The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  I know what you need, I thought, and after our dinner I went down to Fisher’s and got us a bottle of spirit.

  “Cold nights, these,” said Doby Fisher just as his dad would, cold weather or hot, to anyone who bought such a bottle. “Man needs a tot.”

  I carried it up home. Dad watched me cross to the hall with it.

  “I know what you’re at,” he said after me.

  “Good,” I threw back. “I should not like to deceive you.”

  “Impertinent.”

  Well, it took that night a bit of hoo-ing and hawing, and a long disquisition on whiskies the land over, but we reached a time after all the nonsense, late in the night, when all lamps outside were gone excepting the sky’s own, when anything could be said between a son and his father; we’d taken on the perfect amount of liquoring to make the tongue loose but not yet the tears.

  “Oh, Daniel,” he began, out of nothing, out of my questioning way back this morning, “she were so beautiful. You know it,” he said. “You remember. She come out the skin and none of our misery had touched her yet; none of the cruelties of this world had marked her. She was sad, yes, she was desperate to go home, but you could distract her from that, you could fascinate her with any small thing—the way an auger worked, maybe, or a swallow-nest in the eaves. And when she laughed—well, you remember, don’t you? You made her laugh enough. We were all envious of our sons, that could make their mams laugh just by breathing, or playing stones, or asking where the sky ended, or eating up a fresh bowl of porridge. None of us husbands could do that, not so readily. We were always their imprisoners as well as the men they loved, and the fathers of their children.”

  He put out his glass, and I filled it for him, with candlelight and the sweet-woody smell of truth-telling. He slid it back to himself and looked into its dark-gold eye.

  “I’ve had a plenty of time to go over this. While she was here I did not think it, but when she went, and you with her—why, then we all had time, didn’t we? Years we had, to meditate upon it. There were some men all afire to fetch up more women from the sea, but with their few tries they had no luck, and the rest of us, we wanted the wives we’d had and no other; we wanted our own lads back that we knew.

  “I remember when Jon Fisher brought the very first one in, and we all went down the storehouse to see her. Tricked up in Lucy Fisher’s dress, she was, and my, wasn’t she uncomfortable. She stared, one way and another; she would not look at you. She had been crying, all botched about the eyes, you could see. Jon Fisher’s mam sat by her, looking so fierce, no one was bold enough to say a word, to ask the seal-girl anything.”

  He sipped his drink. “I thought she would die if she stayed here, and she must have thought the same, for she made herself bleed breaking into the cupboard where the skin was that night, and fighting her way out of Fishers’. In the morning she was just footprints across the wharf, blood-prints. I was glad for her, and I was blistering angry with Fishers the same, for not locking her up better, or setting any kind of guard on her, so’s we could look some more in the morning.

  “We know Martyr is not an admirable fellow, and we knew he wasn’t then, yet when he showed at market with his new girl on his arm, that he called Ivy, just as if she belonged on dry land among us, the thing we wanted most to know was how he had come by and kept her. And one by one from him and each other we found out, and one by one we went and had a sea-blanket knitted up. Some went by water and netted their wives there. Some waited until the seals come up for sunbasking in Crescent Corner. And some went well away and took theirs from icebergs up north or other islands. There was no stopping us. Even the women threatening to go did not stop us.”

  “But I always thought the women went first, and left the men in need.”

  “Oh no, lad. They were here all the time. They saw it all. They said and said: You don’t stop this, you will lose all the real-wives of the town, and then you will see what it’s like, being married to magic. Which they did, and which we did. Which we are seeing still.”

  He took almost a bite of the spirit, to bring himself back to me and this room a moment.

  “Anyway, I did same as all of them—I was no stronger nor better at the sight of those lovely women. You know the story from there.”

  “I do not,” I said. “Did you go down Crescent Corner or what, for instance?”

