The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

The Long Fade Into Evening ^{Steve Rasnic Tem}

Simon had nowhere to live until his cousin offered him a house in a run-down development on the outer edge of town. All he had to do was stay there to discourage vandalism. The development was almost empty, scheduled to be torn down.

“You’re not suicidal are you?” Will asked as he handed him the key.

“Angela left me years ago. I haven’t been successful in years. Why would I kill myself now?”

Will, pretending to shuffle papers, didn’t look up. “I know it’s been rough, and you’re not getting any younger. It’s just that a few of the families that are left have kids, teenagers. I’d hate for them to find…”

“Old fellows like me, we don’t have the energy to kill ourselves. We usually just fade away.”

Will stared at him. “I see. Do you need directions?”

“I lived in the neighborhood when I was a kid, in one of those old Victorians before they built this awful thing. Now here it’s a wreck as well.”

“I’ve read about that. There was some trouble wasn’t there? Overcrowding, and some violence? Something about a fire?”

“What didn’t burn they bulldozed. Everybody scattered, went their ways. Now here I am with nowhere else to go.”

“I’ve arranged for someone to drop off a sleeping bag and supplies. I’m working on a bed.”

“I’m deeply grateful,” Simon replied. And he was. He’d just never understood who decided what goes, what stays, and where people got to live.

“By the way, we’ve had a problem with cats. Feral cats, running all over the place. Best not let one of them scratch you.”

Simon examined the keys as if reconsidering. “I hate cats,” he said.

On moving day he rushed to finish his final shift at the corner store and get his belongings—everything stuffed into a cardboard suitcase and a patched laundry bag—from behind the counter to the bus stop. Most of the shelves were empty. As ordered, he kept rearranging what remained from the “Going out of Business” sale for more appeal, while restlessly waiting for his replacement to arrive. Julie, always out on a date with no consideration for anyone. By now he’d lost everything of importance, but at least Simon held on to his manners.

A pack of twittering girls burst through the door and raced each other for the drink machine. He used to tell the teens to slow down but the way even the young ones would turn on you these days he no longer dared. Further evidence of how the new world was eating the old. “The girls are worse than the boys,” someone he worked with once said. The sexism embarrassed him, but he worried it might be true. All he needed was a broken arm, or a deep scratch from a dirty fingernail.

He watched as they poked their phones, took pictures, and mixed different sodas at random into a single cup. Apparently they would share. They all appeared to have too many fingers, different colors on too many nails. The new world was raising them strange. Perhaps if he had a child of his own… but Angela always feared he would drop or lose it.

One caught him staring and flashed her tiny tit. The others screamed madly. He blushed and turned away, looking down at his things. He prayed the gigglers would be gone before he tried to haul it all to the bus stop. He hated when he had to pretend to ignore their catcalls.

His possible future caretakers ran out the door without paying. He was relieved not to have to ring them up. Julie came in after, smiling knowingly and smelling of booze. Simon gathered up his life and stumbled for the door.

The bus contained a few more broken types like him, an older woman in a nice dress, and a figure bundled in its oversized coat. Its head, wrapped in a scarf and topped with a watchman’s cap, appeared too small for its torso. Its eyes were buried. The bus sped down the block passing the girls with their surplus of fingers, their writhing clump of shadow hungry and hideous on the greasy brick wall.

The bus struggled up the hill past bars spilling their last patrons, who hailed and cursed the driver who was too wise to stop. At the peak where the lanes grew wider he sped past abandoned storefronts, lots jammed with ancient equipment, the iron skeletons of dead buildings, the rows of silent warehouses with rusted doors flush to the road. There was the rare bus stop, the random passenger standing with one arm waving, but the driver never slowed. Simon believed this part of the city need never exist.

The route would not take Simon all the way to the development. The bus dropped him at a darkened stop to stand beside a crumbling, heavily graffitied bench. Some words were almost recognizable, but lay obscured beneath mindless exhortation. The ground rose steeply before him, and somewhere beyond that rise of shadow the aging development began. Smoky grayness drifted down from the low clouds and seeped out from the overgrown embankment. The hill’s silhouette was deceptive, suggesting primeval forest more than cultivated landscape.

