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

by Paula Guran

  “You always did like dive bars,” I say, trying to shut him up.

  His fingers corkscrew awkwardly into mine. I can feel the clammy creeping from me to him and from him back to me.

  “I bend over, and she’s under the bar, crouched down. Oona. Not Oona now. Oona then. She looks up at me, and she makes this face, this so-Oona face. And I’m freaking out, and the bartender’s freaking out on me because he can’t see the bugs, and he can’t see her either. The last thing I see as he kicks me out into the street is Oona, her braids, the corner of her mouth, and then she turns her head and she’s gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  “Like she folded up.”

  “She didn’t fold up. Oona was still around. I got emails.”

  “Did you open them?”

  I shake my head.

  “They weren’t from Oona. They’d be spam, win a vacation to somewhere, free car, lend money to the lost. Jumbles of numbers, lists of lines from things.”

  “But she was around,” I insist. “Her mom talked to my mom. She grew up. You know she did. Come on. We both slept with Oona.”

  “She was like an animal,” Trevor says. I wonder how much he’s been drinking. “An animal that might bite your face off.”

  He fumbles in his jacket. “I brought something,” he says. “I know you don’t want to see it.”

  We used to be special. Now we’re grown-ups, and this is what you learn. Special children turn into fucked up adults. You can’t even use the word magic now. Back then, we said it all the time, like we’d fallen into something amazing, like what had happened when we were seven could only be a good thing.

  “Something went wrong. I don’t know if it’s ever going to be right.”

  He brings a snapshot out of his pocket. Faded, from the 80s. I don’t have to look. The three of us the day we met. Oona’s in the middle of the photo. She’d lost a front tooth. Yellow dress. I’m in a dirty T-shirt printed with a buffalo, and Trev’s shirtless. We’re on the steps of the trailer my mom lived in back then. It was the first day of summer, and we’d met at the swimming pool line, but they wouldn’t let Trevor in because he didn’t have a suit. Oona, who was already in her swimsuit, took it off and stood there naked. She said, “I don’t have a suit either.” It took about two seconds for us all to get kicked out, including me, because I’d seen Oona, and so I took my suit off too.

  In the picture, both Trevor and I are blurred. We were jumping.

  “Look at her, Zell,” Trevor says, and there’s something in his voice that makes me want to shut my eyes. “Look at the picture. Tell me I’m not crazy.”

  I look over Trevor’s shoulder instead, out the door of the bar, from the dark and into the cold, bright January street. I see a girl walking past. Pale yellow sundress. Long red hair. A hitch in her step that I know. Except that this girl isn’t thirty-seven. And as she passes, she presses her fingers to the glass and looks in at me.

  “Trev,” I say. “Trevor.”

  “This is the only one she was in, and now she’s gone,” Trevor says, shaking the photo at me. “So maybe she’s really dead.”

  The window explodes inward.

  Four

  “Kagome, Kagome?” Oona asks me and laughs. “All kid’s games started as adult games. That’s not more creepy than the normal ones.”

  “I think it’s creepy,” I say. “Who Is My Executioner isn’t an adult game. It’s not a fucking game at all. Why would you need to know who your executioner is? You need to know what your crime is. You need to know who accused you. The executioner isn’t the point.”

  “Maybe you want to know who’s capable of actually killing you,” Oona says, sitting twist-legged in front of me in a blue bustier and a pair of ridiculously short cut-offs. “Like, maybe they’re your lover, Zellie. Maybe you know their secrets.”

  We’re twenty-seven, and I’m sleeping with her for another round of probable heartbreak. She’s midway through a dissertation on children’s games, and everything about it makes me miserable. Oona knows all my secrets. I don’t know hers. I only know she has them. She’s been mostly normal lately, mostly Oona, this gorgeous eccentric, charming enough to sideswipe the fact that she’s professionally a scholar of creepiness. This has always been true. She can do better than pass, most of the time. There’s a thin line between out of control and spectacular.

