The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  Too late. Jeremy had already seen something that held him mesmerized. Heather followed his gaze to the makeshift porch, where an old rocking chair creaked in the wind.

  “That’s my dad’s hat,” he said.

  A red hat lay in the seat of the chair.

  A shadow moved inside the house past a window and was gone.

  “Let’s keep going,” Heather said. But her heart wasn’t in the words. If she’d been in Jeremy’s shoes, she would want to investigate too. There was something about your parents, Heather thought: Whatever they did, they pulled you along too. Even out here in the woods, in the middle of a place that might as well not exist. You were always part of them, even when they stopped being part of you.

  “Is this where he goes?” Jeremy said. “Don’t tell me this is where he goes.” His voice was angry but weak. A tear ran down his cheek.

  “Maybe it would be better—”

  “No. I’m going in.”

  Heather followed him.

  The door swung open soundlessly, revealing a darkened room. A naked woman lay on a couch, smoking something that did not look like a cigarette. She was old, her body wrinkled and crushed by gravity. She brushed long gray-black bangs from her eyes and exhaled a stream of smoke.

  “Who are you?”

  “Where’s my dad?”

  “Your dad?”

  “His hat is on the porch.”

  The woman sat up, making no effort to cover herself. Her breasts, once large, now hung down her chest like empty bags.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jeremy Reddin.”

  She nodded. “He never told me.”

  “That he had kids?”

  “That he had any other than the one that died.”

  Jeremy looked at his feet. “There’s me and my older brother.”

  The woman took another toke. “And little Sam.”

  “He only lived for an hour.”

  The woman leaned back on the couch and closed her eyes. Her knees opened, revealing a dark bed of hair between her thighs. Heather looked away.

  “Yeah, but I hear it was a good hour,” she said, her eyes still closed, a look of complete relaxation on her face.

  “Where is he?”

  Without opening her eyes, the woman pointed to the back of the house. “Out where the graves are.” She took another drag.

  Heather followed Jeremy down a short hallway and into a bedroom covered with clothes and trash and a smell Heather recognized as menstrual blood. A door on the other side of the room, swayed in a slight breeze.

  Passing through the door was like passing into another world, or at least another time. The trees swallowed up the sun back here, forming a perfect canopy of dark green, like pictures Heather had seen of tropical jungles. It made Heather think of hiding under the covers with her father when she’d been a kid.

  Jeremy sucked in a deep breath. Stood still. Looked at the clearing where a man lay on the ground, his arms wrapped around something, his broad back turned to them.

  “Dad?” Jeremy said.

  The man did not move.

  Jeremy took a step closer. Heather waited, tense. Unsure how to stand. What to do other than watch.

  “Dad?”

  There was no response, and for an instant, Heather thought he might be dead.

  Jeremy crouched next to the man. Heather heard the woman’s voice behind them.

  “He’s in the mud,” she said dreamily.

  Jeremy turned and grimaced at the woman before reaching for his father. He grabbed his shoulders and rolled him over on his back. The man moved his head and mumbled something. But Jeremy wasn’t listening. His attention had turned to what his father had been holding—a rock, a crude marker. He knelt and read the inscription in silence.

  The woman stood beside Heather now. She had a needle in her hand. The sharp point dripped with a fluid the color of honey. Heather watched as the woman plunged it into her own arm, squeezing the syringe, as her face went from serene to ecstatic to unknowing.

  Once drained, the syringe fell from her fingers, and she stumbled past Heather. When she fell on top of Jeremy’s father, he barely seemed to notice. They lay together like that, still. Everything was still except for the tall pines agitated by the wind.

  Jeremy stepped around them, his face wet with tears. He paused on the other side of their bodies, looking at them. The woman said something to him, but Heather couldn’t make it out. Whatever it was made Jeremy break. His shoulders drooped. His face twisted into a mask of agony. His thick glasses slid off his nose and landed in the grass.

