The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2015 Edition

by Paula Guran

  Steely J gives us a significant nod. We guests push away from half-empty plates and migrate into the parlor, wine coolers and rum and cokes in hand. I loathe the parlor. It’s cold and dank, the books are moldy, and the stuffed moose head that presides here has gone blind with rot. The notion of accidently brushing against something icky gives me the shivers.

  Zane unlocks a cabinet and sets a jewelry box upon the big circular granite table we’re seated around. The table is slightly concave. Several parallel grooves radiate from the edge to a depression in the center. As for the jewelry case, it is an unpleasant box with the lacquer stripped. The wood is scored and blanched by patterns of fungal decay. An eighteenth-century caravel’s lost antique dredged from the muck at the bottom of Cook Inlet in 1979, or so my peeps testify. Inside the box, a ring nests in crushed velvet. An indelicate description for those playing at home—its color is similar to a blood clot glistening against tissue paper. He plucks the ring and casually passes it to Morton, just like that. No formalities whatsoever.

  “Damn, it’s heavy,” Morton says. Morton always sounds bemused or surprised.

  “Don’t drop it,” Julie Five says. She’s cool and eager. She gave Morton a hummer last August while we were all on a tour bus at Denali State Park. They speak to each other with barely restrained antipathy. “Drop it, and it’s ten demerits.” Gawd, I hate her smug, bitchy tone. I hate that Morton accepted her blowjob and turned me down flat. Heel.

  “By the way, the table isn’t granite,” Zane says as if he’s peeked into my brain. His gaze is cruel. “Another rock entirely. There are chains of sea caves in the Aleutians. This table is carved from the bedrock of those caves. Men died acquiring this on my behalf.” He looks at Morton. “Okay, Mort. Time to get bitten.” He is indulgent, yet commanding. Two decades in Europe, and farther abroad, will do that to a guy, I suppose. Julie Five says Zane spent months lost in a desert and went barking mad. Eating-his-own-shoelaces fucked in the head. Wouldn’t guess it to feast your eyes upon him, or maybe you would. The corners of his eyes twitch if you catch it at the right moment.

  Morton makes a show of examining the ring, as if a middle manager role at an office supply store qualifies him to appraise jewelry. He’s enjoying the spotlight. “Is this the Ouroboros?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Zane’s sneer almost spoils the plastic charm of his perma-smile. I’ve long assumed his genial urbanity is a façade for darker impulses. Doesn’t bother me. Everybody has got another side. It’s exciting.

  “If there were a real Dracula Ring, this would be the one,” Julie Five says. “Lugosi’s was pretty. Fake. Fake. Fake.” She rocks, barely suppressed. Her face is so very animated. I’ve seen that expression. It’s the wide-eyed, lips slightly parted expression women at boxing matches wear. I’m sure the rich hoes in Rome did it the same when they attended the gladiatorial games.

  The ring is formed of thick, intertwined strands of corroded iron. There’s a jagged gap opposite the shank. Whether from damage or by design, I haven’t a clue. The shank is set with the aforementioned gory gemstone that also, if you squint, resembles a death’s head in the way a thundercloud might resemble the skull of an angry god. The stone fitfully glints with the light from the table lamp. Almost a twin to the pendant hanging from Zane’s neck.

  “I thought it’d be a thumb prick.” Morton slips the ring onto his finger.

  “Ha ha, you said prick.” I laugh, but not really. No, not really.

  “Dude,” Vadim says with ample foreboding. “This shit is how you get sepsis or peritonitis or something.”

  “Quiet, punk, you’re next.” Julie Five grins at him. I think of a northern pike opening its needle-fanged jaws to slurp down a hook.

  Zane raises his eyebrow. “A dribble of claret for the cause seems reasonable. The price for betrayal is a blood eagle. JV’s idea. Be warned.”

  “What’s a blood eagle?” I say.

  “You don’t want one,” Vadim says.

  Steely J excuses himself. He steps through a panel near a bookcase and that’s the last I see of him. I think it’s the very last time anybody sees him for a few years. Candice, his latest girlfriend remains at the table with an expression of abandonment. She’s had too many wine coolers.

  Neither Clint nor Leo speak. They’re nervous, I can tell. Leo is a bit green around the gills. Real hard cases. Both of them agitated and wheedled to be included, and now their knees are knocking. And why are they spooked? The ceremony is bullshit. High school melodrama. This is supposed to be mock serious, like fucking about with Ouija boards and séances or homoerotic fraternity paddling rituals.

