The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  Later that night the shadows of the sycamore combed the walls and ceiling of Vic’s room with urgent movements. He lay under mom’s hand-stitched quilt and groggily watched the shapes become tall lean basketball players who tossed a ball to each other, dodged, dribbled, and dunked. Thousands of shadow hands applauded the game.

  The injection Father gave Vic softened the world, and dragged his eyes closed.

  Vic remembered Rain dancing, loose-limbed and radiant, and Don’s frowned concentration as he leaped with the ball. Their beauty suffused him and his heartbeat lurched.

  Mom stroked his forehead and Vic cracked open heavy eyelids. She smelled of soap and tears. The bed creaked when she settled beside him. She placed her hand on his chest, and her fingers echoed the stuttering rhythm.

  It was hard to breathe.

  Father sat on the bottom of the mattress, and placed his hands on Vic’s feet. He nodded.

  Vic closed his eyes.

  Mom kissed his cheek. “You’re a little out of step,” she said.

  Vic kept beating for as long as he could.

  About the Author

  Maura McHugh was born in the U.S.A. but transplanted to Ireland when she was too young to protest. Her short stories and poetry have appeared in publications such as Fantasy, Shroud, Paradox, Goblin Fruit, and M-Brane SF. A script she wrote for a short film was shot and premiered in 2009, and she has written a graphic novel, Róisín Dubh, which is due out from at the end of 2010. Earlier this year she co-edited/juried The Campaign for Real Fear horror fiction contest with Christopher Fowler, and the winning stories were published in Black Static and podcast by Action Audio. She lives in Galway, Ireland and when she’s not writing she works as a blogger, newsletter editor and Web content manager for the Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild. Her Web site is splinister.com

  Story Notes

  This subtle story is not one you can rush through. Since I was reading a lot of stories, I admit to, initially, getting to the end and realizing I needed to go back and read more slowly to fully appreciate it. I did . . . Then I was too stunned to read another story for quite a while.

  HALLOWEEN TOWN

  LUCIUS SHEPARD

  This is the story of Clyde Ormoloo and the willow wan, but it’s also the story of Halloween, the spindly, skinny town that lies along the bottom of the Shilkonic Gorge, a meandering crack in the earth so narrow that on a clear day the sky appears to those hundreds of feet below as a crooked seam of blue mineral running through dark stone. Spanning the gorge is a forest with a canopy so dense that a grown man, if he steps carefully, can walk across it; thus many who live in Halloween must travel for more than a mile along the river (the Mossbach) that divides their town should they wish to see daylight. The precipitous granite walls are concave, forming a great vaulted roof overhead, and this concavity becomes exaggerated near the apex of the gorge, where the serpentine roots of oak and hawthorn and elm burst through thin shelves of rock, braiding their undersides like enormous varicose veins.

  Though a young boy can toss a stone from one bank to the other, the Mossbach is held to be quite a broad river by the citizenry, and this is scarcely surprising, considering their narrow perspective. Space is at a premium and the houses of the town, lacking all foundation, must be bolted to the walls of the gorge. Their rooms, rarely more than ten feet deep, are stacked one atop another, like the uneven, teetering columns of blocks erected by a toddler, and are ascended to by means of external ladders or rickety stairs or platforms raised by pulleys (a situation that has proved a boon to fitness). A small house may reach a height of forty feet and larger ones, double stacks topped off by ornamental peaked roofs, often tower more than eighty feet above the Mossbach. When families grow close, rooms may be added that connect two or more houses, thereby creating a pattern of square shapes across the granite redolent of an enormous crossword puzzle; when feuds occur, these connecting rooms may be demolished. Public venues like O’Malloy’s Inn and the Downlow have expanded by carving out rooms from the rock, but for much of its length, with its purplish days and quirky architecture and night mists, Halloween seems a habitation suited for a society of intelligent pigeons . . . though on occasion a purely human note is sounded. Sandy shingles notch the granite shore and piers of age-blackened wood extend out over the water, illumined by gas lamps or a single dangling bulb, assisting the passage of the flat-bottomed skiffs that constitute the river’s sole traffic. Frequently you will see a moon-pale girl (or a dark-skinned girl with a peculiar pallor) sitting at the end of such a pier beneath a fan of radiance, watching elusive, luminous silver fish appearing and disappearing beneath the surface with the intermittency of fireflies, waiting for her lover to come poling his skiff out of the sempiternal gloom.

