The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  I made a pillow of spun sugar. I made plates of butterscotch. Each morning I tapped a marzipan egg with a little toffee-hammer. But I never caught a sparrow for my plums. They are so very quick. I was always hungry for them, for something living, and salty, and sweet amid all my sugar. I longed for something alive in my crystalline house, something to remind me of the children crushing up cane with tan, strong hands. There was no marrow in my plums. I could not remember the red sun and the long, green stalks, and so I bent low in my lollipop rocking-chair, weeping and whispering to my father that I was sorry, I was sorry, I was no more than a pig snuffling in the leaves, after all.

  And one morning, when it was very bright, and the light came through the window like a viola playing something very sweet and sad, I heard footsteps coming up my molasses-path. Children: a boy and a girl. They laughed, and over their heads blackbirds cawed hungrily.

  I was hungry, too.

  About the Author

  Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979, Catherynne M. Valente is the author of over a dozen books of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, and The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award, the Andre Norton Award, the Lambda Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009, and the Locus and Hugo Awards in 2010. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, an enormous cat, and an accordion.

  Story Notes

  Like Kelly Link’s story, Catherynne M. Valente’s “A Delicate Architecture,” was written for Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales. Unlike Link, Valente stays closer to the anthology’s stated theme: the backstories of fairy tale villains. Although written for younger readers, the vividly descriptive imagery; her twisted uses of the standard fairy tale tropes, trappings, and characters; and the final revelation of exactly who our sweet protagonist turns out to be all make the story a deliciously dark treat for their elders as well.

  THE MYSTERY

  PETER ATKINS

  “For upwards of two hours, the sky was brilliant with lights.”

  —The Liverpool Daily Post, Sept 8th 1895

  There’s actually no mystery at all.

  Not if you went to the Bluey, anyway.

  It used to be the grounds of a house, a big one. No Speke Hall or anything, but still technically a Stately Home. It had been called The Grange and was pulled down in May of 1895.

  Four months later, minus an ornamental lake which had been filled in, the grounds were opened as a park for the children of Liverpool by the city council. It was officially named Wavertree Playground but was almost immediately dubbed “The Mystery” by local people, because the person who bought the land and donated it to the city had asked for anonymity.

  The Bluecoat School, a boys’ Grammar, backed onto The Mystery and if you were a pupil there, even seventy-five years later, it was made pretty damn clear to you that it was one of our old Governors who’d forked up for the park. Philip Holt—one of our four school houses was named for him—was a maritime magnate in the days of the great ships and the Cast Iron Shore. The money needed to clear the land and create the park was probably no more than loose change to the man whose Blue Funnel Line practically owned the tea trade between Britain and China.

  So. No mystery there.

  I’ll tell you what was a mystery, though. The fucking state of the Gents’ bogs.

  The Liverpool of the mid-sixties was a city suffering a dizzying drop into recession. No more ships, no more industry, no more Beatles—Tara, Mum. Off to London to shake the world. Don’t wait up—but even so, the public toilets at the northwest corner of the Mystery were astonishingly disgusting. “Derelict” didn’t even come close. They’d been neither bricked up nor pulled down. It was more like they’d been simply forgotten, as if a file had been lost somewhere in the town hall and nobody with any responsibility knew they even existed. Utterly unlooked-after in a third world sort of way and alarming to enter, let alone use. No roof, no cubicle doors, no paper, what was left of the plaster over the ancient red bricks completely covered with graffiti of an obsessive and sociopathic nature, and last mopped out sometime before Hitler trotted into Poland.

  But, you know, if you had to go you had to go, and I’d had many a piss there back in the day. If you didn’t actually touch anything, you had a fighting chance of walking out without having contracted a disease.

  But to see that soiled shed-like structure still there on an autumn afternoon thirty years later was more than a little surprising.

  I had some business to attend to and shouldn’t really have allowed myself to be distracted, but I felt a need to check it out. The boys appeared just as I approached the stinking moss-scarred walkway entrance.

  There were two of them, both about thirteen, though one at least a head taller than his friend. Although they weren’t actually blocking the path—standing just off to the side, ankle-deep in the overgrown grass—they nevertheless gave the impression of being self-appointed sentries, as if they were there to perhaps collect a toll or something.

  “Where are you going, then?” The first one said. His hair was russet and looked home-cut and his face was patchily rosy with the promise of acne.

  “The bog,” I said.

  They looked at each other, and then back at me.

  “This bog?” said the first.

  “Fuckin’ ’ell,” said the second. He was the shorter one, black Irish pale, unibrowed and sullen.

  “You don’t wanna go in there,” said the first.

  “Why would you go in there?” said his mate.

  I shrugged, but I wasn’t sure they noticed. They were staring at me with the kind of incipient aggression you’d expect, but weren’t actually meeting my eyes. Instead, they were both looking at me at about mid-chest height, as if looking at someone smaller and younger.

  “Why wouldn’t I?” I said.

  “He might get ya,” said the black-haired one.

  “Who?”

