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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  Inside, illuminated by candles, crowded a multitude of statues:

  Our Lady of Ruins, repeated over and over . . .

  OUR LADY OF RUINS

  Sarah Singleton

  A winter forest: dark stripes of trees against the snow, and the girl’s red coat. He followed her, away from the glistening road and inert car. She moved through the black and white, folding herself into the trees.

  He was two hours’ drive from the city. The car had died in the narrow corridor of road. No phone signal, no passing traffic. He lifted the bonnet and stared, perplexed, at the engine, its incomprehensible hieroglyphs of steel.

  To north and south, he saw twin vanishing points, neatly ruled: road, snow, trees, sky.

  Then he saw her, impossible, mythological—a running girl.

  “Hey!” he called out. “Hey! I need help!”

  The forest swallowed his words. The girl didn’t hear him, didn’t stop. He looked again at the car and stepped away from the road.

  He found her footprints in the snow. The road disappeared behind him. Silence—except for the crunch beneath his boots. Prepared for the cold he wore a hat and black sheepskin mittens. His mobile lay in his zipped up pocket, a protective charm proved useless.

  The trail wound to left and right, sometimes circled a tree, backtracked and looped, as though to tease. He’d lost sight of the girl, wondered about wolves and bears, and when the snow grew deeper, sweated. The light would fade in another hour. What then?

  He heard a clink, observed a stab of color.

  He stopped and looked up, shading his eyes to see. A dense net of twig and branch, ink-black, drawn against the sky and a blot, a knot of color—scarlet, blue—turning on the air.

  He stretched out his hand and grabbed. The branch bent and rebound, like a bow, spraying him with snow. He shook his head, wiped his face and stared at the object in his hand.

  A round, white face: bead eyes, stitched mouth and nose. A dress of rags, cunning strips of cloth, a tiny bell hanging from wooden feet. He rolled it from side to side, observing sequins, fragments of glass, silver embroidery, a stuffed pouch made for a body. As his fingers probed, the doll lay like a dead bird in his hand, lolling and gaudy.

  He’d broken the string from which the doll depended so he propped it in a cleft of the same tree and walked on. The footprints veered east. He followed.

  Another doll, then a few paces, three more on one tree. He felt them watch, bead eyes turning in his direction. Then dark pines gave way to silver birches with peeled-paper trunks. He saw the girl again, vivid, only yards away. The birches melted on the air to make a clearing in the forest, a lake of sunlight—and a church with a high turret.

  The church floated above the snow.

  He blinked, struggling to make sense of it: a wooden church with a steep shingled roof, narrow stained-glass windows, the tilted cone of a spire jostling with statues and gargoyles. A church with six huge wooden wheels to carry it through the forest.

  “What’s your name?” The girl in red was standing in front of him, a hood pulled over her head. She was about fourteen, with dark hair, tawny skin, and a slight squint.

  “Rider,” he said. “Dan Rider.”

  “What are you doing here, Rider?”

  “My car broke down.”

  “You followed me.”

  “Yes. I need help—a phone. Someone who can fix cars. Or give me a lift.” He gestured vaguely at the forest, the way he’d come.

  The girl didn’t respond. She narrowed her eyes.

  “The church,” Rider said. “Does it actually move?”

  “Of course.” Her voice was deadpan. “You want to go inside?” She didn’t wait for an answer but turned away holding out an arm to guide him.

  As they drew closer, he saw an encampment of caravans beyond the church, horses tethered and browsing on hay, the twining smoke of a dozen small fires where several anonymous figures huddled.

  They climbed a flight of wooden steps at the front of the church to an arched door. Above it, in a tall niche, stood a statue of the Virgin Mary made of dark, polished wood. Her gaze was raised, her hands pressed together in prayer.

  “Come in,” the girl urged.

  Rider glanced back, aware of time passing, the imminent approach of night.

  “I need to—I have to . . . ”

  “Come on.” The girl was impatient, imperious. Rider’s words died. He followed.

