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

by Paula Guran

  Mini covered her mouth, and then Mom switched to Caroline. —And Tried To Make You Good. But Ronnie Showed Me It Was All Useless. You Are All Worthless. Caroline shook her head until Mom left, and we pulled Ronnie up and ran out to the car together, gripping one another’s hands the whole way.

  We drove, or just Mini drove, but we were rearing forward in our seats, and it was as though we were all driving, strenuously, horsewhippingly, like there was an away to get to, as if what we were trying to escape was behind us and not inside of us. We were screaming and shouting louder and louder until Mini was suddenly seized again. We saw it and we waited. Mini’s jaw unhinged, and we didn’t scream only because this had happened many times—certainly we didn’t like it when it happened to us, but that way at least we didn’t have to look at it, the way that it was only skin holding the moving parts of her skull together, skin become liquid like glass in heat, and then her mouth opened beyond everything we knew to be possible, and the words that came out—oh, the words. Mini began to speak and then we did, we did scream, even though we should have been used to it by now.

  DRIVE SAFE

  DRIVE SAFE

  DO YOU WANT TO DIE BEFORE I TEACH YOU EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW

  The car veered, a tree loomed, and we were garlanded in glass, and a branch insinuated itself into Mini’s ribs and encircled her heart, and Ronnie sprang forth and broke against the tree, and in the backseat Caroline was marveling at how her brain became unmoored and seesawed forward into the jagged coastline of the front of her skull and back again, until she was no longer herself, and it was all so mortifying that we could have just died, and we did, we did die, we watched every second of it happen until we realized that we were back on the road, driving, and all of the preceding was just a little movie that Mom had played inside of our heads.

  “Stop,” said Ronnie. “Stop the car.”

  “No way,” said Mini. “That’s what she wants.”

  Mom’s sobs again. I Killed Myself For Love. I Killed Myself For You, she said. I Came Back For Girls Who Wanted Parents But You Already Had Parents.

  “Mini, listen to me,” said Ronnie. “I said it because it seemed like a thing to say, and it would have been nice to have, but there is no way to reverse the spell, is there?”

  “We can try it. We can go back to the parking lot and do everything, but backward.”

  “We can change the words. We have to try,” Caroline said.

  “Mom,” said Ronnie, “if you’re still here, I want to tell you that I want you. I’m the one who needs a mother. You saw.”

  “Ronnie,” said Caroline, “what are you talking about?”

  From Mini, Mom said, You Girls Lie To One Another. All The Things You Don’t Tell Your Friends. Ronnie thought she already sounded less angry. Just sad and a little petulant. Maybe showing all of them their deaths by car crash had gotten it out of her system.

  “The thing I’m doing,” said Ronnie, “that’s a thing they would kick me out of the family for doing. I need my real family. I need you.” She didn’t want to say the rest out loud, so she waited. She felt Mom open up her head, take one cautious step inside with one foot and then the other. Ronnie knew that she didn’t want to be this way or do those things anymore. Ronnie knew that she couldn’t find a way to stop or escape Alex’s gaze from across the room when everyone else was watching TV. Stop looking at me. If you could stop looking at me for just one second, then I could stop too.

  Mom, while we’re speaking honestly, I don’t think you’re any of our mothers. I don’t think you’re Korean. I don’t even think you come from any country on this planet.

  (Don’t tell me either way.)

  But I don’t care. I need your help, Mom. Please, are you still there? I’ll be your daughter. I love your strength. I’m not scared anymore. You can sleep inside my bone marrow, and you can eat my thoughts for dinner, and I promise, I promise I’ll always listen to you. Just make me good.

  They didn’t see Ronnie for a few months. Mini did see Alex at a concert pretty soon after everything that happened. He had a black eye and his arm in a sling. She hid behind a pillar until he passed out of sight. Mini, at least, had sort of figured it out. First she wondered why Ronnie had never told them, but then, immediately, she wondered how Ronnie could do such a thing. She wondered how Alex could do such a thing. Her thoughts shuttled back and forth between both of those stations and would not rest on one, so she made herself stop thinking about it.

