The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012

by Guran, Paula

  Unconsciously, either from irritation or to keep warm, Leonard started to pace. He stayed next to the cabin, avoiding the stone-step path to the carport, and the line of grass and rocks and sticks that beckoned to surrounding woods. The cool dirt beneath his feet was packed tight, smooth as asphalt but with occasional bumps of buried stone or tree root. When he stopped pacing, Leonard backed one heel against a broken branch that was thick as a roll of pennies.

  He barely brushed over it, expecting to roll the branch with his heel. Instead, he crushed the segment flat.

  Startled, Leonard nearly lost his balance. Was it hollow? Rotted through? A sliver of bark stuck to his bare heel; without looking, he scratched it out with his fingernail.

  He set his empty carafe on the ground and kneeled to examine the flattened branch. The bark was as thin as paper. The patterns along the segment seemed more fauna than flora. Hard to trace after he’d crushed the hollow cylinder, but it seemed like a repeating geometric design of dark lines and inscribed ovals. Beneath the design were faint ridges, like the whorl of fingerprints.

  Probably, this was a segment of snakeskin. How did that work, exactly? The snake wriggled out of the sleeve of its old skin, emerged shiny and fresh—didn’t it? Well, he was no expert on reptiles, wasn’t certain what species were common to this region. Venomous or non-venomous? Either way, he hoped the skin’s former resident had slithered far away by now.

  Leonard peeled up the empty skin—brittle, like a piece of overcooked bacon—and brought it inside. He shut the door behind him, checked the seal between the door and the frame. Then he made a nervous sweep of the cabin’s four rooms, looking under furniture, behind appliances, inside closets.

  The cabin offered no resources to help alleviate his uneasiness as the day progressed. No Internet access, no phone, and no books on Sibley’s shelf titled Deadly Snakes of Northeast Alabama. As he sat in the main room of the cabin, several times he caught himself peering beneath the table to check his feet—now in socks and shoes, thank you, although he wished his pants were more snug at the cuffs. He considered fastening them closed above his ankles with rubber bands.

  Again, the temptation to ride into town. He could stop at the General Store, maybe find some out-of-work locals huddled in a warm booth at the Gas ’n’ Dine. He’d show them his strip of bacon, get advice from old coots who’d survived wars and the depression, had hiked through years of Alabama woods, dodging snakes along dark paths. But, for all Leonard knew, his skin sample really was bacon—and how silly he’d feel, then.

  The worst thing for an academic was to look like a fool. He’d take the risk of his silence.

  Better to concentrate on his book. He’d chosen a creative deconstructionist approach—a mode of criticism mostly out-of-favor since the early nineties (and thus, Leonard gambled, due for a trendy come-back). At the very least, a deconstructionist approach would help him make original claims about an ancient, over-examined play. The idea was to take Oedipus Rex apart, ask questions that tore at the perfect fabric critics had admired since Aristotle’s day.

  Sacrilege! Bennet Sibley exclaimed when Leonard first mentioned the project. You don’t need fancy critical approaches. Sophocles will teach you how to read Sophocles.

  Sibley had too much respect for the text. It limited him.

  The play was based on a riddle. Why not treat the play itself as if it needed a new solution?

  He’d transcribed the famous Riddle of the Sphinx on the first sheet of a fresh legal pad: What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening? The equally famous solution is “Man,” since he crawls on all fours as a baby, walks upright as an adult, and needs the assistance of a cane in later years. But Leonard had scribbled notes over the page to ridicule the accepted answer. Two arms aren’t two legs! A cane is not a leg!

  Sophocles didn’t invent the riddle, doesn’t quote it within his play. But it’s crucial back-story, the reason Oedipus fills the newly vacant seat as King of Thebes. And yet, why praise a man for solving an unfair riddle? Rather, grieve for the guiltless heroes before him, who stood their turn before a feather-breasted monster, half eagle and half lion, and tried to shape an honest answer to the Sphinx’s trickery. What might these men have guessed, in days when such she-monsters could besiege a town? Did some say “Chimera,” their voices rising in a fearful squeak? Perhaps some others made up an animal, in Seuss- or Swift-like fashion: “A bumble-glumph,” or “Hurgle-whynn.” Others, soiling themselves with fear, could have blurted out a desperate, hopelessly wrong answer: “A frog?” “A donkey?” Or maybe a few of them proposed the only reasonable response: “There’s no creature in this world that fits your description.”

