The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  THE YEAR’S BEST

  DARK FANTASY AND HORROR

  2010

  Edited by

  PAULA GURAN

  To Ellen Datlow who has always been and always will be the best.

  Copyright © 2010 by Paula Guran.

  Cover art by Travis Anthony Soumis.

  Cover design by Stephen H. Segal.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-258-0 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-233-7 (trade paperback)

  All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors,and used here with their permission.

  PRIME BOOKS

  www.prime-books.com

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact Prime Books.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction, Paula Guran

  THE HORRID GLORY OF ITS WINGS, Elizabeth Bear

  LOWLAND SEA, Suzy McKee Charnas

  COPPING SQUID, Michael Shea

  MONSTERS, Stewart O’Nan

  THE BRINK OF ETERNITY, Barbara Roden

  FROST MOUNTAIN PICNIC MASSACRE, Seth Fried

  SEA-HEARTS, Margo Lanagan

  A HAUNTED HOUSE OF HER OWN, Kelley Armstrong

  HEADSTONE IN MY POCKET, Paul Tremblay

  THE COLDEST GIRL IN COLDTOWN, Holly Black

  STRANGE SCENES FROM AN UNFINISHED FILM, Gary McMahon

  A DELICATE ARCHITECTURE, Catherynne M. Valente

  THE MYSTERY, Peter Atkins

  VARIATIONS OF A THEME FROM SEINFELD, Peter Straub

  THE WIDE, CARNIVOROUS SKY, John Langan

  CERTAIN DEATH FOR A KNOWN PERSON, Steve Duffy

  THE ONES WHO GOT AWAY, Stephen Graham Jones

  LENG, Marc Laidlaw

  TORN AWAY, Joe R. Lansdale

  THE NOWHERE MAN, Sarah Pinborough

  THE BONE’S PRAYER, Caitlín R. Kiernan

  THE WATER TOWER, John Mantooth

  IN THE PORCHES OF MY EARS, Norman Prentiss

  THE CINDERELLA GAME, Kelly Link

  THE JACARANDA SMILE, Gemma Files

  THE OTHER BOX, Gerard Houarner

  WHITE CHARLES, Sarah Monette

  EVERYTHING DIES, BABY, Nadia Bulkin

  BRUISE FOR BRUISE, Robert Davies

  RESPECTS, Ramsey Campbell

  DIAMOND SHELL, Deborah Biancotti

  NUB HUT, Kurt Dinan

  THE CABINET CHILD, Steve Rasnic Tem

  CHERRYSTONE AND SHARDS OF ICE, Ekaterina Sedia

  THE CREVASSE, Dale Bailey and Nathan Balingrud

  VIC, Maura McHugh

  HALLOWEEN TOWN, Lucius Shepard

  THE LONG, COLD GOODBYE, Holly Phillips

  WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU WAKE UP IN THE NIGHT, Michael Marshall Smith

  Acknowledgements

  Publication History

  About the Editor

  WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN BY “DARK FANTASY AND HORROR?”

  PAULA GURAN

  “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it . . . ”

  —Justice Potter Stewart,

  Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964)

  Like Justice Potter Stewart with pornography, I can’t intelligibly define “dark fantasy.”

  But I know it when I read it.

  Of course, you might not agree with what I “see” as dark fantasy. I might not agree with what you “see.”

  There’s no single definition. “Dark fantasy” isn’t universally defined—the definition depends on the context in which the phrase is used or who is elucidating it. It has, from time to time, even been considered as nothing more than a marketing term for various types of fiction.

  Darkness itself can be many things: nebulous, shadowy, tenebrous, mysterious, paradoxical (and thus illuminating) . . .

  A dark fantasy story might be only a bit unsettling or perhaps somewhat eerie. It might be revelatory or baffling. It can be simply a small glimpse of life seen “through a glass, darkly.” Or, in more literary terms (all of which are debatable), it might be any number of things—as long as the darkness is there: weird fiction (new or old) or supernatural fiction or magical realism or surrealism or the fantastique or the ever-ambiguous horror fiction.

