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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  Twelve uncomfortable minutes into his show, Kurricke ducks into the wings. Returning a moment later, he is pushing in front of him a mannequin on a wheeled chair. She sits woodenly in a gray skirt and white blouse, hands composed in her lap, bare head glossy under the stage lights.

  Wheeling the chair to center stage, Kurricke asks a question of the crowd in a voice that is audible, but incomprehensible. Someone throws a crumpled wad of paper. It makes a high, slow arc before falling short.

  Unconcerned by this reaction, Kurricke throws his arms wide with a shout, as though introducing an act superior to his own.

  Nothing happens.

  Kurricke has forgotten the mannequin’s wig, which hangs on a hook behind the chair. The hair is brown and luxurious. Embarrassed, Kurricke shows it quickly to the now-silent audience, then slips it over the mannequin’s head. Hair in place, he leaps back and throws up the same grand gesture. This time his shout is clear.

  “Evelyn!”

  The mannequin’s eyes open. The magician—arms still raised—beams proudly at his audience, who fail to share his triumph. Behind him, Evelyn has but little control over herself. Her head jerks as though palsied. Her legs kick out then back again, heels scraping the stage floor.

  Kurricke grins as though at a beloved daughter.

  “Evelyn,” the old magician croons. “Evelyn, will you dance?” Holding both her hands, Kurricke draws her out of the chair, and encourages a lurching step forward.

  Pause. Rewind.

  Sam left the couch to put his face closer to the television’s quivering image.

  Play.

  Her eyes open. Her head turns. She grabs for Kurricke’s offered hands and rises. A step. A stumble. He catches her, and his lips are near her ear. Is he whispering to her? His hands hold her slight waist. She clings to him, but her eyes are on the audience.

  Pause.

  Was that fear in her eyes?

  Rewind. Play.

  Evelyn falls into Kurricke, throwing her arms around his neck. He holds her, lips to her ear. His knees are bent to support her weight. Over his shoulder, her eyes are wide. Yes, she is afraid. More than afraid.

  They dance—or rather, Kurricke drags her across the stage. Evelyn is shockingly graceless. A spin—she stumbles. A dip—she clutches him, terrified. The spectacle goes on too long. The audience grows restless.

  When Kurricke at last returns her to the chair, her wig has come askew. Kurricke straightens it for her, and arranges her hands in her lap. Wheeling her around to face the audience, he stands behind her, hands on her shoulders.

  “Evelyn, you were splendid this evening,” he declares to the audience. “Will you wave goodnight to the kind people?”

  Evelyn begins to look back at him, but the magician faces her forward with one hand on either cheek. He will not stop grinning at his audience. He waves, as though to demonstrate what is expected. Evelyn rotates a rigid hand in a shy parade wave.

  While her arm is still in the air, Kurricke wrenches her head to the side, so she is looking suddenly over her own shoulder. Her body jerks, and Kurricke lifts her head away. Evelyn’s arm drops—clack—to her side. Her leg kicks out from under her skirt.

  There is some scattered applause, but mostly he has provoked an uneasy silence.

  Kurricke bows, and bows again, though the applause has died. He leans back to look into the wings because the curtains are not closing. He raises a hand to catch the attention of someone only he can see. He is still smiling—still waving—when the curtains, like walls of black water, sweep in to engulf him.

  Sam’s ad in the Austin classifieds read: Need services of one SCUBA diver. Caving experience and camera required. Will pay for time.

  Sam stepped outside when the black Jeep backed boldly into the narrow slice of driveway beside the dumpster. The driver had the door pushed open before the engine quieted. Bald and unsmiling, the man who stepped down was older than Sam had expected.

  “David?” Sam asked as he crossed the dead grass.

  “And you must be Sam.”

  Sam offered his hand, which David squeezed harder than necessary. Sam waved an arm back at the house. “It’s inside,” he said.

  “Well, then,” said the diver, lifting a backpack from the rear bed. “Let’s have a look.”

  Sam had arranged two portable worklights around the hatch in the basement. He switched them on, and shadows burned away under the brilliant stare of twin 500-watt halogen bulbs.

