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

by Paula Guran

Panic rose in my chest. “What about you?”

  “I’m going to do what I should’ve done a long time ago.” She showed me the paring knife in her back pocket and then pulled her baggy sweater back over it. It must’ve been all she had time to grab. “I won’t be far behind you.”

  “What if you’re not?”

  “Don’t ask stupid questions,” she paused, “I’m sorry for not being stronger. I’m sorry for not getting you away from here.”

  “Kathy,” Kenny’s voice boomed from the corridor, “time for bed.”

  After she left I heard the key turn in the lock.

  I went through the drawers and wardrobe. Kenny had filled them with clothes. I didn’t want to touch anything that had come from him. There was nothing that I could use as a weapon or to help me escape.

  I’d not changed since the time I’d bitten Jade. I lay down, trying to slow my breathing and concentrate. Nothing happened. The silence filled my mind along with all the things he would be doing to Kathy.

  I dozed, somewhere towards early morning, wakening frequently in the unfamiliar room. I missed Tallulah beside me in the bed we’d shared since childhood. I missed her warmth and tangle of hair.

  When Kenny let me out it was late afternoon.

  “Where’s my mum?”

  “Down here.”

  There was a chest freezer in the basement. Kenny lifted the lid. Kathy was inside, frozen in a slumped position, arms crossed over her middle. Frozen blood glittered on the gash in her head and frosted one side of her face.

  Kenny put his hand on my shoulder like we were mourners at a wake. I should’ve been kicking and screaming, but I was as frozen as she was.

  One of Kathy’s wrists was contorted at an unnatural angle.

  “She betrayed me. I always knew it, in my heart.” He shut the lid. “Now it’s just you and me, kid.”

  He took me up through the house, to the room at the back with the double doors. There were dozens of tanks that cast a glow. Some contained a single serpent, others several that were coiled together like heaps of intestines.

  “My beauties. I’ll start breeding them.”

  There were corn snakes, ball pythons, ribbon snakes—though I had no names for them back then—all of which make good pets. I stopped at one tank. He had a broad head with a blunted snout.

  “Ah, meet Shankly.” Kenny put his hand against the glass. “He was hard to come by. They’re called cottonmouths because they open their mouths so wide to show their fangs that you see all the white lining inside.”

  The cottonmouth must have been young. I remember his olive green color and the clear banded pattern on his back, which he would lose as he got older.

  “Are you special, Kathy?”

  “I’m Lola.”

  “Yes, of course you are. Are you like me?”

  “I’m nothing like you. Leave me alone.”

  “I’ll look after you. Like you’re a princess. You’ll want for nothing. And you’ll look after me because that’s how it works.”

  “Don’t fucking touch me.”

  Kenny pressed my face against the tank. Shankly showed me his pale underbelly as he slid towards me.

  “Be afraid of him,” Kenny nodded at the snake, “he still has his fangs. I’ll make a mint from his venom.”

  Shankly climbed up a branch in his tank and settled there.

  Kenny pushed me down with one hand and undid his belt buckle with the other.

  “I’m your daughter.” It was my last defense.

  “I know.”

  Then he put his forked tongue in my mouth.

  I couldn’t move. The place between my legs was numb. I’d already tried sex with a boy from college. I knew what it was about. We’d fumbled and fallen in a heap in the bushes by the old boating lake one afternoon. It wasn’t an experience to set the world alight but it was satisfactory enough.

  This wasn’t just a sex crime, it was a power crime. Kenny wanted my fear. I shrunk into the distant corners of myself trying to retreat where he couldn’t follow. His orgasm was grudging, delivered with a short, gratified moan.

  Afterwards he sat with his trousers open, watching me like he was waiting for me to do something. I was frozen. I’m not sure I even blinked. That was how Kathy must have felt, forever stuck in that single moment of inertia and shock that kept her in the same spot for a lifetime. She was right. She should have run while she had the chance. Fuck her mother. And Ami, for all the good she’d done her.

  Kenny stood up. I thought, It’s going to happen again and then he’s going to dump me in the freezer. Instead, he went upstairs, his tread heavy with disappointment.

