Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (45 page)

    "Son of a bitch," I said.

    "He'd been so strong, all his life. He dragged them all right, but in the end it didn't matter. It didn't count for nothing. I just sat here, all this morning, watching them wolves eating. Funny, they kept walking around and around him, not knowing what to do, really. What to do with it all."

    I stared at the carcass, at the gnawed ribs and purple ice-flecked meat. "They'll be back for more," I said. "They earned it."

    "I'm thinking, Daniel, the same things over and over again. Funny how that happens, eh? I'm thinking about my rifle, and that taste filling my mouth. Metal. He'd been so strong, cut down just like that. And I'm thinking about this window, this one right in front of us, Daniel. Two panes each a quarter inch thick. How everything happened in absolute silence. And the only sound I knew, I know, is something I feel more than hear. It's probably psychological, eh, Daniel? But there's this tingling, like glass chimes, and there's this humming - both coming from my chest. It's fading, I think, Daniel."

    I shook my head, again and again, but he wasn't paying any attention to me. I didn't even know what I was saying no to, but in my head a voice kept asking, "Why?" Why? And Charlie, he kept answering me, he kept saying "Because, Daniel. Only because. Just because."

    "The strangest winter," Charlie said. "No way to explain it, any of it. My tongue turning bluer and bluer, getting stained deeper and deeper every time, the doc telling me it's psychological - what the hell is that supposed to mean?"

    We stood there for a long time, staring at the carcass. I wanted to cry, I wanted to shut my ears, stop the silence outside, never again let it in. But the tracks were cut too deep inside me. I'm not an old man. I don't think I'm very smart as far as young people go. I was never good at things they're good at. I'm not brave, and I'm sorry for that. I really am. I left Charlie that afternoon. I ran from him, across the lake, using one of the buck's trails. I pitched my tent on the other side of Jessica Lake. I could've gone farther but I didn't. I know it wasn't a tree shattering that woke me that night, made me jump up, staring into the darkness, heart pounding. I know that it wasn't a tree, and I'm sorry. Truly sorry.

19 - Glen Hirshberg - Miss Ill-Kept Runt

    
"My mother's anxiety would not allow her to remain where she was… What was it that she feared? Some disaster impended over her husband or herself. He had predicted evils, but professed himself ignorant of what nature they were. When were they to come?"

    -Charles Brockden Brown,
Wieland

    Chloe comes clinking out the front door into the twilight, pudding pop in one hand and a dragon in the other. The summer wind sets her frizzy brown hair flying around her, and she says, "Whoa," tilting up on one foot as though anything less than an F5 twister, a tag team of grizzly bears, a fighter jet could drag her and the fifteen pounds or so of bead necklace around her neck off the ground. The plastic baubles and seashell fragments and recently ejected baby teeth bump along her chest as she tilts, then straightens.

    "I told you to get in pyjamas," says her father from the side of the station wagon, where he's still trying to wedge the last book and pan boxes into the wall of suitcases and cartons separating the front seat from the way-back, where Chloe and her brother the Miracle will be riding, as always.

    "These
are
pyjamas," Chloe says, lifting the mass of beads so her father can see underneath.

    Sweating, exhausted before the drive even starts, her father smiles. Better still, the Miracle, who is already stretched in the way-back with his big-kid feet dangling out the open back door and his Pokemon cards spread all over the space Chloe is supposed to occupy, laughs aloud and shakes his head at her. In Chloe's world, there are only a few things better than pudding pops and beads. One of them is her older brother noticing, laughing. The baby teeth on her newest necklace are mostly for him; she actually thinks they look blah, too plain, also a little bitey. But she'd known he would like them.

    "Miss Ill-Kept Runt," her brother says, and goes back to his cards.

    She's just climbing into the back, enjoying the Miracle's feverish sweeping up of cards, his snapping,
"Wait"
and
"Don't!"
at her, when her mother emerges from the empty house. Freezing, Chloe watches her mother tighten the ugly grey scarf - it looks more like a dishrag - around her beautiful dark hair, linger a last, long moment in the doorway, and finally aim a single glance in the direction of her children. Chloe starts to lift her hand, but her mother is hurrying around the side of the station wagon, eyes down, and Chloe hears her drop into the passenger seat just before her father wedges the Miracle's feet inside the car and shuts the way-back door.

    "Stan," her mother says, in her new, bumpy voice, like a road with all the road peeled off. "Let's just
go."

    
It's the move, Chio.
That's what her father's been saying. For months, now.

    Her father's already in the driver's seat and the station wagon has shuddered to life under Chloe's butt and is making her necklaces rattle when her mother's door pops open, and all of a sudden she's there, pulling the back door up, blue-eyed gaze pouring down on Chloe like a waterfall. Chloe is surprised, elated, she wants to duck her head and close her eyes and bathe in it.

    "Happy birthday," her mother says, bumpy-voiced, and reaches to touch her leg, then touches the Miracle's instead. He doesn't look up from his cards, but he waves at her with his sneaker.

    "It's not my birthday yet," Chloe says, wanting to keep her mother there, prolong the moment.

    Her mother gestures towards the wall of boxes in the back seat. "We'll be driving most of the night. By the time I see your face again, it will be." And there it is - faint as a fossil in rock, but there all the same. Her mother's smile. A trace, anyway.

    
It really
has
been the move,
Chloe thinks, as her mother slams the door down like a lid.

    "Say goodbye to the house," her father says from up front, on the other side of the boxes. Chloe can't see him, and she realizes he sounds different, too. Far away, as though he's calling to her across a frothed-up river. But right on cue, she feels the rev,
rrruummm, rruummm;
it's reassuring, the thing he always does before he goes anywhere. She bets he's even turned around to give her his
go!
face, forgetting there's a wall of cardboard there.

