The Best of the Best Horror of the Year

by Ellen Datlow

  Tara stood to one side, her face red with anger, or humiliation, or both. She marched forward and grabbed him forcibly by the bicep, and yanked him behind her. The men holding him let him go.

  “Should we call the police?” someone said.

  “Oh fuck you!” Tara shouted.

  She propelled him through the front door and out into the cold air. She did not release him until they arrived at the truck. The night arced over them both, and the world was bespangled with Christmas-colored constellations. Tara sagged against the truck’s door, hiding her face against the window. He stood silently, trying to grasp for some feeling here, for some appropriate mode of behavior. Now that the adrenaline was fading, it was starting to dawn on him how bad this was.

  Tara stood up straight and said, without looking at him, “I have to go back inside for a minute. Wait here.”

  “Do you want me to go with you?”

  “Just wait here.”

  He did. She went up to the front door and rang the bell, and after a moment she was let inside. He stood there and let the cold work its way through his body, banking the last warm embers of the alcohol. After a while he got behind the wheel of the truck and waited. Soon, the front door opened again, and she came out. She walked briskly to the truck, her breath trailing behind her, and opened his door. “Move over,” she said. “I’m driving.”

  He didn’t protest. Moments later she started the engine and pulled onto the road. She drove them slowly out of the neighborhood, until the last big house receded into the darkness behind them, like a glittering piece of jewelry dropped into the ocean. She steered them onto the highway and they eased onto the long stretch home.

  “He’s not going to call the police,” she said at last. “Small miracle.”

  He nodded. “I thought you wanted me to confront him,” he said, and regretted it immediately.

  She didn’t respond. He stole a glance at her: her face was unreadable. She drew in a deep breath. “Did you tell Mrs. Winn that we’re Jewish?”

  “ … yeah.”

  “Why? Why would you do that?”

  He just shook his head and stared out the window. Lights streaked by, far away.

  Tara sobbed once, both hands still clutching the steering wheel. Her face was twisted in misery. “You have to get a hold of yourself,” she said. “I don’t know what’s happening to you. I don’t know what to do.”

  He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He felt his guts turn to stone. He knew he had to say something, he had to try to explain himself here, or someday she would leave. Maybe someday soon. But the fear was too tight; it wouldn’t let him speak. It would barely let him breathe.

  When they get home the fight is brief and intense, and Jeremy escapes in the truck, making a trip to the attic before he leaves. Now he’s speeding down a winding two-lane blacktop, going so fast he can’t stay in his lane. If anyone else appears on this road, everybody’s fucked. He makes a fast right when he comes to the turn-in for Wild Acre, the truck hitting the bumps in the road too hard and smashing its undercarriage into the dirt. He pushes it up the hill, the untended dirt road overgrown with weeds. The truck judders around a bend, something groaning under the hood. The wheel slips out of his hands and the truck slides into a ditch, coming to a crunching halt and slamming Jeremy’s face into the steering wheel.

  The headlights peer crookedly into the dust-choked air, illuminating the house frames, which look like huge, drifting ghosts behind curtains of raised dirt and clay. He leans back in his seat, gingerly touching his nose, and his vision goes watery. The full moon leaks silver blood into the sky. Something inside him buckles, and acid fills his mouth. He puts a hand over it, squeezes his eyes shut, and thinks, Don’t you do it, don’t you fucking do it.

  He doesn’t do it. He swallows it back, burning his throat.

  He slams his elbow into the door several times. Then he rests his head on the steering wheel and sobs. These are huge, body-breaking sobs, the kind that leave him gasping for breath, the kind he hasn’t suffered since he was a little kid. They frighten him a little. He is not meant to sound like this.

  After a few moments he stops, lifts his head, and stares at the closest house frame, bone-colored in the moonlight. The floor is covered in dark stains. The forest is surging behind it. In a scramble of terror he wrenches the rifle from its rack, opens the door and jumps into the road.

  The gun is slippery in his hands. He strides into the house frame and raises the gun to his chin, aiming it into the dark forest, staring down the sight. The world and its sounds retreat into a single point of stillness. He watches, and waits.

