The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012

by Guran, Paula

  Beyond the carnage, that narrow bridge stretched across black water. In my vision I traveled across it like a bat on the wing, following an empty mile of hanging planks. I plunged headlong through a burrow of shadow, dropping to roost before the vampire queen.

  She waited on a throne of bones, her tick eyes unblinking. She did not seem to notice me. Her black lace dress was tightly gathered around her narrow waist and the layered architecture of her collar bones and ribs. Her naked white feet rested hard on the bent back of the Navajo slave girl who served as her footstool. Now and then, the queen curled her toes and her sharp nails sliced into the girl’s back, deep enough to raise a tiny scream. And even so the vampire did not smile. For she was waiting, staring across the water with no expression on her face, waiting with a cigarillo between her cold lips. Tobacco smoke traveled from her dead lungs through tight nostrils, whispering into the air on lifeless breaths.

  And I turned away and saw why the vampire queen stared and didn’t blink. I saw why she waited. The bounty killer was walking across the bridge, coming toward her. Black water gleamed through gaps in the rotten boards, churning beneath his every step. Albino alligators snapped against the water. Their great armored tails thrashed, casting guillotine ripples in waves that couldn’t hold a shadow. Tired of a diet of dead carcasses discarded by the queen and her minions, the reptiles gnashed their teeth for a taste of something vital and alive. The bounty killer’s scent drove them wild; it was as if they scented the dead men’s shadows that dragged at his heels and thundered in his heart.

  And that was something I felt in my gut as much as my head, for nothing in the bounty killer’s expression conjured so much as a single word. He was a stone, and the expression he wore made the one on the face of the vampire queen seem as expressive as a Mexican carnival mask.

  And then the vision was over, and just that fast. I blinked and I was back on the playa. Henrietta still circled the fire, pecking at the dirt. Shivering, I drew closer to the coals. The cold shadow of midnight had descended, so I wrapped up Henrietta in a Mexican sash one of Rumson’s whores had given me and tucked her inside my coat. I put a little more wood on the fire. Suddenly I was hungry, and I slipped the leavings of the second chicken off the blacksmith’s plate. I skewered the half-picked carcass and hung it over the fire to warm. Soon enough, the bird sizzled against the flame.

  Just as before, the sound brought back memories. When memories came for you, you had to sit with them. I knew that much. If you were the kind who carried them with you, there was no way around it.

  I was that kind, but that didn’t mean I had to let those memories have their way with me.

  I listened to the chicken crackle on the spit.

  But I ate it all the same.

  For now I was hungry, and the chicken tasted good.

  I woke in the middle of the night and rose from my blankets. The moon still hung above, fat and full, and I moved easily beneath its light. I put the wagon between myself and the campfire, following a straight line behind my shadow for a couple hundred feet. Then I undid my drawers and waited for nature to make its call.

  “Hey, pretty,” the preacher said.

  He was behind me, and I jerked as if slapped. Quickly, I buttoned my pants and turned to face him. There he was, maybe fifteen feet away. Laughing a little bit. Walking my way. His shadow spilling before him against the moonlight, that Bible in his hands. He held it up and gave it a tap. And then he started talking.

  “I know something about stories, boy. This book is full of ’em. I know what they’re good for and what they ain’t. I know how to put them to work and which ones to use to get what you want. If you’re straight with me, you and I can do that together. With a little training you’d make one hell of a preacher, and I’ve got the contacts to get you into the biggest churches from here to ’Frisco. The Apache business is a good start, but it’s the trip to Vampire Lake that’ll hook the suckers like fat trout. Anyway, we get that story fixed up for the holy-roller crowd and the sky is the limit. After that, it’ll be champagne and oysters in any town where we want to shed starched collars and kick it up. Of course, I’ll take a percentage of everything you make, but that’s only fair with what I’d be teaching you and the business I’d push your way.”

  “It sounds like you’ve made lots of plans,” I said. “You shouldn’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’d better worry about living through tomorrow, is what I think.”

