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

by Paula Guran

  To which ’Lij only shook his head, equally freaked. “I . . . yeah, dunno, really. I don’t—even think that was me.”

  “No, ’course not: Yphemaal, right? Who sews crooked seams straight . . . ” She shook her head, cracked her neck back and forth. “Only one of ’em still building stuff, these days, instead of tearing down or undermining, so maybe it’s the only one of ’em who really doesn’t want to go back, ’cause it knows what’ll happen next.”

  “Maaaaybe,” ’Lij said, dubious—then grabbed his wound, like something’d just reminded him it was there. “Oh, shit, that hurts!”

  “You’ll be fine, ya big baby—magic shit heals fast, like you wouldn’t believe. Makes for a great conversation piece, too.”

  “Okay, sure. Hey . . . I saved your life.”

  Camberwell snorted. “Yeah, well—I would’ve saved yours, you hadn’t beat me to it. Which makes us even.”

  ’Lij opened his mouth at that, perhaps to object, but was interrupted by Hynde, his voice creaky with disuse. Demanding, of Goss directly—“Hey, Arthur, what . . . the hell happened, here? Last thing I remember was doing pick-ups, outside, and then—” His eyes fell on Journee, widening. “—then I, oh Christ, is that—who is that?”

  Goss sighed, equally hoarse. “Long story.”

  By the time he was done, they were all outside—even poor Journee, who ’Lij had badgered Katz and Lao into helping roll up in a tarp, stowing her for transport in the back of the one blessedly still-operative truck Camberwell had managed to excavate from the missile-strike’s wreckage. Better yet, it ensued that ’Lij’s backup sat-phone was now once again functional; once contacted, the production office informed them that border skirmishes had definitely spilled over into undeclared war, thus necessitating a quick retreat to the airstrip they’d rented near Karima town. Camberwell reckoned they could make it if they started now, though the last mile or so might be mainly on fumes.

  “Better saddle up,” she told Goss, briskly, as she brushed past, headed for the truck’s cab. Adding, to a visibly gobsmacked Hynde: “Yo, Professor: you gonna be okay? ’Cause the fact is, we kinda can’t stop to let you process.”

  Hynde shook his head, wincing; one hand went to his chest, probably just as raw as Goss’s mouth-roof. “No, I’ll . . . be okay. Eventually.”

  “Mmm. Won’t we all.”

  Lao opened the truck’s back door and beckoned, face wan—all cried out, at least for the nonce. Prayed too, probably.

  Goss clambered in first, offering his hand. “Did we at least get enough footage to make a show?” Hynde had the insufferable balls to ask him, taking it.

  “Just get in the fucking truck, Lyman.”

  Weeks after, Goss came awake with a full-body slam, tangled in his sleeping bag and coated with cold sweat, as though having just been ejected from his dreams like a cannonball. They were in the Falklands by then, investigating a weird earthwork discovered in and amongst the 1982 war’s detritus—it wound like a harrow, a potential subterranean grinding room for squishy human corn, but thankfully, nothing they’d discovered inside seemed (thus far) to indicate any sort of connection to the Seven, either directly or metaphorically.

  In the interim since the Sudan, Katz had quit, for which Goss could hardly blame him—but Camberwell was still with them, which didn’t make either Goss or Hynde exactly comfortable, though neither felt like calling her on it. When pressed, she’d admitted to ’Lij that her hunting “methods” involved a fair deal of intuition-surfing, moving hither and yon at the call of her own angel voice-tainted subconscious, letting her post-Immoelization hangover do the psychic driving. Which did all seem to imply they were stuck with her, at least until the tides told her to move elsewhere . . .

  She is a woman of fate, your huntress, the still, small voice of Eshphoriel Maskim told him, in the darkness of his tent. Thus, where we go, she follows—and vice versa.

  Goss took a breath, tasting his own fear-stink. Are you here for me? he made himself wonder, though the possible answer terrified him even more.

  Oh, I am not here at all, meat-sack. I suppose I am . . . bored, you might say, and find you a welcome distraction. For there is so much misery everywhere here, in this world of yours, and so very little I am allowed to do with it.