  “No, I was not brave enough. Crescent was for lads who could do it alone, and I wanted others around me. You always had to have Messkeletha there, of course, but I wanted fellows, too. Make me feel I was on the right path, that it was not against nature, what I was doing.” He snorted and looked at the window. “Yes, so I just went out on our boats, with the wife-net the witch had spelled for us and that first blanket she had knitted me from seaweed and a good portion of my money, and up come your mam.” He gave this last an end-of-story flourish.

  I did not let up with my eyes, though. He paused and added a little water to the spirit, then shot me a glance. Then—it was a relief, I could tell. He fell into the next part, and his face flowered open. He had never told it before, and he knew he was doing right by telling me, and I saw expressions on him he had never worn before, except when my mam herself were in this very room with the two of us.

  “Then the seal would be fighting trapped in the blanket, and most unladylike noises it would make. Messkeletha was at your elbow muttering: Keep her covered, keep her covered. But even through the knitted weed you could see the split in the seal-flesh, the crimson that did not bleed, the whiteness of the woman that came out clean, not touched or at all smudged or smelling of seal from inside. Clean as a peeled onion she came out, and soon you had all whiteness bucking in there like a mad maggot and you thought, Whoa, Messkeletha’s got me a bent one; how will I get my money back?

  “But then she told me: Right, my work is done now. I am going for sleep before I throw my stomach—for she was always on border of seasick, out there on the boat with us doing this work. All our money in the world could not settle her stomach.

  “And she’s gone, and it’s only you—all the other lads are up beyond the deckhouse so as not to catch the silky’s first eye and become her master instead of you.

  “I found which end was her head and I held her down and I whispered her calm. Her eyes through the netting, through the blanket—I had seen enough seal-women by then to know them, yet this was a new beast, of course, among us, and I was her first close person.

  “All the time whispering, I drew back the blanket, just from her face first and then her hair, untangling as I went. One white shoulder.

  “What have you done? she said to me, at a pause in my whispering. Why have you taken me from my home? Her voice grew stronger later, and clearer, but that first utterance it was rusty and bubbly, and did not know how to pitch itself.

  “To take care of you, I told her, the best you have ever been cared for. To make you my wife.

  “By now we had run out of girl-clothing left to us by our own mams and sisters. But Grinny and Ewart had proved themselves neat at stitching up shifts that covered a woman decent, and I had me one of these, which I gave to her: Here, put this on. It’s kinder than that rough blanket.

  “And I will not forget her in it: lost, white-armed and white-footed and white-faced, sitting on a bollard in the gray shift with the world gray around her, boat and boy and sea and sky of it, looking up to me for—”

  He drained his glass, put it down and examined the table either side of it. “Well, back then I liked to think it were love and comforting she looked for, but she may as easily have been reproaching me, for taking her up from everything she knew, and landing her here in my strange world, for my strange pleasures, for the rest of our lives, as I thought.”

  He sat a long time with that sour expression, thinking. Then his mind moved on, and his face softened.

  “I hope you have a wedding night half like it, though, Dan’l. I hope you hold someone to your heart with only a shred of what I felt for that animal-w
oman. It is not something you can give back to the sea, after that. You put your full self, your full soul into them narrow hands, and afterwards you cannot be far from her, for fear of becoming nothing. When you all went, Dan’l—ahh, can you imagine? Can you imagine the—the—” He grinned over the candle at me. “The ghosts we were, the objects! We bare had strength to eat—and some did not, of course, and died that way, Errol Curse was one. We did not manage a funeral even for Errol, just put him away in the earth where he would not smell and interrupt our miseries, though Baker was all for throwing him in the sea, to make the point to Curse’s wife, and Frederick and Batton, what they had done to him.”

  Then the tears started, and I will not show him to you that way. I stayed out the weeping with him, though, and the talking; I poured him more spirit when he asked for it; I agreed with him and soothed him as I could.

  I lifted my head from my arms some time after midnight. He was staring into and addressing his drink.