Instead of taking the road around, he pulled the flashlight from his laundry bag and sought a shorter path. He followed a trail of broken, grass-invaded sidewalk through the unkempt greenbelt and up the hill. He had to struggle through tall-weeded fields, ignoring unidentifiable animal sounds in the underbrush, the occasional glimmer of a red or yellow eye. Man-shaped spaces opened up in the dark vegetation a few feet away, but no one approached. He tried to remember what, if any, of these features had been here when he was a boy. It had been wilderness then, too, although even less controlled. He and his friends would venture there after sunset. He vaguely remembered the darkness, and the dreadful confusion of echo, but nothing else.

He was nerve-exhausted by the time he entered the murky blocks of identical one story ranch houses and sodden lanes of the development. The neighborhood of his youth had been a crowded slum but at least it had some grandeur in its height and architecture. A sea of bright holes identifying downtown shimmered in the distance behind him. Ahead were the squat rectangles of unlit homes, and houses with few lights on, and houses half-gone into ruin, a handful of dried-up gardens and trashed-out back yards, their wire fences plastered in random trash.

In an abandoned playground a shattered teeter-totter sprawled like a sacrifice across its steel pipe center. The swing framework still stood erect but rusted, its seats and slide gone without a trace. So where did the remaining children play, or were they too old for something so innocent? One was crying now, he thought, although it might have been one of those stray cats.

Simon had no way to determine which houses were actually empty, and which were occupied by people who just wanted to keep to themselves. Without knocking on doors, perhaps peeking through windows, which he wasn’t about to do.

In the old days, in that other neighborhood of taller and less uniform homes, he heard a great many things: the voices of friends he hadn’t seen in decades, music playing from a record player in a neighbor’s upstairs window, misunderstood whispers from lovers hiding themselves in the shadowed strips near walls. All of that had been torn down and bull-dozed, the old neighborhood beheaded. It occurred to Simon he now had more memories than life. It was an uncomfortable way to travel.

Several houses had yellow police tape stretched across their front doors and around their near-identical porches. He assumed the police actions had something to do with drugs; in the news it always had something to do with drugs. That and gang activity. A lot of these poorer teens fell into gangs.

When Simon was young a bike ride to and from this neighborhood had been nothing. He’d fly down the steep curl of road and although the trip back up was a challenge he accomplished it without too much difficulty, feeling like a star athlete afterwards. Not anymore. He should have kept in better shape. Once here, he didn’t expect to leave often. He supposed that was how older people became trapped.

He found the house Will was providing—low and dark and indistinguishable from the others. The newish lock looked inexpertly installed, the hasp mounted crookedly, and rattled as he fiddled with the key. Simon slipped inside and slapped the switch, lighting up the messy interior. He gasped involuntarily from the stench: human waste and aromas both sweet and sour underneath. He reminded himself that his cousin was allowing him to stay here for nothing.

Houses weren’t built to last anymore, nor did it make sense to. Technological expectation changed so quickly it didn’t pay to invest in building for the long term. People moved on, although not necessarily up.

When he first glimpsed the living room walls he imagined a crowd of onlookers, but the arrangement of shadows proved to be stains. Studs and nail head patterns were clearly visible beneath the thin paper.

Cleansers and chemicals and various old tools were stored in a closet with random junk. He couldn’t tell how old any of it was, or how dangerous, but he did what he could, sweeping the foulness out the back door and dumping chemicals on the hardwood floors where they’d been deeply stained, windows open to the cold air to get rid of the smell. He just needed to get his situation clean enough so that he wouldn’t mind sleeping on the floor. The revealed boards were scarred as if from games or ritual. Or maybe from cats. Cats can do a lot of damage if locked inside by themselves.

On several walls sprays of relatively fresh graffiti obscured older layers of scribbling, and here and there certain words and symbols were emphasized by means of deep cuts. He could make no sense of it, although the patterns of marks created an emotional effect not unlike music, so he wondered if some of these marks referred to songs. Over the days to come he painted over the graffiti, but with no confidence it wouldn’t return.

Long threads of dust floated through the rooms. The remnants of his old life were hardly more substantial than these. With most of the people he’d ever known gone, the fabric of day to day reality seemed thin.

That old house where he’d grown up had probably been less than a hundred yards from here. It had a screened back porch where on late nights the adults filled their drink cups and the children consumed their allotted portions of sugar and ran mindlessly around the yard. This house and the ones around it had no back porch and he wondered when those had gone out of fashion. No doubt around the same time as gatherings with the neighbors.

He remembered games of hide and seek that lasted for hours and covered every lot in the neighborhood. He remembered childhood crushes on young girls whose names he no longer remembered. He remembered he would not take a bath when a certain babysitter was on duty, the one who always wanted to help.

