The Best of the Best Horror of the Year

by Ellen Datlow

  Cahokia was a trade centre, of course, the apex of an empire; makes sense they’d do things big, lay on the bling. This, meanwhile ... this is different: smaller, meaner. The faces of the three prime skeletons have been smashed, deliberately, as if in an attempt to make them unrecognizable, a spasm of disgust or desecration; God knows, Aretha’s spent more than enough time piecing them back together to know how effective that first attack was, how odd that it should be followed up with what reads as an almost equally violent avalanche of reverence. But then there’s the cap-stone, the lid, the flensing and the ochre, plus the ochre-saturated grave goods pile itself—all added later, at what had to be great cost to the givers. Like a belated apology.

  No retainers, though. Not here.

  Not where anybody’s thought to look, as yet.

  This last thought jolts Aretha out of half-sleep at last, making her sit up so sharply she almost falls over, a blinding surge of pain stitching temple to temple; holds herself still on her sleeping bag, breathing slowly as possible to thwart nausea. She presses her fingers up against the edge of her eyesockets until white dots flicker behind her eyelids, forcing the pain back by pressure and sheer will, until—gradually—the agony recedes. The minute she’s able, she slips her boots back on, grabs her excavation spade and trowel and ducks out of her tent.

  The mist, cool on her flushed face, brings a moment’s relief. Not sure if her giddiness is inspiration or fever, Aretha heads for the grave pit as fast as she can.

  The light is dimming; she won’t have long. Can’t see anybody working, which suggests they’re at dinner, in the chow tent. But no, not all of them, it turns out. Because as she pauses by the main tent, she can hear Dr. Begg arguing with someone yet again—over the sat-phone, this time. Who?

  Curiosity gets the better of her. She edges up to the tent’s outer wall, holding her breath.

  “... don’t know who she knows, is my point, Gammé,” Begg says. Aretha frowns, translating: Gammé for grandmother, the elder who helped swing the tribal council towards permitting this dig in the first place; Aretha’s never heard Begg sound this uncomfortable with her. “But if it’s somebody with enough clout, somebody who decides they don’t want to honour the arrangement any more—” She stops; sighs. “Might be more money involved, sure. Maybe not. And maybe money’s not what we should be thinking about, right now.”

  A longer pause. “Well, you saw the pictures, right? Yeah, they’re the ones Tat already sent. So if people start agreeing with her—” A beat. “Okay, what? No, I’m not going to do that. No. Because this is science, not story-time, that’s why, and by those standards, what Tat says makes sense. Muddying the waters with mythology isn’t going to—hey, you there? Hello? Hello?”

  No reply, obviously; the receiver slams down, bang. Sometimes the phone cuts out for no reason, even with satellite help—vagaries of location, technology, all that. So: “Oh, fuck me,” Begg mutters, and goes trudging away, still swearing at herself under her breath.

  Mythology?

  There was a moment, back in Week One ... yes, she remembers it now. Sitting around the one smoking camp-fire they’d ever risked as the tarp above dipped and sloshed, Lewin asking Begg to fill in the tribal history of this particular area and Begg replying, slightly snappish, that there wasn’t one, as such: Lots of stories, that’s all; heroes and monsters, that kind of shit. “We don’t go up there much, that place, ’cause of the—”

  —and a word here, something Aretha’d never heard before, clipped and odd: buack, paguk, baguck. Something like that.

  (bakaak)

  Bakaak in Ojibwe, pakàk in Algonquin, a version of Begg’s voice corrected, from somewhere deep inside. It’s an Anishinaabe aadizookaan, a fairytale. They split the difference, usually, and call it Baykok.

  Like the Windigo, Morgan suggested, but Begg shook her head. The point of the Windigo, she replied, was that a Windigo started out human, while the Baykok never was.

  It’s a bunch of puns stuck together. Bakaak means “skeleton,” “bones draped in skin”; thus bakaakadozo, to be thin, skinny, poor. Or bakaakadwengwe, to have a thin face—bekaakadwaabewizid, an extremely thin being. Not to mention how it yells shrilly in the night, bagakwewewin, literally clear or distinct cries, and beats warriors to death with a club, baagaakwaa’ige. Flings its victim’s chest open, baakaakwaakiganezh, to eat their liver ....

  Why the liver? Aretha asked, but Begg just shrugged.

