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

by Paula Guran

  I would feel bad for your sad demise, little seeker, I’m almost sure; Tully’s, even, his ancestry aside. But only if I were anyone but who I am.

  Outside, the rain recedes, letting in daylight: bright morning, blazing gold-green through drooping leaves to call steam up from the sodden ground, raise cicatrix-blisters of moisture from Riverside’s walls. The fields glitter like spider webs. Emerging into it, I smile for the first time in so very long: lips, teeth, muscles flexing. Myself again, for all I wear another’s flesh.

  Undefeated, Maman. Victory. I am your revenge and theirs. No one owns me, not anymore, never again. I am . . . my own.

  And so, my contract fulfilled, I walk away: into this fast, new, magical world, the future, trailing a thousand dark locks of history behind.

  Previously best-known as a film critic, teacher, and screenwriter, Gemma Files has published around seventy-five short stories since 1993. Some of them have been compiled in two collections. She is also the author of the Hexslinger trilogy of novels and We Will All Go Down Together, a story cycle. Files most recent book is novel Experimental Film (2015). She lives with her husband and son in Toronto, Ontario.

  And now she was here, the place to which she had been traveling for decades, since the first landing team shot images back to Earth . . .

  THE GLAD HOSTS

  Rebecca Campbell

  Mai knew them from photographs back on Earth, but she was still mesmerized by the creatures overhead. They were neither mammalian nor insectoid, not birds nor lizards, but the first denizens of a new kingdom, their temporary, webbed wings filling the sky with a murmuration that collected, diverged, dissolved as they ran their courses to the northern roosting grounds. Her first week on Shanti, she spent a very, very long time staring at the sky, at both the unnamed constellations and the creatures, and thought about how they would soon shed their filamentary wings and come to ground in a shallow bay off Shanti’s enormous, singular ocean. She watched the strange stars wheel, and said to herself, This is home, this is home, this is home.

  She had awoken six weeks early, a month before landing. Time, which had stopped for the ten subjective years of her voyage, had begun again with a snap like a slingshot. She knew this not because of menopause, or grey hairs, or radical changes in earthly politics, but because of her inbox, which was filled with thousands of messages she could not yet bring herself to read. During all those years asleep, Mom had written weekly about what she put in the garden, who was married, what books she read. Her messages amounted to more than a million words by the time Mai woke. A million words she could not yet bring herself to read, because they unsettled the persistent sense she had that everyone was as they had been before stasis-time, all of them awaiting ignition as she had done at the beginning of her multi-generational tenure, losing consciousness before synthetic umbilicals snaked into her body. Ten years gone in a single moment so brief that when she woke she wondered if something had gone wrong and they were still circling Earth. But it was Shanti below them, and she had become a woman past forty, floating in placental goo that had not been there a moment before.

  She had swallowed against the tubes down her throat. The panic started. She began to feel the calluses and sores of a decade suspended. She threw up and a hose carried off her yellowish effluent. She felt the slither of internal machinery, and as it withdrew she felt how deeply infested she was by plastic and metal. A voice in her ear—no, not her ear, in the middle of her head, a friendly voice: Do not panic do not panic. When she could raise her wet, entangled hand to her face she found she had no eyebrows or lashes.

  And now she was here, the place to which she had been traveling for decades, since the first landing team shot images back to Earth and she, only twelve, fell in love with Shanti the greenskinned. Shanti, who surpasseth understanding, even when Mai spent a whole afternoon with her eyes turned upward, wondering at the flutter of translucent wings.

  It happened on an afternoon she didn’t notice, walking barefoot near the river, maybe, or staring up into Shanti’s aurora. Some dormant wisp breached her body on an in-breath among billions of other in-breaths. Her hand rose to scratch the inside of her elbow and through the abraded skin slid the spore. Something kindled, something single-celled, a bubble suited only to drift, rudderless, with each heartbeat until it rose through the permutations of its life cycle from spore to something larval, or like a nematode, and then some terminal, adult shape she could not imagine.

