The Best of the Best Horror of the Year

by Ellen Datlow

  “How’d they get it here?” Morgan, the other intern, asks Lewin, who shrugs and glances at Begg before letting her answer.

  “The slab itself, that’s found, not made—shaped a little, probably. More than enough rockfall in this area for that, post-glacial shear. Then they’d have made an earthwork track like at Stonehenge, dug underneath—” Begg uses her hands to sketch the movements in midair. “—then piled in front, put down logs overtop, used them like rollers. Get enough people pushing and pulling, you’re golden.”

  Lewin nods. “Yes, exactly. Once the grave was dug, there’d be no particular problem fitting it overtop; just increase the slope ’til they had a hill and push it up over the edge, down-angled so one side touched the opposite lip, before dismantling the hill to lay it flat again.”

  “Mmm.” Morgan turns slightly, indicating: “What’re the carvings for, though? Like ... what do they mean?”

  “Votive totems,” Begg replies, with confidence.

  The forensics expert—Dr. Tatiana Huculak—just shakes her head. “No way to know,” she counters. “Told us yourself they don’t look like any of the ritual marks you grew up with, remember? So it’s like a sign in Chinese, for all of us—just as likely to say ‘fuck you’ as ‘God bless,’ unless you know Pinyin.”

  Begg’s already opening her mouth to argue when Lewin sees Aretha’s hand go up; she shushes them both. “Oh dear, you don’t have to do that!” she exclaims. “Just sing out, if an idea’s struck you.”

  Aretha hesitates, eyes flicking to Morgan, who nods. Courage in hand, she replies—

  “Uh, maybe. I mean—even when you don’t know the language, there’s still a lot you can get from context, right? Well ...” She hauls herself up, far enough past the slab to tap its top, nails grating slightly over rough-edged stone. “‘Keep out,’ that’d be my guess,” she concludes. “’Cause it’s up here.”

  Lewin nods, as Huculak and Begg exchange glances. “Logical. And down there? On the underside?”

  Here Aretha shrugs, uncomfortably unanonymous for once, pinned beneath the full weight of all three professors’ eyes.

  “... ‘stay in?’” she suggests, finally.

  Working this dig with Lewin’s team was supposed to be the best job placement ever, a giddy dream of an archaeological internship—government work with her way paid up front, hands-on experience, the chance to literally uncover something unseen since thousands of years BCE. By the end of the first week, however, Aretha was already beginning to dream about smothering almost everyone else in their sleep or hanging herself from the next convenient tree, and the only thing that’s improved since then is that she’s now far too exhausted to attempt either.

  Doesn’t help that the rain which greeted them on arrival still continues, cold and constant, everything covered in mud, reeking of pine needles. Sometimes it dims to a fine mist, penetrating skin-deep through Aretha’s heaviest raincoat; always it chills, lighting her bone-marrow up with sharp threads of ache, air around her so cold it hurts to inhale through an open mouth. Kneeling here in the mud, she sees her breath boil up as cones fall down through the dripping, many-quilled branches, their sticky impacts signalled with rifle-shot cracks, and every day starts the same, ends the same: wood mould burning in her eyes and sinuses like smoke, impossible to ward off, especially since the Benadryl ran out.

  “Jesus,” Morgan suddenly exclaims, like she just hasn’t noticed it before, “that’s one hell of a cold you’ve got there, Ree. Does Lewin know?”

  Aretha shrugs, droplets scattering; hard to do much else, when she’s up to her elbows in grave-gunk. And: “Uh, well ... yeah, sure,” she replies, vaguely. “Can’t see how she wouldn’t.”

  “Close quarters, and all? You’re probably right. But who knows, huh? I mean ...” Here Morgan trails off, eyes sliding back to the main tent—over which two very familiar voices are starting to rise, yet again—before returning to the task at hand. “... she’s kinda—distracted, these days, with ... everything. I guess.”

  “Guess so.”

