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

by Paula Guran

  Georgina took a deep breath. “ ‘Cult-followers believed that God had bestowed upon them the power to return the dead to life. When an untimely death occurred in the community, church pastors and town elders would quickly perform a ritual to prevent the soul from leaving the dead person’s body, holding it in a state of “limbo” until the more elaborate resurrection ritual—often involving a simulated burial and rebirth—could be performed. Although resurrection rituals varied, all cults of universal resurrection held the dung beetle—famously worshipped by ancient Egyptians for similar reasons—in high symbolic standing, as the insect’s eggs emerge from a ball of its waste. Rather than Christ the divine worm, cultists worshipped Christ . . . ’ ”

  “Christ the divine scarab,” I finished. Yes, I had learned that line in Sunday school, along with God bestows the gift of life unto those who have faith, and yes, we hung scarabs on our Christmas tree, but only as a reminder that God was all-giving and we were His life-possessing children, and I had no idea what that had to do with bringing people back from the fucking dead.

  “So? What happened to them?”

  “ ‘During the Great Evangelical Revival, they were mostly pressured to convert to mainstream Christianity.’ ” A fingernail scraped a page. Something tore inside me. “Mostly.”

  I left school after my freshman year. There didn’t seem to be much point in staying. I went into the city, because I couldn’t go home—not to that town full of the walking dead. Not to Pastor Joel and whatever he had done to us on the night of the gas leak. Not to my parents. Before I burned their pictures I would search their frozen smiles for some sign, some hollowness, some fakery, some deadness in their eyes. Depending on how much time I’d spent with Brother Whiskey and Sister Vodka, I sometimes found it, sometimes didn’t. Regardless, I took their money—I had to, what with the economy and the price of liquor. They sent me Christmas cards with green-and-gold scarabs on them, and on the off chance that they had the right address I burned those cards along with a lock of my poisoned bleached hair, because Lily Twining said she was a witch and that was how you severed family ties. “Doesn’t purify your blood, though,” Lily warned me, cigarette jammed between her teeth. “Believe me, I’ve tried.”

  When I was twenty-three my Aunt Rose, wife to Uncle Ben the asshole, died of a stroke. My parents picked me up at the bus station with glassy eyes and the old red pickup, and oh how I longed to slide back into a gentler, dumber time when I could simply be their daughter, Amanda Stone, twenty-three years old. It did not work. Memento mori. I remembered.

  Things had changed in Hartbury. My favorite Italian restaurant on Church Street had gone out of business, replaced by a plasma donation center. Everyone looked like ghouls, the skeletons that we all should have turned to grinning through their sagging skin. And a new dog—a black and white spaniel—came bounding off the porch. “Where’s Violet?” I asked.

  “Violet died last year,” said my mother, without a hint of sadness in her voice.

  “Life is cheap,” I replied, rubbing New Dog behind its ears.

  My parents didn’t know what was happening to me. They were frightened by my tattoos: a black outline of my sternum where Miss Lucy poked me, followed by three black ribs on each side. They were worried about Brother Whiskey and Sister Vodka, not realizing that those two had seen me through a lot of darkness. They were embarrassed by how I behaved at Aunt Rose’s funeral. They didn’t understand why Pastor Joel’s numb routine of O death, where is thy sting? and O grave, where is thy victory? made me hysterical with terror and laughter. I went to Manfield on my final night in town, and took New Dog with me—like Violet, this mutt had immediately adopted me, apparently willing to overlook the question of whether or not I was undead. I said I was going to see a friend, as in Hello darkness, my old friend, and my mother asked if I was going to see Allie Felici and her new baby. “Sure,” I said, and slammed the screen door.

  Manfield looked beaten-up. Windows had been broken into, storefronts had been tagged with unimaginative graffiti—a reversed pentagram here, a FOREVER LOVE there. Another car with an unfamiliar set of self-indulgent high school stickers was already parked at the mouth of the main street, and it didn’t take me and New Dog long to find the occupants trudging along in the half-light, posing for pictures while making stretched-out corpse-faces. We crept behind at a safe distance, New Dog and I, just close enough to hear the sharp edges of words.

  “You hear about that other town that got hit with the same stuff, except nobody died?”

  “Why? They closed their windows?”

