The Best of the Best Horror of the Year

by Ellen Datlow

  I’m following the approximate route that I mapped out for Hanks, but when I see the outline of Joshua trees in the distance, a sudden sense of unease washes over me. I’ve always found the trees spooky—the way the branches claw and arch in grotesque, twisted shapes, like the broken limbs of men who’ve been crucified. But now, when I get out of my truck to survey the terrain through binoculars, I spot the outline of a vulture amid the tree’s deformed limbs. At the sight of me, the bird hisses softly. Its neck swivels around and a beak so red it might have been dipped in a wound lifts into the yellow-white glare.

  It takes off, flying out toward a formation of orange sandstone that juts to the east. I follow its flight through the binoculars and zoom in on a dust-caked red fender—Hanks’s Camry, left at the base of the rocks in a puddle of dwindling shade.

  Towing a car so you don’t damage the transmission requires care and the right implements, but not ruining Hanks’s ride isn’t high on my list of concerns. I hook it up to the back of my truck, tow it a half mile away and offload it behind a low rise bristling with pinon and creosote. On the passenger seat I find a modest supply of water and energy bars; a key is hidden under the floor mat. I stuff my backpack with bottles of water and granola bars, lock up the car, and pitch the key into the scrub.

  What I’ve found is that people whose vehicles disappear in the middle of nowhere generally do one of three things: they assume they’ve screwed up and returned to the wrong place and commence a futile and increasingly frantic search. Or they stay calm, keep their wits about them, and try to hike out. Either dehydration and heat stroke fell them or I do the job with the crowbar I keep in my truck next to the phony maps, but either way, the birds feed. A third, smaller group, those with a naive belief in the goodness of humanity, huddle in whatever shade they can find, presumably praying for help to come, and thank God when they see me approaching—at least until they realize I’m not there on a mission of mercy.

  The Modesto couple Hanks mentioned fell into that last category.

  Hanks, though, does none of these things. When I hike back to the sandstone formation, there’s nothing to indicate he’s returned to the place where his car ought to be, no helterskelter footprints of the kind a panicked person generally leaves, no indication he’s attempted to follow my tire tracks. I clamber onto the highest ridge of sandstone and do a sweep with the binoculars. I don’t see him at first—his khaki clothing and tan safari hat blend in with the dun-colored sand—but the lazy swoops of vultures mark his place on the desert floor like a giant red X. He’s about a mile away, heading toward the dune field, puttering along like a geezer perusing his garden. Everything catches his fancy: a thorny cactus pad, a stretch of orange dogweed, the green, tapering shafts of a cluster of desert candles.

  As I watch, he looks up abruptly. Although I know at this distance, he can’t possibly see me, our eyes seem to lock, and his flaccid lips smack with what an over-imaginative mind might interpret as relish. Real or not, the gaze is unsettling and I turn away. A few seconds later, when I focus the binoculars again, he’s no longer there. All I see are the bristly contours of a cluster of teddy bear cholla and the slow rotation of obsidian wings against a searing hot sky.

  Has he stumbled into an arroyo or collapsed in the meager shade of some creosote bushes? I press on, expecting to catch up to him quickly, but the desert seems to have licked up his life like spilled water. It’s not until mid-afternoon that I spot him again, when the temperature in this part of the Cauldron must be approaching a hundred and twenty and the heat waves the vultures are riding look like curtains of shimmering gauze.

  To my astonishment, the distance between us hasn’t narrowed at all. If anything, Hanks has pulled farther away.

  The heat’s pummeling him, though, exposing his decrepitude. His head’s bowed, shoulders sagging, and the hand clutching the cane by turns stiffens and then undergoes bouts of violent trembling. He no longer stops to investigate this flower or that sparkly mineral. Nor does he seem to notice the grim entourage that spirals above him like smoke rings expelled from the simmering earth. A check of my compass tells me what I already suspect, that his meandering course has begun to veer north. The straight line he undoubtedly thinks he’s walking has begun to curve drastically, taking him not to the place where he left his car, but toward the Joshua tree forest.

