Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three

by Simon Strantzas

  “Are you sleeping with him?”

  “What?” Her voice broke. “Nate, the boys are right…”

  His shout punched down like a hammer of God. “Answer me, Abby! Was this some whore’s bargain? Said you’d jump into bed if he’d just cut your poor idiot husband a break?”

  The radio was playing a mellowed-out beach-pop song by a local band that made it out. They used to get her dreaming about coarse California sand from the anarchic desolation of Sokol Auditorium. This song always made her think of breaking surf, of drinks with plastic umbrellas. Maybe they should go on vacation. Maybe they should never come back. “No,” she hissed. “You know I would never do that. You know I would never want to.” She nodded toward the backseat. “Can we please talk about this later?”

  For three minutes, they all breathed together. Then Nate changed the station with a sudden strike of his hand, muttered “Hate that song,” and drove back onto the road. So the rest of the way they listened to Dr. Touchdown on KMKO out of Lincoln. “Wear them down,” said Dr. Touchdown, “The key is to wear down the defense, go for the throat, and don’t let up. Lights out. Bam.” From the backseat, Merrill echoed, very softly, “bam!”

  She was ready—no, not ready, never ready, but resigned—for a fight, but when they got home Nate went into the field and started running the combine even though there was nothing to strip anymore. He watched in a state of near motionlessness. And Abigail watched him from behind the muslin curtain, and the boys watched her over the stained pages of their homework, and the dogs watched the boys with sad bovine eyes. Boys and dogs alike asked for things—food, drink—and eventually, after the sun began to set, Teddy put down his American History book and asked for an explanation of Croatoan. When the Roanoke Colony disappeared, he said, they left that word behind. Yes, a sign post. Salvation, five miles south of Cripple Creek.

  “Nobody knows,” said Zeke. “They probably got eaten by an Indian tribe.”

  “Maybe they ran away,” Abigail said. “Maybe they wanted to.”

  ###

  The cats were gone. She waited for them by their little bowls of dirt-colored pellets for a week, but they weren’t coming back. She had looked everywhere. She even peeked down into the well. She didn’t know why, exactly. Cats didn’t just jump into wells. Did a tiny piece of her think that perhaps someone—who?—had killed the cats and thrown them in? There was something down there, ding dong bell, but the flashlight revealed a collar, a yellow tag, a long nose. It was the dogs. She had last seen them the day before, pacing near the corn and whimpering. Nate had gone to tie them up, and she assumed, to untie them.

  She was watching the kitchen clock tick toward 3:30 and wondering how to tell the boys when a silver Dodge Ram pulled up to the house. Like a crocodile, or a tyrannosaur, sidling up to its prey. Ambrose Pierce stepped out of the cab and she immediately calculated how long it would take Nate to get back from his meeting with Ticonderoga Mills.

  “I haven’t seen you and the boys in town much.” Ambrose looked aside at the barely-tilting wind chimes. “Haven’t heard from you lately neither.”

  Abigail ground her teeth, head shaking slightly to the internal retinue of all the things she’d really like to say to Ambrose, to Nate. Finally, she conceded that “Nate’s been acting a little different lately. Since that light came down…”

  “What light? Different how?”

  Different like standing in the sea of corn, humming at the sky? Different like telling Zeke he couldn’t go out for Junior League baseball this year, because he was “needed” at home? Different like picking up the phone and telling her sister that she wasn’t home when she was just around the corner, fixing dinner? No, that was more trouble than it was worth.

  “Just different. He’s stressed. It’s hard, you know, worrying about feeding a family when your neighbor’s lying in wait, drooling over your property.” She gave him a look. He wasn’t fazed. He’d long-ago reconciled himself to the vulture’s life. “Maybe the water’s gone bad. All the fracking they’re doing out by the aquifer.”

  Ambrose clicked his tongue, muttering something about “hippie bullshit,” then leaned in, putting his right hand on the door frame as if he owned the place, as if she wouldn’t have slammed the door on his fingers. His voice lowered. “Do you need help, Abby?”

