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

by Paula Guran

  Already the hero had wonderful wings, but to fight the maximus she’d need much better. As a rocky shelf, one thousand tons, falls off some mountainside and onto the unlucky walker below, just so did the kaiju hit, with as much force. And their alien effluents, whether spat, shat, or bloodlet, reduced the flesh of earthly creatures to runny sludge, a fertile dung for the world’s resurgent wilderness, feed for the forests that arose where every city fell. They couldn’t guess what shape, this time, the hero’s metamorphosis would take; she had no idea herself. Their only forewarning was that, whatever changes, they would be always perilous, always a shock.

  “Pumpkin,” he said and squatted on his haunches. He reached out his arms and sucking her thumb the baby came to him. But when he urged her from his embrace and toward the hero, saying, “Give Mama a kiss, just like you did before,” the baby seized a fistful of his coat, nor wished to let it go. “Are you scared?” He stroked his daughter’s hair and smiled at her in complicity, allowing a little of his own fear to show. “I know; me too. But I need you to do this one little thing for me. Just for your papa: won’t you give Mama a kiss on her back?” (A kiss compelled held no power—nor did a loveless one.) His appeal shifted something in the child’s heart prior words had not, and her fear-blank eyes began to clarify. He said, “Please?” and the baby nodded. Toward the hero and away from him, he set her walking with gently propulsive hands.

  The baby cast back one uncertain glance. At his nod, she bent to kiss the hero’s dorsal carapace. Fretfully his two hands hovered to grab his daughter back. No sooner did the baby’s lips alight than her mother’s torso—indeed limbs and whole self—returned to a more human shape, but not made of flesh and bone, rather become some kind of living marble.

  At dead center of the hero’s smooth adamantine back, a thin-lipped mouth pursed open. From this hole erupted a long and rotary tentacle of spiked stone. With full decapitatory powers, this flailing rotor tore the air just centimets overhead where he cringed, pressing the baby and himself down, noses flat to earth. Hysterical from terror the baby fought to get free and run, while he shouted at the hero to go up into the air before she killed them both. When the hero had gone aloft, he let the baby go. Sister fled back to brother fireside where the children clung together like half-drowned co-survivors who had won to shore by grace of God alone, and through shark, shipwreck, and storm, had not gone down with all the rest.

  The hero could not lift much more than her own weight off the ground ordinarily, but now without effort she stooped from the sky and plucked him up into her arms. They hovered midair.

  Her mouth by his ear to be heard above the roaring downdraught of that strange, singular wing: “Do you love me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?” Her lips were stone, and if not soft at all, entirely smooth. “I wonder. Love me enough to do anything? No matter what?”

  “Whatever,” he said. Could she even feel his fingertips caress her face? “I’ll do anything.” She was hard to embrace, hard to come close to, being made of stone and so much bigger. “I love you.”

  “To fight the maximus I need more than you ever gave me those other times. A whole lot more.”

  He said, “How much?” and she said,

  “How much can I get?”

  Even then the hero waited on him to press his lips to hers.

  If you’ve ever sucked and chewed on sugarcane, then you have the right image. Vigor, youth, beauty—something on that order—was wrung out of his body like water from a sodden rag, or sweetness chewed from sugarcane. But the agony made no difference to how readily he opened his mouth to the requited passion of her stony kiss. Suppose that some small sacrifice were asked of you as helpmeet and shieldbearer for the greatest hero who has ever lived, and suppose that in fulfilling your role she might deliver the homeworld. Would you do it? He would. She hardened to some much denser substance than living marble, and the arms about him caused his bones to creak and ache. Becoming a chevaux-de-frise of sharp diamond, her lips began to abrade his, drawing blood as the kiss went on.

  As he grew feeble she held him closer, until desire and will notwithstanding, his body just could no longer. The hero held her lips one short millimet from his, begging, “Kiss me, kiss me,” and he tried, oh he did, always whispering back when she asked, “Do you love me?” “Yes, yes.”