  I’m in love again, considering tattoos of Oona’s name because here she is, her hair in long copper braids, each one interspersed with black lilies she’s bought somewhere. She’s not goth. The flowers are alive. We’re in a coffee shop she likes, a place hung with bad art and someone in charge of the playlists who chooses Alan Lomax recordings of field songs. I hate it. Slave songs played over a backdrop of cappuccino steaming. Oona’s always been like this. It makes everyone else skeeved out.

  Oona collects horrible things. I regret ever introducing her to the pictures of the dead, but that ship’s sailed. Her walls are covered in them now, all beautifully framed. It’s only when you look closely that you wish you hadn’t. There’s one she’s had blown up. Black beetle on a little blond girl’s face, right at the corner of her open eye, like a tear.

  “It’s about a beheading, maybe, or about a woman in a cage. Anyway, it’s Japanese,” Oona says. “And it might not be creepy. It might just be sweet. Translators disagree and so does everyone else.”

  She shows me the game, even though I should know better than to play with Oona. She doesn’t play fair. “You’re the oni,” she says. “The demon who gets killed.”

  She blindfolds me in the park with a long red scarf she’s uncoiled from around her neck. She recruits a bunch of kids, and the group runs around me, Oona singing in Japanese:

  “Kagome, kagome

  Kago no naka no tori wa

  Itsu itsu deyaru

  Yoake no ban ni

  Tsuru to kame ga subetta.

  Ushiro no shoumen daare.”

  I don’t know the words to the song and can’t see the kids. I don’t want to do any of this. Old history. Bad history. The kids don’t mind. It’s blind man’s bluff combined with ring around the rosy, except no one falls down. When—through some silent signal—Oona ceases the ring running around me, I’m supposed to stand up. After that, she hasn’t given any instruction.

  “I’m standing up now,” I say, but I don’t hear anything. Not even laughing. It’s daylight, and we’re in public, this day in July, but I feel like I’m lying face down on cold ceramic tile. “I’m standing up.”

  “Who’s behind you?” I hear Oona ask. I can’t tell where her voice is coming from. “Who’s your executioner?”

  I feel breath on my neck, and I feel something else, something I’ve never been able to describe, other than that there’s a sudden weight in my hands and a lightness in my skull. A spinning feeling. I see, for a second, myself as a tiny child, and then my same self, ancient. I see my head falling from my shoulders and into a basket.

  I’m gagging, choking, and I tear off the blindfold only to find all the children gone. Oona’s always had a way with kids. I spin around. No one’s there. The park’s empty.

  Oona’s always insisted she doesn’t remember what happened when we were little.

  “It was just a normal day,” Oona always says, her eyes flashing gold. “Whatever you think happened, it didn’t. I don’t know why you always bring it up.”

  Now Oona laughs from above me. High in a tree, she sits on a branch, her bare feet dangling down.

  “Kagome, kagome,” she sings.

  “The bird in the basket-cage.

  When, oh when will it come out, in the night of dawn,

  The crane and turtle slipped,

  Who is it in front of behind?”

  I look up at her. I’m sweating, like I’ve played another childhood game, a dizzying prelude to a blinded hunt. Her boyish body, her long white throat, her thighs in her cut-offs. Oona’s head is blazed out by the sun behind her, and for a moment it’s like
it’s gone. The way I’m seeing her is not the angle I should be seeing her from. I feel like I’m looking up from too low, and from behind myself. I feel like I’m on the ground, and I start to turn to see what’s there.

  The next moment, I’m down on my hands and knees, puking in the grass.

  “You’re so sensitive,” Oona says, holding back my hair, her fingers on the back of my neck, and I shiver. She got down from that tree faster than she should have. I didn’t hear her land.

  There’s something boiling inside her, a kettle left on the fire. I raise my head to look at Oona, and what I see is not Oona but something else.

  “Who’s your executioner?” Oona says. “Come on. It’s just a game.” She runs her fingers along my thigh, and it’s like I’m being flayed. The air is full of black dots, a swarm of beetles, then gone.

  I take off running out of the park, my feet bleeding, and I don’t stop running ‘til I get to my mom’s extra bedroom, where I stay for the next three weeks, losing my job, falling apart, dropping out of the grad school I sold my soul to get into.

  That’s the last time I see Oona.

