The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (70 page)

The beautiful fireball of light above the swimmer gave her pause, a reminder of a different time, another way. The tears that had stung her in her back yard tried to burn her eyes blind, because she saw how it would happen, exactly like a dream: She would claw the boy’s belly open, and his scream would sound muffled and far away to her ears. Derek would come to investigate, to try to rescue him from what he would be sure was a gator, but she would overpower Derek next. Her new body would even if she could not.

As Abbie swam directly beneath the swimmer, bathed in the magical light fighting to shield him, she tried to resist the overpowering scent of a meal and remember that he was a boy. Someone’s dear son. As Derek (was that the other one’s name?) had put it so memorably some time ago—perhaps while he was painting the porch, perhaps in one of her dreams—neither of them yet had been tested by life.

But it was summertime. In Graceville.

In the lake.

Ars Lacuna is a strange city. In this brief tale, we find the daily lives of its citizens revolve around paper, printing, binding, and books.

There’s also a market for parchment . . .

Walls of Paper, Soft as Skin
Adam Callaway

Tomai awoke to whispers. Hundreds of whispers. All whispering at once. A whirlwind of soft sound. Whispers in a dozen different languages. On a thousand subjects. Whispers of dark demands. Of heady passions. Of dread and hope. Whispers of anguish and of ecstasy. Whispers so inconsequential as to be forgotten the moment they were whispered. Tomai rolled over and went back to sleep.

He awoke to silence. Silence, and the sound of Ars Lacuna waking up. Autocarriages growled. Book vendors hawked hardcovers. The city was as it always was, and so was he.

Tomai sat on the edge of his bed. His apartment was small. Ten feet on a side. No windows. Layers of parchment enclosed the room. Walls yellowed and tearing. Ceiling shedding like a lizard. Floor worn through.

Opposite his bed was a door. Next to the door was a washbasin. Above the washbasin was a cracked mirror.

A photo hung from one corner. The photo held a girl. Skin the color of hazelnuts. Purple birthmark staining her left cheek. A circle of dark rouge. She was smiling. Tomai stared.

The sun moved, and he grunted. A tall pile of blank pages served as a bed stand. Tomai grabbed a cigarette from the bed stand. He put the paper roll in his mouth. He used his tongue to roll it around. Across his upper lip. From one side of his mouth to the other. Tomai would do this until the cigarette disintegrated. It was what he did every day.

He opened the door. A small pail of water sat in front of him. Small pails of water sat in front of every door. In every hallway. On every level. He grabbed the pail and washed himself in the basin. Spat out the bitter tobacco grit.

He only had one shirt. One pair of pants. No shoes. He brushed his hand along one wall. The parchment was soft with age. He closed the door, walked down the hall, down the stairs, and into the street.

Parchment Run was four blocks away. Nothing to see in between but beggars. Nothing to hear but rapids running. And logs thunking. And blades screeching.

The pole workers shared a common room, a tent, outside of the pulping section of the Run. Poles twenty feet long. Made of a variety of trees. They took up one wall. Misshaped boxes for valuables took up another. They were always empty.

Tomai walked in through a flap.

“Tomai. Did you hear, Tomai? An entire debarking team swam into the termite’s jaws. On purpose, Tomai!” Kork said pulling at Tomai’s frayed shirt. Kork stood waist high on his tiptoes.

“I can believe it,” Tomai said. He looked for a pine or birch pole.

“Really, Tomai? I can’t. Debarkers have sickle bone arms. They can swim better than any trout, Tomai! Who’d want to kill themselves with features like that, Tomai?” Kork made wild hand gestures.

“I can believe it.”

“Even if they decided, ‘Okay, let’s do this, girls,’ they could have come up with a better way. The autoblades would have made short work of them. The paper sizers down the way too. But being hacked up and digested by a bug the size of a city block though! Really, Tomai? Can you believe it, Tomai?”

Tomai spotted a curved pine pole under a stack of oak. He grabbed it.

“I can believe it.”

Kork squinted. “I’m not talking to you anymore today.”

Tomai dragged his pole through the inside flap. Into Parchment Run. Where the river exchanged a canopy of sky for corrugated tin. Dozens of pole workers were straightening sawn, debarked logs to enter the jaws of the bug. He took an open spot.

“I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it,” Kork muttered next to him. Kork’s pole was special. The only reserved pole. It was thin. Very thin.

