The Best Horror of the Year Volume Eleven

by Ellen Datlow

  Maybe it’s because I remember so few of her facial features. None, actually. Since the night this happened, my mind has constantly been on overload trying to picture exactly what this lady looked like. Whether she was old or young. The weird thing is that I cannot answer those questions. Weird, as the next thing, I sat down in the shotgun seat and could clearly see her. But no matter how hard I try to recap, the only thing I can say for sure is that she looked drained and bleak, with her breath visibly rising around her face. It was as cold inside the car as outside. The heater wasn’t on. That I noticed right away.

  She gave me a quick glance. Didn’t shake hands, though. I wanted to reach out mine, but changed my mind. What’s common when someone offers you a ride? Is there such a thing as hitchhiker’s etiquette? Not to be rude, I repeated, “Thanks, for real. I appreciate you stoppin’.”

  “I do not like driving alone at night,” said my driver. The silence she dropped was too long. So long that I felt obliged to fill it in. But then she added, as an afterthought: “Especially when it rains.”

  “Well, at least it isn’t raining,” I said. It was a stupid thing to say. I knew that, but I was caught off guard. “I take it there are no streetlights higher up the road. Must get pretty dark out there.”

  “Yes, very dark. I can hear the rain before it falls.”

  The traffic light had switched back to red. We were waiting for nobody.

  “It’s a hearing disorder. I hear a buzzing in my ears. First I thought it was just from earwax, but it’s not. It’s as if there’s a steady rain in the back of my head. It’s not very nice. Not very nice at all.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. And added, because I didn’t know what else to say, “Must be a pain to drive alone with that.”

  “I drive alone every night. I was going to see Udur. Where you going?”

  “Me? To Vranja.”

  I was hearing myself say this. Not having any control over it. Vranja was directly on the other side of the Ucka car tunnel, you see. I didn’t want the lady to know I was going all the way to Pazin, more than thirty kilometers beyond. That seemed very important. The less she knew about me, the better off I would be.

  “Vranja. That sounds familiar. Udur must’ve been there, I think. I was going to see Udur.”

  “Cool,” I said. Trying to keep my voice casual. Not succeeding. “Who’s Udur?”

  And another long silence. I didn’t think the lady would answer me. But she did, right as the light switched to green and she piloted the Prius onto the motorway. “Udur,” she said, “Udur is not a good man.”

  I didn’t know how to process that information. Or why she had said it to me. It made me feel uncomfortable. Perhaps I could tell her maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to see Udur, if he was a bad man. What kind of name was Udur anyway? But I didn’t. I didn’t feel it was my place to poke my nose in her business. Plus she hadn’t said he was a bad man. She’d said Udur is not a good man. There’s a crucial difference.

  The lady was fixated on the road ahead, pale-faced in the dashboard glare. I turned away, rolled my head against the window. Our speed was blurring the outside. The details of the peninsula were black. The Adriatic Sea an empty abyss. A lifeless dark chewing up the world around us. My seat cushion wasn’t comfy at all, giving me that quicksand sense as I sank in it. I moved my legs, but it was too cold to relax. I tried to focus on the glass vibrating against my forehead. It was strangely hypnotic. Like a brain massage.

  I shouldn’t be here. At all.

  “You really don’t mind the cold, do you?” I said, rubbing my hands to emphasize my words.

  “The problem with Udur is that he lets things fall apart,” the lady said. Me, I was weighing the likelihood that she’d deliberately ignored what I’d said. “Udur had a dog. A sheepdog. But not anymore. If you look at him now you’d never think he had a dog.”

  We were driving fast.

  “What happened to it?”

  “In the end it was very old. One eye was all milky from a cataract. We had to put it down.”

  “Aww,” I said. “Such a loss when you need to put your dog to sleep.”

  The lady didn’t look at me as she was speaking. “They’re a real handful and expensive to keep. Especially a sheepdog. Udur is not a dog man.”

  Dog man, is what she said. Not dog person. I should probably have known better, but curiosity got the upper hand. “Did he get sick or somethin’? The dog, I mean.”

