The Best of the Best Horror of the Year

by Ellen Datlow

  They’d locked their front door when they left this morning, but had overlooked the back, so she let herself into the house that way. It was as silent as it was dark, until she blindly slapped a light switch in the kitchen, then heard them overhead as they started to awaken. They got louder as she made her way up the stairs—the weeping, the sounds on the verge of screams, as if they hadn’t yet processed what had happened. These were not cries of physical pain. She was intimately familiar with those. These were worse, in a way. Pain could be managed. Hopelessness and despair came from a deeper place than nerve endings.

  She found them lying huddled in the shards of their windows. Cuts, bruises, scrapes—that was the worst of it. She could treat those. The trauma might take a lot longer to get over.

  More likely, Old Mad Donald would be dead before they had a chance.

  As went the Hendersons, so went the rest of Tanner Falls.

  Few things were more contagious than panic, and few people were in a better position to gauge it than hospital staff. The accident rate spiked again, the way it did whenever fresh fears arose over Donald Beasley’s mortality, and those prone to dulling their fears with drink did what drunks often do.

  Had Beasley and the others foreseen this, in their selfishness?

  The suicide rate spiked, too … or rather, attempted suicides. It never worked. They were brought in by paramedics and frantic families, and occasionally they came in under their own ghastly power—people who should’ve been dead, bodies broken, veins opened, brains exposed, yet somehow life had been refused exit. There was nothing worse to treat than screaming people who should’ve been in the morgue, and knew it; who wanted to be there, and were denied it.

  Had Beasley and the rest meant for this to happen, in trying to preserve the town they’d claimed to love?

  All along, townsfolk had continued to die of natural causes, but cheating was not allowed. Which didn’t keep the desperate from trying anyway. They learned the folly of it no better than those who tried to flee, but at least the runners weren’t shattering their bodies in the process. In trying to kill themselves, they had instead been slowly killing her sense of compassion, which made it all the easier for Bethany to hate them for it.

  The adults, anyway.

  It wasn’t in her—not yet—to hate today’s casualty. Allison, the girl’s name. She’d hung from her back yard noose all night, and by the time her father discovered her this morning, her slim neck was stretched by inches. This soon, it was impossible to say if she would ever hold her head upright again. She was fifteen years old.

  You did what you could. You made them comfortable. You tried not to contract their despair.

  This was no way to live. For anyone.

  And as she needed to do more and more, once a crisis was over, Bethany retreated into the hospital hall to shake it out. Soon there followed the smell of cigarette smoke. She’d come to welcome the stink of it, for these little moments of decompression with Dr. Richard.

  “There’s no meaning in this anymore,” said the man who, two weeks ago, vowed to crawl inside Beasley’s chest before letting him die.

  For the first time in her life, she wished she smoked too, because if she did, that was exactly what she would be doing now. She pointed to the fuming stick between his fingers. “Those things’ll kill you, you know.”

  “If only.” He seemed to contemplate snuffing it out, then didn’t. “That’s been the idea. But I don’t think cancer likes me.”

  “The ones who die naturally … do you really think they’ve escaped what’s coming?” she asked. “Or did they just get scooped up earlier than the rest of us?”

  He shrugged. “A moot point for me. It was worth a try.”

  The hallway windows overlooked a stretch of parking lot, and beyond that stood a neighborhood of grand old houses, and beyond that the buildings of downtown, most prominently the Tanner Hotel, with that hateful sign they could never be rid of. It was the tallest thing around. They all lived under it, no matter where their homes were.

  “You know, I’ve never believed in life at all costs. I’ve been called a heretic for it. Just not by anybody whose good opinion of me mattered,” Richard told her. “I could never see the value of using extraordinary measures to squeeze day after day of life out of a patient when the only thing we’re accomplishing is prolonging suffering. Quality of life always seemed the better benchmark to me. Somehow I got away from that.”

  As they stared out the window, from somewhere beyond view came the sound of another siren.

