Year's Best Weird Fiction: 1 Read online

  Ultimately, I endeavored to choose a diverse table of contents. Diverse in voice, diverse in tone, diverse in theme, and diverse in the genres that are represented. Settling on finalists was painful. Peruse the honorable mentions—as may be evident, I could have assembled a second volume. In fact, the honorable mentions list by no means records all of the best material I read last year. The weird is alive and well.

  A few more words before I go: Whittling the candidates down to a final table of contents was no easy task. I’m grateful for the efforts of the editors and publishers whom I consulted while compiling a massive reading list. Ellen Datlow and Gordon Van Gelder were extremely helpful in that regard. I’d also like to acknowledge the ongoing work of S.T. Joshi, and Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. This trio has worked diligently to bring the weird genre into the light and expand its audience. Hand in hand with the current horror renaissance occurring in the small press (and gods bless them too), through a series of excellent anthologies, essays, and lectures, they’ve helped create a climate where a book such as this might flourish. Thank you to the many readers who backed the original fundraiser that helped make volume one a possibility. Finally, my gratitude to Michael Kelly for his yeoman’s labor in culling the K-2-sized slush pile that attended the open submission period. Mike has quietly and humbly become one of the finest editors currently working. It was a comfort to rely upon his skill and expertise throughout the process. He is the epitome of a professional and I can’t imagine a wiser head to serve as series editor.

  So it comes to this; the inaugural volume of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction is at last a reality. Join us now. We are for the weird, else we wouldn’t be here. Pull up a stone by the campfire of your youth and partake of a ghostly tale, or something far stranger.

  —Laird Barron

  May 17, 2014

  Rifton, New York

  Simon Strantzas

  * * *

  THE NINETEENTH STEP

  Simon Strantzas is the author of four collections, including Burnt Black Suns from Hippocampus Press (2014). His writing has appeared in various “best of” annuals; has been translated into other languages; and has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award. He lives in Toronto, Canada, with his wife and an unyielding hunger for the flesh of the living.

  Broken shutters, boarded-over windows, a tree bent crooked and grey, leafless; the house was pressed between two other houses on the dismal November street. Mallory and Alex had already seen countless variations, each more unsuitable than the one before. This house appeared no better. But Mallory would go inside. Mallory always went inside whether her gut told her to or not. She held out hope that for once, she would be surprised.

  And she was surprised. Surprised by the mess. Creaking floors covered in rancid stained carpeting, held down in places with nothing more than household staples. The walls in the rooms all were slate grey, the paint thick and filled with brushstrokes. Whatever it was meant to cover was going to stay hidden. The only pleasant surprise was the staircase to the second level. The surprise was that it was in one piece.

  “It’s a fixer-upper, for sure,” the agent said, “which is why I brought you here. Alex is handy, and if you look past everything you can see that the house itself is in good shape. A bit of elbow grease and this place will double in value. See these floors? Underneath them, cherry hardwood.” She stomped, then reached down and with the tips of her manicured fingers pulled back a corner of the grey wall-to-wall. The wood beneath was mottled but solid. “When they built these houses in the fifties, they installed hardwood floors as a standard. They just assumed people would cover them with carpet. Bare floors were for the poor. This carpet looks like it’s original to the house, which means the floor has probably been protected since day one. Hire a team to do the sanding and varnishing and you’ll have the sort of floor everyone pays through the nose to have nowadays. I’m telling you,” she said, looking smugly at her surroundings, “if you’re looking to flip a house, this is the one. A little work will get a big return. Get us all a big return, I mean.” She winked, and Alex nodded. Mallory as usual acquiesced.

  Flipping houses was the perfect solution for her and Alex’s future. Mallory had been saving every penny she’d made for years, and Alex had spent a lifetime at his carpenter father’s side, installing everything from shelves to roofs. They had no children, jobs without set hours, and were still young enough that they could do without much sleep. They both knew it wouldn’t last forever, but only Alex was keen to buy right away.

