Year's Best Weird Fiction: 1

by Laird Barron

  Joseph S. Pulver Sr.

  * * *

  (HE) DREAMS OF LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR . . .

  Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., is the author of the novels, The Orphan Palace and Nightmare’s Disciple, and he has written many short stories that have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Weird Fiction Review, Lovecraft eZine, Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, S. T. Joshi’s Black Wings (I and III), Book of Cthulhu, The Children of Old Leech. His short story collections, Blood Will Have Its Season, SIN & ashes, and Portraits of Ruin, were published by Hippocampus Press. He edited A Season in Carcosa and The Grimscribe’s Puppets. He is at work on two new collections of weird fiction, A House of Hollow Wounds, and The Protocols of Ugliness, both edited by Jeffrey Thomas. He is currently editing Cassilda’s Song, The Leaves of a Necronomicon, and Unlanguage of Unknowing: Examination No. 1 COMMON QUESTIONS for 2015 release.

  You can find him on the internet at: https://sites.google.com/site/thisyellowmadness

  {for my dear brother, a certain Mr. Hopfrog, Esq.}

  (Then) (by the light of an East Coast moon . . .)

  after the beans.

  after coffee.

  after the day’s vigorous adventure in sunlight, the walk, enjoying the blue. a pen in silver hands, prizing. dreaming—‘wholly overruled by the newer and more bewildering urge.’—from (and laced with) mathematics, and physics, and hints . . . ‘Subterranean region beneath placid New England village, inhabited by (living or extinct) creatures of prehistoric antiquity and strangeness’. . . ‘Lonely bleak islands off N.E. coast. Horrors they harbour—outpost of cosmic influences’. . .‘A very ancient colossus in a very ancient desert. Face gone—no man hath seen it’. . .words, aware—of history and science, and ancient fruits (and the embrace of Eternity). . . ‘There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hidden and terrible powers – the “Black Man” of the witch cult’. . . astonished words. of cellars and cobwebs, of the inquiries of a madman. the hunger of the engine in the fountain burns in the nest. winter. telling farther. shaking with the moments when the clock faces the stars. the race to the gate. leaping with fast dreams. today. yesterday. a cold year (wrapped in beauty and loneliness) that disappears in a stream of years. words. dreams. words. words, lost and found . . . and melted.

  dreaming (dusk) (shadows) (dark corners). . . revising.

  in the tomb. dreaming. and other tales of terror . . .

  (now) (by the light of a West Coast moon . . .)

  after coffee.

  after Thai food.

  after singing along with the new Streisand cd—twice. the

  hungry hands (of the poet) at the keyboard. mining (commitment). deeper and deeper to emerge with landmarks. words. each dreaming of the master . . . each in sorrow and ecstasy, formed by heart. words. no make-up today. {ashton}ished WORDS—rising, leaping (soon to be thrust into the hands of The Editor), fast as midnight explored. fingers in the unwound mists of a woodland asylum, eyes in the master’s Commonplace Book. more words—‘He kissed the instrument, then held it to the moon, that globe of dead refraction’. . ., more phrases—‘Autumn is my favorite time of year; it heralds absolutely the death of torturous summer’. . .‘She placed her hands together in a semblance of prayer’. . .more (legions of deliberateness, each raindrop-tongue pulsing) grow (in Sesqua Valley) (and other haunts). words, stitching blight on the doorways of abandoned streets. blue-veined words, caging the empty-handed prayers of the garden. carved words that must weight in. sign and sentence, lamps in the witch-house! (tearswept) words. choirs of words, gut and reflexes that won’t hide, or stop . . . the stain of dark blossoms covering the page. words, plucked (from the master’s territories) by the velocity of his nets, and piled high on his altar of

  Lovecraftian dreams . . . .

  face pressed to words, roots (of death and decay and dark black earth) and raven stars. briars—burdens, shaking with burdens. the movement (every knot and gesture lit) of association and choice.

  words.

  flares.

  bells.

