The Best of the Best Horror of the Year

by Ellen Datlow

  “And yeah, that is what I’ll be thinking of at the end.” Janet said this with a glare, almost an accusation. “That’s the kind of thing you get to think of when you don’t have anybody, and know you never will.”

  She made companionship sound like a comfort she was denied, but really, was it? Maybe Janet was the lucky one here, and would see it that way when the time came. When not dying alone meant having to watch someone you love die next to you, who really wanted that?

  They could all die alone, together.

  Bethany walked home after her shift, because she could. All the first-stringers on the Beasley team lived close enough for a shoe leather commute. Call it hospital policy, and plain old good sense. They wanted to be able to assemble the top tier crash team in minutes, any time of day or night, regardless of how much rain or snow or wind or ice might get in the way.

  The plan had gone into effect years ago, before the old man’s health started to decline. It had begun early, as soon as the first of the city fathers from a generation ago died. They would all be sick old men one day. Some of them were already old. Others were already sick middle-aged men. Over time, they’d all done what sick old men do, eventually overcoming each and every extraordinary measure to prolong their selfish lives, until Donald Beasley was the last man standing, however unsteadily.

  Children used to sing about him, years ago, and maybe still would, if only there were enough kids around to pass the song down to, the way these things used to work. But after a generation, birth rates had fallen so low, by choice, that children were now a rarity in Tanner Falls. Even they knew something was wrong, in this place where their future had been taken from them before they were born.

  “Old Mad Donald had a town,

  iä iä oh!

  And in that town he had a goat,

  iä iä oh!”

  Horrible little song. You had to marvel at how jubilantly children could sing of terrible things without appreciating what they were actually about. Yet she still missed the sound of it.

  There was a time when Tanner Falls had been a great place to grow up. That was how she’d experienced it. You could roam all day here, under the radar of adults. Even within town, there were pockets of woodland that felt so much farther from civilization than they really were, centuries of trees grown up around ponds and laced together by streams and paths worn smooth by bicycle tires. There were fish to catch and frogs to race. There were railroad tracks to explore, wondering where they led, hunting for treasures that might have fallen from passing trains, and if you couldn’t find anything, at least there were plenty of targets daring you to throw rocks at them.

  And in the city park, the concrete bandshell always seemed to smell faintly of pee—a phenomenon explained by the shards of brown glass that always seemed to reappear—but it projected your voice in a most wonderful way, especially when you bunched together with your friends to see how loudly all of you could shriek together, so that even the old people who lived by the park came out on their porches to scowl.

  And when you grew old enough for four wheels instead of two, you had the drive-in theater on the edge of town, and the A&W, where carhops on skates brought trays to hang on your door, loaded with burgers and onion rings and frosted mugs of root beer. And that was good for a while, as well, until it all started to seem too small, and boredom became an enemy that could only be outrun by going anywhere else but here.

  Bethany didn’t have to work to remember the town that way. Because it was still the same. It was all exactly the same, as immutably fixed as the old spoke-wheeled cannon on the courthouse lawn, commemorating a war no one alive had even fought in.

  Like the shop on the corner over there, Stewart Drug & Sundries. Sundries—who even used the word anymore? Here, they did. Across the street and down the block? Where would you even expect to find something called Franklin’s Dime Store today, in this, the post-Reagan years of George Bush? But here it was, unchanged from the pictures she’d seen when her parents were children. In any direction you looked where houses stood, you would see a skyline bristling with towering TV aerials, as if no one had heard of cable. They had … but it had never come here.

  Bethany knew enough of the world beyond to realize you were meant to remember such things fondly because they were no longer around. That was how nostalgia was supposed to work—mourning defunct businesses and outmoded ways and untamed land lost to bulldozers sent by developers who called it progress. Recalling them with a golden luster because they had meant enough to your heart once to crowd out memories of all the uglier things better off forgotten.

  Like that sign painted on the huge brick side of the Tanner Hotel, smack in the heart of downtown:

  NIGGER, DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOU HERE

  Nobody wanted it. Nobody liked what it had to say, or what it said now about the town. They could scarcely bring themselves to look at it. It repelled the eye, yet resisted all efforts to erase its existence. Whitewash it, paint over it, paper over it, hang a banner across it from the roof—whatever went up wouldn’t last the night. Sandblasting just made a gritty mess. Even attempts at demolition were plagued by mechanical failure.

  It had been more than fifteen years since they’d given up trying.

  And Tanner Falls stayed just as it was in 1969.

  The hotel’s insistence on cleaving to the status quo was one of the first bits of evidence that something was wrong here, early proof that someone had done a terrible thing to them all.

  People change. People grow. Those who can’t, die off, and with luck their worst notions die with them. Nobody wanted that hateful sign anything other than gone.

  Except, maybe, for Donald Beasley and the fellow town fathers from a generation ago who had beat him to the grave.

  There was a time when Tanner Falls had seemed like a great place to grow up.

  What an unlikely thing to have doomed it.