  “Is this really quality of life?”

  “Matt, my husband, says we should go out to Route Fifteen and repaint the Welcome to Tanner Falls sign to read Death Row,” she said. “But of course, that would be change.”

  “Can’t have that.” Richard clucked disapproval. “Don’t most patients, when it’s terminal, want to be the ones to choose when they die? I think they do.”

  “It’s the last decision they can control. At least, it should be.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “I think I’ll have a word with the mayor.”

  She felt the weight of responsibility bearing down from above, from Donald Beasley’s room on the second floor. How nice to be rid of it.

  “Are you getting at what I think you are?” she asked.

  “Probably.”

  So it had come to this. After a moment’s shock, she was surprisingly at peace with it. Then thought of her fellow nurse, Janet, sitting watch over the most hated man in the town’s history. I’d start with his eyes …

  “You need to offer people more than just a choice.” She couldn’t believe the words coming out of her. But it had come to this. “You need to offer them participation.”

  On the day of the special election, she took another turn as watch-nurse, sitting at Donald Beasley’s bedside, listening to the reassuring beep of the cardiac monitor, watching the rise and fall of his chest. Machines hummed and puffed. His face and arms were a topography of wrinkles and tubes.

  He was awake, even cognizant. He studiously avoided her, preferring instead to look straight ahead at the far wall, until, after an hour of being ignored, Bethany scooted her chair close enough to lean on the bed rail, and to smell the dry musty odor of him, so he couldn’t pretend her away any more.

  “I get it,” she told him. “I really do. How scared you all must have been. That’s the last word any of you would’ve used with each other, or with yourselves, but that’s exactly what you were. Scared. Grown men as scared as little boys when the bully shows up to take a toy truck away.”

  The more she had to say, the more he creaked his head away from her, toward the window and its view of the town that despised him.

  “No, I get it. The whole world must’ve looked like it was changing all at once back then, and none of it into a place you wanted to go. Guys like my husband, they grew their hair out and started playing music you couldn’t understand. Girls like me, they got birth control pills and started realizing there could be a life beyond the kitchen and the crib. We discovered drugs you shot-and-a-beer types never dreamed of.”

  Now that she’d started, she couldn’t turn it off.

  “And black people, there was no keeping them to the back of the bus anymore, was there? It didn’t matter how many of their leaders bigots like you shot, or how many dogs or firehoses you turned on them, they were going to keep coming no matter what, and that must’ve scared you most of all.”

  Under his sheet, Beasley quivered with what she hoped was impotent rage.

  “You armchair patriots, you had a war the country was turning against, and deep down, maybe you even suspected that the men who wanted to keep it going were lying to you whenever it fit their agenda, only you were too dug in to admit it.”

  She wanted tears from him. Maybe he was finally too dried out to weep.

  “The world was leaving you behind. You cowards. Everything was slipping away from you. You were probably afraid someone like Charles Manson was goin
g to show up any day, if you didn’t do something. I get it. So if you couldn’t stop the rest of the world from moving on, you wanted to stay hunkered down here in Mayberry while it did. And I can’t blame you for that, for being cowards, because that’s what cowards do. It’s the nature of the beast to cringe.”

  Under the sheet, his shallow breath had visibly quickened, and the cardiac monitor pulsed more rapidly.

  “But how do you go from that to sacrificing everybody else’s lives just to sustain your own illusions a little longer? That’s a whole different level of greed. A bunch of goddamn sociopaths, the lot of you.”

  If he had a massive heart attack now, that would be the most merciful thing for him. But he didn’t. Good.

  “How much could you all really have loved your town when you bargained it away to something that shouldn’t even exist? Just to keep it the way it was, until the last of your little group was dead, and then to hell with the rest of us, because we were only … what, bargaining chips?”

  At last, with effort, Beasley rolled his head back to face her.

  “The Goat,” he whispered, slowly, with a sound like dry reeds. “The Black Goat … we never thought she would answer.”

