The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012 Read online

  THE YEAR’S BEST

  DARK FANTASY & HORROR:

  2012 EDITION

  PAULA GURAN

  Copyright © 2012 by Paula Guran.

  Cover art by Man In Black/Fotolia.

  Cover design by Telegraphy Harness.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors, and used here with their permission. An extension of this copyright page can be found here.

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-368-6 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-345-7 (trade paperback)

  PRIME BOOKS

  www.prime-books.com

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact Prime Books at [email protected].

  Contents

  Introduction, Paula Guran

  Objects in Dreams May Be Closer Than They Appear, Lisa Tuttle

  After the Apocalypse, Maureen McHugh

  Sun Falls, Angela Slatter

  The Bleeding Shadow, Joe R. Lansdale

  Catastrophic Disruption of the Head, Margo Lanagan

  Tell Me I’ll See You Again, Dennis Etchison

  The Maltese Unicorn, Caitlín R. Kiernan

  King Death, Paul Finch

  Why Light?, Tanith Lee

  Josh, Gene Wolfe

  Time and Tide, Alan Peter Ryan

  Rakshasi, Kelley Armstrong

  Why Do You Linger?, Sarah Monette

  Vampire Lake, Norman Partridge

  Lord Dunsany’s Teapot, Naomi Novik

  The Dune, Stephen King

  The Fox Maiden, Priya Sharma

  Rocket Man, Stephen Graham Jones

  Journey of Only Two Paces, Tim Powers

  Near Zennor, Elizabeth Hand

  Conservation of Shadows, Yoon Ha Lee

  All You Can Do is Breathe, Kaaron Warren

  Mysteries of the Old Quarter, Paul Park

  Still, Tia V. Travis

  Crossroads, Laura Anne Gilman

  The Bread We Eat in Dreams, Catherynne M. Valente

  Hair, Joan Aiken

  The Lake, Tananarive Due

  Walls of Paper, Soft as Skin, Adam Callaway

  The Last Triangle, Jeffrey Ford

  After-Words, Glen Hirshberg

  Four Legs in the Morning, Norman Prentiss

  A Tangle of Green Men, Charles de Lint

  About the Authors

  Acknowledgements

  The Third Time May Be a Charm, but It’s Not Necessarily Definitive

  Paula Guran

  This is the third volume of The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, and I still feel I need to introduce it by pointing out that there is really no definition of “dark fantasy.” Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; dark fantasy is in the mind of the reader.

  I mean that literally. Neuroscience can now identify the particular parts of the brain affected by reading. According to Maria Nikolajeva, director of the Cambridge/Homerton Research and Training Center for Children’s Literature, fiction with a very dark theme “creates and amplifies a sense of insecurity . . . but it can also be a liberation, when readers ‘share’ their personal experience with that of fictional characters . . . readers’ brains are changed after they have read a book . . . ” (quoted by Valerie Strauss, “The Answer Sheet,” The Washington Post/washingtonpost.com: 2010 September 4.)

  But what makes one brain sense insecurity may not affect another in the same way. What our minds perceive as “dark” varies. Dark fantasy, in general, can evoke a wide range of responses and those may differ by degree. It can be slightly unsettling, a bit eerie, profoundly disturbing, or just generally convey a certain atmosphere. Since darkness itself can be many things—shadowy and mysterious, deep and unknowable, paradoxically illuminating—it can be used in fiction in innumerable ways. Stories need not even remain dark throughout. They can be journeys through the dark with a positive, even uplifting, outcome. The dark can amuse even as it disturbs.

  “The dark” can be found in any number of literary forms—weird fiction (new or old), supernatural fiction, magical realism, the mythic, fairy tales, adventure, mystery, surrealism, or the fantastique. Since it is fantasy, something of the supernatural needs to be involved, or the story can be set in a world where what is ordinary is, in our world, extraordinary.

  As for horror: horror is a subjective and personal emotion. Again, what you feel is not necessarily what I feel. Not everyone agrees—there is no exact definition—but I do not think horror fiction needs to be supernatural. Life itself—and our fellow humans—can be far more terrifying than the extramundane. And when we speculate on the darker possibilities of our future, that, too, can be horrific.

  As far as this series of anthologies is concerned, you will encounter scary stories, but the intent is not to always frighten the reader. Nor is it to make you constantly feel subconsciously insecure—although some of you may. Certainly you will feel slightly uneasy at times, perhaps apprehensive, possibly unsettled, even disturbed. Thoughts may be provoked. But you’ll also smile here and there, maybe even laugh out loud.

  Perhaps you can consider The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror an exploration of the shadowy places and darker paths of the imagination. These stories—all published in 2011—will take you to a great many of those locations. It will take you back in time to several eras (not all of which are part of our history), forward into several futures, down mean streets, just next door or perhaps over the next hill, inside minds quite unlike (I hope) yours, to places you don’t quite recognize but are still somehow familiar, and into many otherworlds.