  They entered a wooden box with an uneven floor. Light leaked through stained glass windows—three narrow slots on each side and one elaborate circle above the altar. The walls were not quite true, creating a sense of vertiginous hallucination. The church seemed to totter. Rider’s brain struggled to make sense of it, the out-of-true walls, the shadows punctuated by candles burning in lanterns. He grabbed the back of a pew.

  The girl seemed immune. She walked up the aisle, pushing her hood back, and stood before another statue, beside the altar.

  “The church is dedicated to the Virgin,” she announced, the tour guide. “Our Lady of Ruins.”

  Rider, grasping each pew ended as he proceeded, stared up at the statue. Of painted wood, taller than he was, Our Lady of Ruins wore silver armor and a sky-blue cloak. Her right arm, stretched out to her side, held a sword, and on her left a shield painted with white lilies. A snake languished beneath bare feet. Her face was pure and insane.

  “So pray,” the girl said. “Kneel—here.”

  Rider dropped to his knees, lost and perplexed. He’d never prayed in his life, didn’t know how to. He stared at the Virgin, opened and closed his mouth, his mind a perfect void. Outside the sun sank behind the trees. Darkness swilled through the forest and filled the church.

  Rider crouched by the fire. An ancient man, sunken-faced with feathery white hair, nodded and smiled at him beyond the flames. Rider’s questions about his car and need for help made no impression. He could hear them talking, but apart from the girl in red, struggled to make out what they said. The conversations were opaque. Were they speaking another language?

  The old man nodded again. They’d given him a bowl of oily rabbit stew and a slab of black bread. Something in the stew, herbs perhaps, left an acrid taste in his mouth. Red (the girl wouldn’t tell him her name) had unstrung one of her many necklaces as they left the trundle church and slipped it over his head. The pendant, a carved, painted effigy of the Lady of Ruins, dangled from his chest as he hunched over his bowl.

  “We make them for pilgrims,” she said.

  “I’m not a pilgrim,” Rider answered.

  Sitting at the front of the caravan, an elderly woman sewed the face of another doll.

  “They represent the saints,” Red said. The dolls were hung in trees as prayers and petitions to God in the forest. Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, Saint Perpetua, Saint Sara the Black, Saint Maxentia, Saint Caesaria. Rider saw the old woman stab her needle in the cloth face as she stared at him across the fire.

  When he’d eaten, the travelers gathered. Some carried lanterns, others crucifixes and statues. Myrrh smoked in a silver censer. Rider stood up. Around him the travelers murmured. Above the miasma of hot breath, wood smoke and incense, he looked up to clear cold air, a circle of treetops and a bowl of stars. From far away he heard the low, wandering chorus of wolves.

  “It’s time.” Red held out her hand.

  “For what?”

  She smiled, encouraging: “The church, Rider. The church.”

  They walked in procession and oddly Rider’s unease deserted him. He accepted the situation, the strange faces, the low, untuneful hymn rising from the procession and wondered briefly if the stew had been drugged because his gums were numb, his tongue stinging.

  The church door was open, the interior lit with a host of candles. The travelers watched as he climbed the steps and went inside. He looked back at the uncanny faces, the calm, well-meaning smiles, and he stepped inside. They closed the door behind him.

  He stood on the threshold. A single
figure stood before the altar. The statue, Our Lady of Ruins, presided over the empty space. Yellow light played over the multitude of figures painted on the walls, monsters and angels, winged and fanged.

  “Thus saith the Lord: Behold, waters rise up out of the north, and shall be an overflowing flood, and shall overflow the land, and all that is therein; the city, and them that dwell therein: then the men shall cry, and all the inhabitants of the land shall howl.” The man at the altar had his back to Rider but his words filled the church.

  Rider took a step forward. On the walls the painted figures swam, a mass of limbs and faces, gesturing, reaching out, rolling their eyes.

  “Lift up thy feet unto the perpetual ruins; even all that the enemy hath done wickedly in the sanctuary,” the voice said.