  “It’s simple: we stop throwing money away on renting an apartment and buy a rundown house; we then live in the house while fixing it up; when it’s fixed, we sell the house for a tidy profit.” He did the math for her: if they worked hard for five years, flipping houses, by the time the two were thirty, they would have a big enough nest egg that they would never have to worry about their future again. This is what finally sold Mallory on the idea.

  Alex noticed the problem with the staircase first, despite the number of times Mallory had travelled up and down it during the initial renovation, then during the final move, then during the rearranging and reorganizing. But why would it occur to her that anything might be wrong? She wasn’t a carpenter, after all. She didn’t know how these things were done. So when Alex said, in passing over the knock of his hammer against drywall nails, “Have you noticed the stairs?” she didn’t know what to make of the question.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, there isn’t the right number of them. They’re uneven.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s not up to Code. There should be an even number of stairs. But there’s not. There are too many. Or not enough.”

  She must have betrayed her lack of comprehension, because he spoke slower, in that way she hated.

  “These risers are seven inches tall, with a one inch tread. I’ve double-checked. This floor has ten-foot ceilings. Assuming two feet between floors, there should be exactly eighteen steps from this floor to the next. But there aren’t.”

  “Is it really that big of a deal?”

  “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “Probably not.”

  And they went on to talk about other things.

  But Mallory didn’t forget, and when breakfast was done and Alex was in the office, installing new shelving, Mallory paused at the foot of the stairs to the second floor and counted. There were eighteen, just as Alex had said there should be. So she counted them again to be sure. Even if she included the floors themselves and not the steps between, the number was even. She shook her head. What Alex was thinking? She put down the basket she’d been carrying and walked through the kitchen toward the office. There was quiet muttering, as though Alex were speaking to someone, but when she entered the room he was alone, tape measure against the wall. “Were you just on your cell phone?” He looked at her as though she were an alien. “No,” he said, the word drawn out until it lingered between them. “Why?”

  “Nevermind. Listen, I counted the stairs. There are eighteen of them.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “It’s true. Come see for yourself.”

  He put down the tape measure and hurried out of the office, the shelves behind him instantly forgetten under the possibility of being proved wrong.

  “See?” she said, narrow finger pointed as they stood before the staircase. “Eighteen.”

  She watched his head bob as he counted, then a perplexed look crept across his narrow face before his head bobbed once again. Without a word, he began to climb the stairs. Mallory watched him, amused at his need to prove himself, as though neither she nor his own eyes could be trusted. He’d always been that way, since the day they met. Sometimes, his inability to believe anyone else was infuriating, but often she simply found it charming.

  “A-ha!” he said as he reached the top of the stairs. “I was right. Nineteen!”

  �
��What?”

  “Watch!” he said, and proceeded to descend quickly toward her. He led with his right foot, and counted the stairs off, one at a time. When he reached the last step, he landed on his right again, exclaiming “Nineteen!”

  Her mind boggled. She pointed at the steps one at a time and counted. Then counted them again. No matter how she tried, there were only eighteen.

  “I need to sit down.”

  Alex strutted back to the office, his reputation intact, while Mallory remained behind, seated on the living room sectional, her head a-buzz. It had to be a trick, she reasoned. Like an optical illusion, what she saw with her own eyes could not be trusted. There was something more to the stairwell, something she could not articulate. There wasn’t any word for it, but it stayed with her the rest of the day, and kept her awake at night while Alex snored blissfully beside her. She flipped the covers back with irritation and put her feet in her slippers.

  The staircase lay in half-darkness, shadowed by the odd arrangement of lights on the wall. In her tired state, she thought she saw the steps move ever so slightly, as though they had settled into place only as she’d turned the corner. She shuffled to the top of the staircase and looked down. The light stretched far enough to reveal the entirety of the staircase, and Mallory counted the steps again. There were eighteen. This did not make her feel any better. Alex’s gentle snoring emanated from the bedroom down the hall. Mallory smiled. Then she turned back to the staircase and took her first step down.

