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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  The dunes become long grass and then packed brown earth. I’ve never seen so many trees. Their fallen leaves are needles underfoot, faded from rich green to brown.

  There’s a hatch buried in the ground. One of my guards opens it and clambers down, waiting at the bottom.

  “You next.”

  The corridor leads downwards. Our boots shed sand and needles on the tiles. There’s the acrid smell of antiseptic.

  “In here.” One of them touches my arm.

  The other’s busy talking to someone I can’t see because of the angle of an adjoining door. I catch the words, “Makin sent her this way. She’ll need time to heal.”

  “Take your clothes off and put them in the bin. Turn this and water will come out here. Get clean under it.” My guard’s talking to me like I’m a child. “Soap’s here. Towel’s there. Put on this gown after.”

  I’m mortified, thinking they’re going to watch, but they’re keen to be away. I drop my clothes into the bin. I can still smell Sally on me but she doesn’t stand a chance against the stream of hot water and rich suds.

  A woman’s leaning against the far wall, watching. I pull the towel about me and try to get dry. She looks like a china doll, with high, round cheeks and blue eyes. Her long yellow hair swings as she walks.

  “Sit there.”

  She tuts as she touches my cheek where the skin’s split. Then she checks my eyes and teeth. A needle punctures my vein. Blood works its way along a tube into a bottle. She takes scrapings from the inside of my mouth.

  “Disrobe.”

  I stand up and let the towel drop to a puddle at my feet. I stare ahead of me. She walks around me like a carter considering a new horse. Her hand floats across the plane of my back, around the garland of yellow and purple bruises that run from back to front. She touches my breasts, my stomach, my thighs. From the steadfast way she avoids my gaze, I know there’s more chance that the Liver birds will fly than of me leaving here.

  I try and stay calm. I was dead from the moment Jessop opened the door of the red room. From the moment I put the sampler to my arm. It’s either this or a jig at the end of a rope. There’s no point in me going cold into the warm ground to rot when I can help Sally and Lolly. I hope they’ll remember to take Gabriel with them.

  Ink-fingered Makin, the artful scrambler, making his calculations. The possibility I’ve got him wrong is a cold, greasy knife in my belly. If I have, I’ve served up Sally, Lolly, and Mrs. Tsang into the constabulary’s hands.

  The woman seems satisfied. I want to say, Look at me. Look me in the eye. I’m a person, not a piece of meat, but then I realize I just might as well be. A piece of meat. Rag and bone.

  “Rag and Bone” is based in Liverpool, UK, the beautiful city where Priya Sharma was a medical student. She is now a doctor but writes whenever she can. Her short stories can be found in various publications including Interzone, Black Static, Alt Hist, Tor.com, and more will be available in 2014. She has been anthologized in several “Year’s Bests.” More information is available at www.priyasharmafiction.wordpress.com.

  I swear to you, that day the Angel of Death wore a face

  and that face was the face of the slipway gray.

  THE SLIPWAY GRAY

  Helen Marshall

  Sit by me, my bokkie, my darling girl. Closer, yes, there.

  I am an old man now, and this is a thing that happened to me when I was very young. This is not like the story of your uncle Mika, and how he tricked me in the Breede River and I almost drowned. It is also not like the story of my good friend Jurie Gouws whom you called Goose when he was alive, which was a good name for him. He used to hitchhike all across Rhodesia until he blew off his right thumb at that accident at the Selebi mine, which I will say something about. Afterward the trucks would stop anyway, even when he wasn’t trying to hitch a ride, because of the ghost thumb, he used to say, which still ached with arthritis when it rained.

  These are what your father would call fables or fancies or tall tales, and perhaps he is right that they have grown an inch or two in the telling, but the story I will tell you is a different sort of story, my bokkie, because it is my story and it is a true story. It has not grown in the telling because I have never told anyone about what happened except for your Ouma, God rest her soul, to whom I told all the secrets of my heart and let her judge them as she would. Still, even she did not know what it meant, and neither of us could ever come to much agreement on this.

