The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  Days passed like shadows marching across the depths of a deep and narrow valley, brief flickers of light carving tall prison walls from darkness. Agents watched from their cars, just close enough for her to notice. Reporters thrust microphones and cameras at her when she left the house, recorded every move she made as she went to the police, to the government agents, private detectives. There were many questions, but she only knew one answer: I don’t know.

  Allan remained reclusive. She only knew he was still in the world because federal agents asked her to corroborate what he’d told them, and twice, left them waiting together in a motel room. He watched television both times. She napped on the first visit, read the book she’d brought with her the second.

  Her lawyer reviewed offers for interviews, books, movies, and handled the store receipts while pointing out that Meg could only hold down the boutique for so long. Morose friends sat beside her as she waited for news, their expressions blurs lacking anchorage in hope, their brittle words of comfort shattering against her despair.

  A distant cousin called to say she’d heard about Samarra’s terrible ordeal, was very sorry and had the funeral arrangements been made.

  Samarra waited, night after night, to disappear and join her children and brother wherever they’d gone. The faces of strangers haunted her dreams, reminding her of magazine pictures of the widows of men, mothers of children, lost in a war or a cleansing or some other form of terror, alone in their homes or gathered in protest at a square or in front of a government building.

  Their eyes, she recalled, had stared through the photographer’s lens and the flat simulacrum of the page. The detachment in the collective isolation of their gaze had shaken her loose from the heavenly comfort of her life’s nest, the beating heart of her own, still living family. Even then, she’d understood that if she’d been in the same room with any one of those poor souls, they’d never see her. They would always be looking beyond the moment, searching for the road that might lead them to what had gone missing from their lives.

  She took down the sheet covering the dresser mirror. Her face was a stranger’s, but this time she recognized the eyes. Samarra released her reflections, needing the cold comfort of their company.

  Days flowed into weeks, then months. The family’s story was optioned selectively and lingered in the electronic air, in library stacks and on the covers of bundled magazines left out for recycling. Videos and pictures from the tragic story circulated on the Internet. A quickly made family cable movie hinted at family troubles and runaway children. Blogs and message boards fed the mystery for a while, but comments and discussion threads faded into silence. The telephone stopped ringing, even late at night. The agents sifted through the resurgence of responses, tracked down suspects identified by profiling, but found nothing.

  She still flinched at the blame placed on her for losing the children.

  The seasons changed, a new school year started. Rey had been eager to start kindergarten, having tasted only enough of the world’s wonders in pre-school to know he was hungry for more. Mirabel would have been reluctant to go back to the mild teasing her odd behavior sometimes inspired from even her kindred in class. But she’d looked forward to assuming the role of Rey’s older protective sister in school, as if she could hide what she was under a burden of responsibility. Justine had been racing ahead with her studies, poised to skip grades and looking forward with a mix of dread and predatory joy to being placed with older children in another school after the coming year. Already, she’d been dropping her few friends and preparing herself for a terrible dislocation. Samarra was certain Justine would have brought up, once a day, for this entire semester, a neighbor’s comment that she should pretend to be stupid so she could stay with her friends and meet boys her own age.

  When the leaves changed and her children still weren’t home, Samarra thought of another way to share their fate. Preparing the fresh roast she kept in the refrigerator in case they returned, she stared at the boning knife in her hand. She held it close to her wrist, letting blood drip on her skin. Curious, she let the blade hover at her throat.

  Thoughts crowded her mind, slipping out of reach whenever she focused on them. A few broke free, flew on wings beating to the rhythm of her racing heart. They promised blood, and flashed visions of monsters and fire consuming her children. She choked on a cry as her hands trembled, her knees buckled.

  Then a promise caressed her fingers, slowed and soothed the tumult of thoughts. Pushed the knife closer.

  A sliver of comfort pierced her terrors. Her babies had crossed over to someplace else. If she stopped being here, she could follow and be with them, there.