In one corner of the living room a sleeping bag, some toiletries, and food had been left for him. When he thought he’d cleaned sufficiently for a relatively untroubled night’s sleep he crawled into the bag and succumbed almost immediately.

The morning came quickly. He had dreamed and sweated, and now the sleeping bag stank. He wondered who might have used it before. He crawled out and walked barefoot into the kitchen, splashed his face with water tinged a muddy rust color. He’d let it run until it cleared. He went to the back door and opened it for air and sun.

He was surprised not to see the sun, or even the sky. A few feet in front of him a tall brick wall with curtained casement windows blocked his view, awash in smoky gray shadow, part of a larger house that rose three stories. Looking straight up he glimpsed the old-fashioned soffits and Victorian roof. It looked somewhat like the house he’d grown up in, except larger. Turning his head he saw similar large houses out to both sides, an entire neighborhood of slummy Victorians in ill repair. He could also hear creaky music, children’s voices, a cat’s howl, the soft explosive echo of a distant barking dog. But he couldn’t make out any of the finer details of his surroundings, not even this close.

Simon went to get his flashlight for a more detailed look. But when he came back there was the sky, and the sun just over the treetops illuminating a vista of dull one story homes. The filth he’d scraped from the house the night before still lay piled around the bottom step. Sometime during the day he would have to bury it.

He took a breath. He hadn’t been fully awake. It happened sometimes, even several minutes after walking around, a piece of dream still lodged in your brain changes the world. There were the sounds of children squealing like the damned in a nearby yard, but was that still part of the dream? The excited screams of children at play often fooled you into thinking there had been some grave tragedy.

Simon worked several hours in the bathroom and kitchen—scrubbing and throwing out the useless and the unsalvageable—not bad for an out of shape old man, he thought. He felt uncomfortably heated and propped open the back door. The outside temperature had dropped precipitously. He’d tried the thermostat but the furnace wouldn’t come on. Another problem to ask Will about. Whatever sounds he heard—the whistle of a speeding car, the broken explosions as a plane pushed through the air overhead—were very far away. Whoever lived nearby was impressively quiet. “Safe as houses,” as his mother used to say, but it never reassured. Some houses weren’t safe at all.

Cooking smells drifted in from outside—some sort of richly spiced meat, perhaps a stew. Someone in the neighborhood knew how to cook.

He thought he heard a school bus pull up and children piling out, but the sounds faded quickly, swallowed by the increasing rush and push of the wind. It would be a breezy time for a walk, but he’d only have light for a couple more hours, and Simon wanted to see the neighborhood and some of its residents in the light of day.

The wind hitting the house made a constant groan. Simon wondered if the poorly built structure could bear it—he imagined minute fracturing exacerbating decay, perhaps even some sort of collapse. A sick apprehension heightened his need to get out.

Outside in his coat he walked toward the broken playground. He kept his eyes open for people, but after a few blocks there was nothing, not even any toys left outside or laundry on a line. He listened carefully for conversation or music—he was sure he’d heard some before—but all he heard now was the wind battering the shoddy roofs, and a whistling down the lanes between the structures.

There should have been teenagers out, even if the adults had the sense to stay inside. Teenagers were the adventurers and the hasty ones, those always said to be “at risk.”

A sudden clamor from several houses over made him pick up the pace. But it was just a piece of roof blown off into a side yard. He wondered if his own roof was sound. He stared hard at the twisted bit of wreckage, the curly shadows trapped beneath. Then a mass of the curly shadows unfurled and escaped around the edge of the house on its too many legs. A cat with insulation tangled into its fur, he presumed, living in the house’s attic. Poor thing. That’s when it started to rain.

He liked the smell, like damp earth everywhere, moist dirt in the air he breathed, like a memory of his future, as if the rain had released something from the dirt of the aging neighborhood. The air grayed around him, fading everything it touched. Or was it his eyes failing? He hadn’t been to an optometrist in years, afraid of what he might be told. Complete failure took a long time to occur, it seemed, but the process was relentless.

The rain was light, so he continued walking for several blocks around the complex. He saw no one, no signs that children had recently played, no signs that any of these houses were occupied at all. There were lights on in a few, but with the lack of residents he guessed they might simply be on for security. And yet he couldn’t believe his cousin had lied to him—what would be the point?

“Hello! I say hello! Is anyone else here?” His voice bounced and echoed against the brick.