  Matt was already home when she got there, his back-support belt hanging from its peg by the side door. His shift had an hour to go yet, and by the look of things he’d been home long enough for three cans of Iron City already. Matt was the first person she was aware of who’d figured out that once you had a job in Tanner Falls, it was impossible to lose it, a fact of life he exploited with heedless impunity. Termination was change, and hey, they couldn’t have that.

  So there he was, still moving the same furniture in the same warehouse that had paid him for fifteen hours a week after school in 1969, so he could save up to buy his first real guitar.

  He didn’t notice her, such was his focus, so for a while she watched him play. Watched him go somewhere else, the only way left to him.

  He was a leftie, and so was his Les Paul. Even Bethany, who had assisted while surgeons’ hands worked wonders, could never figure out how Matt could be so dexterous as to play three parts at once: rhythms on the bottom two strings, melodies on the top two, and harmony and counterpoint in the middle. The effects pedals between the guitar and amp made it even more expansive, a swirling, psychedelic storm front of thunder and squalls that climbed and plunged, that promised hope and delivered heartache.

  Every generation in every town had its Matt Meadows: the guy who could’ve really done something, gone places, if only he’d left.

  He noticed her, finally, and brought the spaceship in for a landing, the last ripple of arpeggios echoing into the sonic horizon, until the only sound left in the hush of the house was the hum of his amp.

  And in every town, every girl had her own potential Matt: the guy she ended up marrying because she hadn’t left either.

  “That good a day, huh?” he said.

  Later, they went for a walk, meandering through the neighborhood, then straying west, as she sensed he might, through neighborhoods where the houses got bigger and farther apart. He had a homing instinct, and Bethany knew where they were going to end up long before they did: a pocket of undeveloped woodland tucked alongside a tributary upstream of the falls that gave the town it
s name. Matt had a need to torture himself with this place, and all it had taken from them.

  She regarded this the way she regarded the beer he brought with him, even on a stroll: didn’t like it, but didn’t object. Let Matt be Matt. Let him have what he needs to get by, because without it, it could be so much worse. Everything would be worse soon enough.

  The trees were not packed tightly here, except for a few small, compact groves. It was mostly an open field, with thickets enclosing the sides like walls, and a stream ran through it. Matt and his friends used to put on safety goggles and thick sweatshirts and have BB gun fights here. Nobody had ever lost an eye, a tooth. Welts were as bad as it got. No wonder they’d gotten the idea they were blessed.

  They were boys and, for a time, invincible.

  In some other life, in some other town, she might have had a son just like that. She would’ve welcomed the prospect of fretting over every little injury and wound that, in the puzzling way of boys, grounded him with pride and meaning. She would’ve welcomed a daughter like this just the same.

  Only once had the Ortho-Novum failed. She’d kept the procedure quiet, kept Matt in the dark altogether. Nothing good could have come of him knowing. It wasn’t that he would have disagreed with her decision; more that she didn’t want to give him one more thing to regret.

  The hoofprints. Once here, Matt always went for the hoofprints.

  It was what people called them, anyway—a row of inches-deep depressions striding along the broadest clearing in the field. They hadn’t filled in during the twenty-two years they’d been there, as if something about their creation had seared them in place for all time. Life shunned them. Not even the most opportunistic weeds grew in them, or anywhere close.

  Honestly, Bethany didn’t know if they were hoof prints or not. They were the right shape, cloven, like mirrored images of half-moons. Then again, each one was as big around as a truck tire.

  She’d been a child when the event had happened, not yet ten, and although she hadn’t witnessed it, she’d heard so many stories that it felt as if she had. Not that the stories were necessarily trustworthy. People were liars, even if they didn’t mean to be. By now the strands of folklore had wound so inextricably around fact that it was impossible to twist them apart and get to the truth of things.

  Under the black watch of a springtime new moon, the town had been lit for an instant by a flash of light. It wasn’t lightning, though—no account ever mentioned a storm. It was more like reports describing the bright death of a meteorite. Nor was it white. Blue, some said. Others insisted it was green, while still others couldn’t pin down a color at all, only that they didn’t find it natural.

  A fearsome wind had kicked up, too, and that lasted longer. Residents in the north of town swore it blew south, while those in the south swore it blew north. On the east side, they said it swept in toward the west, and here on the west side, the direction depended on how far out people were. They couldn’t all be right, unless something had punched a hole in the night, like knocking out a window in an airliner that sucked the air in from everywhere at once.

  Maybe it had.

  People said that something appeared through the trees that night, big enough to have appeared above even the tallest ones. Some reported a churning cloud, while others swore they witnessed vast legs striding through the woods, coarse with bristling black hair and cloven hooves. A cloud with legs? Oh, why not. Something had changed the fundamentals of reality here.

  She couldn’t recall the first time she heard someone, in a low voice, speak of the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. It was just one of those things you grew up with, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

  “You think it’ll come back, right here?” Matt said. “Is that the way it’s supposed to happen?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Beasley, any of them, they’ve never said anything about what to expect? Not even at the end, or when they were doped out on the good meds?”

