The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  And now—

  Now I sit here, waiting. Writing. What else can I do? There’s a story, buried, under all these bits and pieces. If I can find it, I can tell it—control it. Sell it.

  Make sure there’s something left of me for people to read, and remember, after.

  About the Author

  Gemma Files won the 1999 International Horror Guild Best Short Fiction award for her story “The Emperor’s Old Bones.” She is the author of two collections (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart) and two chapbooks of poetry. “The Jacaranda Smile” was nominated for a 2009 Shirley Jackson Award in the short fiction category; her story “each thing I show you is a piece of my death,” co-written with her husband Stephen J. Barringer and originally published in Clockwork Phoenix 2 (edited by Mike Allan) was nominated as best novellette. Her first novel, A Book of Tongues: Volume One of the Hexslinger Series, was published in 2010. It will be followed by a sequel, A Rope of Thorns, in 2011.

  Story Notes

  In general, I think most editors (and readers) tend not to care for stories about writers writing stories about writers writing stories. But Gemma Files proves an exception to generalities with “The Jacaranda Tree.” Perhaps one reason her story is exceptional is because it’s objective rather than introspective. Her narrator discovers more than she expects about herself by observation rather than looking inward. As for the rest, well, the Underneath does rise up, and it always will, to become “the dark in every crack, the bone under every stone.”

  THE OTHER BOX

  GERARD HOUARNER

  Samarra discovered the box on the foyer floor when she came home from the boutique.

  Rectangular, wrapped in crinkled, off-white paper, secured with rough twine, the box was about the size of a human head.

  Samarra froze. Cold dread chased the day’s hectic rush of customers and sales rep pitches for the new season from her mind. The box. The house took a spin around her. Someone whispered in her ear, “Farewell,” and she whirled around to face the open doorway. No, that voice was a memory, like the warm breath that had carried the word. No, no, imagination.

  The box. That was a transgression. It shouldn’t have been inside waiting for her. They’d all left the house together this morning. The floor had been empty.

  She dropped her purse and shoulder bag, putting both hands over her belly, where an ache had awakened.

  She started as the alarm system’s rhythmic beeping signaled her to punch in the security code. Between the piercing pulses, she thought she heard voices crying, like newborn kittens mewling for milk.

  Samarra backed out, checked the house number on the door and glanced at the azalea in the front yard. Of course, she was home. She took out the cell phone with a trembling hand.

  No. Stop. The system hadn’t gone off. No one had broken in. There was no real danger.

  Dread knotted into terror. Guts twitched and bubbled. But she gritted her teeth, breathed deeply, steadily. She had to deal with this. The kids were coming home soon. With the alarm still beeping, she re-entered the foyer, reached slowly down, palms suddenly moist, hands shaking, breath short, knees weak and legs drained of blood.

  Something whimpered in a far corner. Or was that her breathing? What was going on?

  Samarra nearly fell backwards when her hands shot up: the package was light as a balloon, as if even the cardboard, paper, and twine between her fingertips weighed nothing. She squeezed the box, almost expecting her fingers to pass through, but the sides were firm, unyielding.

  Real. Not dangerous. A trick, that was all.

  The house settled into a reality she understood. Yes, the faint trace of her own perfume, which Justine had dabbed on herself this morning when she thought her mother wasn’t looking, couldn’t smell it. Mirabel’s spilled milk. Rey’s sweaty scent, punctuated by craft glue.

  The ache in her belly dwindled into a brief spasm, then was gone.

  She laughed, with relief as much as delight, and quickly shut off the alarm. It really was time for a vacation, she thought, when she started taking life’s little mysteries too seriously. In the space between what she’d done, had yet to do, and what she’d feared had happened, a garden of ideas blossomed, like flowers after a desert rain.

  Maybe one of her children had answered an ad for air from the Himalayas.

