The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition

by Paula Guran [editor]

  It occurred to him there was no one in charge here to watch this field, to witness its presence in the world, to wonder at its peace or fury. No doubt the owners and the field hands lived some distance away. This was the way of things with modern farming, vast acreages irrigated and cultivated by machinery, and nobody watched what might be going on in the fields. It had been much the same when Caroline vanished. It had seemed almost as if the fields had no owners, but were powers unto themselves, somehow managing on their own, like some ancient place.

  Dan took continuous visual notes. He itched to rough these into his typical awkward sketches, but although he always kept sketching supplies in the glove compartment he couldn’t bring himself to do so in front of his mother. He never showed his stuff to anyone, but his untrained expressions were all he had to quell his sometimes runaway anxiety.

  So, like Van Gogh’s “Wheatfield With Crows,” Dan saw long angular shadows carved into the wheat beginning to lift out of their places, turning over then flapping, rising into the turbulent air where they became knife rips in the fabric of the sky.

  “She was right here, right here.” His mother’s voice was like old screen shredding to rust. She was standing near the edge of the field, her head down, eyes intent on the plants as if waiting for something to come out of the rows. “My baby was right here.”

  The wheat was less than three feet tall, even shorter when whipped back and forth like this, a tortured texture of shiny and dull golds. At six, his sister had been much taller. Had she crouched so that her head didn’t show? Had she been brave enough to crawl into the field? Or had she been taken like his mother always thought, and dragged, her abductor’s back hunched as he’d pulled her into the rows of vibrating wheat?

  Out in the field the wheat opened and closed, swirling, now and then revealing pockets of shade, moments of dark opportunity. The long flexible stalks twisted themselves into sheaves and limbs, humanoid forms and moving rivers of grainy muscle, backs and heads made and unmade in the changing shadows teased open by the wind. Overhead the crows screeched their unpleasant proclamations. Dan could not see them but they sounded tormented, ripped apart.

  His mother knelt, wept eerily like a child. He had to convince himself it wasn’t Caroline. He stepped up behind his mother and laid his hand on her shoulder, confirming that she was shaking, crying. She reached up and laid her hand over his, mistaking his reality check for concern.

  A red glow had crept beneath the dark clouds along the horizon, and that along with the increasingly frayed black plumes clawing the ground made him think of forest fires, but there were no forests in that direction to burn—just sky, and wheat, and wind blowing away anything too insubstantial to hold on.

  Suddenly a brilliant blaze silvered the front surface of wheat and his mother sprang up, her hands raised in alarm. Dan looked around and, seeing that the pole lamp behind them had come on automatically at dusk, he turned her face gently in that direction and pointed. It seemed a strange place for a street lamp, but he supposed even the smallest towns had at least one for safety.

  That light might have been on at the time of his sister’s disappearance. He’d been only five, but in his memory there had been a light that had washed all their faces in silver, or had it been more of a bluish cast? There had been Caroline, himself, their mother, and Mom’s boyfriend at the time. Ted had been his name, and he’d been the reason they were all out there. Ted said he used to work in the wheat fields, and Dan’s mother said it had been a long time since she’d seen a wheat field. They’d both been drinking, and impulsively they took Caroline and Dan on that frightening ride out into the middle of nowhere.

  Ted had interacted very little with Dan, so all Dan remembered about him was that he had this big black moustache and that he was quite muscular—he walked around without his shirt on most of the time. Little Danny had thought Ted was a cartoon character, and how it was kind of nice that they had a cartoon character living with them, but like most cartoon characters Ted was a little too loud and a little too scary.

  “I never should have dated that Ted. We were all pretty happy until Ted came along,” his mother muttered beside him now. She hadn’t had a drink in several years as far as he knew, but like many long time drinkers she still sounded slightly drunk much of the time—drink appeared to have altered how she moved her mouth.

