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

by Paula Guran

  For once, Rook’s gaze was lucid. His thinning hair was combed slick, shirt ironed, the tie under his waistcoat knotted impeccably and pinned with a burnished gold rod. When he exhaled, it was through trimmed nostrils, not out of a drooping mouth, and as he spoke Avice caught a whiff of fresh mint.

  “I am gravely disappointed with your performance, Mrs. Welles,” Martin said, emphasizing the grave, which elicited a giggle from Miss Fiona. Lifting his trousers by the pleats to minimize creasing—the way Avice had been trying to get him to for years—Rook crossed his legs at the ankle, leaned back, and winked at the Taskmistress before plucking a leather-bound volume off the felt blotter.

  “Fiona,” Avice said, half standing as two and two made four. She’d got him dressed for this meeting; no doubt the strumpet had done her fair share of undressing him as well. “What on earth—”

  Her thoughts evaporated as Martin Rook placed a pudgy palm on the book, looking for all the world as though he were about to swear an oath. Caressing the cover, he waited for Avice to realize that this journal was fashioned not from black hide stained liberally with Tokay, but was clothed in a rich shade of navy, gilt shimmering on the spine and the paper’s cut edges. Not his, then, but . . .

  “Where did you get that?” she whispered. “Have you sunk so low, Martin, that you must steal from trusted friends?”

  By the door, Miss Fiona snorted. Her cracked red hands were greasy with rose-scented lanolin; the uniform she wore was crisp white, the weave finer than any Avice owned.

  “I see,” the Matron said. Martin had had it stolen. And at such a low price. “You’ve done well for yourself, Taskmistress.”

  “Matron,” Fiona corrected, triumph adding a note of glee to the title. “That’s Matron to you, Miss Avice.”

  “I did everything,” Avice said, after the buzzing in her ears subsided, the spots in her vision dispersed. “I liaised with Skaille, oversaw these—” she waved her hand in Fiona’s direction “—ingrates. Bridewell has flourished under my care. There are fewer deaths, though intake is up. And the children.”

  “Indeed. The children. It wasn’t like you,” the Superintendent said, lip curling, “to be so . . . caring.”

  Avice swallowed bile, remembering Rook’s wandering hands, his rancid breath by her ear, the rough scrape of his tongue, and the thrust of him inside her. Remembering all the things she’d done, all the things she’d allowed to be done to her.

  “How dare you,” she spat, but Martin waggled her diary by one gilded corner.

  “Dalkeith’s flights of fancy I can ignore; he’s a man of science, after all. But you . . . Disappearing each morning? Those urchins at your beck and call? How could I know you’d been seeking pleasure with necrotic tissue? Couldn’t you have simply used the good doctor as a means to cure your frigidity? Then at least I might have benefited from your extra-curricular activities—as you did from mine.” Rook smiled warmly at Fiona, who blushed like a schoolgirl instead of the forty-something trollop she was. The idea that he thought she’d enjoyed any of what he’d done to her made Avice’s head pound. “But it soon became clear the doctor was not of abiding interest to you, so I asked Fi here to call on you, see what was keeping you so preoccupied of late. And if you should happen to be out when she dropped by, well . . . All the better.”

  “You had no right,” Avice said, trembling.

  “You always have undermined my authority, Mrs. Welles. For a while—oh, let’s be honest, for years—I was content to turn a blind eye. Play the fool to your queen, the jester to your highness. Whatever warmed you, warmed me, darling. But I cannot ignore this.” He cleared his throat and said, more forcefully, “I did not authorize this.”

  He tossed the diary to Fiona, as though he couldn’t bear touching the thing a second longer. “We are not in the business of creating criminals, but of rehabilitating them. At the very least, it is our mandate not to make them worse.”

  When the children woke, they found it was to a dull gray day. There was no sign of the sun when Bert poked his head outside their little shed; the rain had once more set in overnight, but it was obvious they’d overslept. Their stomachs told them they’d missed breakfast, which in turn told them they’d not been woken. And that told them something had happened to Matron Welles.