  Like the knife and the blood, the thought didn’t feel like a part of her. But it seemed like a simple truth. The smell of raw meat gave the idea the weight of reality. A single, simple cut, and she’d be with them. Wherever there was. The logic was inescapable.

  Relieved that she’d found a way back to the children, Samarra pushed the blade’s edge against her throat.

  The touch of cold metal against her skin sent a shock through her body, as if she’d connected not with Rey, Justine, and Mirabel, but the barbed fencing of the prison cage which kept them from her. She dropped the knife in horror. It landed on the kitchen tile with a hollow clatter.

  Sammara broke down and wept at the edge of what she’d almost done.

  They weren’t dead. She wasn’t crazy. She was a better mother than the one who almost killed herself. Not good enough to keep her babies, but not so bad as to run away when they needed her.

  Something had slipped through her despair, led her to the brink of self-destruction. Intangible, invisible, yet all around. Capable of anything.

  Certainly a thing able to make her babies disappear.

  If she’d been a better mother, she could have heard that vast and terrible thing laughing at her from the empty corners of the house.

  That night, Mirabel flew on ephemeral wings. Rey forged his own reality from the world’s raw foundations. Justine saw far, dreamed further. They felt warm in her arms as she kissed them all goodnight before she woke.

  The next day, she refused to believe she’d nearly cut herself, laughed at the memory of an invisible entity in the house. She certainly wasn’t going crazy.

  Allan informed her by postcard that he was living at his parents’ house. He wasn’t talking to anyone. His family’s lawyer contacted hers and they quickly reached a divorce settlement. She refused to give up the house, fearing the children would come back someday and she wouldn’t be there for them. Her lawyer referred her to a therapist. Meg finally bought the boutique.

  Snow returned, and the house weighed on her with the solemnity of a marble mausoleum. She heard footsteps running up and down the stairs. Echoes of giggles. Singing. But there were no snow angels in the backyard, or sled tracks, or forts stocked with snowballs. No sinister laugh of monsters.

  Her bed was sometimes warm from the heat of a missing lover.

  She bought frames by the case, filling walls and flat surfaces with pictures. The faces of her children stared at her from every space and angle. Memories replaced the life she wanted back.

  She lasted through the winter by sitting into the early morning hours at a seat by the door waiting for the bell to ring. She listened for a surreptitious raising of windows and the sound of bare feet tip-toeing on wood flooring upstairs, since the children might very well try to surprise her in the morning and pretend they’d been home all the time. It was a lie she understood she would have believed.

  But when the days slowly stretched out on longer beds of light, when the snow melted and buds appeared on ice slick branches, cracks of doubt shot through her determination to hold on.

  With the help of answers to her therapist’s questions she didn’t divulge in sessions, Samarra concluded that whatever else had happened to Justine, Mirabel, and Rey, they were far from the life they’d shared together. New experiences had shaped, and scarred, them. Maybe he
r babies couldn’t come back to the graveyard of their past. Home might not be a real place for them, anymore. Mommy and Daddy, empty words. Perhaps they had other plans, or the road they traveled on was taking them to another place they needed to be.

  The thing on the other side of the boning knife may have shown her a piece of the truth.

  Something else had to be done. She couldn’t sit in the big house and wait. She had to go out, hunt them down, transform herself into a mother they’d recognize and need to hold them in her arms, again.

  She could be that kind of mother.

  The seeds of a plan dug its roots in her mind. Hope gave her the strength to begin the transformation while keeping how and why to herself.

  The house was sold by mid-spring, a year after the children had vanished. With a gym bag full of her share of real estate and media money bundled in cash, Samarra drove off in a used car to follow them, and in her way, disappeared.

