The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012

by Guran, Paula

“Fool, do you think I am still speaking of that night? You were to visit me the next afternoon, at two o’clock. I specifically told you. Did you forget? One month before, when you gave my father and me a tour of your laboratory, you spoke of the death of Socrates, and the poison you were using for you experiments—I stole it. I wanted to provide my own experiment, perhaps with a kitten or a mouse. But then at one o’clock, because of my despair, I thought I’d use a larger animal. How would I know you would not come? Can you be so stupid as to think I wished to die? No, I wished to punish you as you deserved. I imagined you’d have all the time to make the antidote. I’d read the book. Socrates—the fellow talked for hours. But how could you think that I was serious, when I said I never wished to see your face again?”

  There was thunder over the river, and rain upon the roof of our little house. Monsieur was quiet. I think he must have guessed what was to happen. He had a fever, after all, and his skin was yellow, streaked with sweat. He could not look my mother in the face. Instead, he glanced at me. But in place of helping him, perhaps I gave him the last shock to his system, for at that moment I felt something beside my ear. When I looked up I saw my mother’s serpent, which she used sometimes in her ceremonies. It lived in a wicker basket underneath the altar, but was forever getting out, a harmless creature from the swamp. So it was reaching toward me from one of the shelves, a long, green creature that was like this tube that runs to the cylinder of compressed oxygen, right by my nose, like this.

  I brushed it away. Because I have the gift, I was afraid. But at the same time I was thinking how terrible this woman was, so cruel and such a liar. Innocent as I was, even I could see that if you reject this man one day, and kick him in the place she mentioned, perhaps you can’t expect for him to visit you the next day as if nothing had happened. Who would swallow deadly poison, unless she wanted to destroy herself? And these mice and these kittens—at fourteen, I could not bear to think about them. I’d had enough. I stepped toward him, and monsieur followed me with his eyes. I don’t know what I was going to do. But I was finished with something. My mother turned toward me also, and I could see it mixed together in her face, something that knew that I was going to challenge her, and reject her, and run away from her, not only that morning, but forever in the years to come. Her face twisted with rage. She had her fingers locked in monsieur’s hair, and she forced his head back and forth, and turned his neck one way and another. When I came toward her, she turned his head so that he watched me, twisting his neck with her right hand. She was a strong woman, but what she used was not her strength. It was the strength of the devil that was inside of her, a devil in league with many others, and many other names. But always it requires a human agency. Another drink of water, please. You see I offer a confession at long last, but not just for myself . . .

  (Recorded and transcribed as part of the research into a book, Mysteries of the Old Quarter, by Ernest Butler Smith [Grossett & Dunlap, 1938], an interview never quoted or otherwise mentioned in the published text.)

  8. Three years previous: “ . . . the morning has come after the storm.”

  September 10, 1885

  My dear Monsieur,

  I thank you for the flowers you have sent. I will be so happy to see you when I have returned from the sanatorium, which Papa tells me we have you to thank for the arrangements, due to your friendship with the director, a kind gentleman, even though he is a Swiss with a long beard. It is hard to remember how I must have behaved to be so desperate in that place. But now the morning has come after the storm, because of your generosity. Oh, I am so ashamed. But now Papa tells me there is no reason to concern myself, that these attacks of nerves are quite common and can be easily forgotten. To be a woman is to have these moods. Oh, I am happy to think so! I am quite sure you will be proud of me, and of the progress I have made. I wish it were tomorrow. But what will come, will come quickly, after all.

  Fondly,

  S. N.

  (From a letter discovered in the inside waistcoat pocket of a corpse, otherwise unidentified, found in a coal sack in a flooded alley off the Rue Dumaine, May 26, 1888.)

  Sometimes it’s not what you hear, or think you hear, that unsettles you. It’s what you don’t.

  Still

  Tia V. Travis

  I.

  Jodi stands still as air and envisions the field as it might have been then: the same sky or close to it, edges with a brittle luster observed only at particular times of day, under certain conditions of light, at the close of winter. Clouds scud on the back of the Chinook, beads of ice in the slow white melt of spring.