  “No, joker. Look, my mom was a 911 operator. They got so many calls from Hartbury that she thought the whole town was toast, just like Manfield. But when the rescue workers got there, freaking Hartbury just closed up and told them to go home, said everything was fine.”

  At Aunt Ruth’s funeral, my father told me that I had no respect for the life this town gave me. I said that he had no respect for death. I said that if he respected life so much then why didn’t he just dig up Aunt Ruth and bring her back? His face collapsed like a withered orange. “Aunt Ruth was ready to go,” he said. I flailed out of his grasp like a wildcat. I ran to the parking lot over the graves of strangers who had decided to stay dead, under the watchful eye of the great green stained-glass scarab in the window of the church. But I am a scarab, and no man.

  It sounds romantic when you first hear it: seven minutes in heaven, seven minutes for your soul to board its tiny interstellar ship and set the coordinates for God. Seven minutes for you to change your mind. But that time is spent in nothing but the dark. The empty. Just like underneath Manfield’s carefully preserved skin, behind the Ram’s Head Tavern sign forever creaking in the wind, there’s nothing but gas masks and body bags.

  The world was changing, very fast. I had stolen food out of children’s mouths, helped a man I loved pilfer from plague corpses, thanked God I wasn’t pregnant because I didn’t want a calcified stone baby at the bottom of my stomach. I’d seen a lot of skeletons, but only on a cross-country bus in the dead of summer did my own return to me—howling, ushered in by smoke. Its bones were just as coarse as I remembered, but its agony was so much deeper, that much richer. My skeleton had grown up. That time, I let it win. I unclenched my fists and let go. I let God.

  I woke up when we stopped to let new passengers barter their way on in exchange for gas. Outside my window, one man was beating another to death for whatever the dead man had in his bag—soldiers who couldn’t have been older than fifteen ran off the survivor, the killer. I might have tried to see what I could salvage from the dead one, as ghouls go after corpses, but was interrupted by an old man on the other side of the aisle with rotting teeth and a black fedora. He called me young lady, though I felt like I’d lived forever, and asked where I was from.

  It was a question I hated answering. Sometimes I named the state. Sometimes I lied. Sometimes I said something crazy—“outer space” or “Hell” or “beyond.” That time I told the truth. Memento mori—the skeleton made me. I told him about Hartbury, about the harvest festival. I told him about Seven Minutes in Heaven. I told him about playing dead—laying frozen in time in a bed of fallen leaves, waiting for someone to pluck you back to life.

  “Can I tell you a secret? I died there.” The shadows of nearly all my bones were tattooed across my body—I wanted to command the world to pay witness to my death. “I’ve died.”

  The old man grinned and wiggled deeper into his suit, as if he and I and every other loser on that bus were buckled into a fantastic Stairway to Heaven. “Join the club, living dead girl.”

  The third time I went to Manfield, I was thirty-four. I walked, because my sponsor was big on cold night walks with a backpack filled with stones, to symbolize the burdens we all carry in our Pilgrim’s Progress. I was alone, save for the county dogs that smiled at me with bloody gums as they trotted up and down the cracked remains of the interstate. New Dog, whose name turned out to be Buttons, had been hit
by a car on Highway 51. I invited my parents, but they frowned sadly and wondered why on Earth I’d want to go. “That’s a dead town,” they said.

  How strange I must have always seemed to them. They must have spent my life blaming themselves for my choices, wondering why I wasn’t more like sweet little Jennifer Trudeau, who had her head wrenched off in a freak accident with an ice cream truck. Seven minutes in heaven can’t undo that kind of fatality. “It’s peaceful there,” I said.

  So it was. There was a stillness in Manfield that you couldn’t find in Hartbury, because when the blanket of death came for us we kicked it off. and were left naked and shivering in the world. But in Manfield there was grass carpeting what had once been the sidewalk, vines crawling up Ram’s Head Tavern, rabbits nesting in the seats of long-gone drivers. Rehab always stressed peace in our time—there are some dragons you must appease, my sponsor said, because there’s no fighting them. And truth’s one such dragon.

  A new flock of teenagers had landed in Manfield. Two girls, three boys, all on crippled bicycles whose parts had been cannibalized for the war effort. I hid behind a termite-eaten column as they wobbled past.

