The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012

by Guran, Paula

  All of which would have happened, too.

  Except for Les.

  He’d picked up the bat that I guess I’d dragged through the chalk between second and third, so that, when he slapped it into the side of Michael T’s head, a puff of white kind of breathed up. At first I thought it was bone, powdered skull—the whole top of Michael T’s rotted-out head was coming off—but then there was sunlight above me again, and Les was hauling me up, and, on the sidewalk, Amber Watson was just staring at me, her whistle still in her mouth, her hair still wet enough to have left a dark patch on the canvas of the sneakers looped over her shoulder.

  I put two of my fingers to my eyebrow like I’d seen my dad do, launched them off in salute to her, and in return she shook her head in disappointment. At the kid I still obviously was. So, yeah, if you want to know what it’s like living with zombies, this is it, pretty much: they mess everything up. And if you want to know why I never went pro, it’s because I got in the habit of charging the mound too much, like I had all this momentum from that day, all this unfairness built up inside. And if you want to know about Amber Watson, ask Les Moore—that’s his real, stupid name, yeah. After that day he saved my life, after Les became the real Indian because he’d been the one to scalp Michael T, he stopped coming to the diamond so much, started spending more time at the pool, his hair bleaching in the sun, his reflexes gone, always thirty-five cents in his trunks to buy a lifeguard a lemonade if she wanted.

  And she did, she does.

  And, me? Some nights I still go to the old park, spiral up to the top of the rocket with a “Bury the Tomahawk” or “Circle the Wagons” spirit ribbon, and I let it flutter a bit through the grimy bars before letting it go, down through space, down to the planet I used to know, miles and miles from here.

  Her words were from Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter”—spoken by the Walrus just before he and the Carpenter began devouring the gullible oysters . . .

  A Journey of Only Two Paces

  Tim Powers

  She had ordered steak tartare and Hennessey XO brandy, which would, he reflected, look extravagant when he submitted his expenses to the court. And God knew what parking would cost here.

  He took another frugal sip of his beer and said, trying not to sound sour, “I could have mailed you a check.”

  They were at one of the glass-topped tables on the outdoor veranda at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, just a couple of feet above the sidewalk beyond the railing, looking out from under the table’s umbrella down the sunlit lanes of Rodeo Drive. The diesel-scented air was hot even in the shade.

  “But you were his old friend,” she said. “He always told me that you’re entertaining.” She smiled at him expectantly.

  She had been a widow for about ten years, Kohler recalled—and she must have married young. In her sunglasses and broad Panama hat she only seemed to be about twenty now.

  Kohler, though, felt far older than his thirty-five years.

  “He was easily entertained, Mrs. Halloway,” he said slowly. “I’m pretty . . . lackluster, really.” A young man on the other side of the railing overheard him and glanced his way in amusement as he strode past on the sidewalk.

  “Call me Campion. But a dealer in rare books must have some fascinating stories.”

  Her full name was Elizabeth St. Campion Halloway. She signed her paintings “Campion.” Kohler had looked her up online before driving out here to deliver the thousand dollars, and had decided that all her artwork was morbid and clumsy.

  “He found you attractive,” she went on, tapping the ash off her cigarette into the scraped remains of her steak tartare. He noticed that the filter was smeared with her red lipstick. “Did he ever tell you?”

  “Really. No.” For all Kohler knew, Jack Ranald might have been gay. The two of them had only got together about once a year since college, and then only when Kohler had already begged off on two or three e-mail invitations. Kohler’s wife had always thought Jack was inwardly mocking her—He forgets me when he’s not looking right at me, she’d said—and she wouldn’t have been pleased with these involvements in the dead man’s estate.

  Kohler’s wife had looked nothing like Campion.

  Campion was staring at him now over the coal of her cigarette—he couldn’t see her eyes behind the dark lenses, but her pale, narrow face swung carefully down and left and right. “I can already see him in you. You have the Letters Testamentary?”

  “Uh.” The shift in conversational gear left him momentarily blank. “Oh, yes—would you like to see them? and I’ll want a receipt—”

  “Not the one from the court clerk. The one Jack arranged.”