  “A night like this, it were,” he said, “with the night breeze drabbling in the window just so, with not much to it.”

  I did not know if he meant the wedding night, or the night he met Mam, or the night they all went down to Fishers’ store and saw the first seal-woman, and began the whole thing—or indeed another night of his story, that I had not been awake for.

  I was washing the breakfast plates next morning when Dad came to me, which was unusual of him. Just his approaching, out of his chair when I knew he had already performed all the rituals of his morning, threw the day unusual. Was he poorly some way?

  He came up close. “The Winch girl is here,” he said to my shoulder.

  “Here?”

  His blue eyes swam as surprised as I felt. “She wants to speak to Daniel.” As if Daniel were a third person—which almost he might be, a Daniel that Miss Lory Winch summoned.

  I dried my hands. Dad watched me, watched me go, as if I were become that third man, another creature suddenly.

  She flamed in the street outside. She had her hair different today, tied back still but exploding out beyond her shoulders. But very demure underneath it, with her arms folded.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  Her face was so white it seemed lit from inside. She considered me until my greeting had erased itself from the air into foolishness. “You don’t remember, then,” she said, disappointed.

  Which immediately I did. There was only the one red girl to remember, after all, other than Trudle and Trudle’s girls. “Knocknee Market,” I said.

  She beamed.

  “I went home and bothered my mam about you Killy men. I had not even realized she came from here. I suppose it is not something you boast of, that you were no prospect in a town full of beautiful mer-women.’

  In my head Dad said, Did you like her? And I heard his tone now as I’d not when he said it, the great restraint in it, over the shyness, over the interest. I hid one-third of myself by leaning behind the doorpost. How could she stand so cheerfully in the sunlight and talk so?

  “I am very disappointed not to have seen them,” she said. “From the looks of the lads, they must have been quite a different make.”

  She wore neat mainland shoes, with an odd strap on them that seemed not entirely necessary.

  “Were there any pictures painted of them, or photographs taken?”

  “Cawdron drew some, of his mam, when he was little, that his dad has still on their wall. Grinny’s dad brought a picture from the mainland—not of a wife, but a woman who looked like a wife. Some old painting; this was a picture of the painting. She had quite the look. That is at their place, sometimes on the wall, sometimes behind an armchair.”

  “Come walking?’ she said. “You can only footle about on a doorstep so long.”

  “I’ve dishes to finish.”

  “Those can wait, Daniel,” said my dad up the hall. “Or even I could do them, at a pinch. Think of that. You go.”

  “Come down the water?” said Lory Winch. “I have barely seen anything, there was such a crowd around me yesterday.”

  “Are you sure?” I said to Dad.

  “Of course.” He waved me away. “Go. Go. A walk in the sunshine with a pretty girl can only do you good.”

  So out we walked, and down the town, and as we walked and conversed—as she questioned me and I showed her the shapes of my ignorance, as I filled their emptinesses from Dad’s memories and brought them back to her—without hardly being noticed, the rest of that summer went by. By the time we reached the water the air was chill and the sky gray. Graceless the waves moved, chop-chopping where they ought to have been smooth, a field of moving thorns against the underside of the land-world.

  Lory and I walked along the mole between them, the littler water to our left an apron for the town; then to our right and forward the larger sea, busy all the way to the horizon and who knew how far beyond? Foam smeared it here and there, like whiteness being combed out; apart from that, the surface was dark and opaque; nothing splashed or surfaced, and no boat cut through the chop.

  We did not hold hands; we were too secret for that. I did not even look at her, though her orange hair burned as bright now in my heart as it did at my shoulder-height over there. I could see it out the corner of my eye, crawling up into the air, unraveling from its ponytail, the frizzy bits at her forehead and temples flinging themselves away from their tetherment, always sprung back by their curliness. I could see, even as I chewed my lip and looked out at the nothing overriding our mothers, Lory’s curve of white forehead; Lory’s round-tipped white nose spattered with pale freckles; Lory’s mouth that I intended kissing, soon as I could summon myself, the palest apology for color; Lory’s soft girl-chin. All of these were neat and clear-edged against the dirty ocean, and her mainland hair, her dads’ hair, smoked orange into the sky, curled and tumbled down her back like brookwater tightened between rocks.

