The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition

by Paula Guran [editor]

  I woke three hours ago, blurred by nightmares, having been dream-stalking a man-eater, not the present tiger, but the one from 1918.

  With me in my dream was Henry, his elbow in tattered cotton, his silvered beard and long hair, his skin a dark contrast to the yellowed whites of his eyes. I looked over at him once, and saw him open his mouth, but his lips moved, and I heard nothing.

  The screams, when they came, seemed a part of the same dream. They were not. At 4:13 this morning, a young man of twenty-three was taken from his hut, and dragged through the center of town. A villager shot at the man-eater, and swears he hit her chest, but she leapt with her victim over the briars and barbed wire, twenty-five feet, a seemingly impossible height, and returned to the forest. Pitiful scraps of the man’s clothing hang from the highest thorns.

  Dulled by exhaustion from yesterday’s travels, by the time I was on my feet and out into the main area, it was too late. In truth, I need not excuse my speed. If one hears screaming, rescue is already impossible. Those left behind can only hope that death will be quick. There’s no possibility of pursuing a victim into the dark, not when they’ve bled so much that the dust is red mud, and the man’s wife, having woken to the feel of something heavy and vividly alive brushing past her bed, is already keening in her doorway.

  For twenty seven minutes after the attack, we listened to the tigress departing through the trees, heralded by a sound like a kennel of dogs readying for a feeding, though it was something quite different, the kakar barking their alarm, tiger passing here, tiger coming.

  The man-eater scratched her victim’s door, and the scores in the wood are deep. I showed them to K_______, who examined them with interest. There’s a slight odor of alcohol drifting about the man this morning, that and a cloying floral cologne, for which I severely remonstrated him. He purged it with a gin-soaked handkerchief. Gin is better than lilies.

  The tigress left pugmarks in the dirt, and with them, I’ll be able to identify her with certainty. K_______ dutifully cast them in plaster of Paris, and annotated his drawings with measurements. There is no blood trail. It is often the case that a tiger one shoots to kill, even as the bullet seems to have connected, remains strangely unwounded. This is the way things are here, even, in some cases, for a shikari.

  K_______ has arrived with the cast and his rudimentary drawing, and I will examine them, taking notes here, as part of this entry.

  Size: Extremely large, at least ten feet over curves, a nearly unprecedented size for a female, and her paws are strikingly unsplayed, unusual in a tiger so immense. Her claws are so sharp as to suggest daggers.

  Age: She is, by her prints, young, though her intelligence would indicate experience. This is a tigress who’s been terrorizing the villages in this region for over five years, a beast who certainly must at some point have been at least superficially wounded.

  Tracks: The symmetry of her tracks shows almost no sign of such wounding. On her left front paw, there is an old scar across the pad.

  A clean gash that clearly went deep. Can this—

  *Break in text*

  Later. The shape of the scar stopped me as I sat looking at the marks by torchlight. It stops me now that K_______ has left, and I sit alone in my tent again. I can’t—

  After I came down from these mountains, I published a partial account of my exploits. There were photographs of my grin on newspaper front pages, a certain level of celebrity, a short film in which I demonstrated my stalking technique. I had no notion of what was coming for me, of the way this forest would stay with me. I had no idea.

  After that film was screened, I borrowed a woman’s fountain pen to autograph a photograph for her, and ink leaked onto the pad of my thumb. Without care for observers, for cameras, she took my thumb into her mouth and licked it clean, her tongue turning sepia.

  “There,” she said, when she was finished, still holding my hand, looking up and directly into my eyes. “Now you won’t leave marks on me.”

  I took her to the coast. We fucked with the lanterns lit, bright enough that all the moths in miles flew to press their bodies against our tent. One night she ran into the dark, and I stumbled after her, calling her name, and waiting for her to show herself. I was tired of tracking.

  “You might have found me by my footprints,” she said, stepping out of the night, raising one foot to show me the scar on the right arch. “I stepped on a water glass years ago, and didn’t get it stitched. Look at that mark. Beautiful, isn’t it?” I took her foot in my hand, and then stopped. The mark was a mark I knew.