  Why any damn thing? It’s a boogeyman, so it has to do something gross. Like giants grinding bones to make their bread.

  You could do that, you know, as long as you added flour, Huculak put in, from the fire-pit’s far side. Just a flatbread, though. Bone-meal won’t bond with yeast.

  Thank you, Martha Stewart.

  Is that what Begg’s grandmother just said, over the ’phone? That the skeletons look like Baykok—Baykoks? That Huculak’s right, and also wrong? That Begg—

  Oh, but Aretha’s head is burning now, bright and hot, like the Windigo’s legendary feet of fire. So hot the raindrops should sizzle on her skin, except they don’t; just keep on falling, soft-sharp, solid points of cold pocking down through the sodden, pine-scented air. And the pit gaping open for her at her feet, a toothless, mud-filled mouth.

  She drops to her knees, scrambles over the lip, slides down messily inside.

  By the time Morgan comes by it’s ... well, later. Aretha doesn’t know by how much, but the light’s just about completely gone, and she’s long since been reduced to scraping blindly away at the grave’s interior walls with her gloved fingers. Looks up to see Morgan blinking down at her through a flashlight beam, and smiles—or thinks she does; her face is far too rigid-numb at this point for it to be any sort of certainty.

  “‘Lo, Morgan,” she calls up, not stopping. “How was dinner?”

  “Uh, okay. What ... what’re you doing down there, Ree? Exactly?”

  “I have to dig.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. Are you okay? You don’t look okay.”

  “I feel okay, though. Mainly. I mean—” Aretha takes a second to shake her head, almost pausing; the pit-walls blur on either side of her, heave dangerously, like they’re breathing. Then: “It doesn’t matter,” she concludes, mainly to herself, and goes back to her appointed task.

  “Um, all right.” Morgan steps back, raising her voice incrementally with each new name: “Tat, Dr. Huculak, c’mon over here for a minute, will you ... like, right now? Anne-Marie? Dr. Lewin!”

  They cluster ’round the edge like flies on a wound, staring in as Aretha just keeps on keeping on, almost up to her wrists now in muck. “Aretha,” Dr. Lewin begins, at last, “you do know we mapped out that area already, yes? Since a week ago.”

  “I remember, doctor.”

  “You took the measurements, as I recall.”

  “I remember.”

  “Okay, so stop, damnit,” Huculak orders. “You hear me? Look at what you’re doing, for Christ’s sake! Anne-Marie—”

  Begg, however, simply shakes her head, hunkering down. “Shut up, Tat,” she says, without turning. To Aretha: “Howson, Ree ... it’s Aretha, right?” Aretha nods. “Aretha, did you maybe hear me, before? Up there, on the sat-phone?”

  “Yes, Dr. Begg.”

  “Uh huh; shit. Look ... the Baykok’s just a story, Ree. It’s folklore. You’re not gonna find a, what—separate bunch of human bones in there, is that what you’re thinking? Like a larder?”

  Still scratching: “I’m not thinking that, no.”

  “Then what are you thinking?”

  Aretha wipes mud off on her cheek, gets some in her mouth, spits brown. “Sacrifice,” she answers, once her lips are clear again. “Like at Cahokia; slaves for the underworld, not food. But then again, who knows? Might’ve been both.”

  “Uh huh. How long you been down there, Ree?”

  “I don’t know. How long did they co-exist, Neanderthals and Homo habilis? ‘Cause they did, right? I’m right about that.
Lived long enough to share the same lands, even interbreed, enough so some people have Neanderthal DNA ....”

  “That’s the current theory,” Lewin agrees, sharing a quick, dark look with Begg. But: “The hell’s she saying?” Huculak demands of Lewin, at almost the same time. “Elyse, don’t you vet your damn volunteers? We need to get her out, back to the Rez at least, get her airlifted somewhere—”

  “Just shut up, Tat,” Begg repeats, still not turning. “Morgan, you’re her friend—on my count, okay? One ... two ....”

  But that, precisely, is when the wall of the grave-pit finally gives way. Releases a sudden avalanche of half-liquid earth that sweeps Aretha back, pins her under, crowns and crushes her alike on a swift, dark flood of roots and stones and bones, bones, bones.