  “No.”

  He looked at her in a way that made it feel like they were strangers. He was just thirty-two, and already his face was too lined. “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t keep it to yourself just to spare me?”

  Briefly, she wondered if he knew about the abortion after all, how she’d suctioned out the life they’d created rather than see it born into a short, cruel existence as chattel.

  “Most of those guys,” she said, “I think they were in denial about what they did. They wouldn’t admit they’d done anything at all, much less speculate about what the consequences were going to be like. Not to us, anyway. Why would they? They knew by the time it happened, they weren’t going to be around to worry about it.”

  “Yeah, but … they had kids, grandkids.”

  “Denial can cover a lot of ground when you’re determined.”

  They walked and he drank and they pondered issues whose understanding would forever be denied them.

  “How does something like that even get started in a town like this?” Matt said. “I bet they didn’t even mean it.”

  “I don’t know about that. Whatever happened here, it didn’t happen because they were half-assed about it.”

  “At first, I mean, when they first started. I’ll bet it was like some small town, good old boy version of the Hellfire Clubs.”

  “Hellfire Clubs?” This was a new one. “That sounds ominous enough to me.”

  “It wasn’t. They were just something a bunch of upper crust English and Irish politicians and other outwardly pious types did for a lark. An excuse for them to get together to frolic with whores and feel like bad boys.” Matt looked at her, and couldn’t have missed her puzzled expression, how this was in his storehouse of knowledge. “I used to read up on stuff like that. When I was a kid, once I got to a certain point, all my favorite bands and musicians, they seemed like there was something dangerous about them. You’d hear how they were into things. Secret things. It seemed like maybe they knew stuff nobody else did. It seemed like it should be true. How else could they be so good at what they did? But eventually you realize it’s just an image.”

  “That must’ve been disappointing,” she said.

  “I don’t know what was worse.” He threw his empty can to the ground, because who cared anymore. “Deciding it’s all bullshit? Or realizing there’s something to it after all, and these goobers here were the ones who figured it out.”

  Beasley remained stable over the days to come, but word of his condition had spread. There was no way of keeping a thing like that quiet. Everyone in Tanner Falls had a vested interest in his health, and its insistence on declining set off a fresh wave of subdued panic.

  One would think they’d gotten it out of their systems years ago. But no.

  At the sound of a daybreak ruckus on her day off, Bethany looked out to see the Hendersons, across the street and three houses down, stuffing their sedan with as much as it could hold. Middle-aged husband, middle-aged wife, twenty-something son still living with them because job prospects were dim. They loaded and argued, squabbled and hurried, and then, in a streak of taillights, they were gone.

  As if nobody had ever thought of this before.

  If it was happening on their block, she assumed that fear had pushed others across town into trying it, too, hopes bolstered by the mantra of the desperate: Maybe this time will be different.

  Yeah, good luck with that.

  Nearly everyone able-bodied enough to do it had attempted at least once over the last two decades to get away. Failed efforts, all. The early, unsuspecting ones were those who simply had normal, greener-pastures reasons to move along. The later refugees fled in terror, compelled by the very inability of others to leave, and the rumors that had started to spread about why the town shrugged off every attempt at modernity and change.

  They’d tried everything from moving vans to impulse exits with little more than the clothes on their backs. They’d driven cars, taken buses, ridden motorcycle
s. The more adventurous ones had attempted it on foot, as if to steal away with no more noise than what their shoes made would let them pass beneath the notice of what waited and watched, ready to corral them like straying livestock.

  Everyone, it seemed, had to prove it for themselves, and often more than once.

  They would be back.

  The Hendersons would be back.

  While Matt slept, she made coffee and set up watch from the porch that night, all cool air and the creaking of crickets. How more normal a night could anyone ask for? Except for the first aid kit by her chair, just in case.

  The moon had arced halfway across the sky before things started to happen, when the streetlights flickered and dimmed. However these entities moved, it seemed to create electromagnetic disturbances. It seemed more than a simple factor of visibility. Dimensions, some speculated. They moved in and out of different dimensions.

  Bethany had no recollection of the experience herself.

  One moment they weren’t there, and the next they were, like full-grown trees sprouted on the Hendersons’ lawn. But trees didn’t scuttle from one place to another, or wield their branches like arms. They were visible only for a few moments, more shadows than details. Far too tall to fit in the house, the three of them simply smashed a pair of second-story windows with their crowns of appendages and jammed their cargo through, then scuttled away from the house and faded from view as if they’d never been there at all.

  Had they been aware of her watching them? One seemed to pause and turn her way, but nothing about them remotely suggested that they had faces, much less eyes.

  Surprisingly few people had seen them, even though most had been carried by them. These, the general consensus went, were but a few of the Thousand Young, left behind to enforce the pact.

  She grabbed her bag and hurried for the Hendersons’ house. She wondered how far they’d gotten, and where the car was, if they’d ever see it again, or the possessions they’d deemed important enough to carry. If they would even care. In maintaining the status quo, vehicles didn’t seem to matter. People were paramount.