It’s winking at me. The fucking house is winking at me.
Jake is pulling out his phone, calling up the flashlight app, and it’s just going on and beaming out across the remaining path and toward the door when he stops. Drops the phone. I watch it fall in slow motion—I thought that shit only happened in movies, but no. It hits the concrete and it shatters. It glitters in its own light before the light goes out.
Jake steps forward. Stiff. Plodding. Staring straight ahead.
The rest of it happens so fast. He gets to the door and then he steps through the door and he’s gone. Drew and Kyle are yelling his name, demanding that he come back; they’re not total idiots, they know that something’s wrong here even if they don’t know what it is, and when Jake doesn’t appear again after a minute their cries start getting angry.
Drew’s hand is loosening on my arm. I could twist free, I know it. I could turn and run back down the street. They might not catch me? But I know that’s bullshit. They’d catch me. They’ll be pissed, and they will be scared, and I’ll have run and they’ll be pumped up and bursting with adrenaline and I know what happens to a lot of kids like me in hick towns like this and I know it’s bad and I know sometimes you walk through that door and you never come out again.
Everywhere in front of me are doors. There are no good endings behind any of them. There’s no good choices here.
But there is this one.
Fuck it.
I break free. Drew is yelling the second I do, lunging forward, but that second I have on him is what I need and I’m tearing ass toward the gate and through it and up the path. Toward the door. All those processions of animals, all those zombie creatures, walking without ever turning back. In all the months and years we’ve been feeding the house none of them have ever turned back. I’m a living conglomeration of rhythm, my heart and my lungs and my pumping arms and the pounding of my feet. I don’t even know if they’re chasing me. They probably aren’t. But even if they don’t follow—
It’s like everything in my brain folds in on itself.
I stop. One by one all of my muscles are locking up. I can’t get them to respond to anything I do. I don’t even think my lungs are working like they were because suddenly I can’t get my breath. I’m looking at the house and it occurs to me that I shouldn’t fight this. The house is my friend, because it helped me and it’s still helping me now. The house doesn’t care who I am; the house will let me be whatever I want to be. I should go to it. I should go in there.
It can’t turn it off, I think distantly. Not even for me. It can’t.
My legs are carrying me forward. I think I’m smiling.
I’m kissing Zhan on the blacktop. We’re sitting shoulder to shoulder and I’m imagining that I can taste his mouth on the cigarette we pass back and forth. We’re in the woods, doing fuck-all the way we do. We’re lying in Riverside Park and my head is on his stomach and I can hear his heartbeat and that soft little gurgle that stomachs make even when you’re not hungry. There are birds taking off, landing, all around us. We’re standing in front of the house and watching animals go where we won’t go. Where he wouldn’t let me go. The first time he took me there. He told me to stand clear.
I try to stop before I even get why I’m trying. My legs don’t really stop moving but my body stops, and that makes them walk right out from under me and I drop onto my ass. The pain drowns out everything else and something in me snaps, a tether coming loose, and I roll onto my stomach, clawing at the dry ground. Trying to crawl. That pleasant hum in my head that was drowning out everything jerks into a screech, angry and loud, and I scream, clapping my hands over my ears but I can’t block it out.
It wants me. It wants me and it’s going to have me and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Something heavy and hard comes down on my ankle and twists it sideways. If I cry out I don’t hear myself. Turning over is like rolling a log down a hill; it’s tough to get going but once you’re there it’s tough to stop. My vision is blurring, bursting with light at the edges, but I can see enough.
Drew and Kyle. Standing there, locked in place. They came for me. The stupid fuckers actually came for me.
And they’re moving forward toward the door.
With them there, it feels like the focus is swinging away from me and onto them. I can pull myself up to my hands and knees, one hand still against the side of my head. The screech has faded. The house is getting what it wants. And so much of it, too. Three big, meaty courses. Drew and Jake step onto the porch and together, without hesitation, they walk through the door.
My arm hurts. I don’t feel sorry for them. I don’t feel sorry when I think, at the edge of the hum in my brain, I can hear them start to scream.
I’m floating around the periphery. The house can’t or won’t pull me in now, so it’s locked me into a stable orbit. Around and around. I think it might be waiting.
Things have happened. Things are still happening. I can’t go back, even if I get free. I’m a singularity. Everything has changed and is always changing forever.
I open my eyes once in the dawn light and I’m surrounded by bones. I’m looking into the empty eye sockets of a skull. Totally clean. Polished. Sunlight gleams off it at a low angle and looks red. I don’t know whose it is.
They weren’t as digestible as squirrels. As cats. I guess.
I slide my fingers into the sockets like a bowling ball. I float back down like that. There’s something comforting about it. I’m not alone. Or I won’t be. If I just wait long enough, I have a feeling he’ll come. He always has.
“Tom.”
I’m locked into an orbit, but my name pulls me back. Barely. I lift my head off the hard-packed dirt and Zhan is there, at the gate, and dawn light is washing all the remaining color out of the world, and I know my time itself was sucked into the house and I’ll never get it back, and I’m not sure I care. Zhan’s eyes are taking up his whole face. God, he’s so beautiful.