  “At that time, Udur had the baby. It’s not easy, you see, especially at night. The nights were worst. Sometimes it didn’t stop raining all night, and we could hear the baby cry in the barn. Anyway, Udur hadn’t checked on the dog for a few days. We’d left it on a leash. We used to just toss the meat in the pig trough, but the dog hadn’t touched it for days. When Udur finally went into the barn he said it was just lying there. The barn was old and there was a big hole in the roof. Even though the rain came pouring in and made the dog all muddy and wet, it wouldn’t move. Udur said the dog wasn’t looking well. Not well at all. Said it was staring back at him with one good eye, smelling all sweet and acrid. So he thought he better get it rinsed and inside. It was a big dog, a sheepdog, but still Udur wanted to try and lift it up. I told him, you shouldn’t. But he did anyway. When he turned it around, he found its belly was open and swarming with larvae. They were everywhere, roving the stains in its fur and the wet spots in its flesh and up and down its silly limbs like some flood of living disease. The dog was being eaten alive. From the inside out. And we never would have known if Udur hadn’t gone and checked on it. If it hadn’t been for the baby, crying.”

  These words, this lady, that’s exactly what she said.

  “I think it got infected with something. Began to rot. Udur tried to suture the hole back together but it didn’t work. In the end he had to hit it in the head with a hammer until it was dead. To put the dog out of its misery, give it peace. It was a most merciful thing to do.”

  But I found nothing merciful or peaceful in the image the lady had cooked up. Besides, we’d been picking up speed all along as we were talking. I don’t think the lady realized how fast we were going. This was plain irresponsible on a two-lane road. It was too curvy. Too dark.

  I tried to sneak a peek at my driver obliquely, didn’t want to show I was gaping up at her. She was tall. Very tall. Why hadn’t I noticed before? She seemed too tall to fit comfortably behind the wheel, but her posture was straight up. There was nothing sexy or attractive about her length. It unsettled me.

  I noticed I was sweating again. Despite the cold. Maybe because of the cold. “It’s cool if you just let me out here, ma’am,” I heard myself say. But my voice sounded frail, the words swirling away from me. I wasn’t sure whether I had actually said them out loud.

  “Sometimes, my head is filled with buzzing,” said the lady. “It just doesn’t stop. I’ll never get used to it. It’s like there are voices in the rain. At least that’s what Udur says, but I know it’s not voices. It’s wasps.”

  A car was coming. I tried to see the driver, but in the dark it was hard to make out anything. When it swooshed by, the blast of air shook the Prius and we swayed left and right.

  “Wasps,” she repeated. “I know because I’ve seen them. There’s a wasp in the center of the universe that’s bigger than all others. It crawls from star to star and when it finds you it stings. Its sting paralyzes you. You’re awake, but you cannot move. Like sleep paralysis, are you familiar with that? You feel it crawling all over you. Sometimes it crawls inside through the holes in your body, and you cannot stop it. It’s very frightening. I can feel it crawling on the inside of my skull right now. It’s laying eggs. In a while, its larvae will feed on me, too.”

  Okay, that was it. I needed out. Now. I didn’t care that I’d be out on some shit road in the dark, alone, in the middle of fucked-up nowhere. I’d walk all the way back into town if I had to. As long as I could get away. Away from this lady. Something was terribly wr
ong. I didn’t want to look at her anymore. But I had to. I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed.

  Her fingers groping the steering wheel. Slithering over its black leather cover. I suddenly realized that we’d been on cruise control all along. These fingers. Pushing a button. Again. On the display, digits switching from 102 to 108 and me hearing the motor accelerate. But that was not what was most alarming. There was something wrong with these fingers. They were not longer than before, but still, they looked like they were. Long and curved. Cold-cold blue. Almost dripping. And I noticed the tips had no nails. What had happened to her nails?

  For a second, I thought I heard something move behind me. I froze. Suddenly I knew I wasn’t mistaken. It was not in my head. I heard a baby cry. At the sound, it felt like my scalp began to crawl over my skull. With a jolt, I turned to look where it was coming from. It was hard to distinguish anything on the rear bench in the dark, but behind the shotgun seat I could vaguely make out the shape of a strapped-in portable cradle. I hadn’t noticed it before. Something in it was moving. I couldn’t see what.

