The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  In her bedroom she carried the beautifully polished cabinet with the long, delicate legs to a shadowed corner away from the window, the door, and any other furniture. She did not understand this impulse exactly; she just felt the need to isolate the cabinet, to protect it from any other element in her previous life in this house. Because somehow she already knew that her life after the arrival of this delicate assemblage of different shades of wood would be a very different affair.

  Once she had the cabinet positioned as seemed appropriate—based on some criteria whose source was completely mysterious to her—she sat on the edge of her bed and watched it until it was time to go downstairs and prepare dinner for her husband. Afterwards she came back and sat in the same position, gazing, singing softly to herself for two, three, four hours at least. Until the sounds in the rest of the house had faded. Until the soft amber glow of the new day appeared in one corner of her window. And until the stirrings inside the cabinet became loud enough for her to hear.

  She came unsteadily to her feet and walked across the rug with her heart racing, blood rushing loudly into her ears. She held her breath, and when the small voice flowered on the other side of the shiny cabinet wall, she opened its tiny door.

  Twenty years after his wife’s death Jacob entered her bedroom for the third and final time. The first time had been the afternoon he had strode in to announce his well-meant but inadequate gift to her. The second time had been to find her lifeless body sprawled on the rug when she had failed to come down for supper. And now this third visit, for reasons he did not fully understand, except that he had been overcome with a terrible sadness and sense of dislocation these past few weeks, and this dusty bed chamber was the one place he knew he needed to be.

  He would have come before—he would have come a thousand times before—if he had not been so afraid he could never make himself leave.

  He had left the room exactly as it had been on Alma’s last day: the covers pulled back neatly, as if she planned an early return to bed, a robe draped across the back of a cream-upholstered settee, a vanity table bare of cosmetics but displaying an antique brush and comb, a half-dozen leather-bound books on a shelf mounted on the wall by her window. In her closet he knew he would find no more than a few changes of clothes. He didn’t bother to look because he knew they betrayed nothing of who she had been. She had lived in this room as he imagined nuns must live, their spare possessions a few bare strokes to portray who they had been.

  It pained him that it was with her as it had been with everyone else in his life—some scattered sticks of furniture all he had left to remember them by—where they had sat, what they had touched, what they had held and cared for. He had always made sure that when some member of the family died he got something, any small thing, they had handled and loved, to take back here to watch and listen to. And yet none was haunted, not even by a whisper. He knew—he had watched and listened for those departed loved ones most of his adult life.

  His family hadn’t wanted him to marry her. No good can come, they said, of a union with one so strange. And though he had loved his family he had separated from them, aligning himself with her in this grand house away from the staring eyes of the town. It had not been a conventional marriage—she could not abide being touched and permitted him to see her only at certain times of the day, and even then he might not even be present as far as she was concerned, so intent was she on her conversation with the people and things he could not see.

  His family virtually abandoned him over his choice, but as a grown man it was his choice to make. He was never sure if his beloved Alma had such choices. Alma had been driven, apparently, by whatever stray winds entered her brain.

  The gift she had chosen in lieu of a child (for how could he give his child such a mother, or give his wife such a tender thing to care for?) still sat in its corner in shadow, appearing to lean his way on its insubstantial legs. He perceived a narrow crack in the front surface of the small cabinet, which drew him closer to inspect the damage, but it was only that the small door was ajar, inviting him to secure it further, or to peek inside.

  Jacob led himself into the corner with his lantern held before him, and grasping the miniature knob with two trembling fingers pulled it away from the frame, and seeing that the door had a twin, unclasped the other side and spread both doors like wings that might fly away with this beautiful box. He stepped closer then, moving the light across the cabinet’s interior like a blazing eye.

  The inside was furnished like some doll’s house, and it saddened him to see this late evidence of the state of Alma’s thinking. Here and there were actual pieces of doll furniture, perhaps kept from her girlhood or “borrowed” from some neighbor child. Then there were pieces—a settee very like the one in this room, a high-backed Queen Anne chair—carved, apparently, from soap, now discolored and furred by years of clinging dust and lint.

  Other furniture had been assembled from spools and emery boards, clothespins, a small jewelry box, then what appeared to be half a broken drinking cup cleverly upholstered with a woman’s faded black evening glove.

  He was surprised to find in one corner a small portrait of himself, finely painted in delicate strokes, and one of Alma set beside it. And underneath, in tiny, almost unreadable script, two words, which he was sure he could not read correctly, but which might have said “Father,” “Mother.”

  He decided he had been hearing the breathing for some time—he just hadn’t been sure of its nature, or its source. The past few years he had suffered from a series of respiratory ailments, and had become accustomed to hearing a soft, secondary wheeze, or leak, with each inhalation and exhalation of breath. That could easily have been the origin of the sounds he was hearing.

  But he suspected not. With shaking hand he reached into the far corner of the box, where a variety of handkerchiefs and lacy napkins lay piled. He peeled them off slowly, until finally he reached that faint outline beneath a swatch of dress lace, a short thing curled onto itself, faintly moving with a labored rasp.

  He could have stopped then, and thought he should, but his hand was moving again with so little direction, and just nudged that bit of cloth, which dropped down a bare quarter inch.