  She looked at me. Her eyes were not yellow, no. She did not change into anything but what she was, a beautiful woman with a broken footprint.

  “You’ll never forget me now,” she said, and her tone was not quite playful. “Did you think you could? But you’ll have to follow me, and if you don’t, I’ll follow you.”

  I fled the next morning before sunup. She opened her eyes as I pawed my way out of the tent, and said nothing, only smiled. I could see her teeth in the dark.

  There were other women after her, and other nights like that, when I ran from imagined monsters. I knew there was nothing haunting me, and yet I couldn’t seem to resist the narrative, the tracks of the tigress, broken prints, broken lines. I shunned my own hallucinations, but I kept looking.

  I was a drunk, in those days. There are years of my life I scarcely recall. I will say that here.

  I will also say that the tigress, the long-ago tigress, the dead tigress, was paw-scarred by Henry’s knife. She’d surged up from below him as he leaned over a rock to peer at the place we believed she was lying up over a kill. He managed to roll from beneath her while she licked her wound, and I fired at her, but I missed. A few days later, he was gone, and I was broken.

  No one emerges unscathed from my profession. The line between sanity and insanity is imperceptible until you cross it, a mere game trail on a hillside, unmarked and unnoticed, until one finds one’s feet pacing that path, higher, higher, into the dizzying thinness of the air.

  As I sit here, writing this, I shake my head.

  The tracks—- I can scarcely write these foolish lines -—have appeared in various places over the years. In the dust of my stoop in Kenya, a woman’s bare feet, scar in the arch. And padding in soft circles around the bed I share with my wife, a tiger’s tracks, sliced cleanly across the pads by a knife. There’ve been times I’ve seen them everywhere I went. I know that guilt writes its own stories. These prints are true, though, the ones the tigress left here last night.

  I leave this entry to page through all the pugmarks I’ve seen in the last forty years, recorded and coded in my notebook, searching for another explanation.

  16 September 1950

  Later.

  I find myself longing for my old partner. I should never have returned to these mountains. Shaitan, my mind tells me, but I should know better. Henry would.

  In 1908, when I first met him, he was in his later fifties, but could easily spring shoeless straight up a mountain, fleet as a ghooral. I once saw Henry casually pluck a fish from a pool with his hand. I hadn’t even seen the glimmer of it in the water. He was a far better hunter than I, for though I was young then, and strong, I was bound by strange decorum, intent upon differentiating myself from the beasts.

  Henry’s skills had been passed down through four generations, and he had himself functioned as the Kumaon region’s chief shikari since the year I was born. The hunters did more than simply hunt. They catalogued the spirits in the trees and the devils in the waters, dispersed measured portions of the bodies of man-eaters to the villagers for their good luck charms. The rifles are lighter now, the bullets more destructive, and the ancient ways are being forgotten.

  The old shikari could track a butterfly on the wing, by the breeze created in its flight. They could find a snake the size of a quill pen, slithering up from a trail, and chart its passage through the streams.

  When Henry opened his mouth to speak, it wa
s as plausible that a forlorn tiger’s call for a mate would come from it as words in human language. He could mimic anything in these woods. Once, in a moment of triumph, having together slain a leopard after weeks of stalking, he smiled slightly at me, and gave a whistling trill, then another. Eventually, I counted thirty-seven species of birds flocking to us.

  I would be remiss if I did not record here that Henry was also superbly mechanical, capable of combining two rifles into something better than either had been. Or of creating a precise and killing snare out of a length of silk thread drawn from a sari, a coil of spring, and razor blade. He mapped our prey with precision, and he knew which tiger might be near from the shape the creature’s body left in the grass. For ten years, Henry and I hunted man-eaters all over India, surveying the trees for motion, listening to the sounds of warning coursing through the mountains like ripples on a gin-clear pond.