  I am getting older, and I can feel the ache Jurie complained of in his thumb. It lives in every part of me, but my lungs most of all, which the doctor tells me are all moth-eaten by the mining work, even though that was many years passed. Perhaps you will say that moths are not made for lungs. They are made for closets and for fine things such as the silk your Ouma wore on our wedding day—white silk, the finest Tsakani government silk, so fine it felt like water in my hands, but then after she died and I went to see to her things, there it was, so thick with moths in the crawlspace where she had hid it, so thick it was as if she had made the dress of these little white-winged creatures with their dark nesting eyes, and maybe she had, maybe there had been nothing but moths on her as she walked down the aisle to marry me. But the way that dress looked when the moths had scattered—all coming to pieces in my hands, this beautiful thing, this beautiful thing I had loved so much when I had seen it that day, the doctors say that is what my lungs are like now, from the mine dust.

  When a man gets older a man starts to think about all the things in the world—like you, my bokkie, the things that he loves and the things that he will leave behind—but then he also thinks about the place that he might be going to and the people he might see there, like Jurie and the others and especially like your Ouma who has had to wait far too long for me to catch up with her.

  The story goes like this, and I know you have not heard it before, but even so, if you have heard parts before or heard something like it then keep still, my bokkie, keep still and listen, for a thing that starts the same does not always end the same.

  I first met Jurie at Howard College when I was studying. He was an Afrikaner like I was and he was also studying engineering. From that first look, I judged Jurie to be something of a NAAFI, which is to say, No Ambition and Fuck-All Interest, if you don’t mind me saying so and please don’t repeat it to your father, but that is the kind of man he was. Skinny as a bushwillow, with a mess of bright red hair. He had the look of a traveling man, and that is an untrustworthy sort of look. As it happened, though, I spent much of my time studying and Jurie spent little enough time at the same endeavor, still when our grades were posted he consistently beat me. I knew he was not a more diligent student than I, and I guessed he was not a smarter one. I confess this rankled somewhat, particularly because I was only there because your Uncle Mika had paid my way to University instead of going himself, and even then he had just been drafted into the National Service, though it was as a cook, thank God, and not a proper service man because he had flat feet. So it was that near the end of term, after I had had a somewhat ill-informed dalliance with a particular lady who was not your Ouma, because this was before your Ouma and before I found out what love was, that my grades started to slip. You see, my bokkie, the thing about women is that they have a power about them that is not unlike that story Jurie told you about his thumb. Women are like that, they’ve got the power to stop you in your tracks. You will be the same, my bokkie, just you wait.

  But I won’t go further into that matter here, for the sake of your Ouma who, if she was listening, wouldn’t like to hear it much repeated. The important thing is that I found myself in a somewhat precarious position in terms of my schooling. I had watched Jurie, who, as I say, seemed no smarter than I was, rise higher and higher in the postings while my own place suffered. As the end of term stepped closer and closer, I found myself in what you might call desperate straits, so it was then I approached Jurie and inquired in what might have been rather ruder terms than I shall r
epeat as to the nature of his successes. Jurie did not answer in the manner I expected. He was, you see, used to that sort of line of questioning, and had developed a limp and the occasional black eye from answering badly. That smile of his, well, I’ll tell you that it didn’t hang quite so straight on his face back then. Remember, I wasn’t an old man and so all this skin you see hanging off my bones and my lungs raggle-taggled, well, it wasn’t much like that. It had been remarked more than once that I could have been a champion boxer if I had applied my mind to that instead of engineering. I confess I might have asked Jurie in such a way that he considered it wisest to answer quickly. So he tells it, anyway.

