The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You cannot be lying to me.”

  “I know. I’m not.”

  The end of the pistol wavered, and for a moment, Davis was certain that the Lieutenant was unconvinced, that he was going to squeeze the trigger, anyway. He wondered if he’d see the muzzle flash.

  Then the pistol lowered and the Lieutenant said, “Good man.” He holstered the gun and extended his hand. “Come on. There’s a lot we have to do.”

  Davis caught the Lieutenant’s hand and hauled himself to his feet. Behind the Lieutenant, he saw the charred place that had been the Shadow, Lee’s torn and blackened form to one side of it. Further back, smoke continued to drift out of the spot in the trees where Han had lain. The Lieutenant turned and started walking towards the trees. He did not ask, and Davis did not tell him, what he had seen with his eyes closed. He wasn’t sure how he could have said that the image behind his eyelids was the same as the image in front of them: the unending sky, blue, ravenous.

  About the Author

  John Langan is the author of novel House of Windows (2009) and collection Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (2008). He lives in Upstate New York with his wife, son, two cats, and a small pond of frogs.

  Story Notes

  Some horror enthusiasts rail that the vampire is no longer a monster, that the icon has been turned primarily into a desirable anti-hero rather than the dreaded blood-drinking undead fiend, or that the trope suffers from the “same old story too often retold” syndrome. Langan in this novella, however, gives us a handsomely crafted, highly effective, thoroughly relevant, completely twenty-first century vampire story.

  CERTAIN DEATH FOR A KNOWN PERSON

  STEVE DUFFY

  On the whole my life has been pleasant, but unexceptional. Honestly, you wouldn’t pay to read my autobiography, apart from a couple of odd occurrences; or actually just the one occurrence, the beginning of a chain of events which seems, twenty-three years on, still to be working itself out. The rest of it—school, university, work—is everybody’s story, and I shan’t bore you with it. As for the incident in question, this is what happened:

  It was my first term at the University of Exeter, where I shared a room with a bloke called Dave Masters. We’re good friends still, and meet up every year or so if it’s possible. Both of us were West Country boys: I was from Weston-super-Mare, and he was from a small village to the north of Dartmoor called Inwardleigh (“Really?” I asked him when we first met, and made him show me in the road atlas). He used to go back home for the weekend with a big bag of laundry under his arm—both his and mine, God love him—and leave me the digs to myself. He had a girlfriend at home, and they were both anxious to make sure the relationship didn’t fizzle out. They’ve been married twenty years now, Dave and Cathy, so I suppose it was worth the effort.

  One weekend towards the end of the first term, Dave suggested I come back with him: it was Cathy’s birthday, and there was a party at her house. Why not? I thought. So come Friday we took the bus from Exeter to Okehampton, then walked the couple of miles to Inwardleigh, where Dave’s folks lived. We stopped for tea (dropping off our washing in the process—students, eh?) and then Dave’s dad drove us the twelve miles or so to High Thornhays, Cathy’s parents’ place up on Dartmoor.

  It was a big old house that stood on its own on a shoulder of the high moorland. Inside, it was a real rabbit warren, all corridors and staircases, the sort of place it takes a week to find your way around. They needed a big place: besides Monica and Tom, Cathy’s mum and dad, there were four Headley children, all daughters. Cathy was the eldest at eighteen, then there was Emily, then Fiona, then Trish. They filled up that crossword puzzle of a house between them: I remember there always being laughter round each corner, as I tried to find my way from one room to another. I liked it very much; I liked the Headleys, too.

  At first sight it all might have been a bit intimidating, but the warmth of the Headleys’ welcome put me completely at my ease. While I was still trying to get everybody’s name right, they were already treating me like an old friend, showing me where I’d be sleeping and asking me if I’d eaten yet. It helped me get over the other stumbling blocks, to do with class and money and my ingrained inferiority complex concerning both those things. I’d never been the guest of anyone as well off as the Headleys, nor of anyone who lived in a house like High Thornhays. It was all a learning curve for me, and it was all good.

