Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4

by Helen Marshall

  Such mundane matters interested few of us.

  The teenage werewolf, however, engaged us all. Anticipating the turnout, the town fathers moved the meeting to the high school gym. We gathered in Section A, at center court, and watched our parents and our teachers, our coaches, our scout masters, and our pastors file grimly in. They did not acknowledge us. They did not speak among themselves. And when Mayor Flanigan called the meeting to order, there was barely a rustle as they settled their attention upon the makeshift stage. We wondered if they thought, as we did, of the bloodstains that had been scrubbed from the hardwood underneath.

  Mayor Flanigan told us that we faced a crisis unlike any other that Rockdale had ever endured. He voiced our grief for Maude Lewis and Helen Bissell. He adjured us to cooperate with Police Chief Baker and Detective Donovan in the ongoing investigation. He quoted scripture and bowed his head in prayer. And then he summoned the witnesses. Jim Whitt was too drunk to testify (Mayor Flanigan summarized his account), but the rest of them took the stage one by one—Mike Talbot and Miss Drummond and Miss Ferguson, each of them building the case that something terrible haunted the streets of Rockdale.

  Then Arlene Marshall mounted the stage, stitched up like a teenage Frankenstein. A whisper of shock ran through the gym. In the silence that followed, Arlene took the microphone with trembling hands and surveyed the crowd, letting her gaze come to rest at last upon us, her peers. We could not read her expression. We could not see beyond her ravaged face. The sutures—there must have been a hundred or more, black and knotty, the puckered wounds slathered with some glistening antiseptic balm—pulled her skin taut, her mouth into a snarl. Her voice was unsteady when she began, barely audible and difficult to understand, but as she shared her experience in the park she gained confidence. She held the audience rapt as she described the howling in the night, the stalker in the woods. Gasps erupted when the monster came crashing through the trees, and when she spoke the fatal words at last, when she said that the thing had been a teenage werewolf, clad in the letter jacket of Rockdale High, a single cry of sorrow and horror—it was a woman’s voice—scaled the walls and echoed in the raftered vault above.

  Arlene left the stage, and—though the teenage werewolf sat somewhere in our section, hidden in a human skin—she took her place among us.

  Detective Donovan was the next to take the stage. He begged of us our forgiveness. He had failed the town. He had assumed, even in the face of his own doubts, that Maude’s murder had been the work of a merely human killer—despite the impossible violence of the attack and the tuft of coarse brown hair he’d found in one clenched fist. He’d ignored the evidence. His imagination had failed him. He would refine the focus of his investigation.

  Mayor Flanigan and Police Chief Baker were not so humble. They did not acknowledge their own failures, and did not examine past error. For them, the only question was the course forward. New policies were to be implemented. A strict curfew would be established and enforced. All high school extracurricular activities—including sports—would be put on indefinite hold. And it went without saying (they said), that the Junior-Senior Prom—a mere week away—would be cancelled. We stirred in discontent at the first of these pronouncements. A chorus of whispers sprang up in response to the second. An active outcry broke out at the third. Did Mayor Flanigan really think a curfew would contain a teenage werewolf? Had he forgotten that the basketball team was in contention for the state championship? And what about the prom? We’d purchased our dresses and sent our suits to the dry cleaners, made dinner reservations, ordered flowers. Did the Mayor intend to reimburse us for these expenditures—for a year’s worth of yards mown and snow shoveled, drive-in food delivered, babies sat?

  He hesitated. He didn’t answer.

  Police Chief Baker cleared his throat. He gave us a stern look, but we’d seen that look before. Our teachers used it when they caught us smoking behind the fieldhouse, and our parents used it when we came home late on Saturday nights. Our coaches used it when we took a bad shot or forgot the play, our pastors when we missed services. It no longer frightened us, that look. We knew it for an empty threat. We’d seen what a teenage werewolf could do, and we knew that Chief Baker too was afraid. What would we have him do? He wanted to know. Would we surrender the once peaceful streets of Rockdale to a reign of blood?