  When Henry and I came to Naini Tal in the final days of 1917, it was our goal to deliver the residents of the monsters they’d made. If a plague strikes a remote place such as this one, and there are not enough villagers left to carry the bodies of the dead down to the water in procession, the rites of burial may be simplified. A live coal is placed in the mouth of the corpse, and then the bodies carted to a cliff, and thrown into the valley below, where the leopards and tigers find them, eat them, and develop their own desires.

  We were summoned by a desperate rumor, a cooee call from ridgeline to ridgeline until it arrived at us. This place was far from the world, back then. There were no telephones, no telegrams. There were no cars. The village had lost their own shikari to a Himalayan bear six months before the plague began.

  All the adults in the village were dead by the time we heard of Naini Tal, and only children remained. The tigers had taken over the town. They swept through the narrow passages between the huts, their golden bodies glinting in the starlight, their chins lifted to scent the air. It was as though the cats meandered through a night market, from stall to stall, sampling wares. There were twenty-six of them, and what had been a thriving village had become a place of terror.

  Henry and I arrived to a place in shambles, tiger’s marks before each door. The children were packed into one hut, and they’d left the rest of the village to the man-eaters. The pond where water was collected was half-dry, and all around it were the marks of claws.

  When we arrived, the children came cautiously from the hut. They were all skin and eyes. There’d been no forage, and their livestock were dead. Each of the children had about their neck a locket containing a piece of tiger: red fur or black fur or bone or claw, but the charms had done nothing to save them. I argued to remove them from their village. I’d never imagined so many man-eaters in one location.

  Henry, though, had grown up in the region. This was his territory. He knelt at the pond, treading on the tracks of the cats. He searched for a moment in his camp sack, and then brought forth an empty can, along with clockworks from my own recently smashed watch. I hadn’t known he’d saved them.

  After a few minutes work, he’d made of these materials a tiny creature. As the children came closer, fascinated by the toy he made, trusting him, he finished it, a sharp-edged bird made of metal. He twisted something beneath its wing.

  It fluttered, and then, miraculously, took flight into the trees. It circled, swaying and wobbling in the air, and then landed again in his hand. The children looked at him as though he was a god, bringing animals to life out of broken things.

  Henry shrugged when I asked how he’d made it, and told me it was nothing, a children’s game. I never saw the bird again, though I thought of it often, the part of me that was still a child as enchanted as those children had been.

  One by one, over the next months, we stalked and killed each of the man-eaters. At last, there was only one remaining.

  I think of how I saw Henry last, his hand raised to protect his face, the choked sound he made—

  He’d changed in the months we’d hunted those twenty-six tigers. Begun to drink in daylight, and sometimes at night. At the time, I didn’t notice. I was killing tigers too. The night before he died, though, Henry looked over our fire at me, and asked if I thought the tigers deserved to win. I immediately answered that they’d developed a taste for humans, and killing them was all that could be done. I didn’t want to talk about anything else.

  After all of it was over, I convinced myself that Henry’s death had been his own doing, that he’d been drunk, and endangered us both.

  But in my mind, Henry looks at me again, mute as he was in my nightmare. I know what he wanted to say, I know.

  He’d seen a glimpse of color. In places like this, anything red means tiger. Anything white means bone. Anything golden means seen, and seen means eyes, and eyes mean death, unless one is luckier than one has any right to be.

  The tigress had watched as we placed ourselves, thinking we awaited her arrival, when in fact she’d been crouched patiently in her own blind, waiting for us all night.

  In the book that was published all over the world, the book that inspired generations of hunters to come to these woods, I did not say that my courage failed me. When I felt the tigress coming close on me, I abandoned Henry and ran.

  She didn’t pursue me. No. She took him instead.

  I regained my senses too late and followed the trail of her drag, but I found only a pool of his blood, deep enough to dip my hands in, deep enough to cover.

  For another five days, I stalked her, sleepless, out of food, my rifle jammed in my flight from her. I talked to myself, and to Henry, talked to the tigers I felt but could not see. I was a coil of rope caught by something invisible and swift, my soul tight between its teeth. I unspooled into emptiness.