  “Seven is a good number,” Zane says. He’s not counting himself, obviously. He’s playing Satan. “Seven were the apprentices in the Devil’s Grotto.”

  “Power number, baby,” Julie Five says, Ed McMahon to his Johnny Carson.

  We all stare at one another. Similar to gazing into a mirror—after a while, everybody is as plastic as Zane. I poke Morton in the ribs. Somebody has to be the first to leap and he’s it. He makes a fist. Blood begins to flow. The blind moose watches as we each take our turn.

  God, do You remember my third year in college when I saved that little old lady who fell on the ice in front of a moose that had wandered into town? I threw snowballs and shrieked until it ambled away into the trees. Surely, if You’re the real deal You were there. God, please be real. Please help me now. Because I can’t see anything. I’m flopped on my belly atop a heap of corpses. That can’t be right. The dark is sticky. Warm, inanimate flesh yields beneath me. My pinky slips into someone’s dead staring eye. Eyelashes bat against my knuckle.

  Zane kisses my cheek. I’d recognize his Rico Suave cologne anywhere, even here. He says, “Welcome and congratulations. You’re part of it. You’ll always be part of it. I’ll see you at the party. Guest of honor, Ed.”

  The rest of the night is a blank. Or a hole. So, thanks for that, God. If you exist, which I figure you don’t. The cut in my finger doesn’t close for weeks. The hole in my soul remains the equivalent of a sucking chest wound.

  II: Culling

  Zane Tooms makes the CNN ticker three and a half years later.

  Kind of a funny story. A terrific day until that point. I spend it shopping for vintage LPs at this fat cat record producer’s annual garage sale. Vinyl is my true addiction. Stronger and purer than my fondness for baby dykes, or even my love of a self-effacing bear with real taste in the arts. I spend weekends with my boyfriend Tony at his Malibu beach house. This summer my theme resounds courtesy of The Kinks: “Little Miss Queen of Darkness.” I don’t really identify. Drag isn’t my thing and any sadness in my eyes is liable to be incidental tearing from my extra lush lashes. Nope, I love the song because its lyrics are true poetry. Poetry is distinctly lacking in this modern world. Barbarians have sacked the music industry, despoiled Hollywood. Publishing is a joke with celebrity tell-alls and Dan Brown as the punchline.

  I’m lamenting these facts while sprawled on the sofa in Tony’s giant game room. The news hits as I’m raising a mojito to my lips. Hard to believe my eyes. I didn’t believe them either, though, when the accusations of seventy counts of Rohypnol-facilitated rape first came down to the clack of a magistrate’s gavel. Apparently that dark side of Zane’s was worse than I thought. Theory goes that seventy is a conservative estimate—who knows how many victims he’s left scattered across Europe.

  Now Zane is dead. The DEA and Mexican police shot him a bajillion times in some fleabag hotel in Mexico City. I don’t know how to feel. There’s a tiny white scar on the underside of my middle finger. I look at it and wonder if he ever raped me. Doubtful. Despite all indications, evidence is he didn’t swing for dudes. Like I said, I don’t know how to feel.

  “Ha! Hell yes! I told you they’d get that rat bastard!” Tony wanders in from the shower and does a sack dance in celebration. He played ball for the Forty-Niners. His gut is enormous. The old me, lily-fresh college grad, would’ve cared.
The worn and worried me is more concerned with Tony’s heart. He’s a kindly soul, his celebration of Zane’s demise notwithstanding. Tony heard the stories and paid for my therapy. He’s earned the right to cry, “Ding-dong!” etcetera.

  Oops.

  The doorbell rings and it’s Julie Five on the step. I almost swoon at the shock.

  “So, we meet again.” She’s wearing sunglasses and a white sundress. Her skin is softer and pinker than I recall. Time has rejuvenated her or she’s gotten on the E. Bathory program. A midnight-blue Mustang is parked in the drive with the top down. The hood symbol looks more like a particular malformed death’s head than any mustang. Three and a half years might as well be three and a half days. She makes a moue of her lips. I don’t offer my cheek for the courtesy peck, no way. I’d rather let a tarantula sit on my face.