  “Something very bad is going to happen,” whispered the lady. I couldn’t believe how tall she was! I bounced back in my seat, squirmed away, my back against the car door. Terror filled me. Absolute terror. The lady, she was much too tall to fit inside the Prius, and yet she was sitting next to me, like an optical delusion. I think that’s when I knew. There’s something very similar to a living, healthy lady behind the wheel, but altogether different at the same time. It’s the equivalent of every ghost story you’d ever heard. For the first time since I’d entered the car, the lady looked at me again. Blood was dripping from her nose. “And I do feel the cold,” she whispered. “It’s always cold here. So cold.”

  “Let me out,” I said, my voice raw and hoarse. “Please, let me out of the car.”

  We turned the last curve and in the distance, I saw the mouth of the Ucka Tunnel. The motorway suddenly lit. A yellow, sickening glare. The mouth of the tunnel a dark hole in the mountain. Coming closer lightning-fast.

  The light. It revealed everything. The dead lady behind the steering wheel. The paralyzed, hollow expression on her face. Her hands, so long that they reached all the way from the back of the driver’s seat to the steering wheel. Arms bent in all-impossible angles from her body. Again, she accelerated. We veered to the left. The lady sent the Prius into the opposite lane.

  “I was going to see Udur,” she said. “Now I’m stuck in the dark. You will see Udur too.”

  These words, the motor roaring, the baby crying: a top-three of things I’ll never forget. When I looked again, she was gone. You know how the story goes.

  The driver’s seat was empty. As if the lady had never been there. And the Prius was on a dazzling high-speed collision course with the concrete pillar left of the tunnel mouth.

  It was a reflex. This was me. This was my second chance. That I lived to tell the tale was a twist of pure luck. Or maybe it was basic instinct. Fuck if I know. What I do know is it’s not common sense that saves you from certain disaster. It’s something much more primitive taking over. I remember yanking the wheel around. Missing the pillar by an inch. The car swayed into the tunnel, leaving twin smoking tracks of burned rubber. Inside, I was tumbling over the center console and caught by the safety belt, hearing a whiz-bang noise as the air escaped my lungs like a ripping bullet. The first thing I saw as my head popped up was the concrete slab on the right of the two-lane blacktop, dead-on in my headlights. I cranked the wheel back. The car bumping, joggling, onto the curb. Screeching metal. Sparks flaring up the dark like shooting stars. Another jolt, and I had the wheel in both my hands. Midway between catching fire and losing a door, the car bounced back onto the road. But we just kept on going, blazing deeper into the dark with unabated velocity. For a few seconds, there was a twitching, pile-driving sense of claustrophobia. A voice calling in my ears: I was going to see Udur. Now I’m stuck in the dark.

  Cruise control. Of course. How did you turn the fucking thing off? This too was a lucky reflex: reaching down, I pulled on the handbrake. Not having my license, I didn’t expect the counterpressure. It startled me, forcing me to let go. Now I understand that my lack of experience probably prevented the Prius from jackknifing or flipping over. Instead, I added pressure bit by bit. The Prius immediately slowed down. With a few jolts, the engine stalled and the car came to a stop.

  Almost a minute went by before I could even move. The sudden silence was full of echoes. What had just happened? Incredulously, I realized that there had just been a point-blank assault on my life. The real possibility of a sudden death shocked me more than the vision of the impossible. It was the appalled disbelief of a swimmer being attacked by a bull shark: something like that only happened to others. Not me. This dead person I’d been alone with, she had wanted to drag me into her darkness. Forget subtlety. I had to get out of here. Right now. What if she came back?

  The baby! I looked around. There was no cradle. No baby.

  But it had been there.

  I threw open the door and stumbled out of the car. It was unpleasantly cold inside the Ucka Tunnel. It smelled of exhaust and crankcase oil. And something else. Something stale. I couldn’t identify what it was. Skittishly, I wheeled around. Wary of any sound, anything that moved. I took a few quick steps away from the car. The echoes of my footsteps making it seem as if I were being stalked by a regiment of ghosts. Beyond the intermittent puddles of bleak, yellow light I saw the entrance of the tunnel arching in the distance. The Prius had blasted inside for at least three hundred meters before it had come to a halt.