  As for Mini and Caroline, their hair grew out or they got haircuts, and everything was different, and Caroline’s parents had allowed her to quit ballet and Mini’s parents were still leaving her alone too much but she grew to like it. And when they were around, they weren’t so bad. These days they could even be in the same room without screaming at each other.

  There was another meet-up for Korean adoptees. They decided to go. School had started up again, and Mini and Caroline were on the wane. Mini and Caroline thought that maybe bringing it all back full circle would help. But they knew it wouldn’t be the same without Ronnie.

  Mini and Caroline saw us first before we saw them. They saw us emerge from a crowd of people, people that even Caroline hadn’t befriended already. They saw our skin and hair, skin and eyes, hair and teeth. The way we seemed to exist in more dimensions than other people did. How something was going on with us—something was shakin’ it—on the fourth, fifth, and possibly sixth dimensions. Space and time and space-time and skin and hair and teeth. You can’t say “pretty” to describe us. You can’t say “beautiful.” You can, however, look upon us and know true terror. The Halversons know. All of our friends and admirers know.

  Who are we? We are Ronnie and someone standing behind her, with hands on her shoulders, a voice in her ear, and sometimes we are someone standing inside her, with feet in her shoes, moving her around. We are Ronnie and we are her mom and we are every magazine clipping on how to charm and beautify, the tickle of a mascara wand on a tear duct, the burn of a waxed armpit.

  We watched Mini and Caroline, observed how shocked they were. Afraid, too. Ronnie could tell that they would not come up to her first. No? she said to her mother. No, we said. For a moment Ronnie considered rebellion. She rejected the idea. Those girls were from the bad old days. Look at her now. She would never go back. Mom was pushing us away from them. She was telling Ronnie to let them go.

  Ronnie watched Mini and Caroline recede. The tables, the tables of food and the chairs on either side of them, rushed toward us as their two skinny figures pinned and blurred. We both felt a moment of regret. She once loved them too, you know. Then her mother turned our head and we walked away.

  Alice Sola Kim lives in New York. Her fiction has recently been published or is forthcoming in Tin House, Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales, McSweeney’s Literary Quarterly, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  Family comes before everything. Someone wrongs one of yours, you bring misery to whoever offended. That’s what your blood demands of you . . .

  Children of the Fang

  John Langan

  1. In the Basement (Now): Secret Doors and Mole-Men

  The smells of the basement: dust, mildew, and the faint, plastic stink of the synthetic rug Grandpa had spread down here two decades ago. The round, astringent odor of mothballs stuffed in the pockets of the clothes hung in the closet. A distant, damp earthiness, the soil on the other side of the cinderblock walls. The barest trace of cinnamon mixed with vanilla; underneath them, brine.

  The sounds of the basement: the furnace, first humming expectantly than switching on with a dull roar. The rug scraping under her sneakers. What Rachel insisted was the ring of water in the water tank, though her father swore there was no way she could be hearing that. The house above, its timbers creaking as the air in its rooms warmed.

  The feel of the basement: openness, as if the space that she knew was not as large as the house overhead was somehow bigger than it. When they were k
ids, Josh had convinced her that there were secret doors concealed in the walls, through which she might stumble while making her way along one of them. If she did, she would find herself in a huge, black, underground cavern full of mole-men. The prospect of utter darkness had not troubled her as much as her younger brother had intended, but the mole-men and the endless caves to which he promised they would drag her had more than made up for that. Even now, at what she liked to think of as a self-possessed twenty-five, the sensation of spaciousness raised the skin of her arms in gooseflesh.

  The look of the basement: the same dark blur that occulted all but the farthest edges of her visual field. Out of habit, she switched her cane from right hand to left and flipped the light switch at the bottom of the stairs. The resulting glow registered as only the slightest lightening in her vision. It didn’t matter: she hardly needed the cane to navigate the boxed toys and clothes stacked around the basement floor, to where Grandpa’s huge old freezer squatted in the corner opposite her. For what she had come to do, it was probably better that she couldn’t see.

