Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

Tabby seemed to like it.

When she asked if there were pictures, Kerry knew better, and didn’t show her the ones she had, didn’t even acknowledge their existence. The ones taken from Colonel Escovedo’s office while the rains drenched the wreckage, after she’d helped the few survivors that she could, the others dead or past noticing what she might take from the office of their commanding officer, whom nobody could locate anyway.

The first eight photos Tabby would’ve found boring. As for the ninth, Kerry wasn’t sure she could explain to a six-year-old what exactly it showed, or even to herself. Wasn’t sure she could make a solid case for what was the mouth and what was the eye, much less explain why such a thing was allowed to exist.

One of them, at least, should sleep well while they were here.

Came the day, at last, in early February, when her binoculars revealed more than the tranquil pool of the harbor, the snow and ice crusted atop the breakwater, the sullen chop of the winter-blown sea. Against the slate-colored water, they were small, moving splotches the color of algae. They flipped like seals, rolled like otters. They crawled onto the ragged dark stone of Devil Reef, where they seemed to survey the kingdom they’d once known, all that had changed about it and all that hadn’t.

And then they did worse.

Even if something was natural, she realized, you could still call it a perversity.

Was it preference? Was it celebration? Or was it blind obedience to an instinct they didn’t even have to capacity to question? Not that it mattered. Here they were, finally, little different from salmon now, come back to their headwaters to breed, indulging an urge eighty-some years strong.

It was only a six-block walk to the harbor, and she had the two of them there in fifteen minutes. This side of Water Street, the wharves and warehouses were deserted, desolate, frosted with frozen spray and groaning with every gust of wind that came snapping in over the water.

She wrenched open the wide wooden door to one of the smaller buildings, the same as she’d been doing every other day or so, the entire time they’d been here, first to find an abandoned rowboat, and then to make sure it was still there. She dragged it down to the water’s edge, plowing a furrow in a crust of old snow, and once it was in the shallows, swung Tabby into it, then hopped in after. She slipped the oars into the rusty oarlocks, and they were off.

“Mama …?” Tabitha said after they’d pushed past the breakwater and cleared the mouth of the harbor for open sea. “Are you crying?”

In rougher waters now, the boat heaved beneath them. Snow swirled in from the depths overhead and clung to her cheeks, eyelashes, hair, and refused to melt. She was that cold. She was always that cold.

“Maybe a little,” Kerry said.

“How come?”

“It’s just the wind. It stings my eyes.”

She pulled at the oars, aiming for the black line of the reef. Even if no one else might’ve, even if she could no longer see them, as they hid within the waves, she heard them sing a song of jubilation, a song of wrath and hunger. Their voices were the sound of a thousand waking nightmares.

To pass the time, she told Tabby a story, grafting it to all the other tales she’d told about kingdoms under the sea where people lived forever, and rode whales and danced with dolphins, and how they may not have been very pleasant to look at, but that’s what made them love the beautiful little girl from above the waves, and welcome her as their princess.

Tabby seemed to like it.

Ahead, at the reef, they began to rise from the water and clamber up the rock again, spiny and scaled, finned and fearless. Others began to swim out to meet the boat. Of course they recognized her, and she them. She’d sat with nearly a third of them, trying trying trying to break through from the wrong side of the shore.

While they must have schemed like fiends to drag her deep into theirs.

I bring you this gift , she would tell them, if only she could make herself heard over their jeering in her head. Now could you please just set me free?

Abbott, Megan “My Heart Is Either Broken,” Dangerous Women .

Allan, Nina, Vivian Guppy and the Brighton Belle (novella), Rustblind and Silverbright .

Antosca, Nick, “Burial Grounds,” Exotic Gothic 5 Volume I .

Atkins, Peter, “Postcards From Abroad,” The Imposter’s Monocle .

Barron, Laird, “Ardor,” Suffered From the Night .

Barron, Laird, Termination Dust (novella), Tales of Jack the Ripper .

Cadigan, Pat, Chalk , This is Horror, chapbook.

Chinn, Mike, “Cheechee’s Out,” Second City Scares .

Cluley, Ray, “The Festering,” Black Static #36 .

Crow, Jennifer, “Anna They Have Killed” (poem), Mythic Delirium issue 0.2 .

Ford, Jeffrey, “A Terror,” Tor.com July.

Frost, Gregory, “No Others Are Genuine,” Asimov’s SF. Oct/November.

Gardner, Cate, This Foolish & Harmful (novella), The Transfiguration of Mister Punch .

Gavin, Richard, “A Cavern of Redbrick,” Shadows & Tall Trees, #5 .

Gerrold, David, “Night Train to Paris,” F&SF January.

Grant, John, “Memoryville Blues,” Memoryville Blues .

Graves, Rain, “Hades and its Five: The Ferryman” (poem), Four Elements .

Harman, Christopher, “Dark Tracks,” Supernatural Tales 25 .

Hobson, M.K., “Baba Makosh,” F&SF November/December.

Hodge, Brian, “We, The Fortunate Bereaved,” Halloween .

Hook, Andrew, “Rain from a Clear Blue Sky,” Black Static #33 .

Janes, Andrea, “The Last Wagon in the Train,” The Tenth Black Book of Horror .

Johnstone, Carole, “21 Brooklands: Next to Old Western…” For the Night is Dark .

Jones, Stephen Graham, “Interstate Love Affair,” Three Miles Past .

Kiernan, Caitlín R., Black Helicopters (novella), chapbook.

Langan, John, Mother of Stone (novella), The Wide, Carnivorous Sky .

Llewellyn, Livia, “Furnace,” The Grimscribe’s Puppets .

Maberry, Jonathan, “Mister Pockets,” Dark Visions 1 .

Marolla, Samuel, “Black Tea,” Black Tea and Other Tales .

McHugh, Ian, “Vandiemensland,” Next .

Miéville, China, “The Design,” McSweeney’s 45.

Nevill, Adam, “Always in Our Hearts,” End of the Road .

Nickle, David, “Black Hen a La Ford,” In Words, Alas, Drown I.

Oliver, Reggie, “Come into My Parlour,” Dark World: Ghost Stories .

Oliver, Reggie, “The Silken Drum,” Fearie Tales .

Partridge, Norman, The Mummy’s Heart (novella), Halloween .

Reed, Kit, “The Legend of Troop 13,” Asimov’s Science Fiction January.

Schanoes, Veronica, Burning Girls (novella), Tor.com June.

Schanoes, Veronica, “Phosphorus,” Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells .

Schow, David.J., “A Home in the Dark,” Nightmare #15 December.

Snyder, Maria V., “The Halloween Men,” Halloween .

Swirsky, Rachel, “Abomination Rises on Filthy Wings,” Apex #50 .

Tem, Steve Rasnic, “Bedtime Story,” Black Static #32 .

Volk, Stephen, “The Peter Lorre Fan Club,” The Burning Circus .

Warren, Kaaron, “The Unwanted Women of Surrey,” Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells .

Warrick, Douglas R., “Rattenkónig,” Vampires Don’t Sparkle/Plow the Bones .