  Let him go. There was a gravelly clatter, rock-on-rock, as pebbles bounced off much harder stuff. Dimly he became aware that his children were screaming and throwing stones at their mother again. Let him go. I hate you. Had the kiss gone so far already? Not too far yet, he hoped. Someone must see the baby and boy tucked into their blankets tonight. And who but him would see them fed a hearty warming bowl in the morning? Such terror these thoughts inspired, he turned his face from hers. Released, he felt himself fall through the air, and hitting the ground saw rainbow-bright glitter and then darkness.

  He woke to the baby and boy saying please don’t be dead. Prostrate on the ground he scrabbled there unable to turn faceup, without the strength even to lift his bloody mouth from the dirt. Get up, Papa, get up. Trying to say anything that might comfort the children, he made only the mewling of a kitten which alone of its litter tossed overboard had washed ashore undrowned. These efforts to speak and rise, strenuous to no effect, wearied him so that finally he lay for a long time with quietude hardly to be distinguished from that of a corpse on its bier. The children as well exhausted themselves, and their howls waned to grizzling; their yanking at his coat, to a small hand each stroking at his hair.

  From faraway in the night there came at random either one vast crash or repeated booms, as if contending gods took and threw godlike blows. Once, a tremendous though faint echo of the hero’s anger resounded out of the distance, her voice pitched such that blood would have spurted from their ears, had he and the children heard that blast near at hand.

  Time did what it does and by and by he felt himself drift from merest proximity to death, into slightly more distant purlieus. He splayed one withered claw under each shoulder and pushing against the ground—pushing as hard as he could—came somehow up to sit. Just the sweet Lord can say how he got up on his two stick legs and made it over to the fire where he sat again, or fell. They paced him there, a child at either side; patient, silent, good as gold.

  “Buddy.”

  “Papa?”

  “Look in the pack there. Get me out the cut-ointment and a clean rag.”

  The boy did so.

  It wasn’t too bad dabbing the mud from his lips with the dampened rag, but smearing his lacerated mouth with the astringent ointment, he made noises that couldn’t be helped.

  “All right,” he said once he’d caught his breath. “Put it up now, bud. Rag goes with the dirty ones.”

  “Okay, Papa.”

  Exactly once before had the baby seen the toll of this dire miracle, though she might not remember. Standing beside him, she groped with bemittened hands at his slack-seamed cheeks, his thin white hair, as if only by touch could she grasp this onset of morbid age. He smiled at her and said, “Mama will turn me back like I was after she beats the kaiju.” If she does . . . “Don’t you worry, pumpkin.” But not even the voice was his own: higher, breathy, querulous. Her face crumpled, tears welling in her eyes, and none of his friendly words were reassuring to the baby.

  The boy came back to sit, and lean, gingerly against him. Had you trotted the globe around and come home again, having despaired that day would ever arrive, so too might you breathe out as the boy did then, as long and slow, a shudder passing also through you. Many times he’d seen his papa go suddenly grey, though never before this stooped and frail, a spotted scalp visible like dirt and stone under a dusting of snow.

  To distract the baby’s unhappiness, he said, “Want to hear something wonderful?” Brightness pulsed in the western dark, like the traffic of thunderbolts between stormclouds. “Let me tell you what happens sometimes, pumpkin.”

  Between hiccups: “What, P
apa?”

  “Sometimes, when a hero’s got no son or daughter with the factor—that’s still alive, I mean—then it starts expressing in the other same-sex child. That happens a lot with heroes, actually. Your papa should’ve been on the lookout.” His tone was light, as at storytime, or telling jokes.

  “What you mean, Papa?”

  “I think, pumpkin—” he kissed her teary cheek “—you’re gonna wake up just like Mama one day real soon. A hero. How about that?”

  The baby reached a hand to his mouth as she’d done when almost newborn, still an infant, and pressed his lips together in a buttoning gesture. She let the hand fall and said, “No,” as decisively as when refusing despised foods. “I don’t want that.”

  “Well,” he replied (as always when the sequel would come soon enough, nor be anything the children desired): “We’ll just have to see then, won’t we?”

  “No, Papa!” The baby grabbed his coat and gave him a good shake—he so weak, she could do so. “Not see. I want to stay people.”

