by Ellen Datlow
Leaves crackled and twigs snapped as unseen hooves pawed the ground. The putrefying skull turned, tilted down toward them, and opened its mouth again.
Chloe shook her head, mumbling desperately. She reached up one trembling hand as if to stroke the long muzzle. Instead, she placed her hand inside the creature’s mouth. The jaws snapped shut on her wrist and the skull jerked violently from side to side, like a dog shaking a toy.
Her screams were terrible. Wild, primal animal sounds. She flailed at the skull with her other hand, trying to pull away. But the creature pushed her down on the ground. She made a sound as if she’d been punched in the stomach, a breathy “Oof!” that might have been funny under other circumstances.
Ian could only stare in horror as something heavy pressed her down, stamping repeatedly. But there was nothing there. Only the floating shroud with the terrible skull emerging from it. Chloe’s screams became guttural croaks as the powerful jaws finally snapped the bone and wrenched her hand away. Blood spurted across Ian’s face but still he couldn’t move.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, lowering his head. He stared at the ground beneath him, where blood was trickling between the dead leaves. Chloe’s hand dropped into the detritus in front of him and he felt his stomach lurch. He couldn’t bear to see any more, so he closed his eyes. “Sorry, sorry, sorry . . .”
Strident neighing broke the silence, but Ian didn’t move. He felt his bladder let go as he sank to his knees, waiting, praying for mercy he knew would not come. When he felt the hooves smash into the back of his neck, he fell forward into the bloodstained leaves. The pain was terrible, but he couldn’t scream. His mouth was too full of earth.
“Are you all packed?”
Heather nodded without looking up at her dad. Her suitcases were laid out on the bed and she was ready to go, ready to leave this awful place far behind.
Dave gave her shoulders a reassuring squeeze. “I’ll take those out to the car.”
Once he was gone, Heather made her way slowly through the house and stood by the back door, peering out into the garden. The little wooden cross she had placed there lay on its side, and the soil was disturbed, scattered across the ground in a trail that led all the way into the woods.
Heather looked down at her hands, at the jagged, broken nails caked with dirt and dried blood. Beneath her shirt, the horsehair was beginning to itch.
As she made her way to the car, she clicked her teeth together, three times. It felt strangely reassuring.
GIRLS WITHOUT THEIR FACES ON
LAIRD BARRON
Delia’s father had watched her drowning when she was a little girl. The accident happened in a neighbor’s pool. Delia lay submerged near the bottom, her lungs filling with chlorinated water. She could see Dad’s distorted form bent forward, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, cigarette dangling from his lips, blandly inquisitive. Mom scooped Delia out and smacked her between the shoulder blades while she coughed and coughed.
Delia didn’t think about it often. Not often.
Barry F threw a party at his big, opulent house on Hillside East. He invited people to come after sundown. A whole slew of them heeded the call. Some guests considered Barry F an eccentric. This wasn’t eccentric—sundown comes early in autumn in Alaska. Hours passed and eventually the door swung wide, emitting piano music, laughter, a blaze of chandelier light. Three silhouettes lingered; a trinity of Christmas ghosts: Delia; Delia’s significant other, J; and Barry F.
“—the per capita death rate in Anchorage is outsized,” Barry F said. “Out-fucking-sized. This town is the armpit. No, it’s the asshole—”
“Bethel is the asshole,” J said.
“Tell it on the mountain, bro.”
“I’ll tell you why Bethel is the worst. My dad was there on a job for the FAA in ’77. He’s eating breakfast at the Tundra Diner and a janitor walks past his table, lugging a honey bucket—”
“Honey bucket?”
“Plumbing froze, so folks crapped in a bucket and dumped it in a sewage lagoon out back. Honey bucket. It’s a joke. Anyway, the dude trips on his shoelace . . . Go on. Imagine the scene. Envision that motherfucker. Picking toilet paper outta your scrambled eggs kills the appetite. Plus, cabin fever, and homies die in the bush all the livelong day. Alcoholism, poverty, rape. Worst of the worst.”
“Please,” Delia said. “Can we refrain from trashing a native village for the sin of not perfectly acclimating to a predatory takeover by the descendants of white European invaders?”
