Year's Best Weird Fiction: 1

by Laird Barron

  I ascended the wide stone steps that led to Adam Webster’s bookstore and stopped to smell the red frangipani. Moonlight beamed through the trees that surrounded the large house, and I paused so as to light an opium-tainted cigarette. I sucked, and then I sighed and lifted my eyes so as to watch Luna through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled fantastically. The tree that spread before me offered its fragrant flowers, and for a moment I fancied that these were blooms of blood I looked on. Ah, blood and moonlight, smoke and perfumed air. I was surrounded by enchantment. The moon was then veiled by clouds, and I passed through new-born darkness, up the wooden steps that took me to the large canopied porch. I sucked, and then extinguished my cigarette in a tall vase filled with sand and bits of bone. Adam stood before a hearth in the large bookshop that had been constructed by removing walls and turning separate rooms into one spacious chamber. Scented candles provided the sole source of light, the mellow illumination that felt so comfortable on my eyes. Sighing happily, I sank into an armchair and crossed one leg over the other.

  “Simon’s vanished,” I informed him. “He was going to teach me the Ninth Diagram. I’m rather annoyed.”

  “He’s in Prague,” Adam informed me, his back to me as he fiddled with some tiny figurines that sat upon the hearth.

  “Something’s disturbed him. He was behaving so irrationally the last time we met. Rather disconcerting, to see the beast so thrown off balance.” The fellow continued to ignore me. “So, what do you have for me?”

  “Ah,” he replied, pointing a finger upward as he walked to a bookshelf and removed a title bound in green cloth. “It’s nothing special, but knowing your penchant for Wilde titles I thought you’d enjoy it.” He moved to me and I took the book. The Harlot’s House and Other Poems by Oscar Wilde, with “Interpretations” by the artist, John Vassos. I loved old editions of Wilde, and this 1929 title was in perfect shape. I opened to the title piece and read aloud:

  “Then, turning to my love, I said,

  ‘The dead are dancing with the dead,

  The dust is whirling with the dust.’”

  My recitation was followed by suggestive silence, and as I looked up I saw that the child of shadow was frowning at me. He said, “Wilde was called a corrupter of youth. This is something you share with him. You’ve been influencing Cyrus to dream. This must stop.”

  I made a rude noise with my lips. “Don’t be a bore, Adam. Cyrus overflows with curiosity. He’s hungry for new sensations. I taught him the art of concocting an absinthe cocktail the other day, and how happily intoxicated we were, nude and dancing beneath the autumnal moon. It was deliciously Greek. What have you against dreaming? You live in Sesqua Valley, where dreams are enhanced outlandishly. I have only to gaze for a length of time at the white mountain before falling into slumber to experience the most fantastic visions.”

  “It is dangerous for us to dream, Jonas. To dream in this valley is to open portals. Simon has explained this to you.”

  I squeezed my face so as to make an appalling expression. “The valley itself is a portal. It sucks one in, and twists one’s psyche, and blasts one’s brain. It gathers us, the valley does—we freaks of the world, and teaches us new ways in which to mutate. Ah, sweet intoxicating vale, poisonous and potent. We shut our eyes to your enchanted light, and in dream we follow your moonlit paths. As Wilde once said, so wisely, ‘A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight.’ The moon over Sesqua is ripe for dreamers.”

  “Then dream on your own, Jonas. Do not coax my shadow-kindred to follow you. Cyrus is especially susceptible to mortal influence.”

  I rose out of the chair and winked at Adam’s ugly face. “Thanks for the book, mate.” Exiting the shop, I walked down the steps and onto the road that led to town. The moon had undressed herself of clouds, and her naked brilliance touched my eyes with wonder. Opening the book again, I whispered the title poem’s opening lines:

  “We caught the tread of dancing feet,

  We loitered down the moonlit street,

  And stopped beneath the harlot’s house.”