  Victoria was sent into the storm to scout for information while the others huddled within their four walls, listening to the roiling thunder. It wasn’t long before the girl was back, muddy and soaked, babbling how she’d overheard William Henry laughing with the Constables about Avice’s fall from grace. How Miss Fiona preened and swanned inspecting the women of all classes, wearing a pretty new outfit.

  Initially there was a stunned silence, until first one then the other broke into ragged laughter, interspersed with whoops and tears of joy. All of them, except Bert, who tolerated their noise until he couldn’t think.

  “Shut it!”

  “But, Bert, she’s gone! She can’t lord it over us anymore,” said Millie, trying to make him see reason.

  After a short pause, he said, “But we need her, don’t you see?”

  They all shook their heads in a dogged fashion.

  He sighed. “If she’s gone who’s going to be in charge of us? Who’s going to take us to Dr. Dal? He won’t be wanting to babysit the likes of us. Welles was the only one to organize things for him.”

  Turning away, Bert pulled the well-worn book out from beneath their bedding and pinned it down with his knees like a map on the floor, pointing at the page he’d selected like a battlefield commander instructing his troops. The image showed Frank lowering a deep black heart into his creature’s splayed ribcage. Lines etched around the organ showed it still beat.

  “He’s right,” sighed Victoria, with a growing dread that seemed to transmit itself to the rest of them.

  “We need one last thing—one last fecking thing,” despaired Ned.

  And then Bert smiled. It was a slow smile, a sure smile, a smile to curdle the blood, but his company took only comfort from it. Millie alone remained belligerently pessimistic, lacking faith.

  “Where are we gonna get one of those?” she demanded.

  Bert’s smile grew wider. “I know where we can find one, barely used. Wait until nightfall.”

  Avice did not hear the knocking at first, so deeply sunk she was in her misery.

  The new Matron will attend to Bridewell’s daily reckonings . . .

  The new Matron will contact the Queen’s Orphan School in Hobart about places for our lost sheep . . .

  Constables! Escort Mrs. Welles to her quarters and see to it she doesn’t leave.

  Was Hettie caught so easily, Avice had wondered, as she was led to her—the new Matron’s—cottage. Was she as foolish as her mother? Was that her only inheritance?

  That stupid old man, she seethed now, and that even stupider harlot . . .

  The tap-tap-tapping finally broke her concentration.

  In the sliver betwixt door and frame, Millie’s pale face appeared.

  “How did you get in?” demanded Avice, and the girl grinned.

  “Ned and Alf led ’em off, the Constables. Be quick about it, Matron, if you’d like to make good your escape.”

  Avice Welles did not need to be told twice. She left everything behind, everything but the small purse of sovereigns Miss Fiona had failed to find stuffed into the mattress. She let go all notes, all researches. She would start again, would recall enough to rebuild.

  Following Millie, she kept watch on the girl’s thin straight back. She thought how her recent kindnesses to the children had paid off in this act of charity.

  Outside, it was raining still. She could barely see a foot in front of her, could only just hear when Millie said, “This way, Matron.”

  Head down, Avice kept pace with the child’s quick step. Around her the other children gathered like misty wet ghosts. When she finally looked up, they were at the isolation cell. Millie smiled. Bert was there, too. He offered his hand a
s if to help her across a threshold.

  “A hiding place, Matron. Not for long, but long enough.” Nodding, she took his fingers and stepped over—then found herself falling. Falling so far and so fast, the plummet stopped by a breathtaking hit, a great splash of dirty water. Her leg broke beneath her, one ankle too, but she was too shocked to cry out. Through the pain she noticed a rope snaking from above; the children, one by one, slid down it like monkeys, wet, mud-spattered monkeys all coming into the strange dank room lit by candle stumps.

  Bert was first. He sloshed across the cellar and took something from against the wall, then stood in front of her, waiting until the others were safely there to witness. Ned and Alf, Millie and Victoria, Only Sarah, Fat Mary, Red Mary, Tall Mary, Dark Mary, Spotty Mary. In the shadows behind them Avice thought she saw another shape, thin and small, translucent and shivering beyond death: Little Sarah. And there, beside her, features so long forgotten, so long diluted by time, but now undoubtedly her: Hettie.

