The Best Horror of the Year Volume Eleven

by Ellen Datlow

  We talked. I said little about my life. The drinks cart came round again. And she told me this story. I’m not sure how it came up. Maybe I pushed her about why she was anxious, what caused the shaking in her arm.

  When she started, a queer look came over her face. She’d had a blush developing from the wine but it drained off her. It was like a higher level of gravity switched on just for her, drawing everything down.

  “I was actually born in Cumbria—not the Beatrix Potter bit, just a touch further north. Near Carlisle anyway, if you’ve heard of it—an awful little town if I remember right, and this was back in the ‘80s.

  “I turned twelve in May of ‘89 and my father died—no, there’s no need be sorry, it’s okay—it was such a very long time ago. On the day of the funeral the rain was coming down like nothing you’ve seen. Hammering on the roof of the black car all the way to the church. I had on a black velvet dress I was trying not to touch because I hated the texture. My coat was pink and even with the rain and the cold my mum made me take it off in the car.

  “I held onto one of her hands and my little brother, Teddy, not even three then, stumbled along holding on to her other hand. At the church door she lifted him onto her waist because he was fussing, and she let go of me.

  “I remember the wet earth in my hand after the service, how my mother helped me throw it onto his coffin. I felt there was nothing holding me any more. That there was nothing keeping me safe.

  “We used to have our routines. Daddy would drop me at school on his way to work with a kiss and hand me my lunch. At dinner he would feed Teddy and make jokes, make things so easy.

  “Now Teddy screamed bloody murder at every meal. He pushed the plate away from him, his little face tense and red. My mother in a panic, and me, smashing a plate on the kitchen floor and pretending it was an accident.

  “So in the end my mother gave in to one of the many offers of help and my aunt, my father’s sister, moved into the little room on the ground floor next to the garage. I hated that room. I used to hold my breath when I had to walk past it. The roof was flat in there, so all the rain coming down and down made an unearthly sound.

  “When my aunt moved in things changed again. I was used to eating my tea watching Blue Peter while my mother staged Battle Royale with Teddy, but no, now we were all to sit at the table and not get down until we were all done.

  “She dressed Teddy in the morning. So carefully brushing his hair and of course it was a mess a second later. She was forever pulling up his socks, his trousers, spitting on a hanky to get dirt off his face. Always pulling at him, and her voice so high when she spoke to him: ‘Who’s your favourite auntie?’ and ‘Where’s my lovely little boy?’ He’d twitch away and roar but still she came down on him, smothering him with kisses. She didn’t seem to care that she was so unwanted. I would have cared. From the start she barely had a kind word for me.

  “My mother shrank into herself, forever starting things and not finishing them. My aunt took over, whisked embroidery out of my mother’s hands. She’d always say, ‘You need to be resting, Audrey, don’t tire yourself.’

  “Once I woke up in the dead of night and kept my eyes squeezed shut from fear. It’s such a pure fear you get when you’re a child and alone in bed at night. The shape of your dressing gown on the wall is like a skinny dark figure covered in hair. Everything is out to get you. Teddy laughed to himself in the next room. ‘Toto,’ he said, like he was greeting someone with affection, I hid under my duvet. His little giggles and that word made the fear in me worse. I started to think, maybe we weren’t alone.

  “Teddy got to be more and more of a handful. He started kicking and biting and he’d never been like that before, not vicious. My aunt came off worst, with all her pawing of him. He was still a small child, but his little fists could hurt. She was always carrying bruises and little teethmarks.

  “It was his words that got under my mother’s skin.

  “‘I don’t like Mummy,’ he’d start—a little murmur and get louder and louder till he was screaming it. The first time it was funny, but not over days and over weeks.

  “I asked him who he did like and he just said, ‘Toto’ and then, ‘I want Toto’—and that was all we heard for the rest of the day.

  “I felt uncomfortable. I started keeping my light on at night but still I looked around, scared there was something there, more than just the four of us gnawing at each other.

  My aunt started taking me and Teddy to church, as if she sensed something too. He’d scream and thrash but she’d keep tight hold and take both of us up to the priest to be blessed for Holy Communion. Teddy fussed, trying to get his head away. I accepted my blessing quite calmly.

