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

by Paula Guran

  Her gaze goes to the wall where there isn’t a poster anymore, and then to the drawer she saw me close. Her expression sharpens and she stops smiling. “Who are you?”

  “We’re Soren’s friends,” Decker says.

  “None of you ever visited here before.” After a moment of silence, she steps back from the doorway and continues in her brusque voice. “I am going to ask you to leave. Now. We’re all very upset and whatever you’re doing—we don’t have time for it. Be glad I don’t have the energy to pursue this further.”

  “Sorry,” Toad says, sliding past her into the hall, head down. I follow him, unable to do anything else. I feel shamed, even though I know we weren’t doing anything wrong. Sorry made us promise to come. Sorry left us the flash drive. He wrote a message just for us: go now before she finds you.

  Out in the hall, I feel like a coward.

  Decker is standing in the middle of the room, staring at Sorry’s stepmother, eyes blazing. He looks like he’s trying to swallow words before they crawl out of his mouth.

  “Come on,” I say.

  Finally Decker makes a motion like he’s zipping his lips closed and swings toward us. I keep glancing back to make sure he stays with us and as I do, my gaze falls on something I didn’t notice before. There’s a lock on Sorry’s door—a brass dead latch—on the wrong side. The side that would have locked Sorry in.

  My head starts to pound and I can feel the sweat under my armpits. As I walk out the door, my gaze sweeps over the black-clad people in the living room.

  It occurs to me that maybe Sorry was sure he was going to die because he thought that someone was about to murder him.

  We get back in Decker’s car—a beat-up Impala with inside upholstery held together mostly with duct tape. We don’t speak. Decker starts the engine and drives in what appears to be a random direction.

  Finally, after long minutes of silence, Toad says, “I’m sorry. I freaked out.”

  Decker says, “I wanted to punch that bitch in the face.”

  And I say, “We need to see whatever is on that flash drive.”

  A few minutes later, Toad and I are on our smart phones, trying to find a place with internet that also serves food. There’s not a lot of choices, but there’s always Starbucks. We head to the nearest one. This time Decker doesn’t say anything about us navigating with our phones.

  We all have laptops, but there’s only one free outlet, so I pull out my MacBook Pro and Decker and Toad crowd around. My laptop is covered in stickers; just the familiar sight of them makes me feel better. I flip open the case, type in my password and shove the flash drive into the USB.

  The game starts up again.

  Words appear on the screen of my computer.

  You are sad.

  >|

  I type in “L” again.

  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 text on the other side.

  >|

  I try something else this time. Why am I sad? I type.

  Some guy you know from the internet is dead.

  >|

  I raise my eyebrows and look at Toad and Decker. Sorry had clearly intended us to find this, just the way we did, but why? X poster, I type, “x” being standard shorthand for examine.

  The back of the poster looks like a crazy person has written it on. It seems to indicate that you have a deadline to complete this game. I guess you’d better hurry.

  >|

  Decker raises his eyebrows. “I don’t like this. I don’t like anything about this.”

  “What do I do next?” I ask them.

  “Take the flash drive from his desk,” says Toad. “I mean, that’s what we really did, right?”Right,” I say, my fingers on the keys.

  You’ve already taken it or you wouldn’t be playing this.

  >|

  “I don’t think there’s anything else here. Exit the room,” Decker says, blowing out a frustrated breath.

  Toad stands up, heading toward the counter. “I need cake for this,” he says. “And caffeine.”

  “Good idea,” says Decker, reaching into his pocket for wadded up cash. “Get me a latte. And get Cat . . . what do you want, Cat?”

  “Cappuccino with a lot of extra shots,” I say and start typing to exit the room in the game.

  You are in the living room. More sad people wearing black. One of them isn’t as sad as she seems, however.

  >|

  Talk to Sorry’s Stepmother, I type without anyone needing to suggest it.

  What would you like to ask her? Type the number to ask the question or type “X” to say nothing.

  1. Do you still have your MasterCard?

  2. How come you tried to murder your stepson?

  3. How come Sorry’s father is never home anymore?

  4. Did something happen three weeks ago?

  5. Are you a diabetic?

  >|

  I turn the computer so Decker can see the screen. Toad comes back with our order. His pink and white piece of cake is enormous.

  “Uh, two, obviously,” Toad says, taking a big bite of it.

  Sorry’s stepmother looks at you like you’re a worm stranded in a puddle after rain.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she says. “Surely if I did that there would be proof. Surely someone would have noticed. Just because he got sick a few months after I married Aaron and then got progressively sicker until he died, just because I was in sole control of his care, just because I love the attention I get when he’s unwell, just because I locked him in his room and disconnected his cable modem three months before he died, none of that means anything.”

  >|

  “Do you think that’s what his game is? The proof?” Decker says, between swigs of latte. “Are we supposed to take his game to the police?”

  “Then why would we need to play quickly?” I shake my head.

  “Maybe his stepmother’s going to destroy evidence,” Toad replies. “Maybe the game is going to tell us how to stop her.”

