The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2016 Edition

by Paula Guran

  Clark took in my paint-stained jeans and plain grey top, his jovial expression fading into a look that almost matched mine. He was wearing a suit, nicer than anything he ever put on for work, and enough pomade in his hair to make him smell like a Yankee Candle franchise.

  “I thought I told you to put on something nice,” he said.

  “I thought I told you I was willing to meet you for coffee,” I shot back. “Last time I checked, the dress code at Starbucks was ‘no shirt, no shoes, no service.’ I have a shirt and shoes. I think I’ll be fine.”

  Clark continued to glower for a moment before shouldering his way past me into the apartment.

  “Hey!” I yelped, making a futile grab for his arm. It was already too late: He was in my living room, turning slowly as he took in all the dolls that had joined my collection since the last time he’d been here, some three months previous. I tried not to open a doorway to the Kingdom more than once a week, but sometimes it was hard to resist the temptation, especially when I had more than one trouble to decant. Dolls like Strawberry held sorrow, while others held different emotions—anger, loneliness, even hope, and love, and joy. Positive emotions took longer to grow back and had to be decanted less frequently, but they were represented all the same.

  Clark’s examination took about two minutes before he focused back on me, disdain replaced by pity. “This is why you broke up with me?” he asked. “I mean, you said it was because of the dolls, but I thought that was just a crappy excuse, you know? The weird-chick equivalent of ‘I have to wash my hair on Saturday night.’ But you meant it. You like plastic people better than you like real ones. There’s something wrong with you.”

  “My dolls aren’t plastic,” I said automatically, before I realized I was falling back into the same destructively defensive patterns that had defined our brief relationship. I glared at him, shutting the door before Trinket could get any funny ideas about making a run for the outside world. “You want to have this talk? Fine. Yes, I chose my dolls over you. Unlike you, they never tell me I’d be pretty if I learned how to do something with my hair. Unlike you, they don’t criticize me in public and then say they were just kidding. And unlike you, they shut up when I tell them to.”

  “You really are a crazy bitch.” He strode across the living room, grabbing the first thing that caught his eye—pretty little Strawberry in her mourning gown. His hand all but engulfed her body. “You need to learn how to focus on real things, Marian, or you’re going to be alone forever.”

  “You put her down!” I launched myself at him as if he weren’t a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier than I was. I was reaching for Strawberry, trying to snatch her out of his hand, when his fist caught me in the jaw and sent me sprawling.

  I’d never been punched in the face before. Everything went black and fuzzy. I didn’t actually pass out, but the next few minutes seemed like a slideshow or a Power Point presentation, and not like something that was really happening. Static picture followed static picture as I watched Clark stalk around my apartment, grabbing dolls off the shelves. When he couldn’t hold any more he walked over to me, looking down, and said, “This is what you get.”

  He kicked me in the stomach, and then he was gone, taking my dolls with him, and I was alone. At some point, I came back to myself enough to start crying.

  It didn’t help.

  Trinket stuck her nose through the curtain of my hair and mewled, eyes wide and worried. I sniffled, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand, and sat up to pat her gently on the head. “He didn’t hurt me that bad, Trinket. I’m okay. I’m okay.”

  I was lying to myself as much as I was lying to the cat: I might be many things, but I was distinctly not okay. I picked myself up from the floor inch by excruciating inch, finally turning to take stock of the damage.

  It was greater than I’d feared. Fifteen dolls were missing—at least one from every shelf, as well as one of the unfinished dolls from my table.

  Relief washed over me when I saw that. At least not everything he’d taken was a weapon. Shame followed on relief’s heels. He’d stolen fourteen full vessels, fourteen doorways into the Kingdom of the Cold, and I was relieved that it wasn’t one more? What was the difference between fourteen and fifteen when you were talking about knives to the heart? Fourteen would be more than enough to kill. The only question was who.