“Ooh, my girlfriend doesn’t enjoy the turn of conversation. Sorry, my precious little snowflake. Folks weren’t so politically correct in the 1970s. I’m just reporting the news.”
“If we’re talking about assholes, look no further than a mirror.”
“Kids, kids, don’t fight, don’t derail the train,” Barry F said with an oily, avuncular smile. “Anchorage is still bad. Right?”
“Wretched. Foul.”
“And on that note . . .” Delia said.
“Haven’t even gotten to the statistics for sexual assault and disappearances—”
“—Satanists. Diabolists. Scientologists. Cops found a hooker’s corpse bound to a headboard at the Viking Motel.”
“Lashed to the mast, eh?”
“You said it.”
“Hooker? Wasn’t she a stripper, though? Candy Bunny, Candy Hunny . . . ?”
“Hooker, stripper, I dunno. White scarves, black candles. Blood everywhere. News called it a ritual killing. They’re combing the city for suspects.”
“Well, Tito and Benny were at the Bush Company the other night and I haven’t seen ‘em since . . .”
“Ha-ha, those cut-ups!”
“I hope not literally.”
“We’re due for some ritual insanity. Been saying it for months.”
“Why are we due?”
“Planet X is aligning with the sun. Its passage messes with gravitational forces, brain chemistry, libidos, et cetera. Like the full moon affects crazies, except dialed to a hundred. Archeologists got cave drawings that show this has been a thing since Neanderthals were stabbing mammoths with sharpened sticks.”
“The malignant influence of the gods.”
“The malignant influence of the Grays.”
“The Grays?”
“Little gray men: messengers of the gods; cattle mutilators; anal probeists . . .”
“They hang around Bethel, eh?”
“No way to keep up with the sheer volume of insanity this state produces. Oh, speaking of brutalized animals, there was the Rabbit Massacre in Wasilla.”
“Pure madness.”
“Dog mutilations. So many doggy murders. I sorta hate dogs, but really, chopping off their paws is too damned far.”
“And on that note . . . !” Delia stepped backward onto the porch for emphasis.
“On that note. Hint taken, baby doll. Later, sucker.”
A couple separated from the raucous merriment of the party. The door shut behind them and they were alone in the night.
“What’s a Flat Affect Man?” Delia wore a light coat, miniskirt, and heels. She clutched J’s arm as they descended the flagstone steps alongside a treacherously steep driveway. Porch lights guided them partway down the slope.
“Where did you hear that?” Sports coat, slacks, and high-top tennis shoes for him. Surefooted as a mountain goat. The softness of his face notwithstanding, he had a muscle or two.
“Barry F mentioned it to that heavyset guy in the turtleneck. You were chatting up turtleneck dude’s girlfriend. The chick who was going to burst out of her mohair sweater.”
“I wasn’t flirting. She’s comptroller for the university. Business, always business.”
“Uh-huh. Curse of the Flat Affect Men, is what Barry said.”
“Well, forget what you heard. There are things woman was not meant to know. You’ll just spook yourself.”
She wanted to smack him, but her grip was precarious and she’d had too many dri
nks to completely trust her balance.
Hillside East was heavily wooded. Murky at high noon and impenetrable come the witching hour. Neighborhoods snaked around ravines and subarctic meadows and copses of deep forest. Cul-de-sacs might host a house or a bear den. But that was Anchorage. A quarter of a million souls sprinkled across seventeen-hundred square miles of slightly suburbanized wilderness. Ice water to the left, mountains to the right, Aurora Borealis weeping radioactive tears. October nights tended to be crisp. Termination dust gleamed upon the Chugach peaks, on its way down like a shroud, creeping ever lower through the trees.
A few more steps and he unlocked the car and helped her inside. He’d parked away from the dozen or so other vehicles that lined the main road on either side of the mailbox. His car was practically an antique. Its dome light worked sporadically. Tonight, nothing. The interior smelled faintly of a mummified animal.
The couple sat in the dark. Waiting.
