The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Why didn’t the witch use the spell on herself, to keep from aging?”

  “Because you had to be young for it to work, or so she told me. But perhaps it was because she knew that eventually, no matter what it was contained within, it would get out. You had to worry about it forever pursing you, forever fleeing.

  “As time went on, my shadow grew, and the old woman placed the jar in a crock, and one day we heard the jar crack inside the crock, and we knew the shadow was growing. During the day I did her bidding. I chopped and gathered wood. I worked her garden. I cooked her meals and washed her clothes. At night I lay on the floor in the thin clothes she had given me, shivering or sweating, according to the weather, unable to move because of the magic marks the old witch had made on my body. And my shadow, I could hear it moving around inside the crock, like insects in a hive.

  “Then, one morning I awoke and nothing held me. The spell was broken. In the night the old woman had died. I buried the crock deep in the ground inside the floorless cabin and I set the place on fire and burned it and the old woman’s body up. I went away then, walking as fast and as far as I could go.

  “All I could think about was my shadow. When I lay down at night I felt as if I could hear it swell inside that crock, under the ground, and that it was breaking free, and coming up through the earth, taking to the wind, moving deliberately after me. I knew this as surely as if I could see it. I knew this because it was part of me and it was missing. I knew it traveled only at night, and found dark places during the day, for it had lost its host, and without me, it couldn’t stand the light of day. I knew all of this instinctively, the way a chicken knows to set a nest, the way a fish knows to swim or a dog knows to bark.

  “I moved across the land, year after year, ahead of my shadow, moving when it moved, at night, sleeping during the days, sometimes, but often driving day and night until exhaustion took me. The decades ticked by. I grew weary. That’s why I was in the car during the night when I should have been moving. I slept the day and planned to move on when night came. Kept telling myself, You’re too tired to drive. Just a few more minutes. A half hour. And then you can go. It’s only just dark. Thoughts like that; the kind of thoughts an exhausted man thinks. I had been that way before, all tuckered out, and it had almost caught me. I was down with some disease or another. Down for three days, and I awoke, some kind of internal clock ticking louder and louder, and I knew it was near. This was over a hundred years ago, that near catch, and I still remember it sharp as a moment ago. The air turned cold in the dead of summer, and the world felt strange and out of whack, as if something had tilted. I took a horse and rode out. As I rode, I looked back, and there it was, a dark swirl of gloom tumbling toward me, dead as a distant star.

  “I whipped that horse and rode it until it keeled over. I whipped it to its feet, rode it until it fell over dead. I ran on foot and found a barn and stole another horse, rode it for miles. I caught a train and just kept going. But it had been close. I had felt it coming, and that had saved me. I feel that way now. In this damn cell I’ll meet my Waterloo, and there you’ll stand, watching it happen.”

  I stood there for a long moment, and then I got the cell key and opened the door. I said, “Not if you run.”

  Wilson stood up and adjusted his hat and came out of the cell, showed me a thin smile. “Bless you . . . By the way. The real name, it’s Elton Bloodline. Thank you, thank you.”

  “Go!”

  I followed as Bloodline moved swiftly to the door, opened it, and stepped out. The wind was chill and Bloodline stopped as if something wet had crawled up his spine; he went white under the overhanging light. He turned his head and looked, and I looked too.

  Way down the street, the darkness pulsed and moved toward us on the breeze; it twisted and balled and sometimes resembled a giant dark and faceless man, running.

  “It’s found me.” Bloodline seemed frozen to the spot. “Torn away, and now it’s coming back.”

  I grabbed his arm. “Come. Come with me. Now!”

  He came alert then. We darted to the police car. He got in and I got behind the wheel and started up the engine and drove away in a roar and a squeal of tires.

  I glanced in the rearview. And there it was, a shadow man, maybe ten feet high, passing under streetlights, pulling their glow into its ebony self. It ran swiftly on what looked like long, wide, black, paper-wobbly legs, and then its legs fluttered out from under it and it was a writhing wraith, a tumbleweed of darkness.

