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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series. The twelfth novel, Kitty in the Underworld, is due out in July 2013. She has also written young adult novels, Voices of Dragons and Steel, and the fantasy novels, Discord’s Apple and After the Golden Age. Her short fiction has appeared many times in Lightspeed and Realms of Fantasy, and in a number of anthologies, such as Fast Ships, Black Sails, and Warriors. She lives in Colorado with a fluffy attack dog. Learn more at carrievaughn.com.

  “Have you committed a crime? In your dreams?”

  THE DREAM DETECTIVE

  Lisa Tuttle

  In the beginning, I was not attracted to her at all. Quite the opposite.

  I don’t know if it was intentional on her part, and honestly, I’m not the sort of dick who always judges women on how hot they are, but if there’s any situation in which a person’s attractiveness matters, I think everybody would agree it’s a blind date.

  Hannes and Mardi, my so-called friends, so worried about my single state, had once more stepped into the breach and invited me to dinner to meet someone “very special.” They had introduced me to several very nice, lovely, smart, sexy women in the past, and all had been good company even though there’d never been the necessary, mutual spark that would ignite a love affair—but not this time.

  My first sight of Mardi’s old house-mate Grace was of a lumpy little figure in drab, ill-fitting clothes. Her hair probably hadn’t been brushed since she’d rolled out of bed, her eyebrows looked like hairy caterpillars, and apart from a slash of bright red lipstick, she hadn’t bothered with makeup. “Couldn’t be bothered” was a good description of her in general, and from her sullen look, she was equally unimpressed by me.

  As it was only the four of us for dinner, I couldn’t ignore her without being rude. But my first few attempts to engage her attention fell flat.

  Hannes kept the ball rolling with some stories I hadn’t heard before—he’s very funny, especially considering English isn’t his first language—until Mardi shrieked for his help in the kitchen, and we were left alone together.

  “So what do you do?” I asked.

  I could have kicked myself as soon as the words were out. I didn’t want to talk about my own tedious job, so why put her on the spot?

  She stared at me for a long moment while I tried to figure out a way of withdrawing the question that wouldn’t make things worse, and finally she said, “I’m a dream detective.”

  I thought I’d heard wrong. “Dream?”

  She nodded. “Detective,” she added, helpfully.

  If it was a joke I didn’t get it. “You mean you solve dreams?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. You said it.”

  “I didn’t say I solved dreams. I solve crimes, and other mysteries, in dreams.”

  “What’s your success rate?”

  “Quite good, actually.” She made a modest face. “Although, I shouldn’t brag; I have to admit I haven’t done much of anything lately . . . ”

  She was playing it straight, so I had to do the same. “But you’ve solved a few, over the years?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “How long have you been helping the police with their enquiries?”

  She looked as if she was about to laugh, but stopped herself, and simply shook her head. “The police aren’t interested in dreams.”

  “But—I mean, if you are solving crimes—”

  “Dream crimes.”

  “What’s a dream crime?”

  She sighed, as if I were deliberately obtuse. “A crime committed in a dream.”

  “In a dream.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  This fey game of hers was really getting up my nose. It wasn’t funny, and it wasn’t clever—if it was a game. Just checking, I said, “But not in the real world.”

  I was reminded of one of my least favorite teachers by the snooty look she gave me and her retort: “In your opinion, dreams aren’t part of the real world?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the one who—”

  “You don’t dream?”

  “Everybody dreams.”

  “You’d be surprised how many people say they don’t. Or that they can’t remember. It’s not for me to say they’re lying, but forgetfulness can be a cover for things people find too painful to think about.”

  “I dream a lot.” Since childhood, I’d enjoyed my dreams and enjoyed thinking about them; if I rarely told them to anyone, it was out of the fear that my descriptions would be inadequate, and they’d sound boring or nonsensical, instead of the fascinating adventures they were to me.

  She leaned across the table, fixing me with eyes that were larger, darker and more eloquent than I’d realized. “Have you committed a crime? In your dreams?”

