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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  Except this time it isn’t them, it’s only me.

  And he’s singing. Somebody is out here singing, I can hear him, it’s for me!

  Are you lonely, do you miss it, do you want it, it’s so weird, and then, in the bushes something sparkles just above my head and the sneaky, nice-nasty sound comes with, too low for anybody but Ida Mae to hear, it’s so pretty, would you like it, and the sparkle hangs closer, do you want it, see I brought it just for you and all of a sudden I don’t want to move, I don’t jump, I don’t sound the alarm because I want to listen, I have to see, if you want it you can have it . . . and I should hoot to warn my sister Scouts but instead I just let the song happen until I see him through the leaves, he’s singing and singing, he’s close!

  He looks huge in all that stuff, and, oh! Miss Tracie, I talked to him, I did! I kept it low, so as not to reach the others, I whispered, “Oh, you can take off the hat, our rattlers are all curled up sleeping in their holes,” which is a lie, but I had to see what he looked like in the face behind the veil.

  “Oh,” he said, “are you in there? Let me see you, come out and look at me, and let me look at you.” If he Tried Something I would have bopped him but he didn’t move, he just waited in what was left of the moonlight, dangling this sparkly thing and singing his long, sweet song thing that made me squirm Down There, if you want it you can have it, I brought diamonds just for you . . .

  And they’re so shiny and he’s so close that I almost, almost betrayed the spirit of Miss Tracie and Melody and Stephanie and all my other sister Scouts sleeping under my watch. I’m weak! I think: It’s okay, I don’t even have to warn.

  I tell myself: I just want to see him. Then I’ll decide.

  I tell myself: be careful, careful, Ida Mae, there are gangs of big city folks asleep on the ledge up there, right there, in the bus, but his song is so sweet, so soft and so all about me and my chain of diamonds that I squirm forward on my elbows like a rattler in heat and at the last second I rear up so he sees me and like he promised, he takes off the veil hat and I’m all, “Oh, crap.”

  “You,” he says, in a different voice, he’s so ugly, and this is awful. He says it like: ewwwww. “You aren’t . . . ”

  And I think: fine! so I say, too low to wake up my sister Scouts, “Well neither are you. Go away!” but I keep coming at him because I want the sparkly. I’ll just grab it and let him go.

  But he snaps off a branch and starts swinging at me like I’m a monster that he has to kill but it’s okay, I have my rock.

  I really think I can just bop him and roll him off the edge before my sisters come but he yells “Get away from me” mean enough to scare the whole mountain and I vomit one last warning, “Shut up, shut up!”

  But he howls in my face, “Get away, you ugly dirtbag.” Then he shouts out the worst thing ever. “You’re too damn old!”

  So I smash him with the rock. Then I bash his head and bash it and bash it, I have to wipe that disgusting, hurtful word off his disgusting face. By the time my sister Scouts are wide awake and charging uphill to join, there’s not much left to bash but, oh boy, he screamed so loud that up there on the ledge, lights pop on all over Clyde’s bus and we hear them hammering to get out. Usually we’re such good Scouts that we come and go without anybody knowing, but this time it got loud, and it’s all my fault.

  “Ohhhh, Melody, I’m so sorry.”

  Her voice goes hard. “Don’t worry, I heard.”

  “Old.” This is awful, it comes out in a sob. I’m so embarrassed. Everybody is. “Old!”

  Stephanie looks down at what’s left of the man, like he’s a rattler we had to squash. “We all heard.”

  “Okay girls, Scout council.” Melody points and we squat in a circle around what’s left of what we just did, wondering what to do.

  Sisters, worrying. “Tomorrow they’ll find out.”

  “They don’t have to.” Melody is the one who decides whether.

  This is so hard. I say, “They can’t find out.”

  We shudder. “Nobody can.”

  “They might.” Even Stephanie is scared.

  Melody comes down on that like a hammer, “They won’t find out,” and we all feel better because Melody also decides when.

  Day and night, summer, winter, year after year for a really long time, we have protected our sweet life on the mountainside. Nothing gets between Troop 13 and our freedom, and nothing will.