  “Come on!” he screams. “Come on! Come on!”

  But nothing comes.

  THE CALLERS

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL

  Mark’s grandmother seems barely to have left the house when his grandfather says “Can you entertain yourself for a bit? I could do with going to the pub while I’ve got the chance.”

  Mark wonders how much they think they’ve entertained him, but he only says “Will grandma be all right coming home on her own?”

  “Never fret, son. They can look after theirselves.” The old man’s hairy caterpillar eyebrows squirm as he frowns at Mark and blinks his bleary eyes clear. “No call for you to fetch her. It’s women’s stuff, the bingo.” He gives the boy’s shoulder an unsteady squeeze and mutters “You’re a good sort to have around.”

  Mark feels awkward and a little guilty that he’s glad he doesn’t have to meet his grandmother. “Maybe I’ll go to a film.”

  “You’d better have a key, then.” His grandfather rummages among the contents of a drawer of the shaky sideboard—documents in ragged envelopes, rubber bands so desiccated they snap when he takes hold of them, a balding reel of cotton, a crumpled folder stuffed with photographs—and hauls out a key on a frayed noose of string. “Keep hold of that for next time you come,” he says.

  Does he mean Mark will be visiting by himself in future? Was last night’s argument so serious? His mother objected when his grandfather offered him a glass of wine at dinner, and then her mother accused her of not letting Mark grow up. Before long the women were shouting at each other about how Mark’s grandmother had brought up her daughter, and the men only aggravated the conflict by trying to calm it down. It continued after Mark went to bed, and this morning his father informed him that he and Mark’s mother were going home several days early. “You can stay if you like,” she told Mark.

  Was she testing his loyalty or hoping he would make up for her behaviour? While her face kept her thoughts to itself his father handed him the ticket for the train home like a business card, one man to another. Mark’s mother spent some time in listing ways he shouldn’t let anyone down, but these didn’t include going to the cinema. Wearing his coat was among the requirements, and so he takes it from the stand in the hall. “Step out, lad,” his grandfather says as Mark lingers on the pavement directly outside the front door. “You don’t want an old crock slowing you down.”

  At the corner of the street Mark glances back. The old man is limping after him, resting a hand on the roof of each car parked with two wheels on the pavement. Another narrow similarly terraced street leads into the centre of the small Lancashire town, where lamps on scalloped iron poles are stuttering alight beneath a congested late April sky. Many of the shops are shuttered, and some are boarded up. Just a few couples stroll past deserted pristine kitchens and uninhabited items of attire. Most of the local amusements have grown too childish for Mark, though he might still enjoy bowling or a game of indoor golf if he weren’t by himself, and others are years out of bounds—the pubs, the clubs waiting for the night crowds while doormen loiter outside like wrestlers dressed for someone’s funeral. Surely the cinema won’t be so particular about its customers. More than one of Mark’s schoolmates has shown him the scene from Facecream on their phones, where the girl gets cream squirted all over her face.

  As he hurries past the clubs he thinks a d
oorman is shouting behind him, but the large voice is down a side street full of shops that are nailed shut. At first he fancies that it’s chanting inside one of them, and then he sees an old theatre at the far end. While he can’t distinguish the words, the rhythm makes it clear he’s hearing a bingo caller. Mark could imagine that all the blank-faced doormen are determined to ignore the voice.

  The Frugoplex is beyond the clubs, across a car park for at least ten times as many vehicles as it presently contains. The lobby is scattered with popcorn, handfuls of which have been trodden into the purple carpet. A puce rope on metal stilts leads the queue for tickets back and forth and twice again on the way to the counter. When Mark starts to duck under the rope closest to the end of the queue, a man behind the counter scowls at him, and so he follows the rope all the way around, only just heading off two couples of about his own age who stoop under. He’s hoping to avoid the disgruntled man, but the queue brings Mark to him. “Facecream, please,” Mark says and holds out a ten-pound note.