  2. The Tape (1): Iram

  Around her and Josh, the attic, hushed as a church. Off to one side, their grandfather’s trunk, whose lack of a lock Josh, bold and nosy at sixteen as he’d ever been, had taken as an invitation to look inside it. Buried beneath old clothes, he’d found the tape recorder and cassettes. Rachel slid her index finger left over three worn, plastic buttons, pressed down on the fourth, and the tape recorder started talking. A snap and a clatter, a hiss like soda fizzing, and a voice, a man—a young man’s, someone in his teens, rendered tinny and high by time and the age of the cassette: “Okay,” he said, “you were saying, Dad?”

  Now a second speaker, Grandpa, the nasal complaint of the accent that had followed him north to New York state from Kentucky accentuated by the recording. “It was Jerry had found the map and figured it showed some place in the Quarter, but it was me worked out where, exactly, we needed to head.”

  “That’s Grandpa,” Josh said, “And . . . Dad?”

  “It isn’t Dad,” Rachel said.

  “Then who is it?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I think it might be Uncle Jim.”

  “Uncle Jim?”

  “James,” she said, “Dad’s younger brother.”

  “But he ran away.”

  “Obviously, this was made before,” she said, and shushed him.

  “—the company would have been happy to have the two of you just take off,” Uncle Jim was saying.

  “Well,” Grandpa was saying, “there was time between the end of work on one site and the beginning of work on the next. It’s true, though: we couldn’t wander off for a week. If we said there was a spot we wanted to investigate, the head man was willing to give us a day or two, but that was because he thought we meant something to do with oil.”

  “Not the Atlantis of the Sands,” Jim said.

  “Iram,” Grandpa said. “Iram of the Pillars, Iram dāt al-`imād.”

  “Right,” Jim said, “Iram. So I guess the sixty-four thousand dollar question is: did you find it?”

  Their grandfather did not answer.

  “Dad?” Jim said.

  “Oh, we found it, all right,” Grandpa said, his voice thick.

  3. The Freezer (1): Early Investigations

  Enamel-smooth, the surface of the freezer was no colder than anything else in the basement. Once he understood this, at the age of nine, Josh declared it evidence that the appliance was malfunctioning. Rachel corrected him. “If it was cold,” she said, “it would mean it wasn’t properly insulated.” She softened her tone. “I know it sounds weird, but it’s supposed to feel like this.” She had tested the freezer with her cane, drawing the tip along the side of it and knocking every six inches. “There’s something in it,” she announced. She set the cane on the floor and pressed her ear to the appliance. She could hear ice sighing and shifting. When the motor clicked to life and she placed her hands on the lid, the metal trembled under her fingertips.

  Six feet long by three high by three wide, the freezer served her and Josh as a prop when they were young, and a topic of conversation as they aged. She would lie, first on top of, then beside the metal box with one ear against it, trying to decipher the sounds within, while Josh ran his fingers along the rubber seam that marked the meeting of lid and container. Both of them studied the trio of padlocked latches that guaranteed Grandpa’s insistence that the freezer’s contents were off-limits. Josh inspected the bolts which fastened the locks to the freezer, the makes of the padlocks, their keyholes; she felt for gaps between the heads of bolts and the latches, between the latches and the freezer, tugged on the padlocks to test the strength of their hold. After speculating about diamonds, or some kind of rare artifact, or a meteor, she and Josh had decided the freezer most likely housed something connected to their grandfather’s old job. Grandpa had made his money helping to establish the oil fields in Saudi Arabia, in what was known as the Empty Quarter. As he never tired of reminding them, it was among the most inhospitable places on the planet. It was, however, a desert, whose daily temperature regularly crossed the three-digit mark. What he could have brought back from such a land that would require an industrial freezer remained a mystery.

  Interlude: Grandpa (1): The Hippie Wars

  The house in which Rachel and her brother were raised was among the largest in Wiltwyck. However, its second story belonged entirely to their grandfather. Within the house, it was accessed by a staircase which rose from the front hall to a door at which you were required to knock for entry; outside the house, a set of stairs that clung to the southern wall brought you to a small platform and another door on which you were obliged to rap your knuckles. There was no guarantee of entry at either door; even if she and Josh had heard Grandpa clomping across his floor in the heavy work-shoes he favored, he might and frequently did choose to ignore their request for admission.

