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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  I never used to drink. I wanted to take it up, starting with something old and fine. I want a new life. I desire to do things differently. Live!

  Fyodor drank again . . . and looked up at the light bulb. He blinked in its fierce sulfurous glare, its assaultive parhelion. It seemed almost part of an eye, a glowing yellow eye, looking at him from some farther place . . .

  He stood up suddenly, shaking himself, his twitching hands dropping the bottle—it shattered on the concrete with a gigantic sound that seemed to resound on and on, echoing . . . and in the echo was a voice. His mother’s voice . . . the part of her mind that had spoken to him through the sea of static. This time it said something else: We need souls. We have few left in our world. Come to us, across the Great Deeps. Restore our world. Become one with us.

  The room, which should be dull gray, seemed to quiver in ugly colors. He turned and staggered to the stairs. His head buzzed. Then he looked up to see that Roman Boxer was standing at the head of the stairs. “Doctor? Are you well? You are Doctor Cheski, are you not? I believe that was the name . . . ”

  Fyodor started wobblingly up the stairs. Alcohol level must have gotten very high in the wine. Seeing things. Unable to climb damn basement stairs very well . . .

  He got to the third step from the top—and Roman put out his hand to him. “Here—take my hand. You look a trifle unsteady.”

  But Fyodor held back, afraid to touch Roman and not sure why. “You . . . should be asleep.”

  “Yes, well—I simply woke up. And everything was fine! Whatever you gave me helped me enormously. The pain in my stomach is gone! I was surprised to be no longer in the hospital . . . Yes. Thought I was a goner. Kind of you to bring me home—if that’s what this place is. That nurse—is she here?”

  “The nurse? What . . . ” Fyodor licked his lips. “What is your name?”

  “You really have overindulged, my friend. I am your patient, Howard Lovecraft . . . ” Roman smiled widely and once more reached for him. Fyodor jerked back, irrationally afraid of that hand. The hand of a dead man.

  And Fyodor tipped backwards, flailed, tumbled down the stairs. He heard a sickening crunch . . .

  Darkness entered through the crack in his skull. It swept him up, carried him away . . .

  He drifted through the darkness—orbiting a far world. Beginning to sink toward that cloud-clotted planet . . .

  No. He refused to go.

  “In time, you will come. We traded him for you . . . ”

  Fyodor struggled, psychically writhing, to get back. A long ways back, and an endless time somehow folded within a few minutes . . . Then he was crawling across the basement floor. Someone was helping him up. Roman . . . was that his name?

  The young man, quite solicitous, helped him up the stairs to the front hall—and then Leah stepped in the door. “Oh my God! Fyodor! Roman, what happened! Have you hurt him? He’s got blood on his head! I knew something was wrong! I was sure of it! Never mind, just sit down, Fyodor, I’ll call an ambulance . . . and the police.”

  How the seasons wheel by. Spring, summer, fall, winter; spring, summer, fall; a year and another . . . And then an early summer day . . . the roses were pretty, quite new, not yet chewed by the fungus. . . .Mom drooped in her chair, across from him, eyes completely hidden in sunglasses. She would want to play cards when she woke up. He preferred the puzzle.

  “Fyodor?” It was Leah, speaking from the back door. Smiling. Dressed up rather formally. “We’re going out. To the book signing.”

  “Hm?” Fyodor looked up from his Old Providence jigsaw puzzle. Mother had been grumpily helping him put the puzzle together on the card table, in the late summer sunshine; the rose garden behind the Dunn house. But Mom had gone to sleep, a jigsaw piece in her hand, slumped in her chair. She looked contented, snoring away there.

  Roman was so good to take care of her—to care for them both here.

  “I said, we’re going to Roman’s signing—for his book? You sure you won’t come? The man from the New York Times is going to interview him.”

  “Is he? That’s good. Big crowd?”

  “Oh, yes. It looks to be a bestseller. I know you don’t like crowds.”

  “No. Crowds and cats . . . ”

  He had heard Roman’s agent, a pretty blond lady, chattering away over breakfast. “They’re framing it as Roman Theobald, the man Lovecraft might have become . . . ” Then she’d turned to him. “How are you this morning, Fyodor? Would you like some more orange juice?”

