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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  “May his soul know peace,” Daggon said, “and may the God Beyond be thanked that he never decided we were worth his time.”

  “Amen,” Earnest said.

  “Of course,” Daggon said, “there is still Bloody Kent. Now he’s a right nasty fellow. You’d better hope he doesn’t get your number, friend. And don’t you give me that innocent look. These are the Forests. Everybody here has done something, now and then, that you don’t want others to know about . . . ”

  New York Times #1 bestseller Brandon Sanderson made a name for himself in the fantasy genre with his first novel Elantris and its sequels as well as the Mistborn series before being chosen to finish Robert Jordan’s famous Wheel of Time sequence—left uncompleted on Jordon’s death—writing volumes such as The Gathering Storm, Towers of Midnight, and A Memory of Light. His fantasy series for young adults, Alcatraz, consists of Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians, Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener’s Bones, Alcatraz Versus the Knights of Crystallia, and Alcatraz Versus the Shattered Lens. The Stormlight Archive series began with The Way of Kings in 2010 and continues with the recently published Words of Radiance. He lives in American Fork, Utah, and maintains a website at brandonsanderson.com.

  It is funny how a man can see only what he wants to see.

  He wants to make her the same as him,

  because he thinks he’s better . . .

  THE PLAGUE

  Ken Liu

  Lessons on life.

  I’m in the river fishing with Mother. The sun is about to set, and the fish are groggy. Easy pickings. The sky is bright crimson and so is Mother, the light shimmering on her shkin like someone smeared blood all over her.

  That’s when a big man tumbles into the water from a clump of reeds, dropping a long tube with glass on the end. Then I see he’s not fat, like I thought at first, but wearing a thick suit with a glass bowl over his head.

  Mother watches the man flop in the river like a fish. “Let’s go, Marne.”

  But I don’t. After another minute, he’s not moving as much. He struggles to reach the tubes on his back.

  “He can’t breathe,” I say.

  “You can’t help him,” Mother says. “The air, the water, everything out here is poisonous to his kind.”

  I go over, crouch down, and look through the glass covering his face, which is naked. No shkin at all. He’s from the Dome.

  His hideous features are twisted with fright.

  I reach over and untangle the tubes on his back.

  I wish I hadn’t lost my camera. The way the light from the bonfire dances against their shiny bodies cannot be captured with words. Their deformed limbs, their malnourished frames, their terrible disfigurement—all seem to disappear in a kind of nobility in the flickering shadows that makes my heart ache.

  The girl who saved me offers me a bowl of food—fish, I think. Grateful, I accept.

  I take out the field purification kit and sprinkle the nanobots over the food. These are designed to break down after they’ve outlived their purpose, nothing like the horrors that went out of control and made the world unlivable . . .

  Fearing to give offense, I explain, “Spices.”

  Looking at her is like looking into a humanoid mirror. Instead of her face I see a distorted reflection of my own. It’s hard to read an expression from the vague indentations and ridges in that smooth surface, but I think she’s puzzled.

  “Modja saf-fu ota poiss-you,” she says, hissing and grunting. I don’t hold the devolved phonemes and degenerate grammar against her—a diseased people scrabbling out an existence in the wilderness isn’t exactly going to be composing poetry or thinking philosophy. She’s saying, “Mother says the food here is poisonous to you.”

  “Spices make safe,” I say.

  As I squeeze the purified food into the feeding tube on the side of the helmet, her face ripples like a pond, and my reflection breaks into colorful patches.

  She’s grinning.

  The others do not trust the man from the Dome as he skulks around the village enclosed in his suit.

  “He says that the Dome dwellers are scared of us because they don’t understand us. He wants to change that.”

  Mother laughs, sounding like water bubbling over rocks. Her shkin changes texture, breaking the reflected light into brittle, jagged rays.

  The man is fascinated by the games I play: drawing lines over my belly, my thigh, my breasts with a stick as the shkin ripples and rises to follow. He writes down everything any one of us says.

  He asks me if I know who my father is.

  I think what a strange place the Dome must be.

  “No,” I tell him. “At the Quarter Festivals the men and women writhe together and the shkins direct the seed where they will.”

  He tells me he’s sorry.

  “What for?”

  It’s hard for me to really know what he’s thinking because his naked face does not talk like shkin would.

  “All this.” He sweeps his arm around.

  When the plague hit fifty years ago, the berserk nanobots and biohancers ate away people’s skins, the soft surface of their gullets, the warm, moist membranes lining every orifice of their bodies.

  Then the plague took the place of the lost flesh and covered people, inside and outside, like a lichen made of tiny robots and colonies of bacteria.

  Those with money—my ancestors—holed up with weapons and built domes and watched the rest of the refugees die outside.

  But some survived. The living parasite changed and even made it possible for its hosts to eat the mutated fruits and drink the poisonous water and breathe the toxic air.

  In the Dome, jokes are told about the plagued, and a few of the daring trade with them from time to time. But everyone seems content to see them as no longer human.

