The Best of the Best Horror of the Year

by Ellen Datlow

  Shit.

  Wrapping the sleeping bag around her like a puffy cloak, she stumbles out into open air, for once blessedly free of rain; no visible sky between the trees, but there’s less sinus-drag, cueing a possible shift in air pressure. Lewin, Begg and Huculak are huddled around a Coleman stove maybe ten feet away, clustered gnats and moths flying up like sparks; Lewin turns as Aretha nears, almost smiling as she recognizes her, which is ... odd, but welcome. Things must be bad.

  “Aretha!” she calls out, voice only a little strained on the up-note. “You look—better. Than you did.”

  Aretha clears her throat, even as the other two shoot Lewin looks whose subtext both clearly read are you fucking kidding me? “... thanks,” she manages, finally. Then: “Morgan?”

  Lewin sighs. “No, dear. Not yet.”

  “How—long?”

  “Two hours, maybe three,” Huculak replies. “Anne-Marie went out looking, but—”

  “I didn’t find her,” Begg says, a bit too quickly, too flat. “Not her.”

  Aretha nods, swallows again. No spit.

  “What did you find?” she asks.

  Tracks, that’s the answer; about five minutes’ walk from the camp. They’re narrow but deep, as if carved, each a slipper full of dark liquid, welling up from underground. The soil is saturated here, Aretha can only suppose, after a solid four and a half weeks of precipitation—but there’s something about the marks, both familiar and un-. They look ... wrong, somehow. Turned upside-down.

  “They’re backwards,” she observes, at last. Bends closer, just a bit, and wavers, not trusting herself to be able to crouch; the water throws back light, Huculak’s beam crossing Lewin’s as Begg hovers next to them, holding back, waiting to see if Aretha can eventually identify that particular winey shade without prompting.

  “Not water,” Aretha says, throat clicking drier yet, and Begg shakes her head. “No,” she confirms, and Aretha dips further, sniffing hard. Smells rust, and rot, and meat.

  Blood.

  Lewin recoils, almost tripping, but Huculak stands her ground, demanding: “And you didn’t think to tell us? The fuck, Anne-Marie!”

  Begg stays where she is, rooted fast, as though every ounce of protest in her has long since drained out through her heels. Doesn’t even bother shrugging.

  “Not much point,” she says, simply. “You’d’ve found out eventually too, once either of you thought to ask. But Aretha here’s been a whole lot better at that than most of us throughout, hasn’t she? Which is sort of interesting, in context.”

  “How so?”

  “Things my Gammé told me over the years, that’s all, about this area. Stuff I discounted automatically, pretty much, because—well, you know why, Tat: because science. Empirical data vs. subjective belief, all that. Because I’ve tried so fucking hard to never be that sort of Indian, if I can help it.” She pauses here, takes a ragged breath. “But what do you know, huh? Sometimes, a monster isn’t a metaphor for prejudice at all, plus or minus power. Sometimes, it’s just a monster.”

  Huculak stares at her, like she’s grown another head. “What?” she asks, yet again.

  “What I just said, Tat. We should probably get going, if we’re going to.”

  “Going to—?” Lewin apparently can’t help prompting, carefully.

  Begg sighs, windily, as though about to deflate. “Try, that’s what I mean,” she says, after a long moment’s pause. “To leave, I mean. Before they get here.”

  “‘They,’” Lewin repeats. “They ... who?”

  Now it’s Begg’s turn to stare, even as Huculak—possibly just a tad swifter on the uptake, or simply paranoid enough to connect the dots without being asked—draws a sudden in-breath, a choked half-gasp; hugs herself haphazardly, grasping for comfort, but finding none. While Lewin just stands there, visibly baffled: it doesn’t make sense to her, any of it, and can’t, really. Not in any scientific way.

  “They were here first, that’s what Gammé always told me,” Dr. Begg—Anne-Marie—remarks, softly, as if to herself. “Hunted us like animals when we came into their territory, because that’s what we must have seemed like to them, the same way they did, to us; things with some qualities of people, not people who just happen to look like things. So we fought back, because that’s what we do, but there were more of them, and they were—stronger, fought harder. Started out taking us for food, then for slaves, then for breeding stock. Changed so they could hide, everywhere. Hide inside of us.”

