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

by Paula Guran

  She paused.

  Silence fell over the amphitheater, an undersea silence fathoms deep, the silence of breath suspended, of heartbeats held in abeyance. Ben scanned the crowd, searching for Lois—for Stan and MacKenzie, for Cecy—Cecy who had been born into a world of ruin and death. There. There. There and there. He feared for them every one, but he feared for Cecy most of all.

  Someone stirred and coughed. A chorus of murmurs echoed in the chamber. A man shifted, braced his hands upon his armrests, and subsided into his seat. Veronica Glass stood silent and unmoved. Another moment passed, and then, because Cerulean Cliffs had long since plunged into desperation and despair, and most of all perhaps because ruination and devastation would soon overwhelm them every one, a woman—lean and hungry and mad—stood abruptly and said, “I will stand your challenge.”

  She walked down to the arena floor. Her heels rang hollow in the silence. When she reached Veronica Glass, they exchanged words too quiet to make out, like the wings of moths whispering in the corners of the room. The woman disrobed, letting her clothes fall untended around her feet. Her flesh was blue and pale in the chill air, her breasts flat, her shanks thin and flaccid. Silent tears coursed down her narrow face as she turned to face them. Veronica strapped her to the table, winching the bands cruelly tight: at wrist and elbow, ankle and knee; across her shoulders and the mound of her sex. Her head she harnessed in a mask of leather straps, fastened snugly under the headrest.

  “What you do here, you do of your own will,” Veronica said.

  “Yes.”

  “And once begun, you resolve not to turn back.”

  “Yes,” the woman said. “I want to die.”

  The screens lit up with an image of the woman strapped to the table. Veronica turned to face the audience. She donned gloves and goggles, a white leather apron—and began. Using a scalpel, she drew a thin bead of blood between the woman’s breasts, from sternum to pubis, and then, with a delicate intersecting X, she pulled back each quarter of flesh—there was an agonizing tearing sound—to unveil the pink musculature beneath. The woman arched her back, moaning, and Cecy—Cecy who had known nothing but ruin in her short life—Cecy screamed.

  Ben, startled from a kind of entranced horror, held Veronica Glass’s gaze for a moment. What he saw there was madness and in the madness something worse: a kind of truth. And then he tore himself away. Lurching to his feet, he shoved his way through the seated masses to scoop Cecy up. He clutched her against his breast, soothing her into a snarl of hiccupping sobs. Together, his arms aching, they stumbled to the aisle.

  “You have to walk now,” he said, setting her on her feet. “You have to walk.” Cecy took his hand and together they began to climb the steps of the arena.

  There was a rustle of movement in the stands. Ben looked around.

  MacKenzie, weeping, had begun to make her way to join them, Lois too, and Stan.

  They were almost to the cliff side when the screaming began.

  So ended the last suicide party at Cerulean Cliffs—or at least the last such party attended by Ben and his companions. Over the next few days they gradually shifted back to a diurnal schedule. Stan dug up an old bicycle pump to inflate Cecy’s soccer ball, and they spent most afternoons on the lawn, playing her incomprehensible games. There was no more talk of trading partners. Their drinking and drug use dwindled: a beer or two after dinner, the occasional joint as twilight lengthened its blue shadows over the grass.

  Late one morning, Ben and Stan made another pilgrimage inland. They traded off carrying a small cooler and when they reached the edge of the devastation—they didn’t have far to go—they stretched out against the trunk of a fallen tree and drank beer. Ruin had made deep inroads into the driveway by then. The weeds on the shoulders of the rutted lane had crumbled, and the gravel had melted into slag. Scorched-looking trees had turned into charred spikes, shedding their denuded branches in slow streamers of dust. Ben finished his beer and pitched his bottle out onto the baked and fractured earth. Ruin took it. It blackened and cracked as if he’d hurled it into a fire and began to dissolve into ash.

  “It won’t be long now,” Stan said.