  Inside the main tent, Begg and Huculak are going at each other like ideological hammer and tongs, as ever—same shit, different day, latest instalment in an infinite series. It’s been a match made in hell, pretty much since the beginning; Huculak’s specialization makes her view all human remains as an exploitable resource, while Begg’s tribal band liaison status puts her in charge of making sure everything that could conceivably once have been a person gets put right back where it was found after cataloguing, with an absolute minimum of ancestral disrespect. Of course, Begg’s participation is basically the only reason they’re all here in the first place, as Lewin makes sure to keep reminding Huculak—but from Huculak’s point of view, just because she knows it’s true doesn’t mean she has to pretend to like it.

  “I’ll point out, yet again,” Huculak’s saying right now, teeth audibly gritted, “that the single easiest way we could get a verifiable date on this site continues to be if we could take some of the bones back and carbon-date them, in an honest-to-Christ lab ...”

  Aretha can almost see Begg curtly shaking her head, braids swinging—the way she does about fifty times a day, on average—as she replies. “Carbon-date the grave goods, then, Tat, to your heart’s content—carbon-date the shit out of them, okay? Grind them down to paste, you want to; burn them, smoke the fucking ashes. But the bones, themselves? Those stay here.”

  “Oh, ’cause one of ’em might share maybe point-one out of a hundred-thousandth part of their genetic material with yours? Bitch, please.”

  Lewin’s voice here, smooth and placatory as ever: “Ladies! Let’s be civil, shall we? We all have to work together, after all, for a good month more ...”

  “Unfortunately,” Huculak snaps back, probably making Begg puff up like a porcupine. Hurling, back in her turn—

  “Hey, don’t denigrate my spirituality just because you don’t share it, is that so hard? Say we were in Africa, digging up Rwandan massacre dumps—things’d be different then, right?”

  “You know, funny thing about that, Anne-Marie: not really. They’d be the same way anyplace, for me, because I am a scientist, first and foremost. Full friggin’ stop.”

  “And I’m not, is what you mean.”

  “Well ... if the moccasin fits.”

  At that, Aretha whips her head around sharply, only to meet Morgan’s equally-disbelieving gaze halfway. The both of them staring at each other, like: seriously? Holy cultural slap-fight with potential impending fisticuffs, Batman. Wow.

  “Knock-down drag-out by six, seven at the latest,” Morgan mutters, sidelong. “I’m callin’ it now—fifty on Tat to win, unless Anne-Marie puts her down with the first punch. You in, or what?”

  Aretha hisses out something that can’t quite be called a laugh. “Pass, thanks.”

  Morgan shrugs, then turns back to her designated task, head shaking slightly. “Your loss.”

  Going by her initial pitch, Lewin genuinely seems to have thought hiring only female associates and students would guarantee this little trip going far more smoothly than most, as though removing all traces of testosterone from the equation would create some sort of paradisical meeting of hearts and minds: cycles synched, hands kept busy, no muss, no fuss. The principle, however, was flawed from its inception: just ’cause they ain’t no peckers don’t mean ain’t no peckin’ order, as Aretha’s aunties have often been heard to remark, ’round the all-gal sewing circle they run after hours out of their equally all-girl cleaning service’s head office. It frankly amazes Aretha how Lewin could ever have gotten the idea that women never bring such divisive qualities as ambition, wrath, or lust to the metaphorical table, when she’s spent the bulk of her career teaching at all-girl facilities across the U.S., before finally ranging up over the border—

  But whatever. Maybe Lewin’s really one of those evo-psych nuts underneath the Second Wave feminist frosting, forever hell-bent on mistaking biology for destiny no matter the context. Jus
t as well she’s apparently never thought to wonder exactly what those pills Aretha keeps choking down each day are, if so.

  On puberty blockers since relatively early diagnosis, thank Christ, so she never did reach the sort of giveaway heights her older brothers have, and her voice hasn’t changed all that much, either; that, plus no Adam’s apple, facial and body hair kept chemically downy as any natal female in her immediate family, even if the other team-members felt inclined to body-police. But the plain fact is, they’ve none of them seen each other in any sort of disarray since they left base-camp—it’s too cold to strip for sleep, let alone to shower, assuming they even had one.

  This is typical paranoia, though, and she knows it; the reason everyone here knows her as Aretha is because she is. That’s the name under which she entered university, legally, and it’ll be the name with which she graduates, just like from high school. She’s a long damn way away from where she was born at this point, both literally and figuratively.