As if in reply a distant truck horn sounded like a large animal in distress. Simon was reminded that you couldn’t always trust your senses to tell you the truth. He turned the corner and walked in a different direction, hoping for a new perspective. He peered over fences and gleaned a few new details—mud-encrusted junk, old foundations exposed between patches of unmown grass, an abandoned barbecue lying on its side like a felled animal. But nothing recent, nothing indicating current occupation.

He became gradually aware of the faint stench of invisible smoke, like the memory of an old barbecue, or when his grandmother used to lie about her smoking habit and snuck off behind the house for a drag or two before the cancer eventually took her.

He came to a wide circle in the lane with a bent and dead streetlight poised over it like some kind of giant predatory insect. When he was a boy the neighborhood kids used to gather beneath the streetlights and ride their bikes at night. He stooped down—there were warm cigarette butts beneath the crippled lamp post. He looked around, saw nothing, and the charcoal sky split open from the weight of water, beating him momentarily to the ground.

He looked up, saw the dark twisted shapes lingering nearby like a collection of corroded statues, their rude fingers pointing as they plotted their harassment. All around him the blurred outlines of the houses had added a story or two, with high roofs swaying precariously overhead. Cats encased in their wet and wiry fur took swipes at his face. Simon ran to find shelter, pushing himself against a greasy brick wall. He thought he recognized the house—someone’s aunt had lived there when he was a child. But that was impossible. He looked up to find the window where she used to watch for her husband, and found slanted yellowed eyes staring at him through the rain—he thought maybe some feline’s eyes, or child’s. The pale face that suddenly appeared around the eyes was much like a skinny child’s face, surrounded by a matted cloud of ashen hair. But he was greatly fatigued, and this was the only face he’d seen in a couple of days, and he found it increasingly difficult to see in this dimness. This is what getting old is like, he thought. A long fade into evening.

The rain began to ease and so Simon headed toward home. With each step the force of the rain lessened and the clouds of moisture dissipated, and no house was over a story again, the houses beaten down, until he reached his own house where everything was remarkably dry. Something escaped out of his back yard—a tangle of broken or too-many-segmented legs. A truck was parked out front and two squat men were unloading the bed his cousin promised.

There was a leak in the kitchen faucet, the water oozing like syrup. It had begun raining again, beating against the house like a thousand tiny fists. The house appeared to resent the abuse and issued some grumbling complaints of its own.

At least the bed made Simon feel more civilized. It wasn’t particularly comfortable, though better than a sleeping bag on the floor. But now he could imagine uninvited guests hiding beneath. He wasn’t a child anymore, of course, but he was feeling very little like an adult. He tried to sleep but could hear tiny tappings on the house’s most distant windows, water still dripping from the rain or maybe the trapped beating of moths against the glass. Eventually succumbing, he dreamed of a small riot he’d witnessed as a child—teenagers throwing bricks, someone’s mother screaming, faces washed in blood. The young sometimes simply couldn’t take it anymore and had to strike out because of conditions. But sometimes when you were old you were too wrapped up in your memories to move as fast as you should—you got hurt lying in the way.

The next morning he found long strands of, presumably, animal hair coiled in the corners of the room and lying across his blanket. But he had been cleaning aggressively and couldn’t imagine where these coarse strands had been hiding. As the sun rose the movement of shadow inside the house became unceasing: trees bending outside the windows, the travel of clouds across dark patches of sky, and the nearby houses rising up hazily and swaying in the wind.

He crawled from out of the covers and staggered to the back door in trepidation, but there were no big houses in the back yard today. By the fence a cluster of weeds and something else unrepentantly tangled. He looked for eyes but could find none.

He thought he heard children playing in some remote yard, bossy and excited and dramatic and now and then hurt and crying over nothing and everything. But this might have been a memory. He didn’t bother to look around. He suspected he wouldn’t find anything.

Gazing up at the overhead electrical lines that traveled over the back yard Simon observed their poor state of repair. Tiny bits of black insulation lay scattered like dead bugs all over the grass.

He took another stab that morning at cleaning. It shouldn’t have been necessary, but dust seemed to come out of nowhere to spoil the rooms. The floorboards weren’t tightly fitted—dust from the crawlspace underneath seeped through. Dust also came down from the ceiling, from the flaws at the corners and the holes where plants once hung. It came back as fast as he wiped it away. Dust also issued from the loose-fitting windows and from under the front door. Many of the yards in the development had gone back to bare ground and now the wind was redistributing them.