  At forty-one, Clyde Ormoloo had the lean, muscular body of a construction worker (which, in fact, he had been) and the bleak disposition of a French philosopher plagued by doubts concerning the substantive worth of existence (which, in essence, he had become). His seamed face, surmounted by a scalp upon which was raised a crop of black stubble, was surpassingly ugly, yet ugly in such a way that appealed to women who prize men for their brutishness and use them as a setting to show off the diamond of their beauty. These women did not stay for long, put off by Clyde’s unrelenting and perhaps unnatural scrutiny. Three years previously, while working a construction site in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania (his home and the birthplace of Joe Namath, the former NFL quarterback), he had been struck a glancing blow to the head by a rivet dropped from the floor above and, as a result, he had begun to see too deeply into people. The injury was not a broken spine (he was in the hospital one night for observation), yet it paralyzed Clyde. Whereas before the accident he had been a beer guzzler, an ass-grabber, a blue-collar bon vivant, now when he looked into a woman’s eyes (or a man’s, for that matter), he saw a terrible incoherence, flashes of greed, lust, and fear exploding into a shrapnel of thought that somehow succeeded in contriving a human likeness. His friends seemed unfamiliar—he understood that he had not known them, merely recognized the shapes of their madness. He asked questions that made them uncomfortable and made comments that they failed to grasp and took for insults. Increasingly, women told their friends they didn’t know him anymore and turned away when he drew near. Men rejected him less subtly and formed new friendships with those whose madnesses complemented their own.

  “Sooner or later,” said one of his doctors, “almost everyone arrives at the conclusion that people are chaotic skinbags driven by the basest of motives. You’ll adjust.”

  None of the doctors could explain Clyde’s sudden increase in intelligence and they were bemused by his contention that this increase was a byproduct of improved vision. In Clyde’s view, his new capacity to analyze and break down the images conveyed by light lay at the root of his problem—the rivet had struck his skull above the site of the visual cortex, had it not? At the movies, in rock clubs, in any poorly lit circumstance, he felt almost normal, though most movies—themselves creations of light—seemed designed to inspire Pavlovian responses in idiots, and thus Clyde began attending the local arthouse, hiding his face beneath a golf cap so as not to be recognized.

  “Try sunglasses,” suggested a specialist.

  Sunglasses helped, but Clyde felt like a pretentious ass wearing them day in, day out during the gray inclemency of a Beaver Falls winter. He considered moving to Florida, but knew this would be no more than a stopgap. The sole passion he clung to from his old, happy life (never mind that it had been an illusion) was his love of football, and for a while he thought football might save him. He spent hours each night watching ESPN Classic and the NFL Network. Football was the perfect metaphor, he thought, for contemporary man’s frustration with the limitations of the social order, and therein rested its appeal. Whenever the officials (who in the main were professional men, lawyers, accountants, insurance executives, and the like, apt instruments of repression) threw their yellow flags and blew their silver whistles, prevent
ing a three-hundred-pound mesomorph from ripping out a young quarterback’s throat, they were in effect reminding the millions tuning in that they could expect no more than a partial fulfillment of their desires . . . and yet they did this with the rabid participation of the masses, who dressed in appropriate colors, rooting for the home team or the visitors, but acknowledging by the sameness of their dress that there was only one side, the side that sold them jerseys and caps. Thus football had evolved into a training tool of the corporate oligarchy, posing a dreary object lesson that conditioned proles to accept their cancer-ridden, consumerist fates enthusiastically. Having thought these things, the game lost much of its appeal for Clyde. And so, plagued by light, alone in a world where solitude is frowned upon, if not perceived as the symptom of a deviant pathology, he petitioned the town of Halloween to grant him citizenship.

