The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012

by Guran, Paula

  Finally it hit me that there was no furniture in the house except our camping stuff, so where was the piano? It had to be a CD or something. I got out of my sleeping bag and took down the chairs in front of my door. When I went out into the hallway I knew that the music was coming from downstairs, so I started down fast.

  The music stopped, and then my flashlight went out. I stopped and shook it like you do, and then somebody passed me on the stairs. It is not what anybody would call a wide staircase, and I was holding the rail. She came down the other side where the wall is. The thing was, it was not somebody from downstairs coming up. This was somebody who had been upstairs with me coming down. She came up behind me and went on down, and I have never been so scared in my life.

  My flashlight came back on, but I just stood there with my back pressing the rail, shaking and shaking. Will I think I was a wimp when I read this over later? Well, it is the truth. I never thought that anybody’s teeth really chattered like you see on TV sometimes, but mine did then.

  So I got out the pop-up tent and set it up on the front lawn in the dark, and staked it down, too. And I brought down my sleeping bag and slept in there until this morning.

  This morning I decided I had been spending too much time in the house and too much behind the house, and the thing for me to do is hitch a ride into town and look for them. I mean the little town where the railroad station is. I can talk to the police there, and if there has been an accident and Mom and Dad are in the hospital or missing or something they will know. So I have watched the road a lot. Only one car has come by, an old one with an old man hunched up driving it. I tried to flag him down, but he pretended not to see me.

  10/11

  I did not write yesterday because Vikki was here. We did it in the tent, after. I was pretty bad, I think, but she was really good. She was hot, too. She showed me where to touch her and not hard, and how to keep from coming too soon. All the stuff.

  I ought to write how I feel about it, but I am not sure yet. The thing is that she is gone. I am going to sleep in the house tonight. I just feel so lost.

  It started yesterday afternoon when Mark and Vikki came. They had been hitchhiking since Arizona, Mark said, because it was where Mark’s Harley got wrecked. I knew he was lying about something, only I did not let on. I told them my name, Josh, and they said Mark and Vikki. They were about starved, they said, and did I have anything? Only they could not pay.

  So I said sure, and brought them inside the house and explained. Then we went out back, and I lit the camping stove and warmed up two cans of Irish stew. There was bread and stuff too. I had eaten my lunch already, so I did not eat much. Neither did Vikki, but Mark made up for both of us.

  And all the time I kept thinking I had seen Vikki someplace before, but when it finally hit me I couldn’t believe it. I had seen a girl who looked just like her hitching on TV, the leather jacket, the jeans and boots, the face and all that bushy black hair. Now here she was eating a cracker and smiling at me.

  Then Mark wanted to use the john, so I told him where it was. As soon as he was gone, Vikki said she liked me better than Mark. I was nice and Mark had been mean to her. I was better looking, too, she said. So could she stay here with me and we would tell Mark to keep on going? I said yes. I knew there would be a showdown with Mark and it might get rough. Only I did not think it really would, just some yelling, and he was only a little bit bigger than me.

  Only the main thing was that I could see she was worth it, and if I had said no I would be kicking myself for the rest of my life.

  So when Mark came back, I said it was time for him to get back on the road and hitch. He said OK and come on Vikki like I expected, and I said no. She is staying here with me.

  He pulled a knife. I had not expected that. So I said, OK take her. He kind of sneered and put the knife away. It went in a leather sheath on his belt. Vikki got up and went with him, but when they had started to go she looked back at me and I could not stand it. I jumped him from in back.

  We fought and rolled around on the ground fighting, and then his knife was back. Vikki threw dirt in his eyes, and I got it and I stuck him with it deep three or four times. At first I did not think he was dead, but he was.

  I said we had to bury him and she said she would help, so I went down in the basement and got an old shovel I had seen down there. When I got back where they were, Vikki was down beside him. She got up, and there was blood on her mouth. I said what were you doing, and she said saying goodbye.

