The Best Horror of the Year Volume Eleven

by Ellen Datlow

  Cast on 25 stitches onto the first needle, then distribute those stitches onto three needles.

  By the third week Mags no longer met Rachael at the road and she could walk through the farm by herself. Knowing that the Yarnbombardiers might time how long it took her, she ran for a stretch, giving herself time to examine the small stand of trees.

  The covert was only ten silver birch, branches intertwined above her head. She ran a hand over the trunks. Small lengths of wool were caught in the bark. Kneeling, she sorted through the mass of leaves around her feet. The diamonds were knitted from different colours. Some red and some purple. She pocketed two to get them tested for any residues and carried on walking the rest of the way to the hut.

  At significant points in the creation use more pins than you expect.

  “We’ll start you on flowers this week,” Charlotte said, passing Rachael several balls of wool and two needles. “So much like the stars you love.”

  “You know that there’s a small astronomy club in town. Did you not think about joining them?” Liz said, sipping her tea, pouring a spill from the saucer into the cup.

  Rachael dropped a stitch and swore.

  “Can you help me with this?” She said, holding the knitting to Joan. “Surely you can sort that out?”

  “Hands a bit cold tonight.”

  “Rubbish excuse, but give it here.”

  The best way to fix a dropped stitch is to use a crochet hook.

  Sat in her car, Rachael turned on the inside light and rubbed her eyes. She scribbled down everything she remembered before the memory faded with fatigue from tracking stitches. No-one had given much away. They were too careful, even now she was taken into their confidence, but she could track friendships. Rivalries. Add to the cascade of inter-relationships, leaving space to write in spouses and siblings. Children and cousins. Time consuming. Necessary. She signed the last page, dating her evidence and dropped it into the door pocket.

  Begin by turning the jumper inside out. If the pulled thread has caused the fabric to bunch, as carefully as possible stretch it back into the original form.

  “Not something we can do anything about,” Mags said, tapping cigarette ash into a small foil ashtray. “It’s my hut. I’ll do what I like,” she said to the disapproving looks of the other women.

  “What about this spate of windows getting smashed? Cars. Shops,” Charlotte said, standing to stretch out her back.

  “Do we have a name?” Jan paused to look up, then carried on knitting a cartoon mouse dressed as a cricketer while waiting for an answer.

  “We have a suspicion.”

  “Need more than a suspicion,” Jan said, standing up and walking across to the door. She dropped the lock. Metal against metal too loud in the small hut. “For example if I only had suspicions about Rachael I couldn’t do anything. Finding the notes she’s been keeping on us? That’s not just suspicion anymore. That’s evidence.”

  The two knitting needles went through Rachael’s upper arms, points far sharper than she expected. She started to fall forward across the room and Jan guided her to topple onto the large panel of knitting still lying in the centre of the room.

  To make this item you can use three different stitches. Either garter stitch, moss stitch, or twisted rib stitch.

  Rachael woke. She was outside but not cold. Her arms were strapped to her sides, held in place by the woollen strips wrapped around her torso. Needles pinned through the palms of her hands. She opened her eyes. Saw other figures around her. At least three. Each one bound to a tree and cocooned in wool. Faces obscured by multicoloured balaclavas. Their heads all tipped forward. Flies crawled between the tightly knitted rows.

  Rachael tried to shift her weight. Every other stitch of the blanket enveloping her passed through her skin. The movement re-opened a hundred raw wounds, fine fibres of wool dragged away from scabbed skin.

  “It’s the lanolin. Wool fat. Delays the healing. Helps the wool slide through the wounds as you move. Very delicate work.”

  Jan walked into Rachael’s eye-line and pointed at the other bodies amongst the trees. In the distance Rachael saw others. Older. Wool rotted through and bones tipping out into the roots. She stared at the closest victim. Tried to focus. Through the sodden stitches something caught the light. A pair of shattered glasses on a purple elastic cord.