  I put my foot to the floor and the car jumped and we put space between us and it, and then I hit something in the road, a pothole maybe, but whatever it was it was a big bad bump and the right front tire blew. The car swerved and the back end spun to where the front should have been. As it did, through the windshield I saw that the shadow looked like an inkblot, then I saw lights from the streetlamps, and then the car flipped and bounced and I didn’t see much of anything for a while.

  I couldn’t have been out longer than a few seconds. When I awoke, I discovered that I was hanging upside down. Through habit, I had fastened my seat belt. Bloodline, in his haste and fear, had not; he was wadded up on the ceiling of the car and he was starting to move. I unfastened my belt and managed not to drop too hard or too fast by bracing my hands on the ceiling of the car and twisting my feet around to catch myself. I glanced about. The front and back glass were still intact. The glass on the driver’s side was knocked out and the passenger’s side was cracked in such a way that you couldn’t see out of it.

  Bloodline sat up, shook his head, and looked at me. I saw the hope drain out of him and he began to shake. “You tried,” he said, and then the car was flung upright and we crashed together, and then I heard glass break, and a big dark hand jutted through the shattered windshield. It grabbed at Bloodline. He tried to slide backward, but it stretched and followed and got him around the waist. I grabbed his legs and tugged, but the thing was strong. It pulled him through the glass, cutting him with jagged shards stuck together by the windshield’s safety goo, and then it pulled so hard that he was snatched from my grasp.

  I wiggled through the busted-out driver’s window, and on my hands and knees I crawled along the street, glass sticking into my hands, the reek of spilled fuel in the air. I got to one knee and looked; I saw that Bloodline’s shadow was completely in the shape of a large man. It had grown from only moments ago, standing now twenty feet high and four feet wide. It lifted Bloodline high into the air, tilted its head back, and carefully swallowed him.

  The shadow swelled and vibrated. There was a pause, and then it throbbed even more. With a sound like metal being torn, it grew smaller, rapidly. Smaller and smaller, and then, there it stood, a shadow the shape and size of a man. It looked at me, or would have had it had eyes. The darkness it was made of began to whirl in upon itself. The shape grew pale, and finally it was Bloodline standing there, the way I’d seen him before, but nude, his suit and hat and shoes all gone; his nude body shivering in the wind. He looked at me and a strange expression ran across his face, the kind you might have when someone points a loaded gun at you and you know he is going to pull the trigger. He turned his head and looked to his left, and there, poking out from him, framed by the street-lights behind him, was his shadow.

  Then he withered. He bent and he bowed and his skin creaked and his bones cracked, and his flesh began to fall in strips off his broken skeleton. The strips fell into the street and the bones came down like dominoes dropped, rattled on the concrete; the skull rolled between my feet. When I looked down at it, it was grinning, and shadows moved behind the sockets, and then even they were gone and the darkness that replaced them was thin. The skull collapsed. I stepped back, let out an involuntary cry.

  Then all of it, the skull, the bones, and the strips of flesh, were caught up on the chill wind, and then they were dust, and then they were gone, and then the air warmed up and the night brightened, and the lights all along the street seemed clearer and I was left standing there,
all alone.

  About the Author

  Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and numerous short stories. His novella, Bubba Hotep, was made into an award-winning film of the same name, as was Incident On and Off a Mountain Road. Both were directed by Don Coscarelli. His works have received numerous recognitions, including the Edgar, seven Bram Stoker awards, the Grinizani Prize for Literature, American Mystery Award, the International Horror Award, British Fantasy Award, and many others.

  Story Notes

  As you probably know, Joe R. Lansdale is a noted spinner of yarns. In “Torn Away” he is specifically writing—as was Kelly Armstrong’s story—for a Twilight Zone tribute anthology. Teleplays for that profoundly influential series often wound up reminding us there were shadows that might devour us, or that no one can escape Fate, even with the help of an East Texas cop. There’s another interesting aspect to “Torn Away” that makes it, to me, more up-to-date than nostalgic: Mr. Bloodline is the ultimate “identity thief” who is, eventually, robbed of all identity.