  As for defining horror: Since horror is something we feel—it’s an emotion, an affect—what each of us experiences, responds or reacts to differs.

  What you feel may not be what I feel. Maybe you can’t stand the thought of, oh . . . spiders. Understandably, one doesn’t want to encounter one of the poisonous types, but I think of spiders, for the most part, as helpful arachnids that eat harmful insects. You, however, might shiver at the very thought of eight spindly legs creeping down your wall.

  Once upon a time I felt the term “horror” could be broadened, accepted, and generally regarded as a fiction [to quote Douglas E. Winter who wrote in Revelations (1997)] that was “evolving, ever-changing—because it is about our relentless need to confront the unknown, the unknowable, and the emotion we experience while in its thrall.”

  One reason Winter was reminding us of that in the introduction to his anthology was because the word “horror” had already been devalued. He was right about what horror literature is, but the word itself had been slapped on a generic marketing category and, by 1997, the word had become a pejorative. The appellation was hijacked even more completely in the years thereafter and became associated in the public hive mind—an amorphous organism far more frequently influenced by the seductive images, motion, sounds, and effects that appear on a screen of any size than by written words (even when they are on a screen)—with entertainments that depend on shock for any value they may (or may not) possess rather than eliciting the more subtle emotion of fear.

  And while fine and highly diverse horror literature—some of the best ever created—continues to be written in forms short and long, the masses for the most part have identified “horror” as either a certain kind of cinema or a generic type of fiction (of which they have certain expectations or ignore entirely because it delivers only a specific formula.)

  So, the term “horror” has been expropriated, and I doubt we’ll ever be able to convince the world it means what we alleged horror mavens might want it to mean.

  For this anthology, I might have just stuck with just “dark fantasy” for the title, but there are stories here with nothing supernatural in them at all. I mean, fantasy of any type must have a supernatural element. Doesn’t it?

  Of course some people insist that “horror” has to have a supernatural element for it to be “horror.” Without the woo-woo, they insist, you are deal

  ing with a psychological thriller or . . . something or other.

  Seems we’re back to “What the hell . . . ?”

  I’m not offering any definitions. I’m merely offering you, the reader, a diverse selection of stories—all published within the calendar year 2009—that struck me as fitting the title of this tome. Each of them—no matter the style of the writing, theme, or shade of darkness—grabbed me from the start and kept me reading.

  You may find yourself abruptly jerked from one reality and thrust into anoth
er as you read. I have eclectic tastes. I hope you do, too, or are at least willing to try a taste of something new.

  Or, considering the size of this tome, even if you don’t care for a certain percentage of the stories, I sincerely hope you find enough you do like to have made it worth your while.

  If you are interested in my own shallow musings on the selections, I’ve included comments at the end of each. But don’t read the notes until after you’ve read the story! If you do, well . . .

  You never know what might find you in the dark.

  Paula Guran

  June 2010

  THE HORRID GLORY OF ITS WINGS

  ELIZABETH BEAR

  “Speaking of livers,” the unicorn said. “Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that.”

  —Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

  My mother doesn’t know about the harpy.

  My mother, Alice, is not my real mom. She’s my foster mother, and she doesn’t look anything like me. Or maybe I don’t look anything like her. Mama Alice is plump and soft and has skin like the skin of a plum, all shiny dark purple with the same kind of frosty brightness over it, like you could swipe it away with your thumb.

  I’m sallow—Mama Alice says olive—and I have straight black hair and crooked teeth and no real chin, which is okay because I’ve already decided nobody’s ever going to kiss me.

  I’ve also got lipodystrophy, which is a fancy doctor way of saying I’ve grown a fatty buffalo hump on my neck and over each shoulder blade from the antiretrovirals, and my butt and legs and cheeks are wasted like an old lady’s. My face looks like a dog’s muzzle, even though I still have all my teeth.

