Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three

by Simon Strantzas

  Behind the skeleton and the girls rolled a large, white, bloodstained pickup truck bearing on its door an inscrutable heraldic insignia, military, maybe, or pagan. The truck’s bed was crowded with epicene youths in black and red robes like those of altar boys. Some of them danced, their arms undulating in front of their bodies, their gloved hands tracing shapes in the air; others threw baubles and what appeared to be communion wafers into the crowd, which parted as children ran in to claim them. One landed at Gaspar’s feet and he bent to pick it up. It was a tooth, like a human molar, but the size of a man’s thumb, elongated and coated in yellow-brown plaque. Gaspar, mystified and disgusted, threw it back to the ground, and a kid dressed as a cowboy ran by, scooped it up, and fled back into the crowd. Gaspar wiped his hands on his jeans.

  Next came seven rows of men in red vestments, their hands clasped as though in prayer, but pointed downward, their faces also cast down, chins on chests. On their bald heads were painted demon faces with slitted eyes, curved noses, and grinning mouths full of curved and glistening fangs. Some had pony-tails that served as mustaches for the painted faces. The painted mouths looked disconcertingly real, and Gaspar thought he saw a tongue emerge from the top of one man’s head and lick lasciviously at the teeth. Then came a small, wheeled wooden platform on which capered a goat that brayed and bellowed, the sled pulled on red ropes by two obese, diapered oafs, their pink bellies distended, their navels red knots, their eyes a touch too close together, who with their other hands tootled on long, metallic flutes that glinted orange in the fire’s light.

  It had begun to dawn on Gaspar that he was witnessing something forbidden, that the crowd, which now was full of cheer and merriment and raucous laughter, might, if he tried to leave, turn ugly, dangerous. They might tear him apart. His stomach twisted as the parade continued by, a seemingly endless juggernaut of obscene pageantry: scarecrows with glistening human organs visible through the hay, grey-skinned cadavers hoisted on the backs of policemen wearing Holly Hobbie masks, gnarled, staggering forms that sizzled with festering pustules and buzzed with flies. Among them was Jeremy Scheer, limping along, muttering madly to himself, swatting at the flies that assailed his face and chest. A bruise on his forehead the size of an apple pulsed in the firelight.

  Then the Queen’s float, the last float, the culmination of the parade. It was a giant sleigh, curled up at the front like an elven shoe, of dark wood, ancient, creaking. Six hooded figures walked with it, three to a side. In a throne at its center was Rangel, and warmth burst through Gaspar’s stomach, up his spine, into his head. He was flooded with the resolution of the hope that thought he’d denied himself. She still had the face of a child, the face he knew and loved, the face from that old snapshot, but the body of a grown woman. One elbow rested on the arm of her black throne, her hand aloft, her forearm stilled, her freckled hand waving, blue veins standing out at its back. She spotted him and gasped theatrically, then smiled, the jaw-locked, teeth-together smile of the beauty pageant winner. There were so many teeth, small teeth, crowded in. Rangel’s face contorted with effort, and she began to wriggle from her woman-costume, pulling her small arms from the sleeves. The costume-hand continued to wave as Rangel, just a child, the very child that had gone into the woods thirty years and four days earlier never to return, pushed herself out, clambering down over the lap, down the long legs, trailing behind her a bulging, scarred, red-grey sack of afterbirth. As she climbed from the float, it caught on a spike and burst, releasing horrible oozing fluids and a swarm of buzzing insects that flew into a section of the crowd, prompting some to scramble and flee.

  Gasper opened his arms as Rangel neared, and she opened her arms as well. They confronted each other silently, their eyes hurling messages back and forth like lightning bolts. She wrapped her small arms around him, pushing the side of her face into his belly, and he squeezed her. The homey smell of her—soap and strawberries—brought everything back to him in an overwhelming torrent that weakened his legs. She grasped his index finger with her small hand and guided him up onto the float. As he took his seat, one of the hooded figures approached and affixed upon his head a crown gilded with opals and tourmalines and jewels for whose colors and shapes he had no names.