  Having frankly no idea what to say to that, Goss simply hugged his knees and struggled to keep his breathing regular, his pulse calm and steady. His mouth prickled with gooseflesh, as though something were feeling its way around his tongue: the Whisper-angel, exploring his soul’s ill-kept boundaries with unsympathetic care, from somewhere entirely Other.

  I thought you were—done, is all. With me.

  Did you? Yet the universe is far too complicated a place for that. And so it is that you are none of you ever so alone as you fear, nor as you hope. A pause. Nonetheless, I am . . . glad to see you well, I find, or as much as I can be. Her too, for all her inconvenience.

  Here, however, Goss felt fear give way to anger, a welcome palate-cleanser. Because it seemed like maybe he’d finally developed an allergy to bullshit, at least when it came to the Maskim—or this Maskim, to be exact—and their fucked-up version of what passed for a celestial-to-human pep-talk.

  Would’ve been perfectly content to let Camberwell cut her own throat, though, wouldn’t you? he pointed out, shoulders rucking, hair rising like quills. If that—brother-sister-whatever of yours hadn’t made ’Lij interfere . . .

  Indubitably, yes. Did you expect anything else?

  Yes! What kind of angels are you, goddammit?

  The God-damned kind, Eshphoriel Maskim replied, without a shred of irony.

  You damned yourselves, is what I hear, Goss snapped back—then froze, appalled by his own hubris. But no bolt of lightning fell; the ground stayed firm, the night around him quiet, aside from lapping waves. Outside, someone turned in their sleep, moaning. And beyond it all, the earthwork’s narrow descending groove stood open to the stars, ready to receive whatever might arrive, as Heaven dictated.

  . . . there is that, too, the still, small voice admitted, so low Goss could feel more than hear it, tolling like a dim bone bell.

  (But then again—what is free will for, in the end, except to let us make our own mistakes?)

  Even quieter still, that last part. So much so that, in the end—no matter how long, or hard, he considered it—Goss eventually realized it was impossible to tell if it had been meant to be the angel’s thought, or his own.

  Doesn’t matter, he thought, closing his eyes. And went back to sleep.

  Former film critic and teacher turned horror author Gemma Files is best known for her Weird Western Hexslinger series (A Book of Tongues, A Ropes of Thorns, and A Tree of Bones, all from ChiZine Publications). In 1999, her story “The Emperor’s Old Bones” won an International Horror Guild Best Short Fiction award, while A Book of Tongues won the 2010 DarkScribe Magazine Black Quill Award for Small Press Chill, in both the Editors’ and Readers’ Choice categories. She has also written two chapbooks of speculative poetry, two story collections and a story cycle, We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven. Her latest novel, Experimental Film, will be available from CZP by November, 2015.

  She took a photo of the spell with her phone, and immediately texted it to them without explanation, confident the symbols were so powerful they would tentacle through screens and into their hearts . . .

  Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying

  Alice Sola Kim

  At midnight we parked by a Staples and tried some seriously dark fucking magic. We had been discussing it for weeks and could have stayed in that Wouldn’t it be funny if groove forever, zipping between Yes, we should and No, we shouldn’t until it became a joke so dumb that we would never. But that night Mini had said, “If we don’t do it right now, I’m going to be so mad at you guys, and I’ll know from now on that all you chickenheads can do is talk and not do,” and the whole way she ranted at us like that, even though we
were already doing and not talking, or at least about to. (We always let her do that, get all shirty and sharp with us, because she had the car, but perhaps we should have said something. Perhaps once everyone had cars, Mini would have to figure out how to live in the world as not a total bitch, and she would be leagues behind everyone else.)

  The parking lot at night looked like the ocean, the black Atlantic, as we imagined it, and in Mini’s car we brought up the spell on our phones and Caroline read it first. She always had to be first to do anything, because she had the most to prove, being scared of everything. We couldn’t help but tease her about that, even though we knew it wasn’t her fault—her parents made her that way, but then again, if someone didn’t get told off for being a pill just because we could trace said pill-ness back to their parents, then where would it ever end?