  “My mother didn’t come with us.

  “One Sunday we returned home and she wasn’t there. Her keys were in the bowl and her coat on the hook. But no mother.

  “My aunt called out, and hearing nothing ran upstairs. Teddy was strapped into his pushchair—sat forward and straining as always. But for once quiet.

  “I got a sick feeling. My aunt was moving upstairs quickly, room to room.

  “I walked up to the door to that room by the garage. I put my hand on the handle. Not daring to open it, I sunk to my knees and put my eye to the keyhole.

  “At first, I thought there was a tiny mirror there. But my eyes adjusted to the dark and I could see the eye was red with a waxy lid—I could see it clear enough to know it wasn’t human.

  “I felt like I’d been stabbed. It was a pit opening inside me. I jumped back, screaming. My aunt was there in a second.

  “We found my mother in there. Her eyes tight shut. There was no sign of that thing. There was nothing wrong with her, except for three tiny cuts on the top of her arm. My aunt kept saying that she must have fallen over in the room and caught herself on something.

  “The house felt darker.

  “I tried not to be any trouble. But after you’ve seen something like that, you don’t want to be alone. I clung to my mother. When she was awake she’d accept my kisses and let me sit on her knee, holding me loosely. At least until my aunt pulled me on to my feet saying I was a big girl, that I wasn’t to be coddled. I felt a rush of hatred towards her then.

  “I went back to school. I liked being there because I didn’t feel watched wherever I went. On the walk home with my aunt, I’d feel sick. My hand would get sweaty in hers. She’d ‘tut’ and hold it tighter. As if I had anywhere to run away to.

  “My head hurt with trying not to think about the thing I saw. Anything glimpsed out of the corner of my eye made me jolt, arch my back like I’d been hit. As the sun went down I got into a panic. I’d lie alone in bed, my fists clenched and sweating.

  “I hoped I’d imagined it. Your eyes can trick you when you’re scared and unhappy. It kept raining.

  “That night my aunt was playing with Teddy; she tickled him and he giggled. From the other side of the room I heard what he said clearly. He said, ‘Toto cut Auntie with a knife.’

  “My aunt grabbed Teddy’s tiny wrists and hauled him upstairs. She didn’t say anything. Later, when I walked past Teddy’s room, there was no crying, no screaming or struggling to get out. Instead, just laughter.

  “Night fell. I lay tense in my sheets, cold and scared. I must have drifted off close to morning, because I was woken by my mother’s screaming.

  “She’d found my aunt’s body, after knocking and knocking and getting no reply. They never let me see, but the policemen who came, they all walked out with green faces.

  “We went to stay with a family friend and moved shortly after. My mother found herself a job in Dubai. Teddy was a different child out there.”

  After that the woman on the plane had nothing further to say. We landed, and I watched her get into a taxi. I felt discomfort, like the story she’d told had crawled inside my ear.

  My home was quiet and empty and I flicked on all the lights, wishing I didn’t live alone.

  I LOVE YOU MARY-GRACE

>   AMELIA MANGAN

  There was roadkill all up and down the highway this morning.

  It is nine a.m. and sunlight is sifting through the treetops. The lake is still and black and crawling with bugs. Thin grass grows beside it, tamped down by the boots of men I’ve never met. I am sitting in the hot police cruiser with the windows up, thinking about roadkill, as the sheriff hauls a dog’s head out of the water on the end of a fishing line.

  Maybe there was just more of it than usual, I think. There was a possum and a raccoon and something that was all bloody tubes and hair. Maybe there’s more reckless driving going on in these parts, these days. Or maybe there was always this much killing going on and I just never noticed.

  Ned curses and sweats. He’s stripped to his shirtsleeves. His jacket, with the badge pinned to the front like always, like he wants it to be the first thing about him you ever see, is crumpled up next to me on the driver’s seat. Light refracts through the windshield and cooks the leather. All the smells that make up Ned Cardew rise up beside me: beef and hops and dried salt, spicy aftershave and sour coffee. I’ve been his deputy since I was twenty-one. Nine years of his smell in my nostrils. I’d be able to track him just about anywhere.