  The answers don’t matter. The Sphinx kills them all.

  When Oedipus offers his solution, it’s over-elegant: an analogy of life-span to time-of-day, tucked inside other substitutions of crawl for walk, cane for leg. Legend asks us to believe the Sphinx is so upset by Oedipus’s attack on her riddle—her monstrous sense of self so tied to that impossible one-question quiz show—that she immediately commits suicide.

  Would that all monsters were this sensitive to criticism.

  These were Leonard’s whimsical musings, yet they supported his thesis about the classical unities of time, place, and action. In his argument, these rules actually weakened our ability to appreciate Sophocles’ play. All those important moments from the past, all those bits of violence banished tastefully off-stage and reported by a weeping messenger—if these scenes were represented somehow, in a radical re-staging of Oedipus Rex, the audience would have an entirely new understanding of the central character. The usual interpretation presented Oedipus as an intelligent, well-meaning king (he saved the city from the Sphinx!), undermined by his tragic flaw (pride and impulsiveness . . . and that unfortunate accidentally-killing-his-father-and-sleeping-with-his-mother scandal). In Leonard’s view, Oedipus’s tragic flaw is not an exception to an otherwise noble life. Oedipus is his tragic flaw.

  Abandon the classical unities. Imagine a production of Oedipus Rex where the Sphinx towers over the stage of Thebes, appearing in gruesome flashback when summoned by the Chorus. Or, as Oedipus recollects possibly the world’s first instance of “road rage,” show onstage his disproportionate reaction as he beats a man to death at a crossroads, simply because the apparent stranger (his father) refused to grant him right-of-way.

  Perhaps such a staging would be impossible: too costly, too violent or inappropriate, a logistical nightmare. But his book could do the same work. A chapter for each of the unrepresented scenes, envisioned in a creative section, followed by serious critical commentary. The book would be controversial and attention-getting. Did it matter if the interpretations were “correct”?

  Blasphemy! Sibley would say. Greek theatre is like magic. There are specific rules you must follow, or the spell is broken.

  Well, he was planning to break a lot of spells. By the time Leonard was finished, Sibley would likely regret allowing him use of the cabin.

  Leonard worked through the day, mostly brainstorming and outlining, and the ideas came almost faster than he could write. The shift to handwriting rather than typing seemed to open new floodgates. He devoted a separate legal pad to each chapter; in different ink colors, he drew arrows from one idea to the next, spread new thoughts into margins or pinched them in tiny print between previously written lines. It was a strange and welcome reverie, his vague fear of snakes easily forgotten.

  He nearly forgot lunch, too. At three o’clock he fixed a quick sandwich, smearing peanut butter on bread using a thick handled steak knife he discovered in a kitchen drawer. Then he worked past the winter day’s early sundown, his pen scratches accompanied by the steady rumble of the generator that kept the cabin warm and lighted.

  The generator sat in the utility closet on the other side of the small kitchen. Propane-fueled, it produced a noise similar to the rhythmic rattle of an old-fashioned film projector
. Leonard fancied himself in a movie: the scholar, hunched over a table, frenzied in the formative stages of his most brilliant work.

  Then the film jumped out of the sprockets. At least, that’s what it sounded like: a metallic screech from the generator, like something got jammed in the mechanism. Leonard rushed to the utility closet out of instinct. The generator was his life-line, and if it broke down he’d have to return home—just as he was getting started, after his most-productive day in recent memory.

  He threw open the closet door, and the generator rumbled even louder. This close, the sound was overwhelming. The machine shuddered as if trying to shake itself into pieces. Not that he understood the equipment, but Leonard studied the beige and copper engine, and all the screws and bolts and belts seemed in their proper places. The rumble was loud and steady, with no trace of the scrape and screech he’d heard from the main room.