  He told me that he had learned a special trick to train his mind. Now I know, my bokkie, that this might sound something like those other tales I started off with, but I swear to you that isn’t the way of it. What Jurie could do I had seen with my own eyes, and this is it: he would sit in a certain chair suited to relaxation, and then he would take a certain word, which I shall not tell, and he would repeat it over and over and over again. He described the sensation to me as standing at the top of a stairwell partially submerged in water, and as he would say the word, he would take a step farther and farther downward until such time as he had drifted into the water, until it reached his knees and then his belly and then his shoulders and then his chin.

  When he was deep into the water, so deep he was floating and he could feel nothing but the warmth of the water and all weight had left him, then he would imagine three boxes adrift in the water. As he continued to say the word, he would swim one stroke closer until at last he had reached the boxes. Then he would open each box and he would place inside each box some part of the day’s lessons. Once the whole process was complete, he would begin to stir again, and his eyelids would flutter wild and delicate, then the rest of him would stretch and yawn, but the knowledge would be lodged firmly in his memory.

  I thought this sounded a fine thing. When I saw it at work it seemed no harm so I asked him to show me how it was done.

  Jurie was reluctant. He said that it took time to master the skill properly, but after some time and some insistence eventually he relented. It is difficult to tell you exactly what the experience of that meditation was like, as I have never felt its likeness at all except for, perhaps, the look in your Ouma’s eyes after we had come to the decision together about what should happen, which was a thing both frightening but somehow also calming in the end.

  That is what the experience was like.

  I stepped into the water, lower and lower, but he had not told me how lifelike it would be. For Jurie’s eyes had a furious calm to them, as if he was stepping into a bath, but for me the water was strange and dark. Instinctively, I did not want to go into it.

  To understand this properly, I must tell you something about your Uncle Mika and the Breede River. I know, my bokkie, that he has told you this story before, but as I said earlier, a thing that starts the same does not always end the same.

  There was a time when we were much younger and we lived along the Breede River. As boys, he and I would go diving in the waters because unlike most of the waters in those parts it was free of crocodiles and mosquitoes and hippopotamuses. Because we were boys, and because I was bigger than Uncle Mika even though he was older, he would often make challenges to me. He would say, “I expect you cannot swim as fast to the other side of the river as I can,” or, “I expect you cannot take that man’s prized rod and tackle,” and so forth. That day, he said to me that he reckoned he could stay under the water longer, and I, of course, reckoned otherwise, and so it was set that we would swim out a ways and then we would both go under together. Your Uncle Mika was a damn sight smarter than me in those days, and he took with him a straw he had fashioned for the purpose of breathing under water. The Breede, you see, was so murky in that part that though I could see him, I couldn’t see anything like the straw he had fashioned.

  So down we went, the two of us boys, and out came your Uncle Mika’s straw, and he blew and he blew until it was cleared of water and he could breathe as if he were upon dry land. Down I went, and I sank right to the bottom because I was heavier than he was, and I kept my cheeks puffed out and I stared at your Uncle Mika, so close to the surface and I confess I might have laughed to myself, I confess I might have thought him something of a moegoe or a coward as you would say it, so close to the surface where he could just pop his head up when he was tired. Even then I knew it is not good to have the thing you want too close to you, not if you want to resist it. No, I knew I would do better in the depths where I would forget what sunlight looked like and forget the taste of the Sunday morning air.

  Of course, as you would have guessed it your Uncle Mika could hold out for far longer than me, what with his straw, and though I sat at the bottom, heavy as a stone, smart as a crocodile and laughing in my head at him, I began to feel a burning in my lungs. A little thing at first, but need is need and the need for the Sunday morning air was not likely to diminish. Your Uncle Mika sucked away at it, but me, down there in the darkness with the weeds, I had to live off only what I had taken down with me. So my lungs got to burning, and my lungs got to burning, and all I got see was your Uncle Mika happy near the surface and looking like he might go on forever.

  There is only so much a man can take, my bokkie, and I had long past reached it. So finally when I tried to push to the surface, my lungs feeling like they’d take in the water as happily as the air and my vision all gone strangled and dim, well, wouldn’t you know it but down there in the muck I had managed to hook myself well and good on the trunk of an old yellowwood, it being, as I have said, a sight murky at the bottom.