  Ned digs his heels into the muck and strains at the line. Jim Tarrant, who reported the head, stands to one side, shriveled arms crossed, gray face barely curious. I can see the dog’s head from here, bobbing on the end of the line like it’s worrying at it. One bare tooth flashes in the sun.

  “Goddamn,” Ned spits. “Frankie! Frankie, boy! Get your ass outta that car and lend a hand here, will you?”

  You told me to wait here, I think. I am waiting here because you told me to wait here. And now I am getting out because he tells me to. I am crossing the mushy ground because he tells me to. And I am grabbing the line and helping him draw this dog’s head toward the bank because he tells me to. Jim watches, unmoved, unmoving.

  “Christ, it’s huge,” Ned mutters. The cords in his neck bunch. “Big bastard. Maybe a wolf or a bear or something.”

  It’s a dog. I know it’s a dog. And it is big. The closer it comes the more I see. Seaweed fur, streaming black. Empty eyes withered as dead brown seeds. Hard strong bones under thick tanned hide. And its mouth. Its mouth. A broken, swinging jaw and a black gullet so deep you’d never find the bottom. Yellow fangs stud the darkness, winking underwater.

  “You better get it out of here,” says Jim, refolding his arms. “Looks old. Diseased. Probably leaking all kinds of sickness into that water.”

  “Yeah, it’s old, all right,” Ned says, crouching, examining it. The neck is cut cleanly. No gore. Its flesh is pressed flat against its skull. “Looks like it’s been here for years.”

  “Centuries,” I say. Quietly.

  Ned looks me in the eye. “Now what makes you say that, Frankie?”

  I look down.

  “You an expert or something? You been an expert in dead dogs all these years, never told me?”

  “No,” I say, staring at the soil. “It looks preserved, is all. Like maybe it’s from before the town was founded. Maybe it was buried on the lake bottom and got loose somehow and floated to the surface.” I glance up; he’s still looking at me, so I look at the head. Water drips from a petrified lash, pools in a socket. “Like one of those peat bogs you hear about, with mummies in ’em. Maybe.”

  “Mummies,” Ned repeats. He looks at the head and chuckles.

  “When I was a kid,” Jim pipes up, “people used to say this whole area was settled by dogheads. Y’ever hear about that, Ned? People from someplace in Europe. Had heads like dogs.”

  “I heard that,” I say. “In grade school, I heard that.”

  Ned squints at me. “Well, ain’t you just a font of knowledge today.”

  I hunch my shoulders. “Just trying to help.”

  He nods, pauses. Laughs. “I’m only kidding you, Frankie. You’re a good boy.” He reaches out with one hot hand and ruffles my hair, and I relax.

  Ned gestures at the head. “Let’s get this thing in the trunk, huh?”

  “Sure, Ned.” I hunker down and gather the head into my arms. It’s bigger than my own. Heavy and stinking. Rotting waterweed and gritty mud. Wet dog smell. My fingers knit in its fur, snarl up around its long stringy ears.

  Ned strides up the bank and I trot along after him, pressing the head to my chest. “So you really think it’s a few hundred years old?” he says, popping the trunk and hauling out the cooler.

  It takes me a moment to realize he actually wants an answer. “Could be,” I say, opening my arms. The head rolls out of my hands, settling into the cooler. A tight fit.

  “So it’s probably worth something, then?” Ned asks, slamming the trunk. “To a museum or someplace?”

  Sunlight glares off the lid. The lock seems very solid.

  “Could be,” I say.

  “‘Could be.’ ‘Could be,’” says Ned, climbing into the driver’s seat. “An opinion would be nice, Frankie.”

  “Honestly, Ned, I don’t know about these things,” I say. I am avoiding his eyes again. I find myself very aware of my neck, of the way it dips of its own accord nowadays, lowering my head as if it knew no other way to go.

  “Well, we’ll keep the thing in the evidence locker ‘till I get a chance to make some calls.” Ned guns the engine and glances into the mirror, back at the trunk. His lip quirks. “Centuries,” he says, and shakes his head. “Goddamn.”

  We’re moving. Heading up the hill, further into the trees. I wind down the window and force myself to breathe the air. Tangy pine and oozing sap. Melted asphalt. Laced with roadkill.