  There are analogues on Earth, and she’s afraid her mother will find them and learn about parasitic horrors: the fungus that permeates the exoskeleton of an ant and drives it upward along a stem to the underside of a leaf, where the punctuating explosion of its possession rains infection down on its sisters.

  There’s the flick of a small fish in the water, the light catching its silver belly, and the flash catching the eye of a heron, who catches the fish and—in eating—catches the parasite. The spreading brain-lesions that tell the fish: Flash, flick your tail up through the water to the air, to the beak of the waiting bird. Go. Go. Go. They say it over and over. Go.

  Or the rat who rushes the cat. Or the man who rushes the telephone pole in a sports car because recklessness is a lesion on his brain and Toxoplasma gondii exploits his nervous system. The tongueless fish. The caterpillar who is nurse and nursery to a family of wasp larvae.

  Her first impulse was always to lie. No, everything’s great, she always said. She wrote a letter to her mother, about how beautiful Shanti was. Lovelier than the pictures. Everyone was kind. The fruit trees were always in flower. The ocean was a deep aquamarine, shading into an orange like a traffic cone when the sun descended. There were no traffic cones on Shanti, so she deleted that bit, and added something about a mandarin orange from the shop Mom liked on Fisgard Street. She wondered if Mom had bought oranges there this last Christmas, or any of the intervening Christmases. She hoped nothing had happened to stop the yearly ritual of oranges in green tissue paper.

  She wrote a(nother) letter to her mother. I’ve been infected by a parasite. I won’t tell you what because I don’t want you to search for it. By the time this reaches you it won’t matter much, anyway. In fact, I’m forbidding you right now from looking for anything or asking anyone. Apparently I have about twelve hours as myself. They won’t say what happens next, because it’s kind of unpredictable. There are lots of animals who’ve had it, but only two people. They won’t tell me.

  I can’t stop thinking about the time we climbed up Mount Tolmie, the Christmas after Dad died, and you asked me something about agriculture in a seasonless ecology. And it was such a stupid question, I wouldn’t answer it properly.

  I keep thinking I feel them—every itch, every little nerve-wriggle—though they’re too small to feel, so it’s all in my head. I know it’s all in my head. But they’re not in my head. Or, not yet. The blood-brain barrier is the last redoubt, and then—I don’t know.

  I keep thinking about Mount Tolmie, and looking down at the lights when the city’s fogged over. I keep thinking about the oak trees on the way up, on either side of the path, and the Easter lilies in February and March. Then maybe walking down to the beach and getting gelato, maybe a sugar-cone, and sitting on the beach, and trying to pick up as much Styrofoam out of the high-tide line as we could find. If you want to know, Shanti’s seasonlessness is not much problem for permaculture, at least. Parasites, on the other hand, are a

  She wrote the letter again, but differently, with no mention of the parasite or Mount Tolmie. She screamed at the doctors outside her isolation bubble: extract it, cell by bloody cell. Flood me with all the old cures—malaria or mercury baths, chemotherapy, kill it with radiation. Kill me on the way, if necessary. Kill it, kill it, just kill it I can feel it. Let me go home so they can get it out.

  Overhead the convoy still floated, awaiting its return voyage, and she begged them to put her back in her pod and send her to Earth, hoping stasis killed it dead, or at least delayed its colonization. Bu
t the possibility of cross-contamination, the invasion of Earth’s ecosystem by what amounted to a biological weapon already embedded in what might become a compliant host. Besides, she had years ahead of her, probably, maybe. Shanti is always a one-way journey.

  Do something with the last minute you have. Scream. Again. Scream. Hack yourself open and let the invading legions spill out through the wound you make in your own gut. No.

