Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2

by Nathan Ballingrud

  *

  He woke in the hospital again. He checked his hands first. Left still there, right still robot. With the left, he felt along the familiar edges of the prosthetic and the sleeve. Everything was still there. His hand went up to his head, where it encountered bandages. He tried to lift the prosthetic, but it didn’t move.

  A nurse entered the room. “You’re awake!” she said with a West Indian lilt. “Your parents went home but they’ll be back after feeding time, they said.”

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Pretty bad infection around the chip in your head, so they took it out. The good news is that the electrodes all scanned fine. They’ll give you a new chip when the swelling goes down, and you’ll be using that fine bit of machinery again in no time.”

  She opened the window shade. From the bed, all Andy saw was sky, blue and serene. The best sky to work under. He looked down at the metal arm again, and realized that for the first time in months, he saw the arm, and not Colorado. He could still bring the road—his road—to mind, but he was no longer there. He felt a pang of loss. That was that, then.

  When the swelling went down, a new chip was installed in his head. He waited for this one to assert itself, to tell him his arm was a speedboat or a satellite or an elephant’s trunk, but he was alone in his head again. His hand followed his directions, hand-like. Open, close. No cows, no dust, no road.

  He asked Susan to get him from the hospital. Partly so his parents wouldn’t have to disrupt their schedules again, and partly because he had something to ask her.

  In her car, driving home, he rolled up his left sleeve. “Remember this?” he asked.

  She glanced at it and flushed. “How could I forget? I’m sorry, Andy. Nobody should go through life with a tattoo that awful.”

  “It’s okay. I was just wondering, well, if you’d maybe fix it. Change it.”

  “God, I’d love to! You’re the worst advertisement my business could have. Do you have anything in mind?”

  He did. He looked at the jagged letters. The “I” of “LORI” could easily be turned into an A, the whole name disappeared into COLORADO. It was up to him to remember. Somewhere, in some medical waste bin back in Saskatoon, there was a computer chip that knew it was a road. A chip that was an arm that was Andy who was a stretch of asphalt two lanes wide, ninety-seven kilometers long, in eastern Colorado. A stretch that could see all the way to the mountains, but was content not to reach them. Forever and ever.

  KARIN TIDBECK

  –

  Migration

  EDITH THINKS ABOUT what was up top, as she sits on the edge of her bed waiting for worktime.

  It was a desert, dunes shaded in sepia. They lived in little houses on a wooden platform. Edith would dive for spiny shells in the sand and give them to the bowl-maker.

  Sometimes, though, she dreams of an ocean, of crawling out of a little cave to stand in the surf. The water is warm like blood. The ocean feels as real as a memory. She once mentioned these things to Irma, who merely shook her head. I don’t know what you’re talking about, she said. This is our home, you silly thing. Edith asked, Then where did we come from? Irma’s face went blank, and then she shrugged.

  Gregor’s voice rings out on the other side of the door, “Wash your clothes, wash your clothes!”

  Edith slips into her cardigan and gently shakes the worn bedsheets out. A seam has split along the cardigan’s right shoulder. She’ll have to take it to Irma for mending. Maybe after delivery, because today is delivery day.

  *

  The downstairs flight yawns at her, darkness seeming to seep up from below, and she has to look away briefly. When she turns back, it’s just a set of concrete stairs. Gregor lives down there, after all, and more neighbors below him, and below them, all the way to the bottom, so it’s said. Edith starts her upstairs climb.

  Most of the doors in the stairwell are propped open, and people are sitting and standing in doorways and on landings, already at their tasks.

  Edith greets her neighbors, chanting as she goes, “Mend your things, mend your things?”

  “Wash your clothes?” comes the response from above, and she catches up with Gregor, laundry basket in his thin arms.

  He nods at Edith, who waves back. A neighbor hands him a frock for washing. Edith and the neighbor look on as Gregor drops the garment into the empty basket. He stirs it around with his stick, picks the garment up again, shakes it out and folds it neatly.

