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

by Paula Guran

  From the bed I watched the curtains change in color from grey to yellow to crimson. On cloudless nights the moon shone through the fabric, flesh-white and glistening with grease, making stains on the bedclothes and running like an oil in the blood—

  For months I listened for the swollen creek, fat with autumn rain, white water roaring as it fell. Sometimes I thought I was dying. Other nights I was certain of it. In the evenings, I heard the winds blowing outside, and Mother weeping, and Mr. Orne ascending the stairs—

  Then one night he unlocked the door and entered the room with his Bible under his arm and the usual prayers upon his lips. He knelt beside me and took hold of my wrist. He said some words. There was a sharp pain, then, and a light washed over me, cool as spring rain or the touch of God’s breath on my forehead, and finally, I slept.

  APR 11

  Sunday, no church—

  I will not go. Mr. Carr is away on business, and for all of her coaxing, Bridget could not rouse me from the bed. She is a Catholic girl, of course, and quite devout. From the window I watched her hurry off to mass, wearing her Sunday hat with the brim pulled down to her ears.

  Then I dressed myself in the blue silk he had loved and sat by the window with my diary in my lap. As I write, I watch the birds circle the rooftops opposite. I admire their ease, their lightness. They drift like bracken on the churning current, carried this way and that with the wind through the chimney-pots, dropping like stones when they sight the river.

  The ice is out of the Charles. Every morning reveals a surface more degraded, riven with forks of liquid water. Last week Mr. Carr walked home with me after church. He was meeting a client after lunch, a young man of my own age, and was in rare good spirits. The day was fair and warm and we took the bridge over the Charles.

  Halfway across, I paused and gazed down at the river with its plains of blue-grey ice and glimpsed the creek behind them like the words in a palimpsest. I could hear the falls, too, over the clatter of wheels and footsteps, and recalled the garden at night. The rush of water spilling over rocks, foaming far below. The answering hum of the blood running through me.

  Mr. Carr joined me at the railing. I asked him of what the ice reminded him. He thought for a moment and said that it resembled a map.

  Yes, he said, more confident of himself. It is much like a map of the city. Do you see? he asked, pointing. There is my street, my house.

  April 11th and the ice is gone and Mr. Carr’s map with it. Beacon Hill has dwindled away into the black water, and soon my father’s house will follow. There will be only the river, only the creek, two channels feeding the same sea. I must go back—

  APR 15

  This morning at breakfast I raised the matter of the house in Walpole and asked Mr. Carr for his leave to travel there. At first I thought he had not heard me, for he did not answer, and did not wrest his gaze from the newspaper.

  I must see it, I said. While it is still standing.

  He turned the paper over. He continued to read.

  Hmm? he murmured.

  Father’s house, I said. Our neighbors, the Bosworths—

  Mr. Carr slapped down the paper.

  His cheeks were flushed. They had darkened to purple and the pores stood out below his eyes. We have been married three months, but I have never before seen him angry.

  And how is it you have heard of this? he demanded.

  Uncle Edmund, I said. He wrote to me.

  Is that so? How interesting.

  He reached for his coffee cup. He sipped from it, seemingly lost in thought as a carriage passed in the street outside, rattling the buds on the trees.

  He shook his head slowly. When he spoke, his voice was low and level.

  He said: It is entirely out of the question.

  I will be discreet, I said. Say nothing—

  He slammed down his cup. The saucer cracked beneath it, upturning the cup and sending the hot liquid spilling across the table. He leapt up and called for Bridget. The girl appeared in the doorway with her eyes downcast, looking terrified.

  Clean this up, he said. He indicated the mess before him.

  Yes, sir.

  He glared at me. Leave us, he said.

  And I left—but I listened outside the door.

  Mr. Carr was furious with Bridget. He hissed and spat at her and threatened her dismissal. It would seem he believes that she sneaked a letter to my uncle on my behalf. The good Catholic girl, Bridget did deny the accusation, but bowed her head and accepted this punishment as her due, speaking up only to voice her agreement, and later, her apology.

  See that it does not happen again, he said. Good day.