She regarded the black mass of forest to her right, ignoring his hand on her thigh. Way up the hillside, the house’s main deck projected over a ravine. Bay windows glowed yellow. None of the party sounds reached them in the car. She imagined the turntables gone silent and the piano hitting a lone minor key, over and over. Loneliness born of aching disquiet stole over her. No matter that she shared a car with J nor that sixty people partied hardy a hundred yards away. Her loneliness might well have sprung from J’s very proximity.
After nine months of dating, her lover remained inscrutable.
J lived in a duplex that felt as sterile as an operating room—television, double bed, couch, and a framed poster of the cosmos over the fake fireplace (a faux fireplace in Alaska was almost too much irony for her system). A six-pack in the fridge; a half-empty closet. He consulted for the government, finagling cost-efficient ways to install fiber optic communications in remote native villages. That’s allegedly what he did when he disappeared for weeks on end. Martinis were his poison, Andy Kaufman his favorite (dead?) entertainer, and electronica his preferred music. His smile wasn’t a reliable indicator of mood or temperament.
Waking from a strange, fragmentary dream, to a proverbial splash of cold water, Delia accepted that the romance was equally illusory.
“What is your job?” she said, experiencing an uncomfortable epiphany of the ilk that plagued heroines in gothic tales and crime dramas. It was unwise for a woman to press a man about his possibly nefarious double life, and yet so it went. Her lips formed the words and out they flew, the skids greased by a liberal quantity of vino.
“Same as it was in April,” he said. “Why?”
“Somebody told me they saw you at the airport buying a ticket to Nome in early September. You were supposed to be in Two Rivers that week.”
“Always wanted to visit Nome. Haunt of late career Wyatt Earp. Instead, I hit Two Rivers and got a lousy mug at the gift shop.”
“Show me the mug when I come over for movie night.”
“Honey pie, sugar lump! Is that doubt I hear in your voice?”
“It is.”
“Fine, you’ve got me red-handed. I shoot walruses and polar bears so wealthy Europeans can play on ivory cribbage boards and strut around in fur bikinis.” He caressed her knee and waited, presumably for a laugh. “C’mon, baby. I’m a square with a square job. Your friend must’ve seen my doppelganger.”
“No. What do you actually do? Like for real.”
“I really consult.” He wore a heavy watch with a metal strap. He pressed harder and the strap dug into her flesh.
“There’s more,” she said. “Right? I’ve tried to make everything add up, and I can’t.”
“Sweetie, just say what’s on your mind.”
“I’m worried. Ever have a moment, smack out of the blue, when you realize you don’t actually know someone? I’m having that moment.”
“Okay. I’m a deep cover Russian agent.”
“Are you?”
“Jeez, you’re paranoid tonight.”
“Or my bullshit detector is finally working.”
“You were hitting it hard in there.” He mimed drinking with his free hand.
“Sure, I was half a glass away from dancing on the piano. Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
“Wanna get me on a couch? Wanna meet my mother?”
“People lie to shrinks. Do you even have a mother?”
“I don’t have a shrink. Don’t have a mother.” His hand and the watch strap on his wrist slid back and forth, abrading her skin. “My mother was a . . . eh, who cares what the supernumerary does? She died. Horribly.”
“J—” Would she be able to pry his hand away? Assuming that failed, could she muster the grit to slap him, or punch him in the family jewels? She hadn’t resorted to violence since decking a middle school classmate who tried to grab her ass on a fieldtrip. Why had she leapt to the worst scenario now? Mom used to warn her about getting into bad situations with sketchy dudes. Mom said of hypothetical date rapists, if shit got real, smile sweetly and gouge the bastard’s eye with a press-on nail.
The phantom piano key in her mind sounded like it belonged in a 1970s horror flick. How much did I have? Three glasses of red, or four? Don’t let the car start spinning, I might fly into space.
J paused, head tilted as if concentrating upon Delia’s imagined minor key plinking and plinking. He released her and straightened and held his watch close to his eyes. The watch face was not illuminated. Blue gloom masked everything. Blue gloom made his skull misshapen and enormous. Yet the metal of the watch gathered starlight.
“Were you paying attention when I told Barry that Planet X is headed toward our solar system?” he said.
