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

by Paula Guran

  The camera follows Clark Dunkin’s gaze to the tree. There is a figure standing in front of it, dressed in a soiled white shift and a black execution hood. The figure reaches two pale, thin hands to the edge of the hood as if to reveal its face. And then the camera enters a topspin, all dirt and branches and violet sky, as the cameraman begins to run. Rosslyn Taro is heard screaming. Someone—the cameraman, or possibly Clark Dunkin—is whimpering, as if from very far away, “Oh, shit, oh, shit.”

  And then the video abruptly cuts to black.

  They called themselves the LunaTicks. Like everything else, it was Bay’s idea: he named them after an old British secret society, supposedly “the smartest men in Birmingham.” There were ground rules not only for their operations, but for life as a whole: if one got caught, the rest would confess or expect to be ratted out; where one goes, the others must follow. Only unity saves the damned, Bay said.

  Roz’s father thought the boys were a terrible influence on her. These slouching undead fools had metastasized at his front door one day when Roz was in sixth grade, with their uncombed hair and unwashed skin and vulgar black T-shirts. He’d made the mistake of letting the vampires in. Under their watch, his daughter’s mood swings escalated from mild distemper to a full-blown madness. The charcoal rings around her eyes got deeper; her silver skull necklaces got bigger. She was vandalizing the elementary school; she was shoplifting lipstick. He’d tell her he was locking the doors at midnight and in the morning he would find her sleeping, nearly frozen, on the porch—or worse, he wouldn’t find her at all. So he excavated her room, vowing to take the Baileys and the Dunkins to court if he found a single pipe, a single syringe. He gave up when she failed to apply to community college. The screen door swung shut behind her and he thanked God that he also had a son.

  He was not alone. Bay’s parents hated Roz and Lark as well; their hatred of the two losers who hung like stones around Bay’s neck was the only thing the former Mr. and Mrs. Bailey still shared. They tried, separately, to introduce Bay to different crowds: the jocks, the computer geeks, the 4-H Club. Bay said he hated them all (too dumb too weird too Christian), but the truth was that they had all rejected him. Eventually Bay’s parents gave him an ultimatum: get rid of your friends, or we get rid of the car. So the responsibility of driving down bedraggled county roads—and all roads lead to Goose Lake, the old folks said—fell to Roz and Lark.

  Lark’s parents couldn’t have named Roz or Bay if they had tried. “There’s that raccoon girl,” they’d say, or “It’s that damn scarecrow boy again,” before drifting back into a dreamless sleep.

  None of the LunaTicks would have graduated high school without the other two.

  The Goose Lake video went viral, and life started to change just like Bay predicted. They sent the video from Bay’s phone to the local news and suddenly they weren’t the LunaTicks or the “dumb-ass emo kids” anymore—they were crisp and poignant, three local youths who had captured shocking footage of their hometown spook. People on the street gave them second looks of fear and fascination. A couple reporters came out from Lincoln and Omaha, though their arrogance forbade them from understanding what this video meant to Whippoorwill. They were interviewed on a paranormal radio show, Unheard Of, based in Minneapolis. For the first time in their lives, they came with the warning label they’d always wanted. “The footage that you are about to see,” dramatic pause, “may disturb you.”

  Bay had to keep from laughing whenever he watched the Goose Lake video, because of the absurdity of his perky little girlfriend pretending to be a dead witch—for Halloween last fall, Jessica had been a sexy strawberry. He was proud of her moxie, even though she’d whined afterwards that she smelled like a dead rat.

  “When we make the real movie, I want a better costume,” she said.

  “We ought to hire a real actress for the real movie, babe,” he replied.

  The movie was his big plan for getting out of Whippoorwill. It was all that time spent working at the theater, selling tickets to the “sheeple.” Said sheeple couldn’t get enough of those found-footage mockumentaries. But really, they had a lot of ways out of Whippoorwill. There was working on a Dream America cruise, or hitchhiking, or Greenpeace. There were communes and oil rigs. The LunaTicks would lie on the asphalt watching jets pass overhead and dream up these exit ramps out of car exhaust. I can’t wait to get out of here, they’d say, smiling wistfully—they’d been saying it for years.

