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

by Paula Guran

  “Jealousy,” said Shadow. “Just jealous of Moira and Cassie, even after Moira had left Cassie for him.”

  The man exhaled, shook his head. “Bloody hell,” he said. “Last bugger I’d expect to do anything like this. Needles! Leave it!” He pulled a cell phone from his pocket, and called the police. Then he excused himself. “I’ve got a bag of game to put aside until the police have cleared out,” he explained.

  Shadow got to his feet, and inspected his arms. His sweater and coat were both ripped in the left arm, as if by huge teeth, but his skin was unbroken beneath it. There was no blood on his clothes, no blood on his hands.

  He wondered what his corpse would have looked like, if the black dog had killed him.

  Cassie’s ghost stood beside him, and looked down at her body, half-fallen from the hole in the wall. The corpse’s fingertips and the fingernails were wrecked, Shadow observed, as if she had tried, in the hours or the days before she died, to dislodge the rocks of the wall.

  “Look at that,” she said, staring at herself. “Poor thing. Like a cat in a glass box.” Then she turned to Shadow. “I didn’t actually fancy you,” she said. “Not even a little bit. I’m not sorry. I just needed to get your attention.”

  “I know,” said Shadow. “I just wish I’d met you when you were alive. We could have been friends.”

  “I bet we would have been. It was hard in there. It’s good to be done with all of this. And I’m sorry, Mr. American. Try not to hate me.”

  Shadow’s eyes were watering. He wiped his eyes on his shirt. When he looked again, he was alone in the passageway.

  “I don’t hate you,” he told her.

  He felt a hand squeeze his hand. He walked outside, into the morning sunlight, and he breathed and shivered, and listened to the distant sirens.

  Two men arrived and carried Oliver off on a stretcher, down the hill to the road where an ambulance took him away, siren screaming to alert any sheep on the lanes that they should shuffle back to the grass verge.

  A female police officer turned up as the ambulance disappeared, accompanied by a younger male officer. They knew the landlord, whom Shadow was not surprised to learn was also a Scathelocke, and were both impressed by Cassie’s remains, to the point that the young male officer left the passageway and vomited into the ferns.

  If it occurred to either of them to inspect the other bricked-in cavities in the corridor, for evidence of centuries-old crimes, they managed to suppress the idea, and Shadow was not going to suggest it.

  He gave them a brief statement, then rode with them to the local police station, where he gave a fuller statement to a large police officer with a serious beard. The officer appeared mostly concerned that Shadow was provided with a mug of instant coffee, and that Shadow, as an American tourist, would not form a mistaken impression of rural England. “It’s not like this up here normally. It’s really quiet. Lovely place. I wouldn’t want you to think we were all like this.”

  Shadow assured him that he didn’t think that at all.

  VI

  The Riddle

  Moira was waiting for him when he came out of the police station. She was standing with a woman in her early sixties, who looked comfortable and reassuring, the sort of person you would want at your side in a crisis.

  “Shadow, this is Doreen. My sister.”

  Doreen shook hands, explaining she was sorry she hadn’t been able to be there during the last week, but she had been moving house.

  “Doreen’s a county court judge,” explained Moira.

  Shadow could not easily imagine this woman as a judge.

  “They are waiting for Ollie to come around,” said Moira. “Then they are going to charge him with murder.” She said it thoughtfully, but in the same way she would have asked Shadow where he thought she ought to plant some snapdragons.

  “And what are you going to do?”

  She scratched her nose. “I’m in shock. I have no idea what I’m doing anymore. I keep thinking about the last few years. Poor, poor Cassie. She never thought there was any malice in him.”

  “I never liked him,” said Doreen, and she sniffed. “Too full of facts for my liking, and he never knew when to stop talking. Just kept wittering on. Like he was trying to cover something up.”

  “Your backpack and your laundry are in Doreen’s car,” said Moira. “I thought we could give you a lift somewhere, if you needed one. Or if you want to get back to rambling, you can walk.”