  A child died on an afternoon like this.

  Jodi thinks: I know this place . . . or somewhere like it.

  A car heads north on the highway, a passing reflection: there, then gone. Geese return home in arrowhead formation with a metallic green sheen on their wings. Then . . . stillness. So quiet she hears ice dissolving.

  It’s the turning point in the weather that’s brought her here, a disturbance in the air. But it’s different this time. In the smallest of ways, perhaps: the temperature and relative humidity, the brightness of light. Different. She surveys the landscape: field, highway. Nothing more.

  It’s not that I’ve moved, Jodi decides. It’s the world that’s moved.

  And: You should have come before this.

  It rained hard last summer, same as forty years ago. Big storms with lightning slashes, as if something had slit the sky with a silver knife. That winter was warm and wet snow piled deep across the prairies. Now, only the top tier of fence is visible above the half-frozen slough. The wind picks up, carrying with it the decay of a bird thawing in the grass. Jodi thinks about a child with hair the same shade as that grass: faded sunshine beneath a veneer of ice as perfect and fragile as glass.

  Little girl died out there by that fence.

  That’s what they say sometimes when they drive by, nodding towards an invisible point in the passing landscape.

  Little girl, you say? When was that?

  Long time back. Before you were born.

  Jodi’s footprints break evenly across the white field. Her progress to this time and place is, like points on a map or barbs on wire, visible in all directions. Her shadow clings to the snow like smoke. It could belong to anything, that shadow. Fence post, car exhaust. Sheet snapping on a line. Anything. She imagines the dead sparrow perched on the rim of her footprint, poised for departure in any direction: this world, the next. Jodi shades her eyes, waits. But no bird takes flight from her runway of footprints to the sky.

  Rumors scatter like seeds. Used to be you’d hear them anywhere along this section of highway. It’s a long, straight drive with little to divert your attention but the radio, and soon you’re thinking about nothing more momentous than the flyspeck on the windshield that’s been there the last twenty miles . . . sunlight bouncing off the mirror that makes it hard to see anyone who might decide to pass.

  You think about how late it’s getting.

  About the sun dipping beneath the mountains to the west.

  About how you wanted to be home by now.

  See that fence runs alongside the road?

  Barbed wire coils like ball lightning, a glint of silver in the rearview mirror.

  I see it.

  See that rise, the crest of the hill? There’s a field on the other side, slopes down to a slough with another fence running through it. An old trailer out there someplace, where the Ghost Woman lives.

  Ghost Woman?

  No one goes out there now.

  Jodi’s shadow has lengthened during the time she’s stood here in the Ghost Woman’s field. The sunlight filling the hollows of her footprints has the same bluish tinge as a crocus. Harbinger of spring. You can’t pick a crocus, Jodi knows. Not without mangling the fuzzy violet stems in your fingers as if they were the throats of newborn birds. She looks at the trailer set a half mile off the highway. The trailer’s siding is the same bruised purple as a crocus, the same du
ll white of bone . . . curved wing of a bird.

  Crocus and bird.

  Bones and snow.

  No one goes out there now. No call to. Except kids, sometimes, looking for trouble.

  Anyone ever see anything?

  Oh, sure. You hear things from time to time.

  What about the Ghost Woman?

  They say she’s looking for her little girl who drowned in the slough. Say you can still see her nights, walking the fields, calling to her.

  Some folks don’t like the prairie. They don’t like the sky pressing down on them. In summer, wind combs the fields like a hand passing through hair. In winter, snowdrifts layer down the highway and the wind sounds like someone’s quiet weeping a long way away.

  Jodi understands why people might feel anxious out here. Why they might jump at any sound. Or get the feeling something’s hidden in the grass, attending their every movement. But sometimes . . . it’s not what you hear, or think you hear, that unsettles you.

  It’s what you don’t.

  And sometimes there’s nothing more lonesome than an empty field under an empty sky, when the only sound is your own breathing and your own boots punching through a blanket of spring snow. Because that’s when you know that not only are you alone . . . you always have been.