  She crowds me backward. Her shadow crosses mine and my legs go weak and I collapse upon the rug where sunlight pools on nice days. This is California, so yes, the sunlight is doing that right now. She steps over my supine form and I get a peek at her goods, like it or not. Red panties to match her scary-long fingernails. The sun filtering through the fabric of the dress turns everything to crimson. She reaches into a demure handbag and produces the iron ring. Slides it onto the third finger of her left hand. She looms above me, smiling in a way I don’t recognize from her repertoire. If evil and cruelty can mature the way wine does, then here you go. This goddamned cask of Amontillado’s got cobwebs all over it.

  “What’s going on?” Tony arrives, half-naked and thundering. He quickly takes in the situation and gets right in her personal space. “Who the hell are you?”

  I’m afraid he’ll hit her, shatter her smirk with his mallet fist. I’m terrified he won’t. Either way, it doesn’t matter. I can’t move, can’t speak. My body is cold from the inside out.

  “You’re Anthony. Hello.” She extends her hand.

  He brushes her gesture aside. “And you’re Julie. Yeah, I recognize you. Step, lady. You aren’t welcome.”

  “C’mon, stud. Put her there.” She smirks mischievously and reaches for him again. The light in the room dims because she’s sucking it into her eyes. She snags his hand and clasps it tight with both of hers the way politicians do, the way a black widow fastens to her prey. Squeezes so hard that blood drips from their joined fingers. That’s the end. Tony sways in place and she stands on tiptoes to whisper into his ear. It goes on for maybe ten seconds until she releases him and steps back.

  “Oh, wow,” he says. Tony usually talks loud enough to break your eardrums. This is a mousy little whisper. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” His face changes as he turns away. His skin tightens and his mouth and eyes stretch at the corners, but I only catch a glimpse. He shambles toward the living room, gone forever.

  “Not with a bang but a whimper,” Julie Five says, quoting the only Eliot she’s likely memorized. Julie didn’t use her own brain to get through college. She relied upon cunning and nascent savagery. The light in the room drains away and she floats above me, a pale gemstone revolving against the void. She draws the dwindling heat from my bones and into her huge, luminous eyes.

  I belatedly notice the feathered dart protruding from my breast. Steely J drifts from the unknowable depths, pistol in hand. He salutes me and drapes his arm around Julie Five’s waist.

  I am very, very tired.

  They wink, synchronized, and I wink out.

  Vadim talks while he carries me in his arms, the Bride of Frankenstein.

  “There are these worm things, or leech things, neither, but you get the picture, and they detach or are expelled from a central mass. These worms, or leeches, crawl inside you through whatever opening is available. The urethra and the anus are likely access ways. That’s what happened to the dinosaurs. It’s one theory. I think it works.”

  “Put me down, man.” My voice is hoarse and my skull aches. My breast muscle hurts too. Whatever Steely J hit me with packs a nasty hangover.

  We stand there, wherever there is. An abandoned hotel lobby? Lots of dust, boarded windows, and the light fixtures are fubar. Bright though, because sunlight streams through cracks and crevices. I ask the obvious and he shrugs. He too received a visit from Julie Five and a follow-up dart from Steely J. Like me, he came to in this place.

  “Uh-oh.”

  I follow Vadim’s gaze and see a thick man all in black standing on the mezzanine steps. His face is pale and freaky as shit. The flesh is so tight, his eyes stretch to slits, their corners near his temples. A machete dangles from his fist. Blood drips from the blade.

  “Tony?” Right size, wrong face, except maybe it was the right face, I’d seen it changing at the casa . . .

  “Tony isn’t Tony no more. That’s Mr. Flat Affect.” Vadim grips my arm. “Let’s book.”

  We book. I try the obvious things—exterior door handles are locked and chained from the outside; the windows are barred. I glimpse a dry pool in the courtyard. The yard has gone Planet of the Apes. Grass run riot. The palm trees are dull yellow. Mort is spiked halfway up the bole of the biggest tree. He’s covered in dried blood, but I recognize his voice when he calls for help, for god, for death. There are several more people nailed to trees. Harder to identify. I don’t want to know.

  Before long, I stop to catch my breath.

  “This is about the ritual.”

  “Duh,” Vadim says. “The goon is one of Zane’s pets, or something like that.”