  He cursed loudly and reached for them, but came up empty. Heather started forward to help him, but before she could get there, in his blindness, he managed to crush them underfoot.

  They’d been walking for nearly two hours when the rain began. The journey turned to a slow crawl, as Heather lost her way several times, and had to backtrack through the muck to regain her bearings. Jeremy was little help without his glasses, and the deeper they traveled into the woods, the more Heather seemed to lose her grip on the world she knew. The trailer park seemed far away, and more than that, it seemed unimportant, like a relic from the past.

  As they walked, Heather thought little about the alien or the water tower. At this point she expected to find neither. Instead, her thoughts returned to snippets of sounds and images from the house they’d visited earlier. She kept seeing Jeremy’s father prone on the ground, arms flung around the gravestone, as if he might pull it into himself, and somehow embrace all of his might-have-beens. She saw him turn over, dead-eyed, and not recognize his own son. She heard the woman’s cigarette-stained voice.

  He’s in the mud.

  Heather knew mud was a name for heroin. She’d learned that in health last year. And if she had to guess, based on the way the woman and Jeremy’s father acted, they were using heroin. The woman’s statement seemed to go beyond slang to describe where the man really was, as if he were trying to find his traction, trying to climb out of a pit where solid ground no longer existed, where one slip led to the next, until he was wallowing in it, drowning instead of moving.

  This is what she was thinking when the trees parted at last to reveal a dark sky. The rain had turned to a fine mist, and a pale sliver of moon hung above the sunset. The water tower loomed in the distance on the other side of a wet meadow.

  Like everything out here, rust held sway. The actual tank was roofless, whether from a storm or the hands of man, Heather could only guess. The corrugated tin had turned to a burnished red beneath all the rust. Four stilts held it off the ground, nudging the lip of the tank in line with some of the nearby treetops. Railroad trestles, eaten by time and weather, formed a half-realized path to the tower before disappearing in the high weeds.

  “I see it,” Heather said.

  Jeremy said nothing, but he quickened his pace. Heather knew the water tower had become like a totem to him now, a goal he had fixed in his mind. It mattered little what was actually there—most likely a dead bird, stripped of its feathers or a poor raccoon who drowned inside the murky silt.

  Underneath the tower, water dripped from the slats overhead and landed on their upturned faces. On the other side, they found a badly mangled ladder. Several steps were broken or missing, but Jeremy felt around for one of the solid ones and began to climb.

  Heather followed, pulling herself over the open spaces where the steps were missing, willing herself to the top where she joined Jeremy on the wooden catwalk. She peered over the lip of the tank.

  Inside, past endless rivulets of corrugated tin, a shallow pool looked back at her. A foreign smell came up from the tank, causing Heather to hold her breath. She saw no alien. She saw nothing in the dark.

  The tank shuddered as Jeremy grabbed the rim and shook. The water, dark and shiny as oil, lapped against the sides, but nothing surfaced.

  He gave the tank another shake. “It can’t be too deep.”

  “Maybe the Barrows were just b
ullshitting,” Heather said.

  “No. There’s something here.” He pulled himself up. “I’m going in.”

  Before Heather could stop him, a sound came from the logging road. She turned and saw a truck rumbling toward them from the east.

  “Hurry,” she said. “I think your brother’s here.”

  A thud welled up from inside the tank, followed by a groan of pain. “I’m in,” Jeremy said.

  As Heather pulled herself over the rim, she looked at the moon. A gleaming silver arc, carrying the stars in the same way a mother carries her children, rocking them to sleep, singing the day shut, opening the night. As she fell, she told herself she would keep the moon in sight, a constant to guide her where all other markers had failed.

  She hit the water and then the bottom, first with her feet and then when they couldn’t sustain the impact she crumpled to her knees, cracking them hard against the tank. Rolling over in the shallow water, she found the crescent moon, cradling the stars. The pain in her legs begged for her to scream out, but the moon calmed her like any good mother would.