  Bridget swept out in her apron and skirts. She scurried past me with her face in her hands, reaching the staircase at a near-run.

  For his part Mr. Carr pushed back his chair and vanished through the opposite doorway. I heard the front door shut behind him, his footsteps on the stoop.

  He will visit his club when the working day is done. He will not return for hours.

  Bridget

  [The next page appears to have been removed.]

  I still think of it, that first sight of the Atlantic. When I was sixteen, we visited the coast south of Portland and stayed with Uncle Edmund in a cottage on the sea.

  Evening fell, and we followed the reach of the shore beyond the lighthouse. By then the tide had gone out, leaving the dead fish piled all round and the great ropes of seaweed like sheaves in a summer field, waiting to be taken up and carried in.

  The stench was overwhelming, sour and sweet and sharp with the tang of the sea. Father fell ill. He broke from me without warning and stumbled to the water’s edge where he emptied his guts into the ocean. Afterward, he lay feverish on the cobble and muttered to himself of the battlefields of his youth: Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville.

  I held his hand. I listened. The waves went out from us as the rains moved in, sweeping the shore and eclipsing the light on the rocky headland. There was thunder, then lightning, and Father stirred, moaning with the dark that lived inside him.

  I shook him, gently. Father, I said.

  He opened his eyes.

  APR 19, 5 O’CLOCK—

  I have seen to everything. It can do no harm now to write of it.

  The carpetbag is packed and secreted beneath the bed, and I am alone, waiting for Bridget to return. She left the house at noon to pawn my wedding ring. With the money she will purchase two tickets for a northbound train that will bring us to Walpole in the morning.

  Tomorrow! I am frayed and shaking, a cord drawn taut. I can smell the old garden, the roses. The scent is more vivid in memory than it was in life, mingled with the perfume of soil and damp and that of the blooming linden. I close my eyes and hear the creek, sending up spray where it drops beneath the bridge, and remember the great clouds of dragonflies and the way they drew near us at dusk, wings flashing—

  LATER—

  I am locked in. The door is shut, the key turned fast.

  Bridget has betrayed me. She now keeps watch outside, walking up and down the hallway and singing to herself in Irish. Moonlight spills in a fan across the floorboards, shining on broken glass and specks of hanging dust. I had time only to hide this diary before Mr. Carr stormed inside with Bridget following him meekly.

  He was livid, incandescent with rage. He swept the bottles of my medicine from the dressing table and stomped down on the remnants, grinding the glass beneath his shoes.

  Bridget retrieved the carpetbag from under the bed. At first I thought she meant to spare it his fury, but instead, she merely placed it wordlessly into his hands. He snarled and tossed the bag on the fire. The fabric caught light, then the clothes inside, the blue silk Father loved—

  I threw myself at the fireplace, but Mr. Carr caught me by the wrists and pushed me to the floor at his feet. Throughout this time he said nothing, but his eyes were black and shrunken to points, like those of Mr. Orne, when he ministered to me in the dark of that winter, or thos
e of my mother when first she found us out in sin—

  Mr. Carr produced his ring from his coat pocket and jammed it down the middle finger of my left hand, forcing it past the joint so I knew I should not be free of it.

  You made a promise, he said. To me, as I did to your mother. We mustn’t forget that.

  Come, he said to Bridget, and they were gone.

  APR 21?

  Mr. Orne is here. He paces beyond the door. In his tread I hear the echo of steps from long ago and imagine the house in Walpole where I watch the faceless mourners come and go.

  Some hold dresses or kitchen implements, bed-sheets caked with red and yellow filth. One man carries the charred remnants of my carpetbag while another walks with fistfuls of broken glass, blood dripping from his hands. They proceed with unearthly slowness, with all the gravity of pallbearers: rolling up the rugs, wheeling out the cradle, carrying off the materials of home like the seashell spoils of some god-conquering army.

  Now the house stands empty. It is a ghost of itself, an absence made visible, like the clothes Father wore that morning, when he left the house, and which the Bosworth boy found above the falls. They were neatly laid out, the boy said, the pants folded in quarters, the wedding ring left in his shoe.

