The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Volume 1 Read online

  THE YEAR’S BEST

  DARK FANTASY & HORROR

  THE YEAR’S BEST

  DARK FANTASY & HORROR:

  VOLUME ONE

  EDITED BY

  PAULA GURAN

  Other Anthologies Edited by Paula Guran

  Embraces: Dark Erotica

  Best New Paranormal Romance

  Best New Romantic Fantasy

  Zombies: The Recent Dead

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2010

  Vampires: The Recent Undead

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2011

  Halloween

  New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird

  Brave New Love: 15 Dystopian Tales of Desire

  Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful

  Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012

  Extreme Zombies

  Ghosts: Recent Hauntings

  Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction & Fantasy

  Season of Wonder

  Future Games

  Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations

  The Mammoth Book of Angels and Demons

  After the End: Recent Apocalypses

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2013

  Halloween: Mystery, Magic, and the Macabre

  Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales

  Magic City: Recent Spells

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2014

  Time Travel: Recent Trips

  New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

  Blood Sisters: Vampire Stories by Women

  Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2015

  The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas: 2015

  Warrior Women

  Street Magicks

  The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction

  Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2016

  The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas: 2016

  The Mammoth Book of the Mummy

  Swords Against Darkness

  Ex Libris: Stories of Librarians, Libraries & Lore

  New York Fantastic: Fantasy Stories from the City That Never Sleeps

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2017

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2018

  Mythic Journeys: Retold Myths and Legends

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019

  Published 2020 by Pyr®

  The Year’s Best Dark Horror & Fantasy: Volume 1. Copyright © 2020 by Paula Guran. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover image © Shutterstock

  Cover design by Jennifer Do

  Cover design © Start Science Fiction

  Inquiries should be addressed to

  Start Science Fiction

  221 River Street, 9th Floor

  Hoboken, New Jersey 07030

  PHONE: 212-431-5455

  WWW.PYRSF.COM

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-64506-025-3 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-64506-026-0 (ebook)

  Printed in the United States of America

  To all the Essential Workers.

  Heroes seldom wear capes and rarely have supernatural powers.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Strange Days • PAULA GURAN

  The Fourth Trimester Is the Strangest • REBECCA CAMPBELL

  Shattered Sidewalks of the Human Heart • SAM J. MILLER

  The Surviving Child • JOYCE CAROL OATES

  The Promise of Saints • ANGELA SLATTER

  Burrowing Machines • SARA SAAB

  About the O’Dells • PAT CADIGAN

  A Catalog of Storms • FRAN WILDE

  Thoughts and Prayers • KEN LIU

  Logic Puzzles • VAISHNAVI PATEL

  A Strange Uncertain Light • G. V. ANDERSON

  Conversations With the Sea Witch • THEODORA GOSS

  Haunt • CARMEN MARIA MACHADO

  Nice Things • ELLEN KLAGES

  Glass Eyes in Porcelain Faces • JACK WESTLAKE

  Phantoms of the Midway • SEANAN MCGUIRE

  Hunting by the River • DANIEL CARPENTER

  Boiled Bones and Black Eggs • NGHI VO

  His Heart Is the Haunted House • AIMEE OGDEN

  In That Place She Grows a Garden • DEL SANDEEN

  The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye • SARAH PINSKER

  The Coven of Dead Girls • L’ERIN OGLE

  Blood Is Another Word for Hunger • RIVERS SOLOMON

  The Thing, With Feathers • MARISSA LINGEN

  Some Kind of Blood-Soaked Future • CARLIE ST. GEORGE

  Read After Burning • MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY

  Other Recommendations from 2019

  Acknowledgments

  About the Editor

  INTRODUCTION: STRANGE DAYS

  “Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.”

  —JESSAMYN WEST

  These are unsettling times. The world changed forever as I compiled this anthology, and we don’t yet know what it has changed into.

  Why, some must be asking, would anyone want to read dark fantasy or horror while a pandemic rages, the economy (and who knows what else) topples, and people are dying and suffering?

  I won’t attempt to provide any deep thoughts on the subject. But I do have some shallow ones that occurred to me during the process of deciding on the content of this anthology.

  Most of these stories begin with a world you can identify with (or the fictional universe is an extension of ours). You are grounded. Then things become disquieting, unnerving, disrupted, intruded upon. The world changes. The normal is subverted. But cleverness, or resilience, or caring, or perseverance still somehow exists. And if doom is inevitable, perhaps we emerge resolved to defy the fictional fate if it ever turns real. At the very least, we can admire those who have faced catastrophe.

  For better or worse, these stories will affect you. Make you feel something that reminds you of your own humanity and that of others.

  To quote author Ruthanna Emrys:

  Horror as a genre is built around one truth: that the world is full of fearful things. But the best horror tells us more. It tells us how to live with being afraid. It tells us how to distinguish real evil from harmless shadows. It tells us how to fight back. It tells us that we can fight the worst evils, whether or not we all survive them—and how to be worthy of having our tales told afterward.