  At last, I tracked the tigress around a crumbling mountain ledge, the only retreat back the way I’d come. She was there, sleeping in the open, confident in her size and speed, confident in my despair. Her abdomen was exposed, the fur around her teats matted down from suckling cubs.

  I brought my pistol from behind my back, and shot her in the chest, my hands too unstable to aim at her head. She was awake and nearly on me then, but mortally wounded. The man-eater leapt over me, lunging through the trees. I shot her again as she retreated, and she lost her footing.

  I witnessed her fall from China Peak, her body flipping, twisting, striped gold and black as a wasp, her back certainly broken as she flew.

  Irretrievable, the bodies. The tigress fell deep into the straight-sided ravine, and Henry was gone.

  I tracked the tigress’ two cubs to the place she had hidden them. Not man-eaters. No. Mewling still.

  After it was finished, I went down the mountain, eyes full of tears and blood, and I lied to them all about what had happened. I said that it could not be helped, that I had tried to save Henry, but even as I thought I was speaking, out of my mouth came something else, the cries of deer and the dying, the voices of birds and ghosts. One child wrapped my head in cotton while another packed my wounds and gave me, spoonful by spoonful, wild honey and herbs for my fever. They called from a ridge, and a message went forth to another village.

  Some men of my slight acquaintance came and carried me from Naini Tal, hospitalized me in Delhi, and there I stayed for six months, convalescing, writing the book of lies that made me famous.

  I wonder now if I’m still in 1918, and all I thought I saw and did since then a madman’s dream, because the tigress I’m tracking now, the tigress whose prints I see in the dirt of this village, has been dead for thirty-two years. I killed her.

  17 September 1950

  Nine in the morning.

  “What is it you seek in those mountains?” my wife asked me just before I left. She’d found me at the table, my rifle out for cleaning. “What is it you seek that is not here? Everything is everywhere.”

  She poured red tea into my porcelain cup, white milk into the tea.

  Blood, I thought. Bone. Tiger, I thought.

  I thought about the footp
rints on our stoop. I thought about how every time they appeared, my wife came out with the broom, and brushed them away as though they were nothing. Perhaps they were nothing but dust.

  She added an anthill of sugar to the cup, and then stirred it violently with a metal spoon, rattling the saucer.

  “Do you want to kill every tiger in the world?” she demanded.

  “Not all the tigers,” I protested. “This tiger. In this village. In my village.”

  “That isn’t your village,” my wife said. “I’m your village. Do you see me?”

  It was night, and a mosquito had landed on my arm to drink, its beak trembling. A calm came over my wife as she studied it. After a moment, she took the insect between her fingers and crushed its body, my blood smearing her fingers.

  “This is a tiger,” she said, and she didn’t look at me as she carefully placed the mosquito in the flame of the candle, igniting its wings. “This was a tiger.”

  And now, I’m in Kumaon, making my way up and into the forest toward Pali. Whatever haunts me, I intend to find it. A ghost, a tiger, a woman, a hallucination. Maybe these tracks are left by the wind, but I pursue my old enemy today, and if she finds me before I find her, I deserve what she plans for me.

  K_______ and I have been over the nearby parts of the forest, and now we prepare ourselves to enter it. K_______ has perversely over-armed himself, and his rifle is much too heavy. He carries eleven cartridges, far more than necessary, particularly considering that anything we shoot will be shot by me, not by him. Nevertheless, I can’t convince him otherwise. I didn’t bother to try.

  Strapped to his back is a suitcase filled with powdered preservatives and skinning tools. The taxidermist is nervous as a cat, he told me, with some degree of humor.

  “Tigers are never nervous,” I informed him. “Tigers are nothing like us.”

  I looped the ropes for the machan around my arm. Aside from the pug and scratch marks, there’s no other sign of the tigress in town, nor in the nearby trees. I’d expected to find scat, and other scratching, but I’ve seen nothing. All I see are her broken prints, familiar to me as my own hands, scarred pad, claws digging strangely unretracted into hard-packed dirt.