The Best of the Best Horror of the Year

by Ellen Datlow

  She selected abandoned and orphaned girls from Bay Area cities, and she didn’t discriminate by race, so they tried to stuff kids into the trunk of her Rolls Royce as she drove away. They were all smart, strong little girls; the rest she could make over.

  A certified teacher educated the girls, who had only each other for society. Most stayed through puberty, and came out fearless, aglow with eerie confidence and destined for bright futures. The whole West Coast was peppered with Madame’s prodigies; a sorority that had helped girls obtain scholarships and entry into ivy-league schools, interviews with Fortune 500 companies, and even temporary financial assistance once they graduated university. Counted among the Delos alumni were many powerful women: one of San Francisco’s most successful defense attorneys; a sitting Assemblywoman in Sacramento; even a U.S. junior Senator. They also help keep the secret. Madame Dioskilos wanted no awards, no media attention; most people in town didn’t even know about the riding school.

  THREE

  I rolled up the drive and past the whitewashed Cretan villa with its showcase equestrian stables, over the ridge at the top of the canyon and around the front of the austere pine-log hunting lodge. The garage was locked down, motion-detector lights and security cameras triggering each other. Seeing no lights on, I drove on down into a stand of oaks, where I knew she would be, in the other stables…

  I parked under the awning and told Tonio to stay in the truck. I gave him my cell phone and told him what to do if it rang, then got out and stumbled through the dark to the golden glow of a lantern over the stable door.

  Only the oldest girls at the school came anywhere near here, the ones who had been initiated into what Madame called “the Mysteries.” I didn’t pretend to know what she meant, but I sensed what lay at the root of her fanaticism.

  I pushed open the stable door and stepped into Mediterranean heat and the awesome stink of Madame Dioskilos’s steeds.

  “Ms. Wyeth?” Her voice, from the tack room. I responded and went to the little door beside the corridor that led to the indoor arena. If there’d been an accident at this hour, it would have happened there. I didn’t see the shotgun anywhere about, and was both more and less uneasy as I ducked into the tack room.

  Madame sat in a rocking chair in a corner of the tack room, beside a mountain of dusty blankets. She was wiry and much stronger than I was for her age and size. Her hands clutched each other, shaking.

  “What happened?”

  “An accident,” Madame Dioskilos murmured, “an ill omen.”

  “Which one was it?”

  “I was a fool to trust her with him! I thought, in her, I saw something… Ah! Actaeon,” her wounded voice faltered, and I felt my own heart race with distress. Her prized stallion—

  “Well, where is he? What can I do for him here?”

  “He is… unharmed. I will deal with him later, myself. But I need your help with another matter… It is not for him, that I call you.” She leaned forward as if to get up again, and pulled back the top blanket from the pile.

  A girl lay curled up on her side with her knees tight against her chest, and bound up by her arms. She wore a few rags of the short white chitins that the girls always wore when riding. Blood smeared the inside of her legs down to her knees, soaking the blanket under her.

  “Oh God! What do you want me to do?” I felt sick to my stomach with the tragedy of it; I say tragedy, because it was so inevitable.

  Clearly, she’d already been sedated, or was in shock; her eyes half-lidded, her tongue protruding from her teeth. She was twelve, maybe thirteen, with caramel skin, and straight, shiny black hair in a boyish bob. Her elbows and knees were torn and blotted with sawdust, her lip split, and bruises bloomed on her neck and shoulders. The horrible wound between her legs still bled. She was ready for an ambulance—

  One had to look very long and hard to see her breathe.

  I wasn’t breathing at all. “He—he did this?”

  “Trista is a vigorous rider, a natural hunter… When her first bloodletting came, she embraced the Mysteries, and hunted the hunter. She rode Minos like a high priestess—but she trained too hard. Such girls, one cannot always see it, they are wanton…”

  “Where is he now?” I demanded. It was only for the girl’s sake that I didn’t shout. “Where is the shotgun?”