  He tapped the little fist clinched in his coat and raised his brow at her. The baby turned him loose.

  “Aww, don’t say that.” He shook his head sadly at her. “I really wish you wouldn’t, pumpkin. Mama is people too.”

  “I mean, I mean.” The baby was still at that age when words tend to fail, and anger or tears have to fill the gap; her voice broke. “Like you and buddy.”

  “Shh,” he said, “Okay, then,” as if she might not rise to Homo sapiens heroïcus on his mere say so. “All right, all right.” He rubbed circles on her back, she quieted, and the whole world tipped nauseously then. He heard himself shout.

  “What’s that?” Terrified, the baby embraced him round the neck. “What is it, Papa?”

  The ground beneath them was yawing as if the sea, the planet itself groaning deeply bass and agonized as some old sinner repentant on his deathbed. Abruptly, some twenty kiloms down the valley, a bright volcanic arm—a hand of fire—thrust up from the earth and made a credible grab for the moon, incandescent fingers raking across the sky. Brilliance snatched aside the black of night as though it were a flimsy curtain, the truth behind it high noon. They cried out, throwing up a hand or both as the dark cold valley was relit to midday green. The gushing white blaze spewed comets as a geyser does waterdroplets, these fiery blue offshoots waning yellow-orange-red as they fell to earth, as the sourcefire itself discolored: now dimming to ochre and yet still painful to see, even squinting through their fingers; now dimmer still, ruddy-black as the glowing crumbs of their own little campfire; now going out.

  In that awful first glare, though, they glimpsed the kaiju maximus, its shape like some conjuration out of all the earth’s collective nightmare, reminiscent of a creature he’d seen once in a picturebook, some beast of the forgotten world—and called what? He couldn’t remember. Bright-lit, that apparition stuttered in stark chiaroscuro, wallowing in magma: horrific, bigger than could be put into words. The eruption, dwindling, and burnout endured only for a slow five-count, but it seemed as if hours passed. Nor did they look away even once, not one time blink, until the veils of starless insombriate night fell over that vision again. After this sign and wonder, the baby turned to him expectantly, to see whether Papa might interpret, but he could only shake his head.

  The end of days—what is even this, to a child’s need for sleep? He looked to the boy and saw that his son’s eyes were closed, mouth softly open. To the baby he said, “Let me go tuck in buddy-man.” She released her hold round his neck and stood by watching while the boy was chivvied to his feet and, eyes closed, mumbling irritably, not really awake, was led over to his bedroll where, coaxed, he laid himself down, at once dead to the world again, while the boots were pulled off him, the covers tucked up around him. Heart rattling so in his chest you had to hope it could last the night through, he clambered to his feet after these exertions and saw that far hills were burning like victims in flight from some holocaust, their hair alight, their heads bewreathed in flames, all ablaze with forest fires. The wind began to taste of ash. He sought his spot by the fire again and the baby climbed into his lap. “Ain’t you sleepy at all yet, pumpkin?”

  “No,” the baby said, and then: “Did you love Sofiya?”

  “Yes.”

  Again the earth moved as it should not, making unwonted sounds, but by then they were inured.

  “And did Sofiya love you, Papa?”

  “Well,” he began, and was by fortuity saved from a lie and the truth alike. “Oh, looky there!” He pointed into the darkness just over the marge of their campfirelight. “See who came up to join us.” From those respectful shadows doomed spaniel eyes watched them. For even after hope, it seemed, hopeful forms and strategies survived.

  The baby said, “Puppy!” and jumped up. “Can we keep it, Papa? Like the family in the tent by the river? They got a dog.”

  That ole mangy mutt, there? Of course not, child: it’s no telling what diseases that thing’s got! “All right,” he said, and sent the baby over to the hero’s pack.

  “Well, you ain’t pulling, pumpkin,” he said. “How you fixing to get that knot loose if you don’t pull good? Pull, girl. There you go, there you go. See? Now loosen it up, reach in, and should be right there on top: the hambone left from supper, wrapped in one of them ole-timey plastic bags.”