  In some instances, you may visit some tenebrous locales that are quite similar, but since there are different guides, the peregrinations each prove unique.

  Each reader will, no doubt, take an entirely different trip—choosing, feeling, reacting individually; abandoning some adventures, lingering for a while elsewhere.

  The authors whose work you encounter include some of whom you’ve probably never heard; some you may have read before, but don’t know well; others whose work you already acknowledge as masterful.

  Of course, a single book can gather only a small portion of the great new dark fiction being published each year in anthologies, collections, and periodicals on paper with ink or in pixels on screens. This is far from all “the best” published in one year.

  To repeat what should be obvious: Anthologies with titles including phrases like Year’s Best, Best of, Best (fill in the blank) are what they are. When compiling such a volume, no editor can completely fulfill the inference of the title. Fiction is not a race to be won, there are no absolutes with which to measure it. Yet those of us who edit such anthologies exert tremendous effort in a genuine attempt to offer books worthy of their grandiose monikers. Decisions are arrived at with sincere intention, but personal taste is, of course, involved, and—like it or not—compromises must be made.

  One compromise I made this year was to not include what I felt was certainly one of the finest dark stories of last year (“The Adakian Eagle” by Bradley Denton) because my fellow Prime Books editor, Rich Horton, chose it first. Rich, infinitely more organized than I, invariably meets his deadline long before I do, and announced his table of contents before I did. Fair and square! But since his The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy and my The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror are companion volumes published at same time, I thought it best not to duplicate.

  And, with timeliness in mind, for next year’s volume, it is best to make sure any recommendations or material p
ublished in 2012 reach me by February 1, 2013—preferably sooner. Information on previous volumes of the series can be found on the Prime Books website (www.prime-books.com) and the current “Call for Submissions” can be found at www.prime-books.com/call-for-submissions-years-best-dark-fantasy-horror-2013. You can e-mail me at [email protected].

  Paula Guran

  April 2012

  She knew she had been here before. It was the strongest wave of déjà vu she’d ever felt, a sickening collision between two types of knowledge: she knew it was impossible, yet she remembered . . .

  Objects in Dreams May Be Closer than They Appear

  Lisa Tuttle

  Since we divorced twenty years ago, my ex-husband Michael and I rarely met, but we’d always kept in touch. I wish now that we hadn’t. This whole terrible thing began with a link he sent me by e-mail with the comment, “Can you believe how much the old homestead has changed?”

  Clicking on the link took me to a view of the cottage we had owned, long ago, for about three years—most of our brief marriage.

  Although I recognized it, there were many changes. No longer a semi-detached, it had been merged with the house next-door, and also extended. It was, I thought, what we might have done ourselves given the money, time, planning permission and, most vitally, next-door neighbors willing to sell us their home. Instead, we had fallen out with them (they took our offer to buy as a personal affront) and poured too much money into so-called improvements, the work expensively and badly done by local builders who all seemed to be related by marriage if not blood to the people next-door.

  Just looking at the front of the house on the computer screen gave me a tight, anxious feeling in my chest. What had possessed Michael to send it to me? And why had he even looked for it? Surely he wasn’t nostalgic for what I recalled as one of the unhappiest periods of my life?

  At that point, I should have clicked away from the picture, put it out of my mind and settled down to work, but, I don’t know why, instead of closing the tab, I moved on down the road and began to discover what else in our old neighborhood was different.

  I’d heard about Google Earth’s “Street View” function, but I’d never used it before, so it took me a little while to figure out how to use it. At first all the zooming in and out, stopping and starting and twirling around made me queasy, but once I got to grips with it, I found this form of virtual tourism quite addictive.

  But I was startled by how different the present reality appeared from my memory of it. I did not recognize our old village at all, could find nothing I remembered except the war memorial—and that seemed to be in the wrong place. Where was the shop, the primary school, the pub? Had they all been altered beyond recognition, all turned into houses? There were certainly many more of those than there had been in the 1980s. It was while I was searching in vain for the unmistakable landmark that had always alerted us that the next turning would be our road, a commercial property that I could not imagine anyone converting into a desirable residence—the Little Chef—that it dawned on me what had happened.

  Of course. The Okehampton bypass had been built, and altered the route of the A30. Our little village was one of several no longer bisected by the main road into Cornwall, and without hordes of holiday-makers forced to crawl past, the fast food outlet and petrol station no longer made economic sense.

  Once I understood how the axis of the village had changed, I found the new primary school near an estate of new homes. There were also a couple of new (to me) shops, an Indian restaurant, wine bar, an Oriental rug gallery, and a riding school. The increase in population had pushed our sleepy old village slightly up-market. I should not have been surprised, but I suppose I was an urban snob, imagining that anyone living so deep in the country must be several decades behind the times. But I could see that even the smallest of houses boasted a satellite dish, and they probably all had broadband internet connections, too. Even as I was laughing at the garden gnomes on display in front of a neat yellow bungalow, someone behind those net curtains might be looking at my own terraced house in Bristol, horrified by what the unrestrained growth of ivy was doing to the brickwork.