  I walked onto the planks of wood that are the sidewalk of Sesqua Town and stopped before one tall building so that I could listen to the noise that issued from its top floor. There were no blinds before the windows, no ghostly silhouettes; but there were moving shadows, and the tread of dancing feet. Silently, I passed the building’s threshold and loiter up the flight of stairs that took me to the floor from which the curious din issued. Cautiously, I walked to where double doors parted and watched the unfathomable dancers as they moved as one within the silent room. I thought immediately of lines by Keats:

  “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

  Are sweeter . . .”

  I realized, as I peeped furtively into the room, that I had never before seen so many of the children of the valley gathered in one place; and my curiosity was so compelled that I failed to notice when someone moved behind me, until she pressed one hand upon my shoulder. By some strange instinct, the occupants of the room sensed intrusion and ceased their movement. A horde of silver eyes gazed at me. The female at my side linked her arm with mine and escorted me into the room.

  “I can explain everything,” I assured them. “You see, Adam just procured this delightful edition of Wilde’s poetry, and I was contemplating its title poem as I passed by. And life, poor shoddy thing, imitated Art—for as in the poem the narrator passes and is perplexed by a room of inhuman dancers, so I became aware of your footfalls on this floor, and I was tempted to watch. I can resist everything except temptation, as you well know. I am human, all too human.”

  I turned to acknowledge the creature at my side and saw that she was not native of the valley. Marceline Dubois smiled at me, her eyes of altering shade set within the magnificent ebony face. I could smell the fragrance of her red tresses and for one moment disregarded all else. She turned to kiss the corner of my mouth and one breast brushed against my chest. I watched, as she moved away from me to the center of the room and raised her arms. Someone in the pack produced a flute and began to play a haunting melody, to which the sorceress moved. Other pipes were pressed to inhuman mouths, and the intoxicating noise drew me to the center of the floor, where I raised my arms and joined in the danse. The seductive music wrapped around me, and I knew that I wanted to be clothed in nothing else. Kicking off my shoes, I unzipped my trousers and let them fall to my ankles. Some kind creature helped me out of them and took my book as I began to unbutton my shirt provocatively, as though it were one of seven veils. I wished for a glass of scarlet wine to spill onto the floor, so that I could dance in its ruby pool.

  The music ceased, and I wearied of my waltz. Laughing magically, Marceline helped me to retrieve my clothing, although I did not bother to don them. Nude, I allowed her to guide me from the room and down the bare steps, onto the moonlit road. I suppose I had suffered (happily) a kind of delirium and had no notion as to where I was being escorted until I saw the pale and mammoth monster. I opened my collection of Wilde’s verse, but could not find “The Sphinx;” and so I racked my fevered brain and spoke one remembered line:

  “A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me through the shifting gloom.”

  Dropping everything except my trousers and book, I slipped into my pants and leaned my torso against the statue’s moon-kissed stone. “Perhaps I’ll go into the Hungry Place and dream of dead things.”

  “Whatever are you muttering about?” the black goddess asked me.

  I blew air. “Oh, I’ve been reprimanded about dreaming; or, rather, about influencing Cyrus to dream fantastic things, to dwell in vision as I sing to him the language of arcane tomes. It’s absurd, such caution and propriety. Adam lectured me after he gave me this book. ‘Dreaming opens portals, Jonas.’ Bah! He treats me as though I were a clueless clown.”

  “You are impulsive, and not wholly sane, Jonas Hobbs. Exactly the sort of fellow we like in Sesqua T
own. But Adam is correct. One must use caution in evoking dreams. We dwell in close proximity to the dreamlands, a realm from which influences may leak.”

  “The what? Dreamlands? This is the first I’ve heard of it. Simon’s never mentioned it.”

  The sorceress laughed. “He abhors the things utterly denied him. The dreamlands would never allow Simon access—he’s too poisonous, too polluted from having memorized every known edition of Al Azif.” She buzzed the title rather than articulating it as humans would.

  “I think you’re familiar with this place, this dreamlands. I think you’ve been there.”

  She bowed her head to acknowledge that I was correct. “It is where my Elder Brother dwells.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The Strange Dark One.”