  The Ghost Woman’s husband is gone.

  Looking for work

  looking for

  looking . . .

  The little girl watches him leave early one morning while her mother sleeps. She stands at the window, her breath frosting the glass. Her father sets out across the field in the golden haze as if something draws him onward. And the girl remembers, long afterwards, that he’d glowed in that sunlight . . . glittering in the distance like a lost coin.

  There, then gone.

  After the crystalline brightness outside it takes a minute for Jodi’s eyes to adjust to the dim trailer. The carpet remnants covering parts of the flooring are islands in a swamp of buckled plywood. An armchair swollen as a mushroom seats a radio with a broken dial. An ancient space heater shelters a family of mice. Next to the heater sits a cardboard box of musty clothes and a child’s pair of gumboots crusted with mud.

  Jodi moves through shadows.

  It’s best not to think too much about who lived here. Who left here.

  Who died here.

  So she closes her mind to the past.

  Next to the kitchen sink, a bowl lies tipped on its side. Petrified cornflakes stick to the rim. Wedged inside a half-open drawer is a shoebox crammed with yellowed receipts and government checks. Through a smudge in the window, Jodi sees the smooth stretch of sky and field. Telephone poles disappearing down the highway. Shimmer of ice. The slough doesn’t look far, though it must have seemed the end of the world to an eight-year-old girl who’d lived every one of her years in a trailer parked in the middle of nowhere.

  What’s on the other side of the fence, Mama?

  Fields and more fields. Same as this side.

  The girl runs through the field with empty jars in each hand, trying to catch the wind. If she captures enough, its invisible power will buoy her above the earth where, looking down, she will see—

  What?

  Everything.

  Field, fence . . . her father’s footprints in the snow. What God sees when he looks down from heaven.

  Everything.

  An old Farmer’s Almanac calendar hangs on a nail beside the kitchen window. Jodi pages through phases of the moon. Sees that favorable dates for picking Saskatoon berries, putting in preserves, cutting hair, have been marked in faded pencil. When the breastbone of a fresh-cooked turkey is dark purple it will be a cold winter. The perception of bones foretells the future . . . knowledge deepens the marrow.

  Jodi wonders what color the turkey’s breastbone had been forty years ago. She wonders if it would have made a difference, whether the little girl might have lived had that breastbone been dark as a ripe plum.

  She turns over February’s frozen lake, sees March’s field of crocuses.

  When the crocus opens, warm weather is in store.

  Except for the January cold snap it hasn’t been a bitter winter, not for a prairie province west of the Canadian Shield and east of the Rocky Mountains. And yet, when Jodi steps out of the trailer into the mild afternoon her hands are chilled to the bone, her skin tough as the meat of a fresh-cooked turkey too long in the freezer.

  Using even pressure as you walk across the icy slough, you can test the physical properties of frozen hydrogen and oxygen: the universal law of cause and effect. With experience you will soon determine, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, whether or not the ice possesses sufficient density to sustain your weight.

  The moment that air pocket jumps like a bubble in a spirit level or the last breath of air you’ll ever take, you are faced with a decision: that is, whether or not you should place the balance of your life and faith in Mother Nature’s hands, in the same way you know to bake bread on the seventeenth and twenty-fourth of this month, or to can fruit from the third to the fifth.

  Jodi considers whether the ability to walk on water would have made a difference. Eyes closed, she raises one foot several inches above the frozen slough. Her boot hovers over the ice.

  If you look down, you’ll see there’s nothing there.

  The secret, then, is not to look down. Then you can walk forever.

  But when Jodi opens her eyes, she sees that she has not walked on water. That she has not, in point of fact, gone anywhere at all.

  Skates, the little girl knows, are remarkable things. Sparkling blades and shining leather as white and unobtainable as a cottontail rabbit. So she sits on the edge of the slough and pulls on the next best thing: gumboots dug out of the Sally Ann with worn soles ideal for sliding. Her mother wears a beaver coat that might have belonged to a movie star but has seen more glamorous days, and a pair of Daddy’s tightly laced work boots.