  Nothing there, really, except the tiny eyes. Tissue worn to transparency, flesh vanished into the dusty air, and the child’s breathing so slight, a parenthesis, a comma. Jacob stared down solemnly at this kind afterthought, shadow of a shadow, a ghost of a chance. Those eyes so innocent, and yet so old, and desperately tired, an intelligence with no reason to be. Dissolving. The weary breathing stopped.

  In the family plot, what little family there might be, there by Alma’s grave he erected a small stone: “C. Child” in bold but fine lettering. There he buried the cabinet and all it had contained, because what else had there been to bury? Two years later he joined them there, on the other side.

  About the Author

  Steve Rasnic Tem is a past winner of the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards. His most recent book is a collection of short story collaborations with wife Melanie Tem, In Concert. Steve’s audio collection Invisible was recently published by Speaking Volumes (speakingvolumes.us) in CD and MP3 download. Also available is an ebook of the Tems’ fantasy novel Daughters (macabreink.com/store/). You may visit the Tem home on the Web at www.m-s-tem.com.

  Story Notes

  Two human hearts, the subjectivity of truth, the uncertainty of factual accuracy, and a step from what is usually recognized as reality into some other realm. But if truth is subjective and fact uncertain, then who is to say what is real and what is not? In “The Cabinet Child,” Steve Rasnic Tem has given us a poignant story that moves one to ask such questions while really not caring if they are answered.

  CHERRYSTONE AND SHARDS OF ICE

  EKATERINA SEDIA

  I sat with my face in my hands; not due to inebriation, which was greater than what my finances allowed, but less than what I wanted it to be
. My distress was caused by a combination of events that involved the crooked militia, a slick merchant, and a deceitful woman. As a result, my financial and moral state left much to be desired; so I drank on credit.

  Just as the world was starting to soften around the edges, a shadow fell across the stained tablecloth of the restaurant table. I did not look up. While I was not a man to avoid the inevitable, I still did not relish the sight of my doom’s portends. I wanted to see neither goons, nor the ungrateful bitches.

  “Excuse me,” said a male voice directly above and far, far from my bowed head. “Messer Lonagan?”

  The address was polite enough to make me raise my gaze. Two thugs in the uniforms of the Areti clan grinned at me with as much sincere joy as a shark that spotted a flounder.

  “Yes,” I said, too smart and too experienced to lie. “What can I do for you?”

  “Venerable Mistress Areti desires to see you.”

  I sighed and took another sip of my wine. “I’d rather stay where I am. I had the most wretched day, and surely the Venerable Mistress can find someone better qualified than I.” Not that I liked turning down a paycheck, but Areti’s gold to a businessman was like a millstone to a swimmer.

  One of the thugs grabbed my right wrist, pressing it against the table where it rested. The other goon opened his jacket, extracting a pistol with a heavy handle, flipped it in his hand with a rehearsed motion, and brought it down across my fingers—lightly, but with enough force to give me an idea of how much it would hurt when he did it in earnest. His eyes glinted with a malicious promise.

  “Please don’t break my hand.” I felt tired rather than scared. “I need it.”

  “Will you come then?”

  What was a man to do? I followed them out of the restaurant, into the streets filled with silvery mist highlighted by an occasional hazy sphere of a gas lamp. On our way, we took a shortcut and skimmed along the edge of the deaders’ town, where ghostly dead man’s birches shone through the droplets of moisture in the air, their branches studded with tiny green flickers, the condensation weeping silently down their trunks.

  We walked across a wooden bridge that creaked and resonated under our feet. I smelled something musty, and a moment later spotted a dead beggar, who sat in the middle of the bridge, reclining by the guardrail. His eyes bulged out of his swollen dark face, and his thick purple tongue protruded where his lower jaw used to be, but was now gone, lost forever. He would not walk around for long, and seemed to know it—his white eyes were turned upwards, greeting the stars as they sprinkled across the darkened sky.

  “Filthy rat,” said on of my guides. “He probably died a beggar.”

  “Likely,” I agreed, and couldn’t look away.

  The other guide spat, propelling a gob of saliva and phlegm that landed with a satisfying smack onto the beggar’s left eye. “I can’t believe it. They are everywhere nowadays—their part of town just keeps on spreading.”

  “That doesn’t require a great deal of faith, to believe that,” I said. “The dead will always outnumber the living.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You live, you die. Everyone who’s now alive will end up in the deaders’ town. Even you, so be nice to them.”

  The guards huffed, but their gazes slid off the beggar and turned downward, to the slats under our feet. One could live in this place and be carefree only if he did not think of his inevitable demise, the inexplicable one-way traffic. I couldn’t ignore this silent but constant shuffling from one side of the town to the other; I couldn’t forget that the deader city swelled with every passing year, encroaching onto the town of the living. Soon, the alivers’ town would be but a fleck in the sea of rotting flesh. I was never carefree.

  I shook my head and stepped off the bridge onto the quartz pavement, where the gaslights were installed with regularity, and the trees emitted no deathly glow, but cast deep, cool shadows, soft as crushed silk. A light perfume of jasmine scented the night, and soft singing came from nearby—the sort of thing the alivers enjoy.