  “Back in my grandma’s day it was harder to make people disappear. No-one really moved out of town, but accidents happened. Drunken farmers tried to cross the moors and got lost. Young women escaped their shame. Labourers fell into fast flowing rivers, their bodies swept out to sea. These days it’s much easier. People move around a lot more.” She paused and inhaled a mouthful of smoke. “Deserve it more.”

  The knitting hut glittered in the distance, the empty farmhouse beyond. Even further away the spire of the town church visible like a dropped needle upright in the carpet.

  Rachael went to speak, but the movement tugged several stitches passing through her neck and she lost her voice. Jan continued speaking.

  “Sheep die and families starve. Need to keep the ewes and tups healthy.”

  The herd around Rachael’s feet were all dirty, fleeces clagged with mud and heather.

  “Sacrifices are necessary for good quality wool. It’s been that way for a long time, and we are a very traditional community. A bit of meat and blood in their diet doesn’t hurt either. They have sharp teeth. I’m sorry about that, but if you will come and poke your nose into our business. Thinking you can ingratiate yourself and ‘expose’ us. Who to? We’re respectable ladies of the community. Our families are well established. On the Chamber of Commerce and the Church Flower Committee. Even the Parish Council.”

  Jan walked the short distance to the tree and held Rachael’s head back. With a set of short needles she knitted a panel into place across her eyes.

  “Goodnight PC Lewis,” Jan said. The stars disappeared from sight and Rachael flinched as raw fleece brushed against her feet. Out of sight the sheep began to gnaw.

  NO EXIT

  ORRIN GREY

  The landscape of western Kansas lends itself well to conspiracy theories and apocalyptic visions. The plains, vast and windswept, bending imperceptibly to the horizon. The small towns, unmoored from the highway, like ships cast adrift on a fathomless sea of grain, with silos and brick church steeples their only masts.

  I saw a lot of it as my parents drove me back and forth after the divorce—my mom moved to Kansas City, my dad to a little town north of Boulder. “The kind of place where you can still get your teeth knocked out by a cowboy, if you put your mind to it,” he liked to say. They split custody, so I spent a lot of time in the passenger seat of one car or another, driving those long, blank miles that stretched between the relative civilization of Topeka and Denver.

  I spent the school year with my mom, my dad driving into town for the occasional weekend, when we would stay in a hotel and eat ice cream and waffles for just about every meal. During the summer or on holiday breaks, he would pick me up and take me west, stopping at gas stations along the way to buy slushies—“Don’t tell your mom,” with a conspiratorial wink in my direction—or at the dinosaur museum in Fort Hays. When mom was driving me back, it was never anything but my forehead pressed against the cool window glass, watching the alternating signs condemning abortion, promising eternal damnation, or advertising sex shops.

  When I was a little girl, we had lived in one of those tiny towns that we passed along I-70, with their football fields pressed tight up against the highway. I could remember a house and a yard, a tire swing hanging from the branches of a tree, the golden sunlight and skin-flaying wind that came with life out in the western plains. I could remember my older sister Danielle, only barely. She was a blur of brown hair and freckles, as tall as my mom, with a barking laugh that seemed to echo.

  I was six years old when she died, and my parents divorced within seven months. Years later, I would look up the divorce rates for couples who h
ave lost a child and find that it was much lower than I had been led to believe by counselors and self-help books. Only about sixteen percent, and most of them said that there were problems in the marriage long before the child died. Were there problems in my parents’ marriage? I never asked and they never told me.

  Of course, Danielle didn’t just die, either. That would have been one thing. This was something much worse.

  While snake handlers and the like tend to stay down in Oklahoma and farther south, western Kansas has been home to more than its fair share of fire-and-brimstone revivals, to preachers spewing admonitions about the end of days, not to mention less prosaic cults. The people who planned the bombings of abortion clinics in Wichita in 1993 got their start here, and so did Edward Murray and his “dynamo-electric messiah,” and the Increase Brothers, who claimed that the Garden of Eden had, in fact, been located just a few miles outside of the little town of Lebanon, Kansas.

