The Best of the Best Horror of the Year

by Ellen Datlow

  She could not make out the stone steps that descended into the water on the inside wall, left over from a time when the well had been used to hide contraband. Now… something. Her thoughts swam.

  Focus.

  Even without her camera there was a way to bring home to Victor all the reality he had sent her out to capture for him in pictures.

  She could barely shift her legs over the edge, but at last she felt the cold roughness of the top step under her feet. She descended toward the water, using the friction of her spread hands, turning her torso flat against the curved wall like a figure in an Egyptian tomb painting. The water winked up at her, glossy with reflected moonlight. The backpack, painful with hard stone edges, dragged at her aching shoulder. She paused to raise one strap and put her head through it; she must not lose her anchor now.

  The water’s chill lapped at her skin, sucking away her last bit of strength. She sagged out from the wall and slipped under the surface. Her hands and feet scrabbled dreamily at the slippery wall and the steps, but down she sank anyway, pulled by the bag of stones strapped to her body.

  Her chest was shot through with agony, but her mind clung with bitter pleasure to the fact that in the morning all of Victor’s tribe would wash themselves and brush their teeth and swallow their pills down with the water Victor was so proud of, water pumped by willing hands from his own wonderful well.

  Head craned back, she saw that dawn pallor had begun to flush the small circle of sky receding above her. Against that light, black curls of the blood that her body wept from every seam and pore feathered out in secret silence, into the cool, delicious water.

  WINGLESS BEASTS

  LUCY TAYLOR

  The first thing I tell people headed out here is just this: Go someplace else.

  I mean, Death Valley got that name for a reason, right? And the Mojave, of which Death Valley’s a part, is especially dangerous in ways most people don’t even suspect. I know, because I’ve seen the results of somebody’s wrong turn or ill-considered adventure. And even though I live out here and own Joe’s Towing Service—which comes in handy at times—I don’t patrol the off-road areas on a regular basis, just when I’m edgy or restless or when I’ve got reason to believe someone may be in need of assistance.

  Then I lock up my double wide and head out to the back country, checking salt pans and arroyos and lake beds where those afflicted with hubris or just old-fashioned stupidity are most apt to meet with disaster.

  Tragic deaths and mysterious disappearances don’t deter people, though. They keep turning up, charging off into blast furnace heat, not taking along enough food or water or gas, and sometimes, inevitably, a few meet with misfortune.

  Case in point: the gimp with the cane at the Bun Boy Diner this morning. Only a little after six a.m and I’m just pulling into Baker, California, a pit stop for tourists traveling on I-15 between Barstow and Vegas. The town’s claim to fame is having the world’s biggest thermometer (like you need that to tell you it’s hotter than the devil’s butthole here), which rises 134 feet over a main drag lined with two-star motels, gas stations, and shuttered convenience stores. I park my truck and amble into the Bun Boy for my usual breakfast of eggs, hash browns, and grits before I head out to Barstow to visit my girl.

  Right off the bat, though, the creep at the counter gets under my skin.

  Soon as I see him, a squat, toadish little man, with a shiny bald dome looks like it’s been polished with Pledge and hear him yakking to Margo the waitress about his plans to go off-roading in the Mojave, I peg him for the kind of know-it-all who’ll be in deep shit by sundown.

  I know his type: the obnoxious braying voice of a small man trying to sound imposing, the sardonic roll of his dishwater eyes when Margo suggests that the desert is best left to the young and the able-bodied, the puffed-up way he tries to pretend the cane’s not really necessary, that he only carries it “in case I encounter a rattlesnake.”

  “Well, no rattlers in here,” I tell him and ask which of the vehicles out in the lot belongs to him.

  I figure him for the owner of the Subaru Outback or the Ram1500 or even the goofy-looking Baja Beetle I saw coming in, but he slurps his coffee and says, “Mine’s the red Camry. Oh, I know, go ahead and laugh, but it’s got me where I need to go plenty of times.”

  Which amuses me, because the kind of serious off-roading he’s talking about demands a lot of a vehicle—at minimum, you need a flexible suspension, high clearance, and big tires with deep open treads.