  “Okay,” Melody says, “Council,” Melody says, and we squat in a circle and begin. After Council, she will say how.

  Either we do what we usually do, break camp and fade away to the East Grade and do like it says the Girl Scout prayer, “Help us to see where we may serve / In some new place in some new way,” praying that nobody looks out the window when the sun comes up and Clyde backs that bus around and comes downhill and that Louie doesn’t care what the vultures are eating when he cranks himself up the dome . . .

  Or we go up to the ledge and do something else about it tonight.

  Clyde never unlocks the bus until the sun comes up. There are enough of us to get it rolling, all it takes is one little push.

  Kit Reed’s most recent collection The Story Until Now (The Wesleyan University Press), was published in 2013; Severn House published her latest novel, Son of Destruction, in the UK in 2012 and US in 2013. Her 2011 collection, What Wolves Know, was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. Her many other novels include Enclave, The Baby Merchant, and Thinner Than Thou, a winner of the ALA. Alex Award. A Guggenheim fellow, Reed is the first American recipient of an international literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation. Her stories appear in venues including The Yale Review, Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Omni, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Literature, and The Kenyon Review. Her books Weird Women, Wired Women and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse were finalists for the Tiptree Prize. A member of the board of the Authors League Fund, she serves as Resident Writer at Wesleyan University.

  “I don’t understand anything anymore,” she said.

  “Everything is strange.”

  THE GOOD HUSBAND

  Nathan Ballingrud

  The water makes her nightgown diaphanous, like the ghost of something, and she is naked underneath. Her breasts are full, her nipples large and pale, and her soft stomach, where he once loved to rest his head as he ran his hand through the soft tangle of hair between her legs, is stretched with the marks of age. He sits on the lid of the toilet, feeling a removed horror as his cock stirs beneath his robe. Her eyes are flat and shiny as dimes and she doesn’t blink as the water splashes over her face. Wispy clouds of blood drift through the water, obscuring his view of her. An empty prescription bottle lies beside the tub, a few bright pills scattered like candy on the floor.

  He was not meant to see this, and he feels a minor spasm of guilt, as though he has caught her at something shameful and private. This woman with whom he had once shared all the shabby secrets of his life. The slice in her forearm is an open curtain, blood flowing out in billowing dark banners.

  “You’re going to be okay, Katie,” he says. He has not called her Katie in ten years. He makes no move to save her.

  Sean shifted his legs out of bed and pressed his bare feet onto the hardwood floor; it was cold, and his nerves jumped. A spike of life. A sign of movement in the blood. He sat there for a moment, his eyes closed, and concentrated on that. He slid his feet into his slippers and willed himself into a standing position.

  He walked naked across the bedroom and fetched his robe from the closet. He threw it around himself and tied it closed. He walked by the vanity, with its alchemies of perfumes and eyeshadows, ignoring the mirror, and left the bedroom. Down the hallway, past the closed bathroom door with light still bleeding from underneath, descending the stairs to the sunlit order of his home.

  He was alert to each contraction of muscle, to each creak of bone and ligament. To the pressure of the floor against the soles of his feet, to the
slide of the bannister’s polished wood against the soft white flesh of his hand.

  His mind skated across the frozen surface of each moment. He pushed it along, he pushed it along.

  They’d been married twenty-one years, and Katie had tried to kill herself four times in that span. Three times in the last year and a half. Last night, she’d finally gotten it right.

  The night had started out wonderfully. They dressed up, went out for dinner, had fun for the first time in recent memory. He bought her flowers, and they walked downtown after dinner and admired the lights and the easy flow of life. He took her to a chocolate shop. Her face was radiant, and a picture of her that final night was locked into his memory: the silver in her hair shining in the reflected light of an overhead lamp, her cheeks rounded into a smile, the soft weight of life turning her body beautiful and inviting, like a blanket, or a hearth. She looked like the girl she used to be. He’d started to believe that with patience and fortitude they could keep at bay the despair that had been seeping into her from some unknown, subterranean hell, flowing around the barricades of antidepressants and anxiety pills, filling her brain with cold water.