  Maybe Matt was right. Maybe this whole unconscionable situation began as a stupid lark. Sad little men, still frolicking with whores and pretending to be bad boys, desperate to hold onto what was theirs a little longer, a little longer.

  “Here’s something else you never thought of.” She shouldn’t have been telling him, but it seemed important that he experience dread, the same as the rest of them. “Ever since people started to figure this out, the only thing that’s kept you alive and whole is their fear of what will happen when you die. But even something like that runs its course. So you may not get off as easily as you thought. You know what’s happening right now? The entire town is voting on what to do with you. To see if they’re willing to trade these last few days, weeks, whatever we have...whatever you have … for the satisfaction of making you suffer.”

  And there—there it was. The terror in his eyes. It was what they all needed.

  “I already voted before I came to work,” she said. “I voted in favor of it.”

  To the surprise of few, the special ballot initiative passed: 3,658 in favor, 2,077 against, and another 5,100 or so who didn’t bother turning out one way or another.

  Judgment Day, people were calling it, and preachers argued against it with all the effectiveness of street corner lunatics. The town wanted blood now. There was no divine intervention coming, so they would take what they could get.

  It happened in the town square. Thousands filled the streets, while thousands more stayed home. On the courthouse lawn, they erected the platform used for speeches on Veterans Day, Memorial Day, a half-dozen different kinds of parade days.

  The mayor was there to officiate, and police officers to keep order, and when Donald Beasley was brought in an ambulance, the crowd parted like water to let it through. His care team was down to just two: one physician, Dr. Richard, and one nurse, her colleague, Janet Swain. Even though they were overseeing his death, their job was still the same: to keep him alive as long as possible.

  And Janet got her wish. She drew first blood, taking Beasley’s left eye. He’d been strapped to a gurney that was propped upright, so the crowd could see it happen, and a roaring cheer went up at the sight of the emptied socket.

  He may have been seventy-six years old, and looked at least a hundred, but he squealed like a feeble child.

  Out in the crowd, a few rows away, Bethany averted her gaze to the ground and squirmed her hand into Matt’s, to hold tight for as long as they had remaining.

  “Do you want to leave?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “If you vote for something like this, you should be prepared to see it through.”

  Anyone who wished it got to take a turn, ushered into a line that filed up the steps on one side of the platform, descended on the other, and as far as what happened in the middle, that was up to them. Some were content to curse Beasley, others to spit on him. The rest were not so easily sated. They slapped him, sliced him, pried off nails with pliers. They took his ears. They knocked out teeth. They ground cigarettes into his forehead, and drizzled trenches into his skin with droppers full of acid.

  The cheering quit long before the line was through.

  People stayed, people left, people sobbed with a thousand different sorrows. Some were sick. Others wanted to get back in the line again. A few started laughing and never stopped.

  Bethany reminded herself that there was a time when Tanner Falls had been a great place to grow up. Scrape the veneer away, though, and this was what you got.

  The line kept advancing even after Beasley was pronounced dead, and why not. He may have cheated them out of tomorrow, but they weren’t about to let him cheat them out of one last chance to take it out on his corpse.

  They had an hour, give or take, before the sky pulsed with a single flash of light—green, perhaps, or blue, or maybe it was no color in the known spectrum. A fearsome wind kicked up, blowing west, pulled toward the source of the flash. They had felt this wind before.

  She clutched Matt’s hand so hard it had to hurt him. Had to.

  All around them, their neighbors shrieked and scattered by the hundreds, and though they were buffeted from all sides, she and Matt decided not to bother. When had running ever worked?

  “I had this dream last night,” he told her, his voice starting to shake. “It felt so real. As real as life. I dreamed I was given some sort of pipe to play for God in the chaos at the heart of the universe.”

