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

by Paula Guran

  There was a lock on the outer door, up high where the children could not reach it. But she wasn’t a child anymore, and when she stood on her tiptoes, she could turn it easily. She did, and she pulled open the door and stepped out.

  Light. That was the first thing she saw, and it was all she saw, the light so bright it hurt and she doubled over, shielding her eyes. At first it seemed to come from everywhere. As her eyes slowly adjusted, she realized that the light came from an opening nearly as tall as her. She could see nothing except that opening. She walked toward it and ducked and went through it and—

  Her stockinged toes touched down on nothing, and she pulled back quickly. She put her hands over her eyes to block the light, and then peered through her fingers. She saw . . . sky. That was all. Sky. Except it didn’t look like the sky behind the house. This blue was pale, almost white, and the clouds moved. She blinked hard and stepped back, and when she did, her gaze dropped and she saw a city.

  She knew it was a city from pictures in her books. A city below, sprawled out beyond the forest.

  A dead city.

  That was the phrase that sprang to her mind. She didn’t know from where until a memory flashed, of her father speaking to her mother long ago.

  “It’s a dead city now,” he’d said. “Everyone who could leave is gone. Everyone who stayed . . . The radiation . . . ”

  “Is it safe to even be going there?”

  “Do we have a choice?”

  She could only vaguely recall reading about radiation in a book and knew nothing more about it. Her mother’s journal would explain. For now, she understood this—that the food and water they needed to survive was out there, where it wasn’t safe, but there was nothing they could do about that except not eat, not drink.

  Her eyes had adjusted enough that she could look around and when she did, she saw that she was standing in the mouth of a cave high above the city. A cave in a mountainside.

  She looked behind her, and there was their house. Built inside a cave. She walked back through the hole, exhaling in relief as the light dimmed and she could see better.

  She looked at the walls, painted bright blue. Her sky. She glanced down to see the green underfoot, not like the green beyond the cave’s mouth at all, but short and prickly and never growing any longer. Her grass. Her gaze turned up to see a hole in the roof of the cave, with light streaming through. Her sun.

  She heard a click and then the padding of feet in the small room and a voice calling her name. With a gasp, she raced to the door and through it, and scooped up her sister as she pulled the door shut behind her.

  “And what are you doing, missy? You know you aren’t supposed to open the door.”

  “I heard a noise. And Momma won’t wake up.”

  Grief surged as she buried her face in her little sister’s hair. “I know. We’ll talk about that. First, though, don’t ever open the door. There’s no reason to. Everything you need is in here.”

  And with that, she made her decision. Without even considering an alternate choice, she made it.

  She put her sister down and prodded her into the kitchen. “Let’s go play a game. Maybe Candy Land. I know it’s a baby game, but I feel like playing it today. Later, we’ll have breakfast and talk about Momma. In a few days, I’ll need to go out, like Momma and Daddy did. But not yet. Not just yet.”

  She stepped into the tiny room and locked the outer door. Then she walked into the kitchen, shut the inner door firmly behind her and went to play Candy Land with her sister.

  Kelley Armstrong is the author of the Cainsville modern gothic series and the Age of Legends YA fantasy trilogy. Past works include Otherworld urban fantasy series, the Darkest Powers & Darkness Rising teen paranormal trilogies, and the Nadia Stafford crime trilogy.

  Mom’s theory was that some people are born for a reason; born to do a specific thing.

  DANIEL’S THEORY ABOUT DOLLS

  Stephen Graham Jones

  I’m twelve when this all starts, and Daniel’s about to be five. And I thought he was like the rest of us, then. I thought he was like I had been, at his age. But he wasn’t. It could be he had been born different, of course. Or maybe one day, walking down the hall on his short legs there had been a click in his head, a deep, wet shift in his chest that made him roll his right shoulder, look at all of us in a colder way. Not just me and Mom and Dad. After that click, he looked at people in a colder way. I should have been watching him the whole time. I should have never slept. Then I could have seen him in his twin bed across from mine one night, when he coughed up a shiny black accretion, studied it in the moonlight sifting through our bedroom window, then wrapped it in a tissue, leaving it on the nightstand for Mom to throw away.

