The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012

by Guran, Paula

  I was stunned for a moment by Ms. Berkley’s nakedness. But as he advanced a step, I raised the gun and told him, “Drop the knife.”

  He said, “Be careful; you’re hurting it.”

  At first his words didn’t register, but then, in my hand, instead of a gun, I felt a frail wriggling thing with a heartbeat. I released my grasp, and a bat flew up to circle around the ceiling. In the same moment, I heard the gun hit the wooden floor and knew he’d tricked me with magic.

  He came toward me slowly, and I whipped off two of my T-shirts and wrapped them around my right forearm. He sliced the air with the blade a few times as I crouched down and circled away from him. He lunged fast as a snake, and I got caught against a dresser. He cut me on the stomach and the right shoulder. The next time he came at me, I kicked a footstool in front of him and managed a punch to the side of his head. Lionel came back with a half dozen more slices, each marking me. The T-shirts on my arm were in shreds, as was the one I wore.

  I kept watching that knife, and that’s how he got me, another punch to the jaw worse than the one in the station parking lot. I stumbled backward and he followed with the blade aimed at my throat. What saved me was that Ms. Berkley grabbed him from behind. He stopped to push her off again, and I caught my balance and took my best shot to the right side of his face. The punch scored, he fell backward into the wall, and the knife flew in the air. I tried to catch it as it fell but only managed to slice my fingers. I picked it up by the handle and when I looked, Lionel was steam-rolling toward me again.

  “Thomas,” yelled Ms. Berkley from where she’d landed. I was stunned, and automatically pushed the weapon forward into the bulk of the charging magician. He stopped in his tracks, teetered for a second, and fell back onto his ass. He sat there on the rug, legs splayed, with that big knife sticking out of his stomach. Blood seeped around the blade and puddled in front of him.

  Ms. Berkley was next to me, leaning on my shoulder. “Pay attention,” she said.

  I snapped out of it and looked down at Lionel. He was sighing more than breathing and staring at the floor.

  “If he dies,” said Ms. Berkley, “you inherit the spell of the Last Triangle.”

  “That’s right,” Lionel said. Blood came from his mouth with the words. “Wherever you are at dawn, that will be the center of your world.” He laughed. “For the rest of your life you will live in a triangle within the rancid town of Fishmere.”

  Ms. Berkley found the gun and picked it up. She went to the bed and grabbed one of the pillows.

  “Is that true?” I said and started to panic.

  Lionel nodded, laughing. Ms. Berkley took up the gun again and then wrapped the pillow around it. She walked over next to Lionel, crouched down, and touched the pillow to the side of his head.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  Ms. Berkley squinted one eye and steadied her left arm with her right hand while keeping the pillow in place.

  “What else?” said Lionel, spluttering blood bubbles. “What needs to be done.”

  The pillow muffled the sound of the shot somewhat as feathers flew everywhere. Lionel dropped onto his side without magic, the hole in his head smoking. I wasn’t afraid anyone would hear. There wasn’t another soul for three blocks. Ms. Berkley checked his pulse. “The Last Triangle is mine now,” she said. “I have to get home by dawn.” She got dressed while I stood in the hallway.

  I don’t remember leaving Lionel’s building, or passing the park or Maya’s Newsstand. We were running through the night, across town, as the sky lightened in the distance. Four blocks from home, Ms. Berkley gave out and started limping. I picked her up and, still running, carried her the rest of the way. We were in the kitchen, the tea whistle blowing, when the birds started to sing and the sun came up.

  She poured the tea for us and said, “I thought I could talk Lionel out of his plan, but he wasn’t the same person anymore. I could see the magic’s like a drug; the more you use it, the more it pushes you out of yourself and takes over.”

  “Was he out to kill me or you?” I asked.

  “He was out to get himself killed. I’d promised to do the job for him before you showed up. He knew we were onto him and he tried to fool us with the train-station scam, but once he heard my voice that night, he said he knew he couldn’t go through with it. He just wanted to see me once more, and then I was supposed to cut his throat.”

  “You would have killed him?” I said.

  “I did.”