  “I think I messed my up my ankle,” Jeremy said.

  “Don’t talk,” Heather said. “Look at the moon.”

  “What?”

  “It’ll calm you.”

  Jeremy turned his face up to the moon, its slivered shine opening his face up, glinting in the tiny space of his squinted eyes. Despite the pain, despite the smell, despite the terror she felt at being ridiculed by Ronnie and Clyde, this image of Jeremy was too much. He looked smaller somehow down here, but more defined, more in focus. The shadows hid his faults, the moonglow highlighted everything good about him and Heather could see now there was a lot good about Jeremy. Seeing him like this, now, in this other world made her feel like a part of something mysterious and grand, but also sad. A great, silent secret. She shivered.

  Two doors slammed outside the tower. Voices boomed.

  “You’re buying me a twelve-pack if there’s nothing here, Clyde.”

  “How about you buy me a case if there is?” Clyde said. He sounded confident. Heather looked around the tank, but it had grown even darker now and she could barely make out Jeremy, much less an alien.

  “If I see an alien, I’m going to extract the bastard and sell him on eBay.”

  “Well get ready to extract. Here. Take a flashlight.”

  Heather heard them struggling up the ladder, cursing as they came to the missing steps. She had no idea what to do. In seconds, the flashlights would shine down here, exposing them.

  She looked back at the moon, as if an answer might come from there. There was none. In fact, the moon had slipped away, obscured by the clouds. She thought of her father. Maybe that’s what happened to him too. Maybe the clouds had simply rolled in.

  This thought made Heather angry, even while she found it soothing. If clouds rolled in, they could roll away. It made sense. But why had it happened at all? And why was she here in this water tank waiting to be humiliated? Heather felt the urge to hit something, to strike out.

  Backing into the curved wall of the tank, she kicked it twice with her heels as hard as she could.

  “Was that you, Ronnie?”

  The voices were above them now.

  “From down there.”

  Heather knocked again, this time with her fists.

  “Oh shit.”

  “You didn’t tell me the fucker was alive.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  A series of furious knockings came from the other side of the tank as Jeremy began to hit the walls. Heather joined him and together they made the tower wobble on its wooden legs. Soon she was throwing her body against the walls as the water sloshed around her knees. The sky was completely dark now and the stars seemed to list from side to side as they rocked the tank. At thirteen, Heather had never been drunk, though she imagined this was what it must feel like. The sky appeared to spin above her, to come loose from its fragile place. She had no idea how long this lasted. It seemed like forever.

  When they stopped, Heather was soaked and exhilarated. There was little doubt the Barrows had split. To be sure, she calmed her breathing and listened. Outside, an engine turned over and tires scattered gravel.

  “Awesome,” Heather said. Her words echoed in the dark tank, plinking off the tin walls, falling soundless into the water.

  Jeremy said nothing. She heard him breathing nearby.

  “Jeremy?”

  She reached for him in the darkness. He was there, beside her. Taking her shoulders, he turned her gently. At first, she thought he was about to kiss her, but rather than lifting her face up to his, he tilted her head down.

  “There’s something touching my leg.”

  The clouds around the moon dissolved. Moonlight played over the water, making the smallest ripples shine like silk. It was there, bathed in moonshine, near Heather’s feet. It had been there all along; she’d probably brushed against it without even knowing, unaware of the deadness against her legs. She felt a sudden urge to wipe them clean.

  Jeremy spoke the question, even as it formed inside her mind. “What is it?”

  Heather knelt for a better look. Blue and bloated, almost fishlike in the murky water. Hands splayed apart as if the creature had been pleading. Both knees bent, the creature’s feet in the air. Heather counted the toes. Ten. Ten fingers. She lifted her gaze to the head. Proportionally, too large for its body. The mouth hung open in a toothless scream. Its eyes were open in an expression Heather recognized, though for a time she could not place it. She bent closer, trying to read the eyes. What did they say? Where had she seen them before? Then the moon shifted or the clouds did, but whatever happened made the shadows creep away, and she saw her own reflection in the water staring up at her as if she were a different person, an underwater person, sharing the same body and personality and memories as her normal self. This underwater person, though knew all the secrets. And finally she knew where she recognized the eyes. They belonged to the girl staring back at her. The look, she understood now, was simple confusion and fear. Nothing so confusing and frightening as being born into death.