  I didn’t move. The image of the blue Toyota Prius on the yellow center line brought home the photograph I should have remembered much, much earlier. The photograph that had dominated all the local papers and news sites. Last November. Suddenly, all the pieces fell into place.

  It had been a similar car. Of course it had. A Toyota Prius in Blue Crush Metallic. Only this car, it was a wreck. It was smoking twisted metal with a cutting-edge dynamic tail chassis for athletic look and improved fuel efficiency sticking out. Doing at least one hundred ten, it had crashed into the side pillar of the Ucka Tunnel mouth. The driver must have dozed off at exactly the time one didn’t want to. On board, two dead passengers: a student from Rijeka and an unknown baby. That was the first weird thing about the accident. This baby couldn’t be identified. No one was missing one. The gossip was that it was a family-tragedy suicide, the driver being the troubled mother. But that couldn’t be confirmed. That was the second weird thing: the driver’s body hadn’t been found. Only the baby and the student. The crushed remains of the latter had been strapped to the shotgun seat. Forensic investigation had ruled out the option that he could have been driving the car. But who could? And where was the body? Logic says there had to be a body. I’ve seen the photo. Everyone had. A human body cannot survive a blow like that.

  Listening to the ticking of the engine, I tried to recall the facts. I remembered a desperate appeal to witnesses to come forward. If any did, they didn’t clear up the mystery. A few days after the accident, the Nova List had reported that the police were still in the dark about the origin of the Prius and the identity of its driver. It had struck me as strange. Why hadn’t the license registration shed any light? How come no CCTV footage from gas stations or highway cams surfaced with video of the blue Prius? There were simply no leads at all. Not even from the student’s mourning family. His being in that ill-fated car seemed a horrible coincidence. The student must have been hitchhiking. Hooked a ride with a black heart.

  And here I was, staring at the Prius inside the tunnel, thinking there’s no such thing as a coincidence, and I didn’t have any doubts as to what had happened that night.

  I needed to talk to somebody. Somebody alive. And I had to get out of the tunnel. There was something wrong with the air here. It had been standing still for too long. Outside, there’d be fresh air. And there was a long, long walk’s worth of fresh air ahead.
It goes without saying I wouldn’t be flagging anybody down to catch a ride once I got out.

  And yet I couldn’t put myself in motion. I was staring deeper down the tunnel where it banked away in a slow curve, beyond the reach of the headlights. There was something there. Something singing.

  There was a baby crying.

  The sound came crawling closer from afar. Echoing. Filling the tunnel. The terrible thing about it was that it had a basic human quality, but absolutely wasn’t.

  My eyes were tearing up. I didn’t dare to blink. As if I could trap the thing coming closer in my vision. My feet were smarter than my brain and began to carry me backward. They had a will of their own. They saved my life.

  What came closer, from the deep dark of the tunnel, was not human. It was her. The lady from the car. The Tall Lady. If ever there was a name for her, why not start calling her what she was? This lady, she filled the entire tunnel. So tall she was that she had to walk with her head bent forward. She spread her arms. Her no-nail fingers, pale and bare, scraping over the concrete walls on both sides of the motorway. Pulling grotesque shadows. She was singing. No, she was buzzing. Like a wasp.

  I was in her dark. And she was still looking for company.

  I remember I ran. I had never run so fast before. Jumping from light pool to light pool, chased by a terrible legion of echoes. Crossing the darkness in between as if I were flying. The light pools wouldn’t keep me safe. I had to reach the end of the tunnel before she could reach me.

  Then I heard her. Right behind me. Her buzzing was filling my brain. And footsteps. Slow footsteps. When you have legs of such length, you don’t need to walk fast to move quickly.

  Once, I looked back. The moment I did, all the synapses inside my cerebral cortex instantly stopped firing. I don’t remember what I saw. For real. This is not some sorry excuse not to talk about it. I feel it’s there, somewhere deep inside, but I can’t reach it. I’m grateful for it. When I try to think back on it, I see my vision is shimmering. I see something yellow crawling nearer over the tunnel’s ceiling. Something arthropodal? It’s probably imagination.