    Then they are going, and Chloe is surprised to find tears welling in her eyes. They're not because she's sad. Why should she be, they're moving back to Minnesota to be by Grammy and Grum-py's, where they can water-ski every day, Grumpy says, and when Chloe says, "You can't water-ski in winter," Grumpy says, "Maybe
you
can't."

    But just for a moment, pulling out of the drive, she's crying, and the Miracle sits up, bumping his big-kid head against the roof and squishing her as he turns for a last look.

    "Bye, house," she says.

    "Pencil mouse," says the Miracle, and Chloe beams through her tears. It's her own game, silly-rhyme-pencil game, she made it up when she was three to annoy her brother into looking at her, and it mostly worked. But she couldn't ever remember him
playing
it.

    "Want to do speed?" she says, and the Miracle laughs. He always laughs now when she says that, but only because their father does. Her father has never said what's funny about it, and she doesn't think the Miracle knows, either.

    
"Play
speed," he answers, grinning, maybe to himself but because of her, so that doesn't matter. "In a minute." And he glances fast over his shoulder towards the wall of boxes and then turns away from her again temporarily.

    But Chloe has noticed that his grin is gone. And when she settles onto her shoulder blades and stretches out her legs to touch the door while her head brushes the back of the back seat, she realizes she can hear her mother over the rumbling engine, over the road bumping by.

    
"Oh, freeze,"
her mother is whispering, over and over. Or else,
"cheese."
Or
"please."

    It isn't the words, it's the whispering, and Chloe realizes she knows what her mother's doing, too: she's hunched forward, picking at the hem of her skirt on her knees, her pale, knobby knees.

    
Knees? Is that what she's saying?
No.
Please.

    "Bye, trees," Chloe whispers, watching the familiar branches pop up in her window to wave her away. The blue pine, the birch, the oak where her father
thinks
the woodpecker always knocks, the black-branched, leafless fire trees the crows pour out of every morning like spiders from a sac. After the fire trees comes the open stretch of road with no trees. The trees after that are ones she doesn't know, at least not by name, not to say hello or wave goodbye. Then come brand new trees.

    
"Please,"
comes her mother's voice from the front seat.

    "Dad, Gordyfoot," the Miracle all but shouts.

    "Right," comes her father's answer, not as shiny as usual but just as fast. Seconds later, the CD's on, and Chloe can't hear her mother any more.

    
Fire-trees,
Chloe is thinking, dreaming.
Fire on a hillside with no grass, in a ring of stones, but not warm enough. No matter how close she wriggles, she can't get close enough, she's been out on this mountainside with the grey rocks and grey snakes for too long, and this cold is old, so old, older than daylight, older than she is, she could jump
into
the fire and never be warm…

    Jerking, Chloe struggles up onto her elbows, almost laughing. She has never been camping, not that she can remember, the snakes she knows are green and slippy-shiny except when they're dead and the crows have been at them, and the only cold she's felt the last few months is the lily-pond water from the Berry's backyard.

    On the CD, Gordyfoot is singing about the Pony Man, who'll come at night to take her for a ride, and out the window, the sky's going dark fast with the sun gone. Chloe thinks it's funny that the Miracle asked for this CD, since he says he
hates
Gordon Lightfoot now. But she also understands, or thinks she does. It's hard to imagine being in the way-back, in the car with her parents, and listening to anything else. They keep the entire Gordon Lightfoot collection up there. Also, if the CD wasn't on, they'd have to listen to their mother.
Freeze. Please. Pencil-bees.

    For a while - long enough to get out of their neighbourhood and maybe even out of Missouri, half a CD or more - Chloe watches the wires in her window swing down, shoot up, swing down, shoot up. It's like starting and erasing an Etch a Sketch drawing, the window fills with trees and darkening sky and the thick, black lines of wire, then
boop -
telephone pole - and everything's blank for a second and then fills up again. Gets erased. Fills up again. Gets erased. Abruptly, it's all the way dark, and the wires vanish, and Venus pounces out of the sky. It's too bright, has been all summer, as though it's been lurking all day just on the other side of the sunlight.

    With the Miracle coiled away from her and his head tilted down, she can see the semi-circle scar at the base of his neck, like an extra mouth, almost smiling. Chloe has always thought of that spot as the place where the miracle actually happened, though she's been told that's just where the clip to stop blood flow went. The real scar is higher, under the hair, where part of her brother's skull got cut open when he was five years old. Of course, she'd been all of a week old at the time and doesn't remember any of it. But she loves the story. Her mother curled on the waiting room couch where she'd been ever since she'd given birth to Chloe, expecting the doctors to come at any moment and tell her that her son was dead. Her mother erupting from that couch one morning and somehow convincing the surgeons who'd said the surgery couldn't work that it
would
work, just by the way she said it. By the way she seemed to
know.
And it had worked. The pressure that had been building in the Miracle's brain bled away. Two days later, he woke up himself again.

    "What?" he says now, turning around to glower at her.

    "Speed, speed, speed," she chants.

    He glowers some more. But after a few seconds, he nods.

    "Yay," says Chloe.

    They can barely see the playing cards, which makes the game even more fun. Plus, the piles won't stay straight because of all the vibrations, which frustrates the Miracle but makes Chloe laugh even more as their hands dart between each other's for cards and tangle up and slap and snatch, and finally the Miracle's laughing, too, tickling her, Chloe's shrieking and they're both laughing until their father snarls,
"Kids, Goddamnit,"
and both of them stop dead. Her father sounds growly, furious, nothing like he usually sounds.

    
Because he's trapped up there with Mom,
Chloe thinks, and then she's horrified to have thought that, feels guilty, almost starts crying again.