  For now. I’m going to have to get the wisdom teeth pulled this year while I still get state assistance, because my birthday is in October and then I’ll be eighteen. If I start having problems with them after then, well forget about it.

  There’s no way I’d be able to afford to get them fixed.

  The harpy lives on the street, in the alley behind my building, where the Dumpster and the winos live.

  I come out in the morning before school, after I’ve eaten my breakfast and taken my pills (nevirapine, lamivudine, efavirenz). I’m used to the pills. I’ve been taking them all my life. I have a note in my file at school, and excuses for my classmates.

  I don’t bring friends home.

  Lying is a sin. But Father Alvaro seems to think that when it comes to my sickness, it’s a sin for which I’m already doing enough penance.

  Father Alvaro is okay. But he’s not like the harpy.

  The harpy doesn’t care if I’m not pretty. The harpy is beyond not pretty, way into ugly. Ugly as your mama’s warty butt. Its teeth are snaggled and stained piss-yellow and char-black. Its claws are broken and dull and stink like rotten chicken. It has a long droopy blotchy face full of lines like Liv Tyler’s dad, that rock star guy, and its hair hangs down in black-bronze rats over both feathery shoulders. The feathers look washed-out black and dull until sunlight somehow finds its way down into the grubby alley, bounces off dirty windows and hits them, and then they look like scratched bronze.

  They are bronze.

  If I touch them, I can feel warm metal.

  I’d sneak the harpy food, but Mama Alice keeps pretty close track of it—it’s not like we have a ton of money—and the harpy doesn’t seem to mind eating garbage. The awfuller the better: coffee grounds, moldy cake, meat squirming with maggots, the stiff corpses of alley rats.

  The harpy turns all that garbage into bronze.

  If it reeks, the harpy eats it, stretching its hag face out on a droopy red neck to gulp the bits, just like any other bird. I’ve seen pigeons do the same thing with a crumb too big to peck up and swallow, but their necks aren’t scaly naked, ringed at the bottom with fluffy down as white as a confirmation dress.

  So every morning I pretend I’m leaving early for school—Mama Alice says “Kiss my cheek, Desiree”—and then once I’m out from under Mama Alice’s window I sneak around the corner into the alley and stand by the Dumpster where the harpy perches. I only get ten or fifteen minutes, however much time I can steal. The stink wrinkles up my nose. There’s no place to sit. Even if there were, I couldn’t sit down out here in my school clothes.

  The harpy says, I want you.

  I don’t know if I like the harpy. But I like being wanted.

  The harpy says, We’re all alone.

  It’s six thirty in the morning and I hug myself in my new winter coat from the fire department giveaway, my breath streaming out over the top of the scratchy orange scarf Mama Alice knitted. I squeeze my legs together, left knee in the hollow of the right knee like I have to pee, because even tights don’t help too much when the edge of the skirt only comes to the middle of your kneecap. I’d slap my legs to warm them, but these are my last pair of tights and I don’t want them to snag.

  The scarf scrapes my upper lip when I nod. It’s dark here behind the Dumpster. The sun won’t be up for another half hour. On the street out front, brightness pools under streetlights, but it doesn’t show anything warm—just cracked black snow trampled and heaped over the curb.

  “Nobody wants me,” I say. “Mama Alice gets paid to take care of me.”

  That’s unfair. Mama Alice didn’t have to take me or my foster brother Luis. But sometimes it feels good to be a little unfair. I sniff up a drip and push my chin forward so it bobs like the harpy swallowing garbage.

  “Nobody would want to live with me. But I don’t have any choice. I’m stuck living with myself.”

  The harpy says, There’s always a choice.

  “Sure,” I say. “Suicide is a sin.”

  The harpy says, Talking to harpies is probably a sin, too.

  “Are you a devil?”