  Dark fantasy? Well, I still will not try to define it, but as China Miéville has pointed out about the genre as a whole: traditional fantasy may only, as Tolkien wrote, offer “consolation,” but in the best of modern fantasy “[t]hings are gritty and tricky, just as in real life. This is fantasy not as comfort-food, but as challenge.”

  Dark fiction isn’t escapist, it confronts reality and helps us comprehend it.

  I didn’t pick these stories with any theme in mind. Certainly not to challenge or provide hope in these days of adversity. Response is always personal, but I think there is a chance you may find a modicum of such in some of these stories.

  After ten volumes of the series with Prime Books, this is the first volume with a new publisher, Pyr. I’m gr
ateful to both and hope the Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror series has a robust future in the ever-changing world of publishing.

  And thanks to you readers, new and old; you, more than anyone or anything, determine its future.

  National Burrito Day 2020

  Paula Guran

  THE FOURTH TRIMESTER IS THE STRANGEST

  REBECCA CAMPBELL

  For hours now, the woman across the hall had been screaming. Ten minutes apart, eight minutes, five, and then the long, lonely push through to daylight and silence, and they said nothing about what had happened after that: a child, Jenny hoped, but maybe no child. She could only be sure of the screaming. A needle in Jenny’s wrist dripped magnesium sulfate, which dropped a film between her and the world, as if the light that flooded the hospital room was beyond her, and she knocked against it in her permanent twilight.

  She only noticed the other woman’s screams when she was through her own ordeal, though Greg said it had been going on all along, during the hours when she, turning inward, had drawn her mind deep into her guts and to Max, and had held on to Greg’s hand and pulled him down toward them, too. She had heard nothing but her own breathing in the knocking dark of her body, and Max, who made his dark-water journey out.

  Before the screaming, hers or the woman’s across the hall.

  They told her: Curve around your belly, your knees drawn up, your back exposed, and push each vertebra outward. The nurse held her tightly. The anesthesiologist injected a local anesthetic between the second and third lumbar vertebrae before inserting a needle and threading a thin filament between the bones, into the interior of her nervous system, the epidural space where sensation and thought run.

  She asked them, “What is that? What’s the knocking?” She felt it inside the column of her spine, a shudder with each tap.

  The anesthesiologist said, “Knocking? Never heard anyone say that.” The knocking ceased. The needle was withdrawn and the filament taped in place at what became, later, the meridian of her experience, below which her body was disobedient and strange to her, constituted not of muscle but of clay, so her legs might have belonged to someone else.

  Maybe to the woman screaming across the hall.

  They arranged her on beanbags and pillows, maneuvered her like a marionette. Max’s head pressed against her right hipbone, delaying his entrance into the world, and in the meantime, Greg listened to the swish-swish of his heartbeat through the electrodes taped to her stomach. He watched her absorb Fentanyl via her spinal column, while out of her sight a machine recorded events in that other realm below her navel, confirming her labor, which her body undertook despite the filamentary intervention in her spine.

  When he crowned, she felt no pain, just the trickle of blood, and knew that somewhere on the other side of Fentanyl’s meridian, she was torn. “Stop pushing, madam,” the doctor said. She obeyed, Max halfway into the world, the ceiling-mounted theater lights illuminating his entrance so bright, she couldn’t look at them or the crowd of nurses observing.

  “Now you may push, madam,” the doctor said, and Max was out in a rush and a gush and the doctor upheld a squalling, shining creature, shocked with hair, and she couldn’t tell if that was his face or the back of his head, his little arms and legs stretching for the first time into air and appalled by what they encountered, by variations in texture and temperature that hadn’t existed in that other realm, and she ached with love for him and his confusion.

  The doctor set him on her belly as the placenta slithered out like Max’s malformed twin. She reached toward him with one hand to say, You are not alone, and the doctor stopped her, saying, “Do not touch, madam.” She obeyed, and could only look at his little reaching hand.

  * * *

  Thirty-six hours after the doctor called her madam and slit her open to let Max out, she was on the couch, with Max’s head pressed up under her chin and her arms wrapped around him. The tenderness inside approached pain, an open wound that would remain open forever and ever, her heart born outside her body. He slept rising and falling with her chest, as though she was his ocean, and he—little innocent—on the raft of his life, pushed out into the unknown, no longer contained by the universe of her body but resting upon it, so she fancied she was any number of things: the world-turtle, or the ocean; the ash tree, or the slope of Parnassus.

  Upstairs, Greg was working. She could hear the creak as the two of them paced, the rattle of a door, sometimes the drone of a conference call, Greg’s uninflected, professional voice in long discourse. Sometimes she heard them come down the stairs, pausing on the landing to check the scene below. She would speak, but Max startled when she spoke, so better to retreat into silence, which was nevertheless communication of a deep and bodily sort, as she listened for the tick of his heart, little alien, better suited to that other universe, in the dark and the waters, the nutshell world.