  “It will be long enough,” Ben said, twisting open a fresh beer.

  They toasted one another in silence, and walked home along the winding sun-dappled road under trees that would not see another autumn. Ben and Lois made slow, languorous love when he got back, and as he drowsed afterward, Ben found himself thinking of Veronica Glass and whether she had fallen to ruin at last. And he found himself thinking too of the poet, Rosenthal, who’d chosen ruin over discipline in the end, who’d surrendered up his art to death. “I write the truth as I see it,” he’d said, or something like that, and if there was no ultimate truth here in the twilight of all things—or if there never had been—there were at least small truths: small moments worthy of preservation in rhyme, even if it too would fall to ruin, and soon: Cecy’s cries of joy; and the sound of breakers on a dying beach and the gentle touch of another human’s skin. Art for art’s sake, after all.

  “Maybe I’ve been wasting my time,” he told Lois.

  “Of course you have,” she said, and that afternoon he sat at a sunlit table in the kitchen, licked the tip of his pencil, and began.

  Dale Bailey lives in North Carolina with his family, and has published three novels, The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.). His short fiction has been a three-time finalist for the International Horror Guild Award, a two-time finalist for the Nebula Award, and a finalist for the Shirley Jackson and the Bram Stoker Awards. His International Horror Guild Award-winning novelette “Death and Suffrage” was adapted by director Joe Dante as part of Showtime Television’s anthology series, Masters of Horror. His collection, The End of the End of Everything: Stories, came out in the spring. A novel, The Subterranean Season, will be out this fall.

  Their meandering path formed a pattern that spoke to me and me alone . . .

  Fragments from the Notes of a Dead Mycologist

  Jeff VanderMeer

  [Composed of individual note cards found in disarray and then arranged into a “best approximation” of the original order of composition.]

  i.

  Have you ever dreamed, like I have, of something coming up through the ground—a camera, a periscope, a conduit? Something so mundane maybe you didn’t even think of it in that way. Maybe you didn’t even see them, even though they have always been there. When you do notice them, you don’t think of networks, you don’t think of connections. But they are—connected; I’ve seen it. Sentinel towers communicating under the soil.

  ii.

  They can look almost delicate and exposed, vulnerable, and be misleading that way. You can forget that they exist in a perpetual landscape of decay and dissolution. Until you encounter one that sits there, toadlike and muscular, tough as nails. Something in the stance and the positioning that defies an easy answer. That makes you think of something neither plant nor animal, with a perception of the world entirely alien to your own.

  iii.

  You can lose yourself in them, these beacons no one notices. Follow them wherever they lead, if you’re willing. Say, a trail leading from a newly added gravestone. A trail of red-and-white fruiting bodies that only I could see because only I was looking, just a month after the funeral and the macabre thought: perhaps they came from the grave itself, although that contradicts the point of their invisible omnipresence. And following them in that state of mind? Fragile as their gills and stems? It leads to places not shown on any map.

  iv.

  Some try to mimic orchids or lilies to undercut your defenses, to make you believe everything has returned to normal even though it’s not okay, not even close. Some get caught in mid-step, in mid-journey, on their way to distant battles of spore and climate, colonizing as they go. Foot-soldiers that freeze as you look at them because your senses are inadequate to grasp the movement there. Although the distraction of trying brin
gs a kind of calm.

  v.

  A few of their journeys reach an unexpected ending, like the trail from the gravestone, and you encounter squalid inbred colonies far from the humming, ever-living discourse of decay. From high in the dead branches of deformed pine trees, they whisper down into the mulch . . . and standing there is this place where no wind reaches and the fruiting bodies seem to have gone awry. It all seems to make mockery of any grieving part of me. This quest, this need to follow wherever it might take you. No matter what has gone missing from your life.

  vi.

  I know I can’t have him back, but it is cruel for nature to make me think that it might be possible. He’s gone. He’s gone.

  vii.