  The preacher chuckled. “You want to drive a hard bargain, son, well step right up. But save the rest of it for the rubes. You and me both know that yarn of yours is a yard deep and a mile long, but it’s the only divot you’ll find on this playa. There’s no cave out here, especially not one full up with dead men. And that means that bounty killer will never give us one red cent’s worth of the loot in that bank book. Fact is, we’ll be lucky if he doesn’t get a little testy once he figures out he’s been had. But we can avoid any ruckus. Hell, we can shake hands on a deal, get out of here tonight if you want.”

  “You want to partner up with me?”

  “Yeah.” The preacher smiled. “That’s the idea.”

  “I tell the stories, and you take a percentage?”

  “Now you’ve got it.”

  “Okay then. But I’ve got another story to tell you first.”

  I leaned forward and put a hand on the preacher’s shoulder. My face twitched a little as my scarred lips twisted into an expression that passed for a smile. The preacher smiled back and reached out for my other hand.

  “This story is kind of short,” I said.

  “Do tell,” he said.

  I bucked my knee into the soft spot between his legs. The preacher’s breath shot by my ear, and he dropped to the ground like something that drops from the wrong end of a horse.

  “You want to remember that one,” I said as I turned my back on him. “And you want to remember this: You don’t know anything about stories, or what they mean. But tomorrow, you’re going to find out.”

  Part Four: The Cave

  Indio lit a fuse and a minute later a dynamite blast ripped through the cave. Iron bars tore and twisted. Severed heads skewered on metal spikes exploded, and skull shrapnel shattered against the cave walls. Rivets from a lock forged in hell ricocheted up the tunnel like rounds from a Gatling gun, and flying metal tore at us in places that didn’t much matter. We spilled blood in fat droplets on the ground while swirling smoke wrapped us like mummies, but we were none of us close to dying so we hurried down the tunnel and toward the wreckage, following the lead of the bounty killer’s torch.

  The flames tore a patch through the haze and the air cleared around the gunman. Smoke tumbleweeds rolled by us, low and slow, driven by a fetid wind from far below. I caught a familiar black scent on that gray stampede of nothing, and my throat seemed to blister at the taste of it, but I pushed on because the bounty killer was moving fast now, nearing the wrecked gate.

  “Every devil in hell must have heard that noise,” the Mexican said from behind. “And they’ll be coming for us.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” the bounty killer said. “They’ll hear a lot worse before we’re done.”

  “But they know we’re coming,” the preacher said. “All that noise, there’s no way they won’t.”

  “I’m not here to throw them a surprise party,” the gunman said. “I’m here to blaze a trail to hell.”

  No one said a word to that. It was the cave that did the talking now. The place was like a throat filled up with whispers, and they washed over the big stone gullet and hushed past us on their way to the narrow grave of a mouth above. Thanks to Indio’s dynamite, the iron gate that corralled the vampires’ corner of the world was now a twisted mess. That gate had once been a hell of a sight, scored with chains the blacksmith could never have cut, and spikes set with dead men’s skulls and tattered human hides that flapped like scarecrow warnings in the subterranean breeze. But now the whole thing was so m
uch scrap—just something to get on through, and get on past.

  And that’s what we did. The bounty killer hurried through the shorn hunk of darkness where the barred door had stood, past broken skulls and those tattered sheets of jerky flesh. Flames from his coal-oil torch licked the cold stone ceiling as we continued our descent. We followed, our torches blazing orange streaks where the bounty killer had passed.

  The gunman had parceled out supplies before we entered the cave. He had come prepared and then some, and we all had our own stock. There were the torches, of course, and other things that gleamed in their light—and most everything that gleamed did the job with silver. The bounty killer had his black rattler tied down low, plus a pair of bandoleers crisscrossing his chest that held four other pistols charged with silver bullets. Indio carried a rucksack packed with dynamite, fuses, and a couple boxes of Lucifers, plus a Bowie knife with a silver-dipped blade sheathed on his hip in a rig not unlike the holster that held the gunman’s black rattler. A steel can filled with coal oil was strapped to the blacksmith’s back. He carried a branding iron in his big right hand, the brand-piece a silver cross cinched in place with a hard twist of barbed-wire. Me, I had Rumson’s sawed-off shotgun and the pictures in my head. And the preacher didn’t have anything but his Bible, which he held as if he wished it was a gun, or a knife, or a silver-plated pole ax.