  This was all old stuff, and Dan tuned it out. His mother had always blamed ex-husbands and ex-boyfriends for her mistakes, as if she’d been helpless to choose, to do what needed to be done. Just once Dan wished she would do what needed to be done.

  When Dan had come here at age fifteen it had been the middle of the day, so this oh-so-brilliant light had not been on. He hadn’t wanted to be here in the dark. He didn’t want to be here in the dark now.

  But the night his sister Caroline disappeared had also been bathed in this selective brilliance. That high light had been on that night as well. No doubt a different type of bulb back in those days. Sodium perhaps, or an arc light. Dan just remembered being five years old and sitting in the back of that smelly old car with his sister. The adults stank of liquor, and they’d gotten out of the car and gone off somewhere to do something, and they’d told Danny and Caroline to stay there. “Don’t get off that seat, kids,” his mother had ordered. “Do you hear me? No matter what. It’s not safe. Who knows what might be out there in that field?”

  Danny had cried a little—he couldn’t even see over the back of the seat and there were noises outside, buzzes and crackles and the sound of the wind over everything, like an angry giant’s breath. Caroline kept saying she needed to go to the bathroom, and she was going to open the car door just a little bit, run out and use the bathroom and come right back. Dan kept telling her no, don’t do that, but Caroline was a little bit older and never did anything he said.

  The only good thing, really, had been the light. Danny told himself the bright light was there because an angel was watching over them, and as long as an angel was watching nothing too terrible could happen. He decided that no matter how confusing everything was, what he believed about the angel was true.

  Caroline had climbed out of the car and gone toward the wheat field to use the bathroom. She’d left the car door part way open and that was scary for Danny, looking out the door and seeing the wheat field moving around like that, so he had used every bit of strength he had to pull the car door shut behind her. But what if she couldn’t open the door? What if she couldn’t get back in? That was the last time he saw his sister.

  “I left you two in the car, Dan. I told you two to stay. Why did she get out?”

  Dan stared at his mother as she stood with one foot on the edge of the road, the other not quite touching, but almost, the first few stalks of wheat. Behind her the rows dissolved and reformed, shadows moving frenetically, the spaces inside the spaces in constant transformation. He’d answered her questions hundreds of times over the years, so although he wanted to say because she had to go to the bathroom, you idiot, he said nothing. He just watched her feet, waiting for something to happen. Overhead was the deafening sound of crows shredding.

  There used to be a telephone mounted below the light pole, he remembered. He and his mother and Ted had waited there all those years ago until a highway patrolman came. Ted and his mother had searched the wheat field for over an hour before they made the call. At least that’s what his mother had always told him. Danny had stayed in the car with the doors shut, afraid to move.

  He guessed they had looked hard for his sister, he guessed that part was true. But they obviously did a bad job because they never found her. They also told the officer they had been standing just a few feet away at the time, gazing up at the stars. What else had they lied about?

  The brilliant high light carved a confusing array of shadows out of the wheat, Dan’s car, and his mother. His own shadow, too, was part of the mix, but he had some difficulty identifying it. As his mother paced back and forth in front of the field, her shadow s
elf appeared to multiply, times two, times three, more. As the wind increased the wheat parted in strips like hair, the stalks writhing as if in religious fervor, bowing almost horizontal at times, the wind threatening to tear out the plants completely and expose what lay beneath. Pockets of shadow were sent running, some isolated and left standing by themselves closer to the road. Dan could hear wings flapping over him, the sound descending as if the crows might be seeking shelter on the ground.

  “She might still be out there, you know,” his mother said. “I was so confused that night, I just don’t think we covered enough of the field. We could have done a better job.”

  “The officers searched most of the night.” Dan raised his voice to be heard above the wind. “They had spotlights, and dogs. And volunteers were out here the rest of the week looking, and for some time after. I’ve read all the newspaper articles, Mom, every single one. And even when they harvested the wheat that year, they did this section manually, remember? They didn’t want to damage—they wanted to be careful not to—” He was trying to be careful, calm and logical, but he wasn’t sure he even believed what he was saying himself.