  “Neanderthals,” Aretha says. “And Homo habilis.”

  Begg smiles, slightly. “The current theory,” she replies, echoing Lewin. Not looking ’round as she does, even to watch how Lewin—her cognitive refusal suddenly punctured, sharp and clean and quick—begins, at last, to buckle under her own words’ weight.

  Behind them, the grave-site still gapes uncovered, rain-filled, ochre seeping. From above, Aretha muses, the unearthed cache of grave goods must look like a huge, slightly layered blood-blotch, all that remains of some unspeakably old crime. An apology made on literally bended knees, pot sweetened with a pile of tools and corpses, yet left forever unaccepted.

  Huculak—Tat—clears her throat, knuckles still knit and paling on either elbow. Complains, voice weak: “But ... we didn’t know.”

  “I did.”

  “You never said, though.”

  “No, ’course not, because I didn’t want to think it was true. I mean, c’mon, Tat; seriously, now. Would you?”

  “Well ...”

  (No.)

  Deep twilight, now, under the trees, overlaid with even deeper silence. Deep enough Aretha can finally start to hear it once more, rising the same way her pain does, threading itself through her system: the song of the bones, set shiver-thrumming in every last wet, cold part of her; that note, that tone, so thin and distinct, a faraway cry drawing ever nearer. Like blood through some fossilized shell.

  And oh, oh: Anne-Marie was right, not to want to, she thinks, faintly, as she feels her knees start to give way—as she droops, drops, ends up on hands and knees in the mud, the blood-smelling earth. I’m not even Native, and I don’t like that story much, either. Not at all.

  Not at all.

  “Who’s that?” Aretha can hear Lewin—Elyse—call out, faintly, squinting past her, into the darkness. Adding, hopefully, as she does: “Morgan? I—is that you, dear?”

  To which Anne-Marie just shakes her head, while Tat begins to sob. And Aretha, looking up—seeing those familiar features hanging flat against the Grave Goods u 349 thickening curtain of night, mouth slack-hung and eyes empty, set every-so-slightly askew—doesn’t even have to wait to hear the bones’ answer to know the trick of it already, to her sorrow: that skeletal shadow poised behind, head cocked, holding Morgan’s skin up like an early Hallowe’en mask with the scent of fresh-eaten liver on its breath. That line of similar shadows fanned behind, making their stealthy, back-footed way towards them all, with claws outstretched.

  Don’t worry, the bones’ song tells her, from the inside out, as the Baykok sweep in. This darkness is yours as much as ours, after all: a legacy, passed down hand to hand, from our common ancestors. Where we are, and were, and have been. Where you are, now, and always.

  The only place any of us have left to be.

  Not so different, then, after all: cold comfort at best, and none at all, at worst. Not that it really matters, either way.

  Every grave is our own, that’s the very last thing Aretha Howson has time to think, before the earth opens up beneath her. Before she falls headlong, wondering who will find her bones, and when—what tales they’ll tell, when dug free ... what songs they’ll sing, when handled ....

  How long it’ll be, this time, before anyone stops to listen.

  THE BALLAD OF

  BALLARD AND SANDRINE

  PETER STRAUB

  1997

  “So, do we get lunch again today?” Ballard asked. They had reached the steaming, humid end of November.

&
nbsp; “We got fucking lunch yesterday,” replied the naked woman splayed on the long table: knees bent, one hip elevated, one boneless-looking arm draped along the curves of her body, which despite its hidden scars appeared to be at least a decade younger than her face. “Why should today be different?”

  After an outwardly privileged childhood polluted by parental misconduct, a superior education, and two failed marriages, Sandrine Loy had evolved into a rebellious, still-exploratory woman of forty. At present, her voice had a well-honed edge, as if she were explaining something to a person of questionable intelligence.

  Two days before joining Sandrine on this river journey, Ballard had celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday at a dinner in Hong Kong, one of the cities where he conducted his odd business. Sandrine had not been invited to the dinner and would not have attended if she had. The formal, ceremonious side of Ballard’s life, which he found so satisfying, interested her not at all.

