The Best of the Best Horror of the Year

by Ellen Datlow

  “So that’s what that button does,” I said. “So,” I said. “You didn’t finish what you were saying earlier.”

  She didn’t answer me, but pointed, and I forgot what I’d asked when I saw what she was pointing out. The man from the peak walked across the lawn—on a line parallel with our own course, maybe twenty feet away—with the guy he’d been talking to in the living room. They walked toward the edge of the wood, where a woman—the woman with the bad dye-job—lay on the ground.

  “What is going on over there?” Sarah asked.

  I said, “I’m sure we don’t want to know.”

  “Do you think she’s all right?”

  “She looks fine to me,” I said, though there was no way I could actually judge, from where we stood. “We should leave them be,” I said, but I asked, “Who is that guy anyhow? I saw him come down from the peak.”

  “Which guy?” Sarah asked.

  “The bald guy.” Right when I said that, he was out of sight, he’d stepped into a shadow that made him all but invisible. So I said never mind.

  On the patio, we finished our drinks. Sarah took another cigarette. She looked around—there were other guests on the patio, but none we knew more than just in passing. Richard had gone inside. Sarah said, “I’m not putting any pressure on you, David, but I’m not going to Boston.”

  Sarah seemed like herself when she said that, more than she had all night, and I was glad, I’d known it, known she would leave Richard for me if I’d wanted, and I did want that, and I hadn’t been wrong.

  All the voices on the porch seemed to rise in volume—there was a scream—I decided from inside the house—but no one paid any attention.

  Several hours later, I stood in front of Richard’s house, trying to figure out why there were twelve cars, not including my own, in the driveway. The party had started to die about an hour before; people had slipped out one-by-one. I realized, as I stood in front of Richard’s house smoking, sipping a cheap glass of whisky, that I hadn’t heard a single car go. Even if people had carpooled, had designated a driver, there were still too many cars in the driveway.

  My thoughts weren’t adding up in any significant way. I was in a haze of drunk and sleepiness—not so far gone that I wouldn’t be able to collect Sarah and leave soon, but dull enough that my lines of thought were short.

  I stared for a while at the mountaintop. There were no houses, that I could see, higher than Richard’s. If the man from the peak lived up there, he must have walked from the other side of the peak, and that looked to me like a hell of a walk.

  I coughed, caught a coughing fit, felt a hand on my back.

  “Prudence?” I managed, still bent over.

  “No, not Prudence.”

  The voice was a voice I hadn’t heard once that night, but I knew whose voice it was.

  “Taking in the air?” the man from the peak asked.

  I saw a laugh on his face; he was laughing at me.

  “Smoke?” I asked. “Whisky?” I held out my drink and my cigarette.

  He held up a hand—his fingers were long, his nails were long.

  “You don’t drink,” I said.

  He just grinned his stupid ugly grin, a set of teeth crooked and misshapen. That his speech wasn’t impeded by his malformed mouth was a wonder—indeed, his voice was the most soothing voice I’d ever heard. “So who are you?” I asked.

  He said, “I’m an invited guest,” and I remembered what I’d overheard earlier that night.

  I said, “I watched you come down from the peak. Are there houses up there?”

  He looked at the peak, followed its upward rise with his head until he’d found the very tip and said, “No, there are no houses.”

  I thought maybe he lived in a tent or a trailer home and was just having fun with me, making me ask my questions just so. Normally, when I think someone’s doing that, some cute girl who thinks she’s coy or some clever boy trying to impress, I walk away without so much as a fuck you and that puts them out, and then they beg me for my attention. Normally, that’s what I’d do. But I said, “But do you live on the peak? In a tent? In a trailer? In a mobile home?” I gave that ugly man from the peak all the options I could because I was desperate to hear his answer. For some reason: I was desperate to know.

  He said, “I live in the peak.”

  I didn’t know what he meant by “in the peak,” but I smiled—I felt that dumb smile spread on my face—I smiled and nodded as if “in the peak” made all the sense in the world.

  I asked, “So what is it you’re doing in the backyard?”

