The Best Horror of the Year Volume Eleven

by Ellen Datlow

  “Not hollow,” he wrote, “as an egg might be hollow, but carved out, digged full of holes, as a cork, or a nest.” There was no heaven or hell, according to Hesher. No higher power, and no lower one, but in these holes there were entities who could do things, and sometimes they would whisper to those of us who lived above, as they had to the Millers, as they did to him.

  These were what he was planning to “commune” with when he killed my sister and her classmates. “Eternity is a cruel thing,” he wrote, “but long lastingness is within our grasp, if we are willing to sacrifice much. Being a man is a thing that we can easily cast off, if we are willing to reach past our own bodies to what lies beneath.

  “What scuttles in the shadows when the light of the sun is turned off? Why would we dream that we have seen but the tip of its great limb? It is in the shadow of the world, and it is in the shadow of our hearts. If we open ourselves up to the breath of the abyss, we will hear it whisper our name.”

  Given my preoccupation with the circumstances of Danielle’s death, I don’t know why it took me so long to go to the crime scene. By the time I did I had graduated from college, taking a job as a file clerk at a Kansas City law firm, pushing wheeled carts down long aisles in the dim basement of a tall building. My dad had been in and out of the hospital with colon cancer, and I had driven my old Passat out to Boulder easily more than a dozen times to visit him, passing by the rest stop and the NO EXIT sign each time I did.

  I think maybe I put off visiting it because I knew that there wouldn’t be anything left after that. Danielle was gone, Hesher and his people were in the ground. I had read everything I could find, watched everything there was to watch. My parents never spoke about it, and I never got up the nerve to ask. The rest stop would be the last place I could go to feel closer to Danielle, to make her something more than a fading memory.

  “Legend tripping” is what they call it, I guess, and I could tell before I saw much else that I wasn’t the first to make the journey. I moved the blue painted sawhorses but parked my Passat next to the chunks of concrete, hiking the rest of the way up to the top of the limestone hill, topped with a line of scrub trees that circled it like a crown.

  From the highway, the restroom building and the rotted remains of the picnic shelters didn’t look much different from their brethren at other, less-neglected stops. Up close, though, I could see that they had been visited by graffiti in all its varied forms, from pentagrams and inverted crosses to swastikas, declarations of love, and crude drawings of male and female genitalia.

  Some aspiring graffiti artist had even done their homework. A red circle pierced by a line was spray-painted onto the sidewalk directly in front of the restrooms, in the spot where you would stand to look at the map behind the Plexiglas—if such a map were still present, instead of an empty box with webs in the corners and the dried-up bodies of dead spiders collecting at the bottom.

  In the light of the setting sun, I could see stains on the overgrown parking lot, though whether they were made by oil or blood it was impossible to tell. Some of the picnic shelters were missing their roofs, others their picnic tables. All of them had suffered more from the years of neglect than the restrooms had, the wood splintering and breaking apart while the tan brick of the restroom building simply faded.

  The door marked WOMEN was oddly difficult to open—like there was something behind it, holding it shut, but not anything substantial. Shining my flashlight into the dark on the other side, I saw why.

  The restroom had probably never been very tidy or welcoming. It was the same as the ones in every other rest stop I had ever visited; concrete floors, windows set high in the walls to let in what little light could force its way past the dust-coated Plexiglas, a trio of metal stalls and boxy troughs for sinks. I knew such rest stop bathrooms well from my many pilgrimages along I-70 and was familiar with them as homes for dead leaves, dead bugs, cobwebs, and dust. But this one was positively festooned with spider webs.

  It was as if the decorator for an old Gothic horror film had gone to town but had never been told to stop. The webs filled the room with such proliferation as to make no sense. No insect could ever penetrate them deeply enough for any but the ones nearest the door to catch any prey, and yet they filled every space, the strands sometimes the monofilament thickness that I was used to in spider’s webs, other times reaching a ropy girth that called to mind alien slime or the webs of mutant spiders from the movies.