  Curious to know how my home appeared to others, I typed in my own address, and enjoyed a stroll around the neighborhood without leaving my desk. I checked out a few less-familiar addresses, including Michael’s current abode, which I had never seen. So that was Goring-on-Sea!

  At last I dragged myself away and wrote catalogue copy, had a long talk with one of our suppliers, and dealt with various other bits and pieces before knocking off for the day. Neither of us fancied going out, and we’d been consuming too many pizzas lately, so David whipped up an old favorite from the minimal supplies in the kitchen cupboard: spaghetti with marmite, tasty enough when accompanied by a few glasses of Merlot.

  My husband David and I marketed children’s apparel and accessories under the name “Cheeky Chappies.” It was exactly the sort of business I had imagined setting up in my rural idyll, surrounded by the patter of little feet, filling orders between changing nappies and making delicious, sustaining soups from the organic vegetables Michael planned to grow.

  None of that came to pass, not even the vegetables. Michael did what he could, but we needed his income as a sales rep to survive, so he was nearly always on the road, which left me to take charge of everything at home, supervising the building work in between applying for jobs and grants, drawing up unsatisfactory business plans, and utterly failing in my mission to become pregnant.

  Hard times can bring a couple together, but that is not how it worked for us. I grew more and more miserable, convinced I was a failure both as a woman and as a potential CEO. It did not help that Michael was away so much, and although it was not his fault and we needed the money, I grew resentful at having to spend so much time and energy servicing a house I’d never really wanted.

  He’d drawn me into his dream of an old-fashioned life in the country, and then slipped out of sharing the major part of it with me. At the weekend, with him there, it was different, but most of the time I felt lonely and bored, lumbered with too many chores and not enough company, far from friends and family, cut off from the entertainments and excitement of urban existence.

  Part of the problem was the house—not at all what we’d dreamed of, but cheap enough, and with potential to be transformed into something better. We’d been jumped into buying it by circumstances. Once Michael had accepted a very good offer on his flat (our flat, he called it, but it was entirely his investment) a new urgency entered into our formerly relaxed house-hunting expeditions. I had loved those weekends away from the city, staying in B&Bs and rooms over village pubs, every moment rich with possibility and new discoveries. I would have been happy to go on for months, driving down to the west country, looking at properties and imagining what our life might be like in this house or that, but suddenly there was a time limit, and this was the most serious decision of our lives, and not just a bit of fun.

  The happiest part of my first marriage now seems to have been compressed into half a dozen weekends, maybe a few more, as we traveled around, the inside of the car like an enchanted bubble filled with love and laughter, jokes and personal revelations and music. I loved everything we saw. Even the most impossible, ugly houses were fascinating, providing material for discussing the strangeness of other people’s lives. Yet although I was interested in them all, nothing we viewed actually tempted me. Somehow, I couldn’t imagine I would ever really live in the country—certainly not the practicalities of it. I expected our life to continue like this, work in the city punctuated by these mini-holidays, until we found the perfect house, at which point I’d stop working and start producing babies and concentrate on buying their clothes and toys and attractive soft furnishings and decorations for the house as if money was not and could never be a problem.

  And then one day, traveling between the viewing of one imperfect property to look at another which would doubtless be equally unsatisfactory in
its own unique way, Blondie in the cassette player singing about hanging on the telephone, we came to an abrupt halt. Michael stopped the car at the top of a hill, on one of those narrow, hedge-lined lanes that aren’t even wide enough for two normal sized cars to pass each other without the sort of jockeying and breath-holding maneuvers that in my view are acceptable only when parallel parking. I thought he must have seen another car approaching, and taken evasive action, although the road ahead looked clear.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Wrong? Nothing. It’s perfect. Don’t you think it’s perfect?”

  I saw what he was looking at through a gap in the hedge: a distant view of an old-fashioned, white-washed, thatch-roofed cottage nestled in one of those deep, green valleys that in Devonshire are called coombs. It was a pretty sight, like a Victorian painting you might get on a box of old-fashioned chocolates, or a card for Mother’s Day. For some reason, it made my throat tighten and I had to blink back sentimental tears, feeling a strong yearning, not so much for that specific house as for what it seemed to promise: safety, stability, family. I could see myself there, decades in the future, surrounded by children and grandchildren, dressed in clothes from Laura Ashley.

  “It’s very sweet,” I said, embarrassed by how emotional I felt.

  “It’s exactly what we’ve been looking for,” he said.

  “It’s probably not for sale.”

  “All it takes is the right offer.” That was his theory: not so much that everything had its price, as that he could achieve whatever goal he set himself. It was more about attitude than money.

  “But what if they feel the same way about it as we do?”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  “The people that live there.”

  “But you feel it? What I feel? That it’s where we want to live?”

  I thought about the children—grandchildren, even!—in their quaint floral smocks—and nodded.

  He kissed me. “All right!” he cried, joyously, releasing the hand-brake. “Let’s go!”