  That first evening Monica and Tom went out, so Dave and the girls and I had the house to ourselves. I remember us all listening to records in one of the many odd rooms in High Thornhays—I mean, one of the rooms whose original purpose it was hard to guess. You came across them all through the house; half-a-dozen steps, a narrow corridor, then a strange little space like an architect’s afterthought, largely unclassifiable. I did ask at first, but the answers I got—“Oh, it was the muniment room,” or “This used to be the back receiving parlour”—only left me more confused. I forget the name of the room we were in, but it was long and narrow, and the girls used it as a sort of downstairs den. There was a TV and a stereo, and all along one wall mullioned windows looking out over the moor. There were curtains to the windows, but nobody drew them shut. I remember thinking at some point in the evening how we must have looked to anybody outside in the dark and the cold and the constant wind, how enviably comfy and cosy. But of course, there was no one outside. There were no casual passers-by at High Thornhays. If you were out on the moor at that time of night and you were anywhere near the house, then you probably had business with the Headleys; in which case, you wouldn’t waste your time hanging around outside the windows, would you? That whole curtains thing was just a hang-up I had. It came, I suppose, from spending my formative years feeling the glare of constant observation back in our suburban semi in Weston-super-Mare.

  So there we were in the long room, Dave and I already making inroads into the booze meant for tomorrow’s party. I remember being quite witty, and surprising myself in the process, though I expect this had more to do with the good nature of our hosts than with any latent charisma I might have possessed. They were so perfectly apt to be charmed, even the Elephant Man might have made a good impression.

  Really, they were terrific, the Headley girls. Just looking at them made you feel slightly sub-standard in comparison. Do you know what I mean? Those well-bred, well-educated, well-to-do young ladies who just seem so . . . wholesome? Cathy, for instance, all honey and rose-hips and coltishly long in the bone: I could have gone seriously stupid over Cathy, but of course she was Dave’s girlfriend, so no way. Even little Trish, at thirteen the youngest of the pack, was so playfully vivacious, an absolute stunner-in-waiting—though obviously she was even farther out of bounds than her eldest sister, before you get the wrong idea. Fiona, the second youngest, was adorably earnest; she wore specs, and was hugely bookish, so we hit it off straight away. I might as well admit it, I even fancied Monica, their mother. (Later on that first evening, after the girls had gone to bed, I caused Dave to snort beer down his nose when I drunkenly described Monica as a—wait for it—as a “mumsy vixen.”)

  And then there was Emily, a year-and-a-half younger than Cathy: Emily, for whom it was impossible not to fall, if you were the falling kind. I remember asking Dave how old she was, and thinking Sixteen isn’t that young. Not really. Like that wasn’t a clue right there.

  It was all in her smile. When she smiled, you felt personally singled out for commendation, as if someone had leaned down from the gods and trained a spotlight on you. One glance and your whole being was illuminated, you felt the glow of her friendliness all toasty on your face. Your flushed, inebriated face, you understand—your half-wit’s phizog, with its stupid goonish leer.

  Did Emily notice that she was being ogled by a cretin? I hoped not: if she had, it would have been scaldingly embarrassing. Looking at it objectively, with the benefit of hindsight, I doubt whether my gruesome fixation even registered on her radar. Why should
it have? I was nineteen and . . . shall we be kind, and say unpolished? Whereas she was sixteen-and-a-half, improbably, cartoonishly enthused still by everything she lit upon, thrilled by the vividness of her own response. She wanted for nothing, everybody loved her, and she had the natural grace not to let it ruin her. Life had thrown no setbacks into her path, so far, everything had been good, and nothing had hurt. She was in a magic bubble, and it was slightly heartbreaking to think that one day it would have to break, because none of us gets through wholly unscathed, do we? Nobody gets a clear run at it.

  Over breakfast the next morning, scratchy and hungover, I remember squinting through bloodshot eyes at Emily rough-and-tumbling with Jess, the family Labrador, and feeling old for the first time in my life. Not just older, you understand, as in a mere two-and-a-half years older, but actually old; that feeling I know only too well now on the long slope down to the big five-oh. Creaky, rusting in the chassis, fundamentally unserviceable. I felt it first in the kitchens at High Thornhays, gazing at Emily as she straightened up from playing with the dog and shook her strawberry blond hair off her face. “Have you looked outside?” she wanted to know. “It’s just begun to snow!”