  He gave me a straight answer. An awful answer. And for a moment I could see him exactly as he was; all of a sudden I could see him, see that his clothes—from pant cuff to shirt collar—were drenched in blood and gore. Blood dripped off his shirt sleeves, blood was pooled around his feet, there was blood on the top of his bald head and there was blood all around his mouth. The blood around his mouth was the most horrible, smeared around like finger-paint. Before I became hysterical, I couldn’t see the blood anymore. He looked ugly, but his clothes were clean. His pant cuffs flapped in the breeze. His bright white shirt sleeves were rolled up just below his elbows.

  I wondered, if he could do that, why he didn’t make himself look handsome to me. I think he knew my thought, because he said, “Charisma. You know what I mean.”

  I laughed. He walked back into the house. I stood shaking my head, enjoying for a moment the great joke. Then a wave of nausea passed through me and I vomited—all spit and whisky—and my head was clear. I rushed into the house—for Sarah, I thought, where is Sarah? The guest room was empty. No one was at the bar. Richard was seated on the piano bench next to the man from the peak, and they were playing “Heart and Soul.” The man from the peak playing the chords, Richard plinking out the simple tune with a single finger, laughing like an idiot.

  I ran into Prudence out on the patio. She was drunk, but when she looked at me I knew she was still in control: I’d known from the moment she brushed past me at the front door that the big breasts and the flirty girl-voice were all for show, plumage that got Prudence what she wanted. I’d known that she was like me in that way, and admired her for it. So instead of just ignoring her for Sarah I stopped and told her that we were all in a lot of trouble.

  “I’d sort of picked up on that,” she said, pointing with her thumb toward the backyard. Her calm was wrong, a part of all that was wrong that night. She said, “I was just leaving. My car’s blocked though. I was trying to find someone—”

  “So go out to my car—it’s silver, it’s the last one in the driveway. Go out to my car and wait for me. I’m going to get Sarah.”

  She said, “Sarah? Fuck Sarah. What do you need Sarah for?” I sensed her control was limited, or running low, and so she obeyed me, started toward the driveway. Better to do as I said, than to do what the man from the peak asked her to do. I went through the near-empty rooms, finally went into the backyard, where I knew everyone must be.

  I tried not to understand too much of what I saw. Since there was no moonlight, no stars, I couldn’t make out the exact details anyhow. But the yard was lined with bodies. Many stripped of their clothes, all flat on their back. The bodies, piled like sandbags, formed a wall along the edge of the woods. They were neatly stacked but for a few strays—I saw Michael’s body, not five feet from where I stood.

  And then I saw Sarah, on her feet, wandering in a daze. I became aware that “Heart and Soul” had stopped. I could hear Sarah’s feet brush through the grass.

  I couldn’t speak—had no impulse to. I ran to Sarah, put my arm around her and guided her toward the side of the house, away from the patio door which was opening, away from Richard, who staggered out into the yard, singing, “Heart and Soul.” He fell in love, he sang, “madly.”

  Prudence was not in the driveway, and I thought fine, if he has her, that’ll buy me and Sarah some time, and I’m going to live, and Sarah, too. I pushed Sarah along the dri
veway, dragged her. I opened the car and put Sarah into the passenger seat, then started the car and backed up to turn around. In the headlights, the car still facing the wrong way, toward the house—I saw Prudence, on her back. Her body must have been just out of sight, just under the front bumper. She jerked, once. I couldn’t help watching her breasts: a spray of freckles that vanished into her cleavage.

  The mountain road was so rutted, I couldn’t go fast, not without taking the chance of breaking an axle.

  We were close. Very close to the bottom of the mountain when I heard the bang from the inside of the trunk. I jumped on the accelerator and I could feel a heavy weight shift. Sarah stared calmly ahead, as if we were on a day-trip. There was another bang, and the trunk burst open. I couldn’t see anything out the rear-view mirror—just the silver trunk lid. I drove, swerving around boulders, bouncing in and out of pot holes, cursing each time the front end of the car ground into the dirt, until, incredibly, the man from the peak stared at me through the windshield. He clung to the hood on all fours, his arms and legs wide apart, face inches from the glass. He wasn’t hiding himself: his teeth were bared and he was filthy with blood, dribbling blood onto the glass, foaming blood from his nostrils.