  “Looks like a sub’s escape hatch,” David said. Twenty-four inches in diameter, the hatch was bolted to the concrete floor with twelve thumb-sized rivets. The diver glanced up. “What’s this for?”

  Suspended over the hatch, a pulley system had been bolted to the underside of a supporting beam.

  “It was all here when I moved in,” Sam said. He saw David about to ask so added, “Five days ago.”

  Before there were more questions, Sam took a knee and turned the handwheel counterclockwise. From below came the solid thunk of internal mechanisms retracting. Getting his feet under him, Sam pulled up on the hatch, which opened smoothly on its hinge and locked into a leaning position twenty degrees past the apex.

  He rose and stepped back. Side by side, the two men stared into a pool of dark water.

  Blandly, David said, “Wow.”

  Sam agreed.

  “Bomb shelter?” David asked.

  Having already considered and dismissed that idea, Sam gave a skeptical shrug. “I don’t think so. There’s no ladder.”

  David’s brow furrowed. He knelt next to the hatch, and with his face near the water, breathed deep. “It’s not septic.” He dipped his fingers and tasted. “Not salt, either.”

  Without warning, he plunged his arm in the water, reaching not down, but along the underside of the floor. Sam watched him feel around the entire perimeter, then again, this time lying on his stomach, shoulder-deep in water. When he got back on his knees, he looked concerned. Sam imagined it was exactly how he himself had looked after completing the same exercise. Predicting where David’s mind was leading him, Sam offered him a broom handle.

  “I couldn’t find the sides,” Sam said. “I already tried, but you’ve got a longer reach than me.”

  Holding the broom by its end, David slipped it into the water and probed for anything that would hint at the dimensions of the chamber below them. Finding nothing, he sat up and laid the broom handle aside, mystified.

  “Broom handle’s sixty inches,” Sam said. “My arm’s another twenty-four.” He went to stand at the chalk mark he’d made on the concrete exactly eighty-four inches from the lip of the hatch. He pointed out the chalk marks he’d drawn around the basement, outlining the minimum circumference of the chamber. It wasn’t the entire basement, but it didn’t leave much room.

  David pulled his backpack next to him and unzipped it. Out came a black mask and an underwater light. Pressing the mask to his face, he switched on the light and plunged his head into the water. He was back in a moment to report, “Nothing. I can’t see the sides or the bottom. Have you tested for depth?”

  Sam showed David the five hundred foot spool of utility rope and the twelve-pound river anchor he’d tied to the end of it. “I looped it over the pulleys,” he said. “Then just dropped it in.”

  David waited.

  “A hundred and eighty-eight feet,” Sam said.

  David blinked at the hatch. “Odd,” he said.

  Sam credited the man’s composure. His own reaction, upon realizing that his mid-town home was supported over an abyss by a slab of concrete six inches thick, hadn’t been nearly so indifferent.

  “At this point, I just want to know what’s down there.”

  “Right,” David said, all business. “Let’s get the gear.”

  Five minutes later they had David’s equipment piled beside the hatch. After looping the yellow line through the pulley, they cast the anchor and let it sink. While the pulley rattled and the rope played out, David stripped of
f his T-shirt and cargo shorts. He proceeded to stuff himself into a neoprene wetsuit.

  When the anchor hit bottom, David looped the line around the handwheel and pulled out the slack. After knotting it, he looked at Sam. “That’s a good knot,” he said. “Don’t touch that knot.”

  From one of his bags, David produced a spool of braided nylon rope and a handheld underwater light. “I’ll clip onto the anchor line up here and follow it all the way down. On the bottom, I’ll tie off with this—” He shook the spool of rope. “—and go exploring. I’ve only got about twenty-five minutes of bottom time, so I can’t go far.”

  David shrugged into his vest—burdened with gauges, dials and hoses—and zipped up. He had a spare everything. Sitting at the ledge with his legs in the water, he forced his bare feet into a pair of stiff, black flippers.

  “Aim those big lights into the water after I’m down,” David said. “If all mine go black and I lose the anchor line, I’ll need them to get back.”