  “Thank you,” said Shadow. He knew he would never be welcome in Moira’s little house, not anymore.

  Moira said, urgently, angrily, as if it was all she wanted to know, “You said you saw Cassie. You told us, yesterday. That was what sent Ollie off the deep end. It hurt me so much. Why did you say you’d seen her, if she was dead? You couldn’t have seen her.”

  Shadow had been wondering about that, while he had been giving his police statement. “Beats me,” he said. “I don’t believe in ghosts. Probably a local, playing some kind of game with the Yankee tourist.”

  Moira looked at him with fierce hazel eyes, as if she was trying to believe him but was unable to make the final leap of faith. Her sister reached down and held her hand. “More things in heaven and earth, Horatio. I think we should just leave it at that.”

  Moira looked at Shadow, unbelieving, angered, for a long time, before she took a deep breath and said, “Yes. Yes, I suppose we should.”

  There was silence in the car. Shadow wanted to apologize to Moira, to say something that would make things better.

  They drove past the gibbet tree.

  “There were ten tongues within one head,” recited Doreen, in a voice slightly higher and more formal than the one in which she had previously spoken. “And one went out to fetch some bread, to feed the living and the dead. That was a riddle written about this corner, and that tree.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “A wren made a nest inside the skull of a gibbeted corpse, flying in and out of the jaw to feed its young. In the midst of death, as it were, life just keeps on happening.” Shadow thought about the matter for a little while, and told her that he guessed that it probably did.

  Neil Gaiman is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, Anansi Boys, The Graveyard Book, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains; the Sandman series of graphic novels; and the story collections Smoke and Mirrors, Fragile Things, and Trigger Warning. He is the winner of numerous literary honors, including the Hugo, Bram Stoker, and World Fantasy awards, and the Newbery and Carnegie Medals. Originally from England, he now lives in the United States.

  In games, we know we’re not supposed to give up, not until we’ve won . . . We know that if we don’t give up, we’ll win. There’s always a solution. There’s always a way. That’s why games are great and this sucks.

  1UP

  Holly Black

  When people die, you just press a couple of buttons and bring them back to life. You reset the game. That’s how games work. Restore from your last save point. Restore from the beginning. Start over.

  Your people are never just gone.

  That’s what I think of as I look at the photograph of Soren resting on top of a coffin. His family is Jewish—well, other than his stepmother—so they don’t have open casket funerals. I’ve never been to a closed casket one before. I’m used to seeing the waxy faces of my dead relatives, made up with red lips and red cheeks, like they’re waiting for true love’s kiss to wake them. According to my phone, Jewish law prohibits embalming or removing any organs or doing anything but wrapping him in a shroud and putting him in the ground. That’s why we aren’t allowed to see him, I guess. He’d look too dead.

  I can’t help being sad, though. We’ve never met in person. And now, I guess we never will.

  In games, we know we’re not supposed to give up, not until we’ve won out against the big boss and the
credits start rolling across the screen. We know that if we don’t give up, we’ll win. There’s always a solution. There’s always a way. That’s why games are great and this sucks.

  Even as I listen to the rabbi talk, even as I watch Soren’s grandmother dab her rheumy eyes with Kleenex, even as I hear everyone say his nickname—Sorry Sorry Sorry—over and over, I can’t help trying to figure out how to fix this.

  Just last week, he sent me a message: YOU HAVE TO COME FOR THE FUNERAL. PROMISE ME. It was the first message I’d gotten from him in more than two weeks. Still, I messaged back that there wouldn’t be any funeral, that he was going to get better and we were going to meet up at PAX East in the winter like we’d all planned. But then there was the death notice. That’s why me and Decker and Toad met up in Jersey and made the drive down to Florida together.

  We’d never even met Soren in person, be we were still his three best friends in the whole world. Even if no one from his real life knows us.

  Black ribbons get torn and pinned onto mourners. After they lower the casket into the ground, dirt gets tossed, and we go over to his house to visit his family while they sit shiva.

