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

The clamor of the highway, the stink of oil and gasoline, the buffeting rush of traffic, all served to deepen her sense of displacement. The world was a bewildering, foreign place, the light a lowgrade burn and a stain on the air, the rushing cars on the highway a row of gnashing teeth.

But ahead, finally, opening in long, silent acres to her left, was the cemetery.

It was gated and locked, but finding a tree to get over the wall was no difficulty. She scraped her skin on the bark and then on the stone, and she tore her nightgown, but that was of no consequence. She tumbled grace-lessly to the ground, like a dropped sack, and felt a sharp snap in her right ankle. When she tried to walk, the ankle rolled beneath her and she fell.

Meat, getting in the way.

Disgusted by this, she used the wall to pull herself to a standing position. She found that if she let the foot just roll to the side and walked on the ankle itself, she could make a clumsy progress.

Clouds obscured the sky, and the cemetery stretched over a rolling landscape, bristling with headstones and plaques, monuments and crypts, like a scattering of teeth. It was old; many generations were buried here. The sound of the highway, muffled by the wall, faded entirely from her awareness. She stood amidst the graves and let their silence fill her.

The flutter of unease that she’d felt since waking after the suicide abated. The sense of disconnection was gone. Her heart was a still lake. Nothing in her moved. She wanted to cry from relief.

Still holding the dead robin in her hand, she lurched more deeply into the cemetery.

She found a hollow between the stones, a trough between the stilled waves of earth, where no burial was marked. She eased herself to the ground and curled up in the grass. The clouds were heavy and thick, the air was cold. She closed her eyes and felt the cooling of her brain.

Sounds rose from the earth. New sounds: cobwebs of exhalations, pauses of the heart, the monastic work of the worms translating flesh to soil, the slow crawl of rock. There was another kind of industry, somewhere beneath her. Another kind of machine.

It was new knowledge, and she felt the root of a purpose. She set the robin aside and tore grass away, dug her nails into the dark soil, pushed through. She scooped aside handfuls of dirt. At some point in her labors she became aware of something awaiting her beneath the earth. Moving silences, the cloudy breaths of the moon, magnificent shapes unrecognizable to her novice intelligence, like strange old galleons of the sea.

And then, something awful.

A rough bark, a perverse intrusion into this quiet celebration, a rape of the silence.

Her husband’s voice.

She was alone again, and she felt his rough hands upon her.

It had been nothing more than instinct that guided him to her, finally. He panicked when he awoke to her missing, careened through the house, shouted like a fool in his front yard until lights began to pop on in the neighbors’ houses. Afraid that they would offer to help, or call the police for him, he got into the car and started driving. He criss-crossed the neighborhood to no avail, until finally it occurred to him that she might go to the cemetery. That she might, in some fit of delirium, decide that she belonged there.

The thought tore at him. The guilt over leaving her to die in the bathtub threatened to crack his ribs. It was too big to contain.

He scaled the cemetery wall and called until he found her, a small white form in a sea of graves and dark grass, huddled and scared, clawing desperately in the dirt. Her ankle was broken and hung at a sickening angle.

He pulled her up by her shoulders and wrapped his arms around her, hugged her tightly against him.

“Oh Katie, oh baby,” he said. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ve got you. You scared me so bad. You’re going to be okay.”

An ant emerged from her hairline and idled on her forehead. Another crawled out of her nose. He brushed them furiously away.

She returned to the cellar. He spent a few days getting it into some kind of order, moving precarious stacks into smaller and sturdier piles, and giving her some room to move around in. While she slept in the daytime, he brought down the television set and its stand, a lamp, and a small box where he kept the books she had once liked to read. He left the mattress on the floor but changed the sheets regularly. When he was not at work he spent all his time down there with her, though he had taken to sleeping upstairs so that he could lock her in when she was most likely to try to wander.

“I can’t risk you getting lost again,” he told her. “It would kill me.” Then he closed the door and turned the lock. She heard his steps tread the floor above her.

She had taken the dead robin and nailed it to one of the support beams beside the mattress. It was the only beautiful thing in the room, and it calmed her to look at it.

Her foot was more trouble than it was worth so she wrenched it off and tossed it into the corner.

“That was Heather,” Sean said, closing the cellar door and tromping down the stairs. He sat beside her on the mattress and put his arm around her shoulders. She did not lean into him the way she used to do, so he gave her a little pull until it seemed like she was.

When he’d noticed her missing foot the other night, he’d quietly gone back upstairs and dry heaved over the sink. Then he came back down, searched until he located it in a corner, and took it outside to bury it. The crucified bird had not bothered him initially, but over the days it had gathered company: two mice, three cockroaches, a wasp, some moths. Their dry little bodies were arrayed like art. She had even pulled the bones from one of the mice, fixing them with wood glue onto the post in some arcane hieroglyph.

He was frightened by its alienness. He was frightened because it meant something to her and it was indecipherable to him.

She was watching something on tv with the sound off: men in suits talking to each other across a table. They seemed very earnest.

“She wants to come home for the weekend,” he said. “I said it would be okay.”

She pulled her gaze from the screen and looked at him. The light from the television made small blue squares in her eyes, which had begun to film over in a creamy haze. It was getting hard to tell that one eye was askew, which made him feel better when he talked to her. “Heather,” she said. “I like Heather.”

He put his fingers in her hair, hooked a dark lock behind her ear. “Of course you do, baby. You remember her, don’t you.”

She stared for a moment, then her brow furrowed. “She used to live here.”

“That’s right. She went to college, and she lives there now. She’s our daughter. We love her.”

“I forgot.”

“And you love me, too.”

“Okay.”

She looked back at the television. One of the men was standing now and laughing so hard his face was red. His mouth was wide open. He was going to swallow the world.

“Can you say it?”

“Say what?”

“That you love me. Can you say that to me? Please?”

“I love you.”

“Oh baby,” he said, and leaned his head against hers, his arm still around her. “Thank you. Thank you. I love you too.” They sat there and watched the silent images. His mind crept ahead to Heather’s visit. He wondered what the hell he was going to tell her. She was going to have a hard time with this.

What is the story of our marriage?

He went back to that night again and again. He remembered standing over her, watching her body struggle against the pull of a death she had called upon herself. It is the nature of the body to want to live, and once her mind had shut down her muscles spasmed in the water, splashing blood onto the floor as it fought to save itself.