  bells. and smoke fermenting. bells. thrust into technique, banging on the strictures the stars possess.

  bells.

  bells. the luminous baptism—cooking genesis in the decomposition of apocalypse.

  words.

  wild. decadent.

  falling. shedding restraint. dancing . . .

  dancing—

  FASTER.

  words. nouns and periods, and the commas (that map caves, and understand night infused with crossings), all—the recipe of every leaf, all—loaded with dread. italics diagnosing the rent of blood and butcher’s bill. gang & timber! south, all the way to “There!” with claws in the game. wordshed—strata-phrase, uncork the tears. wordshed—lifting dauntless verbs. words! that light the doom felt last night in Sesqua, to prowl the warrens of Kingsport with kisses of corruption. witness words from hands that reek of smoke. a swirl of thorns hunting marrow . . . words. gathered. the mirrors and thunder of unshuttered words (glowing and trembling)(each a drum and blade and portal), at the threshold with their avid flint harvesting observations of moor and orbit and afflicted memory. words (explorations and ecstasies . . . built for whomever listens). . .and tangled, uncommon yesterdays (wrapped in beauty . . . and loneliness) (like those of the master) that cannot disappear in the stream of years.

  dreaming (dusk) (shadows) (dark corners). . . revising . . .

  in the tomb of the master. dreaming. and other tales of terror.

  {Jon Hassell “Last Night the Moon Came”}

  Jeffrey Thomas

  * * *

  IN LIMBO

  Jeffrey Thomas is the creator of the acclaimed milieu Punktown. Books in the Punktown universe include the short story collections Punktown, Voices From Punktown, Punktown: Shades of Gray (with his brother, Scott Thomas), and Ghosts of Punktown. Novels in that setting are Deadstock, Blue War, Monstrocity, Health Agent, Everybody Scream! and Red Cells. Thomas’s other short story collections include Worship the Night, Thirteen Specimens, Nocturnal Emissions, Doomsdays, Terror Incognita, Unholy Dimensions, AAAEEEIII!!!, Honey is Sweeter Than Blood, and Encounters With Enoch Coffin (with W. H. Pugmire). His other novels are Letters from Hades, The Fall of Hades, Beautiful Hell, Boneland, Beyond the Door, Thought Forms, Subject 11, Lost in Darkness, The Sea of Flesh and Ash (with his brother, Scott Thomas), Blood Society, and A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Dealers. Thomas lives in Massachusetts.

  Anderson awakened to a quiet hissing. As he lay in the dark, his mind scrabbled to make sense of the sound. Steam? Had he left a tea kettle on, to make instant coffee? No, lately he only used his coffee machine. Water running in another apartment, as one of his thinly-partitioned neighbors took a shower? He decided it must be his TV. It was his sole source of companionship these days and he had left it running in the living room, thinking only to lie down in his bedroom for a late afternoon nap.

  That was one of the benefits of being unemployed: being able to sleep whenever the inclination occurred. One of the only benefits of being unemployed. Three hundred dollars a week hardly seemed a benefit, when it took three weeks for him to accrue enough to pay the rent for this one bedroom basement-level apartment. The last time he’d been laid off, he had been getting five hundred dollars a week, but he had exhausted that claim. Fortunately, a week after the money ran out he’d finally found himself a job via a temp agency, at a biotech company. For all of three months, that is, before he’d been laid off again, and his new unemployment claim was based on that brief tease of employment.

  He wondered what it said about his his career choices, his life, or his country that he had been laid off from almost every job he had ever held over the past three and a half decades, since he’d started working at nineteen. He was in his fifties now, and where once he had dreamed he’d be enjoying his last decades in a mellow glow of comfort, here he was having to start anew . . . and start anew again.


  So that muted sizzling sound; was that television static, then? And if so, did that mean his provider had finally moved from threats to actually cutting off his TV service? If that were the case, then he was probably without telephone or Internet service, as well, since all three were part of a bundle deal. Assuming this scenario were correct, he could call the company from his cell phone to restore service, exhausting what he had in the bank, but he’d been saving that for the rent due next week.