  Some have claimed that the plagued are happy as they are. That is nothing but bigotry and an attempt to evade responsibility. An accident of birth put me inside the Dome and her outside. It isn’t her fault that she picks at her deformed skin instead of pondering philosophy; that she speaks with grunts and hisses instead of rhetoric and enunciation; that she does not understand family love but only an instinctual, animalistic yearning for affection.

  We in the Dome must save her.

  “You want to take away my shkin?” I ask.

  “Yes, to find a cure, for you, your mother, all the plagued.”

  I know him well enough now to understand that he is sincere. It doesn’t matter that the shkin is as much a part of me as my ears. He believes that flaying me, mutilating me, stripping me naked would be an improvement.

  “We have a duty to help you.”

  He sees my happiness as misery, my thoughtfulness as depression, my wishes as delusion. It is funny how a man can see only what he wants to see. He wants to make me the same as him, because he thinks he’s better.

  Quicker than he can react, I pick up a rock and smash the glass bowl around his head. As he screams, I touch his face and watch the shkin writhe over my hands to cover him.

  Mother is right. He has not come to learn, but I must teach him anyway.

  Ken Liu (kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He is a winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards. Liu’s debut novel, A Tempest of Gold, the first in a fantasy series, will be published by Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint in 2015, along with a collection of short stories. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts

  “That is outrageous,” I said. “And wicked.”

  “Absolutely, but that does not make it untrue.”

  THE GRUESOME AFFAIR OF by THE ELECTRIC BLUE LIGHTNING

  (FROM THE FILES OF AUGUST DUPIN)

  Joe R. Lansdale,

  Translated loosely from the French

  This story can only be
described as fantastic in nature, and with no exaggeration, it deals with nothing less than the destruction of the world, but before I continue, I should make an immediate confession. Some of this is untrue. I do not mean the events themselves, for they are accurate, but I have disguised the names of several individuals, and certain locations have been re-imagined—for lack of a better word—to suit my own conscience. The end of the cosmos and our world as we know it is of considerable concern, of course, but no reason to abandon manners.

  These decisions were made primarily due to the possibility of certain actors in this drama being unnecessarily scandalized or embarrassed, even though they are only mentioned in passing and have little to nothing to do with the events themselves. I do not think historians, warehouse owners and the like should have to bear the burden of my story, especially as it will undoubtedly be disbelieved.

  There are, however, specific players in my article, story if you prefer, that have their own names to contend with, old as those names may be, and I have not made any effort whatsoever to alter these. This is owed to the fact that these particular personages are well enough recognized by name, and any attempt to disguise them would be a ridiculous and wasted effort.

  This begins where many of my true stories begin. I was in the apartment I share with Auguste Dupin, perhaps the wisest and most rational man I have ever known, if a bit of a curmudgeon and a self-centered ass. A touch of background, should you be interested: we share an apartment, having met while looking for the same obscure book in a library, which brought about a discussion of the tome in question, which in turn we decided to share in the reading, along with the price of an apartment, as neither of us could afford the rental of one alone. Dupin is a Chevalier, and had some financial means in the past, but his wealth had somehow been lost—how this occurred, we have by unspoken agreement never discussed, and this suits me, for I would rather not go into great detail about my own circumstances.

  In spite of his haughty nature, Dupin is quite obviously of gentlemanly countenance and bearing, if, like myself he is a threadbare gentleman; I should also add, one who in manners is frequently not a gentleman at all. He is also a sometime investigator. This began merely as a hobby, something he did for his own amusement, until I assured him that regular employment might aid in his problems with the rent, and that I could assist him, for a small fee, of course. He agreed.

  What I call “The Affair of the Electric Blue Lightning” began quite casually, and certainly by accident. I was telling Dupin how I had read that the intense lightning storm of the night before had been so radical, producing such powerful bolts, it had started fires all along the Rue________. In fact, the very newspaper that had recorded the article lay before him, and it wasn’t until I had finished telling him about the irregular events, that I saw it lying there, and admonished him for not revealing to me he had read the article and knew my comments even before disclosing them for his consideration.

  “Yes,” Dupin said, leaning back in his chair and clasping his fingers together. “But I appreciate your telling of it. It was far more dramatic and interesting than the newspaper article itself. I was especially interested in, and impressed with, your descriptions of the lightning, for yours was a practical explanation, but not an actual recollection, and therefore perhaps faulty.”

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  His eyes brightened and his lean face seemed to stretch even longer as he said, “You described to me lightning that you did not see, and in so doing, you described it as it should appear, not as the newspaper depicted it. Or to be more precise, you only said that the fires had been started by a lightning strike. The newspaper said it was a blue-white fulmination that appeared to climb up to the sky from the rooftops of a portion of the warehouse district rather than come down from the heavens. To be more precise, the newspaper was supposedly quoting a man named F________, who said he saw the peculiar lightning and the beginnings of the warehouse fire with his own eyes. He swore it rose upward, instead of the other way around. Out of the ordinary, don’t you think?”

  “A mistake on his part,” I said. “I had forgotten all about his saying that. I didn’t remember it that way.”