  Looks back up to find Morgan still looking at her and blushes, sniffing liquid, with nothing handy even halfway clean enough to wipe the result away on. “Sorry,” she manages, after a second. “So gross, I know, I really do. I just—sorry, God.”

  Morgan laughs. “Dude, it’s fine. Who knew, right?”

  “Yeah.” A pause. “Think it would’ve been okay, probably, it just hadn’t rained the whole fucking time.”

  “And yet.”

  “... and yet.”

  Morgan has a great smile, really; Aretha’d love to see it closer up sometime, under different circumstances. But right now, little moment of connection under pressure already had, the only thing either of them can really think to do about it is just shrug a little and drift apart once more—Morgan back towards the generator array, which is starting to make those worrying pre-brownout noises yet again, while Aretha heaves herself up out of the pit and stamps sloshily towards the tent itself, planning to sluice her gloved hands under the tarp’s overflowing gutter. This brings her so close to the ongoing argument she can finally see what the various players are actually doing, through that space where the tent’s ill-laid side gapes open: Begg and Huculak squaring off, with Lewin playing referee. It’s not quite at the cat-fight stage yet, but if Morgan’s placing bets, Aretha’s at least setting her watch.

  “Look, Anne-Marie ...” Huculak says, finally, “I know you want to think these are your people outside, in the grave—but I’ve been studying them hands-on for weeks now, and I just don’t think they were, at all. I don’t think these were anybody’s ‘people.’”

  “Jesus, Tat! What the hell kind of Othering, colonialist bullshit—”

  “No, but seriously. Seriously.” Huculak points to a pelvic arrangement, a crushed-flat skull, as much of the spinal column as they’ve been able to find. “Pelvis slung backwards, like a bird, not a mammal. Orbital sockets fully ten ml larger than usual, and side-positioned, not to the front; these people were barely binocular—probably had to cock their heads just to look at something in front of them. Twice as many teeth, half of them canines, back ones serrated: this is a meat-eater, exclusively. And that’s not even getting into the number of vertebrae, projection processes to the front and rear of each, locking them together like a snake’s ...”

  “You’ve got three bodies to look at, barely, and you’re already pushing taxonomic boundaries? Phylogenetic analysis by traits is a slanted system, makes it too easy by far to mistake clades or haplogroups for whole separate species—”

  Ooh, bad move, Dr. Begg, Aretha thinks, even as that last sentence starts, and indeed, by its end Huculak’s eyes have widened so far her smile-lines disappear completely. “Oh really, is it?” she all but spits. “Golly gee, I didn’t know that, please tell me more! Hottentot Venus what?”

  “You know what I’m saying.”

  “I know exactly what you’re saying, yes; do you know what I’m saying? Or did you just start shoving your fingers in your ears and singing lalalala I can’t HEEEEAR yooou the minute I started talking, like usual?”

  Begg snorts, explosively. “You’ve seen the dig, every damn day for a month—it’s a grave, Tat, you just used the word yourself. Full of grave goods. Animals don’t do that, if that’s what you’re implying.”

  “Of course I’m not saying what’s in there is animals, for shit’s sake; an offshoot of humanity, maybe—some evolutionary dead end. Like Australopithecus.”

  “You telling me Australopithecus had snake-spines?”

  “No. But just because we haven’t found something yet doesn’t mean it never existed.”

  “Good line, Agent Mulder.”

  “Oh fuck you, you condescending, indigenocentrist fuck—”

  Lewin raises her hands, goes to interpose between them, but they ignore her roundly—both wider as well as darker, more built for the long haul, able to shrug her off like a charley-horse. Huculak glares up as Begg stares down, hands on hips and braids still swinging, and demands: “Seriously, is that what we’re down to, right now? The black girl and the Indian, calling each other out as racists?”

  Huculak twitches like she’s about to start throwing elbows, trying to divert the urge to punch first and answer questions later; the movement’s actually violent enough to rock Begg back a micro-step, make her start to flinch involuntarily, right before she catches herself.

  “You first,” is all Huculak replies, finally, voice flat.