  Kohler bent down to get his black vinyl briefcase, and he pushed his chair back from the table to unzip it on his lap. Inside were all the records of terminating the water and electric utilities at the house Jack had owned in Echo Park and paying off Jack’s credit cards, and, in a manila envelope along with the death certificate—which discreetly didn’t mention suicide—the letters he had been given by the probate court.

  One of them was the apparently standard sort, signed by the Clerk and the Deputy Clerk, but the other had been prepared by Jack himself.

  Kohler tugged that one out and leaned forward to hand it across the table to Campion, and while she bent her head over it he mentally recalled its phrases: . . . having been appointed and qualified as enactor of the will of John Carpenter Ranald, departed, who expired on or about 28 February 2009, Arthur Lewis Kohler is hereby authorized to function as enactor and to consummate possession . . . In effect it was a suicide note. It had been signed in advance by Jack, and Kohler had recently been required to sign it too.

  “Kabbalah,” she said, without looking up, and for a moment Kohler thought he had somehow put one of his own business invoices into the briefcase by mistake and handed it to her. She looked up and smiled at him. “Are you afraid to get drunk with me? I’m sure one beer won’t release any pent-up emotions, you can safely finish it. What is the most valuable book you have in stock?”

  Kohler was frowning, but he went along with her change of subject. Jack must have told her what sort of books he specialized in.

  “I guess that would be a manuscript codex of a thing called the Gallei Razayya, written in about 1550. It, uh, differs from the copy at Oxford.” He shrugged. “I’ve got it priced high—it’ll probably just go to my,” he hesitated, then sighed and completed the habitual sentence, “my heirs.”

  “Rhymes with prayers, and you don’t have any, do you? Heirs? Anymore? I was so sorry to hear about that.”

  Kohler stared at her, wondering if he wanted to make the effort of taking offense at her flippancy.

  “No,” he said instead, carefully.

  “But it’s about transmigration of souls, isn’t it? Your codex book? Maybe you could . . . bequeath it to yourself.”

  She pushed her own chair back and stood up, brushing out her white linen skirt. “Have you tried to find the apartment building he owned in Silver Lake?”

  Kohler began hastily to zip up his briefcase, and he was about to ask her how she knew about the manuscript when he remembered that she was still holding the peculiar Letter Testamentary.

  “Uh . . . ?” he said, reaching for it.

  “I’ll keep for a while,” she said gaily, tucking it into her purse. “I bet you couldn’t find the place.”

  “That’s true.” He lowered his hand and finished zipping the case; the letter signed by the clerks was the legally important one. “I need to get the building assessed for the inventory of the estate. The address on the tax records seems to be wrong.” Finally he asked, “You . . . know a lot about Kabbalah?”

  “I can take you there. The address is wrong, as you say. Do you like cats? Jack told me about your book, your codex.”

  Kohler got to his feet and drank off half of the remaining beer in his glass. It wasn’t very cold by this time. Jack had always wanted to hear about Kohler’s business—Kohler mus
t have acquired the manuscript shortly before they had last met for dinner, and told Jack about it.

  “Sure,” he said distractedly. She raised one penciled eyebrow, and he added, “I like cats fine.”

  “I’ll drive,” she said. “I have no head for directions, I couldn’t guide you.” She started toward the steps down to the Wilshire Boulevard sidewalk, then turned back and frowned at his briefcase. “You’ve followed all the directions he left in his will?”

  Kohler guessed what she was thinking of. “The urn is in the trunk of my car,” he said.

  “You can drive. Your car is smaller, better for the tight turns.”

  Kohler followed her down out of the hotel’s shadow onto the glaring Wilshire sidewalk, wondering how she knew what sort of car he drove, and when he had agreed to go right now to look at the apartment building.

  She directed him east to the Hollywood freeway and then up into the hills above the Silver Lake Reservoir. The roads were narrow and twisting and overhung with carob and jacaranda trees.

  Eventually, after Kohler had lost all sense of direction, Campion said, “Turn left at that street there.”

  “That? That’s a driveway,” Kohler objected, braking to a halt.

  “It’s the street,” she said. “Well, lane. Alley. Anyway, it’s where the apartment building is. Where are you living these days?”