  Very kind of her. Everyone was very kind to him, since the accident. Since the damage to his head.

  Leah had married “Roman Theobald”—that was his pen name. Roman Boxer was his real name. Anyway—the name on his birth certificate. Sometimes, in the house, she used a funny little affectionate name for him. “Howard.” Odd choice. Anyway, she was Mrs. Roman Boxer now. She was almost ten years too old for Roman, but Mrs. Boxer had approved. She’d bought the Dunn house as a wedding gift for them. Mrs. Boxer had died, soon after the wedding, of cancer. Buried at Swan Point Cemetery.

  Fyodor felt good, thinking about it. Maybe it was the Prozac. But still—it was true, everyone was very kind. Roman, Leah, the doctors. And Leah made sure he took his pills in the evening. He really couldn’t sleep without them. Particularly the pills against nightmares. He was quite sure that if he dreamed of that place again—the place the bells in the sea spoke of—he would not wake up the next morning. He might never wake up again. And Mother, then, poor old Mumsy, would be all alone. Until they came for her too.

  John Shirley is the author of more than thirty novels. His numerous short stories have been compiled into eight collections including Black Butterflies: A Flock on the Darkside, winner of the Bram Stoker Award, International Horror Guild Award, and named as one of the best one hundred books of the year by Publishers Weekly. He has written scripts for television and film, and is best known as co-writer of The Crow. As a musician, Shirley has fronted several bands over the years and written lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult and others. To learn more about John Shirley and his work, please visit his website at john-shirley.com.

  Something seemed vaguely odd to her about the meadow between her grandmother’s house and the river . . .

  DAHLIAS

  Melanie Tem

  In Rosemary Farber’s dream or waking dream or hallucination or vision, that sunny July afternoon on the couch in the house she’d lived in since her marriage just after the Second World War, on the dead-end street in the little town near the foothills of the Colorado Rockies that had officially slid into suburbia but retained much of its insular small-houses-and-big- trees feel—something was coming. She was no more or less its object or prey than were the rabbit brush or the fox, but it would get her, which she thought not entirely a bad thing.

  In Nina Scherer’s multi-tasking rush—on her cell setting up an appointment with a client for later that afternoon, juggling the red and yellow dinner-plate dahlias from her yard and the chicken casserole and chocolate chip cookies she’d stayed up late last night getting ready to bring today, checking her Daytimer for when and where she needed to have her son at band and her daughter at karate, trying to remember if there was enough milk at home for breakfast—in the midst of all this getting-through-the-day and keeping-things-running, something seemed vaguely odd to her about the meadow between her grandmother’s house and the river. Something out of the corner of her eye about the tall summer grass, about its color or its motion in the breeze. This impression didn’t really register with her until she was already on the porch, and it was too much hassle to back out and look again.

  When Nina called and pushed open the door, Grandma Rose- mary was under an afghan on the couch. She spent most of her time there now, looking tired and ninety-one years old but not alarmed, not in pain, not otherwise distressed. In fact, looking calmer than Nina herself ever felt.

  “Hi, Grandma.” Nina set the dahlias on the coffee table and the food on the counter. She bent to kiss the
old woman, so dear to her for so long, still Grandma Rosemary but going away from her a little every day, as if pulled down some slope into a place or a placelessness where Nina couldn’t follow, wouldn’t want to follow, would never want to follow. Although a little rest would be nice.

  Rosemary turned her head. “Those are lovely.”

  “It’s been so dry. Our water bills are sky-high, and the garden is still struggling.”

  “They’re so big and bright.”

  “They grew that way just for you.” Nina smiled past a sudden lump in her throat.

  “Well, not really. We’re in the same world at the same time, is all, the dahlias and me. Nothing personal. I expect I’m a lot more interested in them than they are in me.” She chuckled.