  These were what had made forcing the door open feel like fighting my way past marshmallow fluff, and as I flashed my light across the sticky strands, I thought I saw something writhing in their depths. Something much too big to be an insect, and too malformed to be human. It let out a mewling sound, and I stumbled back, the door swinging shut behind me.

  Or had I gone through a door, after all? The light on the other side seemed changed in some subtle way, the setting sun painting the sky with the radiation glow of a post-apocalyptic future. That wasn’t all that had changed, either. There was an RV in the parking lot that hadn’t been there before. One that looked all-too familiar, down to the circle being pierced by the line daubed onto the door in something too dark to be paint.

  All around me, it seemed that the trees were moving closer whenever I wasn’t looking. I imagined them turning upside-down, their branches becoming spidery legs on which they crept nearer, only to plant themselves again, head down in the dirt, whenever my eyes swept across them. For all that I told myself it was a panic response, a trick of the mind, there was no denying that when I looked again what had been thirty paces from the picnic shelters became twenty, twenty became ten.

  With the trees closing in, I don’t know why I thought the RV was a safer place to be, but I found myself standing in front of its door nevertheless.

  On the other side I could hear sounds. Voices whispering, and something else. The sound of a dozen blades sawing flesh. The door had a handle, the kind that turns downward, a line piercing a circle into the earth, and I turned it and the door opened outward, and from inside came the reptile house smell of pennies and fresh soil.

  Inside was Damien Hesher. On his head he wore that same cow skull, its teeth and horns missing, transforming it into something else, the helmet of a cyclops, the head of an insect. On his hands he wore claws made from the bones of small animals; the same claws he had used, according to the coroner’s report, to tear out his own throat, though I saw now that those claws were unstained by blood.

  His neck was still a bloody, ragged wound, though something now moved inside it, working open and closed. “Eternity is a cruel thing,” are the only words he said to me, the sounds coming not from where his mouth should have been, but from the ragged hole in his neck. Then they came for him.

  The floor of the RV opened like a series of trap doors held tight by webbing, the seams invisible until triggered. Black limbs rose up from the floor, scuttling bodies like the ones I had imagined attached to the spidery trees. They embraced Damien Hesher, taking him back with them to wherever it was he now resided.

  The hand that he reached out toward me was not threatening but supplicating. Beneath those claws of bone, the pad of his hand was pink and soft. I felt sorry for him, this man who had thought he could peer into a dark well and not be frightened by what he saw. I stumbled back, as more of the dark shapes came surging up from the glowing trap doors, and felt a hand fall on my shoulder.

  She stood behind me, still as tall as my mom. She wore the same jeans and hoodie that she had worn when she disappeared, but the hand that touched me wasn’t anything I recognized, and in the dark shadows of that hood her eyes seemed to glitter, and a seam split her face, running up her neck, up her chin. Her smile was the same, though, and she said my name as my arms went around her and I pressed my face into her shoulder, realizing only as I did so that I had gotten to be just as tall as her, over the years.

  When I could no longer feel her arms around me, I opened my eyes, and found myself standing in the parkin
g lot of the rest stop, my shoes on the asphalt. The RV was gone. The sun had set completely, and the night sky was filled with stars, the stunted trees having retreated to their usual distance, though I had the feeling it was only a temporary armistice, not a permanent peace.

  When I got back to my Passat and sat down in the driver’s seat, I felt something crinkle in my back pocket. Pulling it out, I found a faded polaroid of me and Danielle. I was sitting in front of her on the brass bed I had when I was little, and she was braiding my hair and smiling, her face suddenly clarified in the blur of my memory.

  Looking up, I thought I saw her watching me from the tree line, those black eyes sparkling, but when I shut off the dome light there was nothing there. Just the fading hint of a door closing in the rocky cliffside, maybe, nothing more.

  HAUNT

  SIOBHAN CARROLL

  May 31, 1799

  Indian Ocean

  17°10’N, by reckoning 9°W off Cape Negrais

  Swift did not think about the Zong. The Minerva was a different kind of ship, plagued by different kinds of misery. Her hull, for one. Swift did not like the feel of the boards beneath the waterline. Leaning over the jollyboat’s gunnel, he plunged his arm deeper into the ocean, seeking further damage.