  “But why are they after us? We’re part of the inner circle, right? Ground floor of the new order and all that jazz?” I hadn’t taken it seriously, had only gone along because of the pressure. I hadn’t swallowed ZT’s apocalypse fantasies. Now, here I am trying to lawyer my way out of getting murdered.

  “He lied. We’re the blood in the blood pact.”

  “Pact with whom?”

  He gives me a sad look for not paying attention during class.

  Another Mr. Flat Affect saunters through a door and confronts us. He too wields a machete. However, he’s clad in a white paper suit. The suit is streaked and grimy. It’s a bad moment, but Savate! I expect great things from Vadim’s size-eleven Doc Martens. Vadim yells, “Oh fuck!” and elaborately gathers himself like he’s tossing a kaber and snaps this kind of slow-mo roundhouse kick that misses by a mile. Maybe a mile and a half. He lands on his ass. And it would be hilarious except I’m shitting my capris. Mr. Flat Affect doesn’t hurry; I doubt he ever hurries. He raises the machete and splits my best friend’s skull. Does him like the islanders do with coconuts, with a lazy overhand chop. Kerthunk. The killer pauses to savor the gurgling and spurting.

  Doc Martens are peachy. I swear by Nikes. Canary yellow with Velcro, nobody’s got time for laces. I put mine to their best use—slapping tile at a high rate.

  III: The Bear Catacombs

  I run through an archway and am back in Alaska in the Toombs family basement. The bear catacombs. It has to be a nightmare because I instantly recognize the late 90s. Sister, those were bad times for yours truly—nobody told me “it gets better,” they told me to sit down and keep my mouth shut.

  A party is in progress—music on full blast, lights ablaze, half the kids from our high school graduating class doing the bump and grind. Zane lurks on the fringes, a loud, fat, glittery-eyed kid. His smile is sly. He’s exactly as I remember, only more so.

  There my high school self is, on the edge, crushed against a skinny senior track star. My hair is dreadful in spiked hair and a lime mesh tank top, and Stu Whitlock flaunts a mullet. Merciful Jesus, I had no idea I had so much to apologize for.

  The band grinds to a halt and the lead singer chugs from a bottle of whiskey. My youthful double disappears up the stairs. A few seconds later, the shrieks begin. That would be Dave Teague, naked and insane, busting a move for the front door. I remember the rest with unpleasant clarity—there’s a hot blond Ukrainian transfer student lying mangled and murdered in a bed on the top floor. Some lowlife snuffed her and tried for the
daily double with Dave. The killer is in fact shambling after Dave into the night. In a few minutes, state troopers scrag the psycho killer on the access road. I also recall that someone mentions the psycho’s face is white with greasepaint, or he wears a mask, and shit, it hits me—Mr. Flat Affect has been with us since when.

  Mind. Blown.

  “La!” Julie Five steps from the crowd. Modern day Julie Five, fully envenomed, egg sac probably full to bursting. She was sort of a cute kid. Not anymore. She grins and tweaks my nose. Her fingers are icy. “You’re bleeding, sweetie.”

  The blood is Vadim’s—I’ve come through so far without a scratch, and that’s ironic, because I’d bruise if somebody stuck a pea under my mattress. I’m speechless, unable to twitch, Julie Five seems to have that effect on my nervous system. Behind her, kids begin milling around the exposed section of wall where the pipes and tree roots form a maw. There’s some scuffling and I see my erstwhile date Stu Whitlock crawl inside. He’s followed by that beefy guy who played linebacker the year we went to state. Then another, and another, wriggling like sperm to fit through the crack in the earth, burrowing their way to god knows where. Doesn’t take long for the last pair of legs to disappear into the darkness and it’s us chickens left behind in an empty basement.

  Mr. Flat Affect emerges from the corner where the coats are piled. Sways in place, devilish gaze locked on me. He’s a meat suit and whatever powers him came from the deep earth. I whimper.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Julie Five says. “You made the cut. We wouldn’t dream of harming a hair on your frosty little head. You’re our final girl. I always hoped you would be.” She takes my hand, leads me upstairs, and seats me in the parlor at a plain wooden table. The moon glows hard in the upper corner of a bay window. Its light seems to recede, shrinking to a dot as I watch. She removes a black moleskin notebook from her purse, opens it before me, and clicks the action on a ballpoint pen, places it beside the notebook. “Your memoir. It will be important someday, after everyone has forgotten how all this started. There’s a fire safe in the den.”