The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

– 

Da

– 

We miss you, Virgil said. He stood several feet away, gleaming like polished ivory.

– What? Da

– 

Come home. It was apparent that this man wasn't Virgil, although in this particular light the eyes were similar, and he drawled. Virgil grew up in South Carolina, spent his adult life trying to bury that drawl and eventually it only emerged when he was exhausted or angry. The stranger winked at her and continued along the boardwalk. Beneath an Egyptian cotton shirt, his back was almost as muscular as Virgil's. But, no.

Da

– Honey, you okay? The jumble of insectoid eyes, lips, and bouffant hair coalesced into Merrill's stern face. Merrill wore white-rimmed sunglasses that complemented her vanilla dress with its wide shoulders and brass buttons, and her elegant vanilla gloves. Her thin nose peeled with sunburn. -Da

– Yeah. Da

– The hell you are. C'mon. Merrill led her away from the moving press to a small open square and seated her in a wooden chair in the shadow of a parasol. The square hosted a half-dozen vendors and several tables of squawking children, overheated parents with flushed cheeks, and senior citizens in pastel ru

– Okay, okay. I feel better. Da

– You do look a little better. Know where you are?

– The market. Da

– Here, sweetie. Merrill drew two containers of Mahan's foreign cigarettes from her purse and slid them across the table, mimicking a spy in one of those '70s thrillers.

– Thanks, Da

– Hey, what kind of bug is that? Merrill intently regarded a beetle hugging the warmth of a wooden plank near their feet.

– It's a beetle.

– How observant. But what kind?

– I don't know.

– What? You don't know?

– I don't know. I don't really care, either.

– Oh, please.

– Fine. Da

Spurious exoticus minor, closely related to, but not to be confused with, the Spurious eroticus major. Yep.

Merrill stared at the beetle, then Da

– Hey-hey.

May 6, 2006

(D. L. Session 33)

Dr. Green's glasses were opaque as quartz.

– The

Lagerstätte. Elucidate, if you will.

– A naturalist's wet dream. Ask Norma Fitzwater and Leslie Runyon, Da

– A fascinating woman. She was pals with Leslie, a widow like me. Leslie's husband and brother fell off a glacier in Alaska. I didn't like her much. Too creepy for polite company. Unfortunately, Norma had a mother-hen complex, so there was no getting rid of her. Anyway, it wasn't much to write home about. We went to lunch once a week, watched a couple of films, commiserated about our shitty luck. Summer camp stuff.

– You speak of Norma in the past tense. I gather she eventually ended her life, Dr. Green said.

– Oh, yes. She made good on that. Jumped off a hotel roof in the Tenderloin. Left a note to the effect that she and Leslie couldn't face the music anymore. The cops, brilliant as they are, concluded Norma made a suicide pact with Leslie. Leslie's corpse hasn't surfaced yet. The cops figure she's at the bottom of the bay, or moldering in a wooded gully. I doubt that's what happened though.

– You suspect she's alive.

– No, Leslie's dead under mysterious and messy circumstances. It got leaked to the press that the cops found evidence of foul play at her home. There was blood or something on her sheets. They say it dried in the shape of a person curled in the fetal position. They compared it to the flash shadows of victims in Hiroshima. This was deeper, as if the body had been pressed hard into the mattress. The only remains were her watch, her diaphragm, her fillings, for Christ's sake, stuck to the coagulate that got left behind like afterbirth. Sure, it's bullshit, urban legend fodder. There were some photos in the Gazette, some speculation amongst our sorry little circle of neurotics and manic depressives.

– Very unpleasant, but, fortunately, equally improbable.

Da

– Her husband, Dr. Green said. -The one who died in Alaska.

– The same. Trust me, I laughed, a little nervously, at this news. I wasn't sure whether to humor Norma or get the hell away from her. We were sitting in a classy restaurant, surrounded by execs in silk ties and Armani suits. Like I said, Norma was loaded. She married into a nice Sicilian family; her husband was in the import-export business, if you get my drift. Beat the hell out of her, though; definitely contributed to her low self-esteem. Right in the middle of our luncheon, between the lobster tails and the éclairs, she leaned over and confided this thing with Leslie and her deceased husband. The ghostly lover.

Dr. Green passed Da

– How did you react to this information? Dr. Green said.

– I stayed cool, feigned indifference. It wasn't difficult; I was doped to the eyeballs most of the time. Norma claimed there exists a certain quality of grief, so utterly profound, so tragically pure, that it resounds and resonates above and below. A living, bleeding echo. It's the key to a kind of limbo.

– The

Lagerstätte. Dr. Green licked his thumb and sorted through the papers in the brown folder. -As in the Burgess Shale, the La Brea Tar Pits. Were your friends amateur paleontologists?

– 

Lagerstätten are "resting places" in the Deutsch, and I think that's what the women meant.

– Fascinating choice of mythos.

– People do whatever it takes to cope. Drugs, kamikaze sex, religion, anything. In naming, we seek to order the incomprehensible, yes?

– True.

– Norma pulled this weird piece of jagged, gray rock from her purse. Not rock-a petrified bone shard. A fang or a long, wicked rib splinter. Supposedly human. I could tell it was old; it reminded me of all those fossils of trilobites I used to play with. It radiated an aura of antiquity, like it had survived a shift of deep geological time. Norma got it from Leslie and Leslie had gotten it from someone else; Norma claimed to have no idea who, although I suspect she was lying; there was definitely a certain slyness in her eyes. For all I know, it's osmosis. She pricked her finger on the shard and gestured at the blood that oozed on her plate. Da