“Jesus Christ, Tom, what did you do?”
But I don’t need to answer him. In this place, he should understand. We’re compressed into each other. No real space between him and me.
Just like I always wanted.
I had to do it. You weren’t here.
When he showed me the house three years ago he had to have known we were doing more than just feeding it. He must have felt that. You don’t feed something like this and get nothing in return.
Come here, Zhan. Be with me.
My gaze meets his. I can’t move any more than I have but I think if he were closer to me, folded into me, I could move a lot more. We could circle together. We could dance.
“Please.” I don’t know who says that.
For a moment I think he’s going to step through the gate and I’m so happy I can’t breathe. For a moment I’m sure he is. One foot in front of the other, Zhan, just like that. You’ve seen how easy it is, over and over and over.
And he turns around and walks away.
He doesn’t run. We never ran.
My head drops down again. Just let me fall, then.
Without him, my orbit decays.
I never know, afterward, if it’s just that the house demanded both of us and I was unacceptable alone, if I was bait for him and I failed, or if I was stronger than I knew. But at some point I get up. I walk past the bones. I’m plodding, slow and steady, pulled back every second of the way. I go home and I sleep and I don’t dream, and part of me feels like it’s just gone. Like I left it behind. Or like I’m carrying around something new. Or both things at once.
I never hear anything about any bones. No one ever asks me about Drew or Kyle or Jake. That’s good. I don’t know anything.
At the end of the month Zhan moves away.
I never saw him again. But I also see him every day, in the part of me carved out by the house to contain itself.
He can’t stop himself returning. Neither of us could.
Once it had us, it had us. We always th
ought we were better than the animals, better than the boys I tossed through that door to save myself, better because we didn’t let ourselves get pulled in. Better because the house knew us. Better because we had an understanding.
But we always went back there. We were always called. We never said no. In the end he and the house are pretty much the same, devouring me before I can even begin to fight. If I even wanted to.
So half of me moves on with life, high school and college and whatever the hell comes after that, becoming freer, becoming more myself . . . and part of me is still there. Unchanged by time but shaping everything around it. I don’t exist apart from it. I don’t make any sense beyond the arc I carve around it, spiraling inward and out. Small and scared and trying so hard. Waiting for him to come to me.
Live here. I have enough room for you.
There’s never any escaping that orbit. There’s never any going back.
Sunny Moraine is a humanoid creature of average height, luminosity, and inertial mass. They’re also a doctoral candidate in sociology and a writer-like object whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Shimmer, Clarkesworld, and Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, as well as multiple Year’s Best anthologies, all of which has provided lovely reasons to avoid a dissertation. Their first novel Line and Orbit, co-written with Lisa Soem, is available from Samhain Publishing. Their solo-authored novel Crowflight is available from Masque Books. Its sequel, Ravenfall, will be released this summer.
Bravery is perseverance through fear.
MOONSTRUCK
Karin Tidbeck
They lived on the top floor in a building on the city’s outskirts. If the stars were out, visitors would come, usually an adult with a child in tow. Alia would open the door and drop a curtsy to the visitors, who bade her good evening and asked for Doctor Kazakoff. Alia would run halfway up the stairs to the attic and call for the Doctor. At the same time, Father would emerge from the kitchen in a gentle blast of tea-scented air. Sometimes he had his apron on, and brought a whiff of baking bread. He would extend a knobby hand to pat the child’s head, and then shake hands with the adult, whom he’d invite into the kitchen. While the parent (or grandparent, or guardian) hung their coat on a peg and sat down by the kitchen table, Father poured tea and wound up the gramophone. Then Mother, Doctor Kazakoff, would arrive, descending the spiral staircase in her blue frock and dark hair in a messy bun. She’d smile vaguely at the visiting child without making eye contact, and wave him or her over. They’d ascend the stairs to the darkened attic and out onto the little balcony, where the telescope stood. A stool sat below it, at just the right height for a child to climb up and look into the eyepiece.
Alia would crawl into an armchair in the shadows of the attic and watch the silhouettes of Mother and the visiting child, outlined against the faint starlight. Mother aimed the telescope toward some planet or constellation she found interesting, and stood aside so that the child could look. If it was a planet, Mother would rattle off facts. Alia preferred when she talked about constellations. She would pronounce each star’s name slowly, as if tasting them: Betelgeuse. Rigel. Bellatrix. Mintaka. Alnilam.
Alnitak. Alia saw them in her mind’s eye, burning spheres rolling through the darkness with an inaudible thunder that resonated in her chest.
After a while, Mother would abruptly shoo the child away and take his or her place at the telescope. It was Alia’s task to take the child by the hand and explain that Doctor Kazakoff meant no harm, but that telescope time was over now. Sometimes the child said goodbye to Mother’s back. Sometimes they got a hum in reply. More often not. Mother was busy recalibrating the telescope.
When the moon was full, Mother wouldn’t receive visitors. She would sit alone at the ocular and mumble to herself: the names of the seas, the highlands, the craters.
Those nights (or days) she stayed up until the moon set.