  The population of Halloween fluctuates between three thousand and thirty-eight hundred, and is sustained at those levels by the Town Council. At the time Clyde put in his application, the population hovered around thirty-two hundred, so breaching the upper limit would not be a problem. To his surprise, the decision to reject or approve him would not be rendered by the council in full session, but by a committee of three men named Brad, Carmine, and Spooz, and the meeting was held at the Sub-Café, an establishment that had been excavated out of the granite; a neon sign was bracketed to the rock above the entrance, indigo letters flashing on and off, producing eerie reflections in the water, and the interior looked a little like Brownie’s back in Beaver Falls, with digital beer signs and some meager Christmas decorations and piped-in music (the Pogues were playing when he entered), TVs mounted here and there, maple paneling and subdued lighting, photographs of former patrons on the walls, tables, a horseshoe-shaped bar and waitresses wearing indigo Sub-Café T-shirts. A comforting mutter arose from the crowd at the bar, and two of the committee were seated at a back table.

  Carmine and Spooz, it turned out, were cousins who did not share a family resemblance. Spooz was a genial, round-cheeked man in his mid-thirties, already going bald, and Carmine was five or six years younger, lean and sallow, with a vulpine face, given to toothpick-chewing and lip-curling. Brad, who had to be called away from a group gathered around a punchboard, was a black guy with baby dreads, a real beanpole, maybe six-six or six-seven. He brought a beer over for Clyde and gave him a grin as he pulled a chair up to the table. They drank and talked small and Clyde, gesturing at the TVs, asked if they had cable.

  “Shit, no,” said Carmine, and Spooz said, “The cable and the satellite company are having a turf war, so nobody can get either one.”

  “Cable wouldn’t work down here, anyway,” said Carmine. “Satellite, neither.”

  “How come?” Clyde asked.

  “We got a service that burns stuff for us,” Spooz said. “They send DVDs down the next day.”

  “Ormoloo,” said Brad. “That’s French, isn’t it? Doesn’t it have something to do with gilding?”

  “Beats me.” Clyde drained his glass and signaled the waitress to bring another round. “My dad was this big old guy who founded a hippie commune out in Oregon. He changed his name legally to Elephant Ormoloo. When my mom married him, she changed hers to Tijuana Ormoloo. When she divorced him, she changed it back to Marian Bleier. She told me I could choose between Bleier and Ormoloo. I was ten years old and pissed at her for leaving my dad, even though he’d been screwing around on her, so I chose Ormoloo. Anyway . . . ” Cliff resettled in his chair. “I don’t think my dad even realized it sounded French. He used to buy these Hindu posters from a head shop. You know, the ones with blue goddesses and guys with elephant heads and all that. He loved those damn posters. I think he was trying for a Hindu effect with the name.”

  After a silence during which the PA system began piping in the Pretenders, Carmine shifted his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other with his tongue and said, “Too much information, guy.”

  Irritated, Clyde said, “I thought you wanted to know shit about me.”

  “Take it easy, man,” said Brad, and Spooz, with an apologetic look, said, “We want to get to know you, okay? But we got a lot of ground to cover here.”

  Clyde hadn’t noticed any particular rush on the part of the committee, but kept his mouth shut.

  Spooz unfolded a wrinked sheet of paper and spread it on the table. To make it stay flat, he put empties on it top and bottom. The paper was Clyde’s application.

  “So, Cliff,” Spooz said. “Seems like you’ve got a very excellent reason for wanting to move here.”

  “That’s Clyde, not Cliff,” said Clyde,

  Spooz peered at the paper. “Oh . . . right.”

  The waitress delivered their beers and plunked herself down in the chair next to Clyde. She was a big sexy girl, a strawberry blonde with a big butt, big thighs, big everything, kind of an R. Crumb woman, albeit with a less ferocious smile.

  “You going to sit in, Joanie?” Brad asked.

  “Might as well.” She winked at Clyde. “I ain’t making no money.”

  “I thought you guys were going to decide,” said Clyde, feeling that things were becoming a bit arbitrary. “Can just anybody get in on this?”

  “That’s how democracy works,” said Carmine. “They do it different where you come from?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t like girls.” Joanie did a movie star-quality pout.