  Avice opened her lips, tried to make a sound, tried to plead, but all she managed was a muted uhhhnuh before Bert brought the spade down hard on her head.

  From the rickety old fences surrounding the graveyard, Bert had acquired a scrunched roll of barbed wire. Well after curfew, Ned had clambered up on the roof of the isolation cell to affix a star picket of iron there to act as a lightning rod. They’d wrapped the sharp wire around the picket and ran it along the wall, into the lockup, then down, down, down into the hole.

  In this storm, no one was outside.

  Without Avice Welles, no one bothered with them.

  In the puddle-filled cellar, the old Matron had breathed her last, prone in shallow mud. After Bert’s final blows had stopped, Victoria and the Marys had watched on, fascinated, as the woman’s thickened breath bubbled, ribcage expanding and contracting, both ceasing after one last noisy burst of air.

  Behind them, the boys were busy wrapping the new mother in rusted barbed wire. They were careful to ensure the spikes grabbed into the patchwork meat without tearing, equally careful to not let it pierce their own hands. Not always successful in this latter task, they spilled their fresh young blood. Filled with the magic of youth and grief and yearning, it stained the dead flesh, entered wounds that gaped but did not weep. Her recently sewn head, neatly attached by Victoria’s fair hand, listed to the side; as if she slept, Bert thought. Her hair had been cropped right before her death. A rough job; chunks had been taken out of her scalp, leaving longer tufts unshorn. Those gashes hadn’t had time to heal, nor the raw lacerations around her neck—the iron collar’s love-bite, William Henry called it—so these marks, too, were repaired with tidy, meandering stitch-trails. Black and blue threads complemented the black and blue welts on her skin, the black and blue hollows in her lean face.

  Bert thought she was beautiful, just as she was. All the children thought she was beautiful.

  Ever since Dr. Dal had jolted that dug-up, Bert had thought long and hard about it. Relying on instinct more than logic didn’t diminish his confidence in his science. He was positive this procedure would work. He’d used a drill to make several small holes in the skull and now inserted, with painstaking care, stolen wires before attaching their free ends to the barbed cage trussing her body.

  “I dunno, Bert, I don’t want no black-souled mother,” sniffed Millie, standing beside him, her patched shoes making ripples in the puddle around the body. Bert gave a sigh of exasperation.

  “How many times I gotta tell you? Once the lightning hits, that heart of hers will start pumping and brighten right up. The most brilliant blue-white you ever seen. She’ll shine like an angel, and she’ll be our proper mum. Trust me.”

  “What about her foot, Bert?” Ned, checking the wire trailing down from the hole above, nodded towards the ankle which ended only in a stump.

  “Never mind. We’ll make her one, a wooden one, when she’s up and about. Only we need this storm to get her going. We can’t wait. And it’s only a foot; she don’t need a foot to love us.”

  Ned nodded. Bert sat back and surveyed his handiwork. Only one piece left, and they’d be set. The chest cavity was wide open—Victoria stood at the ready with needle and thread—but they’d not yet taken the heart from Matron. Bert had been so anxious to get the lightning rod in place, to get the framework in place, to take advantage of the weather, he hadn’t wanted to waste time. It would all happen so quick, he just knew it. After seeing the woman lightning-struck in the courtyard, all he could think about was how random the bolts were, how they had to be ready, ready, ready to take their chance.

  Let Mrs. Welles keep that heart safe and fresh until the very last minute, he reckoned.

  Millie didn’t look convinced, but she shut up and followed him to the corner where the Matron lay like one of Cook’s butchered sows. Wielding the filched scalpel and a gutting knife Alf had scavenged from the kitchen, Bert slit the woman’s chest, then pried apart her ribs to get at the still-warm organ. Neatly detaching the organ from all the bits and bobs that kept it in situ, he handed the meaty muscle to Millie. “Make yourself useful. Take this over to her.”

