Year's Best Weird Fiction: 1

by Laird Barron

  Since his eyes couldn’t penetrate the darkness—it was so inky he couldn’t even make out the hedges, so close to his screen—he focused on listening to the hissing sound instead. What was that? Static from all the TVs in the other thirty-plus apartments in this cheap little building with its faux brick facade? No, he thought, it must be the stirring of a strong breeze, wind blowing the leaves of trees. Sure, a windstorm could have brought down a power line. During Hurricane Irene, last year, he’d lost power for a day and a half.

  Or maybe the hissing was rain. The sibilant noise also sounded like a crackling fire. Or the blown sands of a desert storm. Any or all of the four elements.

  Voices behind him caused Anderson to whirl around. Gooseflesh spread down his arms; he had mistakenly believed the voices were coming from his computer speakers, but they were in Spanish, and passing through the hallway on the other side of his flimsy, dung-brown kitchen door.

  He crept to the door quietly, not wanting to give himself away as he pressed an eye to the tiny peephole lens.

  There had apparently been a string of people chattering past, maybe a family, headed in the direction of the building’s front door. (There was another entrance at the other end of the corridor, opening onto the parking lot.) Anderson caught a fleeting, distorted glimpse of a young girl—late teens or early twenties—he saw from time-to-time, though he didn’t know which apartment she lived in or even on which of the building’s three floors. He always noticed her, however, because she had a pretty face and a very short, curvy body with a protuberant bottom, typically outlined by tight black jeans. He took her to be Mexican, or from somewhere in Central America, like most of the tenants in this building. When he’d first moved here, going on three years ago, he’d been wary of these tenants, particularly the men, but none of them had ever seemed threatening or impolite, even behind his back. Quite the opposite: even the most thuggish-looking teenage boys were quick to hold the door for him if he were carrying groceries, and he had occasionally chatted with a couple of the older women, who seemed to enjoy testing him on what he remembered of his high school Spanish lessons, once he’d admitted to them that he had studied their language for two years.

  He held no illusions about inspiring this young woman—any young woman, any woman of any age—to fall in love with him, at this stage in his life, but that didn’t mean his libido had expired. He felt like the proverbial young man trapped inside an aging man’s body. At nineteen, working in that boot company, he had been befriended by an Armenian man in his forties. That man, nicknamed Johnny, has once confessed to Anderson that the years had flashed by like a comet. He was still young inside, he protested . . . as if a cruel trick had been played on him. Anderson had never forgotten those words. Now he was living them.

  He figured those people who had passed his door were going to check out what was happening . . . were going to look out the front door. He was tempted to unlock and open his door, step out into the corridor and join them, but a shyness prevented him. He withdrew from the peephole. Anyway, in case the apparent power outage did spread to their building, he should make preparations.

  Anderson drew a kitchen chair over to his refrigerator, stood on the chair to reach a set of cabinets above the fridge, dug out two large candles, a lighter, a flashlight. His “apocalypse stash,” he had joked to himself when he’d put these meager supplies aside after the Hurricane Irene experience.

  Next he went to his bathroom and started filling his tub with water, in case he did lose power and needed to scoop water into his toilet in order to flush it.

  A little excitement didn’t really hurt, did it? He almost welcomed this event, whatever its cause. Anything to break up life’s monotony.

  Anderson was frying two steaks for himself—wanting to use up whatever he had in his fridge before a power loss descended, rather than have to throw food away later—when peripherally he thought he saw a face surface through the shifting pool of interference framed in his computer monitor. He snapped his attention in that direction.

  He had shut off his TV, but not his computer, though its volume had remained muted. After some more attempts to go online, he had left a window open. A feed of restless nothingness. As he stared directly at the monitor now, he saw nothing changed. For all its crackling and popping activity, it was as inactive as a gravestone slate blown up to the highest magnification, its molecules electrified yet bound.

  Just his imagination, he decided, superimposing structure on chaos. Meaning on the meaningless.

  And then he heard a woman scream.

  It was out in the hallway. It had made Anderson jump. This time he rushed to his kitchen door and flung it open before he could consider that he might be exposing himself to some danger . . . or at the very least, to a problem that had nothing to do with him. But the wild, panicky crying that followed the initial cry drew him into the hallway and toward its source: the vestibule of the apartment building’s front entrance.

  On either side of him, the hallway’s walls were plastered with broad trowel strokes, giving them the look of being covered in dirty cake frosting. A number of brown doors interrupted the hall throughout its length. They tended to seal certain odors in the spaces between them. One section might smell enticingly of hamburger cooking for some Mexican dish or other. Another section might smell of incense. This one stank of trapped cigarette smoke, even though smoking was supposed to be against the rules for tenants. At least it beat the chemical fumes that wafted down from the apartment upstairs sometimes. Another tenant had confided to Anderson he believed the young couple up there had a meth lab going.