  “Perhaps,” said Dupin, filling his meerschaum pipe and studying the rain outside the apartment window, “because it didn’t make sense to you. It goes against common sense. So, you dismissed it.”

  “I suppose so,” I said. “Isn’t that what you do in your investigations? Dismiss items that are nonsensical? Use only what you know to be true? You are always admonishing me for filling in what is not there, what could not be, that which faults ratiocination.”

  Dupin nodded. “That’s correct. But, isn’t that what you’re doing now? You are filling in what is not there. Or deciding quite by your own contemplations that which should not be there.”

  “You confuse me, Dupin.”

  “No doubt,” he said. “Unlike you, I do not dismiss something as false until I have considered it fully and examined all the evidence. There is also the part of the article where F________’s statement was validated by a child named P_____________.”

  “But, the word of a child?” I said.

  “Sometimes they have the clearest eyes,” Dupin said. “They have not had time to think what they should see, as you have, but only what they have seen. They can be mistaken. Eyewitnesses often are, of course. But it’s odd that the child validated the sighting of the other witness, and if what the article says is true, the man and child did not know one another. They were on very distant sides of the event. Due to this—and of course I would question their not knowing one another until I have made a full examination— perhaps more can be made of the child’s recollections. I certainly believe we can rule out coincidence of such an observation. The child and the man either colluded on their story, which I find unlikely, because to what purpose would they say such an unbelievable thing? Or, the other possibility is they did in fact see the same event, and their description is accurate, at least as far as they conceive it.”

  “That lightning rose up from the ground?” I said. “You say that makes more sense than it coming down from the heavens? I would think suggesting Jove threw a bolt of lightning would be just as irrational as to suggest the lightning rose up from the earth!”

  “From a warehouse rooftop, not the earth,” he said. “And it was blue-white in color?”

  “Ridiculous,” I said.

  “It is peculiar, I admit, but my suggestion is we do not make a judgment on the matter until we know more facts.”

  “I didn’t realize we cared to make a judgment.”

  “I am considering it.”

  “This interests you that much? Why would we bother? It’s not a true investigation, just the soothing of a curiosity, which I might add, pays absolutely nothing.”

  “What interest me are the deaths from the warehouse fire,” Dupin said. “Though, since, as you noted, we haven‘t been hired to examine the facts, that pays the same absence of price.”

  “Horrid business,” I said. “But I believe you are making much of nothing. I know that area, and those buildings are rats’ nests just waiting for a spark to ignite them. They are also the squatting grounds for vagrants. Lightning struck the building. It caught ablaze rapidly, and sleeping vagrants were burned to death in the fire. It is as simple as that.”

  “Perhaps,” Dupin said. He leaned back and puffed on his pipe, blowing blue clouds of smoke from between his teeth and from the bowl. “But how do you explain that our own acquaintance the Police Prefect, G__________ was quoted as saying that they found a singed, but still identifiable arm, and that it appeared to have been sawed off at the elbow, rather than burned?”

  I had no answer for that.

  “Of course, G__________ is often wrong, so in his case I might suspect an error before suspecting one from the witnessing child. G__________ solves most of his crimes by accident, confession, or by beating his suspect until he will admit to having started the French Revolutio
n over the theft of a ham hock. However, when he has solved his cases, if indeed one can actually consider them solved, it is seldom by any true form of detection. I should also note that there has been a rash of grave robbings of late, all of them involving freshly buried bodies.”

  Now, as he often did, Dupin had piqued my curiosity. I arose, poured the both of us a bit of wine, sat back down and watched Dupin smoke his pipe, the stench of which was cheap and foul as if burning the twilled ticking of an old sweat-stained mattress.

  “For me to have an opinion on this matter, I would suggest we make a trip of it tomorrow, to see where this all occurred. Interview those that were spoken to by the newspaper. I know you have contacts, so I would like you to use them to determine the exact location of these witnesses who observed the lightning and the resulting fire. Does this suit you?”

  I nodded. “Very well, then.”

  That was the end of our discussion about these unique, but to my mind, insignificant events, for the time being. We instead turned our attention to the smoking of pipes and the drinking of wine. Dupin read while he smoked and drank, and I sat there contemplating that which we had discussed, finding the whole matter more and more mysterious with the thinking. Later, I decided I would like to take a stroll before retiring, so that I might clear my head of the drinking and heavy smoke.

  I also had in mind the ideas that Dupin had suggested, and wanted to digest them. I have always found a walk to be satisfying not only to the legs and heart, but to the mind as well; many a problem such as this one I had considered while walking, and though, after talking to Dupin, I still turned out to be mistaken in my thinking, I had at least eliminated a large number of my fallacies of thought before speaking to him.

  Outside the apartment, I found the rain had ceased; the wind had picked up, however, and was quite cool, almost chilly. I pulled my collar up against the breeze and swinging my cane before me, headed in the direction of the lightning fire in the warehouse district along the Rue________. I didn’t realize I was going there until my legs began to take me. I knew the location well, and no research was required to locate the site of the events, so I thought that for once, having seen the ruins, I might actually have a leg up on Dupin, and what he called his investigative methods of ratiocination.