The Best of the Best Horror of the Year

by Ellen Datlow

  Scared, Tonio yet managed a thin smile at Madame Dioskilos, who barely glanced at him. “Hi,” he whispered.

  “Show her your drawings, honey,” I said, but he only hugged the pad tighter.

  Madame scowled and made some ancient cursing gesture with her fingers.

  “You see, Tonio was born with severe cognitive disabilities, so bad that his mother surrendered him to the state. He grew up in a special group home in Oakland. I had a hard time tracking him down. There are so many, many children that nobody wants. I wanted you to meet him—”

  “You have defiled my house with this—”

  “They’re beasts, then, and can never be more?” I demanded, and Madame nodded.

  “What is your point?” she snapped.

  “Please, Tonio, show her your drawings, I want her to see what a good artist you are.”

  Tonio looked warily around the barn, then slowly unclenched and opened the pad. Shy, slow, autistic, whatever the ignorant might call him, he could draw. Horses leapt across the pages like a storm, filling and spilling off the paper, rendered in every color in his box, and some others he’d cleverly blended by smudging them with his little fingers.

  “So you were wrong,” I started, “and you lied to me before…”

  Madame made a gesture of water flowing off her face. “You did the right thing bringing him,” Madame said. “You must be made to see.” She advanced on Tonio until she stood between him and me. Something she took out of her belt made him scream.

  From somewhere in the barn came an answer. The lowing roar and crash of wood and metal froze the room. My heart leapt into my mouth. The jaundiced whites of Madame’s eyes gleamed all around her violet irises. The knife flashed in her hand.

  “Chandra, go and see to the beasts!” Madame ordered. “Marina, shoot her if she moves.” The black girl edged around the awkward scene and stalked into the stables. The girl behind Tonio aimed the arrow at me and drew the string back. Tonio sank to the ground, took out a pencil and began to draw.

  Madame hovered over Tonio, the knife behind her back, intrigued. “You adopted this boy? Do not tell me lies, Phyllis Slabbert.”

  “You lied to me, when you said this had never happened, before…”

  Madame blinked at me. Tonio whimpered and sketched. The bowstring creaked.

  “Look at him, Madame: I want you to count his teeth.”

  Madame whirled on me and brought the knife up to my chin so quickly I couldn’t even flinch. “What is this game?”

  My muscles locked up and I just stared at her. “Actaeon’s done it before, hasn’t he? Maybe you even let it happen, part of the ‘rituals,’ or a breeding experiment? And you made Greta Spivak, your old vet, dump the girl—”

  “Who is this? I know no one by this name!” Madame’s wounded innocence was silent movie acting at its finest.

  “Bullshit! She worked for you! I think it was because you both knew the girl was pregnant—”

  “You lie!” The knife slashed at my face. I ducked away, but the edge flayed my scalp. A big flap of skin with hair on it came away in my hand as I cradled the wound.

  Sobs of pain welled up in my throat, but I gagged them back. Whether or not I could go on, it had to come out. “The girl was only twelve, you remember? She couldn’t keep him, so they put him up for adoption, but nobody wanted him. He’d retreat and draw on everything, then have violent fits of rage. His hormones are all screwed up and no one’s ever tried to reach him, let alone love him, but he’s a sweet, sensitive little boy.”

  Madame looked from Tonio to the bloody knife in her hand. “Look at his teeth, Madame. He’s a strange little boy, no doubt, but is he an animal? Do you want to put a saddle on him?”

  Madame bent down and took Tonio’s jaw, almost tenderly, in her gloved hand. Tonio was too far gone to resist her. Still looking into his mouth as the silence dragged on, she called out, “Chandra, come here.”

  In the stables, a metal pail hit the ground. The stable door groaned as it swung open. The darkness beyond yawned, absolute. Marina’s fingers grew sweaty and tired on the bowstring, and she lowered it. Blood stung my eyes, soaking my hand when I wiped it away. I needed to lie down. I had to get Tonio out of there. I wanted to show her, but I never meant for things to get so out of hand—

  Madame seemed, all of a sudden, to decide. She rose and turned on Tonio with the knife out: he didn’t see it coming.