  With a little heave, David slipped legs first into the water. “Tanks,” he said.

  One at a time, Sam passed the tanks into the water, and David attached them to fittings under his arms, where they dangled like a pair of strange wings. He jerked a thumb at his bag. “There’s a little book in there with a few names and numbers. I’d appreciate you letting them know what happened if I don’t make it back.

  “Relax,” he said when Sam balked. “Me dying won’t come as a shock to anyone.” He held up his camera, safe in its clear little box. “I’m going to swim around, have a nice time, take some pictures. You won’t even miss me.”

  With that, he fitted his mask and stuck a regulator in his mouth. Then he disappeared into the black water. His descending lights were obscured by darkness much sooner than Sam would have thought.

  Forty-five minutes later, the hiss of breaking bubbles preceded David’s return. On surfacing, he peeled away mask and regulator.

  “What did you find?” Sam asked.

  David hefted a tank out of the water, which Sam took and stood to the side. The next came immediately after.

  Twisted into sitting position, David hauled himself out of the hatch. He nodded to his bag while reaching back down to pull off his fins. “Pass me a water, will you?”

  Sam handed him a plastic bottle, then watched the diver twist it open and drink deeply.

  “What’s down there?” he asked again.

  David ran a hand over his bare scalp, then lifted the camera. “Easier to just show you.”

  David sat squarely in the center of the couch, Sam’s laptop on the coffee table in front of him. Sam sat beside him.

  “This is a hundred and sixty feet,” David said.

  Mostly dark, the picture featured a circle of illumination on what appeared to be a muddy slope.

  “The anchor hit here,” David said, touching the screen at the start of a long gouge in the mud. “Then slid off this way.” He traced the groove across the otherwise smooth surface to the lip of a sudden abyss. Barely visible, the yellow anchor line faded into the darkness.

  “This is about ten feet above the structure,” David said.

  Sam hadn’t finished processing the word ‘structure’ before David tapped the keyboard.

  Next picture: clear, black water and darkness crowding in from all sides; the anchor resting in three inches of black mud, yellow rope angling towards the surface.

  “I tied off at the anchor and dropped a flare, just in case.”

  Next picture: a doorless frame in a featureless wall. Beside it, a glassless double window opening into a black room, the edge of a mantle barely visible at the limit of the light’s reach.

  “What’s that?” Sam touched a vague blur inside the room, barely within range of the flash.

  David answered with the next picture: a much closer view. A figure sat in a plain wooden chair in an otherwise empty room. Hands arranged in its lap, it faced an open doorframe on the opposite wall. It wore no clothes, and had no hair. They could not see its face.

  Sam sat back. “You went inside?”

  “I put the camera through the window.”

  Leaning forward again, Sam said, “It’s a mannequin.”

  “All those pictures were from the first house,” David said. “The one right below us.”

  Sam stared at him. “The first?”

  Staring at the screen, Sam became aware of David watching him closely. Realizing he had his hand over his mouth, he took it away and nodded at the laptop. “Keep going.”

  David clicked through a series of images, leaving each one up for just a few seconds. There were bare rooms and bloated furniture, stairways leading into darkness. And mannequins. Some of them were seated, some lying down. One of them stood at a window, another slumped in a dark corner of a drowned room, legs splayed.

  “I didn’t like it,” David said. “I was uncomfortable.”

  Before Sam could reply, David cleared his throat. “I was running low on mix at that point, so I headed back. At that first house, the one right below us, I thought I’d take a few more pictures before coming up. Maybe go inside.”

  David tapped a key. The chair was empty.

  Sam leaned back, but it wasn’t enough distance. Pushing himself out of the couch, he walked a few feet before realizing he had nowhere to go.

  “At first I thought I had the wrong house,” David continued. “But I could see the glow from my flare, and I never left my guideline. So I went around.”

  Sam watched from behind the couch, arms folded.

  The flare, a brilliant shard of harsh light, illuminated a wide expanse of flat mud in the next picture. Half-buried beside the flare was the anchor. Rising from it to the surface, the yellow line. And there, the silhouette of a figure standing beside the anchor.