  And, of course, most infamously, Damien Hesher and the Spiritus Aetum Sperarum, which Hesher claimed translated to the Breath of the Spheres, though that’s probably a little loose. The Spiritus would have been a nothing cult, a footnote in the history of the region’s odd beliefs, had it not been for one afternoon in 1987, when Hesher and a bunch of his cronies kidnapped a bus full of seven high school kids and their coach as it was on its way back from a debate championship in Manhattan, Kansas. One of those kids was Danielle.

  Hesher and his followers forced her and the others into a beat-up RV, leaving the bus driver where he sat on the shoulder of I-70, with the added gift of a sucking chest wound from a double-barrel shotgun. Then they drove to a little rest stop west of Topeka, situated on a limestone outcropping where I-70 split, its top crowned with spidery scrub trees.

  That rest stop was where my sister died, and we drove past it every time my parents ferried me back and forth from Kansas City to Colorado. By that time, though, the turnoff leading to it had been stoppered with blue wooden sawhorses and concrete blocks that had previously been highway dividers; the brown sign that once said “Rest Stop” plastered over with other official signage, white with black letters spelling out two simple words: NO EXIT.

  Maybe it would have been enough if Hesher and his followers had just killed the handful of kids they took from that bus. Certainly, it would have made the national news, maybe even gotten a few books written about it. But it probably wouldn’t have closed down the rest stop forever. It took something special for that.

  The kids weren’t just killed. They were torn apart. Limbs and guts and heads and whatever else strewn all over the place, like something from a Halloween haunted house. They say that the blood soaked into the parking area and wouldn’t ever come clean.

  At least one of the kids threw themselves from the limestone cliff and smashed on the rocks below rather than face whatever reckoning was taking place at that rest stop. The coach managed to crawl some twenty yards from the parked RV where the slaughter began, albeit leaving parts of his legs behind as he did.

  The crime scene photos were all dark and blurry. They reminded me of photos of bigfoot or cattle mutilations; nothing in them identifiable except by its vague shape. The RV parked in the lot of the rest stop, and on its door, painted in what looked like blood, an image of a circle being pierced by a line from above.

  Not all the bodies were ever even accounted for, and there was a period of time when the police entertained the idea that some of the kids had managed to escape, that they might just show up, bloodstained and in shock, standing by the side of the highway. A time when Danielle was simply “missing” instead of “presumed dead.”

  It’s impossible not to wonder how the story would have gone differently if Hesher and his crew had survived to stand trial, but when authorities arrived they found Hesher and all of his followers dead inside the RV, symbols carved into their skin, their throats cut.

  “Murder/suicide” was the official conclusion, though I found a coroner’s report that had been excised from the public record—performed, according to the official account, by a junior medical examiner who had been too shaken by the grisly scene to render an accurate verdict—that said Hesher and his people had died sometime before most of the other victims.

  Even leaving that report aside, it was difficult to square up the crime scene with the murders themselves. Though obvious acts of cannibalism had been performed on the victims, no human remains were found in the digestive tracts of either Hesher or his followers. For a while, the authorities sought other accomplices who had fled the scene rather than participate in the cult’s mass suicide, eventually chalking the partially-devoured state of the bodies up to the depredations of scavengers.

  My parents never talked about what happened—not with reporters, and not with me. If they ever talked about it between themselves—as I know they must have—I never overheard it. I would wonder later if they were trying to protect me by never speaking of it. The Satanic Panic was still going strong when the murders were committed, and there was a media frenzy surrounding the slaughter for months, with local and national news stations trotting out stories of animal sacrifices, kidnappings that predated the murders, and, of course, other, more salacious stuff. A few years later, Unsolved Mysteries even ran a segment and called my parents, who refused to comment or appear on the show.