  Lark couldn’t stop watching the Goose Lake video. He got the file on his own phone and then showed it off like a newborn baby to his retired neighbors, the gas station clerk, the town drunk who sat outside the grocery store with a whiskey bottle in a paper bag. Lark always asked what they saw, as if even he didn’t know the answer. No matter what they said, he’d shake his head and mutter, “That’s not it.” Bay said he was taking the method-acting thing too seriously.

  Roz couldn’t watch the video at all. This played well during interviews because she seemed traumatized, but after the microphones were off she was angry all the time. She wasn’t getting enough sleep, she said. The silver maple outside scratched at her window, as if asking to be let in.

  The town bent around them like a car wrapping around a tree during a tornado. Suddenly all these Raggedy Annies—Raggedy Annie in my yard, Raggedy Annie in my attic, Raggedy Annie in the hospital when my husband passed away—came crawling out into the sunlight. The entire town had grown up with the same story about a witch who aborted babies back when the town was still being sculpted raw out of the rolling prairie, and they all knew the matching nursery rhyme as sure as they knew “Happy Birthday”—we hung her over water, from the mighty oak tree/we hung her looking over at the cemetery.

  A girl from high school, an ex-cheerleader, chatted Lark up in the express lane at the grocery store where he worked. She was buying diapers, but she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. “Aren’t you freaked out? God, I think I might have died if I had seen her.” Lark said that wasn’t part of the story. Raggedy Annie didn’t kill on sight. The ex-cheerleader made a mock screaming sound and hissed, “Don’t say her name!” She also said to meet her at The Pale Horse on Friday night, but she didn’t show.

  So Lark sat at the bar with Bay and Roz. The bartender said he’d always known that bitch Raggedy Annie was real. “Shit, man, every time I drive by Goose Lake, I get this weird feeling. I thought it was a magnetic field or something, like Mystery Quadrant up in South Dakota. But nah, man. Our fucking parents were right! She’s our demon. She’s our cross to bear, if you don’t mind me saying. And the bitch can’t let go of a grudge. There’s just this one thing I don’t get though . . . but why did she show herself to you? Of all the people who’ve been boating and camping out at Goose Lake, why you guys?”

  What they knew he meant was why, out of all the great little people in this great little town, would Raggedy Annie choose these losers? Or was it like attracts like: yesterday’s demon for today’s devils?

  On Monday Lark showed the video to a pack of shabby children in the candy aisle. Tears were shed; one kid pissed himself. As a furious mother hoisted her away, one girl pointed at Lark and shrieked, “Mommy, the tree!” Lark’s coworkers would later say that they had never seen him look so freaked out, so cracked up. He started shouting—in desperation, everyone told the manager, not anger—“I know, it’s the Witching Tree!”

  The day after, Lark neither showed up for work nor answered his phone. He probably would have been fired anyway, given the children-in-the-candy-aisle incident, but Roz and Bay had to make certain he hadn’t somehow died—a freak electrocution, carbon monoxide, anything seemed possible if Lark wasn’t answering his phone—because where one goes, the others must follow. So Roz drove them to the Dunkins’ house on the scraggly edge of town. No luck, no Lark. “I have no idea where he is,” said Mrs. Dunkin, from the couch. It smelled more foul than usual. “But he isn’t here, raccoon girl.”

  His parents had really let the yard go—the branch
es of a grotesque hackberry tree were grasping the roof of the little tin house, like the tentacles of a mummified octopus. They always kept the shades drawn, so maybe they hadn’t noticed it. “Nice tree, Mrs. Dunkin,” Bay said as they left, but she didn’t respond.

  Bay had the big ideas, but Lark was the smartest LunaTick. He slouched in the back of classrooms, mumbling answers only when forced. Most of his teachers dismissed his potential—as the twig’s bent, so the tree inclines, they said. But there was no arguing with test scores. When the time came to shuffle the seventeen-year-olds out of gymnasiums and into the real world, Lark got the Four-Year-Colleges handout instead of Two-Year-Colleges or The-US-Armed-Forces. He stared at it for a week before quietly applying to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. If he stayed he knew he would end up like Roger Malkin. Bay would eventually get a job at the Toyota dealership, and Roz would marry some tool with bad hair, but he’d take up the mantle of town drunk. He had the genes for it. Roger would slur, “You’s a good kid,” and that meant they understood each other, damn it.