  “You know, before I knifed him?”

  “He told me the phantoms and fetches that were after him knew where he was, and it was only a matter of days before they caught up with him.”

  “What was it exactly he did?”

  “He wouldn’t say, but he implied that it had to do with loving me. And I really think he thought he did.”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  Ms. Berkley interrupted me. “You’ve got to get out of town,” she said. “When they find Lionel’s body, you’ll be one of the usual suspects, what with your wandering around drinking beer and smoking pot in public.”

  “Who told you that?” I said.

  “Did I just fall off the turnip truck yesterday?”

  Ms. Berkley went to her office and returned with a roll of cash for me. I didn’t even have time to think about leaving, to miss my cot and the weights, and the meals. The cab showed up and we left. She had her map of town with the triangles on it and had already drawn a new one—its center, her kitchen. We drove for a little ways and then she told the cab driver to pull over and wait. We were in front of a closed-down gas station on the edge of town. She got out and I followed her.

  “I paid the driver to take you two towns over to Willmuth. There’s a bus station there. Get a ticket and disappear,” she said.

  “What about you? You’re stuck in the triangle.”

  “I’m bounded in a nutshell,” she said.

  “Why’d you take the spell?”

  “You don’t need it. You just woke up. I have every confidence that I’ll be able to figure a way out of it. It’s amazing what you can find on the Internet.”

  “A magic spell?” I said.

  “Understand this,” she said. “Spells are made to be broken.” She stepped closer and reached her hands to my shoulders. I leaned down. She kissed me on the forehead. “Not promises, though,” she said and turned away, heading home.

  “Ms. Berkley,” I called after her.

  “Stay clean,” she yelled without looking.

  Back in the cab, I said, “Willmuth,” and leaned against the window. The driver started the car, and we sailed through an invisible boundary, into the world.

  Booklovers can be fanatical in their devotion to books and books can be very dangerous things . . .

  After-Words

  Glen Hirshberg

  Prologue

  The first bombing occurred on a fogbound summer Saturday night, on the just-vacated premises of Harbor Lights Books, in the midst of the 7th Annual Naked Bike Ride. The damage proved minimal: a few blown-out windows; a foot-long splinter of wood driven through the windshield of a parked police car; an elderly upstairs neighbor rumbled out of bed and sent shrieking down the stairwell in her nightfrock, convinced of an earthquake, just as the first bikers swarmed past in their goose-pimpled, genital-beribboned glory. Days elapsed before anyone realized there’d actually been an explosion.

  The second bomb went off near Fisherman’s Wharf in the middle of the night, in the exact spot where that half-senile bookwagon man tried to open a Left Bank-style antiquarian stall in the shadows of the shuttered Barnes and Noble. It was during the next day’s investigation that someone finally realized that the old card-catalogue notecards scattered amid the refuse in both locations weren’t debris. Were, in fact, messages. From the bombers.

  The notecards really had come from some long-extinct branch of the San Francisco Public Library. The book titles on the fronts of the cards seemed random, at
first—Insects Do the Strangest Things, Ferlinghetti’s Love in the Days of Rage—until police found the one marked Tom “the Bomb” Tracy and the Play that Shook San Francisco. Only then did some bright young sergeant think to flip the cards over, take another look at that seemingly innocuous stamp on the back: Property of the Library.

  We’d heard about the Library before then, of course. Seen their self-proclaimed leader standing on his milk-crate under the Clocktower on weekday evenings. With his goatee and his stick-figure legs and his bleat of a voice, he reminded some of Satan, and some of Pan. We’d seen his followers, too. Most were dropouts from the gutted comp-lit program at San Francisco State, plus some runaways and junkies, all of them sallow, lurking around the Book Depots near Hunter’s Point and Potrero Hill. It was their uniform appearance that first marked them: tan overcoats, the pockets stuffed with moldy hardbacks scavenged from the Depots; black, rubber sandals; gaunt faces; most of all, that paper-white skin tone, those eyes blinking fast even against the lights from street-lamps, which drove some online wag to name them Morlocks.