  Feeling more fatalistic than alarmed, tiredly irritated rather than outraged (one became accustomed to life’s subtractions), Anderson swung his legs out of bed and sat on its edge for a moment, waiting for his mind’s fog to clear a little. It wasn’t just sleep obfuscating his mind. He’d been drinking earlier and earlier each night, and today had begun in the afternoon with his lunch of microwaved lasagna (hard as plastic outside, a cool mush at its center). Three small glasses of cheap, 80 proof rum. Maybe the static he was hearing, he idly thought, was in his own head.

  He felt further displaced by the darkness that had fallen since he’d laid down. The sun hadn’t fully set then. He looked at his clock radio, saw that it was eight-thirty at night. He’d slept almost three hours.

  At last he stood, and padded barefoot across the carpet toward the subdued light from his kitchen, which was separated from his tiny living room by only a low half partition, providing an unconvincing illusion of two rooms. He wore his usual uniform of t-shirt and sweatpants, hadn’t even bothered to shower today. Hadn’t shaved in a week.

  The static sound grew louder, and as he turned into his living room his suspicions were confirmed. A pale gray glow radiated from his dated model TV, its screen showing only a field of sparkling, gritty static. His television looked like a box filled with millions of frenzied, angry little flies.

  “Bastards,” Anderson muttered, next turning to check his telephone. He didn’t expect a dial tone when he lifted the handset to his ear, and sure enough there was none, but instead he heard soft, fizzing static. This wasn’t the first time his phone had been cut off, so this static instead of dead air seemed irregular to him. Well, in any case he still had his cell phone, and he had no plan for it that might be canceled; he just added minutes via cards purchased at the supermarket.

  After locating his latest unpaid service bill he tapped out his provider’s number on the cell phone’s keys, but when he sent the call and lifted the little device to his ear, instead of the automated menu he expected would greet him he was simply met with more static. Just as on his home phone.

  Murmuring a less articulate curse than before, Anderson studied the phone’s tiny screen, saw that he still had seventy minutes of air time. He punched in the number again. Listened again. Static.

  “What the fuck?” he hissed, his first thought one of conspiracy. Somehow, they had cut off even his cell phone! But how was that possible? No, that was illogical. He decided to try another number. His parents were both deceased, but he had a sister in New London, Connecticut . . .

  Static.

  Okay, he considered, maybe because it wasn’t a local call. Randomly, he tried his favorite pizza restaurant, just a short walk from his apartment, because it was an easy number to remember (and if they answered, well, a pizza delivery was always a good thing). But even though he knew the pizza place remained open until ten at night, not only was there no answer, but there was nothing at all except that now familiar sound of millions of trapped flies.

  “Doesn’t make sense,” Anderson complained, shoving the phone across the kitchen table in disgust.

  He turned toward his computer, its screen black in sleep mode. His only remaining window on the world, at least in the technological sense. He moved to it, impatiently roused his monitor to brightness.

  His desktop image was a photo of himself with his wife taken at Acadia National Park in Maine. They had asked another vacationing couple to take the picture for them. They were standing in front of Jordan Pond, at its far end the softly rounded twin peaks nicknamed the Bubbles. He almost winced when the photo materialized, and wondered why he tormented himself with it.

  Tammy had been diagnosed with breast cancer at twenty-seven. Anderson had held her hand through it all: the double mastectomy, the hysterectomy, chemotherapy, radiation. But the cancer, even more determined than Tammy in her struggle, had insinuated itself into the lymph nodes along her trachea and she had died just a year after this photograph was taken—at the young age of thirty-two. Twenty years ago. She’d been gone longer, now, than they’d been married.

  Anderson had never remarried, and they had never had children.