  “And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the ruin, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations.”

  The man turned. He watched Rider approach and gestured for him to kneel.

  “How long have you searched for this place?”

  Rider raised his face. The priest had long white hair and aged, riven skin. The Lady of Ruins gazed over the priest’s head. Her sword shone.

  A ribbon of thought ran through Rider’s mind: his home, the city with its glass towers, offices and housing estates, his distant wife, meaningless business, journey, the dead car by the roadside. His memories seemed thin and false. The ribbon dissolved into nothing.

  “I don’t know,” he said, bowing his head. He hadn’t been searching. This place, the church on wheels, a dream he’d fallen into—and from which he might yet wake up to resume in that other faraway place, his life.

  A swelling sound filled the church—a multitude of voices, a storm wind, the choir of wolves—or perhaps just the roar of blood in his eardrums. The priest pressed Rider’s forehead with his thumb and made the sign of the cross above his head. He took a silver cup from the altar and held it to Rider’s lips. Rider sipped, tasting honey on his tongue, feeling dust and ash in his throat. He coughed, choking, unable to breathe, losing balance.

  He tottered, his body a helpless column of flesh and bone, without its bearings. Slowly, slowly he fell to the wooden floor and then he was looking up at the dark shape of the priest. Beyond him, the hectic paintings on the walls, the snarling demons, the dancing angels, each merged into the other. Then the priest was gone. Rider lay on his back, helpless, in the giant cradle of the church. The light in the church intensified, blinding, bleaching out the paintings, burning his brain.

  He opened his eyes. Daylight colored the windows. The spot on his forehead burned. Rider sat up.

  A woman was standing in front of the altar, tall and lean, with a face so exact it was almost androgynous. Rider struggled to his feet.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said. “For a long, long time. I was afraid you’d never come back.”

  Rider stared. “I don’t know who you are.”

  “Yes, you do. You know. Everyone knows. You were looking for me, but you lost sight. You forgot you were looking.” She had pale-almond skin; black, crow-feather hair. They stared at one another. Then she smiled.

  “Time to go,” she said.

  Outside the church, the forest had disappeared. Tracks wended from the giant wooden wheels, a twisting parallel line in the dry dirt that disappeared into the distance, illustrating its journey. Now the church stood at the heart of a ruined village, on a wide, paved square blown with dust from the desert.

  They walked, Rider and the woman, seeing walls like broken teeth, trees rooted in cracked stone, yellow grass spouting from a clay bowl lying on the ground. In a tiny courtyard they found an orange tree, still covered in leaves and fruit. Rider picked an orange, split it open with his fingers, and found inside a ring made of buttery gold which he slipped over his thumb.

  In a small, dark house a book lay open on a table. The words had run from the pages, covering the top of the table, the legs, the floor, and had begun to climb the wall. Rider tried to read them, but couldn’t.

  In a square, between half a dozen white houses, stood a well with a wooden lid, which the woman pushed back. Rider leaned over, seeing far below the glim of water. He heard voices, cries, whispered conversations in the column of air. When he stood up, the darkness inside the well seemed to have tipped out, filling the sky. A huge round moon loomed over the village. The trundle church had gone, moved on. Tracks indicated the way it had come, and the direction of its leaving.

  “Where are we?” Rider asked.

  “In the ruins,” the woman said.

  They walked from the village across the desert, finding old paved roads. Once a ghost funeral passed, and at one of the several carved stone waymarks, a multitude of rusty keys hanging on a fig tree.

  At the end of the desert, they passed into ancient woodland. One evening, by a pond, a nightingale began to sing and Rider saw, over the tops of blossoming hawthorns, the tiled roof of a circular tower. He climbed the spiral staircase winding around the tower to a single door at the top. Inside, illuminated by candles, crowded a multitude of statues: Our Lady of Ruins, repeated over and over, the largest towering over him, the smallest, perched in a niche, thumb-sized.