  Here they are, I was right, she barely has time to think, reeling delirious, her arms full of trophies, struggling to raise them high. See? See? I was right, they’re here, we’re

  (here)

  But who’s that, back a little further beyond her team’s shocked rim-ring, peering down on her as well? That tall, thin figure with its cocked head, its burning, side-set eyes? Its featureless face carved from jet-black stone?

  She hears its scream in her mind, thin but distinct, a far-flung cry. The wail of every shattered skull-piece laid back together and set ringing, tuned to some distant tone: shell-bell, blood-hiss. Words made flesh, at long last.

  (here, yes)

  (as we always have been)

  (as we always will)

  Aretha comes back to herself slowly, lying on a cot in the main tent, pain-paralyzed: hurt all over, inside and out. The out is mainly bruises, scrapes, a general wrenched ache, but the inside—that’s something different. Like the world’s worst yeast infection, a spike through her bladder, pithing her up the middle and watching her writhe; whole system clenched at once against her own core, a furled agony-seed, forever threatening to bloom.

  She’d whimper, even weep, but she can barely bear to breathe. Which at least makes it easy—easier—to keep quiet while the other talk around her, above her, about her.

  “Baykok, huh?” Dr. Huculak’s saying, while Dr. Begg makes a weird snorting noise. “Looks more like a damn prehistoric serial killer’s dump-site, to me. And how’d she know where to dig, anyhow?”

  Morgan: “She said she had a dream. Whispered it, when I was taking her vitals.”

  Dr. Lewin sounds worried; Aretha wishes she thought it was for the right reasons. “Yes, as to that. How bad’s her damage?”

  “That’s one way to put it,” Huculak mutters, as Morgan draws a breath, then replies: “Well ... she’s fine, I guess, believe it or not. Physically, anyway.”

  “What about the—”

  Morgan’s voice gets harder. “Those scars are old, not fresh. Surgical. And none of our business.”

  Lewin sighs. “If they mean what I think they mean, I’m not happy with ... ‘her’ choice to misrepresent ‘herself,’ on the project application form.”

  “Can we not use bullshit scare-quotes, please?” Morgan asks. “I mean—check the University rules and regs, doc. Pronouns are up to the individual, these days.”

  “Is biology? Aretha is—is female, just because ‘she’ says ‘she’ is?”

  “Uh, yeah, Dr. L, that’s exactly what that means. Just like a multiracial person’s black if they say they are, or anybody’s a Christian if they say so, even if they don’t go to church.” The fierceness in Morgan’s voice puts a lump in Aretha’s throat. She cracks her eyes open, tries to find words to thank her with, but her lips won’t work; all that comes out is a dry clicking, some insect clearing its throat from inside her mouth.

  But Huculak’s already moved into the pause anyhow, adding: “Like those things in the pit’d be human, if they could say so.”

  At this, Begg turns, confronting her. “Excuse me, things? We’re back there again? What the fuck happened to parallel evolution?”

  “Oh, I don’t know—tell me again how your elders think of them as ancestors, Anne-Marie. Tell me they don’t call them monsters.”

  “Sure, okay: this is Baykok country, like I said that first week, which is why somebody non-tribal—some hiker from Toronto—literally had to stumble over the cap-stone for us to even know it was here, and why we had to cut our way in, after. But all that proves is that superstition’s a powerful thing. My Gammé’s in her eighties, and frankly, when it comes to archaeology, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  Huculak scoffs. “Yeah, and Schliemann never found eight different versions of Troy by looking where Homer said to, either.”

  “Oh, so what—folktales are fact disguised, is that the song we’re singing? Schliemann using The Iliad as a guidebook was the exception, not the rule; he got lucky, and what he found was not what he’d been looking for, either. Which is exactly what’s happened here, all over.”

  “A pile of bones that don’t look human, with a much larger pile of bones attached which do,” says Huculak, voice heavy with sarcasm. “Yeah, sure, no big mystery there.”

  “Well, in point of fact, no. You heard Aretha: retainer sacrifice, like in a hundred other places, and do you really think we need monsters for that?” For once, Begg sounds more exhausted than angry. “It’s classic Painted Bird syndrome, Tat. Whatever makes a person different enough from the herd to be rendered ... pariah, alien, monstrous: this little family with their wide-spaced eyes and their snake-spines, or my Gammé when she came back from Residential School, hair cut and wearing white kid clothes, barely able to speak her own language anymore. Or Aretha here, for that matter, once Elyse got a look at her chest ....”