  She bought a cottage in the country, far from the closest town, under an identity she’d purchased from a reliable source. The silence of shadows beneath the pines lived with her. Water came from a well, food was scheduled for regular delivery, in exchange for the large denomination bill in its hiding place, once a month at the head of the winding dirt path between the pocked road and her front door. The car was parked in a ditch. She took down the mail box, let the path grow invisible from the road. Chopping wood for cool nights and long, cold winters provided exercise.

  There was enough cash to stay on the road of her children’s disappearance for decades.

  Samarra spent the first night of her journey invisible in the wilderness, surrounded by the boxes containing everything she’d ever need from her old life. In her dreams, she heard children laughing, running footsteps, the rustling of paper and the clink of small tools, as they explored their new home.

  The next morning, the smell of ink and glue, and the scent of the last perfume she’d bought for herself which she’d let Justine try, haunted the cabin’s musty air. She looked out the door expecting to see Mirabel and Rey running down the path, with Justine lagging behind in case one of them fell, to pick them up and take them safely back to their mother.

  The path was empty. Birds sang and chirped in the distance. Insects trilled and clicked. Sunlight skimmed the tree tops.

  “Oh, Justine, you were the one I could always talk to,” Samarra said to the dust and dander and spider silk dancing in the night-scrubbed air, “more than with Allan, Reynaldo, anybody else. Even when you scared me.” Acid dew tears beaded in the corners of her eyes.

  “Are you sending me your dreams, or am I remembering my own these days? You take care of Rey and Mirabel. Remember me. Remember, I love you. No matter what. Don’t forget that, whatever happens, whatever they do to you. No matter what you do. I’ll always love you all. Nothing can take that away.

  “I’m coming for you. Watch for me, please. Let me help. Please, my baby, please let’s all come home together.”

  The peace that followed her plea gave Samarra a certainty as hard as the surrounding hills’ stone foundations that she’d catch up to the children in this place.

  She went back inside to work her way out from the roots of her plan. Breaking open the boxes she’d brought, Samarra built three altars, one for each wall of the cottage. Justine’s she built around the fireplace, Mirabel’s and Rey’s, over the boarded up windows. They looked like memorials to her missing children, dense with framed pictures, clay models and finger paintings, baby shoes, packs of favored candies and cakes, soda bottles, well-worn stuffed animals, threadbare safety blankets, hair clippings, report cards, rickety toys, homemade Halloween costumes and masks.

  But in her mind the altars were only sketches of her living children, abstract representations requiring reality’s fine details to open the way wide to wherever they’d gone, whoever they’d become. Crude lighthouses signaling the way home for her babies.

  Samarra had only a mother’s love. More was needed to reach them, sparks thrown off by their gifts to raise a more powerful light, a touch of her children’s divine nature to fuel the fire.

  Justine’s presence lingered in Samarra’s dreams, her scent on the pillow, echoes of her whispers in the dusk. She held on to the signs, desperate for proof that she wasn’t simply a mad woman fighting off grief’s reality. She’d picked up the trail, tuned into a signal. That was what was happening. Her plan had found the right soil in which to grow.

  She wrote down her visions in the leftover pages of old school notebooks and sketched images that stayed with her after she woke: stark black mountains against a red sky, plains filled with hordes of golden figures, worms rising from the ashen soil of blackened forests, and things that were lines and angles instead of limbs and torsos, shifting and disappearing into one another. She stuck the pages in layers around Justine’s altar, until the floor, walls, and ceiling were coated with a savage collage of words and pictures mined from another world.

  They made no sense, told her nothing of what her daughter was doing or where she was. Samarra’s tears made the ink run, and she found more comfort in what was left.

