And who, she wonders, is the bearwalker now?
“It’s not safe out here,” her father snarls in his new animal-voice. “This ice is too thin. Come with me now.”
Go with him, and she’s dead. Or she’ll become what he is, which amounts to the same thing.
She slides back a step.
“Sarah.” His face darkens. “What are you doing?”
Another step back, and then she sees what she hasn’t noticed: that she’s blundered onto the bog where the channels are deep and the trapping best.
“Sarah, damn it! Come . . .” Abruptly, he lunges. Gasping, she stumbles, her heels tangling, and then she’s falling as he looms. “DAMN IT!” he roars. “Look what you’ve made me . . .”
There is an enormous CRACK louder than any blast from any weapon she has ever heard. Her father suddenly cries out, throwing up his arms in a wild windmilling semaphore, and for a second, she thinks, He’s shot, someone’s—
With a loud groan, the bone-white ice gives, opening wide as a mouth, as the jaws of a skull . . . and swallows her father whole.
• • •
A gurgle. A slosh. The chik of broken ice against ice, and the more distant echoes of her father’s single cry. Close by, an owl hoots.
Silence.
For a shuddering instant Sarah can only pull in one ragged breath after the other. Her heart’s booming. Spread before her, the open blight in the ice is black and still.
“Dad?” The word is tiny. High above, the wind sighs and makes the naked tree limbs clack. Like bone. She looks up. No fiery eyes stare back. “Ms. Avery?” Moving to a crouch, she creeps toward a ragged lip of ice. “Dad? Daddy? ” The inky water is still. “Dad, can you hear . . .”
All of a sudden the water ruptures in an icy geyser. Breaching the surface, her father porpoises in a huge gush and draws in a shrieking breath. “S-S-Sarah! H-honey! ” Spluttering, her father flails. His terrified eyes are wide and white as boiled eggs. It might be her imagination, but his face is clearer, not as hairy, the animal in him . . . less? Fading? “Sarah! I’m caught! My feet . . . the rats . . . I’m . . .” His body slides back now, his face submerging again before he bobs back, vomiting water. “I’M TRAPPED!”
Her father’s voice from another time floats through her mind: Rat saves you the trouble by drowning hisself. His chin slides beneath the surface, and then his face. Choking, he surges up again. “H-help! Help me! I’m sinking, b-baby, I’m s-sinking”—his body slips down again, and now he’s tipped his head so far back, he’s shouting up at the sky and into the night—“S-Sarah, don’t let me d-drown, d-don’t . . .”
Dad. It’s his voice now, his real voice. He killed her mother; he must’ve murdered Ms. Avery. He’s sick. It’s the drugs, his temper, the booze. She might never forgive him, but she can’t let him drown. Not now when, at least, he’s a man again.
“Daddy!” She scurries forward on the ice, but awkwardly, aware that the ice is much more slippery, as if whatever dark magic has led her to this place is fast draining away too. As he begins to sink again, she flattens onto her belly and worms for the edge. She hears a tiny tick of the owl’s skull, still on its leather cord around her neck, against the ice. Thrusting her hand out over the water, she shouts to her struggling father, “Grab it, Daddy! Grab onto me! I’ll save you!”
“That’s g-good, th-that’s . . .” Lunging, her father grapples for her hand. Their fingers brush, but then he’s falling back, coughing, spluttering, sliding away from her.
“NO!” Her chest hovers over black water; her naked toes dig into glare ice. “Daddy, Dad, take my hand! ”
With a gigantic effort he thrashes up. His hands fall in an arc, grappling first in her hair, then slipping away before catching: his right digging into her shoulder—and the left knotting in the owl necklace around her throat.
“Get me out!” His teeth are set in a panicked rictus. “Get me out of here!”
“I c-cuh . . .” He’s choking her. The leather cord cuts into her throat, and her air is gone. Bright orange spangles burst over her vision even as it is darkening, and she can feel herself being pulled, inexorably, to her death. He’s got her; he’s killing her. Maybe he knows this, maybe not. Maybe, regardless, he doesn’t care. D-Duh . . . A hole opens in the center of her vision. She claws futilely at his hand that is tight and then tighter on the cord that is sawing through her skin, cutting off her air. Her blood pounds, and yet everything else is fading, even her father’s shouts. Distantly, she feels her naked feet drumming solid ice, and now there is frigid water slopping against her face, her chest. D-Daddy . . . p-please . . .
Let me. An arm that is only bone suddenly emerges from the dark waters, and then the Avery-thing is rising from the bog like some prehistoric behemoth. He’s mine.
Her father screams, a high keening wail. There is a jolt as the leather cord snaps. The pressure around Sarah’s neck is suddenly gone. By all rights, she should swoon into the water, and yet she feels something—a hand? A claw?—shove and send her sprawling back onto solid ice.
In the water, above her father, the Avery-thing unfurls. Tipped with razor talons, its massive wings stretch to their full length. It is huge, awesome and beautiful and terrible all at once, something that lives only in a high-fever dream. For the first time, Sarah clearly sees the spirit as it now is: all bone and glass-skin and hot scarlet eyes so bright they ought to boil away her sight.
“SARAH!” Her father’s face is a white mask of terror. The owl’s skull still dangles from his left fist. “SARAH, DON’T LET IT TAKE ME, DON’T LET IT . . .”