  That ring: its smoothness on my skin. Whatever became of it? After the funeral, when the mourners had gone, Mother plucked the band from her own finger and flung it into the creek, as though to sink Father’s memory with it, and now I am her cousin’s wife.

  The lamp is dim. Mr. Carr’s ring glitters. It casts a white smear on the wall, an inverted shadow which moves in time with the rhythm of my hand on the paper so that I think of the moon in Maine as it rose over the headland, dragging the waves behind it, water and light trapped in the song they sang between them until at last you woke and looked at me—

  Dusk when I reach Walpole. From the station I walk to the house, lifting my skirts and sprinting when I hear the singing creek.

  I am too late. Little remains save rubble. The floors have been torn out, the walls collapsed into the cellar, and the garden, too, has been plowed under.

  The flowers are gone, the rosebushes. Uprooted and piled on the brush heap. Burned. The smell of wood-smoke lodges like cotton in my throat, stopping the air in my lungs. I can’t breathe—can’t walk—a fever is on me—

  It pulls like the spring current. It drags me through the ruined garden on hands and knees and down the path that leads to the footbridge. Here the water ripples, waves within waves. The creek is running high. Below the falls the waters teem with light, the glint of gold like the flash of drowned skin. Mother’s ring—or yours—and my blue dress charred and floating—

  This was where it happened, where they found you.

  Alfie is in the hall. I hear him scratching. I must

  The diary ends there. The remaining pages are blank.

  In those days, my interest in the abnormalities of the human brain took me to Danvers at least once a month. On my next visit, I sought out the nurse who had sent the diary.

  She was a young woman of pretty coloring and sensitive disposition. She was, in fact, nothing at all like the matronly figure I had imagined. I gathered that she had been quite close to Isabella Carr and considered herself to be something much nearer a friend than a caretaker. She thanked me for coming, and for my kindness in reading the diary, and showed me into the room, as yet vacant, in which Mrs. Carr had lived out the final years of her life.

  From the nurse, I learned that Mrs. Carr had been committed by her husband following an incident in their Beacon Hill home in which the family’s Irish maidservant had been attacked and nearly killed. Edmund Ashe had contested the committal order on his niece’s behalf but his efforts failed when evidence of opiate dependency came to light.

  Throughout her time in the hospital, Isabella was never seen to write letters or keep a diary but instead spent her days beside the window, absorbed in silent contemplation of the grounds below. When she was twenty-eight, she sickened with pneumonia and died. Afterward the nurse found the diary tucked up inside the lining of the feather bed, where it had languished, apparently forgotten, since Mrs. Carr’s arrival at Danvers some years previously.

  “I’m not ashamed to say that it gave me the chills,” the nurse said. “For a moment I even imagined that she had wanted me to find it. Nonsense, of course. She was ill. Probably she had hidden it inside the bed and forgotten about it. Of course it should have been sent to her family—her mother, if not her stepfather—but after reading it . . . well, it didn’t seem right, somehow. And Edmund Ashe is dead these two years.”

  “Had she no other family?”

  “No,” she said. “She hadn’t.”

  Her eyes moved over the empty walls and she was suddenly far away.

  “It’s sad, really. As I said, her uncle tried to fight the committal order. In the courts it emerged that Isabella had mothered a child some years previously, a little boy. She was unmarried at the time, and it had all been hushed up. Her mother and stepfather conspired to hide the pregnancy from their neighbors and married her off to Horace Carr soon afterward. He was Mrs. Orne’s cousin, as you know, a man of certain habits, and it was rumored that the marriage had not been consummated.”

  “And the little boy? What became of the child?”

  “He went to an orphanage. A woman came by and carried him away. I don’t believe Isabella ever recovered from that—though I was often uncertain of how much she remembered. In any case, the poor babe didn’t see his first birthday. Cholera, I believe it was.”

  “What was his name?” I asked. “The baby’s.”

  She did not answer me immediately. Instead, she went to the window and closed the curtains halfway, drawing a shadow across the bed. She filed from the room but paused in the doorway to address me a final time.

  “The child’s name,” she said, “was Alfred.”

  She disappeared into the hallway. Her footsteps retreated down the corridor. The sun broke through the parted curtains, and I was alone with my thoughts.