  The other ones had never done anything like this, but the others were all geldings. They’d only wounded each other or been lamed in accidents. Although they were bred for the steep terrain and rocky cliffs of Greece, there were other dangers here. One was bitten by a rattlesnake; another snarled in razor wire. Madame always went back to Greece and got more, though how she got them into the country always puzzled me.

  The lights were dim in the arena, but I heard him, snorting and pawing the muddy turf. I couldn’t find the shotgun, but I wasn’t to be denied: I found a shovel.

  In the Greek myths, Actaeon was a hunter who stumbled on Diana bathing in a sacred pool. For stealing a glance at her divine nakedness, the hunter was transformed into a stag, and ripped to shreds by his own dogs.

  I went into the dark faster than I could see through it, with the shovel cocked over my shoulder. I followed the wall of the big round arena, wary of the hidden obstacles the girls jumped to train for the Hunt.

  I heard him before I saw him, chains rattling as he came charging out of the shadows, but it gave me no advantage. The chains ran back to stout rings in the wall, giving him more than enough slack to get me. I swung the shovel as hard as I could, but he ducked under it and drove his head and massive shoulder into my gut. I fell hard on my back and lost the shovel.

  I curled into a sobbing ball, with no breath to do anything else. His eyes reflected the moon glow from the skylight as he looked me over, trying to decide what he wanted most.

  He was still saddled. His bridle was twisted around so it hung from his muzzle, which he’d already half-chewed through. His silver fighting spurs glittered in the moonlight.

  A whip cracked between us, the tip raking his face so he leapt back and barked, submissive.

  “Is not his fault!” she cried. “Trista rode him too hard… Her sisters say there is—carnality—in her, but I pay no heed; they are jealous, naturally. She rides him too hard on the course, driving with her hips, but with ulterior motivations: she pleasures herself upon the saddle! Such girls often break their maidenhood on the pommel, and this she did… nature ran away with them both. It is not his fault—the blood—”

  “Well, what the fuck did you expect, Madame?” She looked as if she’d never been yelled at before, so I resolved to make it memorable for her. “He’s a man, for God’s sake!”

  “No!” She shouted, and crossed her arms in negation between us.

  “Not a man: a beast…”

  “All men are beasts,” I said. And most women, I thought.

  “Let me tell you,” she growled, and approached Actaeon. He shifted from foot to foot and studied us both. They’d always been sedated or sequestered when I came before. I had no problem killing them. I did not see their faces in my dreams. Thanks to them, I hardly ever dreamed about my husband.

  Madame Dioskilos coiled the whip taut around one gloved fist as she spoke. “When my ancestors came to the island of Dioskilos three thousand years ago, they were set upon by beasts in the shape of men, who killed and ate our men, and raped our women. The drunken gods often rutted with animals, and sired monsters such as these, here and there in the dark corners of the earth.

  “The goddess Diana heard our prayers and appeared to the girls of the tribe, who alone could tame them, so long as they remained chaste. And they did tame them, Mrs. Slabbert, but they have ever been beasts.”

  Throwing my real name in my face, Madame untangled Actaeon’s reins and tugged his huge anvil of a head down to the dirt. He bowed with a snort, one sturdy knee extended out, and Madame stepped up on it, swung her leg over the saddle and sat erect with her boots in the stirrups. At a clipped shout from Madame, Actae
on rose to his full height. His hooded eyes leered at me over his bloody muzzle.

  She could make a good argument for her case without words. Though he stood on two legs and had hands, he had no thumbs, whether from selective breeding or post-natal surgery, I didn’t care to guess. His barrel torso was rudely muscled, covered in sleek black hair like a goat’s, and his shoulders were broad enough to carry a full-grown woman up a mountain on the elaborate saddle perched upon his slightly hunched back. That those mighty shoulders produced such puny, almost flipper-like arms screamed selective breeding over hundreds of centuries from proto-human stock, perhaps even the last Neanderthals. A Greek myth that Bulfinch left out, for better or worse, though Madame’s ancestors might’ve been the grain of sand that grew so many pearls: the Amazons, who made impotent slaves of their men; Circe, who made pigs and asses of Odysseus’s crew; satyrs and centaurs—

  “This one, you will not kill.” From the saddle, Madame reclaimed her regal bearing. The whip uncoiled, now, for me. “It is his nature.”