  But as fast as we were moving, there was no watching any of the men too closely. The air rippled against the flames from our torches, and the sound was like oars cutting water as we traveled lower. Our lungs pumped like bellows as we advanced down that black gullet, moving fast, and lower . . . and lower . . . and lower still. The bounty killer pulled ahead of us, his desert-colored coat like a hunk of the surface world misplaced in its belly. I was glad I’d left Henrietta on the surface, one leg tied to a wagon wheel. If she were here with me, wrapped up in that Mexican sash, she would have been wriggling as if she’d been sucked down and swallowed whole by the hungry earth itself.

  But it was only the four of us who’d suffered that fate. Deeper we went, and lower, and deeper still. The tunnel grew narrower. Our torches began to flicker, flames licking low. We stopped to charge them—we had to stop. My heart thundered drumbeats, and the pulse filled my ears, and I could barely hear the talk that went back and forth in the darkness. The bounty killer tossed orders, telling the blacksmith to unstopper his coal-oil can and get busy charging those torches, and mind that oil around the flame because nary a one of us was bacon ready for the skillet and neither were those dynamite sticks Indio carried in his rucksack.

  The blacksmith set about his work, slipping that steel tank off his back. Dying blue fire rippled over the torch heads. As darkness closed in, the patchy fungus carpet at our feet began to glow. Then the light from the torches grew dimmer still, and fat round blotches shimmered into view on the cave walls—those glowing mushrooms I remembered.

  The preacher’s torch went out. Suddenly the mushrooms glowed bigger . . . fuller . . . brighter. They put a filter to the rising wall of eternal night that loomed ahead of us, but it was light you couldn’t trust, one that was only fit for ghosts. The walls seemed alive with it, rippling and pulsing in the growing darkness, and—

  “Torches,” the blacksmith said. “Put heads together.”

  And we did. Knotted lengths of oak gripped tightly in our hands, thick torch heads meeting between us. Dying flames danced as they joined, and the blacksmith poured coal oil over the top. Blue fire surged, then rose to a sunflower yellow, and soon the torch heads glowed between us like the fat moon that had hung in the desert sky the night before. Light swelled around us, finding the cave walls. The mushrooms seemed to turn their heads to it, and then some of them started moving—

  A wind rose deep in the cavern. Just that fast, light filled the cave like whiskey brimming in a full bottle. It found the things that lived between those mushrooms, things that had been trapped alone in the darkness on my last trip to the cave. Since then a fresh crop of mushrooms had filled this corridor—growing along its walls, pillowing its ceiling as they spread—and now the unseen things that had once cursed a wagon party on their way to hell were wedged between them.

  Splashes of whiskey light washed those creatures, and every one of them screamed with Satan’s own fury. I saw them clearly now, nestling between thriving fungus on guano-caked walls. Some had faces like sick babies, and others looked like wretched old men with walnut skulls that begged to be cracked. I had no idea who they were or what they were. Maybe they were the lost souls of the vampires’ victims, and they’d been trapped after death as they tried to make their journey to the surface and the heavens above. They sure enough screamed like creatures worthy of such a horror.

  One other thing was sure—the tunnel was full of them. They roiled in their mushroom nests like maggots feeding on a rotting carcass, and their curses put the freeze to my bones and sent the preacher to his knees. He wasn’t moving. I wasn’t moving. Neither were Indio and the blacksmith. At first I thought the bounty killer was frozen, too. And maybe part of him was . . . but the part that pulled the black rattler wasn’t.

