The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (22 page)

“
Natalie,
” snarled Auntie H. from someplace not far behind me. “Have I failed to make myself
understood
? Might it be I need to raise my voice?” The floor rumbled, and tiny hairline cracks began to crisscross the surface of the looking glass. I shut my eyes.

“No,” I told her. “I get it. It’s a grift, and you’re out for blood. But you
know
she used me. Your lackey, it had a good, long look around my upper story, right, and there’s no way you can think I was trying to con you.”

For a dozen or so heartbeats, she didn’t answer me, and the mirrored room was still and silent, save all the moans and screaming leaking in through the walls. I could smell my own sour sweat, and it was making me sick to my stomach.

“There are some gray areas,” she said finally. “Matters of sentiment and lust, a certain reluctant infatuation, even.”

I opened my eyes and forced myself to gaze directly into that mirror, at the abomination crouched on its writhing throne. And all at once, I’d had enough, enough of Ellen Andrews and her dingus, enough of the cloak-and-dagger bullshit, and definitely enough kowtowing to the monsters.

“For fuck’s sake,” I said, “I only just met the woman this afternoon. She drugs and rapes me, and you think that means she’s my sheba?”

“Like I told you, I think there are gray areas,” Auntie H. replied. She grinned, and I looked away again.

“Fine. You tell me what it’s gonna take to make this right with you, and I’ll do it.”

“Always so eager to please,” Auntie H. laughed, and the mirror in front of me rippled. “But, since you’ve asked, and as I do not doubt your
present
sincerity, I will tell you. I want her dead, Natalie. Kill her, and all will be . . . forgiven.”

“Sure,” I said, because what the hell else was I going to say. “But if she’s with Szabó—”

“I have spoken already with Magdalena Szabó, and we have agreed to set aside our differences long enough to deal with Miss Andrews. After all, she has attempted to cheat us both, in equal measure.”

“How do I find her?”

“You’re a resourceful young lady, Natalie,” she said. “I have faith in you. Now . . . if you will excuse me,” and, before I could get in another word, the mirrored room dissolved around me. There was a flash, not of light, but of the deepest abyssal darkness, and I found myself back at the Yellow Dragon, watching through the bookshop’s grimy windows as the sun rose over the Bowery.

There you go, the dope on just how it was I found myself holding a gun on Ellen Andrews, and just how it was she found herself wondering if I was angry enough or scared enough or desperate enough to pull the trigger. And like I said, I chambered a round, but she just stood there. She didn’t even flinch.

“I wanted to give you a gift, Nat,” she said.

“Even if I believed that—and I don’t—all I got to show for this
gift
of yours is a nagging yen for something I’m never going to get back. We lose our innocence, it stays lost. That’s the way it works. So, all I got from you, Ellen, is a thirst can’t ever be slaked. That and Harpootlian figuring me for a clip artist.”

She looked hard at the gun, then looked harder at me.

“So what? You thought I was gonna plead for my life? You thought maybe I was gonna get down on my knees for you and beg? Is that how you like it? Maybe you’re just steamed cause I was on top—”

“Shut up, Ellen. You don’t get to talk yourself out of this mess. It’s a done deal. You tried to give Auntie H. the high hat.”

“And you honestly think she’s on the level? You think you pop me and she lets you off the hook, like nothing happened?”

“I do,” I said. And maybe it wasn’t as simple as that, but I wasn’t exactly lying, either. I needed to believe Harpootlian, the same way old women need to believe in the infinite compassion of the little baby Jesus and Mother Mary. Same way poor kids need to believe in the inexplicable generosity of Popeye the Sailor and Santa Claus.

“It didn’t have to be this way,” she said.

“I didn’t dig your grave, Ellen. I’m just the sap left holding the shovel.”

And she smiled that smug smile of hers and said, “I get it now, what Auntie H. sees in you. And it’s not your knack for finding shit that doesn’t want to be found. It’s not that at all.”

“Is this a guessing game,” I asked, “or do you have something to say?”

“No, I think I’m finished,” she replied. “In fact, I think I’m done for. So let’s get this over with. By the way, how many women have you killed?”

“You played me,” I said again.

“Takes two to make a sucker, Nat.” She smiled.