  She counted them off in her head as she descended, holding the bannister tight and watching her feet. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen—her foot landed safely on the first floor, and her concern carried with it. She looked back at the top of the stairs, dim light wavering as though about to flicker out. She shivered, her teeth chattering, and walked back up the stairs. When she reached the eighteenth, there was still one step between her and the second floor landing.

  It made no sense. None at all. Something was wrong with the reality of the house, some bend in what she had until then believed was solid, and if something as simple as the number of stairs was wrong, then who knew what else could be? She went to take the final step, then stopped. Did the light grow dimmer, or was the staircase fading from reality, leaving her and Alex stranded on the second floor? Worry overcame her. What if she could no longer bring herself to put a foot down on the final stair in case there was nothing to bear her weight? What if she fell and fell and fell into a neverending nothingness?

  She carefully raised her foot and stepped over the nineteenth stair, stretching to reach the second-floor landing. As soon as she pulled herself to it, she dashed for the bedroom without turning around and leapt into the bed. She pressed her body as tight as she dared against Alex, blissfully ignorant and snoring, in hopes it would calm her uncontrollable shivering. As she tried to fall asleep, she wondered if it wasn’t the fear of falling into nothing that terrified her most, but instead her desire to blindly leap.

  In the wash of daybreak, Mallory was humiliated, and thankful there had been no one else present during the night to witness her foolishness. Lying in the soft sunlight, it all seemed so bizarre to her, and she wasn’t absolutely certain it hadn’t simply been some dream born of exhaustion. Of all things to be afraid of, after all: a stairwell? It was absurd. She was quite glad the day had returned, the morning sun clearing away the cobwebs of midnight hysteria. Alex remained sleeping beside her, and she rolled over onto her bent arm and watched his soft lips gently putter for a while.

  Despite her waking confidence, she did her best to avoid the staircase afterward. Once descended, she refused to look back, to even acknowledge there were stairs present. Instead, she found work for herself amid splintering baseboards and chipped plaster. Resuming the renovations helped fade any lingering phantoms from the previous night—though much to Mallory’s chagrin they did not dissipate completely. It only took Alex uttering a single phrase for the amorphous fear to rebloom.

  “Hey, come look at this.”

  She wasn’t sure she could move.

  “What is it?”

  Alex said nothing. Mallory shivered. She hoped he was in the room beyond the staircase, hoped he was any place other than on those wooden steps she’d taken such pains to avoid. But she knew hoping was no use. That would be exactly where he was.

  “Are you there?” she said as she walked through the kitchen toward him, each step becoming progressively more difficult. She could not take her eyes from the other entrance, the corner around which she knew, if she turned, she would be face-to-face with her nightmare. She could feel her legs stiffening, each stride shortening, until she was barely moving at all. And then her legs decided to stop working completely, and she heard only her blood racing in her ears.

  Then Alex materialized before her.

  “You won’t believe this. It’s going to blow your mind!”

  He grabbed her wrist too tightly and dragged her around that corner she had no desire breech.

  Mallory did her best to avoid looking at the stairs, but Alex danced on them, calling for her attention and she knew he would not relent. He wanted an audience.

  “I need you to tell me what happens.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Watch!”

  Alex went back to the bottom of the stairs and started walking up them again, but slower. With each step, he called out its number.

  “One!”

  Mallory felt dread race down her spine. The narrow hallway, the wooden staircase, they began to take on a different aspect, shifting into a sort of hyper-reality. Like a nightmare. Each edge became crisper, every colour stronger—almost too crisp, almost too strong—and Mallory felt the oppressing weight of her terror mounting.

  “Seven!”

  “Alex, come back.”

  She did not want him to continue, did not want to even be in the same house as that horrible staircase. Why couldn’t they leave, both of them, into the night? Simply drive away as far as possible? They could come back later for their things. Or maybe they could just flatten the house and burn it to ashes. Anything but stay as the were, her watching helplessly as he climbed the stairs to the unknown.