  Without in any way adjusting the facts of the extraordinary body she had put on display, Sandrine lowered her eyes from the ceiling and examined him with a glance brimming with false curiosity and false innocence. The glance also contained a flicker of genuine irritation.

  Abruptly and with vivid recall, Ballard found himself remembering the late afternoon in 1969 when, nine floors above Park Avenue, upon a carpet of almost unutterable richness in a room hung with paintings by Winslow Homer and Albert Pinkham Ryder, he had stood with a rich scapegrace and client named Lauritzen Loy, his host, to greet Loy’s daughter on her return from another grueling day at Dalton School, then observed the sidelong, graceful, slightly miffed entrance of a fifteen-year-old girl in pigtails and a Jackson Brown sweatshirt two sizes too large, met her gray-green eyes, and felt the very shape of his universe alter in some drastic way, either expanding a thousand times or contracting to a pinpoint, he could not tell. The second their eyes met, the girl blushed, violently.

  She hadn’t liked that, not at all.

  “I didn’t say it was going to be different, and I don’t think it will.” He turned to look at her, making sure to meet her gaze before letting his eye travel down her neck, over her breasts, the bowl of her belly, the slope of her pubis, the length of her legs. “Are you in a more than ordinarily bad mood?”

  “You’re snapping at me.”

  Ballard sighed. “You gave me that look. You said, ‘Why should today be different?’”

  “Have it your way, old man. But as a victory, it’s fucking pathetic. It’s hollow.”

  She rolled onto her back and gave her body a firm little shake that settled it more securely onto the steel surface of the table. The metal, only slightly cooler than her skin, felt good against it. In this climate, nothing not on ice or in a freezer, not even a corpse, could ever truly get cold.

  “Most victories are hollow, believe me.”

  Ballard wandered over to the brass-bound porthole on the deck side of their elaborate, many-roomed suite. Whatever he saw caused him momentarily to stiffen and take an involuntary step backwards.

  “What’s the view like?”

  “The so-called view consists of the filthy Amazon and a boring, muddy bank. Sometimes the bank is so far away it’s out of sight.”

  He did not add that a Ballard approximately twenty years younger, the Ballard of, say, 1976, dressed in a handsome dark suit and brilliantly white shirt, was leaning against the deck rail, unaware of being under the eye of his twenty-years-older self. Young Ballard, older Ballard observed, did an excellent job of concealing his dire internal condition beneath a mask of deep, already well-weathered urbanity: the same performance, enacted day after day before an audience unaware of being an audience and never permitted backstage.

  Unlike Sandrine, Ballard had never married.

  “Poor Ballard, stuck on the Endless Night with a horrible view and only his aging, moody girlfriend for company.”

  Smiling, he returned to the long steel table, ran his mutilated right hand over the curve of her belly, and cupped her navel. “This is exactly what I asked for. You’re wonderful.”

  “But isn’t it funny to think—everything could have been completely different.”

  Ballard slid the remaining fingers of his hand down to palpate, lightly, the springy black shrub-like curls of her pubic bush.

  “Everything is completely different right now.”

  “So take off your clothes and fuck me,” Sandrine said. “I can get you hard again in a minute. In thirty seconds.”

  “I’m sure you could. But maybe you should put some clothes on, so we could go into lunch.”

  “You prefer to have sex in our bed.”

  “I do, yes. I don’t understand why you wanted to get naked and lie down on this thing, anyhow. Now, I mean.”

  “It isn’t cold, if that’s what you’re afraid of.” She wriggled her torso and did a snow angel movement with her legs.

  “Maybe this time we could catch the waiters.”

  “Because we’d be early?”

  Ballard nodded. “Indulge me. Put on that sleeveless white French thing.”

  “Aye, aye, mon capitaine.” She sat up and scooted down the length of the table, pushing herself along on the raised vertical edges. These were of dark green marble, about an inch thick and four inches high. On both sides, round metal drains abutted the inner side of the marble. At the end of the table, Sandrine swung her legs down and straightened her arms, like a girl sitting on the end of a diving board. “I know why, too.”

