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

  Yes, it did. It rained blood. You got caught in the storm.

  I reached out as far as I could, palm up, just to make sure but it was plain old rainwater. Still coming down hard, enough to make my hand sting.

  The lights in the Graftons’ old house went out. Was it that late already? Maybe I should check to see if my mother was still asleep—

  Time to make that call. That’s what you came up here for.

  Yes, but now that it was time to do it, I was starting to feel shaky.

  You think you’re shaky? Try sprinting around the block and hopping fences in backyards. Your knees’ll knock like castanets.

  I could see a form in the straight-down sheets of rain, someone in the street, waiting while tiles slid off the roof and smacked wetly on the front steps.

  Call him and tell him to come over immediately. Give him hell or sob your heart out but get him here now. Now.

  I picked up the phone and dialed.

  I started by sobbing my heart out but Gideon O’Dell didn’t want to come over. There was nothing he could do while it was still raining and even if it stopped, he certainly couldn’t work in the dark. I kept sobbing and he kept being reasonable, so I tried getting mad. The way he answered made me think he’d had a lot of anger management classes in prison.

  “You just get your ass over here right now and give me back all the money I paid you,” I said, “or I tell everyone on the block who you really are, Gideon.”

  He practically choked. “You—you what?”

  “If you think people here want a murderer taking care of their trees—”

  “Okay, please, stop. I’m coming now, all right? I’ll be there in ten minutes. Not even that. Just don’t—please, I’ve got all your money—”

  I slammed the receiver down, shaking all over. Thunder rumbled but without much power as the rain began to lessen. Lily O’Dell was walking slowly up the incline of our lawn, toward the front door. I knew she’d want me to open it now.

  My mother was still fast asleep, hugging a throw pillow. The cop show had been replaced by old reruns of a different cop show, one that only came on very late. How long had I been upstairs? And had it been raining hard and angry the whole time?

  Open the door.

  That would wake my mother for sure, I thought. Just in time for Gideon O’Dell to show up apologizing and begging her not to tell anyone. She’ll have no idea what he’s talking about but maybe she’ll be too distracted by the tiles that fell off the roof to care—

  Open the door now. Before the doorbell wakes her.

  The rain had stopped.

  Lily O’Dell wasn’t covered with so much blood that I couldn’t see what Gideon O’Dell had done to her face. One eye was swollen shut and the other was getting there; her nose wasn’t just broken but so smashed that it didn’t look anything like something to breathe through. One side of her face was caved in, her lower lip was badly split and she’d lost some teeth. I could see distinct finger marks in the bruising around her neck.

  Only I shouldn’t have been able to. All the lights were out and the TV wasn’t bright enough. And yet, I could see her, could see her struggling to breathe, seemingly unable to gulp in enough air. But I didn’t hear it until she punched both hands through the screen door.

  Suddenly I was small, looking up at her in horror and confusion, tasting blood as she smeared her hands over my face. Her voice was barely audible as she begged for help, and when Gideon O’Dell yanked her away, she couldn’t make a sound.

  Gideon O’Dell, however, was yelling and cursing as she dragged him down the lawn by his hair, past his truck parked at the curb. I don’t think he knew it was her until they got to that very specific spot on the street, but when he did, he went completely hysterical. I thought for sure his screaming and begging would wake up the entire neighborhood.

  But he didn’t. No lights went on in any of the neighbors’ houses or across the street; my mother slept on, undisturbed and unaware. And all the while, I was trying to get the screen door open but the stupid lock wouldn’t budge.

  I don’t know where the knife came from—maybe it was a ghost, like Lily. But also like Lily, it hurt him for real. I didn’t want to watch but I couldn’t look away, couldn’t yell for my mother, couldn’t even move. All I could do was stand there and watch Lily pay Gideon back stroke for stroke, slash for slash, stab for stab.

  It took a very long time. When she was finally done, she turned to look at me and bowed her head a little, like she was saying thanks.

  Then it began to rain again, pounding straight down like before. I closed the door and went to bed.