  “I like girls fine. I . . . It’s . . . ” Clyde drew a breath and let it run out. “This is important to me, and I don’t think you’re taking it seriously. You don’t know my name, you’re not asking questions. My application looks like it’s been in the wastebasket. I’m getting the idea this is all a big joke to you people.”

  “You want me to fuck off, I will,” Joanie said.

  “I don’t want anybody to fuck off. Okay? All I want is for this to be a real interview.”

  Carmine gave him the fisheye. “You don’t think this is a real interview?”

  “We’re in a freaking bar, for Christ’s sakes. Not the town hall.”

  “So what’re you saying? The interview’s not real unless it’s in a building with a dome?” Carmine spat on the floor, and Joanie punched him in the arm and said, “You going to clean that up?”

  “This is the town hall,” Carmine said.

  “Uh-huh. Sure it is,” said Clyde.

  Brad tapped him on the arm in order to break up the stare-down he was having with Carmine. “It’s the truth, dude. Anywhere the committee meets, it’s the town hall.”

  Carmine popped a knuckle. “I suppose where you come from, they do that different, too.”

  “Yeah, matter of fact.” Clyde fixed him with a death stare. “One thing, they don’t let sour little fucks decide anything important.”

  “All right, all right,” Spooz said. “Let’s everybody calm down. The man wants some questions. Anyone have a question?”

  Carmine said meanly, “I got nothing,” and Brad appeared to be mulling it over.

  “What sort of work you do?” Joanie asked.

  Clyde started to point out that the question had been answered on his application; but he was grateful for this much semblance of order and said, “Construction. I’m qualified to operate most types of heavy machinery. I do carpentry, masonry, roofing. I’ve done some wiring, but just basic stuff. Pretty much you name it.” He glanced at Carmine and added, “Too much information?”

  Carmine held out a hand palm down and waggled it, as if to say that Clyde was right on the edge of overcommunicating.

  Brad said, “I don’t believe we’ve got any construction going, but he could start out down at the Dots.”

  Spooz agreed and Clyde was about to ask what were the Dots, when Joanie cut in and asked if he had a girlfriend.

  “How about we keep it serious?” said Spooz.

  “I am serious!” she said.

  “Naw,” said Clyde. “No girlfriend. But I’m accepting applications.”

  Joanie took a pre
tend-swat at him with a menu.

  Brad followed with a question about his expertise in furniture building, and then Spooz and Joanie had questions about his long-term goals (indefinite), his police record (nothing heavy-duty since he was kid), and his health concerns (none as far as he knew). They had other questions, too, which Clyde answered honestly. He began to relax, to think that he was making an overall good impression—Brad and Joanie were in his corner for sure, and though Spooz was Carmine’s cousin, Clyde had the idea that they weren’t close, so he figured as long as he didn’t blow it, he was in.

  The atmosphere grew convivial, they had a few more beers, and at last Spooz said to his colleagues, “Well, I guess we know enough, huh?”

  Joanie and Brad concurred, and Clyde asked if they wanted him to go away so they could talk things over. Not necessary, they told him, and then Carmine said, “Here’s a question for you. How do you feel about the Cowboys?”

  At a loss, Clyde said, “You talking about the Dallas Cowboys?”

  Carmine nodded, and Clyde, assuming that this didn’t require a legitimate answer, said, “Screw ’em. I’m a Steelers fan.”

  Brad, who had been resting his elbows on the table, sat back in his chair. Joanie was frozen for a second and then busied herself in bussing the table. Spooz lowered his eyes as if deeply saddened. Carmine smiled thinly and inspected his fingernails.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Clyde said. “That was a serious question?”

  Brad asked what time it was, and Spooz checked his watch and said it was six-thirty.

  “Hey,” said Clyde. “You need me to be a Cowboys fan, I’ll be a Cowboys fan. I don’t give a good goddamn about football, really.”

  That seemed to horrify them.

  “What do you want from me? You want I should paint myself silver and blue every Sunday? Come on!”

  “Monday,” said Brad. “We don’t get the games until Monday.”