  Others exist only to mimic both the living and the dead, recreating the memory of skulls from ages of spore memory. They give those who witness them a shudder of horrible recognition. They know that they are continually dying only to rise again, and that they are emissaries of the immortal. They bring messages of fatal importance: that we are fruiting bodies unmoored from any anchor deep beneath the soil. When we are chosen before our time or after, there is no new growth to sustain us, to make us whole again. They wear the masks of the missing, and yet we find this fascinating rather than repugnant.

  viii.

  The message I received came to me from a tunnel, hidden under the hill atop which lay the graveyard. I followed those fruiting bodies with their milk-white stems and red-fringed gills through the bramble and the thicket, crawling vines and storm-strewn branches. The ground had a spongy bounce to it and the air around a decrepit stream crawled with the stench of chemical run-off. But their meandering path formed a pattern that spoke to me and me alone. I found a tunnel hidden under the hill, within an abandoned circle of concrete that had once been part of a construction project. There, still following the red-and-white, within the coolness and curve of concrete, I found a door that leads down. Into the earth.

  ix.

  Then there are the shy loners who watch from the side, who you only meet if you approach them. These shy ones lie hidden among the bright, superficial ones that call attention to themselves, obscure the lie within them. You can miss these quiet ones if you aren’t careful. You can miss out on something that is vitally important. The rare and beautiful curve of the thick neck, the line of the throat, so delicate, leading to the thick cap. Something hidden in the ground now. Stolen without reason.

  x.

  Perhaps it wasn’t a tunnel the fruiting bodies had led me to but a conduit. Perhaps it wasn’t a corridor but a refuge. The staircase spiraled down, narrow, difficult to navigate, built for someone smaller. The trail of mushroom faded away to a thready, inconsistent line, and to either side a thick moss appeared from which rose a vague phosphorescence. The moss brushed against my shoulders, my arms, my neck. A smell like something that had died and been resurrected, mingling sweet with bitter, and underneath it a hint of some other, far more familiar scent. The fading of the trail matched a fading of my interest, but even as I turned back, I knew I would return.

  xi.

  Great shelves of cities rise in the aftermath of rain on that hill. Vast, complex communities of microorganisms, ants, lichen, and lizards having taken refuge under that many-tiered aegis. How much goes on beneath that we never recognize? How blind are we? How solitary in our company? Does a gravestone not epitomize that loneliness? Sitting there before the rough stone, this fruiting body that has a laughable permanence. So much more truthful if it were to rot away in a single day, be replaced by another, perhaps utterly different. Take all of these flowers and pebbles and photographs and dissolve them in the soil, reveal their meaninglessness.

  xii.

  I returned to that place, descended further in a kind of trance, and words came spiraling up out of the dark before the gleam of the flashlight. They hit me like a rockslide, brought a tightness into my chest. Dear Jack: “His tender mercies lie across all his works, swallowing up death in resurrection.” I cannot believe that, but I know you do. Written at shoulder-height, rising from amid the moss, in a riotous profusion of green-gold fruiting bodies. A generous cursive script to be so cruel. The words continued on into the darkness and my imagination went with them. A network. A conduit. Language as living beings. Have you ever been ready for something and yet not ready at all? I wanted to follow, but I couldn’t. Too much of me remained on the surface. And they were my own words.

  xiv.

  In the darkness of deep mulch—in public parks, in back alleys, at the base of hills—the elders, falling apart, rotted to pulp-rust, and almost senseless, dissolve into particles that each reveal a self-perpetuating story. The oldest of all, past memory and past recall, communicate with no one and nothing, not even the wind. Nothing can dissolve them. Nothing can destroy them. They are already destroyed.

  xv.