On the day it happened, Alia was twelve years old and home from school with a cold. That morning she found a brown stain in her underwear. It took a moment to realize what had really happened. She rifled through the cabinet under the sink for Mother’s box of napkins, and found a pad that she awkwardly fastened to her panties. It rustled as she pulled them back up. She went back into the living room. The grandfather clock next to the display case showed a quarter past eleven.
“Today, at a quarter past eleven,” she told the display case, “I became a woman.”
Alia looked at her image in the glass. The person standing there, with pigtails and round cheeks and dressed in a pair of striped pajamas, didn’t look much like a woman. She sighed and crawled into the sofa with a blanket, rehearsing what to tell Mother when she came home.
When the front door slammed a little later, Alia walked into the hallway. Mother stood there in a puff of cold air. She was home much too early.
“Mother,” Alia began.
“Hello,” said Mother. Her face was rigid, her eyes large and feverish. Without giving Alia so much as a glance, she took her coat off, dropped it on the floor and stalked up the attic stairs. Alia went after her out onto the balcony. Mother said nothing, merely stared upward. She wore a broad grin that looked misplaced in her stern face.
Alia followed her gaze.
The moon hung in the zenith of the washed-out autumn sky, white and full in the afternoon light. It was much too large, and in the wrong place. Alia held out a hand at arm’s length; the moon’s edges circled her palm. She remained on the balcony, dumbfounded, until Father’s thin voice called up to them from the hallway.
Mother had once said that when Alia had her first period, they would celebrate and she would get to pick out her first ladies’ dress. When Alia caught her attention long enough to tell her what happened, Mother just nodded. She showed Alia where the napkins were and told her to put stained clothes and sheets in cold water. Then she returned to the attic. Father walked around the flat, cleaning and fiddling in quick movements. He baked bread, loaf after loaf. Every now and then he came into the living room where Alia sat curled up in the sofa, and gave her a wordless hug.
The radio blared all night. All the transmissions were about what had happened that morning at quarter past eleven. The president spoke to the nation: We urge everyone to live their lives as usual. Go to work, go to school, but don’t stay outside for longer than necessary. We don’t yet know exactly what has happened, but our experts are investigating the issue. For your peace of mind, avoid looking up.
Out in the street, people were looking up. The balconies were full of people looking up. When Alia went to bed, Mother was still outside with her eye to the ocular. Father came to tuck Alia in. She pressed her face into his aproned chest, drawing in the smell of yeasty dough and after-shave.
“What if it’s my fault?” she whispered.
Father patted her back. “How could it possibly be your fault?”
Alia sighed. “Forget it.”
“Go on, tell me.”
“I got my period at a quarter past eleven,” she finally said. “Just when the moon came.”
“Oh, darling,” said Father. “Things like that don’t happen just because you had your period.”
“Are you sure?”
Father let out a short laugh. “Of course.” He sighed, his breath stirring Alia’s hair. “I have no idea what’s going on up there, but of this I’m sure.”
“I wish I was brave,” said Alia. “I wish I wasn’t so afraid all the time.”
“Bravery isn’t not being afraid, love. Bravery is perseverance through fear.”
“What?”
“Fancy words,” said Father. “It means doing something even though you’re afraid. That’s what brave is. And you are.”
He kissed her forehead and turned out the light. Falling asleep took a long time.
Master Bobek stood behind the lectern, his face gray.
“We must remain calm,” he said. “You mustn’t worry too much. Try to go about your lives as usual. An
d you are absolutely not allowed to miss school. You have no excuse to stay at home. Everyone will feel better if they carry on as usual. Itti?” He nodded to the boy in the chair next to Alia.
Itti stood, not much taller than when he had been sitting down. “Master Bobek, do you know what really happened?”
The teacher cleared his throat. “We must remain calm,” he repeated.
He turned around and pulled down one of the maps from above the blackboard. “Now for today’s lesson: bodies of water.”
Itti sat down and leaned over. “Your mum,” he whispered. “Does she know anything?”
Alia shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“Can you ask? My parents are moving all our things to the cellar.”
She nodded. Itti gave her a quick smile. If Master Bobek had seen the exchange, he said nothing of it, which was unusual for him. Master Bobek concentrated very hard on talking about bodies of water. The children all looked out the windows until Master Bobek swore and drew the curtains.
When Alia came home from school, she found the door unlocked. Mother’s coat hung on its peg in the hallway.
“Home!” Alia shouted, and took off jacket and shoes and climbed the stairs to the attic.
Mother sat on the balcony, hunched over the telescope’s ocular. She was still in her dressing gown, her hair tousled on one side and flat on the other.
Alia forced herself not to look up, but the impossible moon’s cold glow spilled into the upper edge of her vision. “Mother?”
“The level of detail is incredible,” Mother mumbled.
Her neck looked dusty, as if she’d been shaking out carpets or going through things in the attic. Alia blew at it and sneezed.
“Have you been out here all day?” Alia wiped her nose on her shirt sleeve.
Mother lifted her gaze from the telescope and turned it to somewhere beyond Alia’s shoulder, the same look that Doctor Kazakoff gave visiting children. Gray dust veiled her face; the rings under her eyes were the color of graphite. Her cheekbones glimmered faintly.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition Page 61