  It was his soul.

  None of us would know for years.

  For our whole childhood he was just Daniel, always the full name. My little brother seven years younger, the accident that almost killed my mom, being born, like he’d been picking at the walls of her womb, latching his mouth onto places not made for feeding. He didn’t talk until he was four. The doctors said not to worry, that some kids just took their time.

  This isn’t about him getting all the attention, either. This isn’t about me growing up off to the side, taping and gluing my action figures and trucks back together and starting them on another adventure I was going to have to make up alone.

  I’m good with the alone part. Really.

  Those first four years when Daniel wasn’t talking, the house was always buzzing anyway. New wallpaper, the trim painted over and over, slightly different shades each time, like a bird’s egg fading in the sun, its inside baked rotten.

  Our mom and dad were preparing for our little sister. Trying to make her room at the end of the hall so perfect that she couldn’t help being born. Perfect enough that she wouldn’t listen to the doctors, who told Mom there was no way, that Daniel had messed her up too bad, too forever.

  Dad wanted a little princess, see. And our mom would kill herself to give him that princess, if she had to.

  So, when the baseboards finally matched the color of the new knobs on the cabinets, when the corners had been sanded off all the coffee table and footboards, when Dad had parked all the tractors in a line by the barn, then re-parked them again, it finally happened: Janine.

  Our mom and dad named her early so they could coo to her through the tight wall of skin my mom’s stomach became. They named her so they could lure her out, so they could talk her through.

  To explain it to us, what was happening, my dad got a black marker with a sharp point and drew the outline of a sideways baby onto Mom, like a curled over bean with fingers and toes and an open eye watching us. If we’d been a family that already had a daughter, we might have had a leftover doll to use, to explain this process with, but what we had instead was Dad’s strong bold lines on our mom’s belly.

  Years later, at a movie theater, I would see the outline of a person taped off on the street, where they’d died their dramatic movie death, and I would lean forward, away from my date. I would lean forward and turn my head sideways, to see if I could hear that person under the asphalt, whispering.

  Daniel told us it’s how he learned to talk: hours on the couch with Mom in her seventh month, his head pressed flat to her bared stomach, Janine whispering to him.

  When she died just like the doctors had said she would, Dad had to break down the bathroom door to keep Mom from eating all the soap from the towel cabinet. I remember him carrying her down the hall, bellowing at us to get out of the way. How her mouth was foaming, how her eyes were so blank.

  I don’t know if she was trying to choke herself to death or if she thought she was dirty on the inside.

  After she was sedated on the couch, and Dad was pouring me cereal at the formal dining room table we never used, I heard Daniel speaking words for the first time.

  I stood from my chair, peered over the back of the couch.

  Daniel had rolled Mom’s shirt up, had
the side of his head pressed to her stomach.

  He was talking to Janine.

  It was the only time I ever hit him.

  Mom’s theory. when she checked back into the world, was that some people are born for a reason. That they’re born to do a specific thing. And, in teaching Daniel to talk, Janine had done that specific thing. It released her from having to be born at all.

  We held a private service for her in the woods behind our house. I got dressed up and combed my hair flat and everything.

  We walked single-file out to where we’d used to have picnics, under the big tree. It was maybe five minutes past the edge of the pasture. Our dad was trying not to cry. Our mom was squeezing his hand. Daniel was standing on the other side of the hole from me. I guess our dad had dug the hole the night before, or early that morning.

  “Will the ants get her?” Daniel asked.

  Because they always found our watermelon as soon as we cut it.

  Mom shook her head no, not to worry.

  The box they had for her was cardboard and waxy and as long as Dad’s arm. It smelled like flowers, and, because Mom’s stomach was still big, that box made less sense than anything else in the history of the world, ever.