  If I was lucky, he’d accidentally kill himself, and all my troubles would end . . . but that might leave full vessels floating around the world outside, ready to be found by someone who didn’t know what they were holding. Open a vessel improperly, and everything it contained would come flooding out. And there were many, many improper ways to open something that had been closed.

  I wanted to go after him. I wanted to demand the return of my property, and I wanted to make him pay. I glanced to the remaining unfinished dolls, assessing the materials I had, automatically counting off the materials I’d need. Forcibly, I pulled myself away from that line of thinking. Revenge was satisfying, but it would be hard to explain if he had some sort of bizarre accident, and I’d already been reminded that I couldn’t take him in a fair fight.

  Hands shaking, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed the number for the police. When the dispatcher came on the line, voice calm and professional, I began to tell her what had happened.

  I made it almost all the way through the explanation before I started to cry.

  That night was one of the worst I’d had since Father started getting bad. We’d both known what his lapses in memory meant, but we’d denied it for as long as possible, he because he wasn’t ready to go, me because I wasn’t ready to be alone. Every keeper of the Kingdom eventually develops cracks. It’s a natural consequence of being a vessel that’s been emptied too many times. There’s a reason we don’t use the same doll more than once for anything other than the most basic and malleable emotions. That was the reason I couldn’t make myself a new doll, one big enough to hold my shame and grief and feelings of violation. I’d emptied out my sorrow too recently. I was too fresh, scraped too raw, to do it again.

  The officers who came in answer to my call were perfectly polite. They took pictures of the empty spaces on my shelves and of the bruises on my face and stomach, and if they thought the number of dolls still in my apartment was funny, they had the grace not to laugh in front of me. Eventually, they left me with a card and a number to call if Clark came back, and the empty promise that they’d see what they could do about getting my stolen property back. One of them asked me, twice, about filing a restraining order. I refused both times.

  I didn’t sleep. All I could do was lie awake, staring at the ceiling and thinking about the dolls who had been entrusted to my care, now lost in the world with their deadly burdens of emotion. They were so fragile. They had to be if they were going to properly mirror the fragility of the human heart, and do the jobs that they were made for.

  When morning came I rolled out of bed and dressed without paying attention to whether my clothes matched. My face hurt too much for me to bother with makeup, so I left it as it was, bruises like smeared paint on the side of my jaw and around the socket of my left eye, and exited the apartment with my head up and my thoughts full of nothing but vengeance.

  A shocked hush fell over the office when I arrived. I ignored the people staring at me as I walked to my desk. Something white was trapped under the keyboard. I pulled it loose, only to gasp and drop it like it had scalded my fingers.

  Strawberry’s whisper of a dress fluttered to the floor, where it lay like an accusation. You failed us, it seemed to say. You didn’t protect. You didn’t keep. You are no guardian.

  I clapped my hand over my mouth, ignoring the pain it awoke in my jaw, and fought the urge to vomit. Bit by bit, my stomach unclenched. I bent, picked up the dress, and walked calmly down the hall to the door with Clark’s name on it. He had an office; I had a cubicle. He had a door with a nameplate; I had a piece of paper held up with thumbtacks. I should have known better
than to let him buy me that first cup of coffee. Even if I didn’t have that much sense, I should have known better than to let him take me out for dinner even once. I was a fool.

  Foolishly, I raised my hand and knocked. Clark’s voice, smooth as butter, called, “Come in.”

  I went in.

  Clark was behind his desk, a broad piece of modern office furniture that was almost as large as my worktable at home, if not half as old or attractive. He looked . . . perfect. Every hair was in place, and his tailored suit hung exactly right on his broad, all-American shoulders. His eyes darted to the scrap of fabric in my hand, and he smiled. “I see you found my present.”

  “Where are my dolls, Clark?” I’d meant to be more subtle than that, to approach the question with a little more decorum. Father always tried to tell me you got more flies with honey than you did with vinegar, but he’d never been able to make the lesson stick, and the words burst out, hot with venom and betrayal. “You had no right to take them.”

