“You came here for this?” Lorna said as the slimy and overheated pelt cupped her and enclosed her. The room went in and out of focus.
“No, babe. I just followed the trail, and here we are. And it’s good. You’ll see how good it is, how it changes everything. We’ve been living in a cage, but that’s over now.”
“My God, I loved you.” Lorna blinked the blood from her eyes. She glanced over and saw the revolver on the table, blunt and deadly and glowing with the dwindling light, a beacon. She grabbed the weapon without thought and pressed it under Miranda’s chin, and thumbed the hammer just as she’d seen it done. Her entire body shook. “You thought I’d just leave my daughter behind and slink off to Never Never Land without a word? Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“Give it a minute,” Miranda said. The fingers of her left hand stroked the pelt. “One minute. Let it work its magic. You’ll see everything in a whole new way. Come on, sweetie.” She reached for the revolver, and it barked and twisted in Lorna’s hands.
Lorna didn’t weep. Her insides were stone. She dropped the gun and swayed in place, not focusing on anything. The light began to fade. She stumbled outside. She could smell everything, and strange thoughts rushed through her head.
There was a moment between twilight and darkness when she almost managed to tear free of the hide and begin making the calls that would return her to the world, her daughter, the apocalyptic showdown with the man who’d oppressed her for too long. The moment passed, was usurped by an older and much more powerful impulse. Her thoughts turned to the woods, the hills, a universe of dark, sweet scent. The hunt.
——
Two weeks later, a hiker spotted a murder of crows in a raucous celebration as they roosted around the wrecked van. He called emergency services. Men and dogs and choppers swarmed the mountainside. The case made all of the papers and ran on the local networks for days. Investigators found two corpses—an adult male and an adult female—in the van. The cause of death was blunt-force trauma and prolonged exposure to the elements. Further examination revealed that the brake lines of the van were sawed through, indicative of homicide. The homicide theory was supported by the discovery of a deceased adult female on the floor of a nearby cabin. She’d died of a single bullet wound to the head. A fourth individual who’d also lived on the premises remained missing and was later presumed dead. Tremendous scrutiny was directed at the missing woman’s estranged husband. He professed his innocence throughout the subsequent trial. That he’d hired the deceased couple to spy on his wife didn’t help his case.
Years later, a homicide detective wrote a bestseller detailing the investigation of the killings. Tucked away as a footnote, the author included a few esoteric quotes and bits of trivia; among these were comments by the chief medical examiner who’d overseen the autopsies. According to the ME, it was fortunate that picture ID was present on scene for the deceased. By the time the authorities arrived, animals had gotten to the bodies in the van. The examiner said she’d been tempted to note in her report that in thirty years she’d never seen anything so bizarre or savage as these particular bites, but wisely reconsidered.
——
Laird Barron is the author of two collections: The Imago Sequence and Other Stories and Occultation, both from Night Shade Books. His work has appeared in places such as Fantasy & Science Fiction, Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Lovecraft Unbound, Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, Clockwork Phoenix, and The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It has also been reprinted in numerous year’s-best anthologies. Mr. Barron lives in Olympia, Washington.
Elizabeth Bear
—
Last, the bullet blooms against steel. Still almost pristine until that moment, now its conical head flattens. Its copper jacket splinters into shrapnel needles, wire-fine, scattering. The core splashes, the force of impact so great that cold metal splatters like syrup, droplets blossoming in an elegant chrysanthemum. The butt of the casing flattens against the engine block for a split second before it peels away and falls.
But it’s already exited the girl, and the girl is falling.
——
January is baking brownies.
She watches water and butter boil together with a mass of green leaves, once dried and now rehydrating. These are grown-up brownies. Her kitchen reeks of burnt sugar and wet rope, complicated and musty as copal.
She makes sure the water doesn’t boil off. Too-high heat destroys the THC. Cooking is an applied form of chemistry.
She pours the slurry into a pottery bowl through a strainer draped with cheesecloth, then twists the cloth to get the last of the butter. The water and butter go in the fridge to cool. She cleans the tools and starts breaking apart squares of Ghirardelli unsweetened chocolate, which she will eventually combine with brown sugar and melt into the separated butter.
——
The bullet blasts a gaping exit wound in the girl’s body. It’s not the penetration of the bullet that does this; the bullet is quite small. Rather, it’s transferred energy—a shock wave—that knocks a plug of blood and muscle and skin out of her side, that vaporizes a portion of her body and splashes it over the massive open block of the carousel engine a moment before the bullet splashes, too.
That bullet has already passed through the girl when she reaches weak, estranged hands for the impact point and staggers one step back, then two, teetering among littered tussocks on high heels she never should have worn to the carnival.
——
January takes the brownies to the birthday party. The clamor of the Wurlitzer greets her as soon as she opens her car door, but the carousel is out of sight, turning and turning in its great wood-and-glass enclosure that glows like a Christmas ornament in the blue twilight. The sound of the one-machine band climbs against a clear October evening. The western sky’s still creamy gold, though a band of indigo shows to the east, stars prickling through. January’s breath mists, and oblong yellow leaves somersault across the grass, but once she’s inside she’ll be warm.
For now she tugs her scarf tight and balances the plate of brownies on one hand while locking the car doors with the other. She picks her way over uneven ground, watching another dark shape or two rattle keys, check doors, and drift through the gloaming like ghosts drawn to a sйance. January follows a tall, slender woman in a plain gray dress, much younger than most of the crowd. Somebody’s daughter?
The carousel is housed in a circular structure like a train roundhouse—except smaller, and intricately decorated. The row of windows under the cedar-shake eaves are stained glass—this side, over the open double door, shows autumn scenes shading into winter.
January imagines the theme is carried all the way around. Around the curve of the building, the milk-glass snows probably melt out in lime green and gold.
The band organ almost blows her hair back as she passes inside. It thumps through the cold cement floor. The bass drum shudders in the empty spaces of her chest. The lofty space isn’t as warm as she’d hoped—cold air settles along the neckline of the pushed-back hood of her cardigan—but it’s bright and crowded and full of the smell of popcorn and the voices of crowds of people January knows sort of halfway well, or used to know well in college.
She waves with her free hand as she moves around the outskirts of the carousel, looking for the birthday boy, the snack table, or both. The crowd keeps her from getting a good look at the merry-go-round; apparently Martin can turn out enough friends for his fiftieth to make even a carousel housing seem crowded. But that’s okay; she can wait until she’s found Martin to go pet the wooden ponies.