  “Jenny?” A whisper on the stairs. Max was okay, though, so they didn’t need to be concerned. When she looked up at the two of them, she discovered her eyes were closed.

  “We’re good.”

  “Sorry I woke you.”

  “No, I was awake.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She opened her eyes. The light changed, afternoon progressed. “Oh. I didn’t know.”

  “It’s okay. Text if you need anything.”

  For a moment, her eyes were open, she was pretty sure, then she blinked and Max stirred awake on her chest with a thin cry like a kitten.

  “Am I asleep?” But Greg was gone.

  * * *

  “Jenny.”

  What?

  “Jenny.”

  What? What?

  “You need to wake up.”

  She felt Max’s warm imprint beside her. He’d gone, though, under the duvet. She felt, briefly, the curve of his back and his strong little legs, but then he slipped further away and he’d be lost in the pillows and sheets and that was against government regulations regarding infant sleep safety.

  “Listen to me, Jenny.”

  Her eyes were definitely open because they ranged around the room: Greg standing over the bed; Max’s cot; the window a mirror this early in the morning.

  “I’m awake.”

  “Okay, but you need to wake up.”

  “He’s in here,” she explained, but maybe not out loud. She began unbuttoning the duvet where he’d crept inside, careful not to move too quickly and hurt him, but that couldn’t be because he was only three days old. Or was it four? Was it Tuesday? She didn’t know. He was so small he might be lost in the bedding and then what.

  “I’ve got Max, Jenny.”

  “Oh,” she said, and looking up, she saw that it was true: Max was sleeping in Greg’s arms. “Oh,” she said again as under her hands the fugitive Max disappeared.

  It was night, the velvety summer kind, so dark it was hard to think of more than Max and their dual heartbeats. Sometimes she slept—she thought maybe she slept—and mostly she didn’t. They sat outside on the porch together, and Greg was saying something. He finished: “Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, though she wasn’t sure what she’d agreed to. Something about the public health nurse she’d met with earlier in the pregnancy, about the SSRIs and PPD and things, the annoying one who always called her “hun” because, Jenny suspected, the woman couldn’t remember her name. She knew that Greg had been reading since the first trimester, and she had seen the search terms: “postpartum psychosis” among them, which she tried not to take personally. He liked to plan ahead for all possible outcomes.

  “Because,” he responded, “it’s not anyone’s fault. It’s medical, not moral.”

  She had, in morose fits during the weeks before labor, searched similar terms and discovered unpleasant truths regarding the damage mothers can do to their children: women who fall asleep with their newborns and smother them; hamsters who eat their young; kangaroos who throw their joeys out behind them to distract predators.

  While t
hey sat, the sky darkened but for the strip of dandelion yellow in the west, and between the sunset and the streetlights, there came the brief hour of fireflies darting in and out of green-gold luminescence.

  Also mosquitoes. “West Nile,” Greg said in the drowsy hour, Max asleep in his arms. “We should get him inside.” Greg was a good father. At twilight, he often took Max and she was supposed to have time to herself, but when he wept, her throat swelled shut and it was hard to think, but nevertheless Greg always said, You should go for a walk. So even though her feet were still so swollen she had to wear men’s Crocs, she walked their block to the busier local street with the stores and coffee shops, like some nocturnal animal dazzled by sunset.

  “Sorry,” she said for blocking the sidewalk while around her strode determined students talking on cell phones and carrying takeout, in their clean clothes, their hair brushed, probably, and probably their legs didn’t feel loose in their hip sockets, nor their belly-skin flaccid and voluminous.

  Halfway to the next corner, she passed a baby in a carriage and heard its sleepy evening cry, which triggered the first trickle of foremilk, soaking her T-shirt and running down toward her navel. She turned around and thought of all the undone laundry, how she would wash away the honeyish scent Max left on his clothes, which made her cry if she smelled it and he wasn’t in the room. The part of her mind that still sort-of functioned told her it was super weird that she could miss him when he was in the other room, sleeping on Greg’s stomach. The first time she left him behind to do something—a follow-up visit to her OB-GYN to inspect the long tear—she had sat on the bus, her eyes leaking tears at the thought of those hours lost, when Max might have slept in the crook of her arm, and she stared at darkness, the pre-birth substance, the shared ylem of their fourth trimester together.

  But there was laundry, which meant the basement she had never liked, the concrete pad for the washer and dryer and the rest of it just gravel and dust, and the tracks of animals, maybe the delicate bones of a rat.

  She heard them pacing together overhead, worried footsteps as they walked Max. She glanced up at the sound toward the half-open doorway at the top of the old stairs and thought, If it closed, how would I get out? Down here in the deeper dark, the before-time dark of a sleep so dense and heavy she thought she might be dreaming, and this could be the moment before she lurched into wakefulness and found herself not in the basement, but in bed, and this dark the dark behind her own eyelids.