  “They didn’t want to damage her remains. That’s what you were trying to say, right? Well, I’ve always thought that was a terrible word. She was a sweet little girl.”

  “I’m just trying to say that after the wheat was gone there was nothing here. Caroline wasn’t here.”

  “You don’t know for sure.”

  “What? You think she got plowed under? That she’s down under the furrows somewhere? Mom, it’s been years. Something would have turned up.”

  “Then she might be alive. We just have to go find her. I’ve read about this kind of thing. It happens all the time. They find the child years later. She’s too scared to tell all these years, and then she does. There’s a reunion. It’s awkward and it’s hard, but she becomes their daughter again. It happens like that sometimes, Danny.”

  He noticed how she called him by his childhood name. Danny this and Danny that. It was also the only name Caroline had ever had for him. But more than that, he was taken by her story. To argue with his mother about such a fairy tale seemed too cruel, even for her.

  He barely noticed the small shadow that had fallen into place not more than a foot or two away from her, a dark hollow shaking with the wind, perhaps thrown out of the body of wheat, vibrating as if barely whole or contained, its edges ragged, discontinuous. At first he thought it was one of the large crows that had finally landed to escape the fierce winds above, ready to take its chances with the winds blowing along the ground, but its feathers so damaged, so torn, Dan couldn’t see how it could ever fly again.

  Until it opened its indistinct eyes, and looked at him, and he knew himself incapable of understanding exactly what he was seeing. If he were Van Gogh he might take these urgent, multi-directional slashes and whorls and assemble them into the recognizable face of his sister Caroline, whose eyes had now gone cold, and no more sympathetic or understandable than the other mysteries that traveled through the natural and unnatural world.

  His mother wept so softly now, but he was close enough to hear her above the wind, the hollowed-out change in her voice as this shadow gathered her in and took her deep into the field.

  And because he had no right to object, he knew that this time there would be no phone call, there would be no search.

  Steve Rasnic Tem is a past winner of the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy awards. His two books from 2012 were the novel Deadfall Hotel and the noir collection Ugly Behavior (New Pulp Press). Three Tem collections: Onion Songs (Chomu), Celestial Inventories (ChiZine), and Twember (NewCon Press) were released in 2013. Southern gothic Blood Kin (Solaris) is his latest novel.

  In the movies, monsters are always defeated by something ordinary

  and obvious, usually discovered by accident—seawater, dog whistles,

  paprika, Slim Whitman music . . . this is no movie . . .

  BLUE AMBER

  David J. Schow

  When Senior Patrol Agent Rixson first spotted the shed human skin draped over the barbed-wire fence, she thought it was an item of discarded clothing. Then she saw it had empty arms, legs, fingers, an empty mouth-hole stretched oval in a silent scream, and vacant Hallowe’en-mask eye sockets. Carrion birds had already picked it over. Presently it was covered with ants. It stank.

  If you had asked her, before, what her single worst experience working for the Border Patrol had been, Carrie Rixson might have related the story of how she and her partner Cash Dunhill had happened upon a hijacked U-Haul box trailer full of dead Mexicans eighteen feet shy of the Sonora side of Buster Lippert’s pony ranch. Something had gone wrong, and the coyotes—the wetback enablers, not the scavengers—had left their clients locked in the box, abandoned, under one hundred and one-degree heat for over three days. The Cochise County Coroner concluded that the occupants had died at least two days prior to that. The smell was enough to make even the vultures doubtful. The victims had deliquesced into a undifferentiated mass of meat that had broiled in convection heat that topped four hundred degrees, about the same as you’d use to bake a frozen pizza.

  That had been bad, but the flyblown husk on the fence seemed somehow worse.