  I felt a sudden surge of adrenaline, as if she’d come too close to a deeply guarded secret. My heart was racing, and I felt a powerful urge to run, the need to hide—and what an admission that would be!

  I faced her down, smiling, although maybe it looked more like a snarl. “Is that how you solve your mysteries? You ask everyone you meet to confess to an imaginary crime? No wonder if your success rate is high! Who would dare to say no?”

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, staring at me so hard her twin caterpillars became one. Her eyes no longer held the slightest allure; they were like laser-beams, science fictional weapons able to bore right through the bones of my skull, into my brain, where her unnatural vision would find the image of something I had done that was so shameful, so deeply buried, that even I couldn’t remember it.

  Hannes came through the door then, thank God, carrying a platter, announcing dinner was served, followed by his wife carrying a covered bowl.

  Over the meal, conversation was general, on the subjects of food, travel, movies, and then food again when Mardi brought out cheesecake and fruit salad for dessert. It was not the most scintillating conversation; in fact, it was one of the most restrained and boring I could remember ever having around that table, as if we were four random strangers forced to share in a crowded restaurant.

  When Hannes left the room to make coffee there was a silence until Mardi turned to speak to Grace as if I wasn’t there: “How’s the job-hunting? Any luck?”

  Grace shook her head.

  “Still at the charity shop?”

  “Two days. They’d have me for more hours, which would be great if I was getting paid, but, you know, I need to make some money.”

  “So your dream detecting doesn’t pay?” I don’t know what possessed me to jump in with that.

  Mardi stared hard at the other woman. “You told him?”

  The chair creaked as Grace leaned back and crossed her arms. Her face was flushed. She spoke flatly. “I had a feeling he might need my help.”

  “What?” Mardi’s voice rose almost to a wail. “You’re still doing that? You never told me!”

  Hannes poked his head through the door. “Stop it; no fair having fun without me.”

  Mardi’s hair was messy, her lipstick eaten away, her face as red as Grace’s—but on her it looked good. “Oh, honey, you won’t believe it, but Gracie—she’s still—you know, remember that dream thing she did?” She groped with her hand in the air above her head.

  Grace looked at me and said earnestly, “I don’t do it for money. I would never—it would be wrong; it’s a gift. It would be wrong for me to try to exploit it.”

  “Exactly! “ Mardi exclaimed. “Like me and the tarot. I’ll read the cards if someone asks, but I’d never, ever charge money.”

  “I’m astonished,” said Hannes, deadpan. “I thought they only talked about these things in private, when all three witches got together.”

  “We’re not witches.”

  “Who’s the third?” I asked.

  “Remember little Holly?”

  “From your wedding? Ah, yes.” I recalled the tiny yet perfectly formed maid of honor everyone had wanted to dance with.


  He nodded. “The three weird sisters. Or former flat-sharers—but that doesn’t sound so good, does it?”

  I wondered if Grace had been at the wedding, too, and sneaked a look at her. I saw a frumpy, shapeless lump who didn’t know how to make herself interesting. I wondered if the idea of the dream-investigation had been her own, or borrowed from one of her smarter roommates. She did not notice me looking, just went on staring at nothing, seemingly undisturbed by the queasy excitement roiling around the room even when Mardi shouted:

  “We’re not witches.”

  “Sorry, darling, how silly of me. You predict the future, and Holly heals people by stroking their auras, and Grace goes into people’s minds to affect their dreams, and all that is completely ordinary and normal and not at all witch-like or weird.”

  “You’re horrible.”

  “Horribly irresistible.” She scowled at him, then giggled; he invited me to help him get the coffee, and I jumped up, happy for any excuse to leave.

  In the kitchen, I asked: “Fortune-telling?”

  “I’m surprised she’s never dealt the cards for you. She still has them in a velvet bag. True, she doesn’t often get them out these days, hardly ever since we were married, but back then, when she was living with Holly and Grace . . . they scared me sometimes, I don’t mind telling you, those three women in the same room together, looking like they could read your mind and tell your future from the way you sipped your coffee.” He shuddered melodramatically. “But each girl on her own . . . a different proposition.”

