The Best Horror of the Year Volume Eleven

by Ellen Datlow

  Did you close your gummy eyes and continue to take the steps one at a time, just as the younger woman’s mind snapped and the stairwell became an echo chamber for shrieking? Did you manage another flight, another five, your injured foot shrieking almost as loudly to your ears, but ignoring it because it was all you could do? Did you feel the walls around you shudder as something nearby dropped a chorus of shrieking people to their deaths, and did you have the presence of mind to know that this must have been one of the elevators, surrendering to the inevitable? Did you stagger at the thunderous and terribly liquid crash a dozen stories below? Did your imagination insist on providing a vivid illustration of all those shattered bodies left beneath that hammer’s blow, pulping even further from that impact?

  Did you feel a rush of sudden dizziness, perhaps blood loss and perhaps shock, perhaps emotional surfeit, and perhaps just the strain on anybody used to sedentary activities, not used to pushing itself up this many flights of stairs this quickly? Did you feel yourself sway at the next landing, gray spots gathering at the periphery of your vision? Did you gasp and punch the wall and gather your will to stay upright, before ripping open the door to the nearest floor, the twelfth? Did you emerge onto whatever company’s cubicle farm occupied that floor, and did your appearance raise gasps from the workers there, all clustered in the center of the room away from windows that had shattered inward? Were the overhead lights flickering? Did you have the feeling that it would be minutes at most before they failed, and darkness was added to your problems?

  Did you confirm by the blurred shapes plummeting past those windows, that there had been no lessening of the storm? Was the sky instead black with plunging bodies, all thrashing in doomed attempts to fly? Were there thousands more falling with every instant? Did you feel the need to say something to all these wide-eyed people staring at you, a report from downstairs, a bulletin from the street? Did the words fail to come? Did it strike you that they were unnecessary? Did you stumble further into their midst, see the one sandy-haired guy in the thin tie stand up as if to protest at your intrusion, then think better of it and sit down? Did any of these ridiculously clean creatures from a civilization that pre-dated your condition make further attempts to intercept you? Did you stop before an Asian woman turning to gray who recoiled when you looked at her and seemed relieved when it turned out that all you wanted was directions to a bathroom? Even then, did she just point with trembling hand, because it made no sense for her to speak?

  Did you then make your way to the little room at the end of a hallway and inside find a mirror that revealed to you a vision of yourself you had never imagined, and wished that you could not see now? Was the gore so thick on your face and on your clothing that it was not red but black, and were there white flecks that could only be bone fragments? Did you not see anybody you knew in that reflection? Did you turn the tap and find to your astonishment that it still provided water? Did you run the stream and splash it over your face, rinsing some of what painted you down the drain? Did you scrub and scrub before realizing that it made no difference, that there was too much for anything but a long shower to make a difference? Did you succeed in finding your old self behind the remnants of everything you’d crawled through? Even as your face was as clean as it was ever going to get, was the reflection that of a stranger?

  Did the clear hot water streaming from the spigot then sputter and hiccup, only to turn pink and then red, before stopping?

  Did you consider everything you had still wanted from this life? The people you loved, the dreams you’d held to your breast? Did it then strike you that it was all irrelevant now?

  Did you emerge from the bathroom no less horrific nor more recognizably human, but with fresh resolve, as you stormed past the office workers whose great fortune in being inside at the start of this cataclysm had only afforded them a few more minutes of safety? Did you find your way blocked by a balding older man, likely a manager, appealing to you for explanation? Did you place the palm of your hand against his chest and urge him aside, and continue toward one of the abandoned glassed-in offices at the outskirts, which had shielded the central cubicles from the direct effects of the storm? Did you ignore the shouts of panic from behind you and open the glass door, entering a rectangular space now as ruined as any battlefield? Did you step over the corpse of the gray-haired man whose office it had been, and approach the one empty frame that had lost its window to multiple impacts, the only one that offered any degree of visibility between the two that were spiderwebbed with cracks and opaque from the blood streaming from higher floors?

  Did you stand there, on the edge of the bodyfall, breathing deeply as if in appreciation of a refreshing summer shower, taking in the aerial view of the boulevard now so deep in pulped corpses that the accumulation had formed drifts two or three stories high? Did you smell the fires from crashed airplanes? Did you see another jet, drawing a hornet’s-swarm of corpses in its slipstream, disappearing behind the buildings on the other side of the street? Did you wince at the vast eruption of flame? Did you shudder and draw your focus closer, to the bodies falling in great number only a few feet away from where you stood? Was the airspace over the street so thick with them that it seemed conceivable to leap from one to another as they plunged, and in that way, cross the street on their falling backs? Did you see what was written on the faces you were able to glimpse, faces that were similar to humanity but not of it?

  What did you see on those faces? Was it fear? Resignation? Or apology?

  Did you peer down at the street you’d escaped? Did you see the mass of fallen bodies, now risen well past the level of the fourth floor, and still rising? Did you perceive that while most individuals in that mass were dead, the whole throbbed as if alive? Did any of the bodies who’d landed face up seem to meet your gaze, before they sank or were buried by those who fell afterward?