  “Don’t try it on with me, laddie,” the man says and turns his glare on the teenagers who have trailed Mark to the counter. “And your friends needn’t either.”

  “He’s not our friend,” one of the boys protests.

  “I reckon not when he’s got you barred.”

  Mark’s face has grown hot, but he can’t just walk away or ask to see a film he’s allowed to watch. “I don’t know about them, but I’m fifteen.”

  “And I’m your sweet old granny. That’s it now for the lot of you. Don’t bother coming to my cinema.” The manager tells his staff at the counter “Have a good look at this lot so you’ll know them.”

  Mark stumbles almost blindly out of the multiplex. He’s starting across the car park when somebody mutters behind him “He wants his head kicked in.”

  They’re only words, but they express his feelings. “That’s what he deserves,” Mark agrees and turns to his new friends.

  It’s immediately clear that they weren’t thinking of the manager. “You got us barred,” says the girl who didn’t speak.

  “I didn’t mean to. You oughtn’t to have stood so close.”

  “Doesn’t matter what you meant,” she says, and the other girl adds “We’ll be standing a lot closer. Standing on your head.”

  Mark can’t take refuge in the cinema, but running would look shameful and invite pursuit as well. Instead he tramps at speed across the car park. His shadow lurches ahead, growing paler as it stretches, and before long it has company, jerking forward to catch up on either side of him. He still stops short of bolting but strides faster. He’s hoping passers-by will notice his predicament, but either they aren’t interested or they’re determined not to be. At last he reaches the nightclubs, and is opening his mouth to appeal to the nearest doorman when the fellow says “Keep walking, lad.”

  “They’re after me.”

  The doorman barely glances beyond Mark, and his face stays blank. “Walk on.”

  It could be advice, though it sounds like a dismissal. It leaves Mark feeling that he has been identified as an outsider, and he thinks the doormen’s impassive faces are warning him not to loiter. He would make for the police station if he knew where it is. He mustn’t go to his grandparents’ house in case they become scapegoats as well, and there’s just one sanctuary he can think of. He dodges into the side street towards the bingo hall.

  The street looks decades older than the main road and as though it has been forgotten for at least that long. Three streetlamps illuminate the cracked roadway bordered by grids that are clogged with old leaves. The glow is too dim to penetrate the gaps between the boards that have boxed up the shopfronts, because the lanterns are draped with grey cobwebs laden with drained insects. The only sign of life apart from a rush of footsteps behind Mark is the amplified voice, still delivering its blurred chant. It might almost be calling out to him, and he breaks into a run.

  So do his pursuers, and he’s afraid that the bingo hall may be locked against intruders. Beyond the grubby glass of three pairs of doors the foyer is deserted; nobody is in the ticket booth or behind the refreshment counter. His pursuers hesitate as he sprints to the nearest pair of doors, but when neither door budges, the gang closes in on him. He nearly trips on the uneven marble steps as he stumbles along them. He throws all his weight, such as it is, against the next set of doors, which give so readily that he almost sprawls on the threadbare carpet of the foyer.

  The caller seems to raise his voice to greet him. “Sixty-three,” he’s announcing, “just like me.” The pursuers glare at Mark from the foot of the shallow steps. “You can’t stay in there,” one girl advises him, and the other shouts “Better not try.”

  All the gang look determined to wait for him. If they don’t tire of it by the time the bingo players go home, surely they won’t dare to let themselves be identified, and so Mark shuts the doors and crosses the foyer. The entrance to the auditorium is flanked by old theatrical posters, more than one of which depicts a plump comedian with a sly schoolboyish face. Mark could imagine they’re sharing a joke about him as he pushes open the doors to the auditorium.

  The theatre seats have been cleared out, but the stage remains. It faces a couple of dozen tables, most of which are surrounded by women with score cards in front of them and stumpy pencils in their hands. The stage is occupied by a massive lectern bearing a large transparent globe full of numbered balls. Mark might fancy that he knows why the posters looked secretly amused, because the man in them is behind the lectern. He looks decades older, and the weight of his face has tugged it piebald as well as out of shape, but his grin hasn’t entirely lost its mischief, however worn it seems. Presumably his oversized suit and baggy shirt are meant to appear comical rather than to suggest a youngster wearing cast-off clothes. He examines a ball before returning it to the globe, which he spins on its pivot. “Three and three,” he says as his eyes gleam blearily at Mark. “What do you see?” he adds, and all the women eye the newcomer.

