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

by Paula Guran

  “I know they came in here,” Bantle said. “There’s Chink whore blood all over your hands and the floor here.”

  Oh, I knew the answer to that one. I’d heard Madam Damnable say it often enough. “It’s not the house’s policy to discuss anyone who we may or may not be entertaining.”

  Then the thing happened that I ain’t been able to make head nor tail of. My head went all sort of sticky fuzzy, like your mouth when you wake up, and I started feeling like maybe Bantle had a point. That was one of his girls upstairs, and Merry Lee had brought her here—or vice versa maybe—without asking. And didn’t she owe him, that girl, for paying to have her brought over from India? And there was Effie pointing a gun at him.

  Bantle was pointing that glove at me, finger and thumb cocked like he was making a “gun.” I had another skin-flinch, this time as I wondered if Bantle could shoot electricity out of that thing. His eyes sort of . . . glittered, with the reflections moving across them. It was like what they say Mesmeric—I think Mr. Mesmer was the fellow’s name?

  “Do it,” Bantle said, and God help me didn’t I think it seemed like a good idea.

  I was just about reaching over to grab the barrel of Effie’s shotgun when the library door eased open off to my left. Through the crack I could see Beatrice’s bright eyes peeping. Bantle saw her too, because he snarled, “Get that Negra whore out here,” and one of his standover men started toward her.

  I had just enough warning to snatch back my reaching hand and slap my palms over my ears before Effie jerked the gun up and sent a load of buckshot through the stained glass over the door panels that didn’t never get no sun no more anyhow. The window burst out like a spray of glory and Bantle and his men all ducked and cringed like quirted hounds.

  I just stood there, dumbfounded, useless, as full of shame for what I’d been thinking about doing to Effie and Madam Damnable as some folks think I ought to be for whoring.

  “I got four more shells,” Effie said. “Go on. Go and get her.”

  The bully who’d started moving couldn’t seem to make his feet work all of a sudden, like the floor’d got as sticky as my head had been. Without looking over at Beatrice, I said, “Bea sweetie, you take Pollywog and go run get the constable. It seems these gentlemen have lost their way and need directions.”

  When it was coming out of my mouth, I couldn’t believe it. The words sounded calm and smooth, the opposite of the sticky fuzz I’d been feeling a moment before. I even saw one of the bully boys take a half-step back. It didn’t impress Peter Bantle, though, because while the library door was closing across Beatrice’s face he started forward. Effie worked the pump on the shotgun, but he looked right at her and sneered, “You don’t have the balls,” and then he was reaching for me with that awful glove and I didn’t know yet if I was going to scream or run or try to hit him, or if Effie was really going to have to learn to shoot him.

  But a big voice arrested him before I had to decide.

  “Peter Bantle, just what the hell do you think you’re doing in my house?”

  Peter Bantle didn’t have the sense to turn around and run when he heard the ferrule of Madam Damnable’s cane clicking on the marble tile at the top of the stair. He did let his hand fall, though, and stepped back smartly. I heard Effie let her breath go. I looked over at her pale, sweaty face and saw her move her finger off the trigger.

  She really had been gonna shoot him.

  I stepped back and half-turned so I could watch Madam Damnable coming down the stairs, her cane in one hand, the other clenching on the banister with each step.

  She was a great battleship of a woman, her black hair gone all steel-color at the temples. Her eyes hadn’t had to go steel-color; they started off that way. Miss Francina was behind her on the one side and Miss Bethel on the other, and they didn’t look like they was in any hurry nor in any mood for conversation.

  “You got one of my girls in here, Alice,” Peter Bantle said.

  She reached the bottom of the stairs and Miss Bethel fanned off left to come take the shotgun from Effie.

  “You speak with respect to Madam Damnable,” Miss Francina said.

  Bantle turned his head and spat on the fireplace rug. “I’ll give a tart what respect she deserves. Now are you going to give me my whore back or not?”