  I felt, suddenly, quite serene. I brought the car to an easy stop. Sarah and I stepped out.

  The man from the peak hid himself again. He hopped off the hood with a single, graceful flex of his legs. I heard stones crunch under his shoes as he walked up to Sarah. He looked at me while he put a hand on her right shoulder. And she relaxed completely—I wasn’t sure what kept her from collapsing. He grabbed her hair and yanked, forcing her head to the side. She winked at me as if she were about to get a treat she’d been waiting for all day.

  Did I make a move to stop him? No. His eyes locked onto mine. And any desire for survival I’d had, any wish for Sarah to live, just slipped away—was leeched from my thoughts. I reached into my breast pocket, slowly removed my cigarette pack, took a cigarette, tamped it against the box, lit it and smoked. I stood, smoked, watched as he tore a chunk of flesh from Sarah’s throat with those stupid buck teeth of his and opened his mouth to the jet of blood that burst from her artery. I watched him and he watched me and was he grinning while he drank? Oh, surely he was and I smiled back at him, smiled and smoked my cigarette, smoked so hard the filter flared up before I finally dropped my cigarette and stamped it dead.

  I looked up after watching my own foot twist a cigarette butt out on the dirt road and they were gone. He and Sarah were gone. I stared up at the top of the mountain. Stood for at least an hour. Finally, I was released. Trembling, I slid into the driver’s seat and drove down off the mountain into Rattlesnake Valley, as blue light crept across the sky.

  I listened to the radio for three days. I had the dial somewhere between stations. Sometimes one came in stronger, sometimes the other. I heard news, I heard a minister Bible-teaching, organ music, chants—when both stations grew weak I heard a murkier broadcast: two voices, disharmonious music, swamp-static. I’d ordered all my meals by delivery for the last few days. Greasy wax paper curled in on itself; half-eaten sandwiches, flat soda, Styrofoam. I spent the day in a leather arm chair. I slept there—I woke often to be sure that all my windows were fastened, that the bolts on the door had been shot—that I hadn’t been careless after a delivery boy had come by, though, each time I closed the door on a delivery, I locked up, leaned against the door and double-checked the locks. I worried the skin around my fingers and smoked—I’d found a stale pack in my bedroom; not my brand, someone else’s cigarettes, some woman I’d brought here had left her cigarettes. I tried to think of ways that I could have stopped what happened from happening, but there was nothing I could’ve done. I could’ve done little things differently—not waited so long to take Sarah away (not sent Prudence on her own). Yet, even these small acts seemed out of the realm of possibility to me—that I couldn’t have behaved any way other than the way I behaved. My own personality, my own desires, took on monstrous shapes in my mind.

  On the third day I remembered the book that I gave to Sarah—that slim collection of short stories. An image of that book popped into my head, completely unbidden. And once that image was there, I couldn’t shake it—try as I might. As if the image of that book were being broadcast directly into my head. The book must still have been at Richard’s house. I could picture it in each room: on the bar next to a clear, empty bottle; in the guest room on the couch; etc. The book, then the empty room all around it. My thoughts returned incessantly to the book. The book as object. The book as icon. The book as literature—how did those stories tie in with the events of that night? At times, just as sleep would come over me, the stories in that book would seem clearly prophetic—how could I, having read the book, not have known what was going to happen at Richard’s party?

  I left my apartment to retrieve the book. A small part of my brain screamed at me not to, pointed out that going anywhere near Richard’s house was lunacy. I drove up the mountain, tapped the steering wheel, chewed on the end of an unlit cigarette and drove under the no trespassing sign to Richard’s. I would get the book and leave. I would have the book. The sun was high and bright, there was nothing at all to going into Richard’s house and getting the book and then leaving with it, set on the passenger seat or, perhaps, on my lap. Once I had the book, I would be able to settle back into my rational life.