  Kai Ashante Wilson’s stories, “Super Bass” and “The Devil in America,” can be read for free at Tor.com. His novella The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps is available for purchase from all fine ebook purveyors. His novelette, «Légendaire.», can be read in the anthology Stories for Chip, which celebrates the legacy of science fiction grandmaster Samuel R. Delany. Kai Ashante Wilson lives in New York City.

  Workings have a price, you see, and the single best currency for such transactions is blood, always.

  HAIRWORK

  Gemma Files

  No plant can thrive without putting down roots, as nothing comes from nothing; what you feed your garden with matters, always, be it the mulched remains of other plants, or bone, or blood. The seed falls wherever it’s dropped and grows, impossible to track, let alone control. There’s no help for it.

  These are all simple truths, one would think, and yet, they appear to bear infinite repetition. But then, history is re-written in the recording of it, always.

  “Ici, c’est elle,” you tell Tully Ferris, the guide you’ve engaged, putting down a pale sepia photograph printed on pasteboard, its corners foxed with age. “Marceline Bedard, 1909—from before she and Denis de Russy met, when she was still dancing as Tanit-Isis. It’s a photographic reference, similar to what Alphonse Mucha developed his commercial art pieces from. I found it in a studio where Frank Marsh used to paint, hidden in the floor. Marsh was Cubist, so his paintings tend to look very deconstructed, barely human, but this is what he began with.”

  Ferris looks at the carte, gives a low whistle. “Redbone,” he says. “She a fine gal, that’s for sure. Thick, sweet. And look at that hair.”

  “ ‘Redbone?’ I don’t know this term.”

  “Pale, ma’am, like cream, lightish-complected—you know, high yaller? Same as me.”

  “Oh yes, une métisse, bien sur. She was cagey about her background, la belle Marceline, liked to preserve mystery. But the rumor was her mother came from New Orleans to Marseilles, then Paris, settling in the same area where Sarah Bernhardt’s parents once lived, a Jewish ghetto. When she switched to conducting séances, she took out advertisements claiming her powers came from Zimbabwe and Babylon, darkest Africa and the tribes of Israel, equally. Thus the name: Tanit, after the Berber moon-goddess, and Isis, from ancient Egypt, the mother of all magic.”

  “She got something, all right. A mystery to me how she even hold her head up, that much weight of braids on top of it.”

  “Mmm, there was an interesting story told about Marceline’s hair—that it wasn’t hers at all but a wig. A wig made from hair, maybe even some scalp, going back a long time, centuri
es . . . I mean, c’est folle to think so, but that was what they said. Perhaps even as far as Egypt. Her mother’s mother brought it with her, supposedly.”

  “Mummies got hair like that, though, don’t they? Never rots. Good enough you can take DNA off it.”

  You nod. “And then there’s the tradition of Orthodox Jewish women, Observants, Lubavitchers in particular—they cover their hair with a wig, too, a sheitel, so no one but their husband gets to see it. Now, Marceline was in no way Observant, but I can see perhaps an added benefit to her courtesanerie from allowing no one who was not un amant, her intimate, to see her uncovered. The wig’s hair might look much the same as her own, only longer; it would save her having to . . . relax it? Ça ira?”

  “Yeah, back then, they’d’ve used lye, I guess. Nasty. Burn you, you leave it on too long.”

  “Exactement.”

  Tully rocks back a bit on his heels, gives a sigh. “Better start off soon, you lookin’ to make Riverside ’fore nightfall—we twenty miles up the road here from where the turn-off’d be, there was one, so we gotta drive cross Barker’s Crick, park by the pass, then hike the rest. Not much left still standin’, but I guess you probably know that, right?”

  “Mmm. I read testimony from 1930, a man trying for Cape Girardeau who claimed he stayed overnight, spoke to Antoine de Russy. Not possible, of course, given the time—yet he knew many details of the events of 1922, without ever reading or hearing about them, previously. Or so he said.”

  “The murders, the fire?” You nod. “Yeah, well—takes all sorts, don’t it? Ready to go, ma’am?”