  For the next hour, I’m able to keep him in view, expecting him to drop any minute, but he soldiers on and the distance between us barely shrinks. Finally, frustrated, I break into a furious run and briefly enjoy the satisfaction all killers must feel when closing in on their prey. Yet just when I’m almost upon him, something shifts as though a key’s clicked in a door of the universe, and his outline flickers and fades. What just moments ago seemed so obviously flesh and bone blurs away into shadows and sand. The vultures disperse, and a deathly stillness ensues. Suddenly I’m the only thing left alive on the earth and the single sound is the rasp of my breathing.

  I check the number of full water bottles left in my pack, am shocked to discover there’s only one left and that it’s less than half full. I’ve been drinking water throughout the day, but my throat feels like I’ve gargled with sawdust and brine, and my lungs burn like I’ve inhaled the desert. Still, I’m not ready to turn back, a determination that’s strengthened when I find a bright gob of blood on the rubbery pad of a prickly pear cactus. From the looks of Hanks’s tracks, it appears he’s faltering badly, leaning so heavily on the cane that it punches into the sand an inch or two deep.

  Even as Hanks fades, so does the day. The shadows elongate and the sun blowtorches the horizon with bands of vermillion and deep mustard blue.

  And the wind picks up, scouring my exposed skin and hurling huge, tangled masses of tumbleweed around like bizarre beach balls. Its bluster plays tricks with my hearing. A woman’s voice—plaintive and whimpering—plays counterpoint to its keening. A second voice joins in and initiates a fevered duo—my father raging about the temptations of demons and the abyss of the damned where fallen angels feed on their prey. It’s a rant as lunatic and mindless as the woman’s, but more disturbing for notes of threat and contempt underlying it.

  The sky suddenly looks too big to be real, a painted backdrop meant to deceive me. The gritty wind, full of sadistic trickery, is bent on erasing Hanks’s tracks.

  To the west, a cloud of bats rises up from a nest of creosote bushes and takes to the sky like a flurry of semaphores from the pen of a demented scribe. Instinctively I duck down and cover my head as their dark mass swarms by. The rush of their passing distracts me; the warring voices subside. My head clears, and in the distance, I see the stark outlines of the Joshua trees.

  In the fading daylight, the grotesque trees appear eerie and blighted. Black, oval blooms freight their branches, giving some trees the appearance that they are ready to uproot from the earth under the weight of the vultures that roost in them. The stench of carrion wafts toward me, and a low murmur makes the hair stiffen on the back of my neck. It’s the voice of a woman begging for help. Pleading for water.

  Then it changes, and Hanks cries for water.

  The sound, unmistakably real this time, echoes from far back in the trees.

  I catch a glimpse of Hanks’s khaki hat as it flies off his head, of a body tumbling and falling, hitting the ground amid puffs of sand and a cascade of stones. For a second, the wind and Hanks mourn in unison. Then silence.

  I run toward him, but the sunset fires scalding light into my eyes, and my strides are unsteady and blundering. A shadow coiled beneath one drooping, heavy-laden tree brings to mind a fetally curved body. I grab for it and recoil as one hand disappears into flesh so decomposed that it slides off the bone in clumps of powdery fur, while the other grasps a jawbone missing most of its teeth—the scraggly remains of a coyote or fox. Other, larger bones, flecked with threadbare scraps of cloth, suggest deaths older and feedings more savage.

  “Mr. Fitch?” The words, coming from behind me, aren’
t so much spoken as spat, and I whirl around, arms raised but not fast enough, too late and too slow to block the knob of the cane before it staves in the flesh between my brows.

  “Well, finally. There you are.”

  I don’t know how much time has passed, ten seconds or a day, but Hanks’s gravelly voice is edged with impatience and thwarted intent. The cane he brandishes is slick with blood and a caterpillar-like tuft of something I recognize to be one of my eyebrows adheres to a carved notch in the ivory.

  I want to seize him by his wattled neck and wring the life from him, but when he squats down and turns his vexed gaze on me, I can taste his loathing and feel the spikes imbedded in his every word, and I shut my eyes.

  “You didn’t hear what I was saying, did you? You were … elsewhere. No matter. I was speaking of the deserts of Norway and New England and Brazil. Can’t tell you their names, because they don’t exist yet. But they will. You’ll see. Oh, just give it time.”