  As the figure turned, Gaspar caught the merest glimpse of the hard face of his father—their father—in the dark hood. His father jumped from the float and joined a smaller figure. His mother. Their mother. The two turned to a third hooded figure, at the edge of whose cowl Gaspar spied a familiar curl of brown hair. Something somewhere in Gaspar broke off and was pulled away into oblivion. Rangel ascended her throne, climbed back into her costume. The crowd began to murmur, and the murmur separated into words, a chant, a black and blasphemous psalm. The drummers resumed their ritual drumming. The orange fissures in the sky began to crack and open, and whatever was left of Gaspar wondered in terror what had been hidden behind and beyond the façade of sky, what would be revealed when the great starry costume fell away. And then he saw.

  ###

  It is a blazing bright autumn evening. The setting sun pushes its red-orange rays through the orange-red treetops, turning the world the color of cider. A young boy and his younger sister stand at the edge of a great dark wood. “My friends are in the woods,” says the young girl.

  “You don’t have any friends,” says the boy.

  “I do!” she insists, pursing her lips. “They give me gifts. They teach me songs.” She pauses, deciding whether to say the next thing. Finally she says it. “They gave me a costume.”

  The boy’s eyes narrow and he puts his fists on his hips, his bony elbows jutting like less-than and greater-than. “Horse crap,” he says.

  “They did,” she says. “It’s in the woods, and it’s the best costume I’ve ever seen, better than the princess. Wait here. I’ll show you.”

  The boy watches her go into the woods. Further and further down the path she goes in her white sweatshirt and her skinny little faded jeans. The woods rustle and sigh, and the treetops huddle in together, the tree trunks cracking gently as they pull inward. The boy can now only just make out the white of her sweatshirt as the night approaches. The earth fully claims the sun, shadowing the land, banishing light from the devil-haunted streets of Leeds, turning the forest to a towering empire of night, protecting its many secrets, and the boy looks, and he looks, and he looks, and the girl is gone.

  Genevieve Valentine

  VISIT LOVELY CORNWALL ON THE WESTERN RAILWAY LINE

  1.

  The girl in the train car is all alone, except for the doll. She looks tended to—hair neatly pulled back at the crown of her head, a few shiny ringlets at the ends left largely undisturbed from where her mother must have pinched them into the iron.

  It could have been a maid who did her hair, but the wife who sits down opposite her thinks not; the girl’s dress is navy cotton, the sort of thing chosen for practicality in washing, and the wife’s first thought—not unkindly—is that the girl must have wandered up alone from the third-class carriage as the train pulled away from Paddington.

  She has second thoughts when she sees the doll. It’s wearing a dress of rust silk (a colour out of fashion, just at the moment), and in the early-morning light its hair is icy-blonde, leached of any vibrance under the tiny velvet hat, two twists of pink ribbon and a green sequin on the brim standing in for roses. It’s an elegant doll—the dress is in an odd style (it feels much too old, though she couldn’t say why), but there are petticoats peeking out from under the skirt that just brushes the boots fastened with tiny pearl buttons; this is a doll that’s been dressed with care.

  The train rackets across empty countryside, startling birds out of the nearest trees and, once or twice, a deer far off. The wife thinks deer are odd. She knew sheep from back home, but they were solid and stupid and stubborn in a way that felt like they were part of the land. The dainty deer and their long, nervous necks always seem like visitors from someplace else.

  Though they’ve come
from a holiday at her mother-in-law’s, whose neck is markedly similar, so that’s probably not fair to the deer. Her mother-in-law definitely thinks she’s too close for comfort to the sheep. Their country house is merely a complement to the house in London where they make their home; she didn’t want to be reminded how her son had married someone whose country house was a bit too fixedly in the country.