  THE NOWHERE MAN

  SARAH PINBOROUGH

  “I’ve had enough. I’m getting out of here, I swear to God I am.” Amy had been sitting cross-legged on the end of Ben’s bed wearing the same jeans, T-shirt and trainers she would disappear in later that night, when she whispered the words to herself, or to him or the pitch black outside. Ben wasn’t sure which, or even whether she’d meant to say the words aloud at all. He just sat silently in the dark and listened. From somewhere down the corridor of the small single-story house he was sure he could hear Mum’s rattling breath ticking away the hours. Or maybe it was just his imagination and straining ears playing tricks on him. Maybe Amy’s mood was catching. She was fifteen, and it seemed to Ben that she’d been saying a lot of crazy stuff since she’d got so close to adulthood. And also since Mum had started spending most of her time in bed or in the chair on the porch, displaying her cancer to everyone who passed.

  Getting out of here.

  At twelve, it seemed that he saw the world much more clearly than his sister. Dad was long gone, only a vague memory of dark curls and sweet beery breath. Mum was sick—No. Dying, Mum was dying, no get out of jail free card for her—and they were just kids, and this was their home and where they went to school and where there were people to look after them. To smother them with kindness and kisses that stank of guilt and the invisible burden of responsibility that they were all so eagerly waiting to ditch.

  Yes, he thought as they both sat there gazing out of his paint-chipped window, sometimes it would be easier for Amy, for both of them, if she would just let things take their course without fighting all the time. There was no getting out of here. Not for a while yet.

  Ben never told the police those words she’d said in the days after she disappeared. He didn’t see the point. Amy hadn’t run away, no matter what she might have said she was going to do. He knew this for a fact because he knew his sister. And he knew that she would never, ever have left him behind on his own with Mum. Uh-uh, no way.

  And it wasn’t as if the police needed any more encouragement to think that she’d just up and left Bracknell, heading for one of the big cities and a new life. He could see it on their faces. After all, what teenage girl wouldn’t want to get away from this tiny, dusty barely-town and the pressures of looking after a dying woman? And a pretty girl like Amy Kremmer? Who could blame her for escaping?

  For a while they’d buzzed uniformly around in the early summer heat of the house until eventually they disappeared, drifting away one by one, all agreeing that Amy had just taken flight. It was easier to believe than the alternative, and with only three hundred or so houses to search it hadn’t taken long to ascertain that Amy wasn’t locked away or buried in someone’s cellar or back yard. Maybe she was out there hidden in the drying farmlands and pastures on the other side of the highway, but there’d been a stream of police and local pick-ups trekking out to the horizon searching for any hint of her in the first days after she vanished, and they all came back without a trace. And anyway. People didn’t do that kind of thing in a little town like Bracknell. People here cared.

  Behind the dry handkerchief on her too-pale face, Mum had loved the whole sorry trauma although no one but Ben could see it. She’d loved that all that health and vitality had gone before she had. She didn’t think that Amy had gone off to the city either. Not a chance. Because despite the cancer eating her lungs, his mother was a bitch. Always had been, always would be, and the only people that seemed to remember that were Ben, Amy and their mother herself. Since she’d got sick and saintly she’d hidden it better from the rest of the world, but she still knew that Amy wouldn’t have left Ben behind. Not if there had been any choice in the matter.

  Mum had cried a lot in the first days after Amy went, sucking the sympathy out of people as if it could keep her alive longer, and soon Amy’s name turned dirty and muddy. The selfish girl who ran away and left her mother dying. What kind of a girl would do that? Probably a slut. Probably pregnant. Probably a whore by now. Slowly people stopped talking and got back to living, but Amy’s memory was tainted and that made her mother happy.

  Ben didn’t cry. He couldn’t bring himself to. Sometimes, his stomach icy in the dry heat of the afternoon, he would go into the dusty stale air of Amy’s bedroom and look at the things that she would never have left behind. Her favorite jacket still hung on the back of the door, her wallet in the pocket. Her lipstick and the other stuff girls used were still in the tatty pink bag on the dresser.

