Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

He wrings the night into dawn. He covers pages with calligraphed serpents, a poem twisting into a story filled with another story, a novel pushing against the edges of the paper. As he writes, his kingdom comes into being, and he breathes life into it, his fingers leaving prints on the pages, his companion beginning to take shape, an appetite made of points of light, a creature made of the hours of an insomniac.

If a man makes a monster, he wonders, is he responsible for it? If one is the master of the monster, what happens when the monster is left alone? Does it wander in wrath? Does it rage? The poet does not consider his monster’s future. He makes it and sets it free in his kingdom.

The poet is a young man when he begins to build the kingdom called Thule, and he builds for years.

He dreams alongside his dreamers, and in the waking world, he wanders, writing roads alongside his own, sometimes crossing them. A dream within a dream, he thinks. Thule and its king with his dark heart and longing for love, Thule and its ruler, its forests, its floods of ghosts. Dream-land, he thinks, embroidering the edges of a realm stitched in silver.

Into the drawer of the desk the poet puts his Thule, locked and keyed, while he goes into his own life, a marriage, a misery, years of scrimping and sickness, a beach, a bride, a breaking.

Thule continues about its business without its god, and when the poet returns to it and publishes a map of its boundaries, the companion he invented as a young man has been roaming the earth for years.

There has been a dead wife washed up on the shores of Thule, her name Annabel or Lenore, or…

Call this body Virginia. Call this, that was a girl, a ghost with violet eyes and black hair, dead at the age of twenty-four, consumed.

The poet opens his drawer, and finds his kingdom of grim comforts. He looks into the distance, seeking the raven-shaped heart, the starry skin, the sharp teeth, but the creature is nowhere to be found.

The poet remembers a ship left sailing into the line of the horizon, but he can’t recall the direction, not with a compass, not with the sun. Dim, the land he made as a boy, and darkness abutting the edges. But out of that land, in the brightness of the world, there is something he made, and he must capture it.

He writes a trap for the monster, a story filled with dreamers. A woman, a demon, a journey, a town by the water and something floating out in the harbor. He writes a tale for himself to inhabit, a dream within a dream.

This tale.

There are certain stories, any reader knows, that recur in towns boundaried by water. A captain’s wife stares into a gale, and suddenly her husband’s face appears in that green-gray miasma, a vision of his wrack and ruin. Ghostly sailors struggle from the waves, only to fall back again. Ships are found adrift, crews missing. Messages in bottles are discovered ten years after their sender’s drowning, inscribed with predictions of futures unlived.

I need not remind the reader, gentle or no, that these tales are fictions made of desire, that the act of missing a beloved may conjure miracles. For myself, I never held with such. I held with hope, and so I came to Providence for a worldly version of Salvation, in the year eighteen hundred and forty-eight, carrying an umbrella and wearing a long dress, my hem draggling in the mud.

No one turned head to look at me when I emerged from my carriage. I was no longer a girl, but a woman of nearly thirty-five. I’d had money, and then I had none, or at least none in hand. A cutpurse I never saw, and that was gone, though in the hem of my skirt I’d sewn enough to carry me. I was no innocent. By all accounts I was a lost cause and a fallen woman.

The mistress of the inn was slender, with bones that ridged through her skin in distinct knobs.

“I am Mrs. MacFarlane,” I informed her, with as much dignity as I could. “My husband is delayed on the road.”

She looked into my eyes and offered a tight smile. I felt certain that my ruse had not been accepted.

“And every husband is delayed on the road,” she said. “And every road leads to hell.”

It was not as though I had better options. The accommodations were homely but the linens were of a fine hand. The food was good and plain.

I’d come to Providence to make a portrait, a particular rendition of my own visage, and the man I meant to meet had no notion I was coming. It was a wild afternoon in November, and my arrival was veiled by weather. I had no wish to be recognized, and so the rain bothered me not at all, though when I ascended to my room, I hung my dress to dry and returned to the dining room in another gown, this one charcoal hatched with violet stripes, a changeable taffeta petticoat in rose and canary.

In the daguerreotype I planned, I’d look like a woman dressed in dark, but in truth, I was as a nightbird’s wing, flashing my colors. There was a whimsy in that, and though I had suffered, I still had enough humor to see the wit of a woman garbed in silk peacockery, appearing, when drained of color, to be a widow in mourning. I wanted levity in the daguerreotype, if indeed I would be carrying it with me for the rest of my life.

I sat at a small table with a plate of boiled meat, and the innkeeper kept my tea hot. There were curtains hanging all about me, toile printed with scenes of exploration in some unknown country, a legacy of a former life. They were of French manufacture, I believed, though this town was on the eastern coast of America. I ate quietly, contemplating my mission, considering the streets with their cobblestones, the daguerreotypist’s parlor, the items in my valise upstairs.

Eventually the innkeeper emerged again. She’d taken down her hair and drawn a muted paisley shawl about her shoulders. Her hair was an unlikely platinum, near enough to white that I’d thought her older than she was, and it was loose now, in waves down from her pins. It was beautiful, though she was not. It seemed to me that this mattered, though I’d known beautiful women dead in the same circumstances as those whose faces had less grace. Beauty, it seemed to me, was a lie told to girls, a fairytale of prospects and princes, and as my own face had aged, I’d come to wonder whether anything of it was truth at all. Whatever beauty I possessed had only brought me trouble.

“A sip for a storm,” the innkeeper said. I looked at her, feeling weary, though the fire blazed up, and it was warm enough in the room. I’d left New York scarcely recovered from the last fever, and from the ghastliness thereafter. This portrait and photographer were my only hope.

She sat opposite me. I could smell her perfume, a mixture of salts and camphor.

She poured sherry, her hand steady, and I could see her smile, though her head was bowed. It was a smile that said she knew my history. Some jilting, some man turned marauder, or perhaps wed to another lovelier than I. Perhaps she thought I’d promised myself to a sailor, and now waited in vain for his bones to walk out from the bay.

I saw her glance at my waistline, but there was nothing there to betray me. No, what inhabited me hid more efficiently than that.

Beneath my dress, I wore a strand of beads made of amber, the better to absorb the energy of the thing I carried. Sometimes at night I woke, chilled and sweating, gasping, unable to swallow, but I was here, was I not? I’d managed the journey. It had been a question, my body racked with spasms, curled against the hard leather seat.

I’d twisted my wedding ring seven times around my finger, and then taken it off and put it on a chain about my neck for fear of losing it. My father was certain I’d acquired it of a tinker, roadside shine bought as an additive to my delusions of a paramour. He understood nothing.