  “I wouldn’t want to proposition Grace,” I said sourly. “Is that what you thought? She’s really my type. ”

  He gave me a sheepish smile and pressed the plunger down on the cafetiere. “Sorry, man. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. We had invited two other people, and at the last minute they couldn’t make it.”

  “Two? A couple?”

  “Sister and brother. Both single. One for each of you. I swear.”

  “Well, better luck next time,” I sighed, and lifting the tray of mugs, followed him out of the room.

  After I went home that night I did not give Grace a second thought. But she wasn’t done with me.

  I was a turkey-farmer, somewhere in the country, rounding up my herd and then driving them, on foot, down a dirt road until I reached London, which was like the set for a low-budget TV version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I sold the big birds to an East Ender in a patched coat and shabby top hat (“Aow! God bless you, Guvnor!”) and took my little velvet bag of gold coins to buy myself a drink, but at this point wintry London morphed into Paris in the spring, so I walked into a sidewalk café and ordered un cafe, s’il vous plait. It was as I was sitting there, waiting for my coffee, that I realized, from the nervous clenching in my gut, that I’d been followed.

  She was sitting at another table, pretending to read a newspaper, and although she looked nothing like the woman I’d met over dinner—she looked like Edith Piaf, or, rather, like Marion Cotillard playing Piaf in La Vie en Rose—I knew her. I knew she was on to me. But she couldn’t follow me into the men’s toilet, so I was able to get away from her quite easily, although there was still some running and dodging down narrow alleys and in and out of shops before I woke up, heart pounding, feeling I’d had a narrow escape, but with no idea why. Was she police, or a foreign agent? Was I the good-guy spy, or an innocent who knew too much? Dreams feel like stories, but they leave out a lot of the information we’d need to make sense of a movie or a book.

  Another night, another dream: I was in a theatre, up in the gods, where the rows of seats kept morphing into chutes and ladders, and every time I tried to get out, I ran into a little blonde girl in a blue dress, blocking the exit. She looked like Disney’s Alice, but when she trained her eyes on me like a twin-bore shotgun, I knew who she really was, and knew I was in trouble.

  Another time, in the midst of a ripping yarn featuring neo-Nazi conspirators and a fabled treasure hidden at the heart of an Egyptian pyramid, I became aware of her again. I never saw her, but felt the disturbing presence of an outsider; someone female who did not belong, an uninvited visitor who was spying on me. Only afterwards, awake, thinking it over as I showered and dressed for work, I became convinced that it was Grace; and I began to wonder what she was after, and how to get rid of her.

  On my way home that night—I’d been working late, required to be on hand for a conference call with partners in other time zones—I stopped to buy a few things. It wasn’t the store where I usually shopped, but I’d just remembered there was almost nothing in my fridge when I spotted a sign for Morrison’s, and nipped in.

  I found Grace in the wine aisle, inspecting the bottles. At the sight of her I felt disoriented, almost dizzy; that may have been the first time in my life when I genuinely wondered if I was really awake or only dreaming.

  But maybe it wasn’t her. The woman shopping for wine was dressed up and looked quite sexy. Had I become obsessed, was I starting to see the detective of dreams everywhere I went?

  She turned her head and the recognition on her face told me I wasn’t fantasizing. “Oh, hi! How are you? Do you live around here?”

  “Sort of, not too far—but I don’t usually shop here; how about you?”

  She shook her head. “I’m on my way to . . . a party. Thought I’d better bring a bottle.”

  She wore a snug, scoop-necked top and short skirt, clothes that revealed that she wasn’t fat at all, perhaps a little thick-waisted, but she did have a pair of enormous breasts. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to show them off to me, but, clearly, she didn’t feel obliged to keep them hidden all the time; I wondered what made the party she was on her way to now so very different from the dinner at Mardi and Hannes’. She was still far from beautiful, but just then she had a glow about her that made up for any small deficiencies in her appearance.

