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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  I looked at Dupin, who had come to my shoulder to observe what was happening.

  “He is not bringing him back, as in the past,” Dupin said. “He is offering Grimm’s soul for sacrifice. After all this time, their partnership has ended. It is the beginning; the door has been opened a crack.”

  My body felt chilled. The hair on my head, as on Dupin’s, stood up due to the electrical charge in the air. There was an obnoxious smell, reminiscent of the stink of decaying fish, rotting garbage, and foul disease.

  “Yes, we have chosen the right moment,” Dupin said, looking at the growing gap that had appeared in mid-air. “Take both pistols, and light the twist.”

  He handed me his weapon. I stuck both pistols in the waistband of my trousers, and lit the twist. Dupin took it from me, and stuck it in a gap in the bricks. He opened The Necronomicon to where he had marked it with a torn piece of paper, and began to read from it. The words poured from his mouth like living beings, taking on the form of dark shadows and lightning-bright color. His voice was loud and sonorous, as we were no longer attempting to conceal ourselves. I stepped out of the shadows and into the open. Dipple, alerted by Dupin’s reading, turned and glared at me with his dark, simian eyes.

  It was hard for me to concentrate on anything. Hearing the words from The Necronomicon made my skin feel as if it were crawling up from my heels, across my legs and back, and slithering underneath my scalp. The swirling gap of blue-white lightning revealed lashing tentacles, a massive squid-like eye, then a beak. It was all I could do not to fall to my knees in dread, or bolt and run like an asylum escapee.

  That said, I was given courage when I realized that whatever Dupin was doing was having some effect, for the gash in the air began to shimmer and wrinkle and blink like an eye. The ape howled at this development, for it had glanced back at the rip in the air, then turned again to look at me, twisted its face into what could almost pass as a dark knot. It dropped the book on the chair, and rushed for me. First it charged upright, like a human, then it was on all fours, its knuckles pounding against the bricks. I drew my sword from the cane, held the cane itself in my left hand, the blade in my right, and awaited Dipple’s dynamic charge.

  It bounded towards me. I thrust at it with my sword. The strike was good, hitting no bone, and went directly through the ape’s chest, but the beast’s momentum drove me backwards. I lost the cane itself, and used both hands to hold the sword in place. I glanced at Dupin for help. None was forthcoming. He was reading from the book and utterly ignoring my plight.

  Blue, white, red and green fire danced around Dipple’s head and poured from his mouth. I was able to hold the monster back with the sword, for it was a good thrust, and had brought about a horrible wound, yet its long arms thrashed out and hit my jaw, nearly knocking me senseless. I struggled to maintain consciousness, pushed back the sword with both hands, coiled my legs, and kicked out at the ape. I managed to knock him off me, but only for a moment.

  I sat up and drew both pistols. It was loping towards me, pounding its fists against the bricks as it barreled along on all fours, letting forth an indescribable and ear-shattering sound that was neither human nor animal. I let loose an involuntary yell, and fired both pistols. The shots rang out as one. The ape threw up its hands, wheeled about and staggered back toward the stacked chairs, the book. It grabbed at the book for support, pulled that and the chairs down on top of it. Its chest heaved as though pumped with a bellows..

  And then the freshly animated thing on the platform spat out the funnel as if it were light as air. Spat it out and yelled. It was a sound that came all the way from the primeval; a savage cry of creation. The body on the platform squirmed and writhed and snapped its bonds. It slid from the board, staggered forward, looked in my direction. Both pistols had been fired; the sword was still in Dipple. I grabbed up the hollow cane that had housed the sword, to use as a weapon.

  This thing, this patchwork creation I assumed was Grimm, its private parts wrapped in a kind of swaddling, took one step in my direction, the blue-white fire crackling in its eyes, and then the patchwork creature turned to see the blinking eye staring out of the open door to the borderlands.

  Grimm yanked the chairs off Dipple, lifted the ape-body up as easily as if it had been a feather pillow. It spread its legs wide for position, cocked its arms, and flung the ape upwards. The whirlpool from beyond sucked at Dipple, turning the old man in the old ape’s body into a streak of dark fur, dragging it upwards. In that moment, Dipple was taken by those from beyond the borderland, pulled into their world like a hungry mouth taking in a tasty treat. Grimm, stumbling about on unfamiliar legs, grabbed The Necronomicon and tossed it at the wound in the air.

  All this activity had not distracted Dupin from his reading. Still he chanted. There was a weak glow from behind the brick wall. I stumbled over there, putting a hand against the wall to hold myself up. When Dupin read the last passage with an oratory flourish, the air was sucked out of the room and out of my lungs. I gasped for breath, fell to the floor, momentarily unconscious. Within a heartbeat the air came back, and with it, that horrid rotting smell, then as instantly as it arrived, it was gone. The air smelled only of foul sewer, which, considering the stench of what had gone before, was in that moment as pleasant and welcome as a young Parisian lady’s perfume.