  Mother and daughter hold hands and wobble onto the ice like a couple of ducks. Before long they’re practicing figure eights on the slick surface. It seems too soon when a warm wind gusts out of nowhere and Mama looks up at the changing sky.

  Time to be getting home, she says.

  The girl reaches round to brush a circle of snow from her coat. Her Christmas coat, red as cranberries.

  Just a few more minutes!

  We can’t, the ice is thawing. We’ve already been out too long.

  But the girl is eyeing the barbed-wire fence that runs through the center of the slough . . . white-stubbled fields, telephone poles on the horizon, voices whispering in the sky.

  What’s on the other side of the fence, Mama?

  Fields and more fields. Let’s go home and we’ll make molasses cookies.

  The girl clasps her mittened hand in her mother’s bare red one. Then they glide across layers of water gleaming on the ice. The girl slides backwards, staring at the mysterious expanse of fence and sky that makes up their backyard. Mama nudges her homeward like a wayward calf at sunset.

  It’s the same as this side, honey.

  Fields and more fields, the girl whispers.

  So quiet not even the birds hear.

  The dead child gazes up at Jodi from beneath the ice. Her face is pale as the last afternoon of sunlight. Snails leave glistening trails across her ribs. Smooth round stones weight the pockets of her coat. Grains of sand settle beneath her fingernails, sedimentary layers recording the passage of time, seasonal variations.

  Nothing ever happens here, nothing ever changes but the wind.

  Sunlight breaks through the bank of clouds. Suddenly the sky seems too exposed.

  Jodi thinks about the little girl setting out across the field. She sees her glance anxiously at the trailer, hoping her mother won’t notice how far she’s come. But she needs to see what lies beyond that fence. Needs to see why her father left them for a chimera of field, the lure of an empty sky.

  The wirecutters in the girl’s pocket are heavy, and she doesn
’t know how to use them. But she’ll find a way. Red mittens dangle on strings through the sleeves of her coat; it’s warm enough and she doesn’t need them. The Chinook is blowing today and everything is clean and white, the melting snowdrifts so wet they’re translucent.

  Translucent, Jodi tells the girl. That’s what your dreams are. I see through them like I see through air. For a moment she expects a small hand to break through the ice.

  But no. Nothing lives in this slough but hibernating frogs, sleeping tadpoles. Fear, thick as mud. Heavy and still as water trapped beneath ice.

  It’s time that changes everything, Jodi realizes. The passage of time—a drop of water, a grain of sand. Memories sifting to the bottom like silt.

  And here I am, looking down.

  The girl’s world had ended here. Her last moments of awareness preserved like a bird beneath the snow. But Jodi can’t let herself think about those last seconds of life, the last spirit bubble of breath the girl took before water closed over her.

  So she examines the barbed-wire fence.

  The posts have rotted, the wire rusted to the Indian-red of a grain elevator. It’s so predictable, this cycle of sun and rain, thaw and freeze, she could mark it in on the almanac. But predictability isn’t something that little girl had understood.

  Jodi applies her boot heel to the slough, as much slush and snow as it is ice. Soon it begins to give. A few more kicks and she’s broken through. She heaves a slab of ice loose and water sloshes through the opening she’s made.

  All it takes, Jodi knows, is a moment of inattention. Of childish defiance. The stubborn refusal to listen to that still small voice inside yourself that will tell you what to do if only you’d let it, will show you how to keep yourself from harm’s way. But can we ever really keep ourselves from harm’s way?

  The sun is setting, the deepening sky soon to be drowned in a river of night. Jodi lies flat on the ice and plunges her arm deep as she can into the frigid water.

  The little girl’s gumboots slip out from under her and she cracks through the ice too fast to let out much more than a startled hiccup. The wirecutters anchor her straight down to the bottom. Barbed wire jabs to the bone, snags the soft skin of her wrists. She wriggles like a minnow on a pin. Her hair tangles in the reeds. Blood ribbons from her punctured wrists like mitten-strings. She kicks the submerged fencepost, catches her sodden coat on the wire, struggles for that air bubble inches above her mouth—