  I try to swallow, find my throat clogged. “I want … water.”

  He sneers. “Oh, don’t we all!”

  In the bruise-colored dusk, he hobbles back and forth, hunched and scowling like a traveler on a subway platform awaiting a long-delayed train he knows in his heart never will come.

  Suddenly he spins around and wags the cane a few inches away from my face; the sudden, violent motion in front of my eyes off-kilters a slice of my brain, blurs my vision, and stymies my tongue. When I try to speak again, my parched throat produces only a feeble croak that elicits a look of disgust.

  “You think you’re so unique, don’t you?”

  He rolls up the right pant leg, reaches down and pops off the prosthesis, revealing a chewed stump of something oozing and raw, like what you’d see in some third-world butcher shop. The charnel house smell of that suppurating stump makes me gag, but what’s worse is that Hanks doesn’t seem unduly discomforted. Like he’s been existing this way for a very long time.

  He lays a paternal hand on my shoulder. “We’re not so different, you and me. That woman you named Opal, the one you found near Stovepipe and chose to keep for yourself, I understand how that happened. No place lonelier than the desert, and a man has needs that a lap dance in a gentlemens’ club won’t satisfy. I took a woman once too for my personal use—she was a Berber girl from the Tenere whose family threw her out for being unchaste. Unlike you, though, I kept her tightly bound, so she couldn’t escape into the desert where some sheepherder could find her.” He exhales a snort. “A sheepherder, for God’s sake! Like such occupations even exist in this day and age!”

  He hops backward, stork-like on the one leg, teeters a bit, then reattaches the prosthesis. “Didn’t surprise me I had to forfeit a limb. I took what didn’t belong to me after all. Bitch of it was, the leg was still attached when the birds ate it.”

  The tears spurting through my lashes shame and shock me. They’re also precious drops of moisture that I try to capture on my tongue, a futile effort that makes Hanks’s eyes crinkle with contempt.

  But the tears produce more tears and, after that, words that are old and dreadfully familiar. “I’m sorry, so sorry. I won’t do it again. I promise I’ll stop. I won’t kill anyone else!”

  Hanks cocks his head, perplexed and peeved-looking. Then he stands up, his creased face sad, avuncular, and kicks me in the head.

  When my vision clears, Hanks is bent over me, studying my face while a black ant the size of a paperclip navigates the ruts in his forehead.

  “You misunderstood me,” he says, as though there’s been only a slight, inconsequential interruption in our conversation. “My purpose isn’t to stop you from killing. It’s what you do, and you’re good at it. Gifted even.” He gestures toward the trees with his cane and the vultures roosting there stir, hissing softly, their naked necks stretching and curving into question marks. “Not here, though. Not anymore. From now on, yours are the deserts of the interior lands, the hellscapes of your creation. Deserts so vast you can wander for eons before finding someone to kill. Or to fuck. But don’t worry. You won’t be alone. After you left her this morning, someone helped Opal take a sheet into the bathroom and showed her how to hang herself from the shower curtain. She could be free now, but she’d rather be angry. She wants revenge for what you did to her. And she’s still so very thirsty.”

  He gazes around at the skeletal trees with their dark, restless fruit and lifts up the cane. At once the vultures’ hissing grows louder, unnatural, imperative. Some of them take to the air, swooping so low that I can feel the foul breeze from their passing rustle my hair. I know there is very little time.

  “The people you met in the desert,” I blurt out, “Maisie and Claude, did they … ?”

  “Talk about you? Of course they did. But don’t worry about your mama and daddy too much. They were headed to their own desert anyway. You just sent them there sooner.”

  Hanks’s grin is inhumanly wide. His mouth creaks open like a rusty-hinged crypt and belches forth a bevy of soft, struggling things, tarry and mewling, that flee into the darkening sky and are plucked from the air by the vultures. They are the souls of the lost and the damned and I know one of them is my own.

  “Safe journeys,” he says, before his face is obscured beneath a barrage of obsidian wings and stabbing beaks.