  “How many girls will you let him rape?”

  “This has never happened before… It will never happen again. The girls will be trained—”

  I raised the shovel. “Get down off him, Madame—”

  “When you kill them, Phyllis, do you imagine that they are your husband?”

  That stopped me cold, but I didn’t take the bait. I could see where she was leading this, and I brought it back. “What’s to become of the girl? When’s the ambulance due?”

  Actaeon took a few hopping steps, stalking in a lazy, tightening spiral around me. He balanced himself and Madame effortlessly on the balls of his feet—splayed, talon-tipped toes like a mountain lion, the heels augmented with curved bronze stiletto spurs, like a gamecock; and, peeking out of the blood-matted black thicket between his powerful legs—the weapon. He couldn’t have gotten his chastity belt off by himself—nature ran away with them both…His monstrous appendage bobbed and lengthened visibly as he circled; slavering and twitching to have done with Madame’s games.

  She dug her heels into his scarred flanks and tracked my eyes with hers, stroking the back of his head. “She ran away from us, went back to the city, where—small surprise—she was attacked. We will be heartbroken, but resolute. She brought this upon herself. The heart of it is the truth.”

  “So I—you want me—” It was beneath words. “But when she talks—”

  “You are not to hurry, Mrs. Slabbert.”

  Actaeon gave a gibbering gurgle from deep in his throat and strained with his stunted forelegs to stroke his cock, still crusted with Trista’s blood. I tried to stare him down. Menopause makes you think you can pull shit like that.

  He shook his head. His muzzle slipped off. He grinned at me. Each yellow tooth was the size of a big man’s toenail, and the moray eel of his tongue lurking behind them. His breath raised welts on my skin.

  I still had the shovel. “Hey, cut this shit out! I am not going to help you kill that girl!”

  “Of course not, but you are going to get yourself out of what we are both in, no?” She snapped the reins and Actaeon reared up, his spurred feet kicking in the air, flinging sod and sweat. He bent down low, craning his neck until his head was between his knees to sniff my crotch. Madame dismounted to stand between us. “I know that what you have done for me in the past was not wholly out of necessity. You knew how others would judge you. You are a part of the Mysteries, now.”

  I stepped around her and reached out to stroke Actaeon’s bristly black mane. He twitched and unfolded warily from his rigid dismounting stance, and an alarmingly powerful musky scent suddenly filled the arena. Madame gripped his reins in one hand, the whip in the other.

  I scratched behind his ears and the base of his skull, where all animals like it. His jaw went slack, but his eyes never left mine. I leaned in closer, holding my breath. I knew what I’d find, but it was the least dangerous way into the subject.

  “What do you do?” Madame Dioskilos demanded, jerking his head back by the reins.

  “Nothing… I was only counting his teeth. You told me once that they have four more than us—”

  Actaeon obliged by baring his fierce dentition. The extra bicuspids and molars were there. Along with the outsized mandible muscles and projecting palate, they were made to crack open seeds, shellfish and bones. I wondered who had given him his four gold fillings.

  “Like jackals,” Madame said and led Actaeon away from me. She didn’t know where this was going, and so it had to stop.

  “Eskimos and American Indians have different dentition from Europeans. How much ‘less human’ does that make them?” I should have gone to the girl. Madame trusted me to let her die, it would have been so easy to save her and deliver her to the hospital, and we would both get what we deserved. But first, I had to show her—

  She flicked her whip at me by way of dismissal and led Actaeon to the grooming stalls. I went to look at the girl. Her breathing was shallow, pulse shocky, and she still bled. If I dumped her out in the cold somewhere up the coast, like Madame ordered me to, she’d never revive. Madame would never dirty her patrician mind with an explicit request that I help her along, but when you work for someone long enough, you learn to read them.

  Cruel, surely, but in Madame’s world, nature was a serial rapist, and unfit children were left out for the wolves.