  “You know this place is haunted. My older brother knew a guy who went up here on a dare and saw a ghost . . . a girl with a dog. One of them red-eyed demon hellhounds.” In hiding, I smiled. Buttons was going to live forever. “I think that guy got deployed.” As had Brandon Beck, his perfect hair shorn down to the scalp before he left for the front. The town used to hold candlelight vigils for his never-recovered body, before his parents passed and so many others followed in his footsteps. “I think he’s dead.”

  Everyone was dead; everyone was alive. A fighter jet roared overhead, right on time for its appointment with the grim reaper. The teenagers stopped their pedaling to watch the angel pass and I took the occasion to run silent and deep, head down, fire in the belly.

  Nadia Bulkin writes scary stories about the scary world we live in. It took her two tries to leave Nebraska, but she has lived in Washington, D.C. for four years now, tending her garden of student debt sowed by two political science degrees. In 2015, she had stories in the Aickman’s Heirs, Cassilda’s Song, and She Walks in Shadows anthologies. Nadiabulkin.wordpress.com will keep you up to date.

  “The darkness, the closeness of the place! I can scarce describe it . . . The suffocating loneliness, the density of the forest. You couldn’t see more than five yards in any direction. It weighed on you.”

  THOSE

  Sofia Samatar

  “ . . . how is this nonsense possible, that the enemies of Kush are copies of the Kushite enemies of Pharaonic Egypt?”

  —L. Török, Kush and the External World

  Sarah sets the kettle on the hob. She bends and fans the fire, her face aglow for a moment, molten bronze. When she stands up, her color fades in the gloom of the little house with its high windows, that house built like a ship. Tight and trim as a yacht stands the little house, the wind beats hard against the high windows, and Sarah’s father with a blanket over his knees, her father the old seafarer with a black-bordered card grasped tight in one hand, draws his chair to the fire and clears his throat.

  “Poor George, poor George! Well, he would keep his vow, he said; and so he has; we shall never meet again in this life. Poor fellow! Listen, my girl, when you go out, just stop by the Widow Cobb’s, you know the place, at the end of the lane, and see if she has any lilies. We’ll send them over to George’s poor wife. It’s kind of her to remember me after all these years—‘remember’ in a manner of speaking—we never met. George must have spoken of me to her, and kept my address among his papers . . . my God, Sally, but Man is a curious beast!

  “I’ll tell you a strange thing. The first time I was struck by the mystery that is Man, this same George Barnes, whose death has just been announced, was at my side. It was in the Sudan, at Meroe, and the two of us were making our way north to Cairo for a bit of a holiday. We were young and hardy then, but even so, our recent misadventures in the forests had brought us both down—George was so green about the gills, he was practically silver—and we longed for entertainment and pleasure. There was little of either in the dusty villages we passed on our way up the Nile, but the tombs of Meroe promised a diversion. At the time, I considered myself an amateur archaeologist, and it was with great excitement that I packed our Spartan picnic of bread and dried fish. There was also a jug of the native beer called merissa, which George wrapped in a towel as if it had been an infant. I can still see him astride his donkey, his long legs dangling comically on either side, his head swathed in a turban of blinding whiteness . . .

  “He was a child, you know. Little more than a child. His father, whom George described as a ‘holy terror,’ had sent him to sea at the age of twelve, and George, whose nose had been permanently flattened by the fist of this same father, had set off gladly enough. The sea washed him to and fro for a number of years, with its cruelties and privations, the worst of them brought about by the men he served on ship after ship—for sea life is unkind to the small and weak, as I know from experience, though I was twenty when I left home for the waves. I was twenty, and tall, and broad, and George was a slip of a creature with gingery hair, and when we met years later in the Congo forest, natives of the same city, employees at the same plantation, I was thirty and solid as an anvil, and George, though the same age, was still a child. Was it because he’d been robbed of his childhood? Perhaps some men never grow old. What pleasure he took in our excursion to the tombs! He named his donkey Annabelle. He could whistle like a lark—it was his crooked teeth, he said. To think that George, even young George, is dead.”