  Poor is a word they never said, or Common. But the wife has worked so hard to make her vowels shallower and to lift her ’r’s and to bring back her ’h’s that she hardly speaks any more; every time she opens her mouth, the farmhouse falls out all over again. She might as well point them to the dirt road down to the village and the fields pockmarked with stands of trees anywhere you looked.

  But the wife doesn’t want to think about it—either her husband’s family or her old home—and she looks at the girl across from her (solemn, not looking at much of anything) and casts about for something to say.

  “I had a doll very much like that,” she says to her husband—to his collar, stiff and white as enamel. He’s so much taller, and it already seems like too much trouble to look up the extra few inches to his face when he’s never looking back at her no matter what she says.

  He glances up from his paper, back down. “I doubt it,” he says to the international report.

  He’s right—she’d never had anything so fine, her cloth doll had worn a dress made out of a scrap of something the last of her brothers outgrew—but still, the grit in her stomach is churning like to make a pearl. She rubs her fingers against the seams of her gloves; practical, plain cotton gloves, fitting for the wife of a professor teaching his first year at Exeter. So his mother had said, at any rate.

  Exeter is a fine town, his mother had said, finer than any the wife had been likely to see before she married. (The Jewel of the West, a poster in Paddington had assured her, the spire pointing up into a watercolour sky like the blade of a knife waiting for you to impale yourself.)

  The girl across the seat is looking from one of them to the other.

  “It’s a lovely doll,” the wife says to the girl, remembering too late that you should never speak about a person before you’ve spoken to them. She learned that, too, from someone—her husband or his sister or his mother, they all enjoyed giving advice—and though she doesn’t understand half of what they tell her, she doesn’t ever really mean to be rude.

  The girl’s looking from one of them to the other, lingering on her husband, her face unmoving but somehow venomous in that way children sometimes manage.

  The wife has the urge to reach for her husband, to say, This is Roger, like it’s a spell that will protect him—from what, she doesn’t know. But she watches the girl’s fingers curl until they disappear into the skirts of her doll, and she watches the girl’s eyes slide to her, and she realises it’s not her husband she cares much about protecting.

  He was beautiful, she wants to say; his kind don’t often ask to marry mine, and the way he kissed me I didn’t think it might have been for spite of someone else, I didn’t think.

  She wants to say, My daughters will have dolls like yours, not dolls like mine, but that thought sifts into sand and blows away before it can even take hold in her throat. It’s been a long holiday, and she knows more than she did about how her children will be looked upon by her husband’s kin (family, they don’t say “kin”, they don’t know what kin is).

  When the train pulls into Ide Halt station, which rises up out of the trees and the bushes beside the tracks like the skeleton of a thing that a thousand springs have grown over, she’s still looking at the little girl, skin white as the porcelain doll’s. The girl hasn’t spoken, in all this time. The girl’s not even looking at her any more; she’s looking through her, or beyond her, as children do.

  Her husband’s folded his paper under his arm and looks carefully at the pocketwatch he makes a point of checking often, which she thinks is showy but that he explained once was an heirloom, and therefore looking at it in public was only a demonstration of respect for punctuality, in a tone that suggested how amusing it was that she should think to correct him about manners.

  He stands and moves almost as soon as the train’s stopped; she takes her bag from beside her and moves to stand up. The girl watches. In her hands the doll pivots, too, following them, and the hair on the wife’s neck stands up to see it.

  “I have a dress just like that,” she says, doesn’t know what possessed her to say such a foolish thing to a stranger when it couldn’t matter less (there are lies and there are lies).

  Outside the window, her husband’s on the platform looking for her, watch still in hand and glinting under the high sun. Though she can’t see from here, she can feel the spires from the church and the university rising up ahead of her like a devouring mouth.

  Before she steps down she straightens her shoulders, tugs the hem of her jacket, pinches her cheeks to bring up the colour. Her husband married her kind for only one reason besides spite: she’s handsome, and has married one of her betters, and she can guess he wants her to make a good showing.