  Write another letter home warning them that though they may, later, receive letters from a Mai-shaped creature, it will not be her. No, go for a walk. No, eat a meal as a human being. Use the most dire and terrifying pickup line of all time: I’m about to become a composite entity, governed by an occupying host of single-celled aliens, and I’d like to get laid one last time as a person. No. Whatever you do, don’t go to sleep, because then you won’t know when it happens. Just wait, all night if necessary, in the little hut on the edge of the settlement to which you have been exiled for the village’s safety because they really don’t know what happens next. Wait for each little spore to flower in your brain and affix itself to your very substance. No.

  She wrote a letter to her mother: Does the fish flash in the shallows where the bird can see it because it is the parasite’s creature, or because of the pleasure it takes in sunlight? Does the caterpillar love the little wasps, and the rat feel a transfiguring passion for the cat?

  She deleted it.

  Mai seemed to remember that she had felt lonely in quarantine at first, maybe because it had frightened her, spending her nights outside the walls in the little hut. The loneliness, however, was temporary, because the first symptom of the Shanti Parasite’s successful colonization was that she stopped hating the Shanti Parasite. On the afternoon of the second day of her infection she looked down and was surprised to find she had broken two fingers in some struggle against the interior of her own body. There were gouges and deep bruises on her face and belly. That was when it had her, a species better adapted, wilder, subtler, more lovable than any creature any human had ever encountered.

  She healed quickly. She re-read the first letter home, the one about the little dear ones, written in panic, but she could still remember the day on Mount Tolmie. How her mother had wanted to climb it at Christmas in some weak simulacrum of holiday tradition. They’d take the dogs along the winding path to the top, she said, and sit in a patch of sunlight for a few minutes as they had done before Dad died. Mom brought shortbread, Christmas baking that was also a remnant of that other world. To Mai, they all seemed like marionettes, following the forms of a family that no longer existed, and that wouldn’t exist—in the same way—ever again. She wished she’d declined to climb, as her sisters had done, but together she and Mom looked down at the city and Mom tried to make conversation, asking that stupid question about Shanti’s axial tilt. Mai could not control her irritation, nor the anger that flared at this question, since she had explained in great and pedantic detail about axial tilts and seasons and permaculture.

  She remembered thinking: You should have known better than to come home for Christmas, because it was not home, but a husk, remarkable only because it possessed the shape of the thing it once held, which had been your family.

  She’d left her mother to clean up the waxed paper and the Thermos, and gone back to the husk, taking the short, fast route down the mountain, her mother trailing behind her with the dogs. On Shanti, parasitized, Mai remembered the day with the disinterested gaze of a woman staring through a telescope at a tiny, perfectly focused star. The winter jasmine had been in bloom. She wanted gelato from the place down on the beach, and without looking back to see if her mother was still following she had turned away from the house and toward the water.

  On Shanti, she stopped being afraid. She stopped sneezing. That was good. She didn’t mind that no one talked to her anymore because after the dissolution of fear and anger, and after her instantly cured hay fever, came love, which her doctors called a side-effect of the excessive production of oxytocin and phenethylamine, as well as other as yet unidentified endogenous opiates in the reports they sent back to Earth. It would have been easier to call it love, she told them, and they ignored her. The excessive production was exactly what she told them it was: love passionate. Tender. Erotic. Love familiar, and love affectionate. All possible shades rushed her at once: love unspeakable, love irresistible, love both angelic and animal, love that burst her heart like a shell, her pupils permanently dilated as her blood boiled with the little dear ones, and those as yet unidentified endogenous opiates.

  The earlier, earthly passions were only harbingers of Shanti, and she remembered each as a prefigure of the first real love she ever knew: her little sister’s babyhood when she was just four; her cat; her first love, at fifteen. Her second love, at eighteen. Her first adult love, which was also her terminal passion, when she was twenty-one. Then the years of stasis as she awaited Shanti in the library or on the starship, the blank years, during which time passed, but seemed not to.