Hours passed. Tomai didn’t miss a log. Kork didn’t miss a log. Kork didn’t miss a moment to speak. Tomai didn’t miss his mind.

Above the corrugated tin that enclosed the Run, the day fled. Darkness replaced the light that trickled through holes in the tin. Tomai hardly noticed. The lamps were working tonight.

A woman approached Tomai with a dozen loaves of stale brown bread. She stood between him and Kork, tearing the loaves into chunks and throwing them at the debarkers.

“Tonight,” she said. “Behind Xerro’s. Bring coin.”

The woman walked back the way she came. Further down the Run. Tomai sighed.

Hours passed. Tomai and Kork dragged their poles into the common room.

“Want to go get a drink? Bleeding Antons are only a brass a’piece tonight.”

“No.”

Kork left without another word. Tomai was thankful. He walked back into the Run.

Xerro’s was downriver. After the pulpers and shapers and cutters. Before the printers and binders and dealers. It sold stationary.

Tomai saw the woman from earlier. He knew this woman. She had helped him before. Every time, a different disguise. Always the same smell of resin.

Ms. Resin was dressed as a secretary. A Brothers Publishing House secretary. Floor-length gray skirt. White blouse. Auburn hair loose to the shoulder.

“Coin?” she asked, holding out her hand.

“Parchment?” he asked, holding out his hand.

They exchanged items. Tomai gave her two square copper pieces. A month’s wages for a pole worker. She gave him a dozen blank pages.

“I’m running out of people parchment. There needs to be a new plague. Don’t you miss the brittle pink skinflakes?” Resin disappeared through a tear in the Run’s tin.

It was dark. Staring down, Tomai couldn’t even make out his bare feet. He tucked the pages under his arm and left.

The way home was similar to the way there, but different. Two moonbeams instead of two sunbeams. A dead cat. Someone eating it.

He opened his door with a key he kept on twine around his neck, and bolted it once inside.

Tomai grabbed a candle and a metal pan from under his mattress. He placed one on the other. With the pages still under his arm, he sat down on the wooden floor, lit the candle, and set it in front of him.

The pages were blank, and they weren’t. Color gradients shifted across each page, from cream to tarnished gold. Small lines, like paper veins, crossed and re-crossed. A watermark stained the third page.

The watermark was a light purple. Shaped not entirely unlike a circle.

Tomai shook. “My girl,” he said. “My beautiful girl.”

An old woman and a junkie form an unusual alliance in order to do what needs to get done—including dealing with the spell of the Last Triangle

The Last Triangle
Jeffrey Ford

I was on the street with nowhere to go, broke, with a habit. It was around Halloween, cold as a motherfucker in Fishmere—part suburb, part crumbling city that never happened. I was getting by, roaming the neighborhoods after dark, looking for unlocked cars to see what I could snatch. Sometimes I stole shit out of people’s yards and pawned it or sold it on the street. One night I didn’t have enough to cop, and I was in a bad way. There was nobody on the street to even beg from. It was freezing. Eventually I found this house on a corner and noticed an open garage out back. I got in there where it was warmer, lay down on the concrete, and went into withdrawal.

You can’t understand what that’s like unless you’ve done it. Remember that
Twilight Zone
where you make your own hell? Like that. I eventually passed out or fell asleep, and woke, shivering, to daylight, unable to get off the floor. Standing in the entrance to the garage was this little old woman with her arms folded, staring down through her bifocals at me. The second she saw I was awake, she turned and walked away. I felt like I’d frozen straight through to my spine during the night and couldn’t get up. A splitting headache, and the nausea was pretty intense too. My first thought was to take off, but too much of me just didn’t give a shit. The old woman reappeared, but now she was carrying a pistol in her left hand.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said.

I told her I was sick.

“I’ve seen you around town,” she said. “You’re an addict.” She didn’t seem freaked out by the situation, even though I was. I managed to get up on one elbow. I shrugged and said, “True.”

And then she left again, and a few minutes later came back, toting an electric space heater. She set it down next to me, stepped away and said, “You missed it last night, but there’s a cot in the back of the garage. Look,” she said, “I’m going to give you some money. Go buy clothes. You can stay here and I’ll feed you. If I know you’re using, though, I’ll call the police. I hope you realize that if you do anything I don’t like I’ll shoot you.” She said it like it was a foregone conclusion, and, yeah, I could actually picture her pulling the trigger.