  “The feller,” said the redhead.

  “What feller?” I asked him.

  He looked surprised. “Yerav’n ’eard of ’im?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Fuckin’ ’ell,” said the shorter one.

  “He’s there all the time,” his friend said. “Nights, mostly.”

  “Yeah,” Blackie nodded in support. “Nights.”

  “Yeah?” I said to the taller one, the redhead, who seemed to be the boss. “What does he do?”

  “Waits there for lads,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “You know.”

  I didn’t. He shook his head off my blank look, in pity for my ignorance. “He bums them,” he said.

  “Shags them up the bum,” said his companion helpfully.

  “Why?”

  “Fuckin’ ’ell,” said the first one, and looked at his friend with a we’ve got a right idiot here expression. “Because he’s an ’omo, that’s why.”

  “A Hom,” said the second.

  The first looked thoughtful. Came to a decision. “We better go in with ya,” he said.

  “For safety, like,” said the second, with only a trace of his eagerness betraying itself. “He might be in there now.”

  “Oh, I think I’ll be all right,” I said. “If he’s in there, I’ll tell him I’m not in the mood.”

  My tone was confusing to them. It wasn’t going the way it was meant to, the way it perhaps usually did.

  “Yeah, burrit’s worse than we said,” the first one told me, as if worried some opportunity was slipping away. He looked to his friend. “Tell him about the, you know, the thing.”

  “Yeah, he’s gorra nutcracker,” Blackie said. “You know warramean?” He mimed a plier-like action in order to help me visualise what he was talking about. “After he’s bummed ya, he crushes yer bollocks.”

  I remembered that. It was
a story I’d first heard when I was much younger than them. An urban legend, though the phrase hadn’t been coined at the time, conjured into being in the summer of 1965 and believed by nearly every nine year old boy who heard it.

  They were still looking at my chest, as if staring down a smaller contemporary.

  “How old am I?” I asked them.

  “You wha’?” the redhead said.

  “How old do you think I am?”

  They shared a look, and the taller one shrugged. “Dunno,” he said. “About eight?”

  “Might be ten,” the other one said, not to me but to his friend, and the redhead shot him an angry look as if he didn’t want to be bothered with details or sidetracked by debate.

  I snapped my fingers loudly, close to my face, and drew their eyes upwards.

  They looked confused. Their eyes weren’t quite focussing on mine, and I still wasn’t sure they could really see me. There was something else hovering behind their confusion; an anxiety, perhaps, as if they feared they might be in trouble, as if something would know they were being distracted from their duty and wouldn’t be very pleased with them. As far as they were concerned, this was a day like every other and needed to be a day like every other, and any disruption in the pattern was alarming to them, in however imprecise a way.

  I didn’t doubt that this was how they’d spent a fair portion of their time, back when it was linear. Having a little chat and preparing some eight year old victim for a good battering. They’d probably done it before, and more than once. Done it regularly, perhaps, until their belief in the very predator they used as bait had become their undoing.

  “Take a look at this,” I said and took something out of my pocket to show them.

  A few minutes later, back on the main footpath, I took a look back over my shoulder. It was very dark now and neither the toilets nor the boys were anywhere in sight. The moon had risen in the cloudless sky and I took a glance at my watch. It was an old fashioned watch and its dial was un-illuminated, but I was fairly certain it said it was still four in the afternoon.

  I’d kept up a brisk pace while checking the time and, when I looked up again, the house was directly ahead of me, though I hadn’t noticed it earlier. Its size alone suggested it was probably magnificent in the daylight, but its lawns were unlit and its windows shuttered and it appeared simply as a great black shape, a mass of deeper darkness against the midnight blue of the sky.

  Just outside its black iron gates, half-open as if in tentative invitation, a little girl was standing on the gravel of the driveway.

  She was dressed in a simple knee-length smock dress and didn’t look up at me as I walked towards her. She was concentrating on her game, her mouth opening and closing in recitation of something. It was a skipping song, as best I remembered it, but she was using it as accompaniment for the rapid bouncing of a small rubber ball between the gravel and her outstretched palm.

  “Dip dip dip,

  My blue ship.

  Sailing on the water

  Like a cup and saucer.

  O, U, T spells—”

  Oh, that’s right. Not a skipping song at all. A rhyme of selection or exclusion, a variant of eeny meeny miney mo. The little girl, long and ringleted hair pulled back from her forehead by a wide black ribbon, seemed to remember that at the same moment I did and, just as she mouthed the word out, her hand snapped shut around the ball, her eyes flicked up to meet mine, and she thrust her other hand out to point its index finger dramatically at me. Her eyes were jet black and her now silent mouth was pulled in a tight unsmiling line.

  “I’m out?” I asked her.

  She didn’t say anything, and nor did her fixed expression waver. I let the silence build for a few moments as we stared at each other, though I blinked deliberately several times to let her know that if it was a contest it was one she was welcome to win.

  “Your concentration’s slipping,” I said eventually. “Where did the ball go?”