  When my screaming stops and I risk opening my eyes, the sun is still setting and constellations unknown to mortal astronomers swarm in the dome of a blazing red sky. I’m alone in a Joshua tree forest and, a few yards away, an assembly of vultures is squabbling over the remains of my foot.

  Hanks is gone, but his cane lies within reach.

  The birds bolt down their feast and take to the air, one by one, as a woman’s voice, familiar and piteous, cries out for water. She sounds as near as my heartbeat and as far away as the other side of the moon.

  After a while, I pick up the cane and start hobbling along, knowing I have all eternity to find her.

  THE NIMBLE MEN

  GLEN HIRSHBERG

  “But the air, out there, so wild, so white…”

  —Thomas St. John Bartlett, in a letter to Robert Louis Stevenson

  from the Orkney Islands in the winter of 1901

  Ever notice how Satie, played in the dark at just the right volume, can tilt the whole world? That night, I had Je te Veux on the tinny cockpit stereo, and even before the snow, the pines at the edge of the great north woods just beyond the taxiway appeared to dip and lean, and the white lines disappearing beneath the wheels of our little commuter seemed to weave around and between each other like children at a wedding dance as we made our way to the de-icing station. Then the snow started, white and winking, a drizzle of starlight, and even the air traffic control tower looked ready to lift its arms and step off its foundations and sway.

  And then Alex, my junior co-pilot of four months, opened his thermal lunch box. The reek flooded the cabin and set the panel lights wavering in my watering eyes. I swear to God, the iPod gagged. Alex just sat in the steam, eyes half-closed and grinning, as if he were taking a sauna.

  “God, you Gorby, tell me that isn’t poutine.”

  “Want some, Old Dude?” said Alex, and lifted the container from the cooler.

  Out the front of the plane, the world went on dancing, and the snow whirled through it. But I couldn’t stop staring at the mess in Alex’s container. A few limp, bloated French fries stuck out of the lava flow of industrial-colored sludge like petrified slugs. Congealed, gray lumps clung to their sides and leaked white pus.

  “Is that meat?” I asked. “Cheese?”

  Alex grinned wider. “It’s your country. You tell me.”

  “Where’d you even find it? We had, what, three hours? Where does one even find poutine on a three-hour layover in Prince Willows Town, Ontario?”

  “If you turn over control of the stereo, I’ll put it away for a while.”

  We’d reached the de-icing station, and I pushed on the brakes and brought the coasting plane to a r
olling stop. No matter how many times I did this, I was always surprised by the dark out here. At every other point within two miles of this tiny airport, manmade light flooded and mapped the world. But not here.

  I peered through the windscreen and the wavering skeins of snow. It took a few moments, but eventually, my eyes adjusted to the point where I could just make out the de-icer truck parked a few meters off the taxiway in the flat, dead grass. Weirdly, it had its boom already hoisted, as though we were meant to make our way into the fields to get sprayed. I couldn’t see either the driver of the truck or the guy on the enclosed platform at the top of the boom, because both were blanketed in shadow. But the platform looked tilted to me, almost chin-to-chest with the rotating metal stand that supported it. It reminded me of one of the dead Martians from War of the Worlds.

  We sat and we waited. The truck didn’t move.

  “Peculiar,” I murmured, and Alex passed his poutine container right under my nostrils. My eyes watered, and I turned on him. “What was that for?”

  “You were muttering, Old Dude. Just making sure you were conscious. Now about control of that stereo. You ready to deal?”

  For answer, I clicked on the intercom. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We hope all six of you have settled comfortably in your seats, that your luggage is crammed effectively between your knees and the seat in front of you—” Alex snorted at that—“and we look forward to having virtually no time to serve you during our brief skip-hop to Toronto. We will be cleared for takeoff shortly. In the meantime, sit back, relax, be happy this flight is not bound for Winterpeg, and please pay no attention to the gigantic, alien-shaped creature about to swoop down upon us. It comes in peace, to de-ice the wings. Also, we do apologize for the odor escaping into the cabin under the doors of our cockpit. It came with my co-pilot, and I’m afraid there’s little we can do about it. If you need assistance of any kind, please don’t hesitate to call on Jamie, our charismatic, experienced, and resourceful in-flight technician, at any time. We should be in the air shortly.”