  There was a flare of a match as Dupin rose from the floor where he, like me, had fallen. He lit a twist from the bag and held it up. There was little that we could see. Pulling the sword from his cane, he trudged forward with the light, and I followed. In it’s illumination we saw Grimm. Or what was left of him. The creatures of the borderlands had not only taken Dipple and his Necronomicon, they had ripped Grimm into a dozen pieces and plastered him across the ceiling and along the wall like an exploded dumpling.

  “Dipple failed,” Dupin said. “And Grimm finished him off. And The Old Ones took him before they were forced to retreat.”

  “At least one of those terrible books has been destroyed,” I said.

  “I think we should make it two,” Dupin said.

  We broke up the chairs and used the greasy twists of paper we still had, along with the bag itself, and started a fire. The chair wood was old and rotten and caught fast, crackling and snapping as it burned. On top of this Dupin, placed the remaining copy of The Necronomicon. The book was slow to catch, but when it did the cover blew open and the pages flared. The eye hole in the cover filled with a gold pupil, a long black slit for an iris. It blinked once, then the fire claimed it. The pages flapped like a bird, lifted upward with a howling noise, before collapsing into a burst of black ash.

  Standing there, we watched as the ash dissolved into the bricks like black snow on a warm window pane.

  I took a deep breath. “No regrets about the book?”

  “Not after glimpsing what lay beyond,” Dupin said. “I understand Dipple’s curiosity, and though mine is considerable, it is not that strong.”

  “I don’t even know what I saw,” I said, “but whatever it was, whatever world The Old Ones live in, I could sense in that void every kind of evil I have ever known or suspected, and then some. I know you don’t believe in fate, Dupin, but it’s as if we were placed here to stop Dipple, to be present when Grimm had had enough of Dipple’s plans.”

  “Nonsense,” Dupin said. “Coincidence. As I said before. More common than you think. And had I not been acquainted with that horrid book, and Dipple’s writings, we would have gone to bed to awake to a world we could not understand, and one in which we would not long survive. I should add that this is one adventure of ours that you might want to call fiction, and confine it to a magazine of melodrama; if you should write of it at all.”

  We went along the brick pathway then, with one last lit paper twist we had saved for light. It burned out before we made it back, but we were able to find our way by keeping in touch with the wall, finally arriving where moonlight spilled through the grating we had replaced upon entering the sewer. When we were on
the street, the world looked strange, as if bathed in a bloody light, and that gave me pause. Looking up, we saw that a scarlet cloud was flowing in front of the sinking moon. The cloud was thick, and for a moment it covered the face of the moon completely. Then the cloud passed and faded and the sky was clear and tinted silver with the common light of stars and moon.

  I looked at Dupin.

  “It’s quite all right,” he said. “A last remnant of the borderland. Its calling card has been taken away.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “As sure as I can be,” he said.

  With that, we strolled homeward, the moon and the stars falling down behind the city of Paris. As we went, the sun rose, bloomed red, but a different kind of red to the cloud that had covered the moon; warm and inspiring, a bright badge of normalcy, that from here on out I knew was a lie.

  Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over forty novels and numerous short stories. His novella, Bubba Ho-tep, was made into an award-winning film of the same name, as was Incident On and Off a Mountain Road. His mystery classic Cold in July inspired the recent major motion picture of the same name starring Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard, and Don Johnson. His novel The Bottoms will also soon be a film directed by Bill Paxton. His literary works have received numerous recognitions, including the Edgar, eight Bram Stoker Awards, the Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature, American Mystery Award, the International Horror Award, British Fantasy Award, and many others. His most recent novel for adults, The Thicket, was published last fall.

  Sometimes all you can do is kneel in the rain and ask

  what it is that the universe is trying to tell you.

  LET MY SMILE BE YOUR UMBRELLA

  Brian Hodge

  Forget everything you think you know about yourself. Forget those twenty or twenty-five years of assumptions. However old you are. Instead, try looking at yourself from someone else’s perspective for a change. My perspective. Empty out all those pitiful preconceptions and just look at yourself. Look at the effect you’re having on the world.

  What do you see then? Do you see what’s really there? Can you even be that honest with yourself?

  If you could, then I think you would agree that there’s not much choice of what to do about it, is there? The end result? You’ve been claiming all along it’s what you want.

  What I see, it’s not a question of saving, not any more. It’s too late for that. Now it’s come down to quarantine and eradication.

  So it’ll be the same with you as it’s been with the others:

  I’ll take more pleasure in killing you than you take in being alive.

  Who gave you the right to not be happy, anyway? Where did you get the idea that it was okay to throw all that back in the face of a loving, benevolent universe? It’s your birthright, for god’s sake. It’s inscribed right there in the constitution of this great land of opportunity we live in: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So if you squander your liberty by refusing to pursue anything of positive worth, then really, haven’t you forfeited your right to life?

  And remember: According to you, that’s what you’ve wanted for a long time. Well, just wait, because I’m on my way.

  I mean, what kind of attention whore are you, that you would do what you did? Starve yourself to death and blog about the experience so the entire world can share in your sickness—who thinks of a thing like that? If you want to be dead, you just do it, you don’t throw a party and invite the world to watch.