  Obediently, she did so. Waiting beside the wire-wrapped figure, her gaze traveled from the wet heart slicking her hands, dribbling down, down into the gaping cavity there, into the darkness that would soon be filled with this squishy red ticker, with thread and blood, with love. Standing in the freezing stormwater, renegade drops dripped from the open floor above, her thin-soled shoes leaking, Millie shivered, feet so cold she barely felt them. Outside there was a sharp crack and an ominous tumbling rumble not long after. Blinking up into the rain, Millie counted half a second between the flash of light in the opening overhead and the rattling boom that followed. Close, so close.

  On the opposite side of the mother, Bert paced, craning to see the sky through the cell above. It hadn’t really occurred to him that the lightning might not play nice, might not be so willing to come when called, that it would obey only its own elemental rules. Somehow he’d imagined a roiling store of the stuff amassing directly over them, ready to be summoned as needed. But these wild, whiplashing bolts? He had no idea how to get them to go where they needed it most.

  A flash of blistering white. Wincing, Bert cowered near the wall next to Alf and two of the Marys. If the previous strike had been loud, he reckoned this one was a ripper. All the children gave little screams of panic, except Ned and Millie, who kept screeching long after the others had calmed.

  In the spotted darkness after the blast, they both shook and shuddered, buzzed and smoked. Ned’s hands seared to the barbed wire he’d been touching; Millie jittered and juddered in the rainwater pooling around the new mother, who jittered and juddered too, but made no sound. The wires, probes, and metal bindings all crackled and glowed. The heart in Millie’s spasming grip burned black and crisped faster than thought.

  Then it was done.

  It was over.

  Millie and Ned fell slowly, wisps of steam coming off them, like souls released.

  Bert blinked and swallowed, blinked and swallowed again. The children drifted, half-terrified, half-fascinated, to their fallen mates. Kneeling, they examined them, scrunched their noses at the smell of sodden burnt meat, at the power they’d so briefly harnessed at such a cost. The Marys began to cry first—as always—then Sarah, then Victoria, and finally Alf.

  But Bert . . . Bert was processing what he’d seen, even as he stared down at Millie and thought how quiet his life would be without her. Yet, even thinking that, his mind was playing catch-up, replaying what he thought he’d seen. If his eyes hadn’t deceived him, that mist, that smoke, that fog, that essence from his friends’ bodies hadn’t gone upwards, but down. It hadn’t dissipated, but been drawn in. Their spirits, if that’s what they were, hadn’t gone up to Heaven the way Reverend Tanner insisted, but they hadn’t gone to Hell neither. No, they’d only gone as far as the level of his feet before they’d been taken into the patchwork mother.

  Slo
wly, he turned his gaze to where the stitched lady lay.

  Slowly, the others followed, their losses suddenly forgotten.

  Strange science. Dark magic. Yearning and blood, loss and sacrifice.

  The body, their own new mother, still cocooned in the wire frame, was moving.

  “Alf?” said Bert.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hand me them wire clippers.”

  Angela Slatter is the author of the Aurealis Award-winning The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, the World Fantasy Award finalist Sourdough and Other Stories, Aurealis finalist Midnight and Moonshine (with Lisa L. Hannett), as well as Black-Winged Angels, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, and The Female Factory (again with Hannett). In 2015 her story Of Sorrow and Such will be one of the inaugural Tor.com novella series. Her short stories have appeared in publications such as Fantasy, Nightmare, Lightspeed, A Book of Horrors, and Australian, UK and US “best of” anthologies. She is the first Australian to win a British Fantasy Award, holds an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, is a graduate of Clarion South and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, and was an inaugural Queensland Writers Fellow.

  Lisa L. Hannett has had over sixty short stories appear in venues including Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Weird Tales, Apex, The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror (2010, 2011 & 2012), and Imaginarium: Best Canadian Speculative Writing (2012 & 2013). She has won three Aurealis Awards, including Best Collection for her first book, Bluegrass Symphony, which was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Her first novel, Lament for the Afterlife, is being published by CZP in 2015. You can find her online at lisahannett.com and on Twitter @LisaLHannett.