The Best Horror of the Year Volume Eleven

by Ellen Datlow

  For a moment I feel so dizzy I think I’m going to have to lie flat again, but finally my eyes pick out something that isn’t part of the pattern. I reach out and grasp the edge of a limp bundle of fabric, and pull it up on to the bed. A dress? But something’s not right. I try to smooth it out. Was a dress. Now streaked with rust-coloured stains, and in tatters. As though shredded by claws.

  “Jesus.” He pokes at the mangled fabric with his finger. “What happened?”

  “Hang on. There’s more.” This time I almost tumble on to the floor trying to reach the rest of the clothes, but he holds on to my waist as I pull them up on to the bed. Or what’s left of them. We sift listlessly through the pile, trying in vain to reassemble the stained scraps into viable memories. He finally locates what appears to be a pocket and slides his fingers into it hopefully, but the only thing in there is a blue cigarette lighter.

  “Something attacked us,” I say.

  There’s an outbreak of growling, so loud I peer around fearfully, thinking whatever shredded our clothes must be right here with us, in the room. Only when he looks embarrassed do I realise the sound is coming from his abdomen.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I’m starving.”

  “Me too,” I say. “And thirsty. Spitting feathers.”

  We both look longingly at the basin, so distant it might as well be on Mars. I grit my teeth, ignore the pain, and set my feet on the carpet, but before I can go any further I’m hit by another wave of debilitating nausea. Nausea, and something else I can’t quite put my finger on. Something else I don’t want to put my finger on, as though I’m in the grip of something bigger and more powerful, something which is watching and laughing, having fun at our expense.

  I keel sideways, defeated. He sighs as though I’ve let us both down.

  “At least I tried,” I say.

  He interprets this as a reproach, and laboriously swings his legs over the side of the bed in his turn. I slide over to watch his slow progress. I really want him to stand, so he can fetch me some water, but already he’s in trouble. His mouth contorts, and for a second I think he’s going to throw up, but instead he sinks slowly to his knees and lowers his head till all I can see of him is his back. But I can hear him muttering, “Close to the earth . . .”

  His shoulders tense up. Even though I can’t see his face from here, I can tell he’s spotted something.

  Then, in a muffled voice, “We have a bag.”

  A bag! I feel a flush of triumph. Surely the bag will provide answers. There’ll be clues in it. Maybe even a phone.

  He makes a strangled noise in his throat, and when he turns to look up at me, I wish he hadn’t. All the blood has drained out of his face, leaving the skin looking like greaseproof paper.

  “Something else . . . I can’t . . . You’d better get down here.”

  I’m still feeling optimistic about the bag, so even though I don’t like the look on his face I slither off the bed until I’m kneeling alongside him. So long as I have my head down I can keep the nausea at bay. Now I understand what he meant by close to the earth. Close to the earth is where we need to be.

  Down here, on the floor, the sweet and sour smell is stronger, and the humming’s so loud it’s making my eardrums vibrate. The effort of moving has sapped what little energy was available to me, and the yellow light barely penetrates the shadows, so it’s another moment or two before my eyes can make out the object on the floor.

  A leather tote bag, tan and weathered, another yellow Post-it stuck to the side. I unpeel the note and bring it up close to squint at the same spindly printing.

  IF HUNGER’S MAKING YOU FEEL WEAK UNDER THE BED IS WHAT YOU SEEK

  My stomach gurgles in response. I am hungry. Maybe there’s something to eat in the bag, an energy bar, something like that. I grab the worn leather strap and tug at it. The bag is heavier than it looks, but it bumps across the carpet towards me. I prepare to unzip it and look inside.

  The man touches my arm.

  “Not that,” he whispers. “That.”

  He’s shaking his head and pointing at something beyond the bag, so I let go of the strap and peer into the shadows.