  “All done,” he says, and the neighbor thanks him kindly.

  Only Otto needs something fixed today: his shelf has chipped, and Edith taps her hammer on it to fix it. She gets all the way to the janitor’s room at the top landing without another customer. The janitor’s door is closed, and Edith’s first in line. She sits down at the top of the stairs, gazing idly at the painting on the flat wall where the next flight of stairs should have been. It almost looks like a real set of stairs, gray and crumbling slightly at the edges. It’s easy to imagine them switchbacking all the way up to the surface. On the wall between the stairs and the janitor’s door, the elevator is still inert. It could ding at any moment now. The janitor will come out of her room and open the elevator door in a gust of fragrant air. Inside will be stacks of brown boxes, one for each of the neighbors. Edith’s mouth waters at the thought of fresh mushrooms, crispy little insects, chewy lichen.

  It finally happens when the line of neighbors snakes down the stairs as far as Edith can see, and Irma who is right behind her in the queue has just fixed the seam on Edith’s cardigan. The janitor steps outside, tall and magnificent in her blue dungarees. She greets the neighbors with a raised hand and a smile. As if on a signal, the elevator dings. The stairwell falls quiet. With a flourish, the janitor reaches for the handle and pulls the heavy door open.

  The elevator is empty.

  *

  Mealtime consists of the last mushrooms. They’ve gone soggy and smell rank, but Edith forces them down. She sits down on her bed to wait for bedtime. The window-painting on the far wall needs touching up; the blue part of the ocean is flaking. Edith ran out of the blue color halfway through, and painted the rest green. It’s a place where two oceans meet. It’ll be all green when she’s done it over, as if the window has shifted.

  All the janitor had said was the elevator is empty, and the words had traveled down the stairs. The neighbors had looked at each other in confusion, then meekly returned to their rooms. Edith had lingered for a moment. The janitor had merely closed the elevator door and gone back to her room. Edith tried the door handle to the elevator. It was locked.

  Edith finds herself walking around the room, picking things up and putting them in their place, wiping the table and the shelves, folding her clothes, shaking out the bed sheets. She puts the rubbish in the small bucket and sets it down outside the door, where it’ll be empty before morning comes. The stairwell is quiet now. Everyone is waiting for bedtime. There’s a strange acidic tickle in her stomach. It shoots tendrils into her legs.

  Edith sits back down on the bed, but her stomach is churning. Something is about to happen. It’s never good when things happen.

  *

  It began in the colonnades under the town on the platform in the desert. Someone saw a pale and unfamiliar figure leaping from shadow to shadow.

  Then came the horde.

  As the invaders caught the villagers and tore into them, they made soothing, crooning noises that somehow drowned out the shrieking. They strangled the villagers, tore their eyes out, opened their throats with sharp teeth. They rolled the bodies over the edge of the platform, into the sand. When they couldn’t find any more victims, they went into the little houses and closed the doors.

  *

  Edith wakes up in the middle of the night and retches over the side of the bed. She manages to crawl out and find the chamber pot before her bowels empty themselves in a long, excruciating spasm. When it finally subsides, she slides off the pot and onto the floor. The stink of her own
waste makes her retch again, dribbling bile on her shoulder.

  Then someone is banging on the door, and she must have blanked out, because the vomit on her shoulder is cold. Three bangs, then silence, then three more bangs. Voices outside, many footsteps marching down the stairs. They’re going somewhere, and she should be going with them. They’re going to leave her all alone. But every joint in her body hurts, and her bowels empty again before she manages to find the pot, and then she’s standing at the edge of the platform, gazing out across the desert.

  *

  Some of them managed to escape. Edith persuaded them to hide in the silo. They watched the massacre from a little window on the loft. When the light faded and the invaders hadn’t moved for a while, Edith led the refugees out and away from the village. They walked for hours across the hot sand, until they came upon a structure in the middle of nowhere. It was a little concrete shed, perhaps three meters on each side. The heavy door stood ajar. The villagers went inside after very little hesitation, into the cool gloom of a stairwell. The door swung closed behind them. Inside, neatly ordered rooms, as if they had been waiting just for them. They took a room each and sat down to wait for bedtime. When the lights went out, Edith thought she heard a stranger’s voice complaining in the stairwell, They’re much too early. It’s not right.

