Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

She took the floor as well.

“I believe you can understand me. Every word,” Kerry said. “You either can’t or won’t speak the way you did for the first decades of your life, but I can’t think of any reason why you shouldn’t still understand me. And that puts you way ahead of all the rest of God’s creatures I’ve managed to communicate with.”

He looked at her with his bulging dark eyes, and Escovedo had been right. It was a disconcertingly inhuman gaze, not even mammalian. It wasn’t anthropomorphizing to say that mammals — dogs, cats, even a plethora of wilder beasts — had often looked at her with a kind of warmth. But this , these eyes … they were cold, with a remote scrutiny that she sensed regarded her as lesser in every way.

The room’s air, cool to begin with, seemed to chill even more as her skin crawled with an urge to put distance between them. Could he sense that she feared him? Maybe he took this as a given. That he could be dangerous was obvious — the closer you looked, the more he seemed covered with sharp points, none more lethal than the tips of his stubby fingers. But she had to trust the prison staff to ensure her safety. While there was no guard in here to make the energy worse than it was already, they were being watched on a closed-circuit camera. If Marsh threatened her, the room would be flooded with a gas that would put them both out in seconds. She’d wake up with a headache, and Marsh would wake up back in the pit.

And nothing would be accomplished.

“I say God’s creatures because I don’t know how else to think of you,” she said. “I know how they think of you. They think you’re all aberrations. Unnatural. Not that I’m telling you anything you probably haven’t already overheard from them every day for more than eighty years.”

And did that catch his interest, even a little? If the subtle tilt of his head meant anything, maybe it did.

“But if you exist, entire families of you, colonies of you, then you can’t be an aberration. You’re within the realm of nature’s possibilities.”

Until this moment, she’d had no idea what she would say to him. With animals, she was accustomed to speaking without much concern for what exactly she said. It was more how she said it. Like very young children, animals cued in on tone, not language. They nearly always seemed to favor a higher-pitched voice. They responded to touch.

None of which was going to work here.

But Barnabas Marsh was a presence, and a powerful one, radiant with a sense of age. She kept speaking to him, seeking a way through the gulf between them, the same as she always did. No matter what the species, there always seemed to be a way, always something to which she could attune — an image, a sound, a taste, some heightened sense that overwhelmed her and, once she regained her equilibrium, let her use it as the key in the door that would open the way for more.

She spoke to him of the sea, the most obvious thing, because no matter what the differences between them, they had that much in common. It flowed in each of them, water and salt, and they’d both come from it; he was just closer to returning, was all. Soon she felt the pull of tides, the tug of currents, the cold wet draw of gravity luring down, down, down to greater depths, then the equipoise of pressure, and where once it might’ve crushed, now it comforted, a cold cocoon that was both a blanket and a world, tingling along her skin with news coming from a thousand leagues in every direction—

And with a start she realized that the sea hadn’t been her idea at all.

She’d only followed where he led. Whether Marsh meant to or not.

Kerry looked him in his cold, inhuman eyes, not knowing quite what lay behind them, until she began to get a sense that the sea was all that lay behind them. The sea was all he thought of, all he wanted, all that mattered, a yearning so focused that she truly doubted she could slip past it to ferret out what was so special about now . What they all sensed happening now, just as they had fifteen years ago.

It was all one and the same, of course, bound inextricably together, but first they had to reclaim the sea.

And so it went the rest of the day, with one after another of this sad parade of prisoners, until she’d seen nearly twenty of them. Nothing that she would’ve dared call progress, just inklings of impressions, snippets of sensations, none of it coalescing into a meaningful whole, and all of it subsumed beneath a churning ache to return to the sea. It was their defense against her, and she doubted they even knew it.

Whatever was different about her, whatever had enabled her to whisper with creatures that she and the rest of the world found more appealing, it wasn’t made to penetrate a human-born despair that had hardened over most of a century.

There was little light remaining in the day when she left the prison in defeat, and little enough to begin with. It was now a colorless world of approaching darkness. She walked a straight line, sense of direction lost in the clammy mist that clung to her as surely as the permeating smell of the prisoners. She knew she had to come to the island’s edge eventually, and if she saw another human being before tomorrow, it would be too soon.

Escovedo found her anyway, and she had to assume he’d been following all along. Just letting her get some time and distance before, what, her debriefing? Kerry stood facing the water as it slopped against a shoreline of rocks the size of piled skulls, her hand clutching the inner fence. By now it seemed that the island was less a prison than a concentration camp.

“For what it’s worth,” the colonel said, “I didn’t expect it to go well the first day.”

“What makes you think a second day is going to go any better?”

“Rapport?” He lifted a Thermos, uncapped it, and it steamed in the air. “But rapport takes time.”

“Time.” She rattled the fence. “Will I even be leaving here?”

“I hope that’s a joke.” He poured into the Thermos cup without asking and gave it to her. “Here. The cold can sneak up on you out like this.”

She sipped at the cup, coffee, not the best she’d ever had but far from the worst. It warmed her, though, and that was a plus. “Let me ask you something. Have they ever bred? Either here or wherever they were held before? Have any of them bred?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“It’s something I was picking up on from a few of them. The urge. You know it when you feel it. Across species, it’s a great common denominator.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, other than that they haven’t.”

“Don’t you find that odd?”

“I find the whole situation odd.”

“What I mean is, even pandas in captivity manage to get pregnant once in a while.”

“I’ve just never really thought about it.”

“You regard them as prisoners, you have to, I get that. And the females don’t look all that different from the males. But suppose they looked more like normal men and women. What would you expect if you had a prison with a mixed-gender population that had unrestricted access to each other?”

“I get your point, but …” He wasn’t stonewalling, she could tell. He genuinely had never considered this. Because he’d never had to. “Wouldn’t it be that they’re too old?”

“I thought it was already established that once they get like this, age is no longer a factor. But even if it was, Giles Shapleigh wasn’t too old when they first grabbed him. He was eighteen. Out of more than two hundred, he can’t have been the only young one. You remember what the urge was like when you were eighteen?”