  The moment passed when we could stand any longer without awkwardness. Still I stood and stared, not knowing what else to do, but Lory turned and eyed the town, and went to the stones at the path edge and examined among them—for sheltering birds, maybe, or for things washed up. Her curiosity would make something arrive there, make the right thing happen now, any moment, and carry her on out of her shyness, and me with her.

  About the Author

  Margo Lanagan published poetry in her teens and twenties, then began publishing prose with novels for teens in the early nineties. She attended Clarion West in 1999, and her first collection of speculative-fiction short stories, White Time, appeared the following year. Her 2006 collection, Black Juice, was widely acclaimed, winning two World Fantasy Awards, two Ditmar Awards, two Aurealis Awards, and a Michael L. Printz Honor from the Young Adult Library Services Association. It was also shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Stories from Black Juice were nominated for a Hugo, a Nebula, a Theodore Sturgeon, a Bram Stoker, an International Horror Guild Award, and a Tiptree Award. Her third collection, Red Spikes, was the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for older readers, and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the World Fantasy Award, and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her novel, Tender Morsels, won a World Fantasy Award and was also a Michael L. Printz Honor Book. Her fourth collection, Yellowcake, and another novel, The Brides of Rollrock Island, will be published in 2011. Lanagan taught at Clarion South in Brisbane in 2005, 2007, and 2009. She lives in Sydney and is currently working as a technical writer and an arts bureaucrat, and writing a lot of short stories.

  Story Notes

  The selkie myth has often been used as a motif in fiction, but few have handled it as well as Lanagan does in this novella. Other than the gorgeous prose, wealth of atmosphere, and clear characterization, she offers a balanced, poignant view from all sides . . . and even what is probably a happy ending.

  Originally published in X6 by Coeur de Lion, this is Sea-Heart’s first publication outside of Australia.


  A HAUNTED HOUSE OF HER OWN

  KELLEY ARMSTRONG

  Tanya couldn’t understand why realtors failed to recognize the commercial potential of haunted houses. This one, it seemed, was no different.

  “Now, these railings need work,” the woman said as she led Tanya and Nathan out onto one of the balconies. “But the floor is structurally sound, and that’s the main thing. I’m sure these would be an attractive selling point to your bed-and-breakfast guests.”

  Not as attractive as ghosts.

  “You’re sure the house doesn’t have a history?” Tanya prodded again. “I thought I heard something in town. . . . ”

  She hadn’t, but the way the realtor stiffened told Tanya that she was onto something. After pointed reminders about disclosing the house’s full history, the woman admitted there was, indeed, something. Apparently a kid had murdered his family here, back in the seventies.

  “A tragedy, but it’s long past,” the realtor assured her. “Never a spot of trouble since.”

  “Damn,” Tanya murmured under her breath, and followed the realtor back inside.

  Nathan wanted to check out the coach house, to see if there was any chance of converting it into a separate “honeymoon hideaway.”

  Tanya was thrilled to see him taking an interest. Opening the inn had been her idea. An unexpected windfall from a great-aunt had come right after she’d lost her teaching job and Nathan’s office-manager position teetered under end-of-year budget cuts. It seemed like the perfect time to try something new.

  “You two go on ahead,” she said. “I’ll poke around in here, maybe check out the gardens.”

  “Did I see a greenhouse out back?” Nathan asked the realtor.

  She beamed. “You most certainly did.”

  “Why don’t you go take a look, hon? You were talking about growing organic vegetables.”

  “Oh, what a wonderful idea,” the realtor said. “That is so popular right now. Organic local produce is all the rage. There’s a shop in town that supplies all the . . . ”