  “Why I want you to wear that white thing? I love the way it looks on you.”

  “Why you don’t want to have sex on this table.”

  “It’s too narrow.”

  “You’re thinking about what this table is for. Right? And you don’t want to combine sex with that. Only I think that’s exactly why we should have sex here.”

  “Everything we do, remember, is done by mutual consent. Our Golden Rule.”

  “Golden Spoilsport,” she said. “Golden Shower of Shit.”

  “See? Everything’s different already.”

  Sandrine levered herself off the edge of the table and faced him like a strict schoolmistress who happened momentarily to be naked. “I’m all you’ve got, and sometimes even I don’t understand you.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  She wheeled around and padded into the bedroom, displaying her plush little bottom and sacral dimples with an absolute confidence Ballard could not but admire.

  Although Sandrine and Ballard burst, in utter defiance of a direct order, into the dining room a full nine minutes ahead of schedule, the unseen minions had already done their work and disappeared. On the gleaming rosewood table two formal place settings had been laid, the plates topped with elaborately chased silver covers. Fresh irises brushed blue and yellow filled a tall, sparkling crystal vase.

  “I swear, they must have a greenhouse on this yacht,” Ballard said.

  “Naked men with muddy hair row the flowers out in the middle of the night.”

  “I don’t even think irises grow in the Amazon basin.”

  “Little guys who speak bird-language can probably grow anything they like.”

  “That’s only one tribe, the Piraha. And all those bird-sounds are actual words. It’s a human language.” Ballard walked around the table and took the seat he had claimed as his. He lifted the intricate silver cover. “Now what is that?” He looked across at Sandrine, who was prodding at the contents of her bowl with a fork.

  “Looks like a cut-up sausage. At least I hope it’s a sausage. And something like broccoli. And a lot of orangey-yellowy goo.” She raised her fork and licked the tines. “Um. Tastes pretty good, actually. But….”

  For a moment, she appeared to be lost in time’s great forest.

  “I know this doesn’t make sense, but if we ever did this before, exactly this, with you sitting over there and me here, in this same room, well, wasn’t the food even better, I mean a lot better?”

  “I can’t say anything
about that,” Ballard said. “I really can’t. There’s just this vague….” The vagueness disturbed him far more than seemed quite rational. “Let’s drop that subject and talk about bird language. Yes, let’s. And the wine.” He picked up the bottle. “Yet again a very nice Bordeaux,” Ballard said, and poured for both of them. “However. What you’ve been hearing are real birds, not the Piraha.”

  “But they’re talking, not just chirping. There’s a difference. These guys are saying things to each other.”

  “Birds talk to one another. I mean, they sing.”

  She was right about one thing, though: in a funky, down-home way, the stew-like dish was delicious. He thrust away the feeling that it should have been a hundred, a thousand times more delicious: that once it, or something rather like it, had been paradisal.

  “Birds don’t sing in sentences. Or in paragraphs, like these guys do.”

  “They still can’t be the Piraha. The Piraha live about five hundred miles away, on the Peruvian border.”

  “Your ears aren’t as good as mine. You don’t really hear them.”

  “Oh, I hear plenty of birds. They’re all over the place.”

  “Only we’re not talking about birds,” Sandrine said.

  1982

  On the last day of November, Sandrine Loy, who was twenty-five, constitutionally ill-tempered, and startlingly good-looking (wide eyes, long mouth, black widow’s peak, columnar legs), formerly of Princeton and Clare College, Cambridge, glanced over her shoulder and said, “Please tell me you’re kidding. I just showered. I put on this nice white frock you bought me in Paris. And I’m hungry.” Relenting a bit, she let a playful smile warm her face for nearly a second. “Besides that, I want to catch sight of our invisible servants.”

  “I’m hungry, too.”

  “Not for food, unfortunately.” She spun from the porthole and its ugly view—a mile of brown, rolling river and low, muddy banks where squat, sullen natives tended to melt back into the bushes when the Sweet Delight went by—to indicate the evidence of Ballard’s arousal, which stood up, darker than the rest of him, as straight as a flagpole.