The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2015 Edition by Guran Paula

Author:Guran, Paula [Guran, Paula]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: horror, dark fantasy, anthology
ISBN: 9781607014638
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2015-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

2. The Tape (1): Iram

Around her and Josh, the attic, hushed as a church. Off to one side, their grandfather’s trunk, whose lack of a lock Josh, bold and nosy at sixteen as he’d ever been, had taken as an invitation to look inside it. Buried beneath old clothes, he’d found the tape recorder and cassettes. Rachel slid her index finger left over three worn, plastic buttons, pressed down on the fourth, and the tape recorder started talking. A snap and a clatter, a hiss like soda fizzing, and a voice, a man—a young man’s, someone in his teens, rendered tinny and high by time and the age of the cassette: “Okay,” he said, “you were saying, Dad?”

Now a second speaker, Grandpa, the nasal complaint of the accent that had followed him north to New York state from Kentucky accentuated by the recording. “It was Jerry had found the map and figured it showed some place in the Quarter, but it was me worked out where, exactly, we needed to head.”

“That’s Grandpa,” Josh said, “And . . . Dad?”

“It isn’t Dad,” Rachel said.

“Then who is it?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I think it might be Uncle Jim.”

“Uncle Jim?”

“James,” she said, “Dad’s younger brother.”

“But he ran away.”

“Obviously, this was made before,” she said, and shushed him.

“—the company would have been happy to have the two of you just take off,” Uncle Jim was saying.

“Well,” Grandpa was saying, “there was time between the end of work on one site and the beginning of work on the next. It’s true, though: we couldn’t wander off for a week. If we said there was a spot we wanted to investigate, the head man was willing to give us a day or two, but that was because he thought we meant something to do with oil.”

“Not the Atlantis of the Sands,” Jim said.

“Iram,” Grandpa said. “Iram of the Pillars, Iram dāt al-`imād.”

“Right,” Jim said, “Iram. So I guess the sixty-four thousand dollar question is: did you find it?”

Their grandfather did not answer.

“Dad?” Jim said.

“Oh, we found it, all right,” Grandpa said, his voice thick.

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