  “That’s the wrong ride for your purposes,” I say, taking a stool next to him. “You want a vacation, forget the Mojave. Just stay on 15 north. Three hours from now you can be laying bets at a crap table in the Bellagio or getting a lap dance at Spearmint Rhino Cabaret.”

  He grunts, but whether it’s in response to my unsought advice or to some other pain in his pancake-flat ass, I can’t tell. He upends the sugar bowl into his coffee and says with disdain, “Vegas is where Satan vacations when he gets bored with hell. Myself, I prefer the purity of the desert.”

  Now that takes me aback, because he sure doesn’t seem like a man who’d know much about purity or aspire to it or respect it, for that matter. But then, I suppose, neither do I, yet it was the austerity of the desert, the vast silence and uncompromising indifference to all human fears that lured me out here almost ten years ago, and I’ve never been tempted to go back to my old bad-ass life on the streets of L.A., not once.

  “Joe Fitch,” I say, extending a hand, which he shakes with a prissy distaste suggesting he thinks I may have recently used it for wiping my ass. I shrug off the attitude and go on. “If you’re hellbent on going out there by yourself, at least know what you’re getting into. You break down, you get stuck, or your GPS lies to you—and let me tell you, a GPS will lie like a ten-dollar whore—any of that happens and, in this heat, you are goddamn dead.”

  Maybe still worrying about our handshake, he taps a squirt of hand sanitizer from a tube on the counter into his palm, which is thick and red as a slab of raw liver. “Otis Hanks. And, no offense, but I’d prefer you not curse.”

  “I won’t,” I tell him, “except to say if you go off half-cocked in the desert without the right experience and equipment, then you are well-fucked and royally so.”

  Hanks scowls and I figure I’m about to get chastised for the cussing, but what he says is, “Your name’s familiar. Do we know each other?”

  I assure him we don’t. I wonder if we might’ve done time together, but I’m not about to bring up the nickel I did in Lompoc for a bar fight that ended up with a manslaughter charge or the lesser run-ins I’ve had with the law on various occasions. My past is what I moved to the Mojave to forget.

  His comment about my name rankles, but still, in the interest of fairness, I try to put some fear into Hanks, pointing out that the sun’s barely up and the giant thermometer already reads over a hundred degrees, and if he has any sense at all, he’ll rethink his plan for an off-road adventure in the middle of goddamn July.

  But I doubt that he will, because guys like him never listen. They’re like my old man, railing about sin and salvation from the pulpit of the Wrath of God Methodist Church back in California; they already got all the answers. To hear folks like that tell it, God Himself comes to them for advice.

  So I tell Hanks about just a couple of the tragedies that have taken place here over the past few years; about the skeleton that was found in a desert wash by a group of kids looking for arrowheads, just west of Newberry Springs along Interstate 40 and how it turned out to be the remains of a tourist from Munich, who must’ve thought the Mojave was some kind of Disney World, but without the A/C, and then proceeded to stroll off into the fiery furnace with just a half gallon of water, wearing thong sandals, a tee shirt, and shorts. When they found him, his mouth and nostrils and every other orifice was stoppered with sand and the vultures had pillaged his insides like conventioneers at the Golden Nugget’s buffet.

  And I tell
him about the woman from Huntsville, Alabama, who got the terrific idea to take her eight-year-old son camping in the Mojave a couple of summers back and how, when the road ran out and her GPS cheerfully instructed her to turn right and continue another eighteen miles into a waterless hellhole, she followed directions. A ranger found the car and the kid dead nearby a few days later. The mother’s body wasn’t found for months, not much more than a pile of bones, hair, and vulture scat, or so I heard.

  Margo swings by with the coffeepot then and refills my mug, saying, “You setting him straight, Reverend Joe?”

  This makes Hanks’s squinty eyes in their nests of wrinkly, sun-cured skin flicker with curiosity. “Don’t tell me you’re a man of the cloth, Mr. Fitch?”

  Margo grins as she pours a steaming black stream. “Old Joe here’s a reverend like I’m a pole dancer, but folks here gave him that name ’cause he lives out in the nowhere by hisself like one of them—monasticians?”