  I dove after her, screaming. I grabbed her arm, but she slipped out of my blood-slick grip to stab him.

  The knife scythed through Tonio’s down parka and came out amid a flurry of feathers. I’d spoiled her attack, but she cocked her arm to stab him in the throat. I stepped inside her reach and shoved her as hard as I could. Tonio rolled away shrieking and threw his pad at her. Marina shouted, “Madame!” and raised her bow, loosed her arrow.

  It never hit me. Sailing past my eyes, it hit Actaeon in the shoulder, but didn’t slow him down.

  He came so fast I could only fall before him. Leaping over me, he dealt Marina a brutal kick to the chest. The girl slammed into the barn door and slumped to the ground. Almost in the same movement, he lunged after Madame who, in turn, dove after Tonio. His jaws snapped at her and she hung, howling, in mid-air, caught by his teeth in her long white hair.

  Tonio crab-walked backwards into a corner between two walls of hay bales. Hanging by her hair, Madame roared commands in Greek, but Actaeon stood frozen, unable to parse the sticky situation with the stunted brute mind his mistress had given him.

  Sounds of shuffling feet behind me made me turn, and I gasped. The rest of them had broken loose, and skulked out of the dark like madhouse inmates on Judgment Day, knees skinned and spurs bloodied from kicking down their stable doors. Their big black eyes rolled and they began to hoot, deep in their barrel chests, nostrils flared as they scented blood on the air.

  Tonio’s blood. A trickle stood out on his green parka, studded with white down feathers, radioactive in its effect.

  I knew, then, why Madame Dioskilos had always had someone else treat and put down her beasts. The smell of their own blood, the sounds of their pain, drove them mad. I thought, then, that I would die, and I laid still as death on the ground, but I did not exist for them. They stampeded over me and converged on Madame Dioskilos.

  I got up, pointedly not looking at them as I crawled along the wall to Tonio. He pressed his face against the wall and chewed his lips, too scared to make a sound as I bundled him up in my arms and shuffled with my eyes closed for a thousand years to the barn door.

  I raced home and packed bags in a panic. Tonio had fallen asleep in the truck. I was ready to flee again, when exhaustion set in. I had enough strength to bring Tonio into the house and lay him in his bed, before I passed out myself.

  I awakened at dawn, and no sirens wailed, no police broke down the door. We would leave, but not in a hurry, not as fugitives. I couldn’t understand how the world couldn’t sense something so wrong happening, but then, how could it not have sensed how wrong things had been, all along? The sisterhood would smother it in secrecy, and that would be best. No one needed to know—

  I only went back once, that morning. Of the beasts there was no sign, nor of any of the girls. Trista was gone, and there were opened pill packets and gauze bandage wrappers on the floor of the tack room. I still worry about them, but I think they will make out all right. After her fashion, Madame Dioskilos prepared them well to face the world.

  I won’t detail what they did to her body, or where I found the head. The bloody paintings they made on the walls of the barn, in their stables, in the chapel of the Goddess at the barn’s heart, were what I will always remember. Though they had only one color to work in, the delicacy of the shapes of centaurs, satyrs and nymphs sporting across, filling and spilling off the cedar beam walls, spoke as no words could of what they might have been, in another life.

  I burned the place down. I buried what I could find of Madame Dioskilos under the laurel tree behin
d the hunting lodge. I said a prayer for her, after I counted her teeth. Her extra bicuspids were filed down and the jaw surgically rebuilt, but she still had too many molars to pass for human, in her own book. I hope God sees it differently.

  CARGO

  E. MICHAEL LEWIS

  NOVEMBER 1978

  I dreamt of cargo. Thousands of crates filled the airplane’s hold, all made of unfinished pine, the kind that drives slivers through work gloves. They were stamped with unknowable numbers and bizarre acronyms that glowed fiercely with dim red light. They were supposed to be jeep tires, but some were as large as a house, others as small as a spark plug, all of them secured to pallets with binding like straitjacket straps. I tried to check them all, but there were too many. There was a low shuffling as the boxes shifted, then the cargo fell on me. I couldn’t reach the interphone to warn the pilot. The cargo pressed down on me with a thousand sharp little fingers as the plane rolled, crushing the life out of me even as we dived, even as we crashed, the interphone ringing now like a scream. But there was another sound too, from inside the crate next to my ear. Something struggled inside the box, something sodden and defiled, something that I didn’t want to see, something that wanted out.