  “Don’t stay up too late, pet.”

  I think I was waiting for something too, when I should’ve been searching for something sharp to stick between his ribs. I couldn’t summon anything; I was still too deep inside myself.

  I was colder than I’d ever been before, even though the summer night was stifling. The room felt airless despite the window being wide open and butting up against the grille. Sometimes, when Georgia’s away, I feel that cold.

  Get up, get up before he remembers you and comes back down for more.

  “Lola.” A voice carried through the window.

  It was Tallulah, a pale ghost beyond the glass. Her mouth was moving as she clutched at the bars.

  I turned my face away, in the childish way of if I can’t see her, then she can’t see me. I didn’t want her to see me like this. It occurred to me that she might have been a witness to the whole thing. I turned back but she’d gone, so I closed my eyes.

  I should’ve known that Tallulah would never leave me. The snakes swayed in their tanks, enraptured. Tallulah was long and white, with pale yellow markings. Slender and magnificent. She glided over me and lay on my chest, rearing up. I couldn’t breathe because she took my breath away. I could feel her muscles contracting and her smooth belly scales against my bare chest.

  Get up, get up, or he’ll come down and find her like this.

  Are you special?

  Her tongue flicked out and touched my lips. I had no choice. I had to do it, for her. There was the rush of lubricant that loosened the top layer of my skin. The change was fast, my boyish body, with its flat chest and narrow hips perfectly suited to the transformation.

  I crawled out of my human mantle. Molting was good. I shed every cell of myself that Kenny had touched.

  Both Tallulah and I are unidentifiable among my extensive research of snakes, bearing properties of several species at once. We made a perfect pair for hunting. The pits on my face were heat sensitive, able to detect a variation of a thousandth of a degree, feeding information into my optic nerves. I saw the world in thermal. Kenny’s heart was luminous in the dark. I slid up the side of his bed and hovered over his pillow. Tallulah lay beside him on the mattress, waiting.

  Look at your princesses, Kenny. See how special we are.

  Kenny snored, a gentle, almost purring noise.

  It’s a myth that snakes dislocate their jaws.

  I opened my mouth as wide as I could, stretching the flexible ligament that joined my lower jaw to my skull. I covered his crown in slow increments. He snorted and twitched. I slipped down over his eyes, his lashes tickling the inside of my throat. He reached up to touch his head.

  Tallulah struck him, sinking her fangs into his neck. He started and tried to sit up, limbs flailing, which was a mistake as his accelerating heartbeat sent the venom further around his circulation.

  Trying to cover his nose was the hardest part, despite my reconfigured mouth. I thought my head would split open. I wasn’t sure how much more I could stomach. Not that it mattered. I wasn’t trying to swallow him whole. A fraction more and I was over his nostrils completely.

  There was only one way to save himself. I recognized the undulations he was making. I could feel the change on my tongue, his skin becoming fibrous. I had to stop him. I couldn’t imagine what he’d become.

  He was weakening w
ith Tallulah’s neurotoxins, slumping back on the bed, shaking in an exquisite fit. He’d wet himself. I stretched my flesh further and covered his mouth and waited until long after he was still.

  I woke up on the floor beside Tallulah. We were naked. My throat and neck were sore. The corners of my mouth were crusted with dried blood. We lay on our sides, looking at one another without speaking. We were the same, after all.

  “How did you find me?” I was hoarse.

  “I had to wait until Ami went out. I found the house details in her bedroom drawer. I didn’t have any money so I had to get a bus and walk the rest of the way. I’m sorry that I didn’t get here sooner.”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  Tallulah picked up our clothes and then our skins, which lay like shrouds. It was disconcerting to see how they were molds of us, even down to the contours of our faces.

  “I’ll take these with us. We can burn them later.”

  I went upstairs. I edged into the darkened room as if Kenny might sit up at any moment. He was a purple, bloated corpse with fang marks in his neck. I fumbled with the chain around his neck, not wanting to touch him.