  In an apartment building, Kohler thought, probably not as nice as the one we’re trying to find here. The old house was just too unbearably familiar. “Culver City.”

  “Did you like him? Jack?”

  Kohler turned the wheel sharply and then steered by inches up onto the narrow strip of pavement, which curled away out of sight to the right behind a hedge of white-blooming oleander only a few yards ahead. Dry palm-fronds scattered across the cracked asphalt crunched under the tires. The needle of the temperature gauge was still comfortably on the left side of the dial, but he kept an eye on it.

  “I liked him well enough,” he said, squinting through the alternating sun-glare and palm-trunk shadows on the windshield. He exhaled. “Actually I didn’t, no. I liked him in college, but after his father died, he—he just wasn’t the same guy anymore.”

  “It was a shock,” she said, nodding. “A trauma. He had heartworms.”

  Kohler just shook his head. “And Jack was sick, he said. What was wrong with him?”

  She shrugged. “What does it matter? Something he didn’t want to wait for. But—” And then she sang, “We’re young and healthy, so let’s be bold.” She giggled. “Do you remember that song?”

  “No.”

  “No, it would have been before your time.”

  The steep little road did seem to be something more than a driveway—Kohler kept the Saturn to about five miles an hour, and they slowly rumbled past several old Spanish-style houses with white stucco walls and red roof-tiles and tiny garages with green-painted doors, the whole landscape as apparently empty of people as a street in a de Chirico painting. Campion had lit another cigarette, and Kohler cranked down the driver’s-side window, and even though it was hot he was grateful for the sage and honeysuckle breeze.

  “It’s on the right,” she said, tapping the windshield with a fingernail. “The arch there leads into the parking court.”

  Kohler steered in through the chipped white arch between tall trees, and he was surprised to see five or six cars parked in the unpaved yard and a big Honda Gold Wing motorcycle leaning on its stand up by the porch, in the shade of a vast lantana bush that crawled up the side of the two-story old building.

  “Tenants?” he said, rocking the Saturn into a gap beside a battered old Volkswagen. “I hope . . . what’s-his-name, the guy who inherited the place, wants to keep it running.” A haze of dust raised by their passage across the yard swirled over the car.

  “Mister Bump. He will, he lives here.” She pointed at the motorcycle. “Jack’s bike—running boards, a windshield, stereo, passenger seat—it’s as if his RV had pups.”

  Kohler hadn’t turned off the engine. “I could do this through the mail, if I could get a valid address.”

  “They get mail here, sort of informally. Somebody will tell you how to address it.” She had opened her door and was stepping out onto the dry dirt, so he sighed and twisted the ignition key back and pulled it out. Now he could hear a violin playing behind one of the upstairs balconies—some intricate phrase from Scheherazade, rendered with such gliding expertise that he thought it must be a recording.

  With the wall around it, and the still air under the old pepper trees, this compound seemed disconnected from the surrounding streets and freeways of Los Angeles.

  “These were Jack’s friends,” Campion said. “Bring the urn.”

  Kohler was already sweating in the harsh sunlight, but he walked to the trunk and bent down to open it. He lifted out the heavy cardboard box and slammed the trunk shut.

  “Jack is who we all have in common,” said Campion, smiling and taking his free arm.

  She led Kohler across the yard and up the worn stone steps to the porch, and the French doors stood open onto a dim, high-ceilinged lobby.

  The air was cooler inside, and Kohler could hear an air-conditioner rattling away somewhere behind the painted screens and tapestries and potted plants that hid the walls. Narrow beams of sunlight slanted in and gleamed on the polished wooden floor.

  Then Kohler noticed the cats. First two on an old Victorian sofa, then several more between vases on high shelves, and after a moment he decided that there must be at least a dozen cats in the room, lazily staring at the newcomers from heavy-lidded topaz eyes.

  The cats were all identical—long-haired orange and white creatures with long fluffy tails.

  “Campion!”

  A tanned young man in a Polo shirt and khaki shorts had walked into the lobby through the French doors on the far side, and Kohler glimpsed an atrium behind him—huge shiny green leaves and orchid blossoms motionless in the still air.