  It changed into the sound of a clipboard being rapped on the metal frame of my crew house bunk. My eyes shot open. The airman—new in-country, by the sweat lining his collar—stood over me, holding the clipboard between us, trying to decide if I was the type to rip his head off just for doing his job. “Tech Sergeant Davis,” he said, “they need you on the flight line right away.”

  I sat up and stretched. He handed me the clipboard and attached manifest: a knocked-down HU-53 with flight crew, mechanics, and medical support personnel bound for… somewhere new.

  “Timehri Airport?”

  “It’s outside Georgetown, Guyana.” When I looked blank, he went on, “It’s a former British colony. Timehri used to be Atkinson Air Force Base.”

  “What’s the mission?”

  “It’s some kind of mass med-evac of ex-pats from somewhere called Jonestown.”

  Americans in trouble. I’d spent a good part of my Air Force career flying Americans out of trouble. That being said, flying Americans out of trouble was a hell of a lot more satisfying than hauling jeep tires. I thanked him and hurried into a clean flight suit.

  I was looking forward to another Panamanian Thanksgiving at Howard Air Force Base—eighty-five degrees, turkey and stuffing from the mess hall, football on Armed Forces Radio, and enough time out of flight rotation to get good and drunk. The in-bound hop from the Philippines went by the numbers and both the passengers and cargo were free and easy. Now this.

  Interruption was something you grew accustomed to as a Loadmaster. The C-141 StarLifter was the largest freighter and troop carrier in the Military Air Command, capable of carrying seventy thousand pounds of cargo or two hundred battle-ready troops and flying them anywhere in the world. Half as long as a football field, the high-set swept-back wings drooped bat-like over the tarmac. With an upswept T-tail, petal-doors, and a built-in cargo ramp, the StarLifter was unmatched when it came to moving cargo. Part stewardess and part moving man, my job as a Loadmaster was to pack it as tight and as safe as possible.

  With everything onboard and my weight and balance sheets complete, the same airman found me cussing up the Panamanian ground crew for leaving a scuffmark on the airframe.

  “Sergeant Davis! Change in plans,” he yelled over the whine of the forklift. He handed me another manifest.

  “More passengers?”

  “New passengers. Med crew is staying here.” He said something unintelligible about a change of mission.

  “Who are these people?”

  Again, I strained to hear him. Or maybe I heard him fine and with the sinking in my gut, I wanted him to repeat it. I wanted to hear him wrong.

  “Graves registration,” he cried.

  That’s what I’d thought he’d said.

  Timehri was your typical third-world airport—large enough to squeeze down a 747, but strewn with potholes and sprawling with rusted Quonset huts. The low line of jungle surrounding the field looked as if it had been beaten back only an hour before. Helicopters buzzed up and down and US servicemen swarmed the tarmac. I knew then that things must be bad.

  Outside the bird, the heat rising from the asphalt threatened to melt the soles of my boots even before I had the wheel chocks in place. A ground crew of American GIs approached, anxious to unload and assemble the chopper. One of them, bare-chested with his shirt tied around his waist, handed me a manifest.

  “Don’t get comfy,” he said. “As soon as the chopper’s clear, we’re loading you up.” He nodded over his shoulder.

  I looked out over the shimmering taxiway. Coffins. Rows and rows of dull aluminum funerary boxes gleamed in the unforgiving tropical sun. I recognized them from my flights out of Saigon six years ago, my first as Loadmaster. Maybe my insides did a little flip because I’d had no rest, or maybe because I hadn’t carried a stiff in a few years. Still, I swallowed hard. I looked at the destination: Dover, Delaware.

  The ground crew loaded a fresh comfort pallet when I learned we’d have two passengers on the outbound flight.