  Soon it became visible over distant trees and rooftops, dark and boiling, as mercurial in appearance as a storm cloud. So this was what they had summoned, called up, bargained with … this, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. It was a deity from nightmares still seeking its hold in the world, and in the east, the north, the south, wherever people had fled, they all soon found reason to shriek there, as well. Tanner Falls resounded with it. A thousand young could round up a lot of stragglers.

  “So maybe we’ll be okay,” Matt said.

  Closer, and closer still, it rent the air with a screech as if lightning could speak. It churned with mouths that opened and closed and reappeared elsewhere in the anarchy of its form.

  “Why,” she said, “would you ever think that?”

  Three blocks away, it detoured toward the hospital, passing by it, passing through it, this warehouse of failed suicides, and timeless moments later the sky disgorged a furious rain of meat and blood.

  “What if it could’ve had us all along?” Matt said. “But waited anyway?”

  It was coming.

  “Why would it have done that?”

  Coming for the town square.

  “Maybe it was curious. Maybe it wanted to see what we would do.”

  It was coming, as ground and pavement alike steamed beneath its pile-driver hooves.

  “And maybe now, here, today,” Matt said, “some of us finally became … worthy.”

  Bethany shut her eyes as tightly as her hand held Matt’s, as it bore down on them with the sound and fury of a cyclone.

  At last. At last. At long, elusive last …

  It was time to leave home.

  GRAVE GOODS

  GEMMA FILES

  Put the pieces back together, fit them against each other chip by chip and line by line, and they start to sing. There’s a sort of tone a skeleton gives off; Aretha Howson can feel it more than hear it, like it’s tuned to some frequency she can’t quite register. It resonates through her in layers: skin, muscle, cartilage, bone; whispers in her ear at night, secret, liquid. Like blood through a shell.

  The site they’re working on is probably Early Archaic—6,500 B.P. or so, going strictly by contents, thus beating out the recent Bug River find by almost 2,000 years. Up above the water-line, too, which makes it incredibly unlikely; most people lived in lakeshore camps b
ack then, right when the water levels were at their lowest after the remnant ice mass from the last glacial advance lying across the eastern outlet of Lake Superior finally wasted away, causing artificially high lake levels to drop over a hundred metres. Then isostatic rebound led to a gradual return, which is why most sites dating between the end of the Paleo-Indian and 4,000 years ago are largely under water.

  Not this one, though: it’s tucked up under a ridge of granite, surrounded by conifer old growth so dense they had to park the vehicles a mile away and cut their way in on foot, trying to disturb as little as possible. Almost a month later—a hideously cold, rainy October, heading straight for Hallowe’en—the air still stinks of sap, stumps bleeding like wounds. Dr. Anne-Marie Begg’s people hauled the trunks out one by one, cross-cut the longest ones, then loaded them up and took them back to the Reserve, where they’ll be planed in the traditional manner and used for rebuilding. Always a lot of home improvement projects on the go, over that way; that’s what Anne-Marie—Dr. Begg—says.

  Though Canadian ethics laws largely forbid excavations, once Begg brought Dr. Elyse Lewin in to consult, even the local elders had to agree this particular discovery merited looking into. They’ve been part of the same team practically since Begg was Lewin’s favourite TA, operating together out of Lakehead University, Thunder Bay; Lewin’s adept at handling funding and expedition planning, while Begg handles both tribal liaison duties and general PR, plus almost anything else to do with the media. It was Begg who sowed excitement about “Pandora’s Box,” as the pit’s come to be called, on account of the flat slab of granite—lightly incised with what look like ancestral petroglyphs similar to those found on Qajartalik Island, in the Arctic—stoppering it like a bottle. Incised on top and below, as Aretha herself discovered when they pried it apart, opening a triangular gap large enough to let her jump in; shone the flashlight downwards first, just far enough to check her footing before she landed—down on one knee, a soggy crouch, too cramped to straighten fully—then automatically reversed it, revealing those square-cut, coldly eyeless faces set in silent judgement right above her head.