  They didn’t explain it to us.

  We raised our voices, sang one of the children’s songs Mom had been humming down to Janine since the first month.

  It was nice, it was pretty, it was good.

  Except for that box.

  It fit into the hole perfectly, and all four of us used our hands to clump the dirt back in over it. Then my dad pulled a little sharpshooter shovel from behind some tree and scooped a little more on, and tamped it all down into a proper mound.

  “No marker,” our mom said, her hand over her own heart, like cupping it. “We’ll be the marker, okay?”

  This is how families survive.

  “Okay,” Daniel said, trying the sounds out.

  Dad rustled Daniel’s mop of hair. It was like a hug, I guess.

  “I think he’s had the words in there the whole time,” Dad said.

  “My big boys,” Mom said, and lowered herself to her knees, pulled Daniel and me to her and held on, her belly between us, a hard, dead lump.

  “Okay,” Daniel said again, quieter.

  He wasn’t talking to us.

  Three nights later I woke softly, my eyes open for moments before I could see through them, I think.

  They were fixed on Daniel’s bed.

  It was empty.

  I trailed my fingers on the walls, felt my way through the darkened house. Living room, kitchen, utility. Dad’s study, Mom’s sewing room. Their bedroom, the two of them breathing evenly in their musty covers.

  Then Janine’s room at the dead end of the hall.

  I would get in trouble if the sound woke my parents—Janine’s room was already in the process of becoming a shrine—but I clicked the light on.

  It was like stepping into a cupcake. Everything was lace and pink and white-edged, like a thousand doilies had exploded, fell into an arrangement that before had only existed in our dad’s head.

  Daniel wasn’t there either.

  I turned the light off, trying to muffle the sound in the warmth of my palm, and in that new darkness I saw a firefly bobbing outside the window.

  Except it was a yellowy flashlight, moving through the trees.

  Daniel.

  I pulled my shoes on without tying the laces and crept out the front door, left it open a crack behind me.

  Five minutes later, I caught up with him.

  He’d seen where Dad put that little sharpshooter shovel. It was just his size.

  By the time I got to Janine’s grave, he’d already dug down to the waxy cardboard-box center.

  I reached out to stop him—he didn’t know I was there—but it was too late.

  He’d already stepped down into the open grave, the box not supporting his weight, the sound of a jumbo staple popping loud in the night.

  And then I didn’t say anything.

  What he pulled up from that box, holding it under the armpits like a real baby, was the doll Dad had bought for Janine, the doll he hadn’t had to demonstrate the baby in Mom’s stomach.

  She’d been stripped naked, of course.

  If her eyes rolled open, it was too far for me to see, and too dark.

  Because I’d left the door open, when I got back to the house there was something turning in slow deliberate circles on the couch.

  A possum. It was following its rat tail around and around, like it had lost something, or was patting down a bed for itself.

  It hissed at me, showed it rows of teeth, sharp all the way back to the hinge of its jaw.

  I fell back, clutching for the coat rack, to pull it down in front of me, maybe, to hide what was going to be my screaming escape, but what my fingers dug into, it was the shirt of Daniel’s pajamas.

  He didn’t even look over at me as he crossed the living room, the shovel held over his shoulder like a barbarian axe.

  The possum screamed when he swung the blade into it, and by the time our mom and dad had clambered into the living room, my dad with his pistol held high like a torch, my mom’s silk sleep mask pushed up on her forehead like a visor, the possum was biting at its own opened side, and rasping.

  Daniel looked up to Dad, then to Mom.

  The shovel was twice as tall as he was.

  “Daniel,” our dad said, his voice trying to be stern, I think.

  It didn’t work.

  “Oh,” Mom said then, and stepped back from the bloody couch. From the dying possum.

  The possum’s babies were calving off. They’d been hidden under the dark back fur on her back. They looked like malformed mice.