  In the morning, the truck was still parked in front of our house but there was no trace of Gideon O’Dell, nothing to show why he had come here or where he had gone, not even a stain on the asphalt. It had rained that hard.

  PAT CADIGAN sold her first professional science fiction story in 1980 and became a full-time writer in 1987. She is the author of fifteen books, including two nonfiction books on the making of Lost in Space and The Mummy, one young adult novel, and two Arthur C. Clarke Award– winning novels: Synners and Fools. She has won the Locus Award three times and the Hugo Award for her novelette, “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi,” which also won the Seiun Award in Japan. Cadigan lives in North London with her husband, the Original Chris Fowler, where she is stomping the hell out of terminal cancer.

  A CATALOG OF STORMS

  FRAN WILDE

  The wind’s moving fast again. The weathermen lean into it, letting it wear away at them until they turn to rain and cloud.

  “Look there, Sila.” Mumma points as she grips my shoulder.

  Her arthritis-crooked hand shakes. Her cuticles are pale red from washwater. Her finger makes an arc against the sky that ends at the dark shadows on the cliffs.

  “You can see those two, just there. Almost gone. The weather wouldn’t take them if they weren’t wayward already, though.” She tsks. “Varyl, Lillit, pay attention. Don’t let that be any of you girls.”

  Her voice sounds proud and sad because she’s thinking of her aunt, who turned to lightning.

  The town’s first weatherman.

  The three of us kids stare across the bay to where the setting sun’s turned the cliff dark. On the edge of the cliff sits an old mansion that didn’t fall into the sea with the others: the Cliffwatch. Its turrets and cupolas are wrapped with steel cables from the broken bridge. Looks like metal vines grabbed and tethered the building to the solid part of the jutting cliff.

  All the weathermen live there, until they don’t anymore.

  “They’re leaned too far out and too still to be people.” Varyl waves Mumma’s hand down.

  Varyl always says stuff like that because . . .

  “They used to be people. They’re weathermen now,” Lillit answers.

  . . . Lillit always rises to the bait.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Varyl whispers, and her eyes dance because she knows she’s got her twin in knots, wishing to be first and best at something. Lillit is always second at everything.

  Mumma sighs, but I wait, ears perked, for whatever’s coming next because it’s always something wicked. Lillit has a fast temper.

  But none of us are prepared this time.

  “I do too know. I talked to one, once,” Lillit yells and then her hand goes up over her mouth, just for a moment, and her eyes look like she’d cut Varyl if she thought she’d get away with it.

  And Mumma’s already turned and got Lillit by the ear. “You did what.” Her voice shudders. “Varyl, keep an eye out.”

  Some weathermen visit relatives in town, when the weather is calm. They look for others like them, or who might be. When they do that, mothers hide their children.

  Mumma starts to drag Lillit on home. And just then a passing weatherman starts to scream by the fountain as if he’d read Mumma’s weather, not the sky’s.

  When weathermen warn about a squall, it always comes. S
torms aren’t their fault, and they’ll come anyway. The key is to know what kind of storm’s coming and what to do when it does. Weathermen can do that.

  For a time.

  I grab our basket of washing. Mumma and Varyl grab Lillit. We run as far from the fountain as fast as we can, before the sky turns ash-gray and the searing clouds—the really bad kind—begin to fall.

  And that’s how Lillit is saved from a thrashing, but is still lost to us in the end.

  AN INCOMPLETE CATALOG OF STORMS

  A Felrag: the summer wind that turns the water green first, then churns up dark clouds into fists. Not deadly, usually, but good to warn the boats.

  A Browtic: rising heat from below that drives the rats and snakes from underground before they roast there. The streets swirl with them, they bite and bite until the browtic cools. Make sure all babies are well and high.

  A Neap-Change: the forgotten tide that’s neither low nor high, the calmest of waters, when what rests in the deeps slowly slither forth. A silent storm that looks nothing like a storm. It looks like calm and moonlight on water, but then people go missing.