  What is that? A side of beef, or pork? Raw and bloody. Frills of skin and trailing flaps, not a clean cut at all. Something smooth and white sticking out of the top. What the hell is a big chunk of meat doing here under the bed? It should be in the fridge. In any case it’s uncooked, so we can’t eat it.

  Overcome by curiosity, I stretch out an arm, about to prod the joint when my gaze drifts to the other end and I snatch my hand back and, even though it never made contact, wipe it convulsively on the carpet.

  The meat tapers off into a plimsoll. A man’s plimsoll, judging by the size of it. A plimsoll and a sticky red sock. No, not red but grey. Grey drenched in red, like the carpet beneath it.

  “At least now we know where the blood came from,” I say, trying not to giggle and wondering at the same time why on earth I would find this funny.

  “Who put it here?” he asks, as if I’d know any better than him. I ask myself again if he’s feigning ignorance, because there’s something about this situation that feels off.

  I shake this nonsense out of my head. Of course it feels off. In what world would a leg under the bed feel normal? Hoping the bag will provide answers, I prepare once again to unzip it, but he frowns and says, “No, don’t open that.”

  But this just makes me all the more determined, so I grasp the sides of the leather and feel it throbbing softly, and only now do I realise the humming has been coming from inside the bag all along. Has to be a phone inside, making that sound! So I pull on the zip and look inside, and reality abruptly shifts into another, darker dimension.

  He’s watching me apprehensively, so I try to explain. “I thought it was a phone.” Not sure how to put into words what I’m seeing, I push the bag over so he can look for himself. He peers inside, and his eyes widen, but he keeps staring, as though he can’t rip his gaze away.

  At last, he says, “Why is it making that noise?”

  “Maybe it’s fake.” I’m clutching at straws here.

  “Looks real enough to me.” He looks at the leg. “Same person?”

  Christ, let’s hope so. One set of body parts is bad enough. He reaches into the bag and for a ghastly moment I think he’s going to pull the severed head out by its hair, but instead he unpeels the yellow Post-it from the forehead and reads the words out loud.

  THE GAME’S AFOOT! THE HEAD’S IN PLAY

  A LIGHTED FLAME WILL SHOW THE WAY

  We stare at each other, searching for some sort of explanation, but all we see are mirror images of our own disbelief. The yellow light flickers. Once, twice.

  Our heads swivel towards the light fitting. It flickers again, more rapidly now. Each time it blinks, the light grows dimmer, the shadows longer.

  “Oh crap,” I say, because the idea of being trapped in darkness with that thing, these things, this man I don’t know from Adam and who may yet be a psychopath, fills me with a dread more primal than any I’ve been feeling up till now.

  He’s still holding the Post-it Note.

  A LIGHTED FLAME

  “There’s a candle over there,” I say.

  “Worth a try,” he says, and in the rapidly dwindling light I sense rather than see him get to his feet with suspicious ease. Not such an invalid now, eh. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t notice, but now he dives towards the chest of drawers and grabs the putty-coloured candle in its holder.

  “Lighter!” he barks.

  For a second I mistake his meaning and think he’s issuing a godlike command. Then I understand, and grope around on the bed until my fingers close around the blue cigarette lighter, which I scoop up and fling in the direction of his voice, thinking there is no way he’ll see that small object flying through the dying light towards him, and how did I manage to throw it so accurately anyway? But in an impossibly quick movement, he plucks it out of the air, as though some long-forgotten
instinct as a cricket fielder has welled up inside him and repossessed his hand. In a smooth, practised movement, he flicks the lighter and holds the flame to the wick of the candle, which flares up and casts an eerie flickering around the room.

  The light is no longer yellow but the colour of dry oatmeal infested with weevils. Something else in the room has changed. There’s another presence here.

  He turns back to me, looking smug. “We make a good team.”

  “Well, that was odd,” I say, as though everything up until now has been normal. I don’t know where we found that energy, but the sudden burst of activity has left us more enervated than ever. He flops back down, so now we’re both kneeling naked in front of the bag, like supplicants at an oracle.