  We dragged him out into the woods and I dug a grave. There were rocks and roots, and it took so long that it was just about dark when we got back. We thought we ought to wash up, so she took the downstairs bathroom and me the upstairs one I had used before. When she came back outside where I was cooking she had taken off all her clothes and was wrapped up in a sheet she must have found in one of the closets. That was so cool I could not believe it. By the time we had finished my pasta and sauce it was dark. We went into the tent and zipped it up and everything. That was when we did it.

  All that was yesterday.

  This morning Vikki was all dressed again by the time I woke up. She said she had washed her underwear last night and hung it up in the bathroom, and it had been pretty dry now so she had put it on.

  We ate breakfast bars and sort of made out together. I have never smelled another girl who smelled like she did or smelled as good, either. There was smoke in it, and that fresh smell you get after a storm. Most of all, rich dirt like you smell when you dig a flower bed or something. That does not sound so nice when I write it down, but she smelled wonderful. Just wonderful.

  She looked wonderful, too. Those long legs and tits just big enough to fill my hands. No wonder Mark would have killed me for her.

  Only I killed him.

  I got to wondering if his grave was all right, so I told Vikki we would go out there and maybe take a little walk in the woods after.

  So we did, and something had dug him up to eat and opened him up, too. A lot of the stuff from inside was gone. I got out the shovel again, and a mattock this time, too, and dug the grave a lot deeper. It took a long time, and a long time before I finished it Vikki was gone.

  I thought she had just gone back to the house, maybe to fetch something. So I made a cross, which I had not done before, tying two sticks together.

  Only when I got back here, she was gone. Somebody came by, probably, and she hitched, and I am all alone all over again.

  Now I have struck the tent and carried it in. I am going to lock the doors and sleep inside tonight. There is something going on out back in the woods.

  I can hear them.

  There was nothing unusual about the day it happened, nothing remarkable at all . . .

  Time and Tide

  Alan Peter Ryan

  Frank Parsons had to control the look of surprise and horror that came instantly to his face when his father asked him on Monday morning to help him move that old wardrobe out of the garage and up the stairs and into his room. He quickly turned his head away to hide the expression he knew would betray him. If there was anything in the world Frank didn’t want in his room, even if it would only be there with him for the three nights he still had to spend in the house before going off to college on Thursday, it was that old wardrobe.

  Families often acquire pieces of furniture in odd and offhand ways. A piece might have once belonged to a grandmother or a spinster aunt or a bachelor uncle, and when a house was emptied by death or marriage or a distant move, someone in the family supervising the move or the emptying of the house thought the piece too good or too useful or just too familiar to be sold to the local junk shop for a few dollars. It might serve well enough for a child’s or teenager’s room or a father’s workshop where another few years of wear and tear would hardly leave it in worse shape and, while it still had some life in it, it would come in handy and cost nothing. Such a piece might survive in a family for decades, for generations, passing from room to room, house to ho
use, eventually becoming so much a part of daily life that its rickety legs, squeaking doors, split wood veneer, and crackled varnish are no more perceived than the deepening wrinkles in a mother’s or father’s face.

  So it was with the old wardrobe. It was mahogany, or at least mahogany veneer, dark brown with a hint of ancient reddishness in it, and it had a carved and curved wooden decoration across the top of the front, relic of an age that thought clean straight lines unattractive. It stood, only a little unsteadily, on thick curved legs with ball-and-claw feet. It was six feet high. Inside, at the bottom, there were two sets of three drawers. At the top there was a shelf and below the shelf a rod for hanging clothes. The two doors squeaked on old hinges and where wood rubbed against wood at top and bottom, but the latch still worked well and the doors still snapped together securely when closed. The doors had carved molding and set into each near the top was a mirror, about a foot high and rounded against the molding at the top. The mirrors had grown slightly dark and clouded with time.