  And now: the little dear ones who kindled in her blood regulated—blindly, she thought, with the instinctively perfect manipulations of infancy—the operative chemicals in her brain, filling her with all shades of affection. All possible degrees and experiences telescoped into a passion for the single-celled creatures who floated through the viscera of her eye, droplets that cast translucent shadows in the day, and hazed her sight with the bioluminescence of Shanti’s night. She felt the rush of them through all the corridors of her body, the multitudes, the civilizations under her skin, whose shapes she could not imagine, whose futures were inaccessible to her, and whose language she did not speak, though she heard its murmur everywhere.

  She scares the colonists, like she’s a time bomb about to cover them all with Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which is silly, because she couldn’t if she tried, and it doesn’t exist on Shanti, anyway. That’s okay, she says to the one doctor who’s stuck doing physicals and tracking the Shanti Parasite’s progress. When she goes in for her monthly examinations he is masked and latexed. She points out that the whole planet is teeming, and he goes pale and queasy and she feels sad that she’s upset him, but isn’t quite sure why.

  The secret they won’t mention in their reports—though she tells them over and over again—is that the Shanti Parasite makes her a better person. Definitely a better daughter. She reads all her letters from Earth one after another without being afraid of what she’ll find. She wonders why Mai’s first thought was to lie to her mother, and is troubled by this, and by the memories that she possesses but no longer understands. With her astronomer’s gaze she remembers that other life: Mai’s mother on the last morning, in the garden, barefoot in her nighty. Mai in pajamas, sitting on the step with her very last cup ever of morning coffee, watching Mom pull a dandelion—its root as large as a carrot—from the bed beneath the pink rhododendron. Mai watched her snap the root, then scatter the leaves. Dandelions, an old-world invader species, arriving with the first North American settlers, and equally voracious. There were—so far—no dandelions on Shanti. Which was too bad, Mai thought, because dandelion root made a coffeeish sort of drink. Not a substitute, but something you could drink and remember coffee by.

  The sun in the garden now, on the still-unopened buds of the lavender in the border that lined the path, in among the rosemary and low thyme bushes. Mom picked lavender stems, and the young branches of the rosemary and thyme.

  She carried them to Mai, wrapping them with a blade of grass, and handed Mai the tiny nosegay. Mai held it, and the faint stickiness of the herbs’ oily stems spread on her fingers.

  Mai thought of Shanti’s permanent spring, the long, temperate year at the mid-latitudes of the settlement, the heat of the equator, the glacial mountains above the treeline. She held the bunch tight to her lips and breathed through their leaves. She did not look to see, but she thought her mother’s mouth twisted, her eyes fixed steadily on the ground under her bare feet.

  “Take it with you?”


  “I don’t know if they’ll let me.”

  “Mai, you’re crawling with organisms. You’re a generation ship. A little bunch of flowers from your mother isn’t going to destroy Shanti’s ecosystem. We’ve probably already done that, anyway.”

  Mai looked away from the garden, into which she, and her mother, and her sisters had been born, and said to herself, Never anything so familiar, ever again.

  The little bunch of flowers and leaves are still with her, in a baggy, in a locker, with other things she does not use: notebooks, some jewelry still vacuum-packed that fit into her ten-kilo personal allowance. Like most colonists she had loaded up on information, the nearly weightless petabytes of data: favorite books, photographs, patterns and programs, recordings of her sister’s children telling stories.

  The flowers, now scentless, their petals nearly grey, are the only things that demonstrate in their substance the passage of time. Other than her face, of course, which despite the no-doubt moisturizing unguents of the pod, shows years of existence, though not years lived. She and the flowers know it.

  The developing Shanti Parasite: from the single-celled to something like a nematode in the fourth year of her infection. She was sick for three weeks, shedding most of the original millions so only a few thousand survived to settle into lesions on her brain and along her spine. The doctors won’t even touch her anymore. No one touches her, which is less troubling than the die-off that meant she no longer thrums inside like a salmon-river in spring. She misses them.

  The new lesions brought the first of the neurological symptoms: the fingers of her left hand curled around the palm. She often wakes up with a thin film of some flexible amber spread over her face, tinting Shanti’s blue-green palette a warm, nostalgic gold.