“Yes.” Except . . . Barry had told J, hadn’t he?
“Fine. I’m gonna lay some news on you, then. You ready for the news?”
She said she was ready for the news.
“Planet X isn’t critical,” he said. “Important, yes. Critical, no. Who cares about a chunk of ice? Not so exciting. Her star is critical. A brown dwarf. It has, in moments of pique that occur every few million years, emitted a burst of highly lethal gamma rays and bombarded hapless worlds many light years distant. Every organism on those planets died instantly. Forget the radiation. She can do other things with her heavenly body. Nemesis Star first swung through the heart of the Oort Cloud eons past. Bye-bye dinosaurs. Nemesis’ last massive gravitational wave intersected the outer fringe of Sol System in the 1970s. Nemesis has an erratic orbit, you see. Earth got the succeeding ripple effect. Brownouts, tidal waves, earthquakes, all them suicides in Japan . . . A second wave arrived twenty years later. The third and final wave hit several days ago. Its dying edge will splash Earth in, oh, approximately forty-five seconds.”
“What?” she said. “I don’t get it.”
“And it’s okay. This is when they come through is all you need to understand. I’m here to greet them. That’s my real job, baby doll. I’m a greeter. Tonight is an extinction event; AKA: a close encounter of the intimate kind.”
Delia fixated on the first part of his explanation. “Greeter. Like a store greeter?” She thought of the Central Casting granddad characters stationed at the entrance of certain big box stores who bared worn dentures in a permanent rictus.
“Stay. I forgot my jacket.” J (wearing his jacket, no less) exited the car and be-bopped into the night.
Stay. As if she were an obedient mutt. She rubbed her thigh and watched his shadow float along the driveway and meld into the larger darkness. Chills knifed through her. The windows began to fog over with her breath. He’d taken the keys. She couldn’t start the car to get warm or listen to the radio. Or drive away from the scene of the crime.
Delia’s twenty-fifth birthday loomed on the horizon. She had majored in communication with a side of journalism at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She was a culture reporter, covering art and entertainment for the main Anchorage daily paper.
People enjoyed her phone manner. In person, she was persistent and vag
uely charming. Apolitical; non-judgmental as a Swiss banker. Daddy had always said not to bother her pretty little head. Daddy was a sexist pig to his dying breath; she heeded the advice anyhow. Half of what interviewees relayed went in one ear and out the other with nary a whistle-stop. No matter; her memory snapped shut on the most errant of facts like the teeth of a steel leghold trap. Memory is an acceptable day-to-day substitute for intellect.
Her older brothers drove an ambulance and worked in construction respectively. Her little sister graduated from Onager High next spring. Little sister didn’t have journalistic aspirations. Sis yelled, Fake news! When gentlemen callers (bikers and punk rockers) loaded her into their chariots and hied into the sunset.
Delia lived in an apartment with two women. She owned a dog named Atticus. Her roommates loved Atticus and took care of him when she couldn’t make it home at a reasonable hour. They joked about stealing him when they eventually moved onward and upward with trophy spouses and corporate employment. I’ll cut a bitch, she always said with a smile, not joking at all.
Should she ring them right then for an emergency extraction? “Emergency” might be a tad extreme, yet it seemed a reasonable plan. Housemate A had left on an impromptu overnighter with her boyfriend. Housemate B’s car was in the shop. Housemate B helpfully suggested that Delia call a taxi, or, if she felt truly threatened, the cops. Housemate B was on record as disliking J.
Am I feeling threatened? Delia pocketed her phone and searched her feelings.
Her ambulance-driving brother (upholding the family tradition of advising Delia to beware a cruel, vicious world) frequently lectured about the hidden dangers surrounding his profession. Firemen and paramedics habitually rushed headlong into dicey situations, exposing themselves to the same risks as police and soldiers, except without guns or backup. Paramedics get jacked up every day. While you’re busy doing CPR on a subject, some street-dwelling motherfucker will shiv you in the kidney and grab your wallet. Only way to survive is to keep your head on a swivel and develop a sixth sense. The hairs on the back of your neck prickle, you better look around real quick.