  In the small heart-shaped box by her bed was the shoelace necklace Trav had given her before he went off to college at the end of the previous summer. There was a rumor that he’d found himself a new girlfriend and Ben figured it was true, but Amy still loved him. If she’d run away she would have worn that necklace to give her strength, like an amulet against the world. She believed in all that shit. And maybe if you believed in it, then it worked. That necklace was the most precious thing she owned. He knew that because she never talked about and rarely wore it, but sometimes at the end of a bad day with Mum she would take it out of the box and just sit and hold it, a faraway look in her eyes.

  Holding the metal pendant in his own sweaty palm he would wish Amy had worn it anyway. And then he wouldn’t have known for certain that she was dead. That someone had done something very bad to her and that her cold, damaged body lay in a lonely undiscovered place and there was nothing he could do to help.

  Sometimes when his mother was dozing, he would watch her and the greedy monster that was eating her up from the inside out. And he would think of Amy decomposing wherever her monster had left her, feeling the knowledge of her death like a heavy tumor in his own heart. Maybe they were all rotting in their own way. Turning from something they had once been into something entirely new and far less pleasant.

  By the time the summer was at its height and the tiny local school had locked its doors for the long holiday, no one talked about Amy any more. She was forgotten by pretty much everyone but Ben. Miss Bellew, the teacher at school, had looked sadly at him from time to time, but he never knew whether that was because of Amy, or because Mum now had to use the oxygen tank pretty much all the time and a care nurse had moved into the spare room, which surely must mean that she was finally losing a fight with someone. And this time she was going to lose to herself. The irony of that thought made Ben smile, a private, angry twist on his face. But sometimes in the dark of the night it would make him cry hot tears, though he could never understand why.

  He stayed out of the house as much as he could in those weeks. The nurse—Mrs. Cooper, a thin tall woman with the beginnings of a moustache that he couldn’t help stare at—bustled about the house, her presence leaving a sterile bleached scent behind her. She fed his almost-no-longer mother cocktails of drugs or bowls of thin soup and washed her stained and sweaty sheets, tutting quietly under her breath as if his dying mother should know better than to soil her sheets at her age. Watchin
g her, Ben knew when he was in the way. With a woman like Mrs. Cooper a twelve-year-old boy would always be in the way. And so the weeks after Amy vanished, a time in which he didn’t feel much like playing at all, were forced into a time of outdoors, fresh air, hanging around with kids with too many hours and too little to do with them.

  The school playing field lay behind the small building that served to educate all the children in Bracknell aged from four to fourteen, which at last count amounted to thirty-seven young and fragile souls. It was a vast sports area for such a small school, but out here where there was way too much land for people to ever fill the irregularity went unnoticed. And in the long, hot days of summer, so did the field itself.

  By the afternoon that Ben, Cath, and Wrighty sat in the middle of the wicket talking about everything and nothing in that way that only kids can, the ground beneath them was hard and cracked, the green that had covered it not that many weeks before already forgotten.

  It was Wrighty who saw him first, a dark shadow out by the boundary.

  “Who the hell is that?” His voice was soft, just the hint of mild alarm. Wrighty was a whole year older than Ben and nearly a foot taller, as blond and tanned as Ben was pale and dark. Ben figured that pretty soon the two of them wouldn’t be hanging out together, but he hoped the friendship would last the final year before Wrighty started getting the bus into the bigger school at Launceston. There was only so much someone could lose in one summer.

  Absently pulling loose tufts of dead brown grass out from the wrinkled earth and tossing them into the still air, the three of them squinted in the sunshine that refused to duck behind the thin wisps of cloud, their bodies slowly stiffening.

  A man stood very still just beyond the faded white chalk line one hundred-and-fifty yards away, staring directly towards them. The sunlight glared down right behind him, making it difficult to see more than a blur of a shape.