  Daniel Mills is the author of the novel Revenants: A Dream of New England (Chomu Press, 2011) and of the short fiction collection The Lord Came at Twilight (Dark Renaissance Books, 2014). His stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Black Static, Shadows & Tall Trees, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. His second novel will be released in 2017 by ChiZine Publications. He lives in Vermont.

  Vampires are haunted, obsessed things, every one among them. But some much more so than others.

  THE CRIPPLE AND STARFISH

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

  Almost three thousand feet above sea level, the ruins of the Overlook Mountain House squat silent and barren on the crest of its namesake. It is a bleak, disowned place, left for timber rattlers and roosting birds, black bears and chipmunks, visited now only by the occasional sightseers curious and intrepid enough to make the two-hour hike from Woodstock. The hotel burned on a February night in 1923, and all that now remains is a towering grey, right-angle maze of cement poured in 1878, under the direction of architect and builder Lewis B. Wagonen of nearby Kingston, New York. These walls were raised one hundred and thirty-seven years ago, and ninety-two years ago the hotel was razed. There is about this lonely place a mute and inescapable arithmetic—dates, altitude, time, geometry. It is the sum of its history, and little else remains. And, too, there are ghosts, of the fifteen women and men who perished in the fire and of four laborers who died during the hotel’s construction. Though, by ghosts nothing more is meant than fading memory, lingering, voiceless echoes trapped forever in empty window casements and in reinforcing iron bars exposed by crumbling concrete and rusting down all the long decades since the fire. Lost souls with names that are nowhere now remembered, faces forgotten, whispers. In the summer, the ruins are wreathed in a riot of green—bracken and saplings and poison ivy, red oaks, mountain paper birch, balsam fir and red spruce, blackberry, blueberry, huckleberry.

>   But this is not summer. This is a freezing night late in January, and a storm front from Ontario has swept across the Great Lakes to dump its burden of snow on the peaks and ridges and deep glacier- and river-carved valleys of the Catskill Escarpment. The moon, waxing gibbous, is hidden behind the low violet-blue-oyster clouds racing by overhead, occasionally so low that they scrape their underbellies on the mountains, fog-shrouding secrets, concealing those who wish concealment. Those who have come; those who have gathered. Another age might have pulled punches and called this a fairie court, though it is surely nothing of the sort.

  All the same, there is a court here.

  Below the open sky, where once were the second and third stories and the wide peaked roof of Mr. Wagonen’s stately pleasure dome, sits the Queen of Blades, Madam of Keen Steel and Obsidian Massacres, most often known as the Lady of Silver Whispers (she has so, so many sobriquets, but not a proper name among them). She reclines upon her throne. She names it her throne, as does her retinue, the attendants and sycophants and hangers-on, but in truth it’s nothing more than a broken-backed, mildewed récamier, the upholstery so threadbare and rotted than it hangs in faded strips the black and golden yellow of a yellowjacket wasp. She is naked, save the charcoal smears painted on her white skin, skin as pale and cold as the falling, drifting snow. Her eyes are rubies. Her lips are the deep, poisonous black of drooping clusters of belladonna berries, and her kiss is loaded with the same hyoscine, atropine, and hyoscyiamine compounds found in those very same deadly nightshades. Her nails are carved of cobalt glass, as good as.

  The court teems around her, frenetic, freed on nights like this from their necessary seclusion, from the shadow sorceries that conceal them from the eyes of men—save on those rare instances when they choose to reveal themselves. They mutter delightful obscenities among one another, they argue philosophy and history and fashion, they prostrate themselves at her feet. Some among them caper and dance, fuck and engage in acts so perverse that no one would ever deign to call those acts mere fucking. Most nights here there is only hunger, their mutual craving shared and unsated, but not tonight. Tonight there has been a feast, a carload of unwary travelers whose Prius broke down on Route 212, three warm bodies stolen like children from their cribs—father, mother, daughter—and presented to the Lady of Silver Whispers. All here have drunk; not their fill, for there is not ever any genuine satiation. But the bill of fare was enough that the nagging emptiness has been dulled for a time.