  Did they seem inviting, to you?

  Did it seem easier to just give in to the inevitable and join them?

  If so, what did you do next?

  SPLIT CHAIN STITCH

  STEVE TOASE

  To cast on make sure you have a slip knot on the left hand needle. Place the point of the right hand needle into the slip knot and make a knit stitch. Whatever you do, do not slip it off the left.

  Rachael found small towns had a gravity to them like some dense star lay hidden under the marketplace cobbles. Held people in place. Held time in place. She passed through like a comet. There was a skill to prizing herself away from the weight of these little communities. For now though she needed to collapse into the centre and let it consume her. Burn everything else away. She opened the café door, waiting for her eyes to adjust.

  Six women sat around on comfy chairs, each headrest protected by a fine lace antimacassar. The only light came from old lamps balanced on rustic wooden shelves, a small constellation of spotlights above the café’s kitchen, and single mobile phone. Under the low hum of conversation the sound of needles sounded like claws clattering on tiles.

  They all looked up, hands still dancing.

  “Can we help you?”

  The café air reeked of stewed tea and furniture polish. Rachael looked for the woman who had asked the question. She sat close to the door, lap obscured with a half finished cable knit jumper in thick peacock coloured wool.

  “I’m here for the Knit and Natter group,” Rachael said, brandishing her sewing bag like a membership card.

  “Knit and Natter? Plenty of both here. Apart from Sally. Always on that phone of hers.”

  Sally looked up from the screen and scowled, dropping her glasses back around her neck on their purple cord.

  “I’m trying to find that pattern I mentioned, but the Internet keeps fading in and out.”

  “Get it for next week,” one of the other knitters said, reaching behind her for a cup of tea.

  “I wanted to start tonight. Otherwise I’ve got nothing else to work on. I’ll go outside and pick up a signal there.”

  Racha
el watched her stand up and stride across the room. “Sorry, can I just get past,” she said.

  “Sorry,” Rachael echoed, moving over to let her through, shivering in the draught from the open door.

  “Don’t stand there letting the cold in. Some of us have arthritis. Come and get yourself a cup of tea. Sit down. I’m Joan, this is Liz, and this is Mags. Over there is Jan. Charlotte is in the corner. By the radiator. You’ve already met Sally.”

  “I’m Rachael,” she said taking a seat next to Joan.

  “Hello, Rachael. Now show us what you’re working on.”

  Opening her bag, she took out her needles and the ball of wool.

  “I’m not really working on anything, but I want to make something with stars on,” she said, putting them down on the chair arm.

  Joan smiled.

  “Let’s start at the beginning then.”

  By the end of the night Rachael knew how to cast on, cast off, how everyone drank their tea, which ring on the cooker took ages to light, whose husband had been seen with the wrong person, whose son had been arrested for fighting, and the exact place in the near deserted café to get a good WiFi signal. At home she opened the door and shut out the town again.

  When attaching the sleeve, match the notches as you pin it in place. When starting the round ensure the stitches of the underarm are put on hold.

  Joan was making a sweater for her son, though he never really appreciated them. Jan crocheted toys for the local charity shop. Rabbits and mice. That sort of thing. Liz knitted scarves for anyone who sat still long enough. Charlotte owned the café and knitted jumpers for penguins. She’d been making them for years to send out to the Falkland Islands. Mags mainly did cross-stitch, but they let her come along anyway. Sally was always starting the next thing. The next project. The next idea. None of them lasted until the following meeting. And Rachael?

  “I just want to knit a scarf. Maybe a hat?”

  “With stars?”

  “With stars,” she said.

  Joan nodded, and smiled, her hands never stopping. Needles always clacking.

  “Good place to start, a scarf. We all started with scarves didn’t we?”

  No-one looked up from their projects, but they all nodded. Sally clicked her phone off.

  “I think I saw yours in the museum, Joan.”

  The older woman smiled and put her jumper to one side, taking Rachael’s work to check the tension of her stitches.

  “Sally likes to make fun of old people. Sally likes a lot of things that aren’t normally polite in civilised society, but we overlook that. Probably better to stick to crafts though. Might prove useful one day, that,” she said, handing the five completed rows back to Rachael. “You’re almost there. Might be an idea to use smaller needles until you get a bit more practiced. Don’t you think Mags?”

  Mags leant across, peered through her glasses and nodded her head.

  “If you want the scarf to keep winter out, needs to look a lot less like a dog’s chewed it.”

  “Did you hear about Michael? Jenny Morgan’s son? The one caught shoplifting?” Charlotte said. Mags shook her head and leant back in her chair, staring at the ceiling. “More than one place too. A few burglaries as well.”

  Joan nodded, though she didn’t lift her gaze from the ball of yarn down the side of the chair.

  “More than a few. Well, they gave him bail.”