  The Areti manor squatted squarely on the hillside, its windows shuttered, but a soft glow of lamplight seeped around the edges, beckoning. The three of us entered the hallway. Darkness pooled in the rounded recesses of the walls, and my soft-soled shoes seemed too loud. There didn’t seem to be any people here, just echoes. There were no doors either—just curtains that billowed in the entryways, blown about by the dusty winds that skipped around the manor, unchallenged.

  “In here,” one of the goons said, and pulled open a curtain decorated with a beaded dragon. Its eyes glinted in the firelight that reached from within.

  I entered a vast hall drenched in shadows. “Venerable Mistress?”

  “Right this way, Lonagan.” She reclined on a chaise made of solid oak, and still it creaked under her weight. The fireplace cast a semicircle of orange light, and I stepped closer.

  Her face was oval and pretty, with large doe eyes and a prim, full-lipped mouth. Her long auburn hair curled and cascaded, descending onto her shoulders and chest, playing like waterfalls across the vast terrain that was her body. She was a landscape, not a woman—hills and valleys of flesh stretched before me in every direction, barely contained on the gigantic chaise. Only her face and hands seemed human.

  I bowed. “What can I do for you, Venerable Mistress Areti?”

  She smiled, and for a moment I forgot about her distended body, and looked into her ink-blue, almost black eyes. “I hear that you can find things.”

  I inclined my head. “That is indeed the case. What would you like me to find?”

  Her smile grew colder, tighter. “I thought you could figure that out.”

  “No,” I said with rising irritation. “I’m not a magician. I’m just a thorough man.”

  She undulated with laughter, sending slow, hypnotic waves through her flesh. “All right then. I lost a gemstone—or rather, it was stolen from me. By the deaders.”

  “Are you sure?” The deaders were not known for crime—that was the province of the still-living.

  “Oh, quite sure. You see, they are recent deaders, and I fear that my men were somehow responsible for their transition.”

  It still sounded strange to me, but I nodded. Who was I to judge? Perhaps they had the stone on them while they transitioned; perhaps their passions were slower to die than was common. “What is this stone like?”

  “It’s a cherrystone.” She lifted a delicate, fine hand, and spread her index finger and thumb half an inch apart. “Small, pink. You’ll know it when you see it.”

  I was certain of that. Even though I’ve never held anything as valuable as a cherrystone in my hands, I heard enough about them and their powers to know how rare they were. Especially pink ones—chances were, it was the only one in town.

  “What about those who took it?”

  She shrugged. “Ask my guardsmen for a description.”

  “Do you know their names?”

  “I would imagine they’ve shed their names by now, so they would be useless to you.”

  So it was longer than a week since they were dead. Yet, I couldn’t imagine why she would wait a week to start looking for her cherrystone. The only conclusion that made sense was the one that didn’t make sense—that they were dead while committing the theft.

  “Be discreet,” she said, just as I was about to leave. “You understand how precarious my situation is.”

  “Of course, Venerable Mistress. I won’t say a word.”

  I left the crackling of the fire and the oaken chaise behind, and walked along the corridor, back to the entrance. This place did not fill me with trepidation any longer—the air of lonely neglect made me feel sorry for her, despite the Areti’s bloody reputation. I liked to think that my sympathy was not contaminated by the promise of a paycheck.

  One had to be careful in the deaders’ town, and I watched my step, even though I had connections there. The inhabitants were not violent by nature, but protective of what little live
s they had. I prepared myself for the stench by putting a generous dollop of wintergreen ointment under my nose, and stowed the can in my pocket. Abiding the old habits, I waited for the nightfall, to sneak in under the cover of darkness.

  The moment my foot touched the soft moss that grew through the cracks in wooden pavements, I realized that I was foolish—deaders did not sleep, and night made no difference. I heard the ice merchants calling in high voices, and the scraping of their trunks full of green translucent chunks of ice as they pulled them by the ropes.

  I kept close to the buildings, and hid my face in the collar of my jacket. A few passersby did not seem to notice me, as they shambled along. Jas, the deader I was going to see lived well away from the border of the alivers; it wasn’t the first time that I visited him, but the gravity of my task made me feel ill at ease.

  I saw his house, recognizable because of the brick-red shutters, and sped up my steps. The houses seemed superfluous—if it wasn’t for the need to contain the cold, the deaders could’ve just as easily lived outside, shambled along whatever streets, forests or valleys they chose. But they kept to the town, nestled inside in the protective cocoon of ice, trying to slow their decay. Couldn’t say I blamed them.

  I passed a white house, with a small courtyard and a garden in front of it, and paused. One did not see decorations in these parts too often. And I also saw a young girl in the yard. Unaware that anyone was watching, she hummed to herself, and practiced her dance steps. She must’ve died just recently—her skin was pale but whole, and her downy hair blew about her thin face as she twirled with her arms raised. I didn’t know exactly what happens after death, but I noticed that it affected coordination; the girl stumbled, and almost fell over. Stubbornly, she steadied herself, and started on sidesteps.