  I clapped my hand to my mouth, threw up between my fingers.

  Daniel brought the flat of the shovel down on the fastest of the babies, was, as our dad said later, too young to know better, too young to understand.

  Dad wasn’t standing where I was, though. He wasn’t close enough to hear Daniel.

  Daniel was whispering to someone.

  I’m thirty-eight now, and that night under the tree, The Night of the Possum, as we came to call it, it’s still as clear in my mind as if it just happened.

  Daniel would be thirty, I guess.

  And, I wish I could trace a line from the year Janine died to now, and put hashmarks on it. This is Daniels’ first date. This is the neighbor’s new colt. This is when he figured out the bus lines—when he figured out he could go into the city by himself. This is him in the guidance counselor’s office, the counselor not finding an explanation for him in any of the college textbooks she’d saved.

  This is Mom and Dad, watching him return again and again back into the trees.

  This is me, growing up to the side.

  My first date was with Chrissy Walmacher. The neighbor’s new colt is hers. I sat with her while it was dying, for horse reasons I never really understood. This is me and Chrissy, riding the bus to a concert in the city. This is the guidance counselor, veering her to this school, for that life, and veering me to a different school, for a different life.

  This is me at thirty-four, standing at my dad’s funeral, my mom there, Daniel pulling up at the last moment, his suit perfect, his face set to “mourning,” his eyes drinking the scene in for cues.

  We had had the same grades, played the same sports.

  Without me providing the model of what to do, I think Daniel would have had to reveal himself. As it was, he could just step into my shoes, follow my lead, fit in, attract zero attention.

  What Dad died of, it wasn’t anything. Just cigarettes. Just too many years.

  Standing there, I was only on my second job of the year. I’d tried normal jobs, offices, even manual labor, but indexing books in the privacy of my apartment on the second floor was finally the only thing that fit. It was work that made sense.

  Contracts were getting fewer and farther between, though. There’s software
that can do what I do, more or less. With a little fine-tuning afterward, even I have a hard time telling any substantial difference.

  Dad dying, it wasn’t a windfall for me, or for Mom or Daniel either, but it was going to help. My grief was a little bit of a mask as well.

  After the funeral, to escape the house, I drove Daniel down to the bar my dad had been loyal to, the years after Janine—before he cut drinking off altogether, at my mom’s request.

  This was the real funeral. Walking through a space he had walked through, at our age. Moving as he moved, our reflections in the smoky mirror perhaps vague enough to fall into step with his. We were trying his life on, and, before we’d even sat down, we were finding his life not that interesting.

  Saying goodbye, it’s complicated.

  Daniel ordered the same beer I did. He’d never cared about beer, probably wasn’t even going to drink this one to the bottom.

  “So what’s what these days?” I asked.

  I’d seen actors on TV open conversations exactly like that, in places like this.

  “You know,” he said.

  He’d bloomed into an electrical engineer. In his senior year, when I was first getting on the job market, I remember him building model intersections on Dad’s shop table, and wiring stoplights, giving them this or that trigger, this or that safety. The traffic was imaginary, but the lights always clicked through their cycles perfectly.

  Mom and Dad would stand in the doorway, Mom’s hands balled at her throat with pride.

  Everything they’d been saving for Janine, they heaped it onto Daniel.

  My one-time girlfriend Chrissy Walmacher’s second wedding had been two weeks ago. She’d invited me, and it had put a picture in my head of me standing at a white fence, looking over. Just another sad postcard I sent to myself in a weak moment. One of many.

  “Any girls to speak of?” I asked.

  Daniel leaned back, shrugged his right shoulder in that way he had, like he was about to shove his right hand deep into his pocket for the perfect amount of change. He wasn’t looking at me anymore, but at a college girl with hair so metallic red it had to have just been dyed, or colored, however that happens. She was sliding darts from the dartboard, one booted foot pulled up behind her like she was kissing someone in a movie.