  And: “Ladies,” Lewin puts in again, a tad more frantically. “We’re scientists here, yes? Professionals. We can differ, even quarrel, but with respect—always respect. This is all simply theory, for now.”

  Now it’s Huculak’s turn to snort. “Forever, she gets her way,” she replies. “And she will.”

  “Bet your ass,” Begg agrees. “’Cause this is Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation land, and that’s not a theory, so those bones go right on back in the ground where we found them, just like your government promised. No debate.”

  Lewin looks at Huculak. Huculak looks away.

  “Never actually thought there would be,” she mutters, under her breath.

  The grave goods Huculak finds so uninteresting are typical Early Archaic: a predominance of less extensively flaked stone tools with a distinct lack of pottery and smoking pipes, new-style lanceolate projectile points with corner notches and serration along the side of the blades suitable to a mixture of coniferous and deciduous forests, increased reliance on local chert sources. What’s odd about it, however, is the sheer size of the overall deposit—far more end scrapers, side scrapers, crude celts, and polished stone atl-atl weight-tubes than seem necessary for a mere family burial, which is what the three bodies Begg talked about would indicate: one male, one female, one sexually indistinct adolescent (its pelvis missing, possibly scavenged by animals before the cap-stone was laid).

  Folded beneath a blanketing layer of grave goods so large it almost appears to act as a secondary grounding weight, the three bodies nevertheless take pride of place, traces of red ochre still visible on and around all three rather than just the male skeleton, as would be customary. Weirder yet, on closer examination, the same sort of ochre appears to have been painstakingly applied not only to the flensed bones themselves but also to all the grave goods as well, before they were piled on top.

  In burials from pre-dynastic Egypt to prehistoric Britain, Aretha knows, red ochre was used to symbolize blood; skeletons were flensed and decorated with it as both a sign of respect and of propitiation, a potential warding off of vampiric ghosts: take this instead, leave us ours. With no real sense of an afterlife, the prehistoric dead in general were thought to be eternally jealous, resentful of and predatory towards the living ... but particularly so if they’d died young, or unjustly, and thus been cheated of everything more they might have accomplished while alive. Like the Lady of Cao, Aretha thinks, or the so-called “Scythian Princess,” both of whom died in their twenties, both personages of unusual power (the former the first high-status woman
found in Moché culture, the latter actually a Siberian priestess buried in silk and fur and gold), and both of whose tombs also contained the most precious grave good of all, startlingly common across cultures from Mesoamerican to Hindu to Egyptian to Asian: more corpses, often showing signs of recent, violent, sacrificial death.

  Retainer sacrifice, that’s what they call it, Aretha thinks, her head spinning slightly, skull gone hot and numb under its cold, constantly wet cap of skin. Like slaughtering horses so they can draw the princess’s chariot into the underworld, except with people: concubines, soldiers, servants, slaves—maybe chosen by lots, maybe volunteers. Killing for company on that final long day’s journey into whatever night comes next. In Egypt, eventually, they started substituting shawabti figures instead, magic clay dolls incised with spells swapped in for actual corpses; an image of a thing, just as good as the thing itself. Unless it’s not.

  Text taking shape behind her eyes, wavering: she can almost see it on her laptop’s screen or maybe even a page somewhere, whatever reference-method she first encountered this information through. How in Mound 72 at Cahokia, largest site of the Mississippian culture (800 to 1600 CE, located near moden St. Louis, Missouri), pits were found filled with mass burials—53 young women, strangled and neatly arranged in two layers; 39 men, women and children, unceremoniously dumped, with several showing signs of not having been fully dead when buried, of having tried to claw their way back out. Another group of four individuals was neatly arranged on litters made of cedar poles and cane matting, arms interlocked, but heads and hands removed.

  Most spectacular is the “Birdman,” a tall man in his forties, thought to have been an important early Cahokian ruler. He was buried on an elevated platform, covered by a bed of more than 20,000 marine-shell disc beads arranged in the shape of a falcon with the bird’s head appearing beneath the man’s head, its wings and tail beneath his arms and legs. Below the Birdman another corpse was found, buried facing downward, while surrounding him were piles of elaborate grave goods ....