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

“What, praytell, is the name of your companion?” I managed to ask. “Will your friend be staying here long? Shall I tell the servants to prepare a room?”

“My companion’s name is Night,” my husband said, as though I ought to know already.

The thing looked at me, and it glittered like a sky full of stars, but it was a lacunae in the center of the darkness, a place where a star had died, and beyond the edge of the dark there was something much worse, a roiling red planet, hidden behind a thin black veil.

“And where did you meet?” I asked, my voice that of a polite hostess. I had in my hands a tray of cordial, and I could hear the glasses rattling, but I held myself as steady as I could.

“Thule,” said the thing, its voice a hiss containing an unlikely mellifluence. I felt myself sway at its sweetness. “Thule was my kingdom, but I am banished by a mortal dreamer. I was the ruler of Thule, and now I shall bide a time with you while I seek for the dreamer who dares injure me.”

“I found my friend on the ship,” said my husband seemingly oblivious to the creature’s foulness. “A stowaway, fled from the land of dreams. And oh, that such a one could be hidden amongst coiled ropes.” He turned to look at the creature, and on his face there was nothing but worship.

I turned and walked back up the stair, feeling eyes on my spine. I went directly to my own chamber, and locked the door behind me, pressing my back to the wood, gasping.

I was the ruler of Thule . The creature said again in my mind, and the words resonated terribly inside me, over and over.”

I looked at the innkeeper, and her eyes were on mine, steady. She nodded.

“Thule,” she repeated. “I thought as much.”

I continued.

“From that night forward, I listened to the sound of whispers, but I never knew what they discussed. My husband took to drink, and the stowaway took to meat. The butcher brought us wrapped packets, tied tightly with red string, and in these late days, whenever I saw any red fabric, I thought of this, the way that string had unspooled down our front staircase, twisting like intestines on the white marble of the floor.

It was not long before my husband was dead. I looked into his open grave on a snowy day in February and saw something at the bottom of it, dozens of long and tangled arms embracing the coffin. Inside it, his frozen body bore the marks of hooves. In the official version, he died of drink.

My woe continued with my husband’s death, for though he left me his fortune, he also left me the stowaway. I spent my evenings sitting in the dark, opposite a pair of glowing eyes. And so went my misery, nearly twenty years of it.

The creature was neither husband nor companion. We shared the house, but that was all. The stowaway did not visit my bed, nor did it seem eager to woo me to any unsavory realm. It went about its own business, sometimes leaving a trail of blood or of thick, black fluid. In the night, I’d wake to sounds I couldn’t parse, shrills and moans, a music like a piano being dragged down a flight of metal stairs, the scuttlings of animals both small and large, but the stowaway did not speak to me with its honeyed voice, nor did it touch me with its burning fingertips.

It did not, that is, until one fateful night six months prior to this evening. That night is the reason I am here now.”

I looked to my audience. She had leaned forward in her chair, drawing her shawl more tightly about her shoulders.

“Go on,” she said eagerly, but I could not. The knowledge of the thing I carried had overwhelmed me, and it was necessary I retreat to my chamber. It was too dark. Night had fallen, and I no longer trusted myself to remain among humans.

“I have heard many tales,” the innkeeper said. “It may be that I can assist you, whatever it is.”

“Tomorrow,” I told her. “I will tell you the rest of my woe, and you will counsel me, if indeed you can. For tomorrow, I may be liberated from the misery that has haunted me.”

“A sleeping draught,” she said, offering me a hot cup, though sleep was beyond me. I could not allow myself true unconsciousness, not with my burden.

In my bedchamber, a brick at my feet, I sat up in my wrapper, a feeling of possibility in my chest. I was feverish, yes, and my skin was damp with it, but tomorrow there would be a portrait, and the portrait would save me. The portrait would free me.

At last, fearing dreams and the consequences of same, I removed certain items from my case: chains, locks, a key. I twined the chains about the posts of the bed, and around my ankles, and locked myself into place. The key, I threw to the cushion across the room, out of my reach, and thus secured, I allowed my eyes to close. There could be no more dawns like the ones of the past sixmonth, waking to find myself alongside the river, the pale gray light, my hands clutching at small mementoes, but nothing more to tell what I had done. I could not allow that to happen here. There would be no wandering along the bay, no waking choking in an alleyway, my mouth wet and my clothing torn, not from the outside, but from within, the seams stretched and the bones bent.

In dreams I walked, and in dreams I stalked, and in dreams I did things I would never do in the waking world.

Inside my heart, the stowaway whispered endlessly in verse, a sad lament and a hunger for words. Inside my skin, the monster languished, longing and lonely, but nothing of its loneliness was kind. It sent me dreams of ghosts and of ladies walking into the ocean. It sent me dreams of death.

The monster is invented on a whim, a ruler for a kingdom of woe. Night, sitting enthroned in a dark city, looking out over stones and water, decreeing all those who wake to wander blind within Thule.

Now, Night walks with ice inside it, seeking heat. Night moves between dreams and not, through the corners of gazes, out the edges of windows. There is no place a shadow can’t bide, and it hides in lockets and scent bottles, in barrels full of salted fish. The monster is resourceful. It flattens itself between folds of an overcoat, and when the coat is donned, the monster latches on, its mouth full of teeth, enough to consume a man in moments. A long night can make an explorer lost, and this night is long. This is an Arctic evening, twenty hours of darkness, and with each hour, the night devours ships, crews, husbands, captains.

Night is disappointed, consuming wishes and letters, consuming last words, but none of them the words of its maker. It hungers for even a faint lantern lit on deck during a storm. Night was king in Thule, and then its maker fell in love, only to wreck on a shoal far from the northern clouds.

Look at that beach made of broken bones, look at that sea made of ink, look at the way Thule can expand and shrink again, the unknown country vaster than any other. Look at this country of ghosts. They are all ghosts here, all but Night, who lives on fire and blood. Night is the loneliest ruler, on a black throne, and up the throne’s sides rise dark water.

At last, Night flees, killing ghosts and leaving them in their white shrouds, seeking another ending to the story. There is no joy in Thule, not written, not lived, and in Thule the monster is in misery.

The monster slips into a ship leaving Thule for the world. Dream trade and export, slaves imported in again. There are those in the waking world who never wake, shanghaied onto ships of sleepers, corpses crimped.

Night stows itself in a crow’s nest and pretends to be a raven, perched on the basket to look out over the sea, and when the crew ascends, they see only a bird. Night hides in black feathers. The Thule ruler revises itself, a secret hid amongst coils of rope.