  Madam Damnable kept coming, slow and inexorable, like a steam locomotive rolling through the yard. She was in her robe and slippers, like the rest of us, and it didn’t one wit make her less scary. “I’ll give you your head back if you don’t step outside my parlor. You may think you can own folks, Peter Bantle, but this here Seattle is a free city, and no letter of indenture signed overseas is going to hold water. The constable’s on his way, and if you’re not gone when he gets here I’m going to have him arrest you and your boys for trespass, breaking and entering, and malicious mischief. I pay more in taxes than you do, so you know how that’s going to end.” She gestured to the broken door and the busted-out window. “The evidence is right there.”

  “Your own girl shot out that window!” Outrage made his voice squeak.

  I had to hide my laugh behind my hand. Effie squeezed the other one. She was shaking, but it was okay. Madam Damnable was here now and she was going to take care of everything.

  Peter Bantle knew it, too. He had already taken a step back, and when you were faced with Madam Damnable, there was no coming back from that. He drew himself up in the doorway as his bully boys collapsed around him. Madam Damnable kept walking forward, and all four of them slid out the door like water running out a drain.

  Their boots crunched in the glass outside. He couldn’t resist a parting shot, but he called it over his shoulder, and it didn’t so much as shift Madam Damnable’s nighttime braid against her shoulders. “You ain’t heard the last of this, Alice.”

  “For tonight, I think I have.”

  He took two more steps away. “And it’s Hôtel Ma Cherie, you stupid slag!”

  We heard the boots on the broken ladder before Madam Damnable breathed out, and let herself look around at us. “Well,” she said cheerfully, “what a mess. Effie, fetch a bucket. Miss Bethel, put that gun away and find the broom, honey. Karen, you go tell Crispin when they’re done with the Chinese girl he’s to come down here and board up this window and sweep the glass up. He’ll just have to sit by the door until we can get in a locksmith. Miss Francina, you go after Beatrice and Pollywog and tell them we won’t need the constable.”

  Miss Francina bit her lip. “Are you sure, ma’am?”

  Madam Damnable’s hand glittered with diamonds and rubies when she flipped it. “I’m sure. Go on, sweeties, scoot.” She paused. “Oh, and ladies? That was quick thinking. Well done.”

  When I came back up the grand stair with coffee in the china service, the sickroom door was still closed, but I didn’t hear any screaming or any steam engine chugging through it which could only be a good sign. If Merry Lee was still under the knife, she would have been screaming and the machine would have been whining and wheezing away, and if she had died of it, I thought the girl would be screaming instead. So I rapped kind of light on the frame, on account of if Crispin or Miss Lizzie was busy in there I didn’t want to startle them. It took me two tries to make my hand move, I was still that ashamed of myself from downstairs.

  His voice floated back. “It’s safe to come through.” So I set the tray on my hip and turned the knob left-handed, slow in case there was somebody behind the door. The sickroom’s different from our other bedrooms. There’s no wallpaper and the sheets aren’t fancy, and the bedstead and floor and all is just painted white. It makes it easy to just bleach or paint over again if there’s a bad mess, and you’d rather paint stained wood than rip up carpet with puke or pus or crusted blood in it any day. The knife machine kind of hangs in one corner on a frame, like a shiny spider with all black rubber belts between the gears to make the limbs dance. It’s one of only three or four in the city, and it needs somebody skilled as Miss Lizzie to run it,
but it don’t hesitate—which when you’re cutting flesh, is a blessing—and it don’t balk at some operations like other doctors might. And you always know its tools is clean, because Crispin boils ’em after every use.

  When I stepped inside, that whole white room looked like it had been splashed about with red paint, and none too carefully. Crispin looked up from washing his hands in a pink-tinged basin with clotted blood floating like strings of tidepool slime around the edges. Merry Lee was laid sleeping or insensible in the bed on her side, clean sheets tucked around her waist and a man’s white button shirt on her backwards so you could get to the dressings on her back. There was a mask over her face, and Crispin’s other big enamel-knobbed brass machine that handles all those sickbed things that the steam-powered knife machine doesn’t was kind of wheezing and whirring around her, its clockworks all wound up fresh and humming. The bloody sheets were heaped up in the basket, and the Indian girl was perched on the chair by the head of the bed, holding Merry’s sallow hand clutched between her olive ones and rocking back and forth just a tiny bit, like she was trying with all her might to hold herself still.