  I tried not to think about it. I had treated Madame Dioskilos’s livestock—her men—for seven years, and put down four of them, and I knew that what I did wasn’t the worst of it. I knew about the High Hunt at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, and what they hunted. Drifters, illegal aliens, men nobody missed. Anybody with a gun would have killed all of her creatures because they were less than human, but I had let her use me to kill only the useless ones, because they were men.

  Madame’s school—the Hunt and the Mysteries—made these cast-off girls into women the rest of the world respected, envied. It empowered them to reach for undreamed of heights, and liberated them from ever becoming a man’s creature. And I guess I was one of them, from the day I killed my husband.

  We had a thriving vet practice in Maryland—clients in Chevy Chase, contracts with stables that bred Triple Crown contenders. For such a smart man, Dan Slabbert got very, very stupid around money. He did things for it, just to get close to it, to dream of belonging to it. They let him think he could someday be one of them, so he started doping horses for them. Whatever they promised him was enough that, eventually, he killed a champion thoroughbred for them. Insurance paid off, and Dan must’ve got a healthy cut in a hidden account. He started getting consultant work across the country from rich friends who could afford to fly in a witch doctor to see to their sick investments.

  He killed three more before I found out, but I didn’t do anything. I found out he was fucking call girls the clients threw his way, but I said nothing. Then I found out what they’d promised him, in return for becoming their equine hit man: they were going to make him a rich widower.

  I confronted him with the insurance policies and the rest of it, and he took it like a man; he tried to kill me himself. We fought; I won.

  I left the country, laying a convincing trail to nowhere, then quietly snuck back in under an assumed name I’d bought with Dan’s blood money. I knew my new identity wasn’t airtight when somebody deposited fifty thousand dollars into Ruth Wyeth’s new checking account. I suppose, in the end, I did the horsey set a favor.

  In Big Sur, I was just another dumpy misfit who had sublimated her miserable lack of sex appeal into a gift for animal husbandry. I thought I could start over. It took Madame Dioskilos to show me how fucking mad I still was, how many times I still wanted to kill him.

  I packed surgical gauze into Trista’s wound and wrapped her up in a blanket. I left the tack room and found Madame locking her prize stallion in his stable. I hit the speed dial on the spare cell phone in my coat pocket and went to meet her.

  “I’m ready to take her,” I said
.

  The barn door creaked and a solemn ten-year-old black girl in a spotless white tracksuit slipped in through the crack, a big flashlight in one hand, my phone ringing in the other. Looking back at someone outside, she bowed and whispered, “Madame, there’s a boy—”

  Madame Dioskilos hissed in outrage and reached for the bullwhip coiled on the wall. I moved to stop her.

  “He’s mine, he’s just a little boy. I adopted him. Leave him alone—” The girl swung the flashlight at me. It smashed my forearm and the arm went limp.

  “A boy, here?” Madame Dioskilos spat, eyes locked imperiously on mine until I looked away. “And on this night, of all nights!”

  “I didn’t know I’d be dumping a—” He was on the other side of the barn door. I begged, “Oh God, let me see him, please!”

  “You know my rules!”

  “You must’ve rubbed off on me,” I pleaded. “I took him in to have somebody to teach the trade… I couldn’t leave him at home, could I?”

  “If you have taken in a boy, you have learned nothing from me.” Her strong-gloved fingers worried at the silver lunular clasp holding her long white hair. She never looked so old to me before. I thought it was fear over what happened; it had never occurred to me she was disappointed in me.

  “Let him come in, please, Madame. I want you to see him.”

  The door opened wider and Tonio crept in, hugging his pad and pencils to his chest. He looked scared to death, and I started to cry, but when I went to him, the girl brandished the flashlight. A lithe little Latina girl came in with a bow stretched and a silver-tipped hunting arrow nocked.

  I screamed at them to back off. Tonio cried, and I hugged him. “Tonio, it’s okay, honey, you scared them as bad as they scared you.”

  I turned him around to face the old woman. “Tonio, I want you to meet Madame Scylla Dioskilos. She’s one of the ladies whose horses I take care of. She runs a school for girls, kind of like a foster group home, but… nicer. Madame, this is Tonio. Smile big for the nice lady, Tonio.”