  When he thought of the jobs that had come and gone, particularly when he’d been drinking, he reflected on the impermanence of anything he had ever produced. His first long-term job, five years working in a boot company—how many of those boots were likely to still exist now? Various positions in a printing company over a span of fifteen years, churning out business cards and stationery, all of that ephemeral paper probably reduced to dust and reabsorbed into the stuff of the universe. Other jobs, some lasting years but others mere months. And never had he helped create anything truly lasting. A bridge, a museum, let alone a painting to hang in a museum, something to outlive him. No, he didn’t even have a child to allow him the notion of a borrowed immortality.

  But even museums crumbled, he consoled himself. Every painting would degrade and return to a state of disorganized matter, too, eventually. Before that happened, their artists would be forgotten by all but dust-sniffing scholars.

  It was natural. It was the way of things. Anderson was not a religious man. He didn’t believe he would rejoin Tammy one day, except in the sense that they would both be part of the eternal stew of atoms, ever in flux, ever in the process of construction and destruction.

  He had no idea what he was trying to say to himself, with all this muddle. He thought: I’m in a state of self-destruction. He smiled at that, sadly, and looked away from his perpetually young wife’s face to click on the icon for his web browser.

  A window opened, filled the screen. It was entirely white, as Anderson’s home page waited to load. It was taking a bit too long.

  And then, the flat screen of the LCD monitor was filled with static. Furthermore, he had left his volume turned to 75 the last time he’d used the computer, probably after listening to a poor copy of an old music video on YouTube. So the sound of the static was a roar, and he was startled, fumbled with his mouse to lower the volume to 0. He Xed the window, banishing the static. Back to the placid photo, his wife’s gentle smile.

  He opened the browser again. Waited again. Static again.

  He typed in different web addresses. Google. YouTube. Hotmail. Every time: only static.

  “Static on a fucking computer?” he exclaimed out loud. He’d never seen it . . . never heard of such a thing. His fatalistic numbness had turned to rage at last. He ranted, “All right . . . what the hell’s going on?”

  The droning noise of TV snow exasperated him, and he whirled at the machine vengefully and shut it off altogether.

  Yet the whispery background noise continued. More subdued, but it was still there. At first he thought he might not have turned his computer volume down all the way, but then Anderson realized the truth. The sound was coming from outside his apartment.

  There were two small windows in the living room, on level with the ground outside, decorative hedges partially obscuring their view. Two small windows in the bedroom, too, all four looking out on the driveway that led to the apartment building’s parking lot, around back. On the other side of the driveway was a Knights of Columbus hall, which on every Wednesday night held a bingo game—its yellow windows filled with white-haired heads—and on most Friday nights, rented for parties, boomed annoyingly with either Indian or Brazilian music.

  He went to one of the twin living room windows now and pulled the cord to raise the blinds. Then, he took hold of the bot
tom of the window frame and pushed it upwards, after which he put his face close to the screen, expecting to smell the crisp cool air of an October night.

  The air had no smell, but with the window raised the hissing had grown louder, almost as loud as the roar of static had been through his computer speakers. Yet even gazing out into the night, he couldn’t tell what was causing the sound, because it was utterly black out there. Normally, however much those hedges might obstruct his view, he’d be seeing streetlights along this tree-lined side street, the floating windows of neighboring houses, even a faint ambient glow rising from the town all around him.

  “Power failure,” he said to himself, his voice sounding too close, as if the screen trapped it. Yes, it had to be a power failure. It hadn’t reached as far as his apartment building, thank God, but had still affected his TV, phone, computer. His services hadn’t been shut off, necessarily, after all—thank God. So what had caused the failure? Considering the interference with his devices, he wondered if it had been a solar flare, but then dismissed that as farfetched. Probably something as prosaic as a car hitting a pole. Or while he slept, had there been an unseasonal lightning storm, bringing down a power line? He hadn’t listened to the news today. Being laid off, he lived in a kind of insulated world, sometimes not venturing outside for days at a time, sometimes close to a week. The weather had almost become an irrelevancy. The outside world, full of busy workers and married couples, an abstraction.