  She narrowed her eyes as I burst out laughing. “If you’re trying to dissuade my interest, you’re going about it ass-backwards. My brain itches with intrigue. How can I summon this realm?”

  “One does not beckon the dreamlands. One enters into it. There is a place in the valley where Sesqua’s woodland conjoins with the dreamland’s forest. Oh dear, what dreadful curiosity shimmers in your mortal eyes. You’ve been tainted by the beast, and tingle for arcane manifestation.” Ah, her sinister smile. I watched as she raised one sable hand to Luna and made a curious sign, a sign that I carefully observed and memorized. I listened, as a breeze began to blow, an element of which was caught within Marceline’s magical hand. She tilted her head slightly and smiled at me in such a way that my blood prickled in its veins. Playfully, she moved her closed fist before my face, then took it away as I tried to kiss it. Finally, she blew into that hand and released the mingled air. I watched her fingers open, like petals of some obsidian bloom, and then I looked upward to watch the moon darken as it was covered with what I imagined was a spread of molten shadow.

  “I thought you said the dreamlands can’t be summoned.”

  “That is correct; but one may call the things that dwell within its precincts.” The wind grew more vigorous, pushing the sweet scents of Sesqua Valley into my face. Marceline’s magnificent hair billowed in the tempestuous air. “Behold!” she exclaimed.

  I raised my eyes and saw the fragmented patches of black cloud that wheeled in distant sky. No, they were not clouds; for clouds are not composed of rubbery texture that catches and reflects dim starlight. Clouds are not horned, nor do they spread membranous wings. I beheld the horde and guessed that they were perhaps fifty in number. I had seen their curious image before, on an antique piece of parchment that Simon had shown me in his round tower. When I asked him what the illustration represented, he tapped the image fondly and chuckled. “Night-gaunts,” he answered.

  II.

  I spent the next three days in Simon’s cyclopean round tower, finding anything I could related to night-gaunts and the dreamlands; but I didn’t know where to look, for his collection of arcane lore was vast and kept in a chaotic lack of order. Books, scrolls, bas-reliefs and maps were scattered everywhere. The circular walls and floor of the mammoth upper room were covered with cobwebs, dust and diagrams in chalk. Such a litter of lore, and yet I could not find the data that I sought. And then I had a hunch, and trotted down the winding steps of the ancient tower. Finding one of the queer stone circles that existed in the valley, I reclined therein and closed my eyes. I summoned the forest of the dreamlands as new sensation chilled my brain, and sang to valley air and sensed the things that pranced around me. When I partially lifted my eyelids I witnessed the blurry shapes of dark shaggy creatures of diminutive stature that danced around my circle of chiseled stones. Reaching outward, I touched the tiny paws that pulled me from the circle, and I knew that these wee creatures could lead me to the place where the valley’s woodland met the land of dream. They did not do so; rather, they guided me out of the woods and onto a road that took me to town. Frustrated, I crept to the silent sphinx and violently knocked my head against its unyielding stone. I was about to repeat the action when I saw, through streams of blood and tears, movement in the Hungry Place, the neglected cemetery where outsiders to the valley are oft times interred.

  The figure, book in hand, watched me as I entered the somber site, but did not cease his gambol until he noticed that beads of blood fell from my chin, to earth. Using the back of one hand, I wiped away the stream of blood that spilled from where my forehead flesh had torn. Reaching into a pocket, he produced a clean white handkerchief. “Use this. We do not want to titillate this earth with liquid gore. Hello, Jonas.”

  “Eldon, whatever are you doing here?”

  How extraordinary, his laughter. “I’ve had the most delirious dream, of dancing on my tomb!” His voice was high-pitched; it quivered as it issued from his throat, emotional and mad. This was Eldon Prim, one of the valley’s suicidal poets. That he was still among the living astonished us, for Sesqua Valley has an appetite for those so richly lunatic and plays with them, psychically, as cats play at tormenting mice. Eldon’s supernatural scars ran deep. I saw that he was peering at me intensely, as if to read my mind. Again, his manic laughter. “But we are outsiders, Jonas—there’ll be no tombs for us; there will be this hungry sod, and only that, unless we keep company with whatever crawls beneath it. This is where I’ll be planted, this will be my grave. And so I dance upon it. Whee!”