  The harpy shrugs. Its feathers smell like mildew. Something crawls along a rat of its hair, greasy-shiny in the street light. The harpy scrapes it off with a claw and eats it.

  The harpy says, I’m a heathen monster. Like Celaeno and her sisters, Aello and Ocypete. The sisters of the storm. Your church would say so, that I am a demon. Yes.

  “I don’t think you give Father Alvaro enough credit.”

  The harpy says, I don’t trust priests, and turns to preen its broken claws.

  “You don’t trust anybody.”

  That’s not what I said, says the harpy—

  You probably aren’t supposed to interrupt harpies, but I’m kind of over that by now. “That’s why I decided. I’m never going to trust anybody. My birth mother trusted somebody, and look where it got her. Knocked up and dead.”

  The harpy says, That’s very inhuman of you.

  It sounds like a compliment.

  I put a hand on the harpy’s warm wing. I can’t feel it through my glove. The gloves came from the fire department, too. “I have to go to school, Harpy.”

  The harpy says, You’re alone there too.

  I want to prove the harpy wrong.

  The drugs are really good now. When I was born, a quarter of the babies whose moms had AIDS got sick too. Now it’s more like one in a hundred. I could have a baby of my own, a healthy baby. And then I wouldn’t be alone.

  No matter what the harpy says.

  It’s a crazy stupid idea. Mama Alice doesn’t have to take care of me after I turn eighteen, and what would I do with a baby? I’ll have to get a job. I’ll have to get state help for the drugs. The drugs are expensive.

  If I got pregnant now, I could have the baby before I turn eighteen. I’d have somebody who was just mine. Somebody who loved me.

  How easy is it to get pregnant, anyway? Other girls don’t seem to have any problem doing it by accident.

  Or by “accident.”

  Except whoever it was, I would have to tell him I was pos. That’s why I decided I would sign the purity pledge and all that. Because then I have a reason not to tell.

  And they
gave me a ring. Fashion statement.

  You know how many girls actually keep that pledge? I was going to. I meant to. But not just keep it until I got married. I meant to keep it forever, and then I’d never have to tell anybody.

  No, I was right the first time. I’d rather be alone than have to explain. Besides, if you’re having a baby, you should have the baby for the baby, not for you.

  Isn’t that right, Mom?

  The harpy has a kingdom.

  It’s a tiny kingdom. The kingdom’s just the alley behind my building, but it has a throne (the Dumpster) and it has subjects (the winos) and it has me. I know the winos see the harpy. They talk to it sometimes. But it vanishes when the other building tenants come down, and it hides from the garbage men.

  I wonder if harpies can fly.

  It opens its wings sometimes when it’s raining as if it wants to wash off the filth, or sometimes if it’s mad at something. It hisses when it’s mad like that, the only sound I’ve ever heard it make outside my head.

  I guess if it can fly depends on if it’s magic. Miss Rivera, my bio teacher sophomore year, said that after a certain size things couldn’t lift themselves with wings anymore. It has to do with muscle strength and wingspan and gravity. And some big things can only fly if they can fall into flight, or get a headwind.

  I never thought about it before. I wonder if the harpy’s stuck in that alley. I wonder if it’s too proud to ask for help.

  I wonder if I should ask if it wants some anyway.

  The harpy’s big. But condors are big, too, and condors can fly. I don’t know if the harpy is bigger than a condor. It’s hard to tell from pictures, and it’s not like you can walk up to a harpy with a tape measure and ask it to stick out a wing.

  Well, maybe you could. But I wouldn’t.

  Wouldn’t it be awful to have wings that didn’t work? Wouldn’t it be worse to have wings that do work, and not be able to use them?

  After I visit the harpy at night, I go up to the apartment. When I let myself in the door to the kitchen, Mama Alice is sitting at the table with some mail open in front of her. She looks up at me and frowns, so I lock the door behind me and shoot the chain. Luis should be home by now, and I can hear music from his bedroom. He’s fifteen now. I think it’s been three days since I saw him.