  Anderson pushed through the door before the short set of steps that took one up to ground level and the front vestibule. This was like a little airlock, a cramped telephone-booth space between two glass doors. Within it, on either side, were the apartments’ tiny mailboxes. And standing in this tight space, her hands pressed to the glass of the outermost door like suction cups, was one of the female tenants who had tested Anderson on his Spanish. She was still sobbing, staring out into the night.

  “Hey,” he asked her, “are you okay?”

  The short, stocky woman whipped around to face him. Her eyes were ballooned with frenzy, and she started babbling in Spanish, pointing through the glass. “Mi marido desaparecido!”

  “Slow down,” Anderson told her, “I don’t understand you . . . uh, no lo entiendo.”

  The woman took hold of Anderson’s forearm, still pointing behind her at the outer glass door. “My friends . . . my friends from Apartment 18, upstairs, they went outside to see what was going on. They told my husband they were going to go look . . .”

  “Yes?” Anderson prompted her. Had that been the family he had heard passing his door? That attractive young girl amongst them?

  After drawing in a shuddery gulp of air, the woman continued, “They didn’t come back . . . we checked. We knocked and knocked on their door. They left it unlocked, so we went in and no one was there. So my husband, Enrique, Enrique said let’s go outside and see if they’re out there.” The woman glanced over her shoulder at the door. Her bright but transparent reflection was superimposed over the darkness. “When I saw it was so black out there, I told Enrique don’t go. It didn’t look right . . . I was afraid . . .”

  Anderson looked through her reflection. So he wasn’t the only one who had thought it just looked too dark out there. Unnaturally dark. Even, perhaps, for a power loss.

  “Enrique opened the door.” Her sobbing was growing breathless, her words harder to get out. Her fingers crushed Anderson’s arm. “I told him don’t step outside . . .I told him! But . . . but . . .”

  “But what? What happened?”

  She looked up into Anderson’s eyes beseechingly. “He stepped into the black and he was gone! In one second . . . just gone! I couldn’t see him! I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t hear him! Only that sound.”

  “Look,” Anderson told her sooth
ingly, “there’s been a power outage. It’s just really dark out there.” Somehow he didn’t sound convincing even to himself. What they were both feeling . . . about the unnaturalness of the darkness . . . it was an instinctual, intuitive reaction.

  “No . . .no!” she insisted, hysterical. “It’s like the black just swallowed him!”

  Then, something beyond the woman caught Anderson’s attention, and he said more to himself than to her: “Hey.”

  The woman turned to follow his gaze. When she saw that thin black wisps, like inky tendrils of smoke, were flowing around the edges of the door, she shrieked.

  Was it smoke? Was there a fire nearby, and the smoke was so thick out there it obscured all vision? But why then wouldn’t they be smelling it? And somehow these wisps—though pitch black—suggested to Anderson a grainy, gritty, and restless quality . . . as if the snaking tendrils were composed of millions of tiny seething particles. Like the swarming flecks of static on his computer screen.

  The lights went out in the hallway.

  The woman’s wailing was ear-piercing. She clawed at Anderson irrationally, and he ducked his face away from her. Still, her nails raked his neck. And then she seemed to fall at his feet. Anderson reached down for her, and for a second his fingers brushed against her back, but then she didn’t seem to be there anymore.

  Her screams were abruptly cut off. The hallway became silent . . . except for the muffled hiss beyond the glass door.

  Anderson spun away, blundered in the direction of his apartment, so unseeing that his eyes might have been burnt out of his skull. His left hand felt ahead of him along the wall, with its rough plastered texture. He struck one of the hallway’s interspersed doors, shoved it away from him, and now felt at the wall on the left-hand side. Desperately, clawing like the woman had clawed at him. He resisted looking over his shoulder. It would be pointless. His right hand finally closed on a doorknob. What if he had the wrong apartment, and the door was locked? But it turned in his hand, he slipped inside, slammed the door shut and locked it.

  The smoke had got around the edges of the glass door . . . the gap under his door was much wider. Still, with no other plan, Anderson felt his way across his lightless kitchen to where he always draped a bath towel over that little half partition between rooms, to dry his hands on when he worked at the sink. Groping wildly, he found the towel, turned back in the direction of the door (he hoped) and got down on hands and knees. He felt for the door, found it, pressed the towel against that empty wedge at its bottom. The act offered scant relief, but again, at the moment it was better than nothing.

  He got back to his feet, next felt for the counter. His heart’s hammering seemed to cause his every movement to misfire. Finally, though, he located the candles and lighter he had set down there a short time earlier. He thumbed the lighter’s grooved wheel, got a flame, and lit the wick of first one fat candle in its jar, and then a second.

  Now holding one of these candles before him—as if its ghostly flame and meager fluttering light were enough to ward off the unknowable immensity of the universe—he stepped a little closer to the door, staring at the towel he had pushed up against its bottom edge.

  He expected to see tendrils curling and coiling into the room around this paltry barrier, a blacker black than the room’s darkness, but as yet there were none.