  You can be drawn in by spores, by mushrooms, by trails of things that seem to lead nowhere and yet lead everywhere. You can find yourself deep underground staring at a wall with writing on it that you recognize intimately. They were my own words, quoted from the text he worshiped that remained meaningless to me except in that it was not meaningless to him. This I saw when I went back, to walk in the darkness that was not dark. The words glowed and I did not need my flashlight. “Death has no sting; sorrow not for those who are gone, for they reside happily in the other realm.” I’d like to believe that, but I don’t have it in me. It feels like a failure, or maybe it just feels like the remnants of love. The walls that carry this message I have already seen appear to breathe, and in amongst these words so spore-writ, I can see creatures living. A heartbeat wells up from deep below and thrums through the steps and into me. These are my words confronting me; I wrote them to him in a letter, and I placed it atop the coffin before they lowered it into the ground. But here they have been transformed, as if into a message just for me. Nothing can dissolve them. Nothing can destroy them.

  xvi.

  A few outliers extend all-knowing spies above ground, bringing in information through senses we cannot imagine, the great bulk hidden in the soil, waiting for the moment to rise and re-make the world. That which travels through them they know only as a rising brightness, a fullness that is soon gone, leaving them empty again, and searching.

  xvii.

  Some fruiting bodies can absorb the world entire, and in them you will see the bones of a mouse or the rust of iron filings. In an uncanny yet incomplete mimicry they become whatever surrounds them. But words? My own words? My analysis fails me. My reliance on samples fails me. My intuition . . . fails me. But the words keep unraveling along the wall and I cannot escape the hope of them, no matter where they lead. The heartbeat like a cathedral bell. The slow, sonorous breathing. The sway of the tendrils of moss around the words . . . I would like “joy and gladness” now, I would like “sorrow and sighing to flee away,” but it can’t and it doesn’t. I haunt these places we once walked together and I feel as if I am not really here . . . in the dark, under the earth, held here snugly. Not safe, but somehow comforted.

  xviii.

  You know the fleshy feel of a large mushroom, the way it resists puncture at first, not like rubber but like skin. The walls so close now, the brushings against the moss that is not moss, the brushing up against my own, living words. The eruption of ejected spores filling the air with golden dust. The sound of silent wings now, inside of my mouth. The need for light, for food, and even though you know all of these things and what they might mean, also there is a need to find an end to the words. I feel now as if we were cut off in mid-sentence. As if I turned away for just a moment and when I looked again you were gone. This feeling lives in the stomach and the chest and lungs . . . and it never goes away.

  xix.

  Moistness and trickles of water and the clean, smooth delight you feel at finding a newly formed fruiting body—not yet picked at by animals, trod upon, ruined by the passage of time. There is no death visible in such manifestations, no matt
er how it pulls at them mere hours later, no matter how it becomes the point of their journey. Now I know—I must really know—that someone below is writing these words of mine. “There shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” But it’s not the pain that hurts: It’s the interruption, it’s the not knowing.”

  xx.

  Some contain a vibration within them, as if a music waits to be released, even if it is only in the form of spores. These words now vibrate, and the path forward is heavy with friction and heat and the sounds of industry, the heartbeat bleeding in my ears. The way back has been blocked by the moss, which has grown out from both sides of the wall to form an impenetrable mass. Downward to the end of the word, to the impossible, is all that is left to me. “Fear not, for I am with thee; I will strengthen thee; I will uphold thee.” But I don’t need God to strengthen me; I need you to do that.

  xxi.

  Nothing hides from it in its task, and all orbit it. Nothing can be said to exist now without it. The words on the wall are in my throat, thrusting up and thrusting down. It burns in floating motes and still it writes inside of me. The silhouette of everything I have ever sought to see again lies around the curve of the stairs, but if I look upon it, will it be what I need? Above, the moss that is moss still pushes down. I am terrified. I am terrified that after all of this I will not be strong enough to look upon him again, here, in this place. You’ll be near the park where we came to sit and read on Sunday afternoons. I think that you will be at peace here. It will be hard to say goodbye, and it is worse to come here knowing the park is so near, but I’d prefer that to forgetting.

  xxii.