  The humming gets louder and the flickering light turns from oatmeal to greenish, but it’s not just the candle lighting the room now. The head in the bag is glowing. I try to put a name to the colour emanating from it, but all I can come up with is bile.

  The dead eyes flick open. The dead lips vibrate, and the humming forms itself into words.

  “Ask me while I’m still aglow. I’ll tell you all you need to know.”

  The man and I look at each other. It’s the closest I’ve felt to him yet and, in a way, I’m relieved he’s there because I’m not sure I could cope with this on my own. And yet, there’s a buried part of me which is finding this new development hilarious. I suspect that part is insanity, and know instinctively that I mustn’t laugh, or I’ll unleash it into the room. Not that there isn’t enough insanity here to begin with.

  The head is staring at us, but blankly. It isn’t seeing anything. Or rather, it is seeing something—something that might have once been here, but isn’t any longer.

  The man next to me clears his throat and addresses it, as though talking to a severed head is the most natural thing in the world.

  “Who did this?”

  The lips move. In its humming, vibrating mockery of a voice, it says, “You want to know who made this mess? Your hands are red, so take a guess.”

  “No!” says my companion.

  “Your memory is just a blur. You don’t remember what you were.”

  “My name is Elizabeth,” I tell it. “I’m a picture editor.”

  The lips peel back until I see blood on the teeth.

  “Once upon a distant past, in bodies never built to last.”

  My male companion persists. “We’ve never met before.”

  The head rolls its eyes, revealing not whites but yellow jelly.

  “Your bond is forged in pain and blood, in fire and water, air and mud.”

  “Why should we listen to you?” I have to stifle that hysterical laughter again.

  “You knew you’d wander off the track and tasked me to direct you back.”

  I’ve had enough of this. I say to my companion, “I vote we close the bag and kick it back under the bed,” hoping he’ll take the hint and zip up the bag for the both of us, because I have no intention of touching that throbbing leather sac again, not now, not ever.

  “I’m inclined to agree with you,” he says. “We don’t need this . . . this thing ordering us around.”

  The head rolls its eyes again. “Remembering can set you free, but hey, it’s all the same to me.”

  The man says, “What if we don’t want to remember?”

  The head makes a chuckling noise, and hacks up a small quantity of green fluid which reminds me of the stuff I found between my legs. I find myself wondering how it can cough when its respiratory tract has been shorn off at the neck, and feel sick all over again.

  “If you refuse to seek the thread, you’ll end up wishing you were dead.”

  “OK then,” I say. “Tell us what we need to know.” I’m just humouring it now, because I have no intention of letting this abomination boss us around.

  “To clear your mind and stop the pain . . .” Its voice seems to be fading. “Drink, digest, get dressed again . . .”

  I blurt out, “Our clothes are all torn and covered in blood!”

  “The clean clothes folded in the drawer . . .”

  “How do you know what’s in there?”

  It sighs. “You laid out everything beforrrrrr . . .”

  It gets stuck on the syllable, like a gramophone needle stuck in the same groove, coughs up blood again and the vibrations we mistook for a voice die away along with the last of the humming. The eyes close. And the bile-coloured glow fades, leaving the face waxy and dead, the only movement now from the flickering beige candlelight playing across its pallid contours.

  Without the humming the room seems unnaturally peaceful. I feel like clambering on to the bed and going back to sleep. This is all a dream, and when I wake up it’ll all be back to normal . . . whatever normal is, and I’m not sure any more. But I’m too thirsty. What was it the head said? Drink? Digest?

  I look at my companion and he looks back at me. Is it my imagination or does his face seem more familiar now? Have we really met before? Or maybe we only know each other from the past ten minutes, which seem to have stretched into a lifetime of pain, and hunger, and thirst.

  “Water,” he says.

  I’m filled with foreboding. “No, wait.”