  “No, I don’t need your help. What kind of help could you give me?” She grabbed the door. “Nate’s coming home soon. I don’t want to be a witness in a murder trial.”

  Actually Nate didn’t come home for another hour. She heard his truck pull up but he didn’t come in, and when she ventured outside he was standing and staring at the freshly scalped corn field with his keys dangling from his right hand, as if hypnotized by an inaudible sermon. She asked if he was all right, but her fingers wouldn’t quite rise to touch his arm. His exhale seeped out like a deflating balloon.

  “What did the guy at the mill say?”

  “Max Beecham is a motherfucker.”

  “What?”

  “Max Beecham doesn’t believe in us.”

  Abigail hurried back inside. She called her sister’s cell but it was off; called her house phone and only got her five-year-old niece. “Will you tell mommy to call Aunt Abby? Aunt Abby, in Cripple Creek.” She dropped the phone when she heard the porch squeak, but it was just the boys, who dropped their dusty backpacks and started clapping and calling, “Here boy, here boy!” Of course no dogs answered.

  All day she’d been hoping that some vagabond, some wanderer, had snatched up the dogs in the middle of the night and dumped them in the well. Or that perhaps they’d been run over on the highway, or slain by a disease, or just spontaneously died—and that Nate had thrown the bodies in the well in a well-meaning attempt to protect the boys from the reality of death. But when the boys were still mewling out in the field well after she’d called them in for dinner, Nate said, “Boys, I told you, they ran away. Told you we didn’t train them well enough. Probably halfway to Colorado by now.”

  He turned to the little spoons tucked into the little chipped serving dishes, her meek attempts to ward off sadness. “Why aren’t we eating our corn? Wasn’t that the whole point of moving out here?” She thought they ruled out subsistence years ago. “Growing our own food? Living off our own land? Unless you think there’s something wrong with it. You and Pierce.”

  She waited until after the boys were in bed and she had promised Merrill that they would put up lost and found flyers all over town, to say something to Nate. That was how long it took to sculpt the nauseous worry in her heart into something spear-shaped. She lingered at the top of the staircase, rehearsing her words—did something happen to the dogs last night or I found something in the well—when Nate rounded the corner at the bottom of the stairs and started laboriously climbing up.

  “What happened to the dogs?” came stammering out when he reached the second floor.

  He sighed loudly. She willed herself not to apologize. “They ran away. Like I said.”

  “But I found them in the well.”

  Nate’s red eyes finally focused on her. Her poor husband was so horrified—so honest-to-the-bones horrified—by this revelation that he grabbed her by the arm, saying he needed to explain something to her—explain—then pulled the string on the door to the attic to drag her up into that spider-webbed lair of things unwanted, things unexplained. He pushed her down toward the boxes of books that they never bothered to cut open after the move and descended the ladder again, slamming the door shut behind him as she lay shaking in a cloud of dust.

  ###

  At the very beginning she was relieved to be alone. The dark erased everything that taunted her in the light—the carved-up acres of a burned and spent, uniform earth, the harrowing passage of time. She made believe that she was nothing but a set of lungs, expanding and shrinking. She curled up near the door with her palm against the cold wood and slept.

  But when sunlight leaked in through the tiny attic window and the attic door
was still closed, the muscles around her ribs started to cramp. She tried pounding her fist and then a flashlight against the attic floor. She tried shouting—first at Nate, then at Teddy, then at Zeke. She avoided yelling Merrill’s name until she had no choice. The boys’ voices seemed so quiet, like they were many islands away across a great sea.

  But someone was moving down there below the attic door. She tried everything to talk to it. “Nate?” she called. “Nate, please listen to me. Nate, I love you.” When that got no response she started to scream—complicated accusations about his failure as a pharmaceutical sales supervisor and his need to maintain a sense of moral superiority that degenerated into words that degenerated into noise. She chewed off the tips of her nails; she dragged her fingers through her hair so many times that strands began to come off in her fist.

  And then, after the sky’s white-blue started turning to pewter, the door swung open. She was slow crawling toward it, but it was Teddy. Teddy, her wonder. Her savior. The only boy they’d named after a president. “Come quick,” he whispered. “Daddy’s in the field.”