  The first was a kid, right out of high school by the look of it, with bristle-black hair, and too-large jungle fatigues that were starched, clean, and showed the rank of Airman First Class. I told him, “Welcome aboard,” and went to help him through the crew door, but he jerked away, nearly hitting his head against the low entrance. I think he would have leapt back if there had been room. His scent hit me, strong and medicinal—Vicks VapoRub.

  Behind him a flight nurse, crisp and professional in step, dress, and gesture, also boarded without assistance. I regarded her evenly. I recognized her as one of a batch I had flown regularly from Clark in the Philippines to Da Nang and back again in my early days. A steel-eyed, silver-haired lieutenant. She had been very specific—more than once—in pointing out how any numbskull high school dropout could do my job better. The name on her uniform read Pembry. She touched the kid on his back and guided him to the seats, but if she recognized me, she said nothing.

  “Take a seat anywhere,” I told them. “I’m Tech Sergeant Davis. We’ll be wheels up in less than half an hour so make yourself comfortable.”

  The kid stopped short. “You didn’t tell me,” he said to the nurse.

  The hold of a StarLifter is most like the inside of a boiler room, with all the heat, cooling, and pressure ducts exposed rather than hidden away like on an airliner. The coffins formed two rows down the length of the hold, leaving a center aisle clear. Stacked four high, there were one hundred and sixty of them. Yellow cargo nets held them in place. Looking past them, we watched the sunlight disappear as the cargo hatch closed, leaving us in an awkward semi-darkness.

  “It’s the fastest way to get you home,” she said to him, her voice neutral. “You want to go home, don’t you?”

  His voice dripped with fearful outrage. “I don’t want to see them. I want a forward facing seat.”

  If the kid would have looked around, he could have seen that there were no forward facing seats.

  “It’s okay,” she said, tugging on his arm again. “They’re going home, too.”

  “I don’t want to look at them,” he said as she pushed him to a seat nearest one of the small windows. When he didn’t move to strap himself in, Pembry bent and did it for him. He gripped the handrails like the oh-shit bar on a roller coaster. “I don’t want to think about them.”

  “I got it.” I went forward and shut down the cabin lights. Now only the twin red jump lights illuminated the long metal containers. When I returned, I brought him a pillow.

  The ID label on the kid’s loose jacket read “Hernandez.” He said, “Thank you,” but did not let go of the armrests.

  Pembry strapped herself in next to him. I stowed their gear and went through my final checklist.

  Once in the air, I brewed coffee on th
e electric stove in the comfort pallet. Nurse Pembry declined, but Hernandez took some. The plastic cup shook in his hands.

  “Afraid of flying?” I asked. It wasn’t so unusual for the Air Force. “I have some Dramamine…”

  “I’m not afraid of flying,” he said through clenched teeth. All the while he looked past me, to the boxes lining the hold.

  Next the crew. No one bird was assigned the same crew, like in the old days. The MAC took great pride in having men be so interchangeable that a flight crew who had never met before could assemble at a flight line and fly any StarLifter to the ends of the Earth. Each man knew my job, like I knew theirs, inside and out.

  I went to the cockpit and found everyone on stations. The second engineer sat closest to the cockpit door, hunched over instrumentation. “Four is evening out now, keep the throttle low,” he said. I recognized his hangdog face and his Arkansas drawl, but I could not tell from where. I figured after seven years of flying StarLifters, I had flown with just about everybody at one time or another. He thanked me as I set the black coffee on his table. His flightsuit named him Hadley.

  The first engineer sat in the bitchseat, the one usually reserved for a “Black Hatter”—mission inspectors were the bane of all MAC aircrews. He asked for two lumps and then stood and looked out the navigator’s dome at the blue rushing past.

  “Throttle low on four, got it,” replied the pilot. He was the designated Aircraft Commander, but both he and the co-pilot were such typical flight jocks that they could have been the same person. They took their coffee with two creams each. “We’re trying to outfly some clear air turbulence, but it won’t be easy. Tell your passengers to expect some weather.”

  “Will do, sir. Anything else?”

  “Thank you, Load Davis, that’s all.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Finally time to relax. As I went to have a horizontal moment in the crew berth, I saw Pembry snooping around the comfort pallet. “Anything I can help you find?”