  He ignores me, lifts himself on to his hands and knees, and begins to crawl on all fours towards the basin. No, not crawl; more like scuttling, like a misshapen insect. He’s moving unnaturally fast, genitalia swinging from side to side, or maybe it just seems fast to me because I’m still rooted to the spot. The trust I was beginning to place in him has withered. So I follow him, reluctantly. I sense this is a trap, and I’m crawling straight into it, but there’s no going back now.

  He reaches the basin and, grunting with the effort, hauls himself up. By the time I join him there, his fingers are already closing around the glass tumbler, as though it was the prize in a contest I’ve just lost. “No, wait,” I say again, but he picks it up and twists the tap. There’s a whine of protest from the ancient plumbing, and water trickles into the glass, with a sound like music.

  He waits until it’s filled to the brim before saying, “Here we go,” turning towards me with a half-apologetic smile and tipping back his head and pouring the contents of the glass into his mouth, Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows, water running down his chin, dripping on to his chest.

  I paw at his arm, but he shrugs me off, drains the tumbler and lowers his head, looking straight at me with a malicious gleam in his eyes as his fingers tighten, knuckles turning white, fist gripping tighter and tighter until there’s a loud crack and the glass disintegrates into a million splinters.

  “You bastard,” I say.

  He lets the splinters fall, picks slivers out of his palm and drops the biggest shards into the basin. Then holds up his bleeding hand, spreading the fingers so I can see the blood trickling down his arm.

  “Looks like I won,” he says.

  If I weren’t so dehydrated I’d be weeping with fury. I lean over the basin and poke at the remains of the glass, but not a single piece is big enough to hold even a tiny amount of the water now trickling uselessly down the plughole.

  Before I can think about what to do next, there’s an animal screech behind me. I look in the mirror. Beyond the reflection of my face, shiny and alien, I can see him still clutching his bleeding hand. But the image is rippling. His skin is erupting into goose pimples so big they cast shadows like hills on an illustrated map. His fingernails are growing. His face contorts with agony as his eyes sink further and further into his skull until the sockets are dark pools. I sway dangerously, shaking my head, but the image is still there. At last the rippling stops and his mouth spreads into an impossibly wide smile, showing more teeth than a mouth has any right to hold.

  “What the hell,” I say, and make the mistake of turning round to face him, assuming the reflection in the mirror is distorted and that when I see him for real he’ll look normal again.

  Except he doesn’t.

  “Come to daddy
,” he says, beckoning with fingernails now like vicious twigs. His voice has changed. Now it sounds as though it’s coming from a deep dark place beneath our feet. His toenails are growing too, each one curved, like a Turkish scimitar.

  “Fuck no.” I retreat as far as I can into the corner by the basin, wishing I could disappear. I’m beginning to understand. The other guy, the one I woke up with, didn’t attack me. But this one did. And this one isn’t a man at all. I don’t know what he is.

  When he laughs, the sound is like nails rattling in a can.

  I brace myself for another onslaught, but instead of attacking me again he tips his head to one side, as if responding to a distant call my ears can’t hear, and turns to move away from me, towards the bed, where he sinks to his knees in a supple movement, not at all like his earlier collapse. He reaches under the bed and draws out the leg, clamps his teeth into the fatty part of the calf, and begins to chew.

  My empty stomach heaves at the sight, but at least the meat has bought me time. I stumble to the door and turn the handle. Locked. In frustration I bang my forehead against the wood, dislodging the yellow Post-it clinging there. It floats to the floor before I get a chance to read the words on it.

  There’s an explosion of moist laughter at my ear. He’s left the bed and is standing right behind me. It’s the laugh of someone with his mouth full, spitting shreds of meat and saliva. At the same instant I feel a scything pain across my shoulder, as though I’ve caught it in a sliding door, followed by a tightness in my lungs and a shock of freezing air, and wetness spilling out. I fall to my knees, as if someone has snipped the thread that has been holding me upright.