  When they got home they opened up another bottle and took it to the bedroom. And somehow, they started talking about Heather, who had gone away to college and had recently informed them that she did not want to come home for spring break. It wasn’t that she wanted to go anywhere special; she wanted to stay at the dorm, which would be nearly emptied of people, and read, or work, or fuck her new boyfriend if she had one, or whatever it was college girls wanted to do when they didn’t want to come home to their parents.

  It worked away at Kate like a worm, burrowing tunnels in her gut. She viewed Sean’s acceptance of Heather’s decision as a callous indifference. When the subject came up again that night, he knew the mood was destroyed.

  He resented her for it. For spoiling, once again and with what seemed a frivolous cause, the peace and happiness he was trying so hard to give her. If only she would take it. If only she would believe in it. Like she used to do, before her brain turned against her, and against them all.

  They drank the bottle even as the despair settled over her. They ended the night sitting on the edge of the bed, she wearing her sexy nightgown, her breasts mostly exposed and moon-pale in the light, weeping soundlessly, a little furrow between her eyebrows but otherwise without affect, and the light sheen of tears which flowed and flowed, as though a foundation had cracked; and he in the red robe she’d bought him for Christmas, his arm around her, trying once again to reason her away from a precipice which reason did not know. Eventually he laid back and put his arm over his eyes, frustrated and angry. And then he fell asleep.

  He awoke sometime later to the sound of splashing water. It should have been too small a sound to reach him, but it did anyway, worming its way into the black and pulling him to the surface. When he discovered that he was alone in the bedroom, and sensed the deepness of the hour, he walked to the bathroom, where the noise came from, without urgency and with a full knowledge of what he would find.

  She spasmed every few seconds, as though something in the body, separate from the mind, fought against this.

  He sat down on the toilet, watching her. Later he would examine this moment and try to gauge what he had been feeling. It would seem important to take some measure of himself, to find out what kind of man he really was.

  He would come to the conclusion that he’d felt tired. It was as though his blood had turned to lead. He knew the procedure he was meant to follow here; he’d done it before. Already his muscles tightened to abide by the routine, signals blew across his nerves like a brushfire: rush to the tub, waste a crucial moment in simple denial brushing the hair from her face and cradling her head in his warm hands. Hook his arms underneath her body and lift her heavily from the water. Carry her streaming blood and water to the bed. Call 911. Wait. Wait. Wait. Ride with her, and sit unmoving in the waiting room as they pump her stomach and fill her with a stranger’s blood. Answer questions. Does she take drugs. Do you. Were you fighting. Sir, a social worker will be by to talk to you. Sir, you have to fill out these forms. Sir, your wife is broken, and you are, too.

  And then wait some more as she convalesces in the psych ward. Visit her, try not to cry in front of her as you see her haunting that corridor with the rest of the damned, dwelling like a fading thought in her assigned room.

  Bring this pale thing home. This husk, this hollowed vessel. Nurse her to a false health. Listen to her apologize, and accept her apologies. Profess your reinvigorated love. Fuck her with the urgency of pity and mortality and fear, which you both have come to know and to rely on the way you once relied on love and physical desire.

  If they could save her.

  And if, having saved her, they decided to let her come home at all.

  She will never be happy.

  The thought came to him with the force of a revelation. It was as though god spoke a judgment, and he recognized its truth as though it had been with them all along, the buzzard companion of their late marriage. Some people, he thought, are just incapable of happiness. Maybe it was because of some ancient trauma, or maybe it was just a bad equation in the brain. Kate’s reasons were mysterious to him, a fact which appalled him after so many years of intimacy. If he pulled her from the water now, he would just be welcoming her back to hell.

  With a flutter of some obscure emotion—some solution of terror and relief—he closed the door on her. He went back to bed and, after a few sleeping pills of his own, he fell into a black sleep. He dreamed of silence.