• • •
Except for Hank, no one will believe her. They will make her see a psychiatrist who will decide that she was delirious with fever and fear and very lucky to escape, what with such thin ice. She and Bethie will bury their parents and, eventually, live with a distant cousin of their mom’s.
When Sarah asks to go to Ms. Avery’s funeral, the shrink thinks this will bring closure, a ridiculous shrink-word for forgetting (as if nightmares can be wrapped with a bow and slotted onto a high back shelf). The casket is shut on account of how long Ms. Avery, wrapped in the linked chain she’d been strangled with and then secured to weighted muskrat traps, had been submerged. Even though the deep water was frigid, the fish and muskrats were hungry. Instead, Ms. Avery will smile from a picture surrounded with red geraniums, and never once throw Sarah a wink.
But that is the future she doesn’t know yet.
For now, this one instant, she still clings to hope the way a drowning man, like her father, clutches at a straw—or a tiny, fragile skull, in the belief that he still might cheat destiny.
“W-wait!” Eyes streaming, Sarah crouches, shivering like a small, frightened animal. She is so cold, as if the long fever of her guilt has finally broken, and she is fated to live after all. “Please! C-can’t he . . . maybe I can . . .”
No. Some things are beyond repair. Let him go, Sarah. Wrapping its skeleton’s arms tight, the Avery-thing—Manidoo, Maji-aya`awish, Baykok, Murderer, whatever its true name—folds her screaming father close in a last, fatal embrace. Let this evil go, and live.
Then the Avery-thing slips beneath the bog’s black surface, drawing her father away from the light and her life—down deep and into the dark.
Ilsa J. Bick is a child psychiatrist as well as a film scholar, surgeon wannabe, former Air Force major, and an award-winning, bestselling author of dozens of short stories and novels, including the critically acclaimed Ashes Trilogy, Drowning Instinct, and, most recently, her Dark Passages series: White Space (long-listed for the Stoker) and The Dickens Mirror. Currently she lives on a mountain in Alabama with several furry creatures and her husband. On occasion she even feeds them. Follow her, as well as the cats, the backyard, assorted wildlife, Friday’s Cocktails, and Sunday’s Cakes:
Website: ilsajbick.com
Twitter and Instagram: @ilsajbick
Facebook: facebook.com/ilsa.j.bick
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Also by Jonathan Maberry
The Rot & Ruin series
Rot & Ruin
Dust & Decay
Flesh & Bone
Fire & Ash
Bits & Pieces
The Nightsiders series
The Orphan Army
Vault of Shadows
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Introduction and compilation copyright © 2016 by Jonathan Maberry
“The Doomsday Glass” copyright © 2016 by Brenna Yovanoff
“What Happens to Girls Who Disappear” copyright © 2016 by Carrie Ryan
“The Mermaid Aquarium” copyright © 2016 by Cherie Priest
“As Good as Your Word” copyright © 2016 by Ellen Hopkins
“Invisible Girl” copyright © 2016 by Rachel Tafoya
“Death and Twinkies” copyright © 2016 by Zac Brewer
“Secret Things: Poems” copyright © 2016 by Linda Addison
“Danny” copyright © 2016 by Josh Malerman
“Make It Right” copyright © 2016 by Madeleine Roux
“Shadowtown Blues: Poems” copyright © 2016 by Lucy A. Snyder
“Beyond the Sea” copyright © 2016 by Nancy Holder
“The Whisper-Whisper Men” copyright © 2016 by Tim Waggoner
“Non-player Character” copyright © 2016 by Neal & Brendan Schusterman
“Falling into Darkness: Poems” copyright © 2016 by Marge Simon
“What Happens When the Heart Just Stops” copyright © 2016 by Chistopher Golden
“Chlorine-Damaged Hair, and Other Pool Hazards” copyright © 2016 by Kendare Blake
“The Old Radio” copyright © 2016 by R. L. Stine
“Rites of Passage: Poems” copyright © 2016 by Jade Shames
“Corazón Oscuro” copyright © 2016 by Rachel Caine
“The Boyfriend” copyright © 2016 by Steve Rasnic Tem
“Bearwalker” copyright © 2016 by Ilsa J. Bick
Jacket photograph copyright © 2016 by Ali Smith
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The text for this book was set in Warnock Pro.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Maberry, Jonathan, editor of compilation. | Addison, Linda (Poet), author.
Title: Scary out there / edited by Jonathan Maberry ; stories by Linda Addison [and 21 others].
Description: First edition. | New York, New York : SSBFYR, [2016] |
Summary: “Multiple Bram Stoker Award–winning author Jonathan Maberry compiles more than twenty stories and poems—written by members of the Horror Writers Association—in this terrifying collection about worst fears”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015044921| ISBN 9781481450706 (hardback) | ISBN 9781481450720 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Horror tales, American. | Horror poetry, American. | Short stories, American. | Poetry, American. | CYAC: Horror stories. | Short stories. | American poetry. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Short Stories. |
JUVENILE FICTION / Horror & Ghost Stories. | JUVENILE FICTION / Monsters.
Classification: LCC PZ5 .S325 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2015044921
Scary Out There Page 34