  “And you had no right to call the police over a little lover’s spat, but you did, didn’t you?” The jovial façade dropped away, leaving the snake he’d always been staring out of his eyes. “I was going to give them back. As an apology, for losing my temper. I shouldn’t have hit you, and I know that. But then the cops showed up at my apartment saying you’d filed a domestic violence complaint against me. I’m sure you can see why I didn’t like that very much.”

  I stared at him. “I didn’t file a domestic violence complaint against you, Clark, because you’re not any part of my domestic life. I filed an assault charge. You didn’t just hit me. You beat me down. Where are my dolls?”

  His smile was a terrible thing. “I’m not part of your domestic life. How would I know where your silly little toys ended up? As for your trumped up charges, my lawyer will enjoy seeing yours in court. Now you might want to get out of my office before I tell HR that you’re harassing me.”

  Wordlessly, I held up Strawberry’s gown, daring him to say something that would deny he was the one who’d left it on my desk.

  “What, that? I found it in my car and thought you might want it back. You know how it is with grown women who play with dolls. They’re just like children. Leaving their toys everywhere.”

  He sounded so smug, so sure of himself, that it was all I could do to not to walk around the desk and snatch his eyes from his head. I kept my nails long and sharp, to make it easier to position delicate doll eyelashes and reach miniscule screws. I could have had his eye sockets bare and bleeding in a matter of seconds.

  I balled my hands into fists. I was my father’s daughter. I was the keeper of the Kingdom and the maker of the keys, and I would not debase myself with this man’s blood.

  “This isn’t over,” I said.

  Clark smiled at me. “Actually, I’m pretty sure it is,” he said. “Bye, now.” There was nothing else that I could do, and so I turned, Strawberry’s dress still clutched in my hand like a talisman against the darkness that was rushing in on me, and I walked away.

  The rest of the day crept by like it wanted me to suffer. My eyes drifted to Strawberry’s dress every few seconds until I finally picked it up and shoved it into my purse, hoping that out of sight would equal out of mind. It didn’t work as well as I’d hoped, but it made enough of a difference that I was able to complete my assigned work and sneak out the door fifteen minutes early. Thanks to Clark, I had lost track of fourteen filled vessels. I needed to find them, and that meant I needed help. There was only one place to go for that.

  My father.

  The Shady Pines Nursing Home was as nice a place to die as money could buy, with all the amenities a man who barely remembered himself from hour to hour could want. I had made sure of that. Even though I was keeping him alive past the point when he was ready to go, I wasn’t going to make him suffer.

  Part of what that money paid for was an understanding staff. When I presented myself at the front desk an hour after visiting hours, a long white box in my hands and a light layer of foundation over the bruises on my face, they didn’t ask any questions; they looked at me and saw a dutiful daughter who had experienced something bad, and needed her father.

  “He’s having one of his good days, Miss Collodi,” said the aide who walked me through the well-lit, pleasantly decorated halls toward my father’s room. “You picked an excellent time to visit.”

  I could tell he meant well from the look on his face—curious about my bruises but eager not to offend. So I just smiled, and nodded, and said, “I’m glad to hear that.”

  We stopped when we reached the door of Father’s room. The aide rapped his knuckles gently against the door frame, calling, “Mr. Collodi? May we come in?”

  “I told you, the doll house won’t be ready for another three days,” shouted my father, sounding exactly like he had throughout my childhood: aggravated by the stupidity of the world around him, but trying to improve it however he could. “Go away, and come back when it’s done.”

  I put a hand on the aide’s shoulder. “I can handle it from here,” I said. The aide looked uncertain, but he nodded and walked away, leaving me alone with the open doorway. I hefted the box in my hands, checking the weight of its precious burden—so few left, and no way to make more—before taking a deep breath and stepping into my father’s room.