  Frank hated the wardrobe because it reminded him of Junior and Frank hated to be reminded of Junior. Frank had been named after his father’s father but when Bill came along two years later he was named after their own father and was called Junior all his life. All fourteen years of it. He was the living image of his father. He looked like his father, moved and walked like him, held his head like him, and looked at you the exact same way. Even as a boy he sounded like his father, even talked like him, with the same rhythms and intonations. And when he got to be ten years old, and twelve, and then as a teenager, he even expressed himself and answered questions with the same ironic humor as their father. Everyone said he was the spitting image of Big Bill and, partly because of that and partly because he was the younger child, the baby, he was always the favorite of the family and openly acknowledged as such. Even Frank himself was in the habit of deferring to his younger brother.

  When the Parsons moved from Englewood to Seashore Park, there was tangible proof of Junior’s precedence in the family. Seashore Park was the southern extension of Seashore Heights, which was one of the liveliest and most popular vacation centers on the Jersey shore. Seashore Heights was filled with motels, boarding houses, and restaurants, and a mile and a half of its boardwalk was lined with games and arcades and food stands, and there were two amusement piers with rides. Fortunes were made there in pizza (some old signs still called it “tomato pie”), soft ice cream (still called “custard” by the oldest establishments), and saltwater taffy. Seashore Heights was busy and lively, with Central Avenue and the Boulevard and Ocean Avenue filled with impatient cars all day and late into the nights all summer long. Seashore Park, on the other hand, was residential and quiet. It had only three or four motels, all of them on Central Avenue, one very long block from the beach, and only a few restaurants, all offering “fine dining” and all concentrated at its southern end where Central Avenue ended at the entrance to Seashore Beach State Park, a twenty-five-mile stretch of sand dunes at the end of the peninsula, protected as a bird preserve. So between the summer noise and activity of Seashore Heights and the natural tranquility of the state park, Seashore Park kept its head down and minded its own business. For the most part, the only vacationers who came there were older people who preferred the less crowded beach and were willing to bring their own cold drinks with them. The quiet streets, prosaically named with letters of the alphabet, were lined with large old houses, many of whose owners rented rooms in the summer, and small cottages rented by the week or month.

  The new Parsons home was on K Street. It had a “lawn” of white and golden stones, the common local substitute for grass that would not grow in the sand, and was bordered by large hydrangea bushes, thick with balls of pale blue and purplish petals. Downstairs there was a large screened porch that seemed to attract breezes, an enormous living room, and a large kitchen and bathroom at the back. Upstairs there was another bathroom and four bedrooms. There was a master bedroom, a guest room (they called it that although it had been used for that purpose only once, for a month, when Uncle Jack, Big Bill’s brother, split up with his wife), and two rooms for the boys. Frank was fourteen when they moved in and Junior was twelve.

  When the boys examined the house and the rooms, it was immediately obvious that one of the rooms designated for them was better than the other. It was larger, it had three windows instead of two, and it had a view of the beach at the end of the street. Junior said casually that he preferred that room. He didn’t say it aggressively or challengingly, just with his usual easy assurance that his wish would be granted. And so it was. Frank did not object. He was used to giving in, he was happy with his own room, and the issue didn’t really matter to him. Perhaps by way of compensation—Big Bill had merely laid a hand on Frank’s shoulder one day and said he was glad he hadn’t made “a thing” about the rooms—a handsome new wardrobe was bought for Frank’s room and the old monstrosity that had been hauled all the way from Englewood was wrestled up the stairs and placed in Junior’s room.