  “It wasn’t moving,” David said. “It was like it had been moved. Like someone had come while I was gone and just . . . moved it there.”

  The next picture was closer, but no more detailed.

  “That’s as close as I wanted to get,” David said. “I’d seen enough, and I was out of gas, so I got out of there. I dropped the rope and swam for the anchor line about fifteen feet up.”

  David’s final picture had been taken from maybe twenty feet up the anchor line, looking back down. Below, the light of the flare seemed crushed by the weight of the darkness around it. Even at that distance, in that darkness, Sam could see how the human-shaped blur had taken hold of the anchor line and lifted its gaze to follow David’s ascent.

  Sam dragged the trunk in front of David and squatted next to it. “I found this in the attic,” he said. Lifting the lid of the trunk revealed the notebooks and tapes. “The previous owner was a stage magician. This was all his.”

  Seeing that it meant nothing to David, Sam picked up the top notebook. Opening it to one of the pages he’d marked, he read aloud:

  There is no food there. They chose the weakest among them to devour. Does that make their world an imitation of ours? Or is it we who imitate them? Who is the higher being: a creature who is exactly as it seems, or we who cower behind civilized performances? Do layers of artifice make us more human, or less so?

  Imagine I mold a primitive man from a lump of mud. I might teach him to dance and whistle. I might teach him to speak. Because I am proud, I will dress him like myself. His buttons will always be polished, and his cuffs clean. He will learn to smile, and to laugh. But to whatever majestic heights he aspires, I will always know his secret—even if he forgets it himself. It is the same as mine: under our masks, we are only so much mud.

  If we, who think ourselves so fine, were stripped down to our bare essence, would we be any different? I think not. Mud and spit are all that is real. The rest is masks and lies heaped layer upon layer.

  “He knew something,” Sam said with confidence. “I haven’t read all of them, or watched everything yet. But there’s got to be something in there that explains that.” He stabbed a finger at his laptop.

  Sam
could see that David remained unconvinced, so he turned on the television and put the first tape into the camera.

  After the closing of the curtains, Sam felt a grim satisfaction at the stunned look on David’s face.

  “That mannequin . . . ” David said.

  “There were more in the attic.”

  David shifted in discomfort. “Where are they now?”

  “The dumpster. In pieces.”

  “But did they . . . I mean, do you think he got them from down there?”

  “They had to come from somewhere.”

  Sam watched David thinking. After a moment, the older man’s eyes shifted to the open trunk. Pushing aside the layers of notebooks, he uncovered the 8mm tapes beneath. “What’s on the rest of these?”

  “More of the same.”

  David handed one to Sam. “Show me.”

  They spent all afternoon watching the tapes. Both agreed that Kurricke was a mediocre magician, at best. They took to fast-forwarded his act to get to Evelyn’s appearances.

  In the earlier tapes, Evelyn couldn’t so much as rise from her chair. Her hands fluttered in her lap, her head jerked helplessly—an epileptic parody. During one show she spasmed off the chair. Back arching, heels drumming the stage. In later shows, she remained in her chair and responded to simple commands. At the end of those shows, a proudly grinning Kurricke would lift her arm to help her wave. Once, after helping her stand, Kurricke stepped back to applaud her when a seizure shook her legs from under her. One of her arms broke off when she hit the floor, but she continued waving. The crowd was appalled.

  As the timeline progressed, Evelyn became less awkward. Like a child learning to walk, she stumbled stiff-legged across the stage, groping for the encouraging magician. In one show, she danced an awkward solo number under the spotlights, during which she seemed a horrid, life-sized puppet jerked about on unseen strings. She performed a clumsy curtsy when finished, and blew a kiss to the audience. Out came Kurricke from the wings: grinning, waving, smiling—the proud showman. Evelyn sat obediently in her chair, soundless as he twisted off her head and held it aloft for all to see.

  Sam peeled a cold slice of pizza from the box on the counter, then couldn’t decide if he wanted it reheated or cold. It was 11:37 p.m. by the clock on the stove.