  We had an X-Acto knife and a lighter and antibacterial ointment and lard and a fat red candle still shrink-wrapped. A chipped saucer from Ronnie’s dad’s grandmother’s wedding set, made of china that glowed even in dim light and sang when you rubbed your thumb along it, which she took because it was chipped and thought they wouldn’t miss it, but we thought that was dumb because they would definitely miss the chipped one. The different one. We could have wrapped it all up and sold it as a Satanism starter kit.

  Those were the things. What we did with them we’ll never tell.

  For a moment, it seemed like it would work. The moment stayed the same, even though it should have changed. A real staring contest of a moment: Ronnie’s face shining in the lunar light of her phone, the slow tick of the blood into the saucer, like a radiator settling. But Mini ruined it. “Do you feel anything?” asked Mini, too soon and too loudly.

  We glanced at one another, dismayed. We thought, Perhaps if she had just waited a little longer—“I don’t think so,” said Ronnie.

  “I knew this was a dumb idea,” said Mini. “Let’s clean up this blood before it gets all over my car. So if one of you got murdered, they wouldn’t blame me.” Caroline handed out the Band-Aids. She put hers on and saw the blood well up instantly against the Band-Aid, not red or black or any color in particular, only a dark splotch like a shape under ice.

  So much for that, everyone thought, wrong.

  Mini dropped Caroline off first, even though she lived closer to Mini, then Ronnie after. It had been this way always. At first Caroline had been hurt by this, had imagined that we were talking about her in the fifteen extra minutes of alone time that we shared. The truth was both a relief and an even greater insult. There was nothing to say about Caroline, no shit we would talk that wasn’t right to her face. We loved Caroline, but her best jokes were unintentional. We loved Caroline, but she didn’t know how to pretend to be cool and at home in strange places like we did; she was the one who always seemed like a pie-faced country girleen wearing a straw hat and holding a suitcase, asking obvious questions, like, “Wait, which hand do you want to stamp?” or “Is that illegal?” Not that the answers were always obvious to us, but we knew what not to ask about. We knew how to be cool, so why didn’t Caroline?

  Usually, we liked to take a moment at the end of the night without Caroline, to discuss the events of the night without someone to remind us how young we were and how little we knew. But tonight we didn’t really talk. We didn’t talk about how we believed, and how our belief had been shattered. We didn’t talk about the next time we would hang out. Ronnie snuck into her house. Her brother, Alex, had left the window open for her. Caroline was already in bed, wearing an ugly quilted headband that kept her bangs off her face so she wouldn’t get forehead zits. Mini’s mom wasn’t home yet, so she microwaved some egg rolls. She put her feet up on the kitchen table, next to her homework, which had been completed hours ago. The egg rolls exploded tiny scalding droplets of water when she bit into them. She soothed her seared lips on a beer. This is the life, Mini thought.

  We didn’t go to the same school, and we wouldn’t have been friends if we had. We met at an event for Korean adoptees, a party at a low-ceilinged community center catered with the stinkiest food possible. Koreans, amirite?! That’s how we/they roll.

  Mini and Caroline were having fun. Ronnie was not having fun. Mini’s fun was different from Caroline’s fun, being a fake-jolly fun in which she was imagining telling her real friends about this doofus loser event later, although due to the fact that she was reminding them that she was adopted, they would either squirm with discomfort or stay very still and serious and stare her in the pupils with great intensity, nodding all the while. Caroline was having fun—the pure uncut stuff, nothing ironic about it. She liked talking earnestly with people her age about basic biographical details, because there was a safety in conversational topics that no one cared about all that much. Talking about which high school you go to? Great! Which activities you did at aforementioned school? Raaaad. Talking about the neighborhood where you live? How was it possible that they weren’t all dead of fun! Caroline already knew and liked the K-pop sound-tracking the evening, the taste of the marinated beef and the clear noodles, dishes that her family re-created on a regular basis.