  A Glare: a storm of silence and retribution, with no forgiveness, a terror of it, that takes over a whole community until the person causing it is removed. It looks like a dry wind, but it’s always some person that’s behind it.

  A Vivid: that bright sunlit rainbow-edged storm that seduces young women out into the early morning before they’ve been properly wrapped in cloaks. The one that gets in their lungs and makes them sing until they cry, until they can only taste food made of honey and milk and they grow pale and glass-eyed. Beware vivids in spring for the bride’s sake.

  A Searcloud: heated air so thick it blinds as it wraps charred arms around those it catches, then billows in the lungs, scorching words from their sounds, memories from their bearers. Often followed by sorrow, searclouds are best avoided, run through at top speed, or never named.

  An Ashpale: thick, gathering clouds from the heights, where the ice forms. When it leaves, everything in its path is slick and frozen. Scream it away if you can, before your breath freezes too.

  The Cliffwatch is broken now, its far wall tumbled half down to the ocean so that every room ends in water.

  We go up there a lot to poke around now that we’re older.

  After that Searcloud passed, Mumma searched through our house until she found Lillit’s notes—her name wasn’t on them, but we’d know her penmanship anywhere. Since she’s left-handed and it smears, whether chalk or ink. My handwriting doesn’t smear. Nor Varyl’s.

  The paper—a whole sheet!—was crammed into a crack in the wall behind our bed. I rubbed the thick handmade weave of it between my fingers, counting until Mumma snatched it away again.

  Lillit had been making up storms, five of them already, mixing them in with known weather. She’d been practicing.

  Mumma shrieked at her, as you could imagine. “You don’t want this. You don’t want it.”

  I ducked behind Varyl, who was watching, wide-eyed. Everyone’s needed for battle against the storms, but no one wants someone they love to go.

  And Lillit, for the first time, didn’t talk back. She stood as still as a weatherman. She did want it.

  While we ran to her room to help her pack, Mumma wept.

  The Mayor knocked when it was time to take Lillit up the cliff. “Twice in your family! Do you think Sila too? Or Varyl?” He looked eagerly around Mumma’s wide frame at us. “A great honor!”

  “Sila and Varyl don’t have enough sense to come out of the rain, much less call storms,” Mumma said. She bustled the Mayor from the threshold and they flanked Lillit, who stepped forward without a word, her face already saying “up,” even as her feet crunched the gravel down.

  Mumma left her second-eldest daughter inside the gates and didn’t look back, as is right and proper.

  She draped herself in honor until the Mayor left, so no one saw her crying but me and that’s because I know Mumma better than she thinks I do.

  I know Lillit too.

  Being the youngest doesn’t have many advantages, but this one is worth all the rest: everyone forgets you’re there. If you’re watchful, you can learn a lot.

  Here are a few:

  I knew Lillit could hear wind and water earlier than everyone else.

  I know Varyl is practicing in her room every night trying to catch up.

  I know Mumma’s cried herself to sleep more than once and that Varyl wishes she were sleet and snow, alternately. That neither one know what Lillit will turn into when she goes.

  And I know, whether Lillit turns to clouds or rain, that I’ll be next, not Varyl. Me.

  And that maybe someone will cry over me.

  I already started making lists. I’ll be ready.

  Mumma goes up to the Cliffwatch all the time.

  “You stay,” she says to Varyl and me. But I follow, just close enough that I see Lillit start to go all mist around the edges, and Mumma shake her back solid, crying.

  Weathermen can’t help it, they have to name the storms they think of, and soon they’re warning about the weather for all of us, and eventually they fight it too.

  While Mumma and I are gone, the Mayor comes by our house and puts a ribbon on our door. We get extra milk every Tuesday.

  That doesn’t make things better, in the end. Milk isn’t a sister.

  “The weather gets them and gets them,” Mumma’s voice is proud and sad when she returns. From now on, she won’t say “wayward,” won’t hear anyone speak of Lillit nor her aunt as a cautionary tale. “We scold because of our own selfishness,” she says. “We don’t want them to change.” Her aunt went gone a long time ago.