  “Monastics,” I say, “and I’m far from that. But my father was a minister with an interest in such things. I grew up listening to him preach about the religious tradition of men who turned their backs on civilization and went out into the deserts of Egypt and the Sinai. Men like Abba Macarius and Anthony the Great who were looking to deepen their spiritual life through isolation and physical hardship. Guess I got inspired by that.” I shrug. “In hindsight, it seems naive to me now, but finding God was my aim when I moved out here years back and I guess what started out as a bit of a joke at my expense …”

  “ … is still a joke,” chuckles Margo, “but we like you now. You’re one of us.”

  Hanks raises a brow so pale that it’s almost translucent. “And did you? Find God?”

  The question pokes me like a sharp stick as I fork up my eggs. “Of course not. There was nothing to find.”

  We sit in silence then, shoveling food into our pieholes, but I keep dwelling on his comment about my name. After a while, I get up and amble out to my truck, noting with some amusement that the Camry belonging to this guy who only requires his cane for warding off rattlesnakes is parked in a handicapped spot. I get a map from the glove compartment and come back inside.

  Hanks’s mouth twists in annoyance when I unfold the map, like he’s worried I’m going to dip the northeast corner of Nevada into his biscuits and gravy, but I take out a pen and draw him a route through the back country to a remote, beautiful area I call the Cauldron. “It’s a straight shot from the paved road. No need to even get out of your car. Other side of the salt pan, there’s a Joshua tree forest and beyond that, a dune field that’ll make you think you’re on Mars.” I pause before adding, “Probably best not to try climbing them, though.”

  Hanks studies the map the way a prude eyes pornography, with distaste and a thinly veiled craving, then folds it up.

  “I appreciate your concern, Mr. Fitch, but as I was explaining to our waitress here while you were outside, I’m a bit of an amateur eremologist—” he sees of my puzzled expression, “—one who studies the deserts. Since my retirement, I’ve visited quite a few, the Gobi, the Sahara, the Atacama. I’ve hiked some of the world’s most desolate regions and come back none the worse for it.” He glances down at his right boot, which is built up higher than the left one, and yanks up a pant leg, offering a glimpse of an off-white prosthesis. “Well, except for the incident with the leg, but that was due to a sin of lust, not a hiking mishap.”

  Right about then Margo notices some people across the room need more water and goes hurrying over with a pitcher while I try to dispel some unpleasant images about what kind of kinky sexual shenanigans—an amputee fetish perhaps?—might result in the loss of a limb.

  Hanks notes our reactions and has the grace to redden a bit. After some awkward silence, he allows as how, since he has what he calls “a flexible itinerary,” he just may hang onto the map anyway. “Wouldn’t mind seeing that Joshua tree forest,” he says, and there’s a wistful note in his voice that I haven’t detected before, as though he’s longing—maybe not so much to see Joshua trees—but to be somewhere, anywhere else, besides here.

  When Hanks dons his safari hat and gets up to pay his tab, I throw down some bills and walk with him outside. Even with the cane, which is a striking piece of handiwork—mahogany with an intricately carved ivory handle—he creaks laboriously along, huffing like one burdened by more than just a physical disability.

  My tow truck, parked a few spaces down from his Camry, catches his eye.

  “Joe’s Towing Service. Now I recall how I know you.”

  I look at him quizzically.

  “Two nice people I met on a trip recently said you towed their car when it stalled in the desert. Maisie and Claude from Modesto. Said if I saw you to send their regards.”

  I turn away and gaze up at the eyesore thermometer, which now measures a hundred and four, as ice crystals clink in my chest. “Names don’t ring a bell.”

  Hanks sighs, as though my failure to remember the couple confirms for him some basic belief about human nature. We shake hands again and I watch him drive off, then hightail it back into the Bun Boy and make it to the can just in time to puke up a thick slop of greasy coffee, potatoes, and eggs.

  What Hanks said isn’t possible. No fucking way.

  The last time I saw dear ol’ Maisie and Claude, they were stone fucking dead and I was towing their Mazda 280z with their bodies in the back seat.

  Part of me, the impulsive, hot-headed ruffian whose misdeeds inspired some of my old man’s more graphic sermons wants to go after Hanks right then and there, but I choke down the urge. That was the old me. Now I know how to hang back and be patient, bide my time. That’s a skill the desert has taught me.

  So I climb into my truck and roar out toward Barstow, knowing I’ll catch up with Hanks in due time. Right now, I need to spend time with my girl.