  We didn’t answer him.

  Then someone—none of us saw who it was—yelled that half measures wouldn’t do. By all means impose the curfew and cancel the prom. But something more had to be done! Our townsfolk roared their approval. Put extra policemen on the street! Someone cried. And someone else: Issue the officers silver bullets! And then a clamor of competing shouts—wolf’s bane and monkshood and lock them all away!—this last plunging the crowd into a deep silence as our parents contemplated the lengths that they would go to tame or contain us—

  A silence into which Arlene Marshall once again stood and approached the stage.

  She leaned into the microphone.

  “I always dreamed of going to prom,” she said, and after what she’d been through, who could deny her?

  Thus it was decided.

  OUR THOUGHTS ABOUT THE TEENAGE WEREWOLF

  Who would take Arlene to prom? We wondered.

  Following her mutilation, Jonathan Bowling—her boyfriend—had rescinded his invitation (inexcusably, we agreed) on the pretext that she had not sufficiently recovered to attend. When we told him that his place then was at her side—and not at the prom—he had no counterargument. His face burned with chagrin, his eyes with fury. He clenched his fists and set his teeth. Many of us feared him. He was big, a tackle on the football team, and short tempered. Yet even he had no strength to oppose the force of our unified opinion.

  He reinstated his invitation.

  Arlene, to her credit, refused him. Even if she had no other options, she told him, she would not deign to accompany him. As it happened, however, she did have other options—a plethora of them. The attack and its aftermath, most notably her solidarity with us at the town meeting, had conferred a kind of celebrity upon her. But she turned her suitors down, and asked Tony Rivers to be her date. They were kindred spirits, she said. They’d both been scarred by the teenage werewolf.

  But hadn’t we all?

  Hadn’t the teenage werewolf come to shape and define us? Wasn’t its existence, its endless capacity for violence, the single most important fact about us? Hadn’t our townsmen—our parents—made that clear? They wished to curtail our freedoms, cancel our sports, deny us, most of all, the zenith of our year—the axis about which our entire social calendar revolved. As far as they were concerned, until someone identified the teenage werewolf, we were all the teenage werewolf—and if at one level we resented this, at another it empowered us. In trying to save us, they had sought to imprison us. In seeking to imprison us, they had set us free.

  The Friday before the prom, we cast our votes for queen. That night, we gathered to decorate the gym. We erected a band stand, unfolded card tables and disguised them with white linen cloths. We inflated balloons and draped ribbons. We hung a glitter ball from the rafters, like a shining silver moon, and felt wild currents flowing in our veins.

  THE MASSACRE AT THE ROCKDALE PROM

  We woke to rain the next morning, but the weather cleared by ten. We heaved a collective sigh of relief. Cars needed washing, shoes polishing. We arrived early at the florist to collect our flowers—and sighed when we had to wait because everyone else had had the same idea.

  Cliques clicked and gangs gathered.

  We gossiped as we dressed. Our mothers clamped bobby pins between their teeth, plucking them out one by one as they constructed elaborate coiffures. Our fathers helped us knot ties purchased to coordinate with the dresses of our dates. Our stomachs churned with the magnitude of the occasion. We giggled in excitement. We put on stoic faces.

  The prom officially commenced at 8:00, but most of us drifted in half an hour later. It wouldn’t do to arriv
e too early, and besides, we had other things to attend to. Dates had to be picked up, corsages affixed. Pictures had to be taken. Our dinner plans ran long. We ate with mannered precision, conducting stilted conversations over our food. We pretended at adulthood and found it all a bore.

  This was not what we had expected at all.

  We longed for freedom, not a preview of the pinched years to come.

  Upon our arrival, we were alarmed to see that chaperones had attended in unusual numbers. Miss Ferguson was there, of course, as were our teachers. But Mayor Flanigan and Police Chief Baker had also shown up. Our pastors and our parents, too. Detective Donovan kept to the shadows, watching with a weather eye.