  It’s mostly old people. A greying great-uncle with bristling nose hairs. A hysterically weeping second cousin. Aunts who run the coffee maker and take the plastic off trays of cold-cuts. Uncles who smoke outside with a girl who tells us she’s Sorry’s cousin, back from art school for the funeral. No one else talks to us.

  Sorry’s stepmother sits in the center of a sofa, her shoulders rigid as relatives comfort her, tell her what a wonderful nurse she was to Sorry those last months when things went from bad to worse, talk about her inner core of strength. Someone has given her a Styrofoam cup of coffee. I wonder if it’s hot. I wonder if the coffee is burning her hand and she hasn’t even noticed yet.

  Sorry’s father sits alone in a corner, looking at his phone. He’s wearing a black pin-striped suit with a paisley tie that looks more appropriate for a business meeting than burying a kid.

  We obviously didn’t know what to wear either. Decker dressed in a too-small black blazer over black jeans and a black T-shirt. He looks like he’s going to a concert.

  Toad is about what I expected from his avatars and message board signature. Big and shy with a small, untrimmed goatee that extends to his neck. He wears the same thing every day—jeans, funny/ironic nerd shirt and a flannel open over it. It doesn’t even occur to me he’s going to change for the funeral and he doesn’t.

  I’m in a black shirt dress that my mother lent me. It’s boring, which is apparently the point. I have on pantyhose too—medium brown, to match my legs—and my big clunky black boots. Mom told me I couldn’t wear boots to a funeral, but I left the pumps she loaned me in the trunk of Decker’s car. Maybe I shouldn’t have.

  None of us fit in at Sorry’s place. I can’t imagine Sorry fitting in here either—not the Sorry that we knew. Of course, he was sick for so long that maybe it didn’t matter.

  Three years, stuck in his bedroom, too ill to go to high school or do anything teenagers are supposed to do but play games and hang out online.

  Me and Decker and Toad drift toward that bedroom, not sure what else to do. We’ve never been there before, but we know it instantly by his posters of Resident Evil, Arkham City, Left 4 Dead, and Warcraft. We talk in hushed voices about how weird it is to be in his room for the first time.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have come,” Toad says.

  I sit down on his bed. “I know what you mean.”

  Decker flops on the plush carpet of the floor, resting his head against a plush alien chestburster.

  I can’t quite put my finger on what I think of Decker now that we’ve met in person. He’s some bizarre combination of cute and pretentious. He has a put-on British accent and insisted we navigated our way here with real maps, instead of just using the navigation on our cell phones. We got lost twice, until finally, Toad turned off the sound on his phone and pretended not to be looking at it.

  I wonder if Decker notices that I’m a girl. I wonder if he likes girls. Before Sorry died, we would sometimes send each other flirty messages, so maybe it’s not okay that I wonder that.

  Maybe it’s not okay that we’re going to have a long drive back and we’re going to argue about which Marvel movie they should make next and stop for junk food and fast food and we’re going to be sad about Soren, but happy that we went on a road trip together.

  My mom insists that my friendships online aren’t real. She says that until you meet someone in person, you don’t really know them. I don’t agree, but I think that belief is part of the reason she let me come on a three-day road trip with two boys. I’m supposed to call her every night at seven and text her three times a day, plus she spoke with Decker and Toad’s mothers before she agreed to let me come; I think she believes this is my one shot at having IRL friends before college.

  Sitting there, I wonder how I am supposed to feel. I cried when I first heard Sorry was dead, but I haven’t cried since. My eyes were dry when they lowered the coffin into the ground, even though I told Sorry things I never told anyone, things that I don’t know if I will tell anyone ever again.

  It just doesn’t seem real that he’s gone.

  It’s hard to cry when I my brain still can’t accept the truth.

  After a while, Toad turns on Sorry’s computer. “Lot of parental controls on this thing. And it’s not connecting to the internet.”