  Her little brow furrowed briefly and she looked down at her empty hand. She pulled an annoyed face and then looked back at me.

  “Are you going into the house?” she asked.

  “In a manner of speaking,” I said.

  She gave a small tut of derision. “Is that supposed to be clever?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “Not really.”

  “Good,” she said. “Because it’s not clever. It’s just stupid. Are you going into the house or not?”

  “The house isn’t really here,” I told her.

  “Then where are you standing?” she said. “And who are you talking to?”

  Without waiting for an answer, and keeping her eyes fixed on mine, she began to lean her head sideways and down. Keeping her unblinking eyes fixed on mine, she continued the movement, slowly and steadily, with no apparent difficulty or discomfort, until her pale little cheek rested flat against her right shoulder and her head was at an impossible right-angle to her neck. At the same time, in some strange counterpoint, her hair rose up into the air, stately and unhurried, until the ringlets were upright and taut, quivering against the darkness like mesmerised snakes dancing to an unheard piper.

  I grinned at her. She was good at this.

  We exchanged a few more words before I walked through the gates without her, following the wide and unbending path to the house itself. The imposingly large front door was as unlit as the rest of the exterior and was firmly closed. But I knew that others had come to this house before me, and that the door, despite its size and its weight and its numerous locks, had opened as easily for them as it would for me.

  The rest of the vast reception room was pretty impressive, but the portrait over the fireplace was magnificent.

  The picture itself was at least eight feet tall, allowing for some grass below and some sky above its life-size and black-suited central figure, who stared out into the room with the confident Victorian swagger of those born to wealth and empire. A foxhound cowered low at its master’s feet and, in the far background, which appeared to be the grounds of the house, a group of disturbingly young children were playing Nymphs and Shepherds.

  The room, like the long hall along which I’d walked to come to it, was illuminated by many candles, though I’d yet to see anyone who might have lit them. Through a half-open door at the far end of the room, though, I could see a shadow flicking back and forth, back and forth, as if somebody was about their business in a repeated pattern of movements.

  As I came into the anteroom, the young woman who was pacing up and down looked up briefly from the clipboard she was holding. She appeared to be barely twenty, dressed in what I guessed to be the kind of nurse’s uniform women might have worn when they were dressing wounds received in the Crimea, and the stern prettiness of her face and the darkness of her eyes said she could have been an older sister of the little girl I’d met outside the gates.

  There was a single bed in the room and, though it was unoccupied, its sheets were rumpled, as if the woman’s patient had just recently gone for a little walk. There were wires and cables and drip-feeds lying on the sheets and the other ends of some of them were connected to a black and white television monitor that attempted to hide its anachronism by being cased within a brass and mahogany housing of a Victorian splendor and an H.G. Wells inventiveness.

  The young woman, having registered my presence with neither surprise nor welcome, was back to her job of glancing at the monitor and then marking something on her clipboard.

  The image on the monitor—grainy and distorted, washed-out like a barely-surviving kinescope of some long ago transmission—was a fixed-angle image of moonlight-bathed waves, deep-water waves, no shore in sight, as if a single camera were perched atop an impossible tower standing alone in some vast and distant ocean.

  I looked at the image for a moment or two while she continued to pace and to make checkmarks on her clipboard.

  “So what does that do?” I asked eventually, nodding at the monitor.

  She stopp
ed pacing and turned to look at me again. Her expression, while not unfriendly, was conflicted, as if she were both grateful for the break in routine and mildly unsettled by it.

  “It used to show his dreams,” she said, and turned her head briefly to look again at the endless and unbreaking waves. “But it’s empty now.”

  She looked back at me and tilted her head a little, like she was deciding if I was safe enough to share a confidence with. “It’s frightening, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Frightening?” I said. “I don’t know. Perhaps it just means he’s at peace.”

  “No, no,” she said, her voice rising in a kind of nervous excitement. “You’ve misunderstood. That isn’t what I meant.” And then she caught herself and her voice went flat as if she feared lending emotion to what she said next. “I mean we might be having his dreams for him.”

  She looked at me half-expectantly, her eyes wide, like she was hoping I might tell her that she was wrong, but before I could answer a bell began to ring from a room somewhere deeper in the house.

  “Teatime,” she said. “You’d best hurry.”

  The children sat at trestle tables and ate without enthusiasm and there were far too many of them.

  Their clothes were a snapshot history lesson; tracksuits and trainers, pullovers and short pants, britches and work-shirts, smocks and knickerbockers. The ones who’d been here longest were an unsettling monochrome against the colors of the more recent arrivals, and it wasn’t only their outfits that were fading to gray.

  Despite the dutiful shovelling of gruel into their mouths, I knew that they weren’t hungry—there was only one inhabitant of this house who was hungry—and I wondered briefly why they even needed to pretend to eat, but figured that habit and routine were part of what helped him chain them here. Not a one of them spoke. Not a one of them smiled. I decided against joining them and headed back down the corridor to which the nurse had pointed me.