  Anderson remembered the window he had left open. Would its flimsy metal screen be enough to hold back the blackness, or would it now be filtering its way through the mesh? He turned quickly and, still holding the candle before him, hurried to the far side of the living room. To think he had put his face close to the screen, only a brief while ago! Now he was reluctant even to reach out and close the window, lest a thick black tentacle formed of coalesced darkness tore through the screen and wrapped around his wrist. But he got the window closed, and turned the lever to lock it. He then locked the window beside it, moved into his bedroom to lock those two windows as well.

  He stepped backwards from the windows, into the middle of his bedroom floor, and stood there with his candle.

  He realized he was holding his breath, as if afraid to draw the darkness into his lungs.

  He realized he was waiting.

  When he returned to the kitchen, to check on the door again—still no insinuating tendrils—he glanced at the counter beside the sink and saw his flashlight lying there beside his lighter. Stupid: in his panic he had forgotten the most important of the supplies he had stashed after last year’s hurricane and outage. He set down the candle and picked up the flashlight instead.

  After sweeping a beam of light across the bottom of the kitchen door he switched off the flashlight to conserve its batteries. Then, by candlelight, he rummaged in the cabinets under his kitchen sink until he found what he was looking for: a silver-gray roll of duct tape.

  He got down on the floor beside the bottom of his apartment’s door, moved the towel aside, and before any fingers of blackness could come creeping under the door drew a long strip of tape across the gap. He fortified that with several more strips. Then, he sealed the length of the door on both sides, and finally the thin space across the top.

  Every residence by law was required to have two means of egress in case of fire, preferably a back way out. His own second way out—typical of all the building’s apartments—was simply another door opening into the same hallway. In his case, this door was right around the other side of the kitchen wall, near his bathroom. So he went to this door and outlined it in duct tape as well.

  What about the four little windows? He considered this, told himself the windows were fairly new and had never been drafty, seemed pretty airtight.

  But moments later he was sealing the edges of the windows with duct tape, too.

  He used up what he’d had left of tape on the roll, but at least it wasn’t until he’d covered the edges of all four windows. Then he remembered he had another roll in the cabinet under his bathroom sink, because his shower head had been leaking and he’d once done a bandage job on it.

  Duct tape against the universe. Sure, it made sense to a human and an American, he thought, trying to humor himself. Not that he succeeded much in that attempt. His humor was as pathetic a protection as the tape itself.

  Whatever this phenomenon . . . this force. . .was, it would have him when it was ready. When the stain had spread further. Stain? There he was thinking like an arrogant human again. This blackness was purity, wasn’t it? He and his kind were the stain. A stain to be cleansed . . . eradicated.

  The thought that the blackness might be sentient terrified him. But even more terrifying, perhaps, was the thought that it held no intelligence. That it was mindless . . . indifferent. That it had no intent, no mission. That it just was.

  Creeping stealthily from room to room (all two of them), Anderson listened for sounds of humanity around him. Often on the other side of the wall from his sink, he’d hear the neighbor’s shower running and running. God, did they take long showers. But now, nothing. Above him in the kitchen/living room, he’d frequently hear children running up and down the creaky floor. Sometimes, when he lay in bed, directly overheard he’d listen to the rhythmic squeaking of bed springs. People making love (maybe that young couple who were rumored to be running a meth lab). The sound would torment him with memories of his young wife. Torment him with the fact that he hadn’t been to bed with another person, even casually, in almost a decade.

  But there were no sounds from the apartment above, either. He was tempted to fetch a broom, pound the tip of its handle against his ceiling to see if he could establish communication. And then what? Communicate in Morse code? He didn’t know it. And what if by making a loud sound he attracted the blackness to him? Maybe it didn’t realize he was still in here. Maybe he had slipped past its notice altogether, where the others had been less lucky.

  Maybe he should blow out his candles, lest the blackness peek in through the thin slits in the Veneti
an blinds over his windows. Maybe if he sat here in the dark, overlooked, until . . .

  . . .until what? Help came? The National Guard? The cavalry? The day?

  He greatly suspected that day would never dawn again. Once more, it was an intuition. He felt it in his gut.

  He found himself standing unmoving in the center of the kitchen floor, tensed up as if he might bolt into a run at any second. Run where? Into a wall?

  Slowly he became aware of dumb physical sensations. For one, his throat was dry. He was thirsty. He had milk in the fridge and he told himself he should start drinking it before it went bad. But at the same time, even the thought of putting anything into his knotted stomach at this point made him want to vomit. Besides, when the milk had run out, when the food had run out, and all he had left was tap water, then what? Slowly starve? So why even bother at all?

  He was going to die. Or maybe not so much die, he thought, as cease to be . . . as if there were a difference. Curiously, he was not falling to his knees weeping, pounding the walls with his fists, yelling at the top of his lungs. Despite his fear, running through every nerve like an electrical current, despite the nausea, he was oddly calm. Was it brave acceptance? More likely it was the soul having been clubbed down so thoroughly that all it could do was blink and . . . wait. But this clubbing hadn’t only occurred tonight. He felt it had been going on for decades now. Since Tammy’s death, but even before that, really. Maybe from the day of his birth, that beating, that hammering, had begun. Maybe that was why new souls came into this world screaming.