  “How’s she fare?”

  Swift shook the water off his arm. “A stern leak between wind-and-water,” he said. “’Tis an ill wound for an old ship to bear.” He glanced at the sun, a yellow smear in a haze of gray. A storm was brewing.

  “And her hull wants copper-plating,” Decurrs stated. An able seaman, he heard what Swift did not say. “We must move quickly. Pass him the oakum, boy.”

  There were three of them in the jollyboat: Decurrs to manage the oars, Swift to patch, and the watch-boy to assist and learn. But, like her mistress, the Minerva ’s jollyboat was ill-provided for the sea, and the boy had been bailing since they’d launched her. Swift reached for the oakum himself.

  “Mind how the patch goes,” Decurrs said to the boy, as Swift stuffed the sticky fibers between the boards and laid over the tarred canvas. “When the waves surge high, the oakum will swell. The leak will suck the canvas inwards, stopping her mouth.” Decurrs raised the oar to fend off the hull. The jollyboat knocked against the ship anyway, a jolt that shuddered into their bones.

  “Aye,” the boy said. He’d left off bailing and was staring intently at the horizon. “Look,” he said suddenly. “To starboard. A something in the sky!”

  Swift wiped algae scum onto his trousers. “Hand me the sheet-lead,” he said.

  “A haunt!” The boy said. “It follows us!”

  “The sheet-lead,” Swift snapped, “and quick about it.”

  But it was Decurrs who handed Swift the gray sheet of metal and who helped him nail it to the Minerva ’s hull. Like Swift, Decurrs did not scan the horizon for phantoms. He kept his eyes trained on his hands, on the work that could save or kill them.

  “The Nightmare Life-in-Death,” the boy breathed. “Just as the ballad said.”

  “The Devil take your ghosts.”

  Swift ran his hand over the edge of the sheet-lead, making sure the patch lay flush. There was something in the corner of his eye. A flicker of white.

  Back aboard ship, Swift was taken aside by Captain Maxwell. “How’s she fare?”

  Swift rubbed his chin thoughtfully. His hands were still gummy with the oakum pine-tar that gave sailors their name. It smelled like a distant forest, like a place he’d never see.

  “The patch will hold,” Swift said. “But if the seas run high again . . .”

  Maxwell stroked his beard. Swift could see the man considering his charge. The Minerva was a three-masted ship with eleven passengers aboard, forty-eight crew, and a cargo of teak bound for Madras. To turn back to Rangoon would delay the shipment by weeks, and the Company must have its profits.

  I should not have shipped on the Minerva, Swift thought. I should have waited for a better berth.

  “The coast is a lee shore,” the Captain said, “and her waters are shallow. We will make for Madras.” He coughed, wetly, against his arm. Then he said, awkwardly: “The serang says one of the Lascars saw . . . something in the swells. Did you happen to spy anything? In the waves?”

  Near the windlass, Decurrs was scolding the boy. The boy protested vigorously, pointing toward the horizon.

  “No sir,” Swift said. “We saw nothing. Nothing at all.”

  The gale blew into their teeth on the 1st of June, a choking whirl of greenish mist. “She’s taking on water,” came the cry from below. Swift clung close to the windward rigging of the mainmast as he climbed, flattening his body against the damp ropes. Far below him, the deck heaved with the rising swells.

  On the yard he pressed his belly against the hard beam and stepped sideways onto the shivering footrope. It was his stomach, now, that bore his weight as his hands clawed in the heavy canvas of the mainsail. Beside him, two other able seamen did the same, rushing to tie up the ship’s largest sail before the winds rose.

  A cry rang down the yard. One of the Chinese sailors had straightened up, pointing at something behind curtain of rain. Swift hastily turned back to his reef knot, even as the Chinese sailor straightened further, pressing his weight back on the footrope at the very moment the ship rolled. A flurry of motion, and the man fell out of Swift’s vision.

  A crash below told Swift the sailor had slammed into the deck. “A kinder death than drowning.” the old salts said. In the rising wind the Chinese sailor’s loose canvas flapped like the wing of an angry bird.