  Her youngest at four, Rey, always wanted to do things like that: taste the bread he’d seen freshly baked on a five-year-old PBS cooking show; wear the costume and headdress of Navajo kachina or Apache spirit dancer dolls from his uncle Reynaldo’s collection; sing a duet with the tenor of an Italian opera playing on the classical music radio station.

  He always wanted something he couldn’t have, which made birthdays and holidays difficult, even at his age.

  Or perhaps one of her girls had left a message.

  Mirabel, the middle one, a precocious six, was in that phase, pretending to be an angel and leaving cryptic crayon scrawls on random walls, somehow managing to mark even the cathedral living room ceiling. Her husband, Allan, had to use a ladder to reach it so he could wipe away the signs she’d left. Flying deeper into her private garden, Samarra imagined Mirabel in full angel fantasy, writing a poem on the box’s inside, sparking a metamorphoses in her mind that had changed common cardboard into gossamer angel wings.

  Transfiguration seemed to be the first real goal Mirabel had found for herself in her brief life, and neither Samarra nor Allan knew what to do to get her to move on to more realistic wishes. If the box’s illusion of weightlessness was her work, there’d be no stopping Mirabel trying to achieve the same effect on everything else she could write on.

  Justine, the eldest of their children at a stately nine, had given up most of her childish habits and become more involved in the real world, the world of school and other children and games and phones and computers. But she still dreamed, though, as she liked to say, not all dreams come true, or even promise success.

  “Dreams lie,” she’d recently pronounced, picking at her bowl of cereal as if it had been poisoned with broccoli. “Not everyone from the tribe comes back from a night on the mountaintop with a secret name, not every hunter brings home meat for the village. Sometimes something else’s dreams come true instead of yours. The mountain and the sky and the storm and the hunger hold on to a name. Or the animal spirit gets away. Or,” she’d said, dropping the spoon on the floor, “it’s the bad dreams that come true.”

  Samarra didn’t know where the girl had found those words, and had felt sad that her eldest’s innocence was fading so soon. She’d checked Justine’s clothes and her skin, carefully interviewed teachers, and watched her closely on play dates, to be certain the loss was part of her daughter’s natural evolution and not the consequence of unwanted attention.

  Maybe the box was one of Justine’s dreams come true. Or perhaps the whole day was her daughter’s dream that had slipped into Samarra’s mind while she lay sleeping. Maybe the day hadn’t even started yet, but she’d gone through it all in a dream just to reach this moment, this gift from her oldest daughter. What could the box contain: a million dollar check? Free passes to Heaven? A lifetime fifty percent discount coupon for all purchases made by household members under the age of eighteen?

  Samarra laughed again as she put the box down on the dining room table and pinched herself. Pain shot dutifully to her brain, reminding her she was also tired from work, and hungry. She recalled the day with the clarity of the waking and not the fuzzy logic of dream, which was good because she needed the day’s receipts in the checking account.

  Like Allan said, she was far too involved in the children’s fantasy worlds. It wasn’t hard to see which side of the orchard fence their fruit had fallen on. But if she also had the head to run a successful business, then so did their kids, so everything would turn about fine. Eventually.

  Which left her with the problem of the box, quite real, though not entirely logical.

  Aside from its apparent solidity and weig
htlessness, there was no mailing label or postmark, no explanation of how the box had gotten into the house when she’d been the last to leave, setting the alarm and locking the door. Allan was still at work, Rey at daycare, and the girls were at their Tuesday dance class.

  The reality was that no one had been home to accept the package, or take it off the porch and into the house.

  There was only one possibility: Allan had taken time off from work and planted the box for her.

  Anniversary? Birthday? Had she, in bouncing back and forth between real and unreal worlds, forgotten an important date? Hurriedly, she checked through her electronic calendar, found nothing.

  Maybe he’d made arrangements for a surprise vacation. She frowned slightly, thinking of the trouble she’d have making sure the store was covered during the day on short notice. And the kids: was Rey supposed to come along while the others stayed at Reynaldo’s or one of their friends’ houses so they wouldn’t miss school?