  I saw her look in my basket, recognize the pathetic shopping of the single man (frozen chips, pizza, bacon, eggs, and a loaf of bread) and felt suddenly defensive, almost angry are her presumption in judging me, spying on me.

  Without pausing to think, I asked her, “How do you do it?”

  She looked honestly bewildered.

  “The dreams . . . ” Before I got it out, I’d realized how utterly idiotic my question was. She hadn’t done anything. This meeting was coincidence; my dreams were my own. I stalled and fumbled and finally managed: “I was just wondering . . . You said you were a dream detective . . . I guess you were joking?”

  “Oh. No, it wasn’t a joke.” She looked apprehensive. “It was true, but . . . I really don’t know why I said it. I don’t usually tell people. Mardi knows, because I used to do it when we lived together. But not anymore.”

  I know that’s not true. I kept my accusation to myself, though, and only said, “Yeah? It’s odd. I’d never heard of a dream detective before.”

  She cleared her throat and glanced around at the ranks of wine bottles. “No . . . that’s not surprising. Neither had I. I guess I made it up. I was sharing a house with two friends, one read cards and the other read auras; they did it to help people and it was kind of cool and I wanted something I could do, so . . . ” She shrugged and moved away from me to read a price-label.

  “But how did it work? Did people invite you into their dreams, or did you just kind of dream your way inside their heads, or—”

  “What?” Now she was staring at me.

  “How—how did you do it? The dream-detecting?”

  “People told me about their dreams and I interpreted them. What did you think?” Her eyes had widened, and I could see that she knew perfectly well what I had thought, and I realized how crazy it was. Why had I imagined for a moment that this less-than-ordinary woman could see inside my brain, even enter my dreams to spy on me?

  To distract her from my idiocy, I asked another question. “And it worked?”

  She shrugged. “People seemed to think so. They liked it, anyway. It was something I could do
, it seemed vaguely useful, I had a lot of free time and no money—”

  “So why did you stop? I mean, you must still have a lot of free time and no money, and since you’re looking for a job—why not create your own employment? You’d have it to yourself, you’d be the expert, the only dream detective in England—”

  “Oh, shut up. What did I ever do to you?”

  I was surprised to realize she was angry. I hadn’t meant to offend her, but she wouldn’t let me explain.

  “You don’t know anything about it! You think it’s a joke, but it’s not.”

  “No, I don’t think that—I really do take you seriously, that’s why—”

  “I told you, I couldn’t charge money for using this gift—it would be wrong. It’s not a job, it’s a calling. Have you ever seen a rich and famous so-called psychic? What they’re like? Do you think I’d ever be one of those media-whores?”

  “Sorry,” I said, holding up my hands as if her shiny eyes were loaded guns. “Sorry, I didn’t understand; I didn’t mean anything . . . ”

  She grabbed a bottle off the shelf without looking. “Forget it.”

  My dream that night began like a road trip, a pleasurable sort of dream I’ve enjoyed for years. As usual, it was set in the American West, a place I’ve never seen except in movies, out on a flat, open highway, Route 66, maybe. I was in one of those big old-fashioned sedan cars from the 1950s, white and shiny, with fins. Inside, the front seat was like a big leather couch, and the gearshift stuck out the side of the steering wheel. No seatbelts, no airbags, just a cigarette lighter and an AM radio tuned to a station belting out songs by Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, Elvis Presley.

  I myself had more than a touch of Elvis about me, my hair in a quiff with long sideburns, wearing tight jeans, cowboy boots, and a black shirt with pearl-covered snaps, a packet of Camels squashed into the breast pocket. Sitting behind the wheel of that automotive behemoth, singing along to “Jailhouse Rock,” driving through the desert towards somewhere unknown, I was free, and as purely happy as I’ve ever been. Everything was fine, better than fine, it was perfect until, glancing in the rear view mirror, I spotted a little black dot in the distance. Just in case, I checked my speed.