  Big Bill was a construction supervisor and doing better and better all the time. He remodeled the kitchen and, when the porch was discovered to be sagging, he tore it down and built a new one that was larger and breezier. Once they had placed six rocking chairs and a couple of small tables on it, Frank’s parents began to think about renting out rooms themselves, like their neighbors, when the boys were grown and gone off to college. It would be an easy job, Big Bill said, to wall off part of the huge living room to make a bedroom at the back for themselves. They could live downstairs and rent out the four bedrooms upstairs. Frank’s mother, who enjoyed cooking and feeding people, said they could offer a full breakfast to their guests and make it a classy bed-and-breakfast, something that was unheard of in Seashore Heights or Seashore Park, and, with minimal cost, charge an even higher price for the rooms. They were excited at the idea of converting the house into a bed-and-breakfast. But of course that would have to wait until the boys got older.

  But only one of the boys would grow older and go away to college.

  The family had been in the house for two years and Junior was fourteen when he died. Ever since then, Frank did everything possible to avoid anything that would remind him of it, but he would never forget that day.

  Frank was sixteen that summer and had his first job. Two of their neighbors on K Street were teachers at Toms River High School. In the summer, they had adjoining stands on the boardwalk in Seashore Heights where players placed money on numbers on a board and the operator spun a big wheel. If your number came up on the wheel, you won. It was a time-honored entertainment at Seashore Heights. At the back of each stand, right behind the operator, were shelves with a huge display of the prizes available. That year the hot items were digital cameras and iPods, but you could also win MP3 players and pendrives and, if you saved up enough winning coupons, maybe even a laptop. Other stands offered as prizes more traditional items: blankets and sets of towels, silverware, electrical appliances, candy, and huge stuffed animals in gaudy colors. The two stands, though they were side by side, were actually jointly owned and operated by the teachers, and customers whose luck failed them at one wheel would often just move next door and try again at the next one. Frank swept the boardwalk in front of the stands, emptied the garbage cans, went on food and drink runs, organized the stock of merchandise, fetched prizes down from the top shelves, and replaced items that were “won out.” He worked six days a week and he was enjoying the summer. He was off on Mondays, the slow day on the boardwalk.

  On Mondays, he went to the beach, usually with Junior. Mostly they played catch and swam, riding the waves. Sometimes Frank brought a book. He liked to read biographies of baseball players and he had recently discovered the books of Roger Angell. Those were good times. Frank and Junior could spend the day at the beach and it only took five minutes to walk home for lunch or to use the bathroom. They were both well tanned, although Junior, who had more beach time that summer, was darker.

&nbs
p; There was nothing unusual about the day it happened, nothing remarkable at all. Big Bill had taken two weeks off from work to have a little summer vacation himself and to do some work around the house. That morning their parents had gone to the Ocean County Mall to buy something their mother had seen was on sale in the Sunday paper. They would be back by one o’clock and the boys could come home for lunch at one-thirty. At one-thirty the boys walked home for lunch, ate, and returned to the beach. Big Bill said he would meet them on the beach in half an hour or so.

  The beach in Seashore Park, as usual on a weekday, especially a Monday, was sparsely populated. A few young mothers played with small children at the water’s edge, lifting them up to jump the waves. The children were laughing. Two pairs of interesting-looking girls were sunbathing.

  There was a tall, white wooden lifeguard stand nearby and the two guys there were chatting and looking bored. There were no more than fifteen or twenty swimmers in the water. An elderly couple, white-haired and with sagging bodies, strolled along the water’s edge, holding hands. A little girl was knocked over by a wave and let out a howl before her mother could grab her. All these things, of which Frank was barely conscious at the time, lived vividly in his memory afterward.

  He and Junior went into the water, jumping the swells and then riding the waves or the breakers rolling in toward the beach. Junior missed a swell and stayed behind in the water while Frank rode the wave in. When he felt the bottom under his feet he stood up and walked out of the water and up the slight slope of the beach. The two pairs of girls were still sunbathing. One of the girls smiled and waved to him. Frank raised his hand and gave her a half-wave, not sure in the glaring sunlight if he recognized her or not. He looked around for the blanket, spotted it, and saw his Roger Angell book and his and Junior’s sunglasses and their suntan lotion on it. When he looked back toward the ocean and Junior, Junior wasn’t there.