  Three

  We’re seventeen. We’re at the prom. I don’t do prom. I’m wearing fishnets that I ripped with safety scissors and then sealed with nail polish. I didn’t want them to disintegrate. They’re my only pair. Otherwise I’m inappropriately dressed. I should have tried to look pretty. I already don’t belong here. Me and Trevor are the only people of any color at this school, unless you count white as a color. My family came from Veracruz. His came from China. His people believe in ghosts and so do mine, and every time Oona comes around, my mom is like: Out. But that’s partially because Oona’s a high-end drug dealer’s daughter with a fancy house and all the cars anyone could want. My mom thinks they look like a funeral procession.

  Oona’s in magenta, and it doesn’t suit her. Her red hair clashes, and she looks strangely old. Her mother took her to a salon and got her hair done into a high topknot full of bobby pins and hairspray and fluffy silk flowers. Her neck is like a too-thin stalk for a peony, and her head keeps sagging. She’s got vodka in her water bottle. Periodically she looks at me and grins, her eyes lined in silver. She’s been not okay lately.

  “She’s gonna puke,” says Trev.

  “No, she’s not,” I say. Oona is known for her iron tolerance.

  Trev and I are the least of her interests tonight. We’re watching from the edge of the dance floor as Oona leads the dance. She’s the prom queen, of course. Oona is everything at once, and the daily Oona is nearly perfect. It’s only that sometimes things slip. People have short memories. Oona is mostly sweet. Mostly charming. Mostly beautiful. When she’s not, people think it’s them who’ve gone nuts, not her.

  She neglected to bring a date, and so she’s supposed to get a king out of the crowd. Somehow no one got elected. I don’t get it. Neither does Trev, though I look at him, and he looks at me and shrugs, and I think I might know something about where the ballots went. Every boy in the room is circling her.

  “Walk around me ’til I choose one of you,” she tells them. “I guess we need a king if we’re doing this stupid thing.”

  Oona’s kneeling. She puts her head in her hands and sings.

  “Poor Jenny is a-weeping,

  A-weeping, a-weeping,

  Poor Jenny is a-weeping

  On a bright summer’s day.”

  I don’t even know where she learned that, but this is classic choose-a-husband stuff, so I hate it. I’d rather do something involving jump rope. At least that would mean the husband needed a skill. She’s shut the DJ up, and we have no Nirvana, no “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Just Oona.

  She does the next verse herself, standing up and looking down at the place she was. Boys shuffle nervously in their stupid-looking tuxedoes. I have a wrist corsage provided by Trevor. It’s made of weeds. He has a matching one. We both hate ourselves.

  “Why are you weeping,

  Weeping, weeping,

  Why are you weeping,

  On a bright summer’s day?”

  She kneels down again and puts her head in her hands. Her hair’s stiff, a crest of red bone standing up from the back of her neck. I hate her. I don’t.

  “Come on,” says the DJ. “What kind of prom plays fucking madrigals?” He makes a nervous attempt at something else, but the something else is Alanis Morrisette, and so it gets shouted down.

  “I’m weeping for a loved one,

  A loved one, a loved one,

  I’m weeping for a loved one,

  On a bright summer’s day.”

  “Shut up, Oona,” Trev says mournfully as Oona starts spinning, her eyes shut, her topknot swaying like she’s going to break her own head off.

  “Stand up and choose your loved one,

  Your loved one, your loved one,

  Stand up and choose your loved one,

  On a bright summer’s day.”

  I see something moving out of the corner of my eye near the doorway of the gymnasium, near the photo backdrops. We got our picture Polaroided there earlier, me and Trev and Oona, looking all wrong together, a trio of suspicious class hierarchy, the popular girl being nice to the weirdos, the weirdos embracing the popular girl, and even as we got shot, I knew it was a trick. Oona was the weirdo, not us. Trevor and I were tag-a-longs, as always.

  “That’s strange,” said that photographer, squinting at Oona, who smiled at her.

  “What’s strange?”

  “The pretty one,” said the photographer. “You’re not showing up very well.”

  “Am I not?” said Oona as though this wasn’t something she knew already.