  At first Mark can’t see his grandmother. He’s distracted by a lanky angular woman who extends her speckled arms across the table nearest to him. “Lost your mammy, son?” she cries. “There’s plenty here to tend to you.”

  For an uneasy moment he thinks she has reached for her breast to indicate how motherly she is, but she’s adjusting her dress, her eagerness to welcome him having exposed a mound of wrinkled flesh. Before he can think of an answer his grandmother calls “What are you doing here, Mark?”

  She’s at a table close to the stage. He doesn’t want to make her nervous for him if there’s no need, and he’s ashamed of having run away. The uncarpeted floorboards amplify every step he takes, so that he feels as if he’s trying to sound bigger than he is. All the women and the bingo caller watch his progress, and he wonders if everybody hears him mutter “I went to the cinema but they wouldn’t let me see the film.”

  As his grandmother makes to speak one of her three companions leans forward, flattening her forearms on the table to twice their width. “However old are you, son?”

  “Mark’s thirteen,” says his grandmother.

  Another of her friends nods vigorously, which she has been doing ever since Mark caught sight of her. “Thirteen,” she announces, and many of the women coo or hoot with enthusiasm.

  “Looks old enough to me,” says the third of his grandmother’s tablemates, who is sporting more of a moustache than Mark has achieved. “Enough of a man.”

  “Well, we’ve shown you off now,” Mark’s grandmother tells him. “I’ll see you back at home.”

  This provokes groans throughout the auditorium. The woman who asked his age raises her hands, and her forearms sag towards the elbows. “Don’t keep him to yourself, Lottie.”

  The nodding woman darts to grab a chair for him. “You make this the lucky table, Mark.”

  He’s disconcerted to observe how frail his grandmother is by comparison with her friends, though they’re at least as old as she is. The bingo caller
gives him a crooked grin and shouts “Glad to have another feller here. Safety in numbers, lad.”

  Presumably this is a joke of some kind, since quite a few women giggle. Mark’s grandmother doesn’t, but says “Can he have a card?”

  This prompts another kind of laughter, and the nodding woman even manages to shake her head. “It’s the women’s game, lad,” the caller says. “Are you ladies ready to play?”

  “More than ever,” the moustached woman shouts, which seems somehow to antagonise Mark’s grandmother. “Sit down if you’re going to,” she says. “Stop drawing attention to yourself.”

  He could retort that she has just done that to him. He’s unable to hide his blazing face as he crouches on the spindly chair while the bingo caller elevates the next ball from the dispenser. “Eighty-seven,” he reads out. “Close to heaven.”

  The phrase earns mirth and other noises of appreciation as the women duck in unison to their cards. They chortle or grunt if they find the number, grimacing if they fail. Nobody at Mark’s table has located it when the man at the lectern calls “Number forty, old and naughty.”

  “That’s us and no mistake,” the moustached woman screeches before whooping at the number on her card.

  “Number six, up to tricks.”

  “That’s us as well,” her friend cries, but all her nodding doesn’t earn her the number.

  “Forty-nine, you’ll be fine.”

  The third woman crosses out the number, and flesh cascades down her arm as she lifts the pencil. “He’s that with bells on,” she says, favouring Mark with a wink.

  He has to respond, though the smile feels as if his swollen lips are tugging at his hot stiff face. “Three and twenty,” the man at the lectern intones. “There’ll be plenty.”

  Mark’s grandmother hunches over the table. He could think she’s trying to evade the phrase or the coos of delight it elicits from the rest of the players, but she’s marking the number on her card. She seems anxious to win, staying bent close to the card as the bingo caller consults the next ball. “Six and thirty,” he says, and a roguish grin twists the left side of his mouth. “Let’s get dirty.”