  Nina’s phone vibrated and Caller ID displayed a name of someone who, she decided rather grudgingly, could wait. In the seconds it took for the call to go to voicemail, the worry that not answering it had been a big mistake lodged in her mind where it would cause persistent low-level distress, for in her business there was a commonplace though inaccurate adage that a missed call equaled missed opportunity. In fact the call, and the follow-up text message and e-mail she wouldn’t find until much later, were about something that really didn’t matter very much, though the client was convinced it did.

  One of the cats glided from the couch onto the table and, with that lovely and utterly inhuman pink-tongue flickering, lapped delicately from the water in the vase. Hoping nothing in dahlias was toxic to cats, Nina inquired of her grandmother as she put her cell phone away, “How are you?”

  Rosemary said, “Something’s moving in and it will take me. I don’t have much longer.”

  When Rosemary was like this, being in a hurry didn’t work. But Nina had only about forty-five minutes, fifty at the most, before she had to be back at the office for the team meeting. She knew she’d regret it if she missed this conversation. Really, it was the least she could do, and Grandma Rosemary had always been fun to listen to, with her family stories from as far back as the Civil War, her on-the-spot composition of rhymed and free verse, the sense that she was always engaged with more than one world at a time. Childhood summers spent in this house had affected Nina in ways she wasn’t completely aware of, showing her— though she hadn’t learned it very well—how not to take herself too seriously in the larger scheme of things and, at the same time, fostering her m.o. of staying busy, filling time to overflowing, by sheer perpetual motion declaring her own significance.

  She should have paid attention to Rosemary that afternoon, borne witness and learned something. It wouldn’t have made any difference in what happened, but still she should have listened. Instead, “Oh, Grandma,” she remonstrated, smoothing her palm across the thin white hair, “don’t talk like that.”

  Rosemary smiled indulgently. “All right, then, what shall we talk about? What’s new with you?”

  The rocker tipped forward and stayed that way when Nina sat on the edge of the seat. She never knew quite what to say to that question. “Nothing much new, I guess. Same old, same old. You know?”

  “How are the children? How’s Ken?”

  “Good. They’re all good. Busy.”

  “Give them my love.”

  “I will. They said to say hi.” They hadn’t, but she told herself they would have if they’d thought of it, which actually wasn’t likely.

  Anything beyond small talk ran the risk of a longer and deeper conversation than either of them wanted that day. Yet they were both restless, dissatisfied with the chitchat, neither knowing why. Rosemary thought her peevishness was because of her profound, unremitting fatigue. Nina thought hers was from having so much to do.

  Outside, the meadow grass undulated, a swath glistening in the high strong sun and bending under the living weight that was moving up from the river, closer and closer to the house though neither the house nor anything else was its particular target. Rosemary knew it was coming. Nina didn’t quite yet.

  “Are you hungry?” Nina tried.

  “I’m never really hungry anymore.”

  “You have to eat.”

  This exchange they had almost every time Nina visited. But usually Rosemary didn’t say so directly, “Why? Why do I have to eat?”

  “What do you mean, why? You have to eat to live.” Nina didn’t have time for this. Rosemary didn’t have much time, either, but the time she had wasn’t spoken for anymore.

  She did eat a little, a few spoonsful of the casserole, half a cookie, a swallow or two of milk. Nothing tasted good, more a function of her diminished gustatory, olfactory, and tactile senses than of the intrinsic merits of food. Nina ate quickly and quite a lot, sampling, mostly to check on the quality of her own cooking, which she found somewhat lacking. Rosemary said it was good, and it was, because of the companionship and forethought, and also because of the abundance of chips in the cookies, in some places the dough embedded in a melted mass of chocolate rather than the other way around.

  They talked—Nina talked—about things that once had aroused her grandmother’s interest, often passion: the kids, the economy, the war, religion, politics, family stories. Rosemary reminisced about this neighborhood as it used to be, when at weekly coffeeklatches the women got mending and fancy work done and chatted about mostly inconsequential things made to seem consequential by the sharing. She always pointed out that it hadn’t all been placid, there’d been things hidden and not-so-hidden—child abuse, infidelity, illnesses and accidents, a kidnapping. This time how she put it was, “We weren’t really friends. But we were friendly. Those get-togethers were like solid ground. Everybody’s gone now. Some moved away and didn’t keep in touch. Some died. Francine Pollack went to a nursing home last month. So now I’m the only one still left on the street from those days. I’m an island in a rising sea.”