  And yet, somehow, it hadn’t occurred to us to fear them until that moment. Within hours of the bright young sergeant’s discovery, a SWAT team and the entire Homeland Security unit of the Bay Area Police descended upon Library headquarters en masse, arresting everyone in sight and dragging Erick Kinney, who’d taken to calling himself the Librarian, out of the group’s warehouse headquarters before rapt television cameras in handcuffs and ankle-chains.

  “Do you have any comment?” one reporter yelled as Kinney was hustled past.

  And Kinney had somehow dragged himself to a stop. One hand lifted against the glare of the lights, narrow eyes stutter-blinking, satyr-goatee wagging in the misting rain, Manson-smile dancing across his face. “Book ’em, Danno,” he’d said. Then he was shoved forward into a squad car.

  But despite a furious three-day search involving several dozen officers, the police found nothing more incriminating than a few small baggies of hash scattered amid the dust and food scraps and sleeping-mats and piles of reclaimed, moldering books in the warehouse. Late on a Sunday evening, to none of the fanfare with which he had been arrested, Erick Kinney was returned to his cavernous home and his adoring disciples.

  The next bombing, of the rug store that had once housed the legendary Allen Ginsberg/Gary Snyder Six Gallery reading, was bigger. It blew out windows more than a block away and maimed a security guard who’d unexpectedly returned to his post to get his coffee thermos. This time, bomb crews confiscated every mat and scavenged book, testing repeatedly for explosive residue while BATF officials on loan from Washington grilled the whole group. That investigation, too, turned up nothing. There was talk of holding Erick Kinney as an enemy combatant, and also of condemning the so-called Library and driving all of Kinney’s followers onto the streets.

  Gradually, though, over a period of weeks, the investigation lost momentum. And with virtually all of San Francisco’s bookstores now closed, and the libraries long-since eliminated or reduced to weekend hours, the bombings ceased, and the city and Erick Kinney seemed to reach an uneasy peace. Police still kept the building under surveillance. And Kinney still showed up from time to time on his street-corner at dusk, looking more pathetically thin and less threatening with each appearance. He bleated away, regaling tourists and passers-by with his agitprom poems about rotting fruit and dead brain cells. Sometimes people tossed coins at his feet.

  Meanwhile, the Depots swelled with unwanted books, and the Morlocks from the Library took them over, combing the rows and rows of paperbacks, occasionally spiriting away volumes to their warehouse. And Erick Kinney joined the Naked Bike Paraders and the Beatniks and Emperor Norton on the roll-call of San Francisco’s legendary utopian cranks, forever hearkening back to an age few of them actually believed had existed, or else heralding a new dawn even fewer thought would ever come.

  After-Words

  The Second Book Depository Story

  “ . . . whilst evil is expected, we fear; but when it is certain, we despair.”

  —Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

  Aaron came back on a damp, foggy night in early June. I’d just shown Mrs. Morton out the clinic’s front door. She’d cursed my name, spit on the linoleum in the waiting room, and rebuffed my offer to walk her to the bus. I stood under the dripping overhang anyway and watched her edge down the block, through the swarms of homeless people already emerging out of the mist to perch against the shuttered windows of the shelter next door, even though dinner wasn’t for over an hour yet. She didn’t actually need the motorized wheelchair I’d offered to make Medicaid provide for her yet. And the drugs she’d begged me for, weeping, gripping my lab-coat in her clawed hands, might actually have helped, if only temporarily.

  But she wouldn’t have been able to take the drugs anyway. Her dealer-grandson would have ripped them from her hands the second she got back to her one-room apartment. Maybe he wouldn’t kill her for not coming home with them. Some of my patient’s grandsons let them live.

  Retreating inside, I locked the door, making straight for my sanctuary in the back. I did notice, as I turned the knob, that the lights were already on, reprimanded myself for the waste and in the same moment realized I hadn’t left them on, and the shadow separated from the shelves along the back wall and lurched toward me.

  Gasping, I stumbled back, tripping toward the nearest examination room so I could lock myself in. Hands grabbed me around both shoulders and spun me around.

  “Aunt A., it’s me,” he said.