  And not to belabor the obvious, but if you want to be dead, there are a lot faster ways than starving yourself. Starvation takes a long, long time. As I’m sure you realized. As I’m sure you knew damn well before you ever decided that you’d had your last bite of food and now it was showtime.

  Dehydration, now that’s a lot quicker. Three or four bad days, then you’re done. But obviously that didn’t suit your timetable. Obviously you didn’t feel inclined to call water and power, and tell them to turn off the taps, nope, won’t be needing those anymore.

  So I don’t know whether or not you’re genuinely suicidal. For sure, I believe you’re miserable. You don’t have to convince me on that account. But more than anything, you’re an exhibitionist. You want the attention. You wanted to be found out, and then just found, period, before it was too late, because you picked the slowest way possible to kill yourself and gave the world plenty of time to catch up to you. Just sitting there in your apartment there in Portland not eating, oh poor me, poor pitiful me, waiting for the cavalry to ride in and save you, take control of the situation and remove your choice in the matter.

  Goddamn sociopath.

  Photo updates too. That was a nice touch. One a day, so the world could see your ribs and hipbones standing out a little farther each morning. Like anorexia porn. Just so you could convince the pictures-or-it-didn’t-happen skeptics who were calling bullshit on your little experiment. Like, okay, maybe I’m suicidal and masochistic, but don’t anyone dare call me a liar.

  And they found you. Of course. Well played, applause all around. Hiding your online account behind proxy servers during those first three weeks, so they couldn’t trace your identity . . . until you weren’t. Until you mysteriously “forgot.” Because all that hard work of not eating made you loopy and forgetful. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t, but you sure sounded plenty cogent in those last few blog posts.

  What a difference three weeks makes, huh? You went from complete anonymity to international celebrity in three weeks. Everybody wondering what was going to happen to HungryGirl234. Everybody loves to watch a good train wreck. You turned viral in the worst sense of the word.

  I said three weeks? Less time, actually. Your audience was huge before the plug got pulled. Or maybe it was the other way around. The plug got jacked back in. No more worries about life support for you. The main thing I wondered was how the hopes were split. What percentage of people was hoping that someone would get to you in time, and what percentage wanted you to follow this thing to its logical conclusion.

  As to which side I came down on? Do you even have to ask?

  Wait, wait, don’t tell me—you were one of those girls who spent your high school years writing poetry so embarrassingly awful that it would shame a soap opera diva. Yeah, your blog posts had that whiff about them. I bet your favorite color was black and your favorite mood was mope and your classmates voted you Most Likely To Cut Notches Up and Down Her Arms.

  Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being sensitive. Only when you gouge out your eyes to everything on the plus side of the meter, and dramatize and catastrophize everything on the minus side. You live to suffer, and that’s all, don’t you? You have no interest in dining from life’s rich bounty, the good along with the bad, right? All you want to do is revel in eating the shit. Just look up from your dinner table with your helpless sagging shoulders and a shit-eating sob-smile, like you’re asking, “Why does this keep happening to me,” except you’re not the tiniest bit aware of the gigantic ladle waving around in your hand.

  You know what it is that I really can’t stand about people like you? It’s that you’re toxic and contagious and you don’t even care. You’re the runny-nosed moron who wanders up and sneezes on the salad bar. You’re the addict who shares the dirty needles even though you know what the test results said.

  Can your pathetic little pea-sized soul even begin to comprehend the magnitude of your callous indifference to the effect you’re having on the world? It can be hard enough for people to keep their spirits up even when all they have to contend with is the day-to-day mundanity of seeing their dreams end up on the deferred gratification plan. Then they see you, you, someone who would seem to have everything to live for, see you squander the most fundamental gifts you’ve been given and in the process tell them that they might as well not try either. You apparently can’t stand the idea of a world going on without you, never even noticing your absence, and now you’ve made it your mission to drag as ma
ny down to your level as you can.

  Misery loves company, and you’re living proof. You’re a professional sufferer and you hung out your shingle years ago: Abandon hope all ye who encounter me.

  Converts, that’s what you want. You want followers. You want to be Queen of the Suicides, only you’ll never quite manage to get around to ending the suffering for yourself, will you? No, for you, it would be enough to hear about other people following your lead, only with more commitment. Every casualty you inspire just reinforces your negative worldview that much more.

  What a pity. What a waste.

  What a tragic perversion of priorities.

  I’d ask if you have no shame, but I’m afraid you’d only give me a blank stare and ask what the word means.

  I wish you could look up, just once, and see the sun the same way I do, and know its light rather than the shadows. I wish you could take in the first blue of the morning sky and see it as the wrapping paper around the gift of another beautiful day.

  And now you’re at again, aren’t you? HungryGirl234 rides again.

  But why use that, when I know your name now. Deborah. You probably hate it, though, don’t you? Such a wholesome name. Deborah. It’s a cheerleader’s name.

  Not that you’ve forced the world to put you back on suicide watch. You’ve chosen more subtlety this time. You have to know what resorting to the same old hunger strike routine might get you, now that you’re a known head-case. You no longer have the luxury of anonymity, the option of teasing the world along, rationing out only as much information as you want it to have about you. You’ve lost control of that much.