  He told the other LunaTicks that he’d gotten into UNL while Bay was driving them to Dairy Queen. Bay was so upset that he nearly drove the car off Dead Man’s Bridge, and that moment of gut-flattening fear was the most alive any of them had felt in months. “Come with me,” Lark begged, but Roz just chewed her hair while Bay ground his teeth. They looked like scared rats, backing into their holes.

  After the university paperwork started coming in—Get Involved! See What’s New!—Lark realized that his life in Whippoorwill was a mere shadow of real human experience. He saw himself in an inspirational poster: teetering alone on a cliff, muslin wings outstretched, DARE TO DREAM emblazoned across the bottom. In what should have been his final summer in his hometown, Whippoorwill shrank and withered until just driving down Jefferson Street made him itchy, claustrophobic. He’d stand in the shower stall with the centipedes for hours, drowning out the coughs of his narcoleptic parents, willing the water to wash off his mildewed skin. All this is ending, he would think. All this is dead to me.

  When he loaded up his car in August, his parents pried themselves off the couch to see him off. “You won’t get far,” his mother whispered in his ear as she hugged him, bones digging into his back, and from the doorway his father said, “He’ll come crawling back. They always do.”

  And he was right. After Lark came home for winter break, he never made the drive back east. Classes were hard. Dorm rooms were small. People were brusque, shallow, vulgar. Everyone had more money than he did. The jocks who’d made high school miserable were now living in frat houses behind the quad. He hadn’t made any real friends—not friends like Roz and Bay, anyway. They were waiting for him at Dead Man’s Bridge after the big December snow, smiling with outstretched wool gloves. “We knew you couldn’t stay away,” Roz said. For a moment Lark considered grabbing both their hands and jumping into the river of ice below.

  Raggedy Annie stood at the end of the bed. It’s Jessica, Roz thought. Jessica broke into my room and she’s trying to scare me and she and Bay are going to laugh about this tomorrow. She tried to open her mouth and couldn’t. She tried to pry her jaw open with her hand and couldn’t lift her arm.

  The thing at the end of the bed—Jessica, Jessica, Jessica—stretched two bone-white arms to the black hood. Roz tried to close her eyes, but before she could, the hood was gone, and the face of the ghoul was revealed. She didn’t know what to expect, since Raggedy Annie never had a face in the story—but it was her mother. She was glowing blue-green, like fox fire in the woods, and if not for that glow, her face was so flat and her movements so jerky that she could have been an old film reel. Her mother—who should have been a mile away and six feet deep in First Plymouth—opened and closed her mouth as if trying to speak, though only a hoarse, coffin-cramped gasp escaped.

  Roz was a mess the next day. She forgot about makeup and coffee and straightening her hair. She forgot to call the landscaping company about getting the silver maple tree, the one that knocked on her window every night, under control. It was almost as tall as the chimney now; it was overwhelming the house. The one thing I tell you to do, as her father would later say. You’re just like your mother. Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, I guess. She also forgot about the performance review that would have determined whether she’d be made accessories sales supervisor at Clipmann’s, and ended up spending most of the review trying to save her job. “Are you on drugs?” her manager asked, disappointed. He’d made it clear how important it was for women to look put-together on the sales floor. “You look terrible.”

  Old Lady Marigold, who had nothing to do now that her husband was dead except rifle through clearance racks, found her listlessly hanging hats upon the hat tree. It looked like a headhunter’s tower. “You shouldn’t have messed with Raggedy Annie, Rosslyn Taro.”

  Roz squeezed the cloche in her hand and took a deep breath that was meant to be calming. “We didn’t do anything to her, we just . . . ” The calming breath hitched in her throat—memories of smearing the white shift in damp dirt, saying hell no she wouldn’t wear it, watching Jessica slip it on instead—“We were just hanging out at Goose Lake and happened to . . . ”

  “You must have done something!” Old Lady Marigold squinted as if to see through a curtain. “You must have been trying something, you must have invited . . . ”

  “You care so much about her now, but the town elders killed Raggedy Annie, didn’t they? Isn’t that the whole point of the stupid story? This town will literally kill you if you step out of line?”