  “And he disappeared?” Rachael made it a question even though she already knew the answer. “I read it on the sandwich board outside the newsagents.”

  “Good riddance,” said Liz. Holding her latest scarf up to the light, she tugged the edges to check the tension. “Town could do without him.”

  “That’s not very Christian, Elizabeth.”

  “He broke into our Arthur’s shed and stole his tools. My Christian charity only goes so far.”

  Rachael stared down at her knitting and concentrated on her stitches.

  “So you’ve never knitted before, Rachael?” Charlotte said.

  Rachael shook her head. Tried not to lose count.

  “What brings you to a knitting group if you can’t knit?” Charlotte continued.

  “Let the girl alone,” Jan said.

  “I’m just curious. She doesn’t mind, do you Rachael?”

  Rachael looked around the room. Everyone was waiting for her to answer.

  “When I move to a new place I like to get a handle on the local gossip.” She’d known the question was coming and had rehearsed the answer. Even with her preparation it still felt stilted in the dryness of her mouth.

  “And where better than a gathering of old fogeys, who sit around knitting jumpers for the underprivileged,” Jan said.

  “Helps me get my bearings,” Rachael said, Jan nodding at her answer.

  Some of the basic stitches you should master are:

  Knit into the back of the stitch The purl stitch

  To purl into the back of the stitch

  The garter stitch

  Stocking stitch

  Reverse stitch

  Ribbing

  Locking the door, Rachael dropped her knitting bag in the corner. Her notebook was still open on the dining table. She flicked on the overhead lamp and started writing.

  “Most recent disappearance. Personal connection? Anger from Liz ...”

  She signed the bottom of the page, writing the date. Out the window the clouds blew away, leaving stars spattered across the sky.

  Make sure you have a set of stitch markers to hand. They make life so much easier.

  The next few weeks went by in a bit of a blur. Her days consisted of nothing beyond staring out of the window or staring into the computer screen. Every Wednesday she took the short walk into town with her latest project, sat on the comfy chair in the corner and found her way around the latest pattern while listening to the other women talking.

  In no time at all Rachael’s scarf was wearable, and soon after she completed the set with matching hat, gloves, and fingerless gloves. She wore all of them, often. As time went on she sometimes met the other women for coffee during the day. Listened to them talk about their families and neighbours. Those who went missing. The needles moved in her hands without any effort. She held people’s gaze and still looped the wool around itself. This did not go unnoticed. Now her constellations were flecks of colour in balls of wool.

  “You’ve been coming on well, Rachael,” Jan said, holding up the back of the jumper Rachael was working on.

  “Thank you,” she answered, taking the piece back and settling into her chair. “Where’s Sally tonight?”

  “That’s sort of what we wanted to talk about,” Liz said. “You know that we have another knitting group. A little more formal.”

  Rachael nodded.

  “The Yarnbombardiers. How could I miss your work? It’s all over town.”

  It was true. Half the town centre was wrapped in wool. Cartoon characters and scenes from local life. Local personalities.

  “Your knitting has come on so much. We wanted to invite you for a while, but there are only so many places. We had to wait for Sally to go.”

  “To make up her mind,” Jan said.

  “To make up her mind,” Liz repeated, correcting herself. “Very indecisive. We’re not. We needed to ensure you were ready to take her place.”

  Rachael smiled at every woman in the room.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  To start the balaclava cast on 130 stitches using a circular needle and join up to work in the round.

  “The Yarnbombardiers work in a completely different location than the Knit and Natter group. An isolated hut on property belonging to Margaret Travis. The building is approximately one mile from the road with no easy public access. The phone signal is nonexistent. Any communication will be before and after sessions.”

  Rachael closed the notebook and shivered. She walked to the car and sat staring out of the window at the newspaper posters in the shop opposite. Sally’s h
usband was quoted as saying the children were missing their mother. Rachael closed her eyes. Started the engine.

  “You found the place OK then?”

  Rachael nodded. Mags wore old stained tweeds, wellington boots, and a housecoat, pockets stuffed with lengths of wool and unfinished embroidery.

  “Bit of a walk, but makes sure we have privacy. Top secret this work.”

  Rachael tapped her foot to shift adrenaline rippling under her skin.

  “Top secret?”

  “We can’t have people seeing the designs before they’re installed. Ruins the surprise,” Mags said smiling. “You like your stars. You’ll love it out here.”

  They walked in silence through the farmyard, out past the barns and a small wood. In the distance the hut stood by itself, electric light leaking from each window to rob Rachael of her night vision.

  Mags kicked her boots against the wooden plank wall and opened the door. Inside, the women sat in a circle, each with the side of a large panel of wool. Loops of yarn ran around the wall, tied into angled patterns, held in place by long carpenter nails. Taut as guitar strings.

  “Welcome to the Yarnbombardiers,” Jan said. “You’re just in time to make the tea.”

  Rachael made the tea, and she got the biscuits, and picked up the short lengths of wool, and helped Joan to the small outside toilet. Most of all she listened. Listened to the gossip.