  We all visit Lillit twice, early on. Once, sweeping through town after a squall. Another time, down near the fishing boats, where the lightning likes to play. She saved a fisherman swept out to sea, by blowing his boat back to safe harbor.

  We might go more often, but Mumma doesn’t want us to catch any ideas.

  A basket of oysters appears outside our door. Then a string of smoked fish.

  When storms come, weathermen name it away. Yelling works too. So does diving straight into it and shattering it, but you can only do that once you’ve turned to wind and rain.

  Like I said, storms would come anyway. When we know what to call them, we know how to fight them. And we can help the weathermen, Mumma says after Lillit goes, so they don’t wear themselves out.

  Weathermen give us some warning. Then we all fight back against the air.

  “The storms got smarter than us,” Varyl whispers at night when we can’t sleep for missing her twin, “after we broke the weather. The wind and rain got used to winning. They liked it.”

  A predator without equal, the weather tore us to pieces after the sky turned gray and the sea rose.

  Some drowned or were lost in the winds. Others fled, then gathered in safe places and hunkered down. Like in our town. Safe, cliffs on all sides, a long corridor we can see the ocean coming for miles.

  Ours was a holiday place, once, until people started turning into weather too. Because the sky and the very air were broken, Varyl says.

  Soon we stopped losing our treasures to the wind. Big things first: Houses stayed put. The hour hand for the clock stayed on the clock tower. Then little things too, like pieces of paper and petals. I wasn’t used to so many petals staying on the trees.

  The wind hadn’t expected its prey to practice, to fight back.

  When the weather realized, finally, that it was being named and outsmarted, then the wind started hunting down weathermen. Because a predator must always attack.

  But the weathermen? Sometimes when they grow light enough, they lift into the clouds and push the weather back from up high.

  “And through the hole they leave behind,” Varyl whispers. Half asleep, I can barely hear her. “You can see the sky, blue as the denim our old dress might have been, once.”

  The Cliffwatch is broken now, its r
oof gaping wide as if the gray sky makes better shelter.

  We climb over the building like rats, looking for treasure. For a piece of her.

  We peer out at the ocean through where the walls used to be. We steal through a house that’s leaned farther out over the water since the last time we came, a house that’s grown loud in asking the wind to send its emptied frame into the sea.

  Varyl stands watch, alone, always now. She’s silent. She misses Lillit most.

  Mumma and I collect baskets of hinges and knobs, latches and keyholes. People collect them, to remember. Some have storms inscribed around their edges: a Cumulous—which made the eardrums ring and then burst; a Bitter—where the wind didn’t stop blowing until everyone fought.

  “She learned them for us, Mumma,” I whisper, holding an embroidered curtain. My fingers work the threads, turning the stitches into list of things I miss about Lillit: her laugh, her stubborn way of standing, her handwriting. How she’d brush my hair every morning without yanking, like Varyl does now.

  Mumma doesn’t shush me anymore. Her eyes tear up a little. “Sila, I remember before the storms, when half the days were sunny. When the sky was blue.” She coughs and puts a gray ribbon in my basket. “At least, I remember people talking like that, about a blue sky.”

  I’m wearing Varyl’s hand-me-down dress, it’s denim, and used to be blue too; a soft baby blue when it belonged to my sister; a darker navy back when it was Mumma’s long coat.

  Now the gray bodice has winds embroidered on it, not storms. Varyl did the stitching. The dress says: felrag, mistral, lillit, föhn, in swirling white thread.

  The basket I hold is made of gray and white sticks; my washing basket most days. Today it is a treasure basket. We are collecting what the weather left us.

  Mumma gasps when she tugs up a floorboard to find a whole catalog of storms beaten into brass hinges.

  We’ve found catalogs before, marked in pinpricks on the edge of a book and embroidered with tiny stitches in the hem of a curtain, but never so many. They sell well at market, as people think they’re lucky.