  Being in the crosshairs of that kind of hyperbolic attention would be hard enough on grieving parents, let alone a confused kid. Maybe by the time public interest in the murders faded, my parents had decided that it was easier to ignore what had happened than it was to face it, leaving me alone to take the opposite route.

  The proximity of the murders was what kept me at KU when I went to college, even though my dad could have gotten me reduced tuition at CU Boulder, where he was teaching by then. From KU, I could go around to those local stations that were still extant and go through their archives for any old footage about the murders. I probably read every newspaper article ever printed on the subject; police reports, autopsies, anything that I could get my hands on.

  When my parents divorced, my mom switched my name and hers back to her maiden name, and though she changed hers again when she married a man named Dale years later, I kept the old one, so there was nothing left to tie me to Danielle in most peoples’ eyes. I could check out books about the murders from the library, request newspaper stories on microfiche, ask around at news stations, and nobody would think I was anything but a morbid kid with a curiosity about a grisly local crime that had taken on the proportions of urban myth.

  Most of the time, anyone who reported on the killings was content to conjecture wildly about Hesher’s motives and the beliefs and practices of the Spiritus Aetum Sperarum. Hardly anyone bothered to read the admittedly nigh-unreadable book that Hesher had written and self-published, under the unhelpful title Wizard’s Ashes.

  The book cover was simple, dominated by a drawing of a red circle being pierced by a line from above, done in a style like calligraphy. That was on the original edition. After the murders, it was picked back up by a small press called Hex Books and reissued under a new title—The Breath of the Spheres: Secrets of the Spiritus Aetum Sperarum—which attempted to market it as a “true” book of dark spirituality, in order to cash in on the notoriety generated by Hesher’s crimes. That book’s cover featured a blurry and distorted photo of Hesher himself, as he had been found by police when they raided the RV: A cow skull on his head that had been denuded of its horns and carved out inside so that it covered his face like a mask.

  That was the version I read, complete with typographical errors and pages that didn’t always line up correctly with the margins. It contained a brief, and completely fictitious, biographical sketch of Damien Hesher in the “About the Author” portion at the back of the book. In reality, Damien Hesher had been born in Topeka, and had lived his entire life in Kansas. Starting out as Jeremy Miller, he had legally changed his name when he turned twenty-one, the same time he started the Spiritus Aetum Speraru
m. All that I learned from other sources. From his book, I learned that the place where my sister was murdered hadn’t been chosen randomly.

  While Hesher’s book didn’t lay out the specifics of the killing spree, it was full of distressing hints. Hesher was clearly obsessed with the rest stop, which he referred to in the book not only by number but by latitude and longitude. He called it a “thin place,” and said that it was somewhere that “communion” was possible, if the proper sacrifice was on hand.

  According to Hesher, it wasn’t the first time that blood had been spilled on that very ground. In the book he told a story about a family called the Millers—no accident, perhaps, that they shared his own born surname—who had diverged from the Oregon trail and found themselves on that same limestone outcropping where the rest stop would eventually be built.

  By Hesher’s account, their wagon wheel broke on that spot and they didn’t have another one to replace it. What led them from that predicament to what came next is unclear, but he wrote that they took the broken wheel and laid it on the ground, and from there they drew lines, extending the spokes of the wheel outward and outward, decorating them with orbs, sometimes drawn in the dirt, sometimes represented by the smoothest rocks they could find in the surrounding cliffs and gullies. Then, they sat down among the lines and spheres, and they ate themselves. Not the desperate, no-other-choice cannibalism of the Donner party. Intentional, premeditated anthropophagy.

  The why of it was tougher to pin down than the what. Hesher’s writing was rambling, inconsistent, littered with typos and odd grammatical choices, the voice constantly changing, as though the book had been written by diverse hands. What was clear was that Hesher believed that the earth was filled with what he sometimes called “abysses” and other times “spheres.”