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

On a corner table inside the door was a huge, nasty religious mess. Ugly dolls, rat bones, weird trash. If all Satan’s blue-black devils had wifed all God’s blue-blond saints, then a gaudy likeness of their brats was painted on the clutter of seven-day glass candles. She went over to take a look. Breathing through some open window the moment after Anhell followed her in, a breeze slammed the front door shut. The sudden breathless dark had him slapping at the walls desperately until he found the lights. She sneered. “Come peep this. She was on some real hoodoo shit.”

“No, mami.” He came over reluctantly. “This ain’t Voodoo or Santería, ni nada parecido. Your Auntie ain’t bought nunna this at no botánica. Look at that.”

“Yeah? A cross—so what?”

“You don’t see nothing weird about it?”

Though fancy and heavy-looking as real silver, it was just cheap ass plastic junk when she thumped a finger against it. Rather than about-to-die, the face of Jesus looked more like a man nutting, but apart from the crucifix being upside down she couldn’t see what had Anhell all freaked out. She shrugged.

Anhell was superstitious. His grandma had wanted him to go to Miami for some expensive Catholic thing, accepting his saint or some shit like that. But his trifling ass had just bought tracksuits, Jordans, and smoked up all the money she’d left him. Now, he touched the bare skin of his neck as if there should’ve been beads hanging there, some guardian angel to call on today of all days. Her pretty babyboy, so full of regret! She saw how she could fuck with him.

There was a Poland Spring, label ripped off, in the middle of all that voodoo mess. She picked it up.

“You can’t drink that, ’Nisha!”

“It ain’t even been open yet.” She cracked the seal, untwisting the cap to show him. To fuck with him. “It’s clean.”

“It’s blessed water,” Anhell said. “ Cursed —blessed, I don’t know what! But I swear to God, don’t drink it, ’Nisha.”

“Mmm,” she sighed, after gulping down half the bottle. “I was sooo thirsty, though…!”

He got quiet, but she could read these signs from being hugged up with him on the couch so many nights. Forcing him to watch the kind of movies she laughed at, but turned him into a motherless six-year-old, afraid of the dark. While she rummaged the apartment, pulling out drawers and dumping worthless old lady trash onto the floor, Anhell followed close, brushing up against her as if onna’ccident. He was scared as shit and wishing she’d change the channel. But, no, nigga. This is the show. This is what we’re watching.

Not under the mattress, not in the dresser, she didn’t find a fat stash of benjis anywhere. Ratty old bras, holey socks, musty dresses. She sorted highspeed through a folder labeled “important papers,” dropping a blizzard to the ground as her audit turned up nothing but Social Security and Con Ed stubs, obituaries clipped from newspapers, yellowing funeral programs. Her father’s. But the treasure had to be buried in here somewhere . Anhell came to sit by her on the edge of the coffee table. He jumped to his feet when it teetered up like a seesaw. There!

“Get that end,” she said.

They dumped over the coffee table top, its old school Ebony s and dish of peppermints scattering. Underneath was a trunk, a real pirate ass looking trunk. Now we’re talking!

No hinges or latches were visible on it, but when Anhell tried to pry up the lid, he fell back on his butt, saying, “Shit’s locked up tight .”

She said, “No, it ain’t,” and effortlessly lifted the lid herself. Folded up inside was a tall, tall man or woman, long-dead and withered black and dry as stale raisins, their longest bones broken to fit fetus-style in the confines of the chest. Anhell screamed all girly and jumped back onto the couch. She rolled her eyes at him. “ Dead. And how many times I told you what dead means?” she said. “Can’t do nothing to you, Anhell. Nothing to worry about!” He started whining but she ignored him.

There were two things in there with the body (its skin cheap-feeling, just leather ish , like a hundred-dollar sofa from the ghetto furniture store, and the body weightless and unresisting as piled laundry). One was a shotgun that could have come from the Civil War, half made of wood. She set it aside. The other was her baby, a knife equal in length and width to her own arm, its handle protruding from a rawhide sheath.

You-know-who sidles up and offers… what? Change . Not for the better, not for the worse, just a change . But one so huge that you can’t even dream it from the miserable little spot, miserable little moment you’re at now. And don’t go expecting wishes granted, or that kind of boring shit, because transformation belongs to a whole ’nother category. But, oh, babygirl, this could be a wild hot ride. Are you down?

Anhell had slipped off the couch and knelt beside her. He was reaching toward the shotgun, but hesitating too… up until she did it. Until she pulled out the long knife, no, machète , from the leather sheath that flaked apart in her hands like ancient pages from an ancient book. Anhell picked up the gun.

Oh, fuck yeah!

It felt like being at the club, three, fo’ drinks in, every chick in the place hating, every nigga tryna holler—and then your song come on. The beat drop. She felt loose as a motherfucker. “Ooo, Anhell.” Groaning, she wedged the heel of a hand down between her thighs. “You feel that, too?”

Yeah, the nigga was feeling it! She oughta know that look on his face by now, about to bust a really good one.

She tested the machète’s edge with a fingertip and found it all the way dull, however sharp it looked. Even pressing down hard against the edge hardly dented the pad of her thumb.

Anhell, too, reached out wanting to test the edge of that weird machète. But then he sort of thought twice, stopped short, and shied his hand right on back again. Just like that, she got it. Understood all the possibilities for black magic murder. “Come on, papi,” she purred, cat-malicious. “Don’t you wanna see what kinda edge it got?” She nudged the machète out toward him— very recklessly. Woulda cut his ass, too, if he hadna jumped back so quick. “You ain’t skurt, is you?”

She was getting her hands all wet in somebody’s blood today. That was for damn sure.

“Whoa, ’Nisha! Why you playing, though? Back up with that!”

Keys rattled in the lock and the front door swung open.

Two dudes in Dickies and T-shirts came in talking whatever they do over there in Czechoslovakia or Ukraine. The workers were the right color to come to New York and get fat business loans or good union jobs right off the boat, buying a house on a tree-lined street, and all set up for the good life, before their kids even graduated high school. Perhaps for supernatural reasons they didn’t notice the shotgun and machète. For natural ones, she and Anhell weren’t invisible exactly, but seemed to the workers’ eyes only two vague black and brown shapes where they didn’t belong.

“You, Miss Jean-Louis? Boss said you gotta be outta here by five o’clock.” The law on his side, one of the Serbians held up some important piece of paper, typed, with signatures, etc. “Or we call the cops.”

It was instinct. It was thirst . Pivoting, she swung like a Cuban phenom at bat who’d better hit that fucking ball or take his damn ass back to the island. Best believe she hit. A red-hot knife would’ve had more trouble with butter, the Polack’s astonished trunk separated from his bottom two-thirds so easily. Blood and viscera went splashing by the bucketful but none, impossibly, hit the ground.