  “Where’s Kathy?” Tallulah asked.

  I told her.

  “Show me.”

  “No, I don’t want you to remember her like that.” I seized Tallulah’s face in my hands. “You do know that she didn’t mean what she said, about you not belonging with us? She was trying to protect you.”

  Tallulah nodded, her mouth a line. She didn’t cry.

  “We have to bury her.”

  “We can’t. Tallulah, we have to get out of here. Do you understand? Ami will come for you when she realizes you’ve gone. There’s something else.”

  I put my hand in the cottonmouth’s tank. It curled up my arm and I lifted it out, holding it up to my cheek. He nudged my face.

  “Lift out the bottom.”

  Tallulah pulled out bits of twisted branch and foliage, then pulled up the false base. She gasped. Out came bundles of notes and cloth bags. She tipped the contents out on her palm. More diamonds than I could hold in my cupped hands.

  We loaded the money into Kenny’s rucksack and tucked the diamonds in our pockets.

  “What about the snakes?”

  We opened the tanks and carried them outside. I watched them disappear into the undergrowth. Except for Shankly. I put him in a carrier bag and took him with us.

  There are days when I wake and I can’t remember who I am, like a disorientated traveler who can’t recall which hotel room of which country they’re in.

  I’m hurt that Georgia didn’t want me to collect her from the airport.

  There’s been a delay. I won’t get in until late. Go to bed, I’ll get a cab.

  I wished now that I’d ignored her and gone anyway instead of lying here in the dark. The harsh fluorescent lights and the near-empty corridors of the airport are preferable to the vast darkness of our empty bed.

  Not going is a stupid test with which I’ve only hurt myself. I’ve resolutely taken her consideration for indifference. I want her to be upset that I wasn’t there, as if she secretly wanted me there all along.

  See, I confuse even myself.

  The front door opens and closes. I should get up and go to her. She comes in, marked by the unzipping of her boots and the soft sound of her shedding clothes.

  Love isn’t just what you feel for someone when you look at them. It’s how they make you feel about yourself when they look back at you.

  Georgia is the coolest, most poised woman that I know. We’re older now and our hearts and flesh aren’t so easily moved but I still wonder what she sees when she looks at me.

  “Do you love me?” It’s easier to ask it with the lights off and my head turned away from her.

  Everything about us is wrong. We’re lovers, sisters, freaks.

  She answers in a way that I have to respond to. I glide across the floor towards her and we become a writhing knot. We hunt mice in our grandiose pile and in the morning we are back here in our bed, entwined together in our nest.

  When we wake again as human beings she says, “Of course I love you, monster.”

  When we shed the disguises that are Georgia and Eliza, and then the skins that are Lola and Tallulah, we are monsters. Fabulous beasts.

  Priya Sharma lives in the UK. Her stories have been published by Tor.com, Black Static, Interzone, Albedo One, and Alt Hist, among others. She has been anthologized in various “best of” anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow, Paula Guran, Jonathan Strahan, Steve Haynes, and Johnny Mains. “Fabulous Beasts” has been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award in the novelette category. Her short story, “Lebkuchen,” was reprinted earlier this year in Into the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold. More information about her writing can be found at priyasharmafiction.wordpress.com

  Below the falls the waters teem with light, the glint of gold like the flash of drowned skin.

  BELOW THE FALLS

  Daniel Mills

  Gentlemen, I am tired of ghost stories. In my lifetime, I have heard a hundred such tales, a hundred variations on the same tired formula. We have the respectable narrator, the decrepit country house. A series of unsettling incidents: disembodied footsteps, say, or voices in the night. Finally there is the ghost itself, which bursts upon the narrator’s mind like the swift and violent intrusion of the repressed id. His faith is shattered, his sanity. He is never again the same.

  But there is life in the old form yet. If we take the defining quality of a ghost to be its attendant sense of mystery, its otherness, then I propose to you that we are surrounded by such spirits at all times whether we choose to admit it or not. In pain the mind hides even from itself, becoming a darkened star around which light bends but does not pass through.