  Which it had: big fat flakes that soon gave way to a thick and steady whiteout. Bad news for that evening’s party, of course, but what with snowballs and snowmen and all the rest of it, there were compensations. Nothing like a snowball in the face to tackle that hangover. All through the afternoon, people who’d been invited to Cathy’s eighteenth were phoning up with apologies: Sorry, can’t risk it if it stays like this. Everyone thereabouts knew better than to take a car out in that sort of weather. Naturally enough, Cathy was a bit upset, and Dave took her up to her room, trying to cheer her up. Meanwhile, I helped Tom bring more logs in from the stable block, and we got all the fireplaces banked up and roaring, just in case.

  Around dusk, when the snow had stopped falling and all of Dartmoor lay under several feet of drift, I was looking out of the diamond-leaded windows in the long room round the side of the house. The wind had driven a gap in the clouds, and the snow looked quite blue beneath the hard and brittle stars. Around the windows the lamplight from inside shone out through the stained glass, coloring the closest of the snow banks a cheerful harlequin pattern. Away beyond that, the slopes of the high tors looked picturesque, yet forbidding. I shivered, and wandered back through to the kitchens, the warm hospitable heart of the house.

  There, Monica and the girls were getting on with the arrangements for the party despite everything. You never know, said Monica, more in hope than expectation, and sure enough a handful of people braved the conditions—local folk, mostly, people from Chagford and Gidleigh and Lettaford. Nobody from further afield than Okehampton was risking it.

  Cathy was great: she smiled and made the best of things, and I was more than a little envious of Dave as I watched them both chatting to the neighbours. You had to be, because they were so clearly made for each other. (It took me the best part of twenty years to find a Cathy of my own; they don’t grow on trees.) Inwardly I sighed, and went to look for Emily. Just for a chat.

  Annoyingly, she’d found someone her own age to talk to: a girl from school, Pippa or something, all gosh-and-golly, and they were deep in conversation about boys and pony club and stuff I can’t even imagine. “Hiya, Mike,” Emily said brightly, seeing me loitering by the door to the hallway, glass in hand. “You all right? Hey, I think Fiona was looking for you just now!”

  “You setting him up, Em?” the other girl wanted to know. They giggled, and I joined in the laughter, just so they’d know it was all a perfectly splendid joke but I was totally in on it, yeah. Ha-ha, yeah, right. Fiona. Don’t push it, girly, I thought.

  Tipsily aware of the need for dignity and poise in all things, I strolled through to the front parlour, where Fiona wanted to know which I preferred, Alan Garner or Tolkien. Well, this is the thing about being a bookworm. When romantic expectations fizzle out, you can always spend a good couple of hours debating the merits of Middle-Earth over Elidor. By the time we’d decided that Jenny Agutter should be the girl if they ever made The Owl Service into a film, most of the other guests had gone home, and I was into my ninth or tenth pint, and feeling no pain.

  Soon after midnight Tom and Monica went upstairs, leaving us young folk to it. “Don’t burn the house down,” said Tom. He may have been looking at me; I may have been one or two over my limit by then. I didn’t take it personally. Then again, I may not have fully understood what he was saying at the time. Conversation was getting difficult, mostly because of the seven-second delay newly developed between my brain and my organs of speech. But it was okay. It was fine. I remember all of us sitting in the long room where the record player was, the funny long room, and I was saying how this was a funny room, because it was all long, and we all laughed, because that was funny in itself . . . and then I remember there being no electric lights on any more, only the firelight all flickering and magical, and someone was reaching around me, tucking a tartan car blanket around my shoulders . . .

  “Emily?”

  “All right, Mike?” she said, her voice kindly as ever. “How you doing? You were nodding off then.” I was sprawled back into a corner of the sofa, and she was leaning over me with that heart-melting smile of hers. Very close; close enough to kiss, if I dared go for it. Solicitously she removed the pint glass from my unresisting hand. “Just put that down there, out of the way. Are you going to be okay here, then? Or shall we try and get you up to bed?”