  An arm fell around her shoulders. Jeremy knelt beside her, pulling her close. Together they gazed down at the creature.

  “Is it an alien?” he said at last.

  “Yeah,” Heather said, seeing them all in the water now, the baby, Jeremy, and herself. “It is.”

  About the Author

  John Mantooth’s short fiction has appeared in numerous online and print publications including Fantasy Magazine, Thuglit, On Spec, Shimmer, and The Haunted Legends anthology. He also received the Barksdale-Maynard award for his short story “Slide.” He confesses that he has never actually climbed a water tower himself.

  Story Notes

  I wonder if Heather and Jeremy get out of that water tank. I worry about Jeremy getting his glasses replaced. Point is, by the end of this story, I cared enough about the characters to consider their futures. I hope they escape the water tower as well as the horrors of their families and the place in which they live. They will thrive because Heather will understand how special she is and Jeremy will learn he’s not institutionally “special” after all.

  Or maybe, like the “alien,” they never get out.

  IN THE PORCHES OF MY EARS

  NORMAN PRENTISS

  Helen and I should have paid more attention to the couple we followed into the movie theater: his stiff, halting walk, and the way the woman clung to him, arm around his waist and her body pressed tight to his side. I read love into their close posture, an older couple exchanging long-held decorum for the sort of public display more common among today’s younger people. I felt embarrassed for them and looked away. I regret that neither my wife nor I noticed a crucial detail in time, but real life doesn’t always inspire the interpretative urgency of images projected on a screen, and it’s not as if a prop department provided the obvious clues: sunglasses worn indoors, or a thin white cane tapping the ground, sweeping the
air.

  Helen went ahead to get us seats, while I stood in line at concessions to buy bottled waters. We disliked popcorn for its metallic, fake butter smell and, more importantly, because we chose not to contribute to the surrounding crunch—a sound like feet stomping through dead leaves, intruding over a film’s quieter moments. For similar reasons, we avoided candy, with its noisome wrappers, and the worst abomination of recent years, the plastic tray of corn chips and hot cheese dip. Fortunately, the Midtowne Cinema didn’t serve the latter, making it one of our preferred neighborhood theaters. That, and the slightly older clientele who behaved according to that lost era, back before people trained themselves to shout over rented movies in their living rooms.

  The Midtowne wasn’t quite an art house, rarely showing films with subtitles or excessive nudity. Instead, it tended towards Shakespeare or Dickens or E.M. Forster adaptations, the big-screen, bigger-budget equivalents to television’s Masterpiece Theatre, which I tended to prefer; or, closer to Helen’s taste, romantic comedies more palatably delivered through British accents.

  Helen had chosen the afternoon’s entertainment, so we’d once again see that short, slightly goofy actor who survived an embarrassing sex scandal a few years back and still, still managed onscreen to charm the sandy-haired, long-legged actress (who was actually American-born, but approximated the preferred accent well enough for most, and smiled brightly enough to provoke the rest to forgive her). I brought the water bottles into the auditorium—two dollars each, unfortunately, but we broke even by saving as much on matinee admission—and searched for Helen in the flickering dark.

  We were later than I expected. Previews had already started, and the semi-dark auditorium was mostly full. I knew Helen’s preference for an aisle seat, on the right side of the main section, but the crowd had forced her to sit farther back than usual. I walked past her before a whispered “Psst, Steve,” called me to the correct row.

  She turned sideways, legs in the aisle so I could scoot past easily. I handed her a water bottle before I sat down.