  The kettle sings. Sarah takes it off the fire and brews the tea. Soft steam, loamy fragrance, while the wind blows. She fetches her father’s pipe from the shelf and helps him to light it. He grunts his thanks, a hollow rumble deep in his wintry throat. She takes the black-bordered card from his hand and reads it beneath a window. If there are lilies, she will take them to this address. She knows the street, a poor but respectable street much like her own. It’s near the Free Church—a building Sarah has passed often, but never entered. Once a young woman stopped her and gave her a pamphlet about that church, a dark and quiet woman with startling liquid eyes . . . The address on the card is just beyond there, not more than a few doors down. She’ll wear her large bonnet. She’ll knock at the kitchen door.

  “Good afternoon, ma’am. Lilies. For the funeral.”

  For a moment, she will look into the woman’s face. Perhaps she’ll catch it before the expression twists, before it becomes like all the others, molded by the same stamp, indistinguishable. Part of the fog.

  “Thank you, my dear. Would you help—just a little closer—yes, now I feel the warmth at last. I shan’t scorch my beard, don’t worry! Now George, as I was telling you . . . George who’s laid in a box, God rest him! I suppose it ought to make us grateful we can still feel the nip of this blasted autumn . . . George was a merry lad, for all he’d been kicked about the globe like a stone in an alley. Down where we worked, at the teak plantation, the natives gave him a name I can’t pronounce—your poor mother could tell you, if she weren’t in Heaven—but it meant, as far as I understood it, a type of squirrel. And he was just like that, a gingery leaping squirrel with keen black eyes. I remember once at Christmas, when we were invited to dine with the plantation owner, Vermeiren, a bloodless Belgian with fangs like a mastiff, he had a bit of fun with George over that nickname. ‘You do realize,’ he drawled, ‘that the natives eat these squirrels?’

  “ ‘Ha, ha! They are funny fellows,’ laughed George.

  “I laughed too, as would any man who had lived all year on millet porridge, and now found himself at the Belgian’s table facing a guinea fowl poached in French wine. I laughed, I tell you; I opened my mouth and howled.

  “Vermeiren showed his fangs. ‘Oh yes,’ he went on softly (and George and I both cut our laughter off short, so as not to drown him out), ‘that little
animal is quite popular with our dusky friends. Its stomach, I have been told, is full of oil. They prick the stomach—so!—collect the oil, and serve it to the chief.’

  “When he said ‘So!’, he poked his finger in the air, toward George’s midriff. His nail was long and yellow, his hand elegant and, for the tropics, marvelously clean. I noticed George turn pale, and felt a little unsteady myself.

  “ ‘They eat all sorts of disgusting things,’ said George, with an effort. ‘Monkeys. Grubs.’

  “ ‘So they do!’ answered Vermeiren, with ghastly cheer. He addressed himself to his fowl, sawing his knife against the plate, red wine sauce mingling bloodily with the cassava that served us for potatoes. ‘And men, of course!’ he went on. ‘You will have noticed how they file their teeth. Personally I would find it perturbing to have the name of a squirrel. I would find it most unlucky to have this name. As for me, they call me One Gun. Because of my Juliette. This satisfies me.’

  “He pricked up a quivering, reddish bit of meat with his fork, and motioned with his eyes toward the rifle hanging on the wall. This was his hunting gun, called ‘Juliette,’ after his wife, who resided at Marseilles, where, to judge from his furnishings, she embroidered quantities of tablecloths.

  “I do not know why the Belgian chose to rattle George in this manner. Perhaps he was trying, in his rough way, to put some backbone into the lad: for George was Vermeiren’s overseer, charged with ensuring the productivity of the farm, and meting out punishment as required. In the early days of our employment, Vermeiren had often grumbled that George was too soft. On one occasion, I recall, the Belgian had brought forward, as evidence, a recently disciplined native called Francisco, and, exposing the native’s back crisscrossed with small welts, demanded if this was what George called lashes? George protested that he had lashed the black soundly, as anyone could see, and Vermeiren retorted that a native’s back was as insensible as teak, certainly impervious to George’s paltry strokes, and that if George dared shirk again, he would be taught a lesson in lashing upon his own person. So perhaps Vermeiren’s mockery that Christmas was meant to strengthen George’s arm. If so, it was hardly necessary, for George had taken his earlier lesson to heart, and routinely exhausted himself in his exertions with the whip, even putting the same Francisco—apparently an habitual malingerer—into the infirmary at the Catholic Mission.