  Opal isn’t her real name, of course. I call her that, because her blue-gray eyes remind me of opals, flecked with tiny motes of cobalt and daffodil gold. She was found by a sheepherder, wandering up near Red Mountain, half naked and near death with deep, infected gashes on her shoulders and neck, like at some point she’d collapsed, and the vultures had done a little taste testing before she fought them off and got moving again. Far as anyone knows, she hasn’t spoken to anyone since. The heat and the trauma of her ordeal, including whatever led to her being in that situation in the first place, has parboiled her brain. Now she occupies a room at the Rohr Convalescent Center in Barstow, a Jane Doe waiting for somebody to come forward and give her a name.

  Today when I slip into her room, she’s propped up in bed, a little fuller in the face than the last time I saw her, but still stiff as a scarecrow, with that tiny mummified smile on her lips that never twitches or flags, that seems to hint at a cache of secrets she’s hoarding. The only part of her that moves are her half-closed, feral eyes, which scan back and forth, tock-tick-tock, as though she’s mesmerizing herself by following the path of an interior metronome.

  After chitchatting with one of the nurses, who stops in to say hi, I take a comb and brush from the night stand by the bed and set about braiding her hair, which has gone white over the months that I’ve known her. To pass the time, I talk to her like I always do, just random stuff that she’s heard before, about how it was when I first moved to the desert, how that ocean of emptiness both fascinated and horrified me. Something about that burnt, hostile terrain, so purged of anything conducive to sustaining life, gave me a strange kind of solace born of pain and familiarity. I realized that my addled, punitive parents had given me something valuable after all—the ability to survive in a place so barren that few people even come here and those that do, generally don’t stay very long.

  And although I didn’t find God in the way most people know Him, I found deities of my own understanding—hundreds of them, winged carrion-eaters reigning over a savage landscape. I recognized them from my father’s sermons, these vulture-gods, and I named them after the archangels:
Moloch and Charon, Metatron and Uriel and Gabriel. I recognized them at once for what they were, creatures old as the rocks and the salt pans, ancient as the bones of the finned creatures that once lived here sixty-five million years ago when the Mojave was a vast, inland sea.

  I knew they must see us as we really are—wingless beasts lumbering across a destroyed landscape, while they soar on the updrafts, patient and cunning, knowing that we’re here for only an eyeblink in their eternity.

  The great birds appalled me at first—with their plucked, scarlet heads and seething black eyes—and their habits struck me as ghastly. After startling one outside my trailer one day, I watched it take clumsy running hops, flapping furiously to get airborne, then regurgitate a gut full of stinking carrion all over the hood of my truck in an effort to lighten the load. That one, the Leaver of Offerings, was the first, and soon others came. They’d soar on the thermals for hours within sight of my home, silent and watchful, until I’d come outside and let them lead me to whatever they’d found that was dying or injured: a burrowing owl, a tortoise, a chuckwalla … a vagabond from Munich or a mother desperate to find help for her boy.

  Opal shivers then and exhales a sound, not much more than a thin hiccough of dread. I wonder if she’s been hearing me. Doesn’t much matter, she knows who I am.

  Her hair looks good when I finish it, the long braids sliding over her shoulders in smooth, ghostly ropes that stand out against her dark, ruddy skin. But when I hold the mirror up so she can admire herself, her eyes ignite like a cornered bobcat’s and a snarl corkscrews between her bared teeth.

  I lean close, stroke a wisp of hair back off her face and whisper the same thing I always do, “Next time I come here, I’m going to kill you.”

  Now it’s Hanks’s turn.

  On the way back toward Baker, I take a seldom-used exit and follow an unmarked dirt road until I come to the edge of the Cauldron. Here the remnant of road peters out at the edge of a cracked lake bed and I blaze across it, raising a roostertail of white sand sparkling with tiny grains of feldspar and quartz. For miles around, there’s no pavement, no signs, and no help if you need it. No indication that Hanks has passed this way, either, so I head south, where the desert floor splits into a snake’s nest of arroyos and the earth is so dry that sections lurch up, overlapping each other like a shelf of ceramic tiles. When my tires crunch over the baked clay, the noise is an escalation of tiny explosions and the air turns the color of cinders and chalk.