  Allan liked surprises, and even found most of the rest of the family’s fantastic digressions amusing, but he also had his feet firmly planted on Earth. He wouldn’t do anything to upset important routines. So maybe the trip was for next summer.

  Or perhaps, the surprise was something else entirely.

  With the tiniest sliver of apprehension that the box might contain a notice of divorce, Samarra took it up to the bedroom, dropped it on the dresser, and changed. Before leaving to pick up Rey, she put her ear against the wrapping and gave the box a jiggle. There was no rustle or rattle, though a wave of nausea passed through her, as if she’d been the one shaken. She put the box down, called Meg at the boutique, as much to check in on the late store traffic as to make sure her new sales clerk hadn’t closed early, and went out.

  She picked up Rey first, secured him in his carseat, then drove on to the dance school to get Mirabel and Justine. While she waited for the girls to come out of the little strip mall studio, she ordered dinner from a Thai restaurant next door. By the time she had her brown paper bag of food, Mirabel was sitting in the backseat next to Rey, writing furiously in her notebook while Rey demanded she show him what she’d learned in dance class. Samarra put the bag between them and asked, “Where’s Justine?”

  “She was picked up,” Mirabel answered, snatching the food and putting the bag on her lap. She began covering the bag with illegible signs.

  Samarra started home, calling Allan on her cell phone. Fun was fun, but he really should have called her if he was going to leave work early and pick up one of the kids. When he didn’t answer, she checked to see if she had any messages, found none. So whatever was going on involved a conspiracy between father and oldest daughter. Samarra smiled through her irritation, wondering what kind of dream they were trying to make real, together.

  Allan came home at his usual time, after Rey and Mirabel had eaten. The children were upstairs, quiet, lost in the little words inside their rooms. Samarra sat on the too-soft sofa, her attention bouncing off of the television screen, the noise of the evening news washing over her like a tide of sewage.

  “Where’s Justine?” she asked, when Allan sat down next to her, alone.

  Nerves already brittle from the long wait, the absence of any surprise at his arrival, and the residue of a whisper from the earlier twist of reality, Samarra cracked when he frowned and asked, “How should I know?”

  There was a moment of silence, the tip of an iceberg tearing below reality’s water line into Samarra’s heart.

  She hit Allan with the tray of remotes as she screamed, pummeled him with fists and knees as he tried to restrain her, and howled at Mirabel, who had emerged from the room she shared with Justine to stand at the head of the stairs. Both of the little girl’s empty hands twitched. Rey wailed in his room.

  Justine. Her scent made Samarra light-headed when she ran up to the girls’ room and crushed her daughter’s pillow against her face. She curled up in Justine’s bed and refused to move, violently resisting Allan’s pull and ignoring Mirabel’s tearful pleas for her to be Mommy again.

  Mirabel picked up her pad and pen before Allan led her to Rey’s room.

  The police arrived within the half hour. Allan had already checked with Reynaldo, the neighbors, and tried reaching the school. A police detective checked again, following up with family friends and neighbors up and down the block, as well as school officials.

  The dance studio was closed. Mirabel insisted she’d never said their daddy had picked Justine up, only that her sister had been picked up. When the detective asked by who, she answered: “An angel.”

  Mirabel couldn’t describe the angel and withdrew deeper into her drawing. She only started screaming with blind, wide-eyed terror when the detective took her pen away, leaving her nothing with which to write. An ambulance was called when she tried scratching symbols into her forearm with her fingernail, even after the detective tried giving back the pen.

  Rey demanded to know how angels flew.

  The detective studied the picture Mirabel had been drawing and shook his head at the abstract pattern of swirling lines, a weather map of conflicting currents smashing into one another, and fragments of what might be a fairy tale about a war between men and fairies, or maybe angels and men. He asked Samarra and Allan if any of it meant something to them, studying their faces carefully as they denied finding any hidden significance. With a grunt, he tossed the paper aside.