  It wouldn’t have been a difficult thing to get free of. I was a strong boy and a good swimmer, but I was weak from holding in my breathing, and the first thing to set upon me was a panic so strong and so terrible that I flailed like a mad thing.

  Your Uncle Mika, he was just about getting tired of playing that old game anyway, and he looks down and he sees me flailing about, and all he can think is the tales the old fishermen used to tell him about the things that lived in the water, the things that none of us quite believed would ever come so far inland. So your Uncle Mika, he hightails it out of there, thinking I’m already dead, thinking that the thing, whatever it is, has already got me. I can’t fault him for it, even if he were my own brother, but still to this day I think that is why he sent me off to University even though I was never quite as clever as he was. He always felt the shame of tricking me with that little straw and then leaving me to drown.

  So there I am at the bottom of the Breede River, caught up in a tangle with an old yellowwood and not long for the world, I reckon, and soon sure enough the water on the other side of my lips is looking sweeter and sweeter if only so that it’ll stop that damn fire in my lungs. That’s when I see it: to this day your Uncle Mika doesn’t believe me even though he’s seen the old lady himself, but I swear that I saw something dark moving through the water, and to be sure, it was exactly the same thing that your Uncle Mika had been afraid of—an old Zambezi bull shark, the grand dame of river sharks, I reckon, her body like a torpedo with a slit-open mouth across the front, head wavering back and forth as she slid oh so delicately through the waters.

  They say those sharks are killers, man-eaters, they call them, the slipway grays. Sure as Hell if I had thought drowning would be bad, it had nothing on being taken apart bit by bit by those teeth of hers.

  But this one, she just glided past me, a solemn thing, beautiful even though I can’t tell you how, until the darkness and the murk closed around her once more.

  Who can say if I really saw it? I certainly believed it. It was only a moment later that your Uncle Mika was in the water again, and he was hauling me out by the shoulder, by the hair, by any bit of me he could grab hold of. You see, he’d realized there was no blood, and if there had been a shark, there would’ve been blood. So after a minute up on the banks, gasping like a son of a bitch, he
was in the water again and he was after me and I’m sure that I owe him my life for it.

  But that shark, that slipway gray . . . I swear to you, my bokkie, there was nothing more frightening in the world, not even the fear of drowning, than seeing that old thing gliding past. My father, he was a religious man and he spoke to us boys about angels and signs and such, and I swear to you, that day the Angel of Death wore a face and that face was the face of the slipway gray.

  I have told you all this for a reason, though, and that is to say that deep water has always had such an effect on me. It is enough to shiver my blood and tighten my balls, if you don’t mind me saying. I still cannot shake the feeling that deep water, it was not made for the likes of you and I. It was made for the angels and the demons of this world.

  So when Jurie set me to walking down those steps into the cold blackness of those waters, saying that word over and over again, a kind of creeping terror stole over me. All I could imagine was the feel of something against my legs as I crawled through darkness towards the three boxes he told me about, but I did as he told me, and I opened them one by one, and into them I placed the day’s lessons. When I woke, cold-soaked and sweating, there it was in my head, and to this day I still know the things I learned. I only have to travel in my mind to the boxes.

  As you know, Jurie and I became close friends, and I suspect I owe much of my career to him and his tricks. Indeed, it was the very next semester that I met your Ouma, God rest her soul, and if I thought the first woman had a kind of pull about her, well, there has never been another woman like your Ouma.

  The next part of the story happened some time later once Jurie and I had both taken jobs at the Selebi mine in Botswana. I know you have not been to the mines and so you do not know what it was like there. The job of an engineer is to make a place unfit for man livable, and that is what I did. I was the winding engineer, it was my job to inspect the shafts and make sure there were no obstructions for the man winder, that little elevator the workers used to ride, ninety, a hundred-fifty, up to three-hundred-sixty meters down to the bottom where they loaded the copper and tin into bins.