  “Should I call it in?” said Dunhill, sweating in the pilot seat of their Bronco. He was a deputy and answerable to Carrie, but neither of them were high enough in the grade chain to warrant collar insignia.

  “As what?” Carrie shouted back, from the fence. She was already snapping digital photographs.

  Dunhill unsaddled and ambled over for a look-see. No need to hurry, not in this heat. “I think this falls out of the purview of ‘accidental death,’ ” he said.

  “Unless this ole boy was running away so fast he jumped the bobwire and it shucked off his hide.”

  “That happened once,” said his partner. “Dude in New Jersey. Hefty guy, running away from the cops, tried to jump an iron railing and got his chin caught on the metal spike up top. Tore his head clean off. It was still stuck on the end of the spike. I saw it on the internet.”

  Cash and Carrie had been the target of department punsters ever since their first pair-up assignment. She was older, thirty-seven to his twenty-nine years. They had never been romantically inclined, although they teased each other a lot. Cash’s high school sweetie had divorced him in a legal battle only slightly less acrimonious than the firebombing of Dresden, and Carrie had been about to marry her ten-year live-in life partner—Thomas “Truck” Fitzgerald, a former Pima County sheriff turned Jeep customizer—when he up and died of cancer that took him away in six weeks flat. Neither Cash nor Carrie was in the market for loving just now, although they both suffered the pangs in their own different ways.

  “Oh, don’t touch it, for christsake,” Cash told her.

  “I’m thinking cartel guys,” she said as her hand stopped short of making actual fleshy contact. “This is the sort of shit they do. Skin your enemies. Cut off their heads, stuff their balls into their mouths, dismember them and leave the pieces in a public place with the name of the cliqua written in blood.”

  “You see that on the internet, too?” Cash dug out a toothpick. He was battling mightily to stop smoking.

  “Nahh,” she said. “I usually only look at lesbian porn. Girl-on-girl, slurpy-burpy.” The way Cash usually rose to the bait when she egged him on was reliably amusing, under normal circumstances.

  She used a dried stick of ironwood to lift one of the flaps. “Definitely not a scuba suit or a mannequin. There used to be a person wearing this, and not so long ago.” The shadow side of the castoff skin was dotted with oily moisture, as though it was still perspiring.

  “Whose property is this?” Cash was looking around for landmarks.

  “This is outside Puzzi Ranch. I guess it might be Thayer McMillan’s fence.”

  Cash and Carrie’s daily grind was to patrol the strip of International Highway (both a description of the actual road
and its real name) between Douglas, Arizona and Naco Highway. Naco—the town—straddled the US-Mexico border and had always been a sizzling hot spot for violations of all sorts.

  In the dead-ass stretches of high desert separating the two towns, there was just too goddamned much open space for something not to go wrong.

  “Secure Fence Act, my ass,” said Cash, for about the zillionth time. His views on a wetback-proof fence were abundantly known. “I’ll call base; see if we can get a number for McMillan.” He popped an energy drink from the Bronco’s cooler and blew down half the can in one gulp.

  “Gross,” said Carrie. “That candy-flavored salt water is bad for you.”

  The logo on the can shrieked Kamikaze! “ ‘Divine wind.’ ‘Empty wind’ is more like it.”

  Then Cash would say . . .

  “May the wind at your back never be your own.”

  They were okay, as partners. When the meatwagon arrived over an hour later, Billy Szwakop, the coroner’s assistant, scowled at them at though he was the butt of yet another in an endless series of corpse gags. It wasn’t even really a dead body, he said. It was just the skin part. For all they knew, no murder had been committed. “Yeah, he’s probably still walking around, all wound up in duct tape to keep from leaking,” Cash said. Billy’s gentle disentanglement of the . . . item . . . had revealed it to be male.

  It had also revealed a broad split from sternum to crotch, not an incision.

  After it was bagged, Billy added, “I don’t think this was a Mex, either.”

  Carrie got interested. “What makes you say that?”