He stayed away from the windows, not even wanting to look. Sometimes outside there were old house facades that shouldn’t have been there, and slanting shadows from tall houses torn down decades ago. He could see the way the light shifted inside as the outside world impossibly changed—and if he were to look out he’d have to doubt his own sanity.

He still had seen no teenagers, no children of any kind, but he heard their feet scuffling outside, and the ragged sounds of their breath as they ran away. Where were their parents? Where were anyone’s parents? No doubt hiding beneath their beds. At least the cats he’d seen had left him alone.

As if in answer his own bed creaked and something shifted in the light, but Simon refused to turn around. If he just kept his mind on cleaning he would be fine.

Early that afternoon the clouds lifted and light glared across the bedroom ceiling. He witnessed the vague lines in one corner of the heavily textured surface, the slightly depressed outline of a trapdoor into the attic.

It made sense, of course. Each of these houses would have some sort of attic. He could see a fuzz of lines along one side of this small hatch—cobwebs or insect legs or simply an accumulated string of dust hanging down. Perhaps if he removed some of the attic dust he wouldn’t have such a dust problem below. And besides, there might be things put away up there and forgotten, treasures no one remembered.

He had no ladder, but he could slide the bed into the corner. From there it was a simple matter of standing and pushing the panel up and to the side, and then the strenuous but doable labor of leveraging himself up into the darkness.

He saw no treasure, but copious amounts of dust. Much of it had accumulated into furry mounds in the corners. He caught a glimpse of daylight, and shifting himself for a better view saw that a corner of the attic had been damaged, rotted out all the way to the outside air, ragged as if chewed.

Long, coarse hairs from the mounds glistened, moved. Then one of them shuddered, and a ragged gap in the middle opened wide.

Simon dropped back onto the bed, hastily fitting the panel back into place. Over the next hour he rummaged through the junk in the closet, finding a few strips of metal he could screw into the panel’s edges and secure it to the ceiling. He slid his bed back into the middle of the room and lay there watching the fastened ceiling panel. At one point the metal strips might have wiggled, but that might have been his eyes and nerves fraying from staring too long. Outside the teens ran around the house—he could imagine bands of them looking for trouble, or was it the pets they’d left behind? He was too old and too nervous for this. Tomorrow he would hike out of here and visit his cousin. Thank you and sorry and thanks but no thanks. He wasn’t sure if he’d tell him what he’d seen and heard. Old men had been locked away for less. He fell asleep pondering if there was anywhere else to go, and dreamed of being dragged screaming from his bed.

But he woke up still in his temporary house and on his temporary bed. The ceiling panel remained safely in place. What was different was the redness of the room, as if Simon were seeing it through a veil of blood. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. The intense redness still permeated, brighter near the window. He slid off the bed and fumbled the curtains aside.

A glorious scarlet sunset had swallowed the world and retrieved the tall old grandfather and grandmother houses from his childhood. The residents were outside shouting their enthusiasm as they walked toward the center of the development where the air was brightest, as if the sun were descending at that moment into their neighborhood. He could see little more than their rapt and shiny faces, the rest looking thin and dark as lamp black. His eyesight was clearly fading. He knew he would see nothing of the new world now.

He wasn’t sure what to do but couldn’t bear the thought of remaining in this cramped little hovel with all that human activity going on outside. Why had they hid themselves away from him? One glimpse from their hiding places should have told them he had neither the inclination nor the ability to do them any harm. And with those things in the attic he felt safer outside. He jerked open the door and hurried out, determined to get a good look and become a part of whatever was to come.

A few of the neighboring ranch homes appeared unchanged, but as Simon followed the stragglers toward their brilliant destination he saw that the remainder had gradually warped into two stories or three or four, the walls stretched vertically thin to transparency, as if they were decaying upwards into these phantom rectangles with deteriorated regions allowing the night sky to show through. In some places a bright oblong of window appeared to float high in the air with a shouting person inside, with no discernible supporting structure around it.

He turned to the rioter next to him to share his amazement—it was an old man gone to crumbling cinders from his ribcage down.

Turning the corner he came face to face with the blackened crisp remains of youth gangs, shouting and punching those around them even as they had fingers and limbs flaking off. At the block’s center a hollow building displayed a boiling fire inside, dozens of those furry bodies exploding out from its blazing core like flaming cannonballs fashioned of fur.

They had their dirty, dirty hands all over him, their sooty clothes reeking of smoke and booze and the stench of new-fangled habits. He tried to reason with them but discovered he no longer spoke their language. There was nothing he could do, it seemed, and when they dragged him into the flames he found he no longer wished to resist.