  The pistol fired six times. Mushrooms flew apart like dropped cakes, sending glowing spatters raining to the floor. Walnut skulls exploded, and dark blood slapped against stone. And then the gunman yanked another pistol from his bandoleer and put it to work. And another. And soon the bounty killer yelled: “Torches! Now!”

  And in an instant we were all moving, raking our torches across the walls of the tunnel. Those mushrooms caught fire, caps burning as quickly as crumpled parchment. The screaming heads burrowed between them had no place to go. Fire licked the walls, and the mushrooms flaked to lumped coal and cindered off to smoke. And that smoke swirled around us and snaked deep into our lungs like a crawling thing, and I nearly hit the ground at the stink of it, and it busted off the cinches on everything I saw.

  The bounty killer’s pistol hissed past me in the haze. There were fangs set in its barrel, and reptile scales on the gunman’s hand, and his eyes were yellow with black-pupil slits. The preacher screamed in one corner of the cavern, begging for mercy while walnut-faced devils roped him to a wagon wheel and set it turning over a brimstone spit. Then Indio carved through the smoke wearing armor like King Arthur of old, swinging his silver Bowie knife like Excalibur. And with him came Billy the Kid, loaded for bear, and Aladdin, and forty thieves ready to lay siege to hell.

  And then the bounty killer grabbed me and shook me loose from my reverie. He pulled me out of there, into another tunnel. The subterranean wind whipped at me as the gunman sent me stumbling, and I caught that other scent on its breath . . . the scent of Vampire Lake.

  We kept moving.

  The mushroom smoke worked through me.

  Pretty soon it was a bad memory, and we charged into an enormous cavern.

  That’s when all hell really broke loose.

  Part Five: The Lake

  I’d seen Apaches do their worst. I’d seen white men match them sin for sin and then go them one better. But I never saw anything like the horror I saw at Vampire Lake.

  Indio and the blacksmith worked as a team, moving from coffin to coffin along the shore. One threw open the lid, and the other set to business. The Mexican slashing away like a wild butcher with that silver-bladed Bowie knife, carving until the throbbing pound of flesh in the vampire’s chest came a cropper. The blacksmith roasting dead men’s flesh with his silver branding-iron cross, planting his big hand over each squirming bloodsucker’s heart while the poor devil bucked against the pain of unforgiving metal. And I did my part, too, taking care of any vampires who rushed Indio or the blacksmith. They came at any of us, they got a taste of Rumson’s sawed-off shotgun.

  I worked steady, blasting dead men with loads of silver and buckshot. I blew the fangs through the backs of their heads and reloaded as quickly as I could. But stack me up against the bounty killer and I was a full bucket of nothing at all. He was a clockwork reaping machine,
working that black rattler and those four other pistols he kept holstered in his bandoleers, trading one for the other as the legion of shadowmen rushed him.

  You can’t truly believe something like that unless you’ve seen it. For the next few minutes, the shore of that lake was a flurry of black whispers and bloody fireworks. The bounty killer moved forward, dead men rushing him from all directions. Across the sand he went, and through the shadows, slaughtering the dead queen’s minions as they tried to slow his progress toward that bridge.

  He moved forward without a pause, pistols blazing, leaving nothing but gunsmoke where darkness had reigned. And the bridge was closer now. Behind the bounty killer lay a trail of paintbrush splatters and corpses that had hit the ground without so much as the rattle of a medicine man’s spirit pouch. His narrowed lids squinted tight across cat-green eyes, as if the gunman were watching the whole blazing hell-riot from behind an iron mask. And when the killing was over you’d have thought he might have smiled, but he didn’t have it in him. Instead he went down on his knees at the foot of the bridge, a litter of dead men behind him, surrounded by nothing except the pistols he dropped in the sand.

  He started heaving again, and now it was his own blood that paintbrushed the shore. It was an awful sight—just as it had been back at the saloon. The bounty killer tried to get up, drove his fists down against the sand and pushed for all he was worth, but such was his misery he couldn’t make the trip.

  “Preacher,” he said. “I’m out of steam. Say the words.”