  I picked my way between smears of blood. Crispin looked up, grinning instead of grim, so I knew Merry Lee was going to be just fine unless the blood poisoning got her.

  “Karen honey, you are a delivering angel.” He nodded to the tray. “This here is Priya. She helped me change the sheets.”

  I got a good look at her and Merry Lee while I set the coffee on the cleanest bureau. Merry was a lot younger than I would have expected from the stories, fresh-faced and sweet as a babe in her sleep and maybe seventeen, eighteen—not more than a year or two older than me.

  Given she’s been a thorn in the side of Peter Bantle and Amrutar—who’s like Bantle’s older, meaner, richer, Indian twin—and the rest of those cribhouse pimps for longer than I’ve been working, she must have started pretty young. Which ain’t no surprise, given some of Peter Bantle’s girls—and boys too—ain’t no older than your sister, and before she got away from Amrutar, Merry Lee is supposed to have been one of them.

  The Indian girl had taken off that coat and Crispin or somebody must have given her a clean shift. Now I could see her arms and legs and neck, she was skinnier than anybody ought to be who wasn’t starving to death. I sat there watching the knobs of her wrists and elbows stick out and the tendon strings move in the backs of her hands. I guess sailors and merchantmen don’t care so much if the slatterns they visit are pretty so long as they’re cheap, and it’s dark in a whore’s crib anyway; plus, I guess if Peter Bantle underfeeds his girls they’re cheap keepers.

  Still, as I sat there looking at her, her bloody tangled hair and her cheekbones all sharp under skin the color of an old, old brass statue’s, it more and more griped me thinking on it. And it more and more griped me that I’d been going to let Bantle have her.

  And what the hell had I been thinking? That wasn’t like me at all.

  There was plenty coffee in the pot, cream and sugar too, and I’d brought up cups for everybody. But it didn’t look like the Indian girl—Priya—was going to let go of Merry Lee’s hand and pour herself a cup.

  So I did it for her, loaded it up with cream and sugar, and balanced all but one of the biscuits I’d brought along on the saucer when I carried it to her.

  She looked up surprised when I touched her hand to put the saucer in it, like she might have pulled away. She wasn’t any older than me either, and this close I could see all the bruises on her under the brown of her skin—layers of them. There was red fresh scrapes that would blossom into something spectacular, that might have been from dragging Merry Lee bleeding across half of Seattle. There was black-purple ones with red mottles like pansy blossoms. And there was every shade of green and yellow, and you could pick out the hand and fingerprints among ’em. And the red skinned-off slick-looking burns from Peter Bantle’s electric glove, too, which made me angry and sick in all sorts of ways I couldn’t even find half the words to tell you.

  She was a fighter, and it had cost her. My daddy was a horse-tamer, and he taught me. Some men don’t know how to manage a woman or a horse or a dog. Where a good master earns trust and makes a partner of a smart wife or beast—acts the protector and gets all the benefit of those brains and that spirit—all the bad ones know is how to crush it out and make them cringing meek. There’s a reason they call it “breaking.”

  The more spirit, the longer it takes to break them. And the strongest ones you can’t break at all. They die on it, and my daddy used to say it was a damned tragic bloody loss.

  He probably wouldn’t think much of me working on my back, but what he taught me kept me safe anyway, and it wasn’t like either of us asked him to go dying.

  Priya looked up at me through all those bruises, and I could see in her eyes what I saw in some of my daddy’s Spanish mustang ponies. You’d never break this one. You’d never even bend her. She’d die like Joan of Arc first, and spit blood on you through a smile.

  My hand shook when I pushed the coffee at her.

  “I can’t take that,” she said, and that was my second surprise. Her English wasn’t no worse than mine, and maybe a little better. “You can’t wait on me. You’re a white lady.”

  “I’m a white tart,” I said, and let her see me grin. “And you need it if you’re going to sit up with Miss Lee here. You’re skin over bones, and how far did you carry her tonight?”