  “Then why doesn’t it?” I ask, frustrated and sick to my stomach. All those times we chatted and he never said a thing—not one single thing about what was going on. “Why not just spell it out? Why all of this?”

  “I think he made the game for us,” Decker says. “His stepmother wouldn’t understand it, but we would. I don’t think there is any proof. I think he just wanted somebody to know.”

  The idea of that being true is awful. “Why not tell us in chat?”

  Decker shrugs.

  “Remember what I said about the parental controls?” Toad said. “I bet she was tracking what he said.”

  I type talk to Sorry’s stepmother again. I pick number three.

  Sorry’s stepmother gives you a kindly smile.

  “You have to understand how hard it is to have a sick son and not be able to do anything to help him. I think he thought it was easier to concentrate on his work.”

  >|

  No real information there.

  I go through the options again and ask about the diabetes.

  Sorry’s stepmother looks surprised.

  “Is this about all the insulin I ordered from Canada? That was for my cat! What cat? Oh, she’s around here somewhere.”

  >|

  Disturbing.

  My next question is about what happened three weeks ago although I am not sure I can bear knowing.

  Sorry’s stepmother actually looks troubled.

  “You should have seen the expression on his face when I came into the hospital room. He’d been feeling better that day and I guess he’d seen me inject something into the bag attached to his drip. It was just vitamins, but I think he—well, never mind. I was bringing him green Jello. He looked at me and it was like he was seeing me for the first time.”

  >|

  I go through the options one more time and choose the only one
left, the question about her credit card.

  Sorry’s stepmother looks surprised.

  “Do you know something about those fraudulent charges? I swear I never ordered tetrodotoxin. I don’t even know what that is.”

  >|

  “What’s with the tetro-whatever?” Decker eats a piece of the strawberry cake Toad procured and takes another sip of his latte. “Is that what she killed him with?”

  I open up my browser, log into the internet, and search for tetrodotoxin. I frown at the screen. “It’s some kind of toad neurotoxin. Poisonous.”

  “But what about the insulin?” Toad asks. “I don’t get this. Which one did she use? Does he not know? Are we supposed to figure it out, like in a murder mystery? Doesn’t Sorry remember how dumb we are? He’s got to just spell shit out.”

  “Yeah,” I say, barely paying attention. Typing words in the game is enough like chatting to Sorry online that it allows me to—almost—pretend he’s not dead. And yet, the whole game is a reminder that he is.

  The Lazarus Game. I guess this is Sorry’s way of rising from the grave to name his murderer.

  Find proof, I type in, but the game doesn’t seem to know what I am looking for.

  Go to dining room, I type in. It still doesn’t know what I am looking for.

  Go to kitchen, I type. Still, nothing.

  Go to funeral home, I type, which seems grim. I’m almost relieved when it doesn’t work.

  Exit house, I type. Finally, this time I get something else, a menu of options.

  You are standing outside on the patchy lawn in front of Sorry’s house. Cars are parked out front, like there’s a party going on inside, although you know it’s a pretty grim party. It’s afternoon and the Florida sun is beating down mercilessly. You’re starting to sweat.

  Where would you like to go? Type the number to travel or type “x” to stay where you are.

  1. The Police Station

  2. The Hospital

  3. The Graveyard

  4. The Hardware Store

  >|

  “What the hell?” I say. “The hardware store?”

  Toad and Decker had started discussing something in low voices, but stopped abruptly when I spoke. They both leaned in to look at the screen.

  Toad whistles. “I can’t believe you think having the option of going to the hardware store is worse than going to the graveyard.”

  “Uh,” Decker said, blinking at the screen a few times. “Can you google that toad poison again?”

  “How come?” I ask.

  Instead of answering, he opens his bag and pulls out his own laptop. “Spell it?”

  I do and he starts clicking. After a few minutes, his face goes blank, then an expression of horror flashes across it. I can’t even fathom what he could have found. What’s worse than being poisoned by your own stepmother? In fairy tales, stepmothers are wicked, jealous, untrustworthy bitches with poisoned apples, but my mom remarried six years ago, so I am pretty sure not all stepparents are like that. My stepdad drops me off at school most mornings. Some days we get coffees and donuts and sit in the parking lot eating them until the bell rings, just talking. I couldn’t imagine him wanting to hurt me. But I guess Sorry’s stepmother seemed nice too, until she didn’t.

  “I think you better look at this,” Decker says, turning his computer and pointing to the screen. “Read that part.”

  I look where he’s pointing. There were cases of people being given tetrodotoxin and seeming to die, but actually being in a state of near-death, conscious the whole time. For a while, it was even alleged that tetrodotoxin was an essential ingredient to brainwash people into thinking they were zombies.

  “Now read this part,” he says and pulls up another window. It has the amount of time a person can last with the air in a coffin. Five and a half hours.

  “Fuck you,” I say. “He’s dead. We saw him buried.”

  But I am thinking of the message he left for us on the back of the poster. The one with the time limit we didn’t understand.

  YOU HAVE FIVE HOURS TO WIN.

  THE CLOCK STARTED WHEN I WENT IN THE GROUND.

