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

Knees complaining, Sir Henry stood up with another grunt. Ignoring the dirt on his clothes, he broke the seal and unrolled the furled vellum. Just as he’d hoped: the last surviving copy of the abbot’s blasphemous treatise. Brushing dust from his jacket-sleeve, Sir Henry decided to leave Lady Godiva for the night, despite the fact that she was one of his favorites. He only hoped that one day, when he was no more than a shadow, someone would be as kind to him.

The next morning dawned gray and stormy. Sea rain clattered against the windowpane as the wind swirled and howled. Sir Henry awoke with an aching head. His only solace was that the abbot probably didn’t feel any better despite—or perhaps because of—a night spent discussing the miracle of transmutation.

At breakfast, his housekeeper informed him that DeMains had sent a message boy. The project was ready to view. Swallowing some peppermint water, Sir Henry wiped his lips and set out for the west wing, his heart beating in his chest.

At the doorway to DeMains’s inner sanctum, Sir Henry paused. In an unusual moment of self-reflection, he wondered about the wisdom of the path he was about to tread. Why go through the trouble of winning a girl back from the dead only to then sacrifice her to the demons of the sea?

DeMains was right, times had changed, and sacrificing a living girl would be too dangerous. Yet the thought of abandoning such beauty to the demons of this place troubled and angered him. When it came to magic, he was competent enough, but he knew he could never best that vast power that crashed against stone and beach and cliff face, eating away at the land with its omnivorous hunger. Had it not consumed his father when he’d defied it? It was like time itself—eternal, intractable, beyond the power of any mortal to control.

“But occasionally it can be shaped to one’s will,” Sir Henry whispered to himself. “That, a mere mortal can do.” He opened the door.

The first thing Henry saw when he entered was a sculptor’s stand and on top of it, his newest darling veiled in sea-green velvet. DeMains came out of the back room, assiduously wiping his hands on a towel. He was smiling.

“I worked all night,” he said. “She’s far from finished, but I think you’ll like what you see.”

Sir Henry unveiled his prize. The pins were still visible and DeMains had only roughed in the fundamental musculature, but her eyes were in place, green as malachite.

“She has a soul, now,” Sir Henry said.

“Or will soon,” DeMains replied. “Have you thought of a name for her yet?”

“Lady Galatea,” Sir Henry replied.

DeMains nodded his approval. “After Pygmalion’s ivory lady?”

“In part,” Sir Henry said. “But also after the pale nereid. She who is milk-white , the name means in Greek. The most beautiful of all.”

In his mind’s eye, Sir Henry saw the tenuous, invisible thread that still connected this skull to the spirit of a beautiful murderess, sent to the underworld well before her time. Closing his lids, he imagined that thread thickening, and then visualized himself—like the fishermen on that vast stretch of coastline over which he had dominion—hauling her back to the world of the living. It would not be easy. But then again, nothing worth doing ever was.

For three weeks, Sir Henry pored over the abbot’s manuscript, puzzling out arcane symbols, referencing and re-referencing dusty books in his vast library. Sometimes he went out and stared at the sea, cursing it. The sea laughed at him. And then DeMains called him. She was ready.

In DeMains’s studio, surrounded by the scents of turpentine and wet clay, Sir Henry removed the green velvet veil of his sea bride and gasped. She was exquisite—from the malachite of her eyes to the ivory of her skin and the arterial cascade of her hair, she fulfilled every promise of her beauty. “DeMains,” he whispered, “you are a true artist.”

With a small proud smile playing over his lips, DeMains bowed. “And I finished her just in time,” he replied.

“Yes,” Sir Henry said. “Tomorrow is Solstice Eve, and the eve of my birthday.”

“Seven times seven,” DeMains added.

Sir Henry sighed.

“Is everything else in order?” DeMains asked.

Sir Henry nodded. “The seamstresses have been working for a fortnight.”

“Ah. It bodes well.” DeMains cleared his throat. “Would you like… um… someone to accompany you?”

Sir Henry shook his head. “No. A man’s birthdays, like his marriages, are a private affair.”

DeMains bowed again. “As you wish.”

“I wish nothing of the sort,” Sir Henry added querulously. He was staring at his sea bride and felt his heart ache at the sight of her long red hair and green eyes. “But the law is the law.”

“So it is,” DeMains added philosophically. “So it is.”

At half-past nine on Solstice Eve, Sir Henry set out from his château, eager to finish the night’s sordid business. As the sun sank toward the horizon and the full moon rose in the sky, the pink clouds of sunset deepened to violet, and then to indigo. The seven-hour twilight had begun.

Though the air was warm, the sea breeze was chill, and Sir Henry shivered as he carried his shrouded beloved in his arms. Over one shoulder he’d slung a sack filled with everything he would need to welcome the dawning of his birthday, as he had every year since he’d come of age. Tomorrow was his birthday as it had been his father’s, and his grandfather’s, and his great-grandfather’s. He’d never questioned the oddness of this reoccurrence any more than he’d questioned the existence of the sea cliffs, or the gulls, or the hunger of the briny deep. It was as much a part of his inheritance as the château or the deference of the sailors, the fishermen, and their fishwives.

Climbing carefully down the steps cut into the sea cliffs, he focused on the worn stone beneath his feet. How long had this staircase been here? No one knew, but he suspected it was as ancient as the Stone Age settlements dotting the coastline, as old as the standing stones and barrows lining the grand processional that led here from the great stone circles of the east and north.

The staircase ended and Sir Henry carefully tucked his beloved into his shoulder sack before beginning the final stage of his journey. With an agility that belied his years, he scrambled down the steep scree-face, holding tightly to the old knotted rope his father had secured to the rock overhead. He knew from childhood outings that the scree, fallen from the cliffside, was full of fossilized sea creatures—oysters, trilobites, and the twisting palaces of conch shells.

Landing on the sand with a thump, Sir Henry turned his back to the cliff and let his gaze drift over the moonlit beach. The tide was out, but this was no natural tide, as this was no natural night. Though at its zenith the sea usually crashed against the black cliffs and at its nadir was reduced to a gentle lapping at the sand just a few yards away, tonight the mellow gold beach was exposed for more than half a mile, and the sea had been forced to lay bare her hidden treasures of kelp and bladder wrack, starfish and coral, wrecked ships and rotting sea serpents. Even those secret creatures usually hidden in the ocean’s depths were stranded in tide pools. Now those strange, phosphorescent monsters stared up at the moon and pale stars with huge lidless eyes, or gasped, their razor-sharp gills open, dying on the sand. The bones of a long-dead sailor and those of a mermaid, entangled in a final, passionate embrace, shimmered in Diana’s light. But it was on the horizon that Henry’s eyes focused as he stood with his back to the cliff.

Halfway between himself and the water’s edge rose a stone circle, enormous and ancient, exposed by the withdrawing tide. Like this expanse of beach, it was only visible one night each year. Sir Henry couldn’t help but wonder whether it existed in some liminal realm between worlds, a place that came into being during this night’s strange twilight.