The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2011 by Paula Guran

Author:Paula Guran [Guran, Paula]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, anthology, Horror, dark fantasy
ISBN: 9781607012818
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2022-01-01T22:00:00+00:00

Danny knows you can never tell which compromises the gods will understand—for the sake of a good effort—and which ones bring down their wrath. He learns you can work most arcane rituals with nothing more than a sharpened paper clip and grass cuttings . . .

MOTHER URBAN’S BOOKE OF DAYES

JAY LAKE

In a basement that smelled of mold and old cleansers, Danny Knifepoint Wielder prayed down the rain. The house wasn’t any older than the Portland neighborhood around it. Most driveways were populated with minivans, children’s bicycles, heaps of bark dust and gravel accumulated for yard projects postponed through the dark months of winter. None of Danny’s neighbors knew the role he played in their lives. They would have been horrified if they had.

Not making it to church on time carried scarcely a ripple of consequence compared to what would happen if Danny didn’t pray the world forward. Lawn sprinklers chittering, children screeching at their play—these were the liturgical music of his rite.

“Heed me, Sky.”

Danny circled the altar in his basement.

“Hear my pleas, freely given from a free soul.”

Green shag carpeting was no decent replacement for the unbending grass of the plains on which the Corn Kings had once vomited out their lives to ensure the harvest.

“I have bowed to the four winds and the eight points of the rose.”

Wood-grain paneling echoed memories of the sanctifying rituals that had first blessed this workroom.

“Heed me now, that your blessing may fall upon the fields and farms.” With a burst of innate honesty he added: “. . . . and gardens and patios and window boxes of this land.”

“Daniel Pierpont Wilder!” his mother yelled down the stairs. “Are you talking to a girl down there?”

“Mooooom,” Danny wailed. “I’m buuuusy!”

“Well, come be busy at the table. I’m not keeping your lunch warm so you can play World of Warships.”

“Warcraft, Mom,” he muttered under his breath. But he put away his knife, then raced up the steps two at a time.

Behind him, on the altar, his wilting holly rustled as if a breeze tossed the crown of an ancient oak tree deep within an untouched forest. Oil smoldered and rippled within the beaten brass bowl. Rain, wherever it had gotten to, did not fall.

That night Danny climbed up the Japanese maple in the side yard and scooted onto the roof. He’d been doing that since he was a little kid. Mom said he was still kid, and always would be, but at twenty-two Danny had long been big enough to have to mind the branches carefully. If he waited until after Mom went to her room to watch TiVoed soap operas through the bottom of a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, she didn’t seem to notice. The roofing composite was gritty and oddly slick, still warm with the trapped heat of the day, and smelled faintly of tar and mold.

The gutters, as always, were a mess. Something was nesting in the chimney again. The streetlight he’d shot out with his BB gun remained dark, meaning that the rooftop stayed in much deeper shadow than otherwise.

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