  And I think about the options of places to go—the police station where we could report his stepmother (if we had proof) for making him sick, the hospital where we could go to try to find that proof and might stumble on something else, something that would send us to the hardware store and then the graveyard.

  The graveyard.

  Decker snorts. “But if he faked his own death then he’d have to seem—”

  “Whoa,” says Toad, interrupting him. “What? Faked his own death? Both of you need to stop communicating brain-to-brain and spell things out for me.”

  “No,” I say, standing up and jerking my power cord out of the wall. “We need to go. We need to go now!”

  We get to the graveyard just as the sun is starting to set. The sky is shimmering with gold, gleaming on our Home Depot shovels in the backseat. I feel like we’re on a real adventure, the kind that people in real life don’t go on. This is the kind of thing that only happens in video games and right now, I get why. No one in real life would ever want to feel like this.

  I am scared we’re going to be arrested and I am terrified of what we’re going to find inside his casket. We get out. We get our brand-new shovels.

  The dirt is fresh, easy to scoop. My heart is hammering.

  We’re awkward at first, none of us used to this kind of physical work. We’re the kids who spend our free time in front of our computers. We’re the kids whose moms are always going on about “needing fresh air and vitamin D.” My arms hurt and I don’t know how to swing the dirt away in the right rhythm. We smack our shovels into one another’s more often than not, sometimes hard enough to sting my hand. Still, we keep going.

  “What if he comes back as a zombie?” Toad asks.

  I give him a look.

  “It could happen! He’s using some kind of zombie drug and we don’t know what else is in his system. This is how outbreaks happen.”

  I just keep digging. Decker shakes his head.

  Sweat rolls down my neck. I keep hearing the noises of cars going by in the distance and nearly jumping out of my skin.

  “Okay, well, what if he’s not awake yet?” Toad asks. I realize that he’s talking to talk, that it’s his way of managing his nerves. It’s funny, on the drive down he was quiet and I figured that was how he normally was. But robbing a graveyard turned him into a chatterbox. “Like, we know this stuff wears off, but how long does it take? And won’t he look dead until then? How are we going to get him out of here if he looks dead? I don’t want to touch him if he’s like that.”

  “Let’s just try not to get arrested,” Decker says quietly. “I heard Florida jails are no joke.”

  “My mom will kill me if I get picked up by the cops for messing with a grave,” I say and Decker laughs.

  For a moment, it occurs to me that this is crazy. That maybe my mother is right about friendship, because I do feel differently about Decker and Toad now that we’ve been together in real life. Now that we’ve heard the timbre of one another’s laughter. Now that we’ve learned one another’s Starbucks order and how we like our burritos at Chipotle and who can burp the loudest. Now that I learned how far they were willing to go for someone they never met. After all of this, it makes me realize that we didn’t know Sorry at all.

  We’re putting ourselves in the way of a whole lot of trouble for someone we’ve never met.

  Then my shovel hits wood.

  “Sorry?” Toad calls softly. His voice shakes.

  But either Sorry can’t hear us or he can’t reply, because there’s no sound but traffic from the nearby road and wind ruffling the thick leaves of the nearby palms.

  Squatting down, we start to clear dirt so that we can open the casket itself. By now, I am one big ball of sweat and my mother’s dress is caked in dirt. My stockings ripped at the knee without my even noticing.

  As I move earth, I have
these moments of total immersion in what I’m doing and these other moments where I am totally aware that this is a crazy thing to be doing and I must be crazy for doing it.

  Then the casket is cleared and there’s no way to avoid our real purpose. We’re going to open up a coffin and it’s possible we’re going to see a corpse. In fact, as we get ready to wedge open the wood with our Home Depot crowbar, even though I know exactly why we decided to do this, it seems inconceivable to me that we’re going to see anything but a corpse.

  “Get back,” Toad says, wedging the crowbar under the lid. We give him some space.

  And then, with a splintering sound, the lid is off and I am seeing Soren Carp in the flesh for the first time. His eyes are closed, long black lashes sweeping his cheeks. His hair is kind of a mess and he’s wrapped in linen. He looks pale, his lips tinted blue.

  “He sure doesn’t smell dead,” Toad says.

  And even though it sounds rude coming out of his mouth, it’s a relief that it’s true. There is no scent of rot blooming in the air.

  “We’ve got to call 911,” Decker says, looking down at Soren’s face. “He poisoned himself. He could still die.”

  I shake my head. “We can’t. If he’s in a hospital, his parents would get notified.”

  His stepmother was his guardian, the one who’d been making all his medical decisions. We had no legal right to make any decisions and, in fact, the police would probably take us away for questioning. They might not even really listen to what we were saying until it was too late.

  “We should have played the rest of the game,” Toad says. “I thought it was stupid that we could go to all those places, but we probably should have figured out what he wanted us to do.”

  Decker goes down on one knee next to Sorry’s body. “What do you want us to do, buddy?” he whispers.

  I almost expect Sorry to get up and tell us, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t move at all.

  Toad turns in my direction. “Say something to him.”

  “Me?” I edge over to the casket. “What should I say?”

  Toad clears his throat. “He liked you.”

  I am too surprised to know how to respond.