  Even the gym’s transformation disappointed us. The card tables were rickety. The folding chairs betrayed the illusion of elegance. The balloons drooped. The hors d’oeuvres left much to be desired. The cheese tasted ashy. The cookies were dry, the punch thin. And while we told ourselves that the band was fantastic, we knew that it was second rate. Their covers were pale shadows of the rock ’n’ roll we’d grown to love, their harmonies off key.

  Yet we danced as if our lives depended on it. We danced like the twelve princesses in the tale. When the band played a slow song, we clutched each other close—too close, our chaperones would have said. In the shadowy reaches of the room they stirred as if to intercede, but then fell still. And when the band swung into a fast song, we whirled around the floor, waved our arms, drew each other close, and whirled away again. Our parents looked on in disapproval, but they did not speak.

  The dancing became wild, frenetic, Dionysian. The staid adult masks we’d donned over dinner slipped and fell away entirely. And then the music stopped. We all froze panting on the dance floor as a spotlight illuminated Miss Ferguson, thin and pale upon the stage. It was almost eleven by then, the climax of the night, time to announce the prom queen. One by one, to squeals of triumph and delight, her court was appointed: four handmaidens and their escorts, arrayed in a crescent moon around the stage. And then, with a drum roll, Principal Ferguson opened the envelope containing the Prom Queen’s identity. She unfolded the page within, she scanned it silently. She leaned in to the microphone and read it aloud.

  “This year’s prom queen is Arlene Marshall,” she said.

  The room burst into riotous applause.

  As Tony Rivers squired her to the bandstand, we stomped our feet for Arlene. We cheered, we roared as one, and when she dipped her head to accept the crown, we howled. We howled and howled, like wild things, like monsters and like wolves. Her tiara on her head, Arlene turned to the microphone. Before she could speak—had she even intended to speak?—her visage bulged grotesquely, stitches popping, and cracked along the fault lines of her wounds. We gasped when she reached up with her fingers and tore back her human face to reveal the muzzle underneath, slavering and snapping at the air. Her yellow eyes glowed with untamed freedom and with joy. She lifted her head, baying into the dark vault of the gym with its glitter-ball moon. And even as a tide of lupine transformation swept the crowded dance floor, as we too clawed apart our faces to free at last the ravening beasts that lay underneath, teenage werewolves each and every one—even as we assumed our true and long-hidden forms, unknown even to ourselves, our werewolf queen claimed her first victim, decapitating Principal Ferguson with a single swipe of her hand.

  Our muscles tightened and grew tenfold strong, agile, quick. Our fingers sprang razor-edged claws, our pores coarse hair. And our senses sharpened. The gloom of the gym was blasted clean with white, hot light, and we could hear the pulse of blood in every human vein. We could smell it, too, metallic and hot. We could smell everything—the sweet tang of the punch and the terror of our chaperones in their sweat upon the air, even our own rank and randy musk—and we wanted to wallow in it all, to fight and fuck and eat, eat, eat. We were famished and insatiate, bottomless pits of raw appetite. Nothing had ever been so awful. Nothing had ever felt so good.

  We reveled in it. Leapt on tables and smashed chairs. Snarled and howled and took our chaperones down. They stood in shock before our fury. Police Chief Baker died with his revolver still holstered. Detective Donovan got off a single shot before a teenage werewolf bit off his hand and took him to the floor. Someone kicked open a door and we eviscerated them as they fled into the night—pastors and parents, coaches, teachers, the mayor and the city council, too. We ripped out their throats and tore off their arms. We ate of their flesh. We drank of their blood. We killed them all and we devoured them, and then we stood on the roofs of their cars and howled our triumph at the moon. We were teenage werewolves and we owned the night.

  We would never let them tame us.