  Lewin lifts her hands. “Don’t bring me into this, please.”

  “But you’re already in it. We all are.” Now it’s Huculak’s turn to sound uncharacteristic, all her usual snark gone. With some difficulty, Aretha turns her head, sees the woman bent down over something long, greyish-brown and filthy: one of the fresh-dug bones, plucked from a teetery, cross-stacked pyramid of such, off the gurney she stands next to. “I mean, I’d need to do a full lab workup to verify, but some of these remains—they still have flesh on them, under the muck. Like, non-mummified flesh.”

  Dr. Lewin, blinking: “You mean they’re—”

  “Recent. Yeah.”

  “But they were buried. How—?”

  “You tell me. Anne-Marie?”

  Begg opens and closes her mouth. “Well,” she starts, “that’s obviously—um. Okay. I mean, that’s ...” She deflates, slumping. “I don’t know what that is,” she says at last, near-inaudibly.

  You’d think Huculak would be proud to have thrown her chief rival off so thoroughly, but no; she looks equally taken aback, almost scared. Lewin just stands there, studying the tent’s tarp floor, like she’s misplaced something; above, rain drums the roof, incessant, a dull cold tide. Morgan’s gaze flicks from one to the next as the silence stretches ever more thin, disbelieving, ’til it finally falls on Aretha, and her eyes widen. “Shit—Ree! You’re awake!” She hurries over to the cot and kneels down, stroking Aretha’s forehead. “How you feeling, babe?”

  Babe. In Morgan’s mouth, the word sounds good enough to make Aretha cry, or want to.

  “Hurts,” she husks instead, through chapped lips. “All through my groin, lower abdomen ...” She tries to move and hisses, agony spiking her joints. “Elbows and knees, ankles, too.”

  Morgan puts the inside of one wrist to Aretha’s forehead, then takes her pulse; Aretha’s creeped out by how pale her own wrist looks when hefted slackly in the tent’s lantern-light, its veins slightly distended and purpled. “Fever feels like it’s gone down, at least,” Morgan tells her, attempting an unconvincing smile. “But since that’s as far as my Girl Guide first aid training goes, all I can tell you beyond that is you need a hospital, like now. Dr. Begg, is the sat-phone working again?”

  “Um, no, not yet.”

  “Fine. You know what? It’s half an hour back to the
access road; give me that damn thing and I’ll get it to where it can get a signal out, then call an airlift to get her down to Thunder Bay.”

  Lewin puts a hand to her mouth, Victorian as all hell. “Oh dear, not at night, in this rain! What if you get lost, slip and fall, or—?”

  “Ma’am, I’ll be fine, my boots are hiking-rated. Seriously.”

  But: “No, Morgan, trust me, bad bad idea,” Huculak says, Begg nodding agreement. “Wait for daybreak, for the weather to clear, that’ll free up the signal link—”

  Both stop as Morgan, already bent to lace her boots tighter, slashes one hand across the air.

  “I have a compass and a map,” she tells them, not looking up, “a flashlight, a knife, and I’m not gonna melt. Plus it’s safer on foot than trying to drive, when it’s like this. Anybody wants to go instead of me, I’m amenable, but you better speak now or forever hold your peace: Ree’s my friend, and I’m not putting her through one second more of this than we have to.”

  Straightening, she glares ’round, hands on hips, but no one objects. So she stuffs the blocky sat-phone away and ducks down with a shrug instead, planting a swift kiss on Aretha’s forehead—too light to fully track, here and then gone, almost hallucinatory. Like a promise.

  “See you soon,” she murmurs, swinging her knapsack onto her back.

  But: no, that same voice hisses, from inside Aretha’s mind. I—

  (we)

  —think not.

  Aretha doesn’t remember falling asleep. When she wakes, the pain has diminished astonishingly; not gone, still twinging through her hips and knees when she swings herself into a tentative sitting position, but so much less it’s near-euphoric. She feels light-headed, insubstantial; even the forest’s damp pine-reek doesn’t burn the way it used to. For a few moments, she simply enjoys breathing with something like her normal ease.

  Then she sees the light, or lack thereof. The similar lack of company. No sat-phone on the table, just dirt and bones. No Morgan.