  She’s guessed right; as he takes her hand to help her onto the platform, his thumb runs hot across her knuckles, right through her gloves. (The wife of a professor should be beautiful enough to raise interest, and demure enough to deflect gossip. No one’s told her that, but some lessons no one need bother to explain.)

  ###

  On her way to the high street for shopping, she passes a building so sharp and square it reminds her always of a tomb. Her husband told her it was a morbid thing to say, but she avoids the corner where she’ll have to turn and see it looming, hated.

  Still, to turn the other way and avoid it means passing by the toy shop that lines up dolls in the window on a shelf above the train sets. Their porcelain faces crack a little more every month they sit in the window under full sun, everything about them leaching brightness, so a dress the colour of a robin’s egg slowly gives in to the watery blue of a spring sky, and the doll with the darkest hair is going grey at the temples faster even than the wife. One of the dolls had violet eyes that have turned unnervingly pale. She can’t remember the colour of the doll’s eyes in the train car, long ago, no matter how hard she tries.

  She takes the street that passes the tomb.

  That’s where she finds the little dress shop that has the rayon frock in the window: high-necked and plain, with the skirt long enough and the bloused top with its fluttering suggestion of sleeves being stylish and respectable at the same time. It’s the colour of rust. She tries not to think about it as a victory; what a strange thing it would be to think.

  Her husband makes a little face when he sees her in it, as if it worries him. But after a moment of study he must not know where to explain the fault, because he only says, “I hope it wasn’t expensive, you know how I feel about profligacy,” and kisses her on the cheek.

  Profligacy means wasteful extravagance. She’s been educating herself; he asked her to, as the wife of a professor.

  ###

  She wants to go out walking—they’re so close to Dartmoor she can smell it when it rains—but it doesn’t suit the wife of a professor, he says, to be tromping around in the mud and getting brown as a nut.

  She goes anyway, when he has his long teaching days; she can’t stand being still, as if the air in the house is too thick to breathe. So she puts on her rain boots and her mackintosh and walks as far as she can, like Exeter’s pushing her out, the moor pulling her in.

  When she’s passed the farmsteads and the neat fields and the copses of trees she strikes out into the moor, brambles catching on her coat and muck slapping at her boots across the wide swathes of open space, the sky rolling out in every direction, the scrub in the far distance laid out in red and purple and threaded through with rocks. It feels barren of life, and she breathes as deep as she can. (Sometimes she hears the train whistle, far to the south, and shivers like it’s an animal calling out for her.)

  Almo
st too far to see, there’s a dark ridge along the horizon that might be trees, but she can never walk far enough to tell before she has to turn around.

  She always knows when. She has no pocketwatch, but some people are born able to tell the time.

  ###

  At the end of their third winter in Exeter, the husband finds her standing in front of the toy store, staring at the line of dolls.

  One of them seems to be dressed as Marie Antoinette, which he finds a little morbid, but most of them are meant for simpler children; a blonde girl in a navy dress, a lady with roses in her hat.

  She has a few flakes of snow caught on the brim of her cloche, and her lapel’s turned up against the cold, her hands tucked into her pockets. She looks as unhappy as she did the night he told her he was leaving, just before he asked her to marry him.

  He rests his hand on her back, wonders that he’s missed how badly she must want children.

  ###

  She disappears in spring.

  Her valise is still at the bottom of the wardrobe, and there’s a roast wrapped in twine still sitting in the cold oven when the husband comes home, and so he thinks at first she’s gone walking, and then that she’s gone shopping. Nothing else occurs to him until everything has closed for the night, and he wonders if he should have gone down to the train station to ask about her rather than expecting her to come home.

  The professor’s wife had not gone to the train station. She hadn’t hired a cab, or sought a bus. The police search obligingly after he realises her rain boots are gone, but there are only so many miles of wilderness one can bear to look through, and though they send someone as far south as the Haldon tower to look out for her, the answer to every question is always, unspoken, the Moor.