  In the kitchen, light streamed in through the bay window. It was a big kitchen, with a stand-alone chopping table, wide crumb-flecked counters, ranks of silver knives agleam in the morning sun. Dirty dishes were stacked in the sink and on the counter beside it. The trash hadn’t been taken out on time, and its odor was a dull oppression. The kitchen had once been the pride of their home. It seemed to have decayed without his noticing.

  A small breakfast nook accommodated a kitchen table in a narrow passage joining the kitchen to the dining room. It still bore the scars and markings of the younger Heather’s attentions: divots in the wood where she once tested the effectiveness of a butter knife, a spray of red paint left there during one of her innumerable art projects, and the word “kichen” gouged into the side of the table with a ballpoint pen, years ago, when she thought everything should carry its name. It had become an inadvertent shrine to her childhood, and since she’d left Kate had shifted their morning coffee to the larger and less welcoming dining room table in the adjoining room. The little breakfast nook had been surrendered to the natural entropy of a household, becoming little more than a receptacle for car keys and unopened mail.

  Sean filled the French press with coffee grounds and put the water on to boil.

  For a few crucial minutes he had nothing to do, and a ferocious panic began to chew at the border of his thoughts. He felt a weight descending from the floor above him. An unseen face. He thought for a moment that he could hear her footsteps. He thought for a moment that nothing had changed.

  He was looking through the bay window to the garden out front, which had ceded vital ground to weeds and ivy. Across the street he watched his neighbor’s grandkids tear around the corner of their house like crazed orangutans: ill-built yet strangely graceful, spurred by an unknowable animal purpose. It was Saturday; though winter still lingered at night, spring was warming the daylight hours.

  Apparently it was a beautiful day.

  The kettle began to hiss and he returned to his rote tasks. Pour the water into the press. Stir the contents. Fit the lid into place and wait for the contents to steep. He fetched a single mug from the cabinet and waited at the counter.

  He heard something move behind him, the soft pad of a foot on the linoleum, the staccato tap of dripping water. He turned and saw his wife standing at the kitchen’s threshold, the nightgown still soaked through and clinging intimately to her
body, streams of water running from the gown and from her hair which hung in a thick black sheet, and pooling brightly around her.

  A sound escaped him, a syllable shot like a hard pellet, high-pitched and meaningless.

  His body jerked as though yanked by some invisible cord and the coffee mug launched from his hand and shattered on the floor between them. Kate sat down in the nook; the first time she’d sat there in almost a year. She did not look at him, or react to the smashed mug. Water pit-patted from her hair and her clothes, onto the table. “Where’s mine?” she said.

  “Kate? What?”

  “Where’s my coffee? I want coffee. I’m cold. You forgot mine.”

  He worked his jaw, trying to coax some sound. Finally he said, “All right.” His voice was weak and undirected. “All right,” he said again. He opened the cabinet and fetched two mugs.

  She’d had a bad dream. It was the only thing that made sense. She was cold and wet and something in her brain tried to make sense of it. She remembered seeing Sean’s face through a veil of water. Watching it recede from her. She felt a buckle of nausea at the memory. She took a drink from the coffee and felt the heat course through her body. It only made her feel worse.

  She rubbed her hands at her temples.

  “Why am I all wet?” she said. “I don’t feel right. Something’s wrong with me. Something’s really wrong.”

  Sean guided her upstairs. She reacted to his gentle guidance, but did not seem to be acting under any will of her own; except when he tried to steer her into the bathroom. She resisted then, turning to stone in the hallway. “No,” she said. Her eyes were hard and bright with fear. She turned her head away from the door. He took her wrist to pull her but she resisted. His fingers inadvertently slid over the incision there, and he jerked his hand away.

  “Honey. We need to fix you up.”

  “No.”

  He relented, taking her to the bedroom instead, where he removed her wet nightgown. It struck him that he had not seen her like this, standing naked in the plain light of day, for a long time. They had been married for over twenty years and they’d lost interest in each other’s bodies long ago. When she was naked in front of him now he barely noticed. Her body was part of the furniture of their marriage, utilized but ignored, with occasional benign observations from them both about its declining condition.