  The scents and whispers faded, dreams drained into the daylight hours. She wakened from a black pit of sleep to the habit of already scrawling, first on the remaining blank paper, then across the walls surrounding Mirabel’s altar, and on the floor and ceiling, using ink, pencil, chalk, paint, charcoal. It was Mirabel’s turn to be channeled, and Samarra left herself open to inspiration every moment of the day and night, forgetting to eat or change out of soiled clothes as she wrote whatever came into her mind. Mirabel’s favorite books flowed easily from her hand, perfectly reproduced to the last comma, then bedtime stories Samarra had spun for her of forest witches and mermaids, ghosts, and warrior women; and then imaginary letters from Mirabel, not to her mother, father, siblings or classmates, but to strangers, friends she hadn’t made, yet, and lovers, and children to be born. Secret coded messages emerged, maps and plans and designs

  When writing materials ran out, Samarra carved into the space reserved for Mirabel inside the cabin with a knife, and when she ran out of space, the deluge spilled out over the outside of the cabin, the roof, nearby trees, until she awoke weak and filthy, her hands aching, vision blurry, lost in the woods.

  She followed the trail of Mirabel’s angel scrawls back to the cabin and recovered her strength in the gift of quiet granted by her daughter. As soon as she could, Samarra went out and followed the trail she’d made back through the woods, hoping she’d been given a direction in which to pursue her children. But the trail beyond the last carving ended over a cliff, into the sea churning and rolling below. Samarra built a small altar to her middle child at the last tree she’d carved, burying writings and a hair clip and a few tin toys among the roots, encasing others in a small, wooden chest she’d found in the cabin and leaving it suspended on a low branch.

  It was when she was securing the box with string that she felt an urge to build. A vision for a construction, both simple and complex, stormed her mind: corners, flat surfaces, depths, imbued with the lightness of air, the solidity of earthly matter. Rey had come to her, wanting to rebuild the box she’d found so long ago, the day her children began disappearing.

  The terror unleashed by the task numbed her fingers, and for days she wouldn’t leave the bed.

  But as plans for the object filled her mind with possible measurements, textures and angles, Samarra couldn’t deny her youngest’s obsession. She let herself approach the obligation to face her fear, to confront the first symbol of everything terrible that had happened to her. The young had their needs. The language of mystery, its logic. The road they’d taken was there for her to follow. She was that kind of mother.

  She used leaves, at first, and sticks, not wanting to disturb the materials she’d already used for the girls. Small to large, she fashioned crude models, seeking proper proportions, folds and corners, filling the space around Rey’s altar with a range of pyramidal moun
tains. By the time the paper and craft supplies she’d requested through the store that dropped off her provisions had arrived, she’d established the fundamental proportions of the box she’d found in the foyer.

  She began building in earnest. From memory and what Allan had told her, she concluded an origami structure of folded paper had been used to build the original box. She worked through daylight hours and by candlelight, laboring to build on simple crafting skills she’d learned in workshops with her children, experimenting, failing, adding slowly to the mountains she’d already built only the models in which she thought she’d achieved a small measure of perfection.

  Rebuilding the box would not be easy. She wrestled with the problems of weight and size and texture until she ended each day in screams of despair, more than once racing to the cliff’s edge through the night woods, determined to throw herself over rather than face another day of imperfections. She’d come so far, but not far enough.

  So far, the sea crashing to shore in the night made her realize, in this world. Justine, Mirabel, and Rey had brought her to this edge of everything. They weren’t on this side. They were showing her something. The sea. A barrier. A wall.

  A wall had doors. And a box, a lid or flaps for opening.

  So the end she’d reached was not a final one. Justine, Mirabel, and Rey were beyond the sea, the air she breathed, the land she stood on. They were on the other side of the box. Waiting.

  Samarra cried out with joy. She ran out into midnight woods as if she’d heard her children coming, again. She tripped and fell, then waited, listening to rustling underbrush, grunts, trilling, snuffling, catching eyes shining with starlight, raising her cheeks to the kiss of moth wings, feeling that she was close. So close.

  The seasons passed, and the boxes she built slowly approached the perfection for which Rey always strived, working on wrapping and string and bow to complete the replication. She took her final products out along the trail she’d blazed, past the last carving, until the line of boxes reached the cliff, where she tossed them into the water and watched as they were consumed by the churning froth below.