  I recognized the voice instantly, of course. But he was backlit by the lamp in my sanctuary. And his presence was so unexpected, and I’d dreamed of it for so hopelessly long, that it still took me a moment to understand what was happening.

  “Aaron?”

  My hands flew up automatically to hug him, pull his face to my shoulder, but he flinched back. I stared at him, silhouetted against my bookcases. There were flakes of what looked like sawdust in his hair, and the grit on his hands and throat had thickened and coagulated into little black spider-shapes. I imagined them scurrying up his sleeves, down his collarbone into the drooping neck of his threadbare sweatshirt. Tears welled in my eyes.

  “You look filthy,” I said. “Happy birthday.”

  He flinched again, ran a shaky hand through his mess of dark curls.

  “Aaron, my god, are you all right?”

  “You still remember my birthday?”

  The fury that had also been massing these last four years, ever since he’d walked out of his father’s life and mine, erupted from me. “If you were dead a hundred years, I’d remember your birthday, you stupid, selfish—”

  “You’re not my mother, Aunt A.”

  “I’m not your aunt, either. So just A. Okay?”

  Squinting his eyes, he looked at me, in that wondrous way he’d had even when I’d first met him, when he was three years old. A gaze so quiet it could lure mice from their hiding places, baby oak trees from their acorns. That’s how I’d put in the bedtime stories I used to tell him when he was four and five, during the years I’d lived with and almost won the love of his recently widowed, lost, marvelous father. The saddest, best years of my life.

  “Go wash your face,” I said, and felt myself smile. “Your hands, too. No touching my books with those hands.”

  I got just a ghost of a smile. He moved off toward the bathroom, limping visibly, and twice he had to put his hands out to steady himself against the wall. What had they done to him in the goddamn Library? The home he’d traded his life and my love and his father’s love for.

  Out of habit, I went to the shelves, trailed my fingers along the spines. The sagas-and-wonders section, Norse gods and Kwaidan and Pu Songling. Because they’d always been Aaron’s favorites, back when he’d still stopped here on his way home from school and let me read to him. And because this was clearly a night for fox spirits and changelings: fog in summer; my patients spitting curses; Aaro
n coming back.

  Through a fresh swell of tears, I realized I’d better call Oliver, let him know his son was alive. I took a step toward my desk and Aaron reappeared in the doorway.

  “Well?” he said.

  In truth, he looked better than I’d worried he would. He was gaunt, all right, still grit-encrusted everywhere but his face and hands, pasty in that trademark Library way. But his hair, though filthy, shone its familiar, lustrous black, and his dark eyes still flashed with mischief-specks of hazel and green. Fox-spirit eyes, all right.

  “I’m calling your dad.”

  “What for?”

  “To tell him you’re all right, what do you think?”

  “What makes you think he gives a shit?”

  “Aaron, you can’t really think—”

  “More to the point, what makes you think he wants to hear it from you? God, I’ve never understood it. Why are you still friends with him. Why did you let him treat you like that?”

  “What? Aaron, you don’t know anything about it. And it was a long time ago. I still care—”

  “I need your help,” he said, and one of his legs quivered visibly, and he almost fell down.

  Dropping the phone, I moved fast around my desk, put my hand to his cheek, then pulled him against me. “You’ve got a fever.”

  He pushed me away, steadied himself. “Not me,” he murmured. Then he looked me up and down. “You’re looking pretty undernourished yourself, Aunt A.” Another ghost-smile.

  I couldn’t tell if he was concerned or teasing, and I didn’t care. “Then let’s go eat. Saigon Sandwich Shop. When’s the last time? I’ll get my coat.”

  “I need you to come to the Library,” he said, and the hope I’d almost allowed myself froze in my chest.

  “Aaron,” I started, after a few silent moments, “I can’t—”

  “Oh, don’t start, Aunt A. Christ, sometimes you really are like him.” The contempt in his voice hit me like spittle. “I’m not asking you to join. Or to do anything that might help the cause. It’s not like either you or my father understand about why saving books from extinction might be worth fighting for or anything, how could you?” He flung a single, ironic wave toward my shelves.