  “You bitch,” the man said cheerfully, “did you lose your phone? Couldn’t at least honk while you were driving up? “ ‘Tis just like a summer birdcage in a garden.’ ”

  “Mr. Bump,” said Campion, “I’ve brought James Kohler for the, the wake.”

  “No,” said Kohler hastily, “I can’t stay—“

  “Can I call you Jimmy?” interrupted Mr. Bump. He held out his hand. “Mentally I’m spelling it J-I-M-I, like Hendrix.”

  Kohler shook the man’s brown hand, then after several seconds flexed his own hand to separate them.

  “No time to go a-waking, eh?” said Mr. Bump with a smile.

  “I’m afraid not. I’ll just—”

  “Is that Jack?”

  Kohler blinked, then realized that the man must be referring to the box he carried in his left hand.

  “Oh. Yes.”

  “Let’s walk him out to the atrium, shall we? We can disperse his ashes in the garden there.”

  Over Mr. Bump’s shoulder, one of the orange cats on a high shelf flattened its ears.

  “I’m supposed to—” Kohler paused to take a breath before explaining Jack Ranald’s eccentric instructions. “I’m supposed to give him—his ashes—to somebody who quotes a certain poem to me. And I think it would be illegal to . . . pour out the ashes in a, a residence.”

  Behind him Campion laughed. “It’s not a poem.”

  “Jimi isn’t literary, is all,” said Mr. Bump to her reprovingly. He crouched to pick up a kitten that seemed to be an exact miniature copy of all the other cats.

  I’m a rare-books dealer! thought Kohler, but he just turned to her and said, “What is it?”

  “I quoted a bit of it just now,” said Mr. Bump, holding the kitten now and stroking it. “ ‘Tis just like a summer birdcage in a garden; the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out.’ ”

  Kohler nodded—that was it. The will had specified the phras
e, Consumption for fear they shall never get out, and he had assumed it was a line of anapestic quatrameter.

  “What’s it from?” he asked, setting the box on a table and lifting out of it the black ceramic urn.

  “A play,” said Campion, taking his free arm again, apparently in anticipation of walking out to the atrium. “Webster’s The White Devil.”

  “It’s a filthy play,” put in Mr. Bump.

  The cats were bounding down from their perches and scurrying out the far doors into the atrium, their tails waving like a field of orange ferns in a wind.

  The three people followed the cats out into the small, tiled courtyard that lay below second-floor balconies on all four sides. The atrium was crowded with tropical-looking plants, and leafy branches and vines hid some corners of the balconies—but Kohler noted uneasily that more than a dozen young men and women were leaning on the iron railings and silently looking down on them. The air smelled of jasmine and cat-boxes.

  “The character who says the birdcage business,” remarked Campion, “rises from the dead, at the end.”

  “And then gets killed again,” noted Mr. Bump.

  Campion shrugged. “Still.” She looked up at the audience on the balconies. “Jack’s back!” she called. “This nice man has been kind enough to carry him.”

  The men and women on the balconies all began snapping their fingers, apparently by way of applause. Kohler was nervously tempted to bow.

  They didn’t stop, and the shrill clacking began to take on a choppy rhythm.

  The cats had all sat down in a ring in the center of the atrium floor—no, Kohler saw, it wasn’t a ring, it was a triangle, and then he saw that they were all sitting on three lines of red tile set into the pavement. The space inside the triangle was empty.

  Campion had stepped away to close the French doors to the lobby, and Mr. Bump leaned close to Kohler and spoke loudly to be heard over the shaking rattle from above. “This is the last part of your duty as executor,” he said. The kitten he was holding seemed to have gone to sleep, in spite of the noise.

  “It’s not the last, by any means,” said Kohler, who was sweating again. “There’s the taxes, and selling the house, and—and I don’t think this is part of my duties.” He squinted up at the finger-snapping people—they were all dressed in slacks and shirts that were black or white, and the faces he could make out were expressionless. Something’s happening here, he thought, and you don’t know what it is. The sweat was suddenly cold on his forehead, and he pushed the urn into Mr. Bump’s hands.