  “That sucks,” I say. I wonder if there’s something wrong with it. I wonder if that’s why he didn’t message us more or come online to game these last few weeks. I thought it was because he was tired from being sick, but the idea that we couldn’t be there for him—that I couldn’t be there for him near the end of his life—because of a stupid broken cable modem makes me want to punch something.

  Across from me a corner of one poster has peeled back, rolling up. I wonder if Sorry’s dad is going to box all this stuff up and put it in the attic. I wonder if his dad is going to box all this stuff up and just throw it out.

  Toad opens a few more things and types a little. “Weird,” he says, frowning at the screen.

  “What?” demands Decker from the floor.

  “I don’t know,” says Toad, rubbing his head. “Look.”

  He’s opened up a game on Sorry’s computer. It’s an interactive fiction game—what people used to call text games, like Zork—but not one I’ve ever seen before. But no matter what it is, Toad shouldn’t be messing around on his computer, opening his files and stuff.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “I was trying to find his password for Diamond Knights,” Toad says without missing a beat.

  “You were going to make him donate his whole inventory to one of your characters, weren’t you?” Decker says. “Asshole. We’re at his fucking funeral.”

  “I’m an asshole,” says Toad. “This is known. But I didn’t find his passwords, did I? I found this, right on the desktop. Look.”

  We crowd around the computer, peering at the screen.

  THE LAZARUS GAME by Soren Carp

  You are sad.

  >|

  “He wrote a game?” Decker says. “Did any of you guys know he wrote a game?”

  Toad shakes his head. “I didn’t even know he liked this kind of thing.”

  Neither did I. Interactive fiction games aren’t all that impressive to look at. They’re just blocks of text with a blinking cursor after, waiting for you to make the right choice—the clever command—that will unlock the rest of the story. They used to be made and sold by big companies, but they don’t make enough money for that anymore. Now they’re pretty much just made by the people who love them.

  “Look around,” I say. “Type in ‘L’ for ‘look.’ ”

  He does.

  You are wearing black, standing in a kid’s bedroom. There are nerdy posters on the walls and nerdy stuff all around you. One of the posters is curled up at one corner and you think you might
be able to see writing on the other side.

  >|

  The poster I was looking at just a moment before.

  I slide off the bed while the other two are still staring at the screen. I gently pull the poster free of the blue sticky stuff adhering it at three out of four points. Then I turn it over.

  The back has been written on in Sharpie.

  YOU HAVE FIVE HOURS TO WIN.

  THE CLOCK STARTED WHEN I WENT IN THE GROUND.

  GRAB THE FLASH DRIVE AND GO.

  GO NOW BEFORE SHE FINDS YOU.

  My heart starts hammering in my chest. Decker starts to roll up the poster.

  “What are you doing?” Toad says. “They’ll notice it’s gone.”

  “So what?” Decker keeps rolling, crinkling the poster in his haste. “So they think we’re poster thieves.”

  “Where’s the flash drive?” I demand. “We need to find the flash drive.”

  “No, wait, this doesn’t make sense.” Toad looks around the room, like he’s wondering if there’s going to be some kind of hidden camera.

  I go over to the desk, ignoring Toad. Loose change, breath mints, paperbacks, nerdy toys (including a figurine I sent him of a brown-skinned manga girl I wanted him to think looked like me), and a Hot Wheels car that had clearly been modified so that a USB connection stuck out of its rear bumper.

  “Got it,” I say, picking up the car.

  “Wait,” Toad says and I pause. “Shouldn’t we check what’s on it first?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Decker says. He tries to push open the window—I guess so we can slip out in the most criminal way possible—but it doesn’t budge. Toad turns off the computer.

  I shove the flash drive in the pocket of my dress. As I am shutting the desk drawer, the door to the room opens.

  Sorry’s stepmother is standing in the hall, a startled smile pulling at her face. “What are you three doing in here?” she asks.

  “We just—” I start, but I don’t know what to say. This is the exact kind of situation that I’m bad at. This is why I started staying inside and talking to people over the internet in the first place. My tongue feels heavy in my mouth. I want to crawl deep in my clothes, curl up, and hide.