  Or, perhaps a slight screech, like an undercurrent. Maybe in the mechanism—maybe more distant, outside the cabin, an animal’s awful cry of pain.

  Leonard had slept well the previous night, exhausted after the drive up I-20, then side-turns down country roads into twisting, barely marked, gravel and dirt lanes to Sibley’s cabin. He’d thrown fresh linens over the cot’s thin mattress, fluffed his own pillow over the lumpy one Sibley had left behind, and then dropped into calm slumber.

  Tonight was different. The day’s mental activity refused to abate; ideas tumbled through his head in time with the spinning gears and belts of the straining generator. The two bedrooms were each equipped with a working fireplace, but they were too much trouble to get started. He’d pulled the cot into the main room, where he could huddle close to the wall-mounted electric heater. As a result, he literally couldn’t get away from the day’s work: it loomed near his bedside, spread overtop the card table.

  Now that the glow of inspiration had faded, Leonard began to worry that his day’s work wasn’t as good as he’d thought. Was he a victim of that dreaded malady Sibley called “Scholar’s Delusion”? Even in Leonard’s young career, he’d seen his share of the afflicted. Most recently, a colleague had grown so wrapped up in study of a minor nineteenth-century poet, that he convinced himself she was the greatest writer who ever lived. Honestly, Don had said to him in all seriousness, I prefer Felicia Hemans’s poetry to Wordsworth’s.

  Had Leonard fallen into a similar trap of self-deception? His department chair would probably agree. Bennet Sibley’s skeptical countenance floated before him in the dark, a bearded Tiresias eager to express the most awful prophesy of failure. You’re welcome to use my cabin, but . . . Why would you want to write that kind of criticism? Why would anyone want to read it?

  No, no, he had to remind himself. Forget Sibley and his outdated, reverent respect for the text. He wasn’t writing to please Sibley. Indeed, he’d spent too much of his life trying to please people whom he didn’t respect. The same problem plagued his romantic and family entanglements—which largely explained why he was free to spend an entire month alone in a secluded cabin.

  Leonard wrote for a more sophisticated audience, one fully aware that drama was a living organism, no longer the author’s property. You can’t appreciate a text by ignoring its flaws. Oedipus’s story relies on ridiculous coincidence: that a man should flee his adopted father, only to cross paths with the father of his blood; that a she-Sphinx kills each challenger, until one man twists out a solution to her torturous riddle; that a land should need a king, and one walks in. The drama finds its convenience in uncanny chance.

  These were the kinds of observations liable to give Sibley a heart attack. But that’s what the play was all about, wasn’t it—the younger generation taking the place of the old? Harold Bloom said the same thing about writers in Anxiety of Influence: to make their reputations, authors had to reshape the works of their predecessors—kill the fathers of literary tradition, so to speak. The theory should hold equally true in the cutthroat world of academic tenure and promotion. Someday, stodgy old Sibley would have to retire as Chair of the English Department; in his place, Leonard would encourage the inventive scholarship and teaching Sibley hoped to suppress.

  The film projector continued to rattle from the utility closet. Leonard’s thoughts threaded through the sprockets: some projected a grandiose, satisfying future; others cast “Father” Sibley’s vision of doom. He pictured the man’s rich, fuzzy beard, with its neat convex shape—as if half a gray tennis ball were glued over Sibley’s chin. And Leonard knew his thoughts had gone loopy now, from the day’s excitement and subsequent lack of sleep. Sibley typically would rub his bearded chin with one fingertip as he conjured phrases—no insult intended, nothing more than observations, really—but phrases that might undermine a young teacher’s confidence. If the old man had magical powers, they were centered in that weird tuft of beard. Push aside those stiff, overcombed hairs, and from behind would wink his third eye, the source of his prophetic insight.

  These were Leonard’s last semi-lucid thoughts before sleep finally overtook him. He was unable to rouse himself from bed in early morning, when faint cries again seemed to rise above steady mechanical thrums. He was on a train that passed between strange villages. The shades were drawn against the sunrise. In the fields, small animals lifted their heads in a shrill chorus, high-pitched yet also guttural, as if they gargled food, or they were being strangled.