Me, I don’t even remember pulling the trigger. Just the sound of the gunshot, louder than thunder.

In a time when plague rules the land, a surviving rogue masquerades as Death itself, but discovers the extent of his rule and the power of his fright does not extend as far as he had thought . . .

King Death
Paul Finch

The stately parade wound its way through the green shades of Cannock and Longforest.

A galaxy of radiant colors—blues, oranges, purples, pinks—shimmered from the heraldic flags and banners, from the gaudy canvases that roofed the carriages and carts, from the lavish, ermine-trimmed robes worn by the lords and ladies riding therein. The horses—for the most part strong, splendid beasts, hunters and palfreys, milk-white, roan, chestnut brown—walked resplendent in hooded coats emblazoned with baronial devices. Gilded spurs glinted in shafts of September sunlight; polished saddles gleamed; the tapestry curtains bedecking the elegant chaises were embossed with golden rays.

The handsome vehicles trundled in slow but steady cavalcade, their beasts moving at sedate pace, wending idly along the wooded trail. Yet there was no sound of merriment—just the creaking of wheels and woodwork, the gentle jingle of harness; no gay chatter, no laughter, no harmonious singing in chorals. Not a single jongleur—for gentlefolk rarely traveled these days without minstrels or songsters—plucked at his gittern or blew on his reed-pipes. There was no shouting of orders from the staller or the groom, no cracking of whips, no panting as liveried servants scampered back and forth with brimming wine-cups and ribald messages. And yet the retinue passed in regal fashion, the animals treading slowly, softly, nodding with contentment.

Because their masters and mistresses were dead.

All here were dead.

Save one.

A lone knight—dressed all in black, reined up by the roadside.

His name was Rodric, and he had witnessed many horrors over the last year, yet there was something especially odious about this. The combination, perhaps, of rich awning, elaborate fashion, opulent garb—with the caked blood and seeping pus of a thousand plague sores, with the drone of feeding bluebottles.

How long had these dead folk been on the move, he wondered? Hours? Days? Where were they traveling from, and where to? No one would ever know now. The stench was hideous—the stomach-turning fetor that hung over everything in these unhappy days, yet swam in waves from this grisly spectacle, this mobile feast for crows. Much good they’d drawn from the sachets they’d adorned their carriages with—the elf-wort, the honeysuckle, the lavender and thyme—the so-called “herbs of healing.”

The cavalcade swung past, and, at length, Rodric spurred his horse forward. Despite all, there were rich pickings here. Forty or fifty corpses cluttered the carts and wagons—most huddled together, the dead eyes bulging in their raddled, rotted, pulp-apple faces. There would be treasures if one was prepared to look: strings of gems, brooches and clasps, jeweled drinking-vessels, ouches of solid gold. Many of the horses were riderless, the men-at-arms who’d accompanied their masters having fallen by the wayside; though at least one, his foot caught in a stirrup, dragged in the dust. However, their bolsters would be full—with inedible food and stagnant drink, but also purses. Even the pay of the common soldiery—a handful of copper coins, a rosary or a ring of service—was a haul in times like these.

Had Rodric the stomach for it, there was more than even he, with his team of pack-animals, could carry away. The clothing alone, an assortment of taffeta, satin, velvet, fox, and miniver, would bring dividends in due course. But, immune though he now fancied he was to this pestilence—for everyone he knew had died, even women he’d bedded and bosom friends he’d shared cups with, yet, somehow, he lived, unscathed by boil or tumor—even
he
would balk at rummaging among garb so stiff and sticky with the humors of corruption. But the jeweled vessels, the coin, the silver plate—in the absence of anyone else, they were now his.

It was the twenty-second year of Edward’s reign—Edward, the third of that name—and England was a desolated wasteland.

From the high Cheviots to the Cornish moors, from the Fens to the Irish Sea, it was the same. The orchards and cornfields slipped into rack and ruin for want of someone to reap them, the highways lay deserted, the villages in dereliction, the wolds and cots in eerie, sepulchral silence. And then there were the bodies—always the bodies: thick as autumn leaves on the fields and roads, moldering in the ditches. Even Rodric, a veteran of Halidon Hill, where six-thousand Scots fell to English arrows in a single afternoon, and Crecy, where twice that number of French were slain, had no memory of such carnage. And
all,
it seemed, were fair game. He’d seen peasants littering their roods, priests draped across altars, monks over half-finished manuscripts, merchants withering amid their produce. In the towns, rats ran riot across the husks of beggars and aldermen alike. The greatest magnates, he’d heard, had been struck: bishops and abbots, earls, dukes, even princes—cast like rubbish into the same stinking charnel-pits.