  I thought she’d look down, but she didn’t. Her eyes—you’d call ’em black, but that was only if you didn’t look too closely. Like people call coffee black. And her hair was the same; it wasn’t not-black, if you take my meaning, but the highlights in it were chestnut-red. I knew I wasn’t supposed to think so, but she was beautiful.

  “She got shot coming out from under the pier,” she said. “She told me where to run to.”

  Which was a half-mile off, and uphill the whole way. I poked the coffee at her again, and this time she let go of Merry Lee’s hand with one of hers and lifted the cup off the saucer, which seemed like meeting me halfway. I leaned around her to put the saucer and the biscuits on the bedside stand. I could still hear Crispin moving around behind me and I was sure he was listening, but that was fine. I’d trust Crispin to birth my babies.

  She swallowed. “I heard Mister Bantle shouting downstairs.”

  There was more she meant to say, but it wouldn’t come out. Like it won’t sometimes. I knew what she wanted to ask anyway, because it was the same I would have wanted if I was her. “Priya—did I say that right?”

  She sipped the coffee and then looked at it funny, like she’d never tasted such a thing. “Priyadarshini,” she said. “Priya is fine. This is sweet.”

  “I put sugar in it,” I said. “You need it. In a minute here I’m going to head down to the kitchen and see if Miss Bethel can rustle up a plate of supper for you. But what I’m trying to say is Madam Damnable—this is Madam Damnable’s house Merry Lee brought you to—she’s not going to give you back to Bantle for him to beat on no more.”

  I’m not sure she believed me. But she looked down at her coffee and she nodded. I patted her shoulder where the shift covered it. “You eat your biscuits. I’ll be back up with some food.”

  “And a bucket,” Crispin said. When I turned, he was waving around at all that blood on rags and his forceps and on the floor.

  “And a bucket,” I agreed. I took one look back at Priya before I went, cup up over her face hiding her frown, eyes back on Merry.

  And then and there I swore an oath that Peter Bantle was damned sure going to know what hit him.

  On récolte ce que l’on sème. That’s French. It means, “What goes around comes around.” So Beatrice tells me.

  Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, L
ocus, and Campbell Award winning author of twenty-seven novels (The most recent is Karen Memory, from Tor) and over a hundred short stories. Her dog lives in Massachusetts; her partner, writer Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. She spends a lot of time on planes.

  All roads led to Goose Lake, and all of Goose Lake’s dirt paths led to the Witching Tree, the oak to seed and end the world . . .

  Only Unity Saves the Damned

  Nadia Bulkin

  “Dude, are you getting this?”

  Rosslyn Taro, twenty-five, and Clark Dunkin, twenty-five, are standing in the woods. It’s evening—the bald cypresses behind them are shadowed, and the light between the needles is the somber blue that follows sunsets—and they are wearing sweatshirts and holding stones.

  “It’s on,” says the voice behind the camera. “To the winner go the spoils!”

  They whip their arms back and start throwing stones. The camera pans to the right as the stones skip into the heart of Goose Lake. After a dozen rounds, the camera pans back to Rosslyn Taro and Clark Dunkin arguing over whose stone made the most skips, and then slowly returns to the right. Its focus settles on a large bur oak looming around the bend of the lake, forty yards away.

  “Hey, isn’t that the Witching Tree?”

  Off camera, Clark Dunkin says, “What?” and Rosslyn Taro says, “Come on, seriously?”

  “You know, Raggedy Annie’s Witching Tree.”

  The girl sounds too shaky to be truly skeptical. “How do you know?”

  “Remember the song? ‘We hung her over water, from the mighty oak tree.’ Well, there aren’t any other lakes around here. And First Plymouth is on the other side of the lake.” The camera zooms, searches for a white steeple across the still water, but the light is bad. “ ‘We hung her looking over at the cemetery.’ ”

  The camera swings to Rosslyn Taro, because she is suddenly upset. She is walking to the camera, and, when she reaches it, shoves the cameraman. “Bay, shut up! I hate that stupid song. Let’s just go, I’m getting cold. Come on, please.” But Clark Dunkin is still staring at the tree. His hands are shaking. Rosslyn Taro calls his name: “Lark!”