  When the ceiling lamp comes on, it’s weak and flickering. Edith sits in a puddle of shit and vomit next to the bed. The stink is thick like a fog. Her joints still hurt, but not as badly as in the night, and she manages to stand up on shaky legs. She dries herself off with an almost-clean towel and puts on her dress, thick stockings, cardigan, slippers. There’s still a little water in the jug on the table. It eases the burn in her throat.

  The slight groan of the door hinges is very loud in the quiet stairwell. It seems somehow larger than it used to. The downward stairs gape at her.

  “Hello?” Edith calls weakly.

  No reply, save for a faint rustle below. She hobbles across the landing to Irma’s door and knocks. Nothing happens. She pushes the handle down: it’s unlocked. Inside, Irma’s room is tidy and unoccupied: the bed is made, the table empty, her sewing tools sit in a neat row on the shelf.

  Edith starts to climb the stairs but her legs refuse to carry her upward. She sits down on the lowest step, heart pounding in her throat.

  “Hello,” comes a faint reply from upstairs.

  Gregor comes shuffling downstairs behind her. His face is very pale and his eyes wide. He gasps as he sees Edith.

  “I’m so glad to see you. I thought I was alone.” He sits down on the step next to Edith; his nostrils flare briefly but he doesn’t comment on her smell.

  “What’s going on?” Edith says weakly.

  “They’re all gone, Edith.” Gregor gestures upward. “I was just upstairs. No one’s here. Not even the janitor.”

  “Someone was at the door last night,” Edith says. “I wanted to go outside, but I was so sick.”

  Gregor runs his hand over the wall with a rasping noise. “I was afraid,” he mumbles. “I wanted to go too, but it was pitch dark and the noise outside. It scared me. And now…they’re all gone.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Everyone. We shouldn’t be here. Can’t you feel it?”

  Edith swallows. Gregor’s right. It feels like when she once overstayed her welcome at Irma’s, and Irma left so that Edith would take the hint and go home.

  “We have to go find them,” she says.

  Gregor looks nauseated. “I’m still afraid.”

  Edith reaches for his hand and squeezes it.

  *

  The first flight of stairs down to Gregor’s flat is easy enough, especially for Gregor, of course—he lives there. Gregor finds Edith some water and a handful of dried beetles, and her legs become slightly more steady. The next flight of stairs feels slightly more ominous, but still, it’s where Gregor’s under-neighbors live, and he knows them well. They knock on one door each, but no reply. The rooms beyond are tidied and empty. No one seems to have brought anything with them. They have left their tools behind.

  They both stop short at the next flight of stairs. The light is distinctly dimmer. For a second, Edith thinks she sees shadows rushing up at them, but then she blinks, and they’re gone. Gregor grabs her hand.

  “I’ve never been this far,” he says.

  “Neither have I.” Edith pauses. “Do you know how far down the stairwell goes?”

  Gregor shakes his head.

  The doors on the next landing are identical, and the next. Even though she’s counting them, it feels as if Edith and Gregor aren’t actually going anywhere, just arriving in the same place again and again. The fear that spreads cold tendrils through Edith’s face and ears makes her light-headed, almost giggly. They stop knocking on doors, instead just opening them gingerly. On the ninth landing down, the rooms are no longer furnished, just gray-walled cells. The walls become first damp and then wet to the touch, and the air slowly warms up. Gregor’s breathing has a slight squeak. Edith’s knees ache. The smell of wet earth creeps up from below.

  On the seventeenth landing, water seeps out from a crack in the wall and trickles across the floor. A shadow around the little stream tells of an ebb and flow, like in that dream, by the ocean: the water would draw back to reveal a beach pierced with thousands of little holes, each holding a pale and tiny crab. The trickle runs down to the next landing, where the concrete bleeds more water. When water starts seeping into Edith’s slippers, it’s warm, like blood.