  Old Lady Marigold pursed her wrinkled, wine-stained lips but held her tongue for fifteen seconds longer than normal, so Roz knew she was right. Not that anyone needed Raggedy Annie to teach them that lesson—just live in Whippoorwill long enough for the walls to build up, either behind or beyond you. “It is not a stupid story. Good Lord, what did your mother teach you?”

  She shoved the cloche into place. “My mother’s dead.”

  “And you don’t want to let her down, do you? Now Raggedy Annie was an evil woman, but her story is part of our story, Rosslyn Taro, and for that alone you ought to have some respect. You shouldn’t have showed that tape to anyone. You shouldn’t have paraded her around like a damn pageant queen.”

  Roz willed herself to say nothing. Bay had warned them about keeping quiet regarding Goose Lake, to make sure their stories matched. He was getting calls from famous television shows, Paranormal Detectives-type stuff. He kept saying this is it, but Roz couldn’t help thinking that more publicity—more pageantry—would only make the haunting worse. Bay wasn’t getting visits from anything pretending to be Raggedy Annie, so he probably didn’t care. She’d asked him how they would explain Lark’s absence, and he said, “Say he went insane, it’ll sound creepier.” She had never so much wanted to hit him.

  “That friend of yours has been hanging out in Roger Malkin’s trailer. What’s his name, Lark?” Before he gave up the ghost several weeks ago, Mr. Malkin used to sit outside the grocery store next to the mechanical horses, drinking whiskey from a paper bag. Lark would be sent to shoo him away, but never had the heart to do it. “My hairdresser lives out in Gaslight Village, and she says you gotta get him out of there. The debt collectors are coming to get the trailer any day now.”

  She called Bay on her lunch break, to tell him that Lark had not in fact run off to Mexico, and ask him if Jessica still had the costume—her tongue no longer wanted to voice the hallowed, damned name of Raggedy Annie. “Because I think we should burn it.”

  Bay was in an awful mood, supposedly due to a severe toothache. “Don’t flake out on me like Lark.”

  “I’m not flaking, I just think we fucked up! I think we shouldn’t have done this!” She pulled back her hair, sunk into herself, felt the rapid beating of her heart. She thought she saw Raggedy Annie—Mom?—at the other end of the parking lot, but then a car passed and it was just a stop sign. Talk about this, and she’d sound crazy. Forget
sounding crazy, she’d be crazy. Another loony. Just like Lark. She had to use language Bay understood. “We should get rid of the evidence before anybody ever finds it.”

  “Well, I have no idea where it is. I haven’t talked to Jessica since Tuesday. She’s being a bitch.”

  If Lark was here, he’d say no! all sarcastic and wry, and she’d let out her horselaugh, and Bay would get pissed because he was the only one allowed to diss Jessica, and she’d say, “What do you expect with some nineteen-year-old Hot Topic wannabe?”

  “She’s never got the time anymore. She’s always working on her damn terrariums.” She heard him scoff through the phone. “Here I thought she hated science.”

  The next day Roz called KLNW news and said she wanted to come clean about the Goose Lake video. “Our first mistake was making the film at all,” she said on the six o’clock news. “Our second mistake was showing it to other people. I just want to say to the entire community that I’m so sorry for lying, and I’m so sorry for any disrespect we may have caused.” To the nameless, unseen power behind the visitations, she added a silent prayer: Please forgive me. Please let me go.

  The Bailey family tree lived in Aunt Vivian’s upstairs closet. Once upon a time, when Bay was young and bored and his parents were having it out at home, Aunt Vivian had unrolled it and presented it to him on her kitchen table. It was his inheritance, she said. Just like his father’s Smith & Wesson and his mother’s bad teeth. Aunt Vivian’s lacquered fingernails ran from name to name, jumping back and forth in time. “That’s your great-great-grandpa Johnny, he enlisted after getting married and then went and died in the War,” she said. “And that’s Laura Jean, she’s your cousin twice removed. She wanted to be a movie star, but she only sang backup in commercials.”