It was truly a scourge, a malediction of the worst kind.

Everything he saw, as he rode from one part of the kingdom to the next, bore the marks of cataclysm; not just death, but the wretchedness that went with it: the grief of loss, the agony of starvation, the wailing of hopeless prayers, the gasping of the cathedral flagellants, lashing themselves till they dropped insensible from blood-loss, the robbery, pillage, and chaos that resulted when sheriffs died in their castles, reeves in their jails, and justiciers in the very carriages that took them from one court to the next.

Yet, bewilderingly, he—Rodric—was spared.

He didn’t have the faintest idea how. Even more puzzling, perhaps, was “why.” He wasn’t the most deserving specimen of humanity. Had he simply been overlooked? Was the obliteration of one worthless flyspeck deemed irrelevant after so many other, better ones, had gone before it? But these weren’t his only questions. The disaster had become incomprehensible to him. When had it all started? He wasn’t sure any more. How long had it dragged on for? Again, he couldn’t calculate.

He knew only that it was here now. That it had arrived overnight, exploding across the realm with horrific speed. It rose to zeniths of destructiveness in the summer, but though it retreated again in the winter, it did so slowly, grudgingly, leaving waste and wreckage in its wake. The free-company of which Rodric had been part had died to a man during the plague’s first few months, including its captain, Richard Warbeck, even though they had all remained ensconced in the Warbeck castle in Kent. After that, Rodric, the sole survivor, had made for the wild country, only to find that the wild country had come to him. One by one, the great estates, depopulated and collapsing under their own dead-weight, were reclaimed; tilled land disappearing beneath meadow and pasture, greenwood re-invading orchard and coppice.

Of course, it hadn’t all been misery. Suddenly, Rodric had been able to take fish from the rivers, hare and squirrel from the hedgerows, even deer and boar from the chase, without fear of the verderer. On one occasion, a warden had shown himself, but Rodric had killed him, knowing there would be no retribution. Brief luxuries in the midst of catastrophe, but in truth, these were small consolation. Even Rodric—for all his military skills—was a stranger in this land that had once been his home. A power he might be, a force to be reckoned with—not just because he was alive, but because he actually made this calamity pay—but who knew what would follow in the ensuing months? Who knew what
could
follow? This wasn’t just a changed world, but an
alien
one. There were times when even the most hardened outcasts yearned for things they found familiar.

He stood up beside his campfire on the ridge, stretched and gazed down onto the great plain. At first glance, it was glorious: unspoiled grasslands rolling from the Derbyshire hills to the wild Welsh borders. Directly below there was a narrow river-valley filled with ancient oak-woods. It was a great irony that only Man should be stricken by this torment; that the land remained verdant, that animals could wander freely.

Abruptly, Rodric’s reverie was broken. He spotted movement, and dropped to a crouch. Below him, someone was making unsteady passage along the footpath beside the river. Rodric snaked to the edge of the ridge, and peered down. It was a boy, not yet begrimed by rough living, wearing quality clothes rather than scraps, which suggested he was attached to some great household, though walking drunkenly as he was, bowed by grief or sickness, or maybe both, that household was no more.

Rodric tarried a moment, to ensure nobody else was with the lad, then hurried down into the hollow where his horses were tethered. There were six of them, laden with sacks of loot. Some items were of outstanding value: goblets and crucifixes encrusted with gems; others—leather-bound books or reliquaries filled with bones—would be worth a tidy sum in due course. In addition, he had gold and silver—more than enough to set up his own house when the time was right. Under normal circumstances, to carry such wealth openly would invite attack. Not so now. Through a clever ruse, Rodric defended this hoard by the same means with which he had amassed it. He passed himself off as a knight, though in truth he had not been ordained into the equestrian order, having never been part of any noble or meritorious clique. He hadn’t even served a squiredom, though for the knight whom Rodric masqueraded as no squiredom would have sufficed in any case.