  On the twenty-second landing, the stairs abruptly end. Where the next flight of stairs should have started is a blank wall. One single door stands next to a broken wall sconce. The handle glints in the faint light from upstairs. The floor here is dark and soft and squelches with runoff. Edith takes a deep breath and pulls at the door handle.

  A bulb in the ceiling bathes the room in yellow light. It’s furnished and cluttered with tools of all sorts. The bed is rumpled, the sheets smell heavily of sour musk. At the far end of the room is another door. Edith’s knees are throbbing. She sits down on the bed. Gregor closes the door behind him and crosses the room to try the other one. It’s locked.

  Warm fatigue creeps up along Edith’s legs. “I need to rest,” she says.

  Gregor’s fingers drum an uneven rhythm on the tabletop. “What do you think about, when you think about where we came from?”

  Edith blinks. “I thought no one did but me.”

  “Of course not,” Gregor says. “I talked to Adela about it every now and then. We could never agree. She says it was a desert.”

  “It was,” Edith replies.

  “No, it wasn’t, and I don’t understand where you got that from. It was a forest. Tall trees with dark trunks like pillars, and high up there, straight branches covered in little needles. The canopy was so dense that nothing grew on the ground. We lived in spheres hanging from the branches. They were pretty, all coppery metal and with big round windows. We didn’t like touching the ground. We ate needles and bark, and we were happy like that.”

  Edith considers. Then she starts telling Gregor of her own memory, but the light goes out, and sleep takes her.

  *

  It is dark and Edith is in bed, under blankets, Gregor curled up next to her. She has woken up because someone just gently pulled the blanket from her shoulder. A presence is looming over the bed.

  “Who are you?” Edith whispers.

  The sound of lips parting and a dry tongue unfastening from the palate. The words are laden with clicks and smacks. “I am the caretaker. And you’re late for your migration.”

  “Where did the others go?”

  “Downstairs.”

  “Why?”

  “It was time.”

  “I don’t understand,” Edith says. “Are you the one who makes the boxes?”

  “No more questions,” the caretaker replies. “All you have to do is move on.”

  “But where are we supposed to go?”


  A brief pause. “You should know that. Haven’t you had dreams?”

  “I dream of an ocean sometimes.”

  The caretaker smacks its dry tongue. “That won’t do. No. You’re heading for houses. Remember that. Houses in a circle, with lanterns over the doors.”

  The caretaker pulls the blanket off the bed and drops it on the floor. “You’ll know where you’re going. It’ll feel right. Now go. You’ll be late. It’s the other door.”

  It moves away. The door to the stairwell opens with a groan. The caretaker’s silhouette against the faint light of the stairwell doesn’t look quite right.

  “First too early and now too late,” the caretaker mumbles. “Something’s not right.”

  Next to Edith, Gregor stirs and sighs. “What was that?”

  “We have to go,” Edith says.

  *

  The other door opens onto a tunnel through raw rock, walls glowing faintly with blue-white larvae. The echoes of Edith’s and Gregor’s footsteps are very faint. Edith’s heartbeat is slow and heavy. Their breath and the shuffle of their feet on the rough ground count out a rhythm that sucks her in. She almost doesn’t notice when the tunnel widens into a cave, not until whatever is crouching by the little pool moves slightly and Gregor lets out a little squeak. Backlit by the luminous water, the pale figure looks almost like a neighbor. It suddenly turns around and looks up at them. Small eyes glitter in the waterlight. It lets out a small whimper. Edith leans on the wall, because her heart is rushing and her knees are buckling. They stare at each other. The other bounds away into the dark with a rasp of naked feet on stone.

  Gregor sits down with a thud. Edith rests against the wall until she can feel her legs again. Then she pushes herself to her feet and walks over to the little pool. The water is full of little glowing specks that tastes strongly of minerals. Edith splashes the water a little, to break the silence.