  Antonio Collodi had been a large man in his youth, and that size was still with him: broad shoulders and a back that hadn’t started to stoop, despite the deep lines that seamed his face and the undeniable white of his hair. The muscle that used to make him look like a cross between a man and a bear was gone, withered to skeleton thinness; his clothes hung on him like a shroud. He was standing near the window, hands curled like he was working on an invisible doll house. I stopped to admire the workmanship that had gone into him. I must have made some small sound, because he turned and froze, eyes fixing on my face.

  “I’m your daughter,” I said, before he could start flinging accusations.

  He usually mistook me for Pandora—a natural misunderstanding, since I looked exactly like she did in the painting that we had been passing down, generation to generation, since the beginning. He didn’t like being visited by dead people. He said it was an abomination, and a violation of our compact with the Kingdom of the Cold, which some called “Hades,” where the dead were meant to stay forever. “Daddy, I need your help. Can you help me?”

  “My daughter?” He kept staring at me, dawning anger melting into amazement. “You’re beautiful. What did I make you from?”

  “Bone and skin and pine and ice,” I said, walking to his bed and putting down the long white box. I rested a hand on its lid. “Pain and sorrow and promises and joy. You pried me open and called me a princess among doors, and then you poured everything you had into me, and kept pouring until my eyes were open.” I remembered that day: waking on my father’s workbench, naked and surrounded by bone shavings, my teeth tender and too large in my little girl’s mouth, my face stiff from the smile it had been painted wearing.

  My family has guarded the trick to calling life out of the Kingdom for centuries, since Pandora brought it to us and said she was too tired to keep the compact any longer. No one you didn’t make with your own two hands can be trusted. That’s the true lesson of the Kingdom, and what I should have remembered when Clark smiled his perfect smile and offered me his perfect hands. But my father made me too well, and when he bid me to become a woman, a woman I became. If I’d stayed a doll of bone and pine, Clark would have had no power over me.

  “Yes, that’s how you make a daughter,” said my father, following me across the room. “Is that why I’m so empty?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I should be in pieces by the road by now.”

  “I still need you.” I took my hand off the box and opened the lid, revealing a blue-eyed boy doll. He was dressed in trousers and a vest a hundred years out of date, and his face was painted in a way that subtly implied he had a
secret. I undid the ribbons holding him in place and gingerly picked him up. He weighed more than he should have for his size, and my hands shook as I held him out toward my father. “There are five of these in the world. That’s why you can’t go. If you break this one, there will only be four, and you’ll be one step closer to entering the Kingdom.”

  We doll makers were supposed to be at peace there, finally home among our own kind. We were supposed to be rewarded for the things that we had done while we pretended to be human. I didn’t know if that was true . . . but I knew that the humans lived for the promise of Heaven with much less proof of its existence than we had of the Kingdom.

  Pandora and Carlo Collodi had been real people, flesh-and-blood people. Pandora had carried a vase like a broken heart, meant to contain all the dangers of the world, both sweet and bitter. She had been tired from her wandering, from years on years of struggling to recapture the evils she had accidentally released. Carlo Collodi . . .

  He had wanted a daughter. Of such necessity are many strange bargains born.

  Father took the doll. I didn’t look away. This was on me; this was my fault, because I was doing this to him. I could have crafted my child as soon as it became clear that the vessel of Father’s thoughts had cracked. I could have set him free. I was the one who wasn’t willing to let him go.

  “Oh, my brave boy,” he murmured, cradling the doll in his hands. “Your name was Marcus, wasn’t it? Yes, Marcus, and you were a vessel for my anger. The world was so infuriating back then. . . . ” He raised the doll, pressing his lips against the cold porcelain forehead.

  It felt like the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees, the doorway to the Kingdom of the Cold swinging open and locking in place as all that Father had poured into that blue-eyed boy came surging out again, filling him. He stayed that way for almost a minute, lips pressed to porcelain, drinking himself back in one sip at a time. The chill remained in the air as Father lowered the doll, and the eyes he turned in my direction were sharp and clever, filled with the wisdom of two hundred years of making dolls to hold every imaginable emotion.