  It did not work. Nate must have been waiting downstairs, because she woke up back in the attic with a welt and a throbbing pain in the back of her head. She resumed screaming because now the attic was drenched in fading amber half-light and that meant she had been locked in that room for almost an entire day. A child’s voice screamed back at her from somewhere on the second floor. The “mom” dragged like a serrated knife through the wood and the insulation and she realized it was Teddy. He shouted something about “dad” and “crazy” and “room”, and she thought at first that he was talking about her plight but no. Nate had locked him in the spare bedroom, the one they saved for family—family that never visited.

  She told Teddy to apologize to Nate. She told him to ask Zeke for help. But in the end all she could do was press herself flat against the floor and sing, “I love you. A bushel and a peck. A bushel and a peck, and a hug around the neck.”

  That night she stacked up broken furniture underneath the attic window and tried to signal Ambrose with the flashlight. His truck was hurtling by ten miles over the speed limit; he was probably on his way back from Cellar’s Bar and Grill and he was probably rushing home for another, but she didn’t have a choice. She switched the flashlight on and off, on, off, on, off until his red tail lights disappeared behind the cottonwoods. Had the truck slowed? It hadn’t stopped.

  When the attic door was pushed open she had to bite her knuckle to keep from calling Ambrose’s name.

  “You have to let the boys go,” she said. She could not see Nate’s expression, but his face had been a dark blank to her for months now. That light from the sky had come and eaten all the color off his face—all the variegation, the jokes he’d told her, the promises he’d made her. Every time he had shown her what a good father he was. “I’ll stay with you, I’ll help you through this, but you need to let someone else take care of them for a while.”

  “I need you to prove your loyalty to me, Abby. You and Teddy both.” He pushed a cob of their corn—tiny shriveled kernels bounded their grotesquely swollen cousins like rings of baby teeth—toward her on a paper plate. The big awful kernels looked like unblinking eyes. “Please eat it. Please show me I’m not wrong.”

  She picked out a little tooth-kernel and tucked it down between her lip and her gum. It immediately dissolved and filled her mouth with something that melted like pixy stix, something that tasted like bloody soap. “Let them go stay with my sister.”

  He nudged the plate with the long barrel of his gun. “More.”

  So she ate more; but Teddy must not have, because his little voice dwindled to nothing but a whisper that Abigail eventually realized was her own ragged breath, tearing in and out.

  It took Merrill hours that might have been days to speak to her. He would only push the door open by an inch. She crawled toward him in the dark, chewing another kernel—she was hoping they were poisoning her, and was taking the fact that she couldn’t feel her legs anymore as a good sign. “We have to be quiet so Daddy doesn’t get mad,” he whispered. Pale blue eyes rolled down toward the light. “Teddy won’t come out of that room.”

  “I know,” she said. “Listen, baby. You gotta tell your daddy that you’re going to the well. Tell him you’re going to get water and then go to Mr. Pierce’s, okay? Go. I love you.”

  Pale blue eyes blinked, very slowly. In between she saw her little boy smiling, crying, sleeping, dead. A great many colors passing so quickly they were all bleeding together into one monstrous, endless whole.

  ###

  When Abigail woke it was day. Rainbow sunlight filled the room with glitter, though she wore a cloak of shadow. The attic door was open, and Ambrose was clambering up to see her. “Abby? Abby, are you in here?” He sighed green mint toothpaste. “You’re okay now. Nate’s downstairs, he’s messed up bad. I don’t think he can move. I don’t know what’s happened to him, he… I think he needs a doctor. I can’t find… any of the boys.”

  She started to take off the shadow-cloak. The light started to touch the old useless leather skin she could no longer feel. Her hair wrapped around the sun and started to burn.

  “Abby? Honey?”