  USMAN T. MALIK

  In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro

  Look for the ghost trees, memsaab, the college chowkidar had told Noor, grinning from ear to ear, and indeed the road to Mohenjo-Daro was lined with them. Rows of acacia, jand, and Indian lilac stood shrouded in clouds the color of steel filigree. Noor pressed her nose to the window, watching the treetops blur and disappear in the half-breathing ether. The November dawn was clear and without a hint of fog, but the strange gray clouds stretched amebic limbs in either direction mile upon mile as if the Sind riverbank was haunted by a limitless phantom coiling around the foliage. When the school bus sped past one such tree, the wind rush pulsed the specter until it filled with sunrise. Branches red-dark emerged in glistening veins.

  Locust swarms, insect hordes, cotton candy—Noor’s brain groped for an explanation. Sunlight twitched in one of the cocooned trees and the illusion of giant blood corpuscles recurred. Noor’s vision misted; her temple sizzled. For a moment she feared the onset of a cluster headache. The last was two months ago just after she’d joined the cadet college. It had disabled her for two days. Now was not the time for another.

  She stretched her neck from side to side, and flinched when Junaid touched her shoulder. The headache flared. Angrily she turned toward him. His starched white collar jutted into his neck. The striped red tie with the cadet college crest—crossed scimitars underlaid by pine boughs, surrounded by a half moon—looked uncomfortable, but he was beaming, brown eyes sharp and arrogant. He jabbed a stubby finger past her face.

  “Spiders,” he said and widened his thin lips.

  “Don’t touch me again,” Noor said, voice cold as glass. When he continued to grin, she looked to the roadside. White crab spiders—hundreds of them dangling in the gossamer mass blooming from the trees. Gently they swayed in the wind, milky beads studding the latticework—which she now realized was webbing.

  “Have you seen any flies or mosquitoes since you came, Miss Hamdani?” Junaid’s hand rose crablike to sprawl on the headrest in front of her. “The locals told me this happened after all that flooding last year. Thousands of spiders took refuge in the trees.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she watched him finger a strip of leather peeling off the seat. His nails were perfectly manicured. He tore off the strip, drew it into his mouth, and spoke around it, “Everyone was worried about malaria outbreaks. Guess the ghost trees took care of that,” and when Noor didn’t respond, “What? Don’t tell me you’re still angry.”

  “I’m not,” she said sharply.

  “Come now. It’s Eid. Let’s be festive and forgiving.” He was sitting next to her in a row three seats wide and his breath stirred the edge of her hijab. She edged closer to the window. He smiled and began to chew the leather strip. “Kids are watching. Have to be model teachers now, don’t we?”

  Good point, asshole, she thought and closed her eyes. Another reason, other than his over-inflated ego, she’d spurned his advances since her arrival. Then again, this display of dickhood wasn’t limited to him. Many of the faculty—all male except for a quiet burkah-clad part-time lecturer, who disappeared as soon as her classes were over, and Tabinda who now sat left of Junaid in the third seat—took turns leering at her during morning assembly or talking down to her at lunch. Most were graduates of c
adet colleges or military academies and had carried the attitude into their professional lives. That she taught English and not history or Islamiat hardened their stance for some reason.

  Her students didn’t seem to care. Even though they were clearly not used to female teachers, her hijab gained her a bit of respect; something she’d seen frequently in this area. Part of the rural tradition, she supposed. Briefly she wondered how they would react if she whipped out Oxford jeans and long white shirts, her preferred dress back in her high school days in New Hampshire, instead of the plain shalwar kameez and dopatta she wore now.

  She glanced at the boys. They’d set out raucous and excited at predawn, but the motion of the bus had lulled them and they were dozing in their seats. Twelve teenage cadets, heads back, eyes closed, athletic arms crossed over their chests or dangling off the armrest. Dara, the tall muscular kid with sharp green Pashtun eyes, was the only one awake and staring at her. She nodded to him. He raised his chin and looked away.

  There’s another friend I made, Noor thought and covered the smile rising to her face with a hand.

  About half past ten they entered Dokri. Junaid pointed out Cadet College Larkana to the boys as they passed it: a pink structure flanked by red brick wings and triangular arches opening onto the first- and second-floor classrooms. A cast iron gate blocked the driveway leading up to the school building.