon her rebirth upended that notion. She wasn’t numb for lack of want but for wanting too much. She was ravenous for the whole world. The sky and the oceans and the creatures in those oceans and the cities and heartbeats and Ziza and Miles and Bethie and Liza Jane and Nathaniel and the mountains and brass and harps and pianos and wildflowers and glaciers and brothers and sisters and cousins and picnics and the sun and telescopes and a treehouse and sausage and winter and the height of summer, when the air was so thick it stuck to your skin like pecan brittle in your back teeth.

  Even as she imagined possessing all these things, she wanted yet more. It was strange, she thought, how limitless a void inside of a person could be. It was strange that a person could be killed, but not anything that that person had done.

  Ziza scooted up on the bed and laid her hand on top of Sully’s and hummed a hymn about battle. The pitches were low, and the key was minor, a haunting caress of song against Sully’s skin. How many moments like this would it take for her raucous, angry soul to be soothed? How many songs? Were there enough in the world?

  When the song finished, Ziza climbed into the bed with Sully and held her close. She sang yet more, no theme uniting which tunes she chose. Sully let a single hot tear fall onto Ziza’s hand when she understood her spirit would never know true soothing, but wrapped up in Ziza, she saw pinpricks of true glory, a grace big enough to make it worth it. Perhaps there would not be peace, but there would be Ziza, and with Ziza, there was a future. Ziza hummed on, and in that moment, Sully was content just to listen.

  In addition to appearing on the Stonewall Honor List and winning a Firecracker Award, RIVERS SOLOMON’s debut novel An Unkindness of Ghosts was a finalist for a Lambda, a Hurston/Wright, a Tiptree, and a Locus Award, and has been included in numerous best-of-the-year lists, including those from NPR, Publishers Weekly, and The Guardian (UK). Solomon’s short work appears in Black Warrior Review, the New York Times, Guernica, Best American Short Stories, Tor.com, and elsewhere. Their second book, The Deep (based on a song by Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes) was published in 2019. They grew up between California, Indiana, Texas, and New York but currently reside in the United Kingdom.

  THE THING, WITH FEATHERS

  MARISSA LINGEN

  Val had lost hope.

  Routine carried her where hope had stopped: up the stairs to tend the lamp. Into the forest for wood, apples, berries, more rarely a deer or a grouse. Her stores of magic and wild rice came from the same place, though not from the same method: the smaller, murky inland lake, the one too small to need a lighthouse, only the canoes and the flat-bottom boats of the rice harvest.

  Her neighbors were willing to sell her the rice; willing, too, to watch her pick her way carefully out to the middle in her canoe alone. They never asked her about summoning the magic, though she glowed afterwards with the overflow, and they had reason to distrust things that glowed, these last eight years.

  In fact, they never asked her anything. Asking was rude. Sometimes they told her things: how much for the rice. What day there would be fresh corn in from the farmlands, if she wanted any. How they thought the winter would be. (Cold. Wet. Bad. Always bad.) Once, something funny the baby did—but only once, and that felt like too much.

  Val told them things too. Mostly lake things. How the water was settling, what ships had gone by. Whether anything had come out of it they should watch for. Not so many things as they told her.

  Then she went home, up the lighthouse tower, full of magic, bags of wild rice on her shoulders, and sometimes inland farm vegetables she’d traded for. Before she was more than a tall tree’s fall into the forest, the deep silence had enveloped her, and she was home again.

  The route home had gotten longer when the last of the old road crumbled and she had to pick her way through slough instead of walking over the concrete no one could make any more. It got shorter again when she and the neighbors combined their expertise to convince the nesting mallards to nest somewhere else so she didn’t have to worry about the hissing remnants of their egg shards.

  Someone else might have found that balance hopeful, but Val just nodded; things changed, not with a direction, just changed. The mallards were dissolving something else now; they had not returned to their pre-event waddling placidity.

  It would have been easier with hope.

  But the ships deserved not to run into the rocks, even if Val didn’t expect anything much of the world or the people in it. The new things coming out of the lake often came in the dark, and they couldn’t all see in it, and some of them—some few—deserved a light to crawl by. And where they would find another lighthouse keeper this late in the age of the world, Val could not begin to guess.

  One fall afternoon, when the chill had bitten into the wind but the ice had not yet glossed even the small lake, much less the edges of the big one, a very small boat put in at the lighthouse pier. Val did not see it at first—fall meant longer nights tending to the light and more tasks to stock the lighthouse for winter. So instead of seeing the boat, she saw, at the very first, a pair of boots as she came out of the forest with her arms full of wood.

  “Hello?” she said sharply around the wood.

  “Hello, are you the lighthouse keeper?” The voice was scratchy, tenor, further east than the lake but not jarringly so. Cheerful.

  Val set the wood on the woodpile, turned back carefully. She had no reason to be afraid. The magic of the lake was still strong in her for weeks yet, barring emergency, and the lighthouse grounds were her own. When she could see more than boots, the man’s face was cheerful as his voice, a large pointed nose, spectacles of the wire design that were the only kind made, after. Dark curls touched with gray, a battered hat, smile lines. Few enough had managed smile lines, after.

  “I’m Val, the lighthouse keeper. Yes.”

  “Lucian,” he said. “Your old friend Mik said you might be able to help me. I’ve lost my hand connection to my magic. My wrist connection, actually. It’s a bit awkward.” He held his arms out, smiling.

  He was not reaching for her. Val stepped back all the same. “Mik,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t do that work anymore. Not for a very long time.” Long enough, in fact, that Mik’s name made her blink.

  The stranger, Lucian, was undaunted. “But you can still?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is there a guest house near here I can stay while we think it through, or a good sheltered spot to set up my tent?”

  She wanted to tell him that there was no we here, no thinking to be done, only winter coming on to the big lake and its lighthouse, only chores to do and vanishing light t
o do them in. But he had not presumed upon her own space, which made her paradoxically more willing to share it. Even if it was only until the lake was clear to take him back again.

  After all, he was a friend of Mik’s. And she missed the time when that had meant something to her.

  “There’s a guest room on the ground floor,” she said. “You can haul water for me. I don’t promise anything.”

  He grinned, and the lines around his eyes deepened like they knew what they were doing. “Excellent. Mik said—”

  “The me Mik knew was another person. Another life.” She hesitated, but he had come by water, perhaps he would understand. “A river person, yes? I am a lake person. Don’t think of what Mik said of me.”

  “Only of what you say.” He nodded and shouldered his pack, keeping brisk pace with her into the lighthouse. She smiled up at him despite herself.

  Supper was hollowed-out acorn squash stuffed with bacon, wild rice, dried cherries, sage leaves, hazelnuts, blueberries. Lucian scraped the squash skin clean.

  And he asked questions. He had understood her right away, not to ask about Mik or the city or the days before. But that left more than Val had remembered there could be questions about. Birds, to her surprise and delight—the ordinary kind. She thought a great deal about the shorebirds but had said none of it aloud. No one had wanted to hear about trading the fall shorebirds for the winter-nesting ducks and gulls unless there was something altered about them.

  “The ones with the little white apostrophes on their eyes,” said Lucian, following Val up the stairs. “They’re—” He stopped, both speech and action, and Val knew why.

  She continued calmly up, taking the beacon oil trigger out of its housing. The dark would not wait. “Scoters. Yes, they’re immensely more common since the event. I think they—well, there’s something with the magic. I don’t know what it is. They don’t eat it in the sense of making permanently less of it. It might make their eggs stronger. They’re the . . . the boundary birds, scoters. The boundary between the birds that were affected and the ones that weren’t.”