  The woodland passed from spring to smoke- and mud-scented autumn. They found a suit of armor by a smoldering fire and later, an orchard of wild apple trees beneath which lay the skeleton of a horse, caparisoned in silver.

  At the wood’s end, on a grassy plain, Rider saw the banners of two opposing armies, heard the cries of soldiers, blood leaking into a river. All melted on the air, but as they walked, Rider felt innumerable phantoms passing through his body.

  That night, in a roofless marble temple, Rider and the woman undressed and lay, shivering, in each other’s arms. For a measureless time they kissed and caressed. The shadow land melted: they contained it, marked its boundaries. Rider held her gaze when she came. His body burned.

  “I do know who you are,” he said. “How did I forget?”

  “Because you always forget,” she said.

  He was cold when he woke, clothes soaked and filthy. Leaves moved above as he lay alone, body aching.

  A car passed on the long straight road through the forest. Seeing it, Rider’s mind seemed to collapse on itself. Memories fell over each other, shaken up, a kaleidoscope of images.

  Deftly his mind knitted back to the time (how long ago?) when his car died by the roadside. The vast in-between, the trundle church, the woman, the landscape of dreams, seemed to shunt sideways into a parallel realm of dubious memory.

  Rider struggled to his feet. He was still wearing the clothes of that day in the snow, and zipped into his pocket, a mobile phone, battery dead. Considerable time had passed—his hair was long, face bearded, clothes soiled. One boot had vanished.

  He lurched to the road, guessing, from the weather and vegetation, it was April. Had he been gone five months? He’d have to hitchhike, though he wasn’t a good prospect, a wild man covered in filth. Eventually a truck stopped, offering a lift to the city. They talked, Rider and the driver. Rider asked the date. He’d been gone not five months, but seventeen.

  His wife cried and shouted when she saw him. She’d believed him dead, had grieved, moved on, and now seemed put out he was inserting himself back into her life. She asked what had happened, where he’d been. He had no plausible explanation. She followed him into the bathroom as he undressed, asked about the gold ring on his thumb, the pendant, the odd red scar in the middle of his forehead, the picture inked across the skin of his back, a woman in a blue cloak, dressed in armor and carrying a sword. When he couldn’t answer, she shouted and cried again, pummeling his chest with her fists. His disappearance was unfathomable. He’d taken no money from their account, he had returned in the clothes he’d left in. The car had been recovered not long after he’d disappeared, on the forest road.

  Rider shaved but didn’t cut his hair. He’d aged: lines etched his face, strands of white
grew in the mass of dark hair but he was thinner, stronger, lacking the soft paunch of two years before. The first night back, his wife dragged him into bed, evidently intrigued by the stranger who’d returned, the lean, muscular, tattooed man, the mystery of him. Before they slept, she pressed her hand to the side of his face and asked him again:

  “Where did you go?”

  “I don’t know, Marion. I can’t remember. The car broke down, I followed a girl in the wood to get help. And then? I don’t know. My mind’s blank.”

  “You’re different,” she said.

  “Am I? In what way?”

  “I don’t know. Before you went you seemed—well, absent.” She gave a short laugh. “I thought—I was afraid, when you disappeared. Depression maybe.”

  “You thought I’d killed myself.”

  “Yes. We did—the police. You didn’t leave a trail—no money gone, nothing.”

  While she slept, Rider lay awake wondering who he was. It wasn’t true, that his memory was empty. He remembered a sequence of images and emotions—the saint doll lying in his hand, the trundle church in the forest, the woman, the orange tree in a courtyard. He turned the ring on his thumb as his wife slumbered, her hand resting on his chest. Most of all he felt loss and exile.

  Marion didn’t have to go to work the next day, allowed leave for the unsettling reappearance of her dead husband. He heard her speak quietly to a man on the phone, in tender, familiar terms and realized she had indeed moved on. After breakfast, they drove into the city and over a coffee she explained she’d started seeing someone, but that was over now. She apologized and cried again. Rider reassured.