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

The story was gross, and it had all the macabre glee you would expect from a St. John chiller. But I didn’t feel scared by it. No, what upset me most was its sense of futility. The doctor had given up on hope. He wasn’t waiting for rescue. He didn’t believe anyone else in the world was alive. He was simply… persisting. If he was the last man on earth he wanted to last as long as possible. It was grotesque. Why didn’t he open the door? That’s what Luca would said when I tried to explain the plot him. But then Luca was the kind of man who would have opened the door. He couldn’t see another way of living.

Another hour passed. Eventually the receptionist waved me over. Her manicured nails glinted dully in the light. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said, “but the records from those years haven’t been maintained. I didn’t even know we were the ones who published Barron St. John.” She gave a little laugh.

I asked her what that meant for me.

“No one’s free to meet you. We converted to digital years ago,” she said, barely sparing me a glance. “Whatever we had we dumped back then. Besides, who reads that trash anyway?”

After that I found myself at loose ends so I called up a friend of mine, Benny Perry.

Benny and I had gone to grad school together at the University of Toronto, both of us doing doctorates in medieval literature in those early days after the financial crash when we still thought the market would recover enough to give us jobs. I’d kept at it, spinning my work on the scribal culture that produced Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales into a postdoc in Oxford and then riding that into a full-time position in Publishing Studies of all things at a former polytechnic university. It wasn’t glamorous, not like Oxford had been, but I liked the students, I liked my colleagues and I liked the work itself: imagining how books moved through time and all the people who left their mark on them along the way.

Benny had taken another route. He’d always had talent with photography and after he dropped out of the program he’d moved to New York and taken a job with House & Garden before it closed. It’d paid well enough that he’d stuck with photography, jumping from one magazine to another until he had enough of a portfolio to go freelance. He’d taken one of those famous pictures of Trump, the one where his face seems to be receding into the folds of flesh around his neck. In the past couple of months I’d seen it on social media from time and reprinted in the papers.

“It’s made things a bit hard for me,” Benny told me as we sat sipping margaritas in The Lantern’s Keep, a classy place near Times Square where the cocktails cost four times what they would at home. There had been a teary week before Luca and I made our decision when I’d given up alcohol, and even after we changed our minds I still hadn’t felt like touching the stuff. This was the first drink I’d had in eight months.

“How do you mean?”

“Well it’s brought me lots of attention, sure, but not the good kind, you know? Trump supporters hate that picture. Trump does too, which is why it gets recycled so often.”

Benny’s face looked strained and he fidgeted with his glass. He wasn’t quite how I remembered him. Benny was always a big man, a cornfed Iowa type whose Baptist parents had taught him to shun dancing and drink. When I’d met him at orientation he’d been shy, a bit overwhelmed. But after those first awkward weeks he’d just thrown himself into everything. He had this irrepressible love of the new, and he’d taken to those things he’d missed out on most: booze, women—then men, dancing late into the night with this kind of unselfconscious clumsiness which made you want to join in.

He was much thinner now, that kind of thinness that didn’t look healthy. “I’m worried about Emmanuel,” he said, “worried about… well. Anyway. People can be absolute shits, can’t they?”

I agreed that they could.

“But you’re looking good,” Benny said, and I caught his eyes skimming over my breasts. Even though it didn’t mean anything coming from him I still blushed and pulled at the cardigan. “But not… I don’t know, maybe not entirely good?” he was going on. “Hell. I don’t know what I’m trying to say.”

I took his hand gently and told him not to worry about it.

As The Lantern’s Keep started to fill up eventually we wandered out into the street. It was hot and swampy, that kind of early August weather that makes you feel as if you’ve been wrapped in a damp blanket and beaten. We headed south toward the West Village by foot so I could see the sights. North was Central Park and Trump Towers, which were all basically off limits now. New York hadn’t changed so much, not in terms of that strange and beautiful blend of architecture and anger, but there were bits that alarmed me. Like all the police cars all had stickers listing the reward for information on cop-killers with a number you could call.

While I told Benny about the project I was working on. It turned out he’d read St. John as a kid, which surprised me, given his background.

“What I remember about him was that my parents were reading him. They never read anything like that otherwise. Murder and cannibalism and demons and all that stuff. But Faction of Fire , you know, it was all about faith, wasn’t it? In that book there was no getting around it: The Devil was real. And I suppose that’s what my parents thought anyway. Good and evil weren’t abstract concepts to them. There were good folk and there were bad folk. And it wasn’t just that the bad folk made bad decisions. They were… bad . It was something more fundamental. Badness worked through them. It was something tangible, real. And St. John, well, his books were all about that, weren’t they?”

Benny grinned at me and for a moment I could see his younger self peering out, that kid who’d never touched a drop of liquor in his life before I met him.

“How’re your parents doing?” I asked him because that was the kind of thing we were supposed to ask one another now that we weren’t kids anymore.

“Dad had a stroke two years ago,” Benny said with a shrug. “I go back when I can to help her out. She’s lonely, I know, but whenever I do go we just end up fighting.”

I didn’t ask him about Emmanuel, about whether his parents knew. I figured probably they did. There were enough profiles floating around about Benny’s photos so you could only avoid knowing if you really tried.

“How are you and Luca doing?”

“Good.”

“He didn’t want to come with you?”

“Couldn’t get away. You know how it is with these NGOs. Anytime he leaves he feels like he’s letting people down.”

“It’s good what he’s doing,” Benny told me. “We need more people like him right now.” After a moment he stretched and I heard the joints in his shoulders pop. “It must be hard writing horror stories now, you know? It seems like that’s all we’ve got these days. I can’t bear to watch the news anymore.”

I didn’t sleep well that night. When I’d glanced at the papers they were filled with stories about tensions escalating, something to do with the South China Sea islands and whether the US was being too aggressive. John McCain was trying to dial things back but you could tell he was getting tired of it. His eyes looked sharp and a little bit scared.

I’d had panic attacks all throughout the October leading up to the election. There’d been Brexit, of course, our own particular mess. At a conference last summer an American colleague had told me, “What we’re seeing is radical politics. People stopped believing that they mattered to the system—but all that’s different now. It’s exciting, isn’t it? Anything could happen.” Trump had seemed funny back then, dangerous but still avoidable. They called it all a horror show but you could tell there was fascination underneath it all. How close could we come to disaster? But Hillary was ahead in the polls. Some of the Republicans were denouncing Trump, trying to put a little distance between themselves for when the eventual shellacking came on November eighth.