  Samarra dragged herself out of Justine’s bed. She couldn’t meet Allan’s gaze as she explained her rationale for thinking he’d picked her up. It had all started with the box she’d found in the foyer.

  “What box?” Allan asked.

  So did the detective, who offered them all a ride to the hospital behind Mirabel’s ambulance. He waited for Samarra to bring the box down.

  Rey wanted to hold it, but the detective didn’t think that was a good idea.

  While Mirabel was safely in the emergency room, the detective and a partner who had just arrived withdrew to the hospital security office to open the box. Allan kept Rey in the waiting room while Samarra stayed with Mirabel as her wounded arm was dressed, but had to leave when a social worker came to interview her daughter. The social worker also had questions for Samarra, and later for Allan and Rey.

  Face reddened with rage and shame, Samarra understood. They were only looking out for her children. She’d done the same. She was that kind of mother.

  While they waited for doctors and detectives to sift through their lives and the hospital held both Mirabel and Rey for observation, Allan told his wife what the detectives had let him know about what had happened with the box.

  “The thing fell apart. Self-destructed. They cut the string, pulled away the wrapping, and all they found underneath was a heavy stock paper box, almost like origami, all trick folds sticking together and turning back on themselves—until the cop tapped the side and it fell apart.”

  “No ransom note?”

  “No. They had a man there to take fingerprints, but he didn’t find anything, either. They took the paper away to see if it can be traced to a store.”

  Samarra stared at him until he added, “They checked surveillance tapes from nearby businesses, but they didn’t have the right angles to show the kids walking from the van to the school. Nothing else suspicious showed up.

  She looked away, her gaze falling on a silent television screen in the waiting room displaying a cable news show. She became momentarily lost in a clip showing soldiers drifting across rough, rocky ground, weapons poised for firing, and then a line of them on a mountainside. Allan waited for her to say something, but she was out of air and words. He took her hand in both of his and said, “I’m sorry I didn’t leave it there for you as a surprise.”

  “I lost Justine.”

  “Rey must have made it. Saw some kind of origami show and left it for us when we went out this morning. Bet he was the last one out before you locked up. You just didn’t catch it before you closed the door. Probably playing with the g
irls in their dream world.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  She shivered from the barest sting of condemnation in the phrase.

  The next day, with Mirabel and Rey returned to their custody, the detective came by to report that the dance studio owners had been interviewed. They denied Justine ever came to school, though their van driver confirmed he’d picked up both girls up after school along with the other students.

  The studio owner said they’d tried to call Justine’s parents to find out what happened, and had left messages on their cell phones. They’d assumed Justine had another appointment, as often happened with their students, which was why they still charged for lessons if the parents didn’t cancel their child’s lesson.

  Samarra and Allan checked their phones again, this time found the messages. Phone records confirmed they’d been sent at the beginning of Justine’s class. It had just taken time for the calls to come through the system and reach them.

  Samarra threw her phone at a wall and screamed. Allan held her in a tight embrace, containing her rage rather than comforting her. His breath smelled of mint. She quieted only when Rey picked up the broken cell phone and began speaking into it. She snatched the phone away. Rey cried, saying he’d been speaking to Justine and she’d been telling him not to be sad.

  The detective checked the phone, shook his head.

  School officials confirmed Justine had been in class, left on time with Mirabel on the shuttle van. The driver denied seeing anything unusual as he’d watched his charges go inside the studio, though he couldn’t confirm for certain that he’d seen Justine go inside. “The count was good as when they got on,” he said, “and I checked the seats after they went inside. Nobody was left. And no one was hanging around outside the school, either.”

  The other children confirmed Justine had been on the van, though a few couldn’t remember if she’d been in the locker room changing with them, and no one could recall seeing her in class. The ones who’d thought about her while in the studio assumed she was in the back or left early. She’d never been a popular child.