  I felt it then, the suggestion of a pulse beneath my foot, as if some stagnant heart had found resuscitation. Placid dizziness coaxed my knees to bend, and I knelt within the Hungry Place, before the dancing man. The earth on which I kowtowed was soft and enticing, and I pushed my hand into its depth. The mad poet fell beside me and set the book he held upon the ground. I saw that it was the thin hardcover collection of his poems that a friend in Boston had published in a very limited print run. The hand that had held the book grasped my wrist and pulled my hand from earth.

  “No, Jonas, no. You’re not the one who dreamed of dancing in the Hungry Place. It has not summoned thee. ‘Tis not your paltry flesh for which it has an appetite. Nay, remove your mortal hide and let me plant mine own.” He reached into his coat’s deep pocket and pulled out a deadly ritual knife, the very sharp blade of which caught and reflected starlight. Looking up to the stars, Eldon raised one hand and made a little sign unto the sky; and then he rested his hand on the hard surface of his book and, using the dagger, liberated one finger from his hand. An undertone of hilarity issued from some deep place in his throat as he planted his severed digit into the cemetery sod. The valley pulsed more vigorously, and some snouted thing bayed beneath the peaks of Mount Selta. “Arthur Munroe is such a splendid sculptor, have him fashion me a tombstone. Farewell, Jonas Hobbs.”

  I stood and watched for just a little while, as the Hungry Place sifted its soil around the lunatic. He laughed, the sinking man, and sang, a noise that served as background music as I exited the place. I leaned against the moon-kissed sphinx until the distant noise silenced, and when I turned to look again into the Hungry Place I saw that it was void of occupant. But then a distant figure climbed onto a far section of the low stone wall that surrounded the cemetery and leapt into the graveyard. I turned away and leaned the back of my head against the smooth stone of the sculpted beast and let the moonlight play upon my eyes, and I wondered again at how singular the moon looked as it floated over Sesqua Valley, how its shadows formed faces that expanded, melted, and then blossomed again as other expressive things.

  “Eldon’s gone,” a soft voice told me. I did not regard the young creature at my side. “I found his book in the Hungry Place. Guess I’ll take it to the tower. You have it, don’t you?”

  I replied in quotation:

  “I hold it in, the hot and frantic breath.

  I won’t exhale the words of lunacy.

  I won’t pronounce your poison’d shibboleth

  And enter custom with insanity.

  Remember when you talked to me of pain

  And pierced a splin
ter into my soft eye?

  Remember how that splinter sliced my brain

  And planted dreams wherein the starlight died?

  Peace. Your language echoes on the wind.

  Silence all the shrieking in my brain.

  All your arcane lunacy rescind.

  I’ll not mouth your fatal name again.

  I’ll not move among your nightmare race.

  I’ll find solace in some hungry place.”

  Cyrus nodded. “Weird. He wrote that before he came to the valley.”

  “It’s not weird at all, young creature.” I countered. “The valley seeks we who are demented, we who have been tainted by unholy alchemy. It lures us to its confines and sups upon our madness, thus nourishing its own.”

  “You’re laughing at me, aren’t you? You like to pose as so superior,” the lad complained.

  I shrugged. “For someone born of Sesqua’s shadow, you’re hopelessly innocent. Where is your edge of danger, Cyrus? One would mistake you for human.”

  “I’m not—human. Just because I’m not as diabolic as Simon and some others . . .”

  I raised a hand to silence him. “No matter, I’ve been ordered to avoid you. Adam asserts that I’m corrupting your soul.” Slyly, I smiled at him. “Do you shadow-spawn of this haunted valley have souls, I wonder? Or merely appetite?”

  “You’re talking a lot of nonsense tonight, Jonas. Leonidas must have slipped you some of his nasty narcotics. As for Adam, he’s not my master, nor our concern. We’ll continue with our studies. Good evening.”