  “Maybe it’s the glitter,” said the photographer, looking bewildered. “We’ll do the real one. That’s twenty bucks for the wallet prints.”

  The wallet prints won’t turn out.

  Oona, her eyes shut, reaches out her hands and grabs a kid named Steven. He’s tall and gawky, taller even than Oona is.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “I guess you’re the king,” she says.

  “I can’t believe you picked me.”

  “It wasn’t me,” she says. “I was spinning. The spinning picked you. That’s how the game works. It’s like spin the bottle, but I’m the bottle.”

  “Are we going to kiss, then?” asks Steven and manages a grin. He’s out of his league beyond belief.

  Oona takes a paper crown from one of her attendants, and puts it on his head. He looks knighted. He stands taller. The foil shines, and it’s horrible for a second. I see Trevor cringe too. Blade, I’m thinking, but then it’s just a crown made of craft paper and staples.

  Oona takes a step back from Steven and looks at him quizzically for a moment.

  “Pretty,” she says and then takes his hands in hers and dances as she sings.

  “Shake hands before you leave ’er,

  You leave ’er, you leave ’er,

  Shake hands before you leave ’er,

  On a bright summer’s day.”

  She lets go of Steven’s hands, and I feel Trevor flinch. Something’s moving over by the photo backdrop. Something small and fast, a flash of yellow, long red braids. Holding hands with someone else, this person tall and slender, same hair, but this hair caught up in white-streaked snarls. The somethings are spinning, running, flying around the edge of the room.

  I look back in time to see Oona kiss Steven very properly, very gently, on the mouth, and him, dazzled, kiss her back.

  “Oh no,” says Steven. He lifts his hand to his mouth. His eyes widen.

  Steven starts coughing, and Oona leans toward him. He doubles over. A crowd around him. He coughs harder. People are closing in on him now, worried, patting him on the back, and he begins to choke something up. People start screaming and backing away, a chorus of Oh my gods and swearing, the music the DJ’s put on ringing over the whole thing, a crazy chorus of beat and bass as Steven falls to his knees.

  “Somebody call an a
mbulance!” someone yells.

  Steven’s coughing up black beetles, a torrent of them, all wings and legs. Thousands of them, legs tearing and twitching at each other, chitinous crunches underfoot as people freak out and climb onto the chairs, run from the room in their high heels.

  Oona’s right beside him, but Steven’s not looking at her. They’re swarming out of his nose and mouth. Oona’s scared. She looks around frantically, and as she does, we all see it, Steven stops breathing.

  Nobody’s breathing. The people left in the room are all just frozen, staring, me and Trev included.

  “Help!” Oona yells, but no one moves.

  He falls forward, and the crown tilts off his head and crumples on the ground.

  At the corner of my vision, I see the redheaded girl and the white-haired woman shift back into the bouncing gleam coming off the disco ball, and all the beetles are gone with them, the floor covered in black confetti.

  Someone laughs nervously, and Steven stands up looking stunned, and Oona’s there beside him, her spine straight, herself again.

  “King and Queen,” she says, and maybe only Trev and I can hear her voice wobbling. “There you have it, ladies and gentlemen.”

  “Are you okay?” I ask her, even though she looks like she is. She looks fine.

  “Nothing happened,” she says.

  I watch a beetle crawl from the inside of her fist, very slowly, up her arm and into her dress. She reapplies her lipgloss. Her hands shake.

  On the photo wall as we leave the prom, there’s a fully developed Polaroid of me and of Trev, with Oona between us looking like a smudge of light, and inside that the faintest outlines of a little girl looking straight at the camera, her eyes glowing.

  Trevor and I each take her hands and we go out to Trevor’s car, borrowed from his grandfather. We ignore the sweetish smoky smell. Oona’s fingers lace into ours.

  “What was that?” I ask her.

  “That was nothing,” she says. Her eyes reflect headlights, and then she gets out of the car and takes off running down the highway, five miles from anywhere. We follow her. Her magenta dress, her corsage, her heels, one by one, her bra, her underwear, center of the road. She gets home. I call. Her mom answers. Oona’s sleeping.