  “Fine here,” I assured her. Suave to the core, I was going to point out there was plenty of room for two if she cared to join me, but by the time I’d figured out which order the words should go in, she was gone; and very shortly after that I was gone as well.

  I don’t know what time it was when the ferocity of my own snoring brought me round. I’m not even sure that I came round all the way, so strictly speaking I don’t know whether what I’m about to tell you actually happened, or whether it took place only in some abnormally detailed dream-version of reality. I know what I believe to be true, but you’ll judge that for yourselves. This is what I remember:

  It was night outside, but the fire in the grate was still in, banked down to a glowing bed of embers. That helped me realize where I was; that and the starlight, reflected off the snow outside and streaming through the still uncurtained windows. The room was dark but not inky black. You could make out shapes, and even a measure of detail; you could probably have found a book, but you wouldn’t have been able to read it, not without turning on a light.

  I wanted no light. I wanted only about another twelve hours or so of sleep, and the soothing hand of a beautiful woman on my brow, and possibly a cup of tea, if there was one going. I was thinking in an aimless way about getting back off again, when I realized I wasn’t alone in the room.

  Someone was sitting in one of the armchairs over by the windows. I could see a head, silhouetted against the gleam of the snowfields outside, but no features, none of the detail; the firelight was too low for that. I must have caught my breath in surprise, or grunted or something, because the figure raised a hand in silent acknowledgement.

  Who was it? I assumed it was somebody else sleeping over for the night, one of the neighbors who’d maybe had one over the eight. Had I been introduced? Well, that was anyone’s guess. I yawned and said, “All right?”

  “Fine, thank you. Nice of you to ask.” A man. I didn’t recognise the voice—no, that’s not it, exactly. I thought I did; I just couldn’t put a name to it. He spoke a cultured RP English with just the slightest edge; that cool sardonic humor that comes with the assumption of unbounded and perpetual pre-eminence. The sort of voice that built the Empire, and left half the world wishing we’d stayed at home instead.

  “What time is it?” I would have told him how I was, but he hadn’t asked.

  The other—the guest—shifted a little in his seat and glanced over his shoulder through the window. I still couldn�
�t see his face, but I thought I saw a glint of something red as he turned his head. He may have been wearing glasses, and they may have caught the firelight. “It’s very late. Or very early still, depending on which way you look at it.”

  Well, that was helpful. “Have you got a watch on?”

  “I don’t have any use for watches,” admitted the guest, politely amused at the notion. “I’m always on time, you see, wherever I arrive.” And modest with it. Clearly, a prince among men.

  “No? Well, doesn’t matter.” I was quite prepared to leave it at that. I was very, very tired, remember, and a bit drunk still, I dare say; not in the mood for late-night conversation. I was settling back on the sofa, when the guest spoke again.

  “Nice party.” Not inflected one way or the other; an open-ended statement, or a polite enquiry.

  “Yeah. Yeah, it was great.” Had I said anything? Had I done anything? Spilled my drink over him? Come on to his wife? I couldn’t remember.

  “All the young people enjoying themselves.” Again without discernible inflection. A pause, then: “You were certainly having a ball.”

  Oh Christ. I had done something. What?

  “Talking to Emily, I mean.” Friendly on the surface; but no further. Underneath that? You wouldn’t want to look.

  “They’re great . . . all the girls.” I so didn’t want to be having this conversation. “Really nice family. Nice people.”

  “Yes, but Emily is your favorite, isn’t she?”

  Oh, no way. No way had I made it that obvious. “I wouldn’t say—”

  “That’s because you think this is an ordinary conversation.”

  Could there be anything more calculated to make you throw your brakes on? In the end I just didn’t know what else to say. “Isn’t it?”

  “No,’ said the guest, so categorically that it seemed to leave no space for an answer. After a little while, during which time I’d almost decided that the whole thing was actually just an extremely weird dream, he resumed. “No, it isn’t. Encounters such as this, they don’t happen every day, you see, Mike.”