  The shadow-cloak pooled around the stumps that had once held her feet. All her cells looked at Ambrose, waiting to be embraced, but when his eyes and only his eyes looked back at her they wept with horror and hatred and he shot her with his unseeing fingers that cradled the gun like a baby. The pain was not a pain but a liberation. She rose as Ambrose fell, rose all the way to the ceiling and blossomed like a rose, filling the house’s every nook. She saw Nate on the couch, dying and then dead and still shuddering, pieces of his mortal coil stubbornly struggling along on the floor. But he was fractured; she was whole.

  The walls of the house peeled open like an onion for Abigail. Outside, the well was beating like a brilliant magenta heart, a small nuclear star. The boys were inside with the dogs; they were all waving to her. The many-splendored light was in there too, curling and coiling as it prepared to spring-board off this world and into the next. It wrapped her in electric seaweed tendrils and promised her oceans. It promised her color. But when the boys weren’t broken down into simpler matter, they were saying “Mama” and for them she floated down. Crimson and indigo and violet, for violence.

  Robert Shearman

  BLOOD

  In the morning Donald and Chrissie would go down to the breakfast room, and there they’d have croissants. Donald would have his croissants with confiture and with beurre. He liked saying confiture and beurre, he liked exaggerating the accent, he especially liked rolling the ‘r’s in the beurre. Chrissie told him that if he wanted to look French he should eat his croissants plain, that was the proper way to do it, and Donald noticed how disapproving the waitress was when he hacked away at his croissants tourist-like with his knife fair bleeding jam. But then, as Donald thought privately, maybe you could get away with eating good croissants plain, but these croissants weren’t very good. The hotel itself wasn’t very good. It was small, and it was discreet, and that was enough.

  There’d be cold meats too, threadbare slices of ham and salami, and Donald would eat these as well. Chrissie stuck to her croissants, she was a vegetarian. She said she didn’t mind Donald eating meat, and that was one of the reasons he liked her, she was so sweet and forgave him all his flaws. So long as he brushed his teeth before he kissed her, just in case any scraps of dead animal were sticking to them.

  And after breakfast the happy couple would set out and explore Paris. They had done all the popular tourist sites, and there was nothing wrong with that, no doubt they were popular for a reason. They went up the Eiffel Tower. They walked down the Champs Elysees. At Montmartre Donald paid twenty euros so that an artist could draw a sketch of Chrissie, and Chrissie was delighted, and flung her arms around Donald nice and tight, and she told him that she loved him very much.

  She told him she loved him quite
often, and he was always pleased to hear it, but he sometimes thought the words came out a little too easily. Still, it was probably nothing to worry about.

  Of an evening they would stroll hand in hand by the bank of the Seine, no matter that it was quite a hike from their hotel, no matter that it was usually raining. They looked up in the sky, right up at the moon, and pretended it was a different moon to the one they had back at home. “I love the Paris moon,” said Chrissie. “Me too,” he said.

  He told her he loved her quite often as well, and each time he said it he felt a little giddy, and he had to force it out, as if it were a confession.

  Chrissie was the one who said they shouldn’t go back to England. She said it on the fourth morning, just before they went downstairs for the croissants. They’d just stay here, together, forever. And Donald had already had the same idea. He’d had it a week ago. He’d had it when he’d locked the front door to his flat in Chiswick, when he’d got the taxi to the airport—he’d kept on expecting that someone might stop him—he’d kept expecting he would stop himself—he’d thought, everything’s going to change, I may never be able to go home again. He hadn’t told Chrissie because he hadn’t wanted to scare her. He never wanted her to be scared, he just wanted to protect her, always, always. Through the entire flight he’d been shaking and he’d had to pretend it was excitement.

  “Do you mean it?” said Donald. “Do you really want to stay here?” And Chrissie said yes, didn’t he? As if it were the simplest thing. She asked whether he had enough money to support them, and he told her not to worry, but the same thought had been nagging away at him ever since they’d arrived in Paris. They wouldn’t be able to afford to stay in a hotel for long, not even a budget hotel like this. They could get a cottage somewhere, maybe in the countryside, that would be cheap—he’d have to get a job, and so would she—maybe they could be farmers!—maybe they could keep chickens and grow their own food and things!—maybe they wouldn’t need money! Maybe, maybe.