  “I’m sorry, Grandma. That must be a terrible feeling.”

  “It’s the way of the world.”

  “Well, we don’t have to like it.”

  “Doesn’t matter if we like it or not.”

  Rosemary saw no point in saying any more right then about what regularly swept through the neighborhood like a viscous transparent tide. It had brought the great love of her life as well as his early death, the Klingmans’ house fire and also their glorious roses, Mark Abernathy going MIA in Vietnam and Cheryl Raines becoming a doctor in sub-Saharan Africa, hand-built houses bulldozed for a strip mall and a lovely new creekside park replacing dilapidated and dangerous apartments, both Francine Pollack’s deterioration and her good long life—bringing or causing or revealing, Rosemary didn’t know, but all of it with the utter indifference she found terrible and reassuring. “I’d like to take a little walk,” she announced, and began the laborious process of getting to her feet.

  Startled, Nina took refuge in glancing at her watch. “Oh, Grandma, I don’t think—There’s not enough time—Are you sure you can—?” But she hastened to support the unsteady walker that her grandmother was using to pull herself up.

  They made their way out the back door. It was a dry hot summer, and petunias were languishing in their pots. “Do you suppose it would help,” Rosemary asked, breathlessness and strain altering her sardonic intent, “if we prayed for rain?”

  Nina was praying that Rosemary wouldn’t fall, that she would make the meeting, that she had enough gas in the car for all the running around she had to do yet today. Whether she really believed in the efficacy of petitionary prayer or it was only a ritual like a jump-rope chant, it gave her the illusion of calm while actually adding to her tension. Uncomfortable in the heat and her two-inch heels, aware that her cell was beeping with missed calls, she could manage only, “Maybe.”

  “God,” Rosemary panted, “whatever that means, most likely cares not a whit about my dried-out petunias or your drooping dahlias.”

  “So God hates us? Or the universe or whatever?” Nina couldn’t tell whether she should take her grandmother’s soft elbow or put an arm around her or
not.

  “I think we’re of no interest to him. It.”

  “Gee, Grandma, that’s cheery.”

  “Not cheery.” Rosemary teetered and Nina grabbed her. “But not not cheery, either. Neutral. It just is.”

  “You’re going to fall. It’s hot out here. Let’s not do this.” Rosemary saw or felt or tasted or in some other way took in the gloss moving up over the meadow. Nina probably didn’t yet, or didn’t know she did. It had oozed around the apple tree now and under the ancient swing set. The tree would live quite a few more years to bear hard little fruit for the crows and squirrels, but the swing set would finally rust through that fall. Nina, realizing her attempt to be helpful was actually contributing to the old woman’s unsteadiness, let go of her and just stayed close.

  Nina had been having episodes of vertigo and pounding headaches, once or twice with blurred vision, and every now and then two fingers of her right hand went numb. Stress, she was sure. She didn’t have time to do anything more than be sure the ibuprofen bottle in her purse was always full. Right now she was having some trouble with her left foot. She didn’t mention this to Rosemary or anyone else, didn’t give it much thought, her thoughts being busied with many other things, at the moment her grandmother’s slow but somehow headlong momentum. “Where are we going?”

  “Just down the meadow a little ways,” Rosemary said. She was in its path. Everybody was in its path. It was time. Might as well go meet it, see what would happen next. She thought to assure her granddaughter, “It won’t take very long,” which was true, but what she couldn’t know was that it would take the rest of Nina’s life.

  Frail as she was, Rosemary managed to guide the two of them across the patio and down into the backyard. This meant navigating three steps and the sliding patio door that stuck, requiring Nina to pull hard enough to compromise the balance of them both, individually and together. Clouds were moving in from over the mountains, where weather almost always came from. “It couldn’t have stayed pretty just a few more minutes for us,” Nina grumbled. The air was humid now, full, as if threatening rain, but it wasn’t threatening anything, even if it did rain. And in this case there would be no precipitation all that week, though yards and gardens and the meadow itself could have used drenching.