  Slightly after noon, Leonard staggered outside with his coffee. Thick clouds masked the sun, a diffuse gray light breaking through. Another abandoned fragment of skin lay, hollow and fragile, on the patch of ground fronting the cabin door. It was not a snake skin.

  He kneeled on the ground to get a closer look. The same repeating design of lines and ovals around the circumference, the same ridges faint beneath, the texture of fingerprints. He hadn’t crushed this specimen with his heel, so the cylindrical shape was preserved. It swelled thicker on one end, and bent at a right angle directly in the middle of the hollow tube. In size and shape, with a brown-bark dead-leaf color, it looked like a broken cigar.

  The smaller opening was frayed in tiny strips; they curled like paper at the end of an exploded firecracker. Leonard brushed the side of his forefinger against the frayed edge, then pulled his hand away in surprise. The tiny strips were sharp, like pincers.

  Without thinking, he pressed his finger to his lips, then bit down slightly where he’d been scratched.

  Maybe he really should drive into town, find somebody who could tell him what the heck this thing was.

  Then that animal cry again, familiar from last night, and from this morning’s hypnogogic daze. He had trouble judging direction, here in new surroundings and with sound waves echoing off the perimeter of trees. But the noise seemed to come from the other side of the cabin.

  This morning, his exit from bed had been more leisurely. He’d put on shoes and dressed for the day. The air was brisk, but not as chilly as yesterday. He could walk for a short while. Go exploring.

  He didn’t find any strange animals. But he found something equally strange.

  Some evergreens grew close to the back of the cabin, giving the building year-long shade on that side. Past the edge of the woods, most of the trees were bare. Leonard found the obvious foot path, and followed it. A few yards in, the path sloped into a steep drop. Through thin, leafless branches, Leonard could easily distinguish a clearing far, far below.

  At the center of the clearing sat an impossible, full-scale replica of a Greek amphitheatre.

  Hidden out here? In the middle of nowhere?

  Leonard had to see it up close. He followed the path, keeping the outdoor theatre in sight. He felt dizzy after a moment, and soon realized the cause. It was a trick of perspective. The clearing wasn’t as far below as it seemed, and the amphitheatre wasn’t a full-sized model.

  Once he corrected his erroneous impression, it took little time to reach the small clearing. He stood with his hands on his hips, an unlikely Gulliver. The amphitheatre was made out of stone
blocks, as the originals had been, but they were set in a round cement foundation—about the size of a large dinner table. A rectangular stage occupied one ground-level section, with all the appropriate elements: the parados, aisles where choric singers entered from the sides; the flat orchestra area where dancers would perform between scenes; and the skene, the building that formed the backdrop to the stage, with three doors in place for the main actors’ entrances and exits. The theatron itself, where the audience sat, fanned out from the orchestra area in rising cement steps, forming the main bulk of the structure.

  Some people might lay down cement to build a barbeque area next to their wooded cabin. But Sibley, he built himself a miniature amphitheatre. From the looks of it, the model was old—showing some chipped decay, to echo the modern-day ruins of the real theatres in Greece. Leonard guessed it dated back to the fifties, from when Sibley was writing his one and only book.

  He wondered if Sibley’s wife ever accompanied him to the cabin. She might have sat there and watched him, knitting while her husband envisioned a miniature Oedipus or Creon or Iocaste pacing the puppet-sized stage; or pictured the deus ex machina contraption lowered from the top of the skene replica, like a tiny God from a tiny heaven.

  Nothing currently perched on the roof of this skene—no serpent-drawn chariot for Medea to ride, no cut-outs of the sun for Apollo, the lightning bolt for Zeus. But the detail on the small building was remarkable. Faded paint over the rough concrete simulated the brick-pattern of a royal palace. Thin rectangular panels along the top border glowed with faint gold inlays. The three doors along the front of the skene looked like weather-worn wood, rather than concrete. They each had a small hook-latch on the front, as if they were actually functional doors.

  Were they? Leonard bent toward the left-most door and tapped it with a knuckle. The answering sound was a wooden thunk.