  The trailer squats at the top of the incline, right where the road ends and the woods begin in earnest. We’re off Jim Tarrant’s property now, in the trees, the real wild trees, owned by nobody. This isn’t the only trailer in the vicinity. There are a series of clearings like this, and, technically, they all make up a park. But that makes it sound like a community, and it definitely isn’t that. Nobody up here ever talks to anybody unless they have to.

  I get out of the car and follow Ned up to the trailer’s front door. The clothes-line is out, like last time, like always. Water beads on fraying elastic. Wounded clothing. Holes and patches, stitches, scars. The ground beneath is mud.

  My heart twists. Every time.

  Music rattles and thumps behind the rusted tin. Hammering piano, drowsy saxophone. A woman’s voice taunts and swoons, warning us that if we should lose her, we’ll lose a good thing.

  Ned balls up a fist and knocks. Patient, polite. He knows he’ll be heard.

  The music cuts off. There’s a long, still moment, crystallized in the heat. I can feel breath being held. Maybe it’s mine.

  Ned waits, out of courtesy. Knocks again.

  Chains jangle, locks click. Mary-Grace Hogue shuffles out, bare-legged and blonde and mosquito-bitten. Her shoulders are bare and slumped, dusted down with sweat, her eyes turned to her feet, her glossy painted toenails. Cheap polish, a brand-new coat. That sticky drugstore smell. A melted plastic candy apple.

  Ned places one hand on the roof of the trailer, right over her head, and leans in. “Well. How’s this morning finding you, Mary-Grace?”

  Mary-Grace’s eyes dart up and I see dark red-blooded hatred shiver through them, but Ned is very good at looking at people, very practiced. Mary-Grace can’t match him. Her lids lower again, the lashes fall back down. “Good,” she says, low.

  “Good,” says Ned. “And how’s business?”

  Mary-Grace’s arms hang limp at her sides, but I see the little finger of her left hand twitch, crooking down, like a slashing claw.

  “Fine,” she says.

  “Fine,” says Ned. He nods.

  Mary-Grace raises an arm, scratches at a bite on her wrist. The bite is very red, the skin puckered.

  Saliva, I know, is a very good treatment for bites.

  “Well,” Ned says, louder, “if you don’t mind . . .”

  Mary-G
race shudders aside. Ned vanishes into the trailer. I hear him rustling things, emptying things, turning things over. Upending Mary-Grace’s little life. Same as every month.

  I am left alone with her. “Hi, Mary-Grace,” I say.

  She looks up. “Hi, Frankie.”

  Mary-Grace Hogue has the biggest eyes I have ever seen and smells better than anything in this world. I think this, as I have thought it for most of my life.

  Ned grunts.

  Mary-Grace’s mouth is a line, set hard as cement. One arm is crossed over her body, shielding it from me. Her forearm is poised in the air, clutching for a desired and non-existent cigarette.

  Normally I do not talk to Mary-Grace and she does not talk to me.

  “We found something this morning,” I say. “In the lake. Down near the Tarrant place.”

  Mary-Grace blinks. “Oh,” she says.

  Something heavy topples inside. She flinches, looks over her shoulder.

  My head buzzes with heat. “Do you remember when we were in grade school?”

  She looks back at me. “What?”

  “What you told me back then? About the town settlers?”

  Another crash. Her face does not move, but her arm begins to shake.

  “What about it, Frankie?”

  Ned re-emerges. His footsteps shake the floor. “Okay,” he says. “All present and correct. Nothing illegal on the premises.”

  Mary-Grace is silent.

  “Come on now, Mary-Grace,” Ned says, spreading his hands, helpless, “don’t you be giving me that look. You know I gotta obey procedure. We have to keep things honest around here.”

  Her lips convulse. A glimmer of shadowed teeth.

  Ned coughs. “So,” he says. “Guess I’ll be on my way, then.” He stands over her, waiting.

  Mary-Grace bows her head and shoves past him into the trailer.

  Ned tilts his head. “Y’all have a nice chat?”

  I stare at him. Mary-Grace returns and slaps a thick paper envelope into Ned’s hand.

  Ned weighs it and nods. Tips his hat. Turns and saunters back to the car, stuffing the envelope into his back pocket.