  Prudence’s body wasn’t in the driveway. I remembered the wall of corpses the man from the peak had made.

  I was glad there was still a mess from the party—bottles, ash trays full of butts, objects displaced, leftover dip, etc. If the man from the peak had taken the time to clean the house—that might have made me crazy—if the house had looked as it did on the occasions I’d come to visit Sarah when Richard was away, I’d’ve been greatly disturbed. There had been a party. The man from the peak had come.

  The moment I touched the book I knew that I hadn’t come for it after all, and that I hadn’t come of my own will.

  The peak was a black spike surrounded by sun. I climbed toward the peak. I sweated heavily in my dark clothes—if someone had stood at Richard’s front door, would they have been able to see me at all? Just shy of the boulders that crowned the mountain, I found the crevasse I knew was home to the man from the peak. “I live in the peak,” he’d said.

  I sat down at the edge of the crevasse. A jagged, open crescent, as if a sliver of the moon had burned its impression onto the side of the mountain. When I leaned over, I felt a gust of wet air, like breath; it reeked of ammonia and dirt. I’d smoke until my cigarettes were gone and by then there wouldn’t be much light left. I didn’t want to be here but I found that it was impossible to leave.

  IN PARIS,

  IN THE MOUTH OF KRONOS

  JOHN LANGAN

  I

  “You know how much they want for a Coke?”

  “How much?” Vasquez said.

  “Five euros. Can you believe that?”

  Vasquez shrugged. She knew the gesture would irritate Buchanan, who took an almost pathological delight in complaining about everything in Paris, from the lack of air conditioning on the train ride in from De Gaulle to their narrow hotel rooms, but they had an expense account, after all, and however modest it was, she was sure a five-euro Coke would not deplete it. She didn’t imagine the professionals sat around fretting over the cost of their sodas.

  To her left, the broad Avenue de la Bourdonnais was surprisingly quiet; to her right, the interior of the restaurant was a din of languages: English, mainly, with German, Spanish, Italian, and even a little French mixed in. In front of and behind her, the rest of the sidewalk tables were occupied by an almost even balance of old men reading newspapers and young-ish couples wearing sunglasses. Late afternoon sunlight washed over her surroundings like a spill of white paint, lightening everything several shades, reducing the low buildings across the Avenue to hazy rectangles. When their snack was done, she would have to return to one of th
e souvenir shops they had passed on the walk here and buy a pair of sunglasses. Another expense for Buchanan to complain about.

  “M’sieu? Madame?” Their waiter, surprisingly middle-aged, had returned. “Vous êtes—”

  “You speak English,” Buchanan said.

  “But of course,” the waiter said. “You are ready with your order?”

  “I’ll have a cheeseburger,” Buchanan said. “Medium-rare. And a Coke,” he added with a grimace.

  “Very good,” the waiter said. “And for Madame?”

  “Je voudrais un crêpe de chocolat,” Vasquez said, “et un café au lait.”

  The waiter’s expression did not change. “Très bien, Madame. Merçi,” he said as Vasquez passed him their menus.

  “A cheeseburger?” she said once he had returned inside the restaurant.

  “What?” Buchanan said.

  “Never mind.”

  “I like cheeseburgers. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing. It’s fine.”

  “Just because I don’t want to eat some kind of French food—ooh, un crêpe, s’il vous-plait.”

  “All this,” Vasquez nodded at their surroundings, “it’s lost on you, isn’t it?”

  “We aren’t here for ‘all this,’” Buchanan said. “We’re here for Mr. White.”

  Despite herself, Vasquez flinched. “Why don’t you speak a little louder? I’m not sure everyone inside the café heard.”

  “You think they know what we’re talking about?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Oh? What is?”

  “Operational integrity.”

  “Wow. You pick that up from the Bourne movies?”

  “One person overhears something they don’t like, opens their cellphone and calls the cops—”

  “And it’s all a big misunderstanding officers, we were talking about movies, ha ha.”