  When he opened the door to them, they confronted a gallery of closed rooms against whose doors her cane knocked. Should either of them touch one of the cut-glass doorknobs, Grandpa’s “You let that alone,” was swift and sharp. To her, Josh complained that Grandpa’s part of the house smelled funny, a description with which Rachel did not disagree. It was the odor that weighted the air after their father performed his weekly scrub of the bathroom, the chlorine slap of bleach. Heaviest in the hallways, it was slightly better in the sitting room to which Grandpa led them. There, the couch on which she and Josh positioned themselves was saturated with a sweet scent spiced with traces of nutmeg, residue of the smoke that had spilled from the bowl of Grandpa’s pipe for who knew how long. Once he had settled himself opposite them, in a wooden chair whose sharp creaks seemed to give warning of its imminent collapse, he conducted what amounted to a brief interview with each of them. How was school? What had they learned today? What was one thing they’d learned this past week they could explain to him? In general, she and her brother were happy to submit to the process, because it ended with a reward of hard candy, usually lemon-drops that made her cheeks pucker, but sometimes cherry Life Savers or Atomic Fireballs.

  Once in a while, the questioning did not go as smoothly. As time passed, Rachel would understand that this was due to her grandfather’s moods—generally neutral if not pleasant—which could take sudden swings in a hostile, and nasty, direction. Should she and Josh find themselves in front of him during one of these shifts, the hard candies would be replaced by a lecture on how the two of them were squandering the opportunities they hadn’t deserved in the first place, and were going to end up as nothing but hippies. That last word, he charged with such venom that Rachel assumed it must be among the words she was not permitted to say. If Josh had done something particularly annoying, she might use it on him, and vice-versa. Long after her parents had clarified the term’s meaning, it retained something of the opprobrium with which Grandpa had infused it—so much so that, when Josh, aged twelve, answered the old man’s use of it b
y declaring that he didn’t get what the big deal about hippies was, Rachel flinched, as if her brother had shouted, “Motherfucker!” at him.

  Given Grandpa’s reaction, he might as well have. Already sour, his voice chilled. “Oh you don’t, do you?” he said.

  Josh maintained his position. “No,” he said. “I mean, they were kind of weird looking, I guess, but the hippies were into peace and love. Isn’t that what everyone’s always telling us is important, peace and love? So,” he concluded, a lawyer finishing his closing argument, “hippies don’t sound all that bad, to me.”

  “I see,” Grandpa said, his phrasing given a slight slur as he bit down on the stem of his pipe. “I take it you are an expert on the Hippie Wars.”

  The name was so ridiculous she almost burst out laughing. Josh managed to channel his amusement into a question. “The Hippie Wars?”

  “Didn’t think so,” Grandpa said. “Happened back in 1968. Damned country was tearing itself apart. Group of hippies decided to leave civilization behind and live off the land, return to the nation’s agrarian roots. Bunch of college drop-outs, from New Jersey, New York City. Place they selected for this enterprise was a stretch of back woods belonged to a man named Josiah Sparks. He and his family had shared a fence with our people for nigh on fifty years. Good man, who didn’t mind these strangers had settled themselves on his land without so much as a by-your-leave. ‘Soil’s poor,’ he said. ‘Snakes in the leaves, bear in the caves. If they can make a go of it, might be they can teach me something.’ All through the spring and summer after they arrived, he left them to their own devices. But once fall started to pave the way for winter, Josiah began to speak about his guests. ‘Kids’ll never make a winter out there,’ he said. Good, folks said, it’ll send them back where they came from. Josiah, though—it was as if he wanted them to succeed. Not what you would’ve expected from a marine who’d survived the Chosin Reservoir. One especially cold day, Josiah decided it was past time he went up and introduced himself to his tenants, found out what assistance he could offer them.