  “Belay that sail!”

  A Lascar slid sideways on the yard to take his shipmate’s place. The Indian sailor worked quickly, his eyes intent on the task. His own reef-knots tied, Swift pulled himself back to the standing rigging and slid back to the frenzy of the deck. The Chinese sailor’s body rested amidships. His fellow seamen stepped around him, their eyes on their assigned lines.

  Swift leaned over the man—a young fellow, his eyes wide, staring at the sky. A red stain spread beneath his body, mingling with the wash on the deck.

  “He saw a ghost,” said the second belay, eyes on his line. “That’s what he screamed. A sei-gweilo in the waves.”

  “Belay that nonsense.” Swift ran his palm over the Chinese sailor’s eyes, doing what he could to close them. When he raised his hand a half-moon of white showed through, as though the man’s spirit studied Swift from the other side. Swift felt a chill that had nothing to do with his sodden clothing, or the rising gale.

  “Pumps in full labor,” said a voice. It was Manbacchus, one of the Lascars. “She takes water.”

  Swift felt the heaviness in his gut, what the old dogs called the “sinking feeling.” He hoped it would not come to that.

  Crouched in the forecastle, the starboard watch discussed the rumors. The sails were close-reefed and the leak patched, but still the Minerva took on water. They said the bilge smelled almost sweet. A bad sign.

  “The Lascars say there is a haunt that follows our wake,” Holdfast Muhammad said. Though he hailed from London, Holdfast had the tongue, and often he passed the whisper from the other Mussulmen aboard. “They say it pressed A-kou.”

  “There is a haunt,” their mess boy said proudly. “I saw it, when we were in the jollyboat.”

  “You saw a cloud,” Swift said sourly. “For I too was in that jollyboat and I saw no such thing.”

  But the tide of conversation was already moving past him.

  “I saw a haunt off Ireland once,” said Glosse, the third mate. “I’m no Frenchman to turn tail and run, but I tell you boys, I was damnably scarified.”

  “You saw a haunt and lived to speak of it? You’re a lucky man, Glosse,” Decurrs said.

  “That I am, boys,” Glosse laughed. “A jack tar with the devil’s own luck.”

  “It could be the Dutchman that follows us,” mused the fresh-faced sailor they called Pretty Pol. “Him that cursed the name of God. He cannot put into port now, b
ut must sail the seas endlessly, eating only red iron and gall. He seeks out all the old sinners of the sea, to press them for his crew.”

  “It could be the Mystery,” the boy said. “The slave ship where the Negroes bound the captain to the mast, and forced him to sail ‘til the end of time.”

  “That’s the Wake,” said Pol. “The Mystery was the slave ship turned into a rock, to stand to this day as a warning. One of its crew was a magician. He killed the Negroes first, and then the sailors, and last he bound the captain to the foremast, and forced him to stand watch ’til the Devil came to claim him.”

  The forecastle had grown quieter at the mention of slave ships. Decurrs watched the boards, Holdfast Muhammad, and Glosse. Swift knew then that they’d all worked the Trade.

  “Warning of what?” The boy was deaf to the silence swelling around him. “And why would a tar kill all aboard?”

  “Perhaps it was a Negro that was meant,” Cobb said, thinking aloud. “For plantation men sometimes call Negroes blacke, on account of their complexion.”

  Pol, whose own deep tan had been put down as blacke in the ship’s log, scoffed. “’Twas, one of us, a tar, who told me that tale,” he said. “And ‘twas one of us, a tar, that sunk that ship. But he was a Yorkshireman.”

  “Ah,” Cobb said. Everyone knew it was unlucky to sail with Yorkshiremen.

  The boy’s brow remained furrowed. “But why would a tar kill all aboard? On a slave ship? If—”

  “You’ve not sailed under many captains,” Glosse said. The crew laughed the way men do when they’re eager to change the subject.

  “What do you think, Swift?” said Holdfast Muhammad. “Does your patch still hold?” It was telling, Swift thought, that the man would now rather talk of leaks than haunt-ships.