What could I say? I took the money, and she went back into her house. My first reaction to the whole thing was to laugh. I could score. I struggled up all dizzy and bleary, smelling like the devil’s own shit, and stumbled away.

I didn’t cop that day, only a small bag of weed. Why? I’m not sure, but there was something about the way the old woman talked to me, her unafraid, straight-up approach. That, maybe, and I was so tired of the cycle of falling hard out of a drug dream onto the street and scrabbling like a three-legged dog for the next fix. By noon, I was pot high, downtown, still feeling shitty, when I passed this old clothing store. It was one of those places like you can’t fucking believe is still in operation. The mannequin in the window had on a tan leisure suit. Something about the way the sunlight hit that window display, though, made me remember the old woman’s voice, and I had this feeling like I was on an errand for my mother.

I got the clothes. I went back and lived in her garage. The jitters, the chills, the scratching my scalp and forearms were bad, but when I could finally get to sleep, that cot was as comfortable as a bed in a fairy tale. She brought food a couple times a day. She never said much to me, and the gun was always around. The big problem was going to the bathroom. When you get off the junk, your insides really open up. I knew if I went near the house, she’d shoot me. Let’s just say I marked the surrounding territory. About two weeks in, she wondered herself and asked me, “Where are you evacuating?”

At first I wasn’t sure what she was saying. “Evacuating?” Eventually, I caught on and told her, “Around.” She said that I could come in the house to use the downstairs bathroom. It was tough, ’cause every other second I wanted to just bop her on the head, take everything she had, and score like there was no tomorrow. I kept a tight lid on it till one day, when I was sure I was going to blow, a delivery truck pulled up to the side of the house and delivered, to the garage, a set of barbells and a bench. Later when she brought me out some food, she nodded to the weights and said, “Use them before you jump out of your skin. I insist.”

Ms. Berkley was her name. She never told me her first name, but I saw it on her mail, “Ifanel.” What kind of name is that? She had iron-gray hair, pulled back tight into a bun, and strong green eyes behind the big glasses. Baggy corduroy pants and a zip-up sweater was her wardrobe. There was a yellow one with flowers around the collar. She was a busy old woman. Quick and low to the ground.

Her house was beautiful inside. The floors were polished and covered with those Persian rugs. Wallpaper and stained-glass windows. But there was none of that goofy shit I remembered my grandmother going in for: suffering Christs, knitted hats on the toilet paper. Every room was in perfect order and there were books everywhere. Once she let me move in from the garage to the basement, I’d see her reading at night, sitting at her desk in what she called her “office.” All the lights were out except for this one brass lamp shining right over the book that lay on her desk. She moved her lips when she read. “Good night, Ms. Berkley,” I’d say to her and head for the basement door. From down the hall I’d hear her voice come like out of a dream, “Good night.” She told me she’d been a history teacher at a college. You could tell she was really smart. It didn’t exactly take a genius, but she saw straight through my bullshit.

One morning we were sitting at her kitchen table having coffee, and I asked her why she’d helped me out. I was feeling pretty good then. She said, “That’s what you’re supposed to do. Didn’t anyone ever teach you that?”

“Weren’t you afraid?”

“Of you?” she said. She took the pistol out of her bathrobe pocket and put it on the table between us. “There’s no bullets in it,” she told me. “I went with a fellow who died and he left that behind. I wouldn’t know how to load it.”

Normally I would have laughed, but her expression made me think she was trying to tell me something. “I’ll pay you back,” I said. “I’m gonna get a job this week and start paying you back.”

“No, I’ve got a way for you to pay me back,” she said and smiled for the first time. I was 99 percent sure she wasn’t going to tell me to fuck her, but, you know, it crossed my mind.

Instead, she asked me to take a walk with her downtown. By then it was winter, cold as a witch’s tit. Snow was coming. We must have been a sight on the street. Ms. Berkley, marching along in her puffy ski parka and wool hat, blue with gold stars and a tassel. I don’t think she was even five foot. I walked a couple of steps behind her. I’m six foot four inches, I hadn’t shaved or had a haircut in a long while, and I was wearing this brown suit jacket that she’d found in her closet. I couldn’t button it if you had a gun to my head and my arms stuck out the sleeves almost to the elbow. She told me, “It belonged to the dead man.”