  I hope you might allow me to read from an old diary. The tale it relates is, I aver, a kind of ghost story, though the dead do not walk in its pages, except in the usual way by which the words of the deceased survive on paper long after their graves have been filled.

  The diary came into my possession some years ago when I was practicing medicine in Lynn, MA. A nurse at the hospital in Danvers, knowing of my interest in psychoanalysis, mailed it to me upon the death of its author, a young woman by the name of Isabella Carr.

  Mrs. Carr was born in Walpole, NH, and lived there with her mother and stepfather until the age of eighteen, when she was married to Horace Carr, Esq, of Beacon Hill, Boston. The diary begins shortly after her wedding and depicts the weeks immediately prior to her committal.

  Aside from these few facts, the nurse’s letter was tantalizingly vague, and in the same spirit, I present the diary to you now without further prelude.

  APR 2

  Alfie was here again last night.

  I heard him at the door, his faint scratching. He was just outside the room, waiting for that late hour when the whole of the house lay sleeping and there was only me to hear him.

  I opened the door. He scuttled inside, dragging his belly on the floor. He was terribly thin, his hair all in patches. It came away in tufts beneath my fingertips, baring the pitted skin beneath, the sallow flesh speckled with rot: they had buried him alive.

  I dropped to my knees and wrapped my arms around him. He did not resist but merely lay with his head against my chest as I whispered into his ear.

  I’m sorry, I said. I thought you were dead.

  His breathing was strained and rapid but still he did not stir. He listened as the words poured out of me, an undammed torrent. I spoke for hours, or what seemed like hours, and later, I awoke to find him gone with the bars of sunlight on my face.

  Bridget woke me. She entered the room while I slept and now applies herself to the tasks of stripping the bed, taking down the curtains. She whistles as she works—an Irish song, I suppose, for I do not recognize the tune.

  Downstairs, the clocks all sound the half-hour, and I know that I have overslept. Mr. Carr awaits me in the breakfast room. He will be dressed for
his clients, his club, checking his watch as the minutes tick past and still I do not come—

  APR 7

  A letter from Uncle Edmund—

  This morning I woke early, before dawn, and padded downstairs in my nightgown. In the hall I found the mail where it had been dropped through the slot. In amongst my husband’s correspondence was a letter addressed to me in my uncle’s hand.

  I recognized it at once. Edmund is my father’s brother, his senior by ten years or more. He is a big man, like Father was, and likewise well-spoken, if occasionally given to maundering, and his avowed agnosticism had once made him a figure of some controversy in our household.

  When Father died, Edmund took to writing me long letters, and these I cherished like jewels, for I heard my father’s voice in his words and seemed to catch his scent upon the page. The letters ceased with Mother’s marriage to Mr. Orne, who is a Methodist of the meanest sort, though it was months before I realized they had hidden them from me.

  Uncle Edmund had obtained my husband’s address from a gentleman friend in Walpole “of some slight acquaintance” with Mr. Carr. He rarely speaks of it, but Mr. Carr was born there as well and is, in fact, my mother’s cousin—though he relocated to Boston as a young man and was subsequently estranged from his family for years.

  Now Edmund writes to say that Father’s house has been sold and is soon to be demolished. My mother has moved with Mr. Orne to Vermont, so as to be nearer his church, while our neighbors the Bosworths have bought the property. They have plans to erect a gristmill, damming the creek where it plunges to the falls.

  Soon it will all be gone: the gardens, the paths down which we walked on summer evenings, Father and I, when the damp lay thickly on the air and the rosebushes rustled all round. I remember. We crossed the creek at the footbridge, where the petals lay like a blood-trail, and sat together in a place above the falls while the current frothed and broke among the rocks below.

  APR 8-9

  Midnight—

  I hear the church bells tolling, the passing of the mail coach. An old man sings his way home, and a young girl weeps in the alley. In the silence of this hour, each sound recalls to me my shame and the solitude that followed. Days and nights in that bedroom with the curtains drawn while Mr. Orne kept watch outside and Mother walked the halls, screaming.