  “Eleven!”

  “Whatever it is, Alex, I don’t care. Just come down.” There was a sickening fear gnawing at her; a terrified scream raging to be born.

  “Seventeen!”

  “Alex, don’t.” Her throat was drier than it had ever been.

  “Eighteen!”

  “Alex, please come back!” she said, tears blurring her vision.

  But Alex did not come back. Did not answer. Made no sound at all. Mallory wiped her eyes profusely, certain he would no longer be on the staircase when she could finally see again. But Alex was there, standing on the final step quietly, not moving, his back to her.

  “Alex?” she said, her relief suddenly turning cold. “Alex? Are you okay?”

  He remained perfectly still.

  There were no thoughts in Mallory’s shaking head. The walls pulsed, throbbed like a beating heart. Mallory could not move, could not turn her head away. She could only stare at Alex, terrified he would never turn around. Terrified of what would happen if he did. Mallory stared and stared until—

  “Nineteen.”

  Mallory couldn’t speak. Alex slowly turned. His face was grey as ash, wrinkled as it had never been before. And his eyes, staring off into the distance, his eyes . . .

  “Mallory, I—”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I—I can see . . .”

  He paused one final time, and Mallory felt on the verge of losing everything.

  “What is it, Alex? What do you see?”

  And this is what he told her . . .

  Paul Tremblay

  * * *

  SWIM WANTS TO KNOW

  IF IT’S AS BAD AS SWIM THINKS

  Paul Tremblay is the author
of the novels The Little Sleep, No Sleep till Wonderland, Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye, Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly (as PT Jones with Stephen Graham Jones) and the forthcoming A Head Full of Ghosts (May 2015, William Morrow). His short fiction and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and numerous Year’s Best anthologies. He is also the author of the short story collection In the Mean Time and he co-edited (with John Langan) the anthology Creatures: Thirty Years of Monster Stories. He lives just outside of Boston, and when he’s not writing about narcoleptic detectives, girls with two heads, or teens who float, he helps administrate the Shirley Jackson Awards. www.paultremblay.net

  What I remember from that day is the road. It went on for forever and went nowhere. The trees on the sides of the road were towers reaching up into the sky, keeping us boxed in, keeping us from choosing another direction. The trees had orange leaves when we started and green ones when it was over. The dotted lines in the middle of the road were white the whole time. I followed those, carefully, like our lives depended on them. I believed they did.

  We made the TV news. We made a bunch of papers. I keep one of the clippings folded in my back pocket. The last line is underlined.

  “The officer said the police don’t know why the mother headed south.”

  I need a smoke break bad. My fingertips itch thinking about it. It’s an early afternoon Monday shift and I’m working the twelve-items-or-less register, which sucks because it means I don’t get a bagger to help me out. Not that today’s baggers are worth a whole heck of a lot. I don’t want Darlene working my line.

  We’ve never met or anything, but Julie’s youth soccer coach, I know who he is. Brian Jenkins, a townie like me, five years older but looks five years younger, a tall and skinny school-teacher type even if he only clerks for the town DPW, wearing those hipster glasses he doesn’t need and khakis, never jeans. Always easy with the small talk with everyone in town but me. Brian isn’t paying attention to what he’s doing, lost in his own head like anyone else, and he gets in my line with his Gatorade, cereal, Nutter Butters, toothpaste, and basketful of other shit he can’t live without. Has a bag of oranges, too. He’ll cut them into wedges like those soccer coaches are supposed to. I’m not supposed to go to her games so I don’t. From across the street I’ll walk by the fields sometimes and try to pick out Julie, but it’s hard when I don’t even know what color tee shirt her team wears. When Brian sees it’s me dragging that bag of oranges over the scanner, me wondering which orange Julie will eat, sees it’s me asking if he has a Big Y rewards card, and I ask it smiling and snapping my gum, daring him to say something, anything, he can barely look me in the eye. Run out of things to say in my line, right coach?