  Ronnie rooted herself by a giant cut-glass bowl full of kimchi, which looked exactly like a big wet pile of fresh guts. She soon realized that (1) the area by the kimchi was very high traffic and (2) the kimchi emitted a powerful vinegar-poop-death stench. As Ronnie edged away from the food table, Mini and Caroline were walking toward it. Caroline saw a lost and lonely soul and immediately said, “Hi! Is this your first time at a meet-up?”

  At this Ronnie experienced split consciousness, feeling annoyed that she was about to be sucked into wearying small talk in addition to a nearly sacramental sense of gratitude about being saved from standing alone at a gathering. You could even say that Ronnie was experiencing quadruple consciousness if you counted the fact that she was both judging and admiring Mini and Caroline—Mini for being the kind of girl who tries to look ugly on purpose and thinks it looks so great (ooh, except it did look kinda great), her torn sneakers and one thousand silver earrings and chewed-up hair, and Caroline of the sweetly tilted eyes and cashmere sweater dress and ballet flats like she was some pampered cat turned human.

  Mini had a stainless-steel water bottle full of ice and vodka cut with the minimal amount of orange juice. She shared it with Ronnie and Caroline. And Caroline drank it. Caroline ate and drank like she was a laughing two-dimensional cutout and everything she consumed just went through her face and evaporated behind her, affecting her not at all.

  Ronnie could not stop staring at Caroline, who was a one-woman band of laughing and drinking and ferrying food to her mouth and nodding and asking skin-rippingly boring questions that nevertheless got them talking. Ronnie went from laughing at Caroline to being incredibly envious of her. People got drunk just to be like Caroline!

  Crap, Ronnie thought. Social graces are actually worth something.

  But Caroline was getting drunk, and since she was already Caroline, she went too far with the whole being-Caroline thing and asked if she could tell us a joke. Only if we promised not to get offended!

  Mini threw her head back, smiled condescendingly at an imaginary person to her left, and said, “Of course.” She frowned to hide a burp that was, if not exactly a solid, still alarmingly substantial, and passed the water bottle to Ronnie.

  Caroline wound up. This had the potential to be long. “So, you know how—oh wait, no, okay, this is how it starts. Okay, so white people play the violin like this.” She made some movements. “Black people play it like this.” She made some more movements. “And then Korean people play it like th—” and she began to bend at the waist but suddenly farted so loudly that it was like the fart had bent her, had then jet-packed her into the air and crumpled her to the ground.

  She tried to talk over it, but Ronnie and Mini were ended by their laughter. They fell out of themselves. They were puking laughter, the laughter was a thick brambly painful rope being pulled out of their faces, but they couldn’t s
top it, and finally Caroline stopped trying to finish the joke and we were all laughing.

  Consequences: For days after, we would think that we had exhausted the joke and sanded off all the funniness rubbing it so often with our sweaty fingers, but then we would remember again and, whoa, there we went again, off to the races.

  Consequences: Summer arrived. Decoupled from school, we were free to see one another, to feel happy misfitting with one another because we knew we were peas from different pods—we delighted in being such different kinds of girls from one another.

  Consequences: For weeks after, we’d end sentences with, “Korean people do it like ppppbbbbbbbttth.”

  There are so many ways to miss your mother. Your real mother—the one who looks like you, the one who has to love you because she grew you from her own body, the one who hates you so much that she dumped you in the garbage for white people to pick up and dust off. In Mini’s case, it manifested as some weird gothy shit. She had been engaging in a shady flirtation with a clerk at an antiquarian bookshop. We did not approve. We thought this clerk wore thick-rimmed hipster glasses to hide his crow’s feet and hoodies to hide his man boobs so that weird high-school chicks would still want to flirt with him. We hoped that Mini mostly liked him only because he was willing to trade clammy glances with her and go no further. Unlike us, Mini was not a fan of going far. When the manager wasn’t around, this guy let her go into the room with the padlock on it, where all of the really expensive stuff was. That’s where she found the book with the spell. That’s were she took a photo of the spell with her phone. That’s where she immediately texted it to us without any explanation attached, confident that the symbols were so powerful they would tentacle through our screens and into our hearts, and that we would know it for what it was.