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

And something was wrong with the vivifieds. Instead of rustling in the depths of the thicket, they lurched up and down the irregular paths in a sluggish remembrance of flight. A snake with a crushed spine lolled in a hollow. A pack of coyotes, moving in rolling prowls like house cats, moved single file in a line from the stables to the well, not even swiveling an ear as Lindsome squeezed past.

Near the main steps of the house, the burst-open billy goat had gotten ensnared in a tangle of creepers, its blackened entrails commingling with blackened vines.

Lindsome resolutely ran past it.

A dead sparrow fell from the sky and pelted her shoulder, and a frog corpse crunched beneath her foot. A hundred awful things could smear her with their putrescence — but oh, let them, because she was a lady. And ladies always did what needed doing.

There.

The gardener’s careful path to the yellow room.

She was at the final vista, now. Then the private patio. The sheer curtains were closed, but one of the patio doors was open, swinging to and fro on the fretful breeze.

In the center of the room, the three-legged table waited, but the bell jar was gone.

Lindsome slumped in gratitude. Uncle Albion had finally come to his senses. Or Chaswick had felt guilty about their talk last night, or careless Thomlin had knocked it over and broken it, even.

But then Lindsome remembered.

Today is Thursday .

Her throat made an awful squeak. She turned back and ran, up the vista and through wilderness to the ring path.

To the basement. Where ranks of monsters rotted as they stood, and the flesh of nightmares yet to be born floated in tanks, dreaming inscrutable dreams.

One of the doors to the basement stood open, too, swinging in the mounting wind. Lindsome ran inside. By now, she was panting, her back moist with sweat, her heart fighting to escape the hot prison of her chest. The foul air choked her. She bent double and gagged, falling to her knees on the icy stones.

Scores of waiting eyes watched her.

The wall of bodies began to moan, hundreds of bastard vocalizations from bastardized throats that had long ago forgotten how to speak. Pulpy flesh surged forward against bars and railings, jaws unhinging, the sound rising like the discordant sirens of an army from the Abyss.

Beneath them, Lindsome began a keening of her own, tiny and devoid of reason.

She did not know how she stepped to that far corner, where the future nightmares waited, but step she did, into a forest of burning candles. Some had toppled over onto the floor, frozen in sprays of wax. Some had melted into puddles, now aflame. The plentiful light showed all the tanks and that long, black curtain pulled fully back.

The giant tank on the bottom, as long as two men laid end to end, was drained, empty, and open.

The moaning grew. Lindsome’s keening grew into a wail, though she could not hear it, only watch as her feet pointed her around and sent her across the basement and up the stone steps.

The door at the top was already open.

Lindsome’s wail squeezed down into words, screamed loud enough to tear her throat as thorns will tear a dress. “Uncle Albion!”

Someone emitted a distant, ringing scream.

Lindsome couldn’t breathe. She stumbled through the first floor, gasping, her uncle’s name a mere whisper on her wide-open lips.

She found a door that Chaswick had forbidden, the door to the other basement-cum-laboratory. Or rather, she found the space where the door should have been. Both door and molding had been torn away.

As if the unseen gardener had entered the house, signature violence in tow.

“Uncle,” Lindsome gasped. Outside, lightning flickered, and Lindsome saw four steps down. Dark smears daubed the floorboards. Further within, the glitter of metal and broken glass.

A bloody handprint on the wall.

The scream came again, an animalistic screech of distilled and mortal terror. Lindsome backed away from the stairs. Her legs quaked too much to run now.

She walked to the grand staircase. A painful flash of lightning illuminated the entire house — the puddles of ichor through which Lindsome trod, the monstrous gouges in the wood and wallpaper on either side of her, the gaslamps torn from their mounts.

The mental image of a tiny fist, its knuckles bumping the inside of a tank as long as two men laid end to end.

Lindsome found Chaswick on the staircase. He had ended up like the billy goat outside, his stomach torn open, his entrails tangled in the shattered spindles of the banister.

“Linds …” One of his hands, slimy and bright, pawed at the banister.

She stared at him.

“Up …” Chaswick whispered. “Up …” His head twitched in the direction of the second floor. “If you … love … then up …”

Lindsome’s head nodded. “Yes, Mister Chaswick,” her mouth said.

His gaze clouded. The room flickered, as if under a second touch of lightning, and the pools of blood below him flashed into a sizzle.

Lindsome blinked, and Chaswick was gone. In his place, a pile of clothing lay tossed against the spindles, commingled with heavy black ghostgrease.

Somehow, Lindsome was running.

Sprinting, even. Up the stairs. “Uncle Albion!” she cried, and realized that she could speak again, too. Yet again, Lindsome heard that scream, that inhuman terror.

“Albion!” someone else called. Emlee, the gaunt old housekeeper. Third floor. The devastation continued up the staircase.

“Get out!” Her uncle. Alive. “Go!”

“No — not when she’s—” A crash.

“Run, damn your miserable old hide! If ever you loved me as I loved you, Albion, then run!”

And that scream. That Ghost-forsaken scream.

Lindsome ran, up and up and out, tripping over shredded carpet, torn-down paintings, shattered vases and urns. From around a corner came a ghastly crunch, then booms and bangs, the sound of something mighty hurtling down a staircase.

“No, Marilda! Stop!”

Lindsome rounded the corner. The servants’ staircase lay before her, walls half-ripped asunder, ichor on the steps.

Lindsome took them one flight down. At the bottom lay the housekeeper’s clothes, black with ghostgrease.

“Uncle!” Lindsome wailed. “Uncle, where are you? We have to hide!”

His bedroom. Outside in the hall. Uncle Albion’s door was open.

So was the door next to his, the one that had looked rusted shut.

The stench inside was unspeakable. Lindsome fell to the carpet and vomited, despite her empty stomach, hard enough for bile to dribble over her lips. Vivified. An ark of freshly vivified. They had to be stacked to the ceiling, packed like earth in a grave.

But when she looked up, all she saw were briars.

Roses. Thousands upon thousands of roses. Fresh, dried, rotting, trampled, entire bushes of them, as though a giant had uprooted them and brought them in here.

They were woven into a gigantic nest.

In the center sat Thomlin. His eyes were rolled up, showing nothing but white. He grasped his knees to his chest and rocked, like all those windblown, yawning doors, moaning like that wall of rotting flesh. A frothy river of drool dribbled down his chin.

Lindsome did not speak to him. It was clear that Thomlin would never speak again.

The siren song of that inhuman scream rang out, and Lindsome ran out into the hall. She called her uncle’s name, shouted it, even, but received no answer.

She ran into his room, searching. The knobs of a rope ladder lay bolted into his windowsill.

“Uncle!” Lindsome peered over the sill. The ladder still wobbled from a recent descent, trailing down into a tight copse of saplings. Lindsome scrambled down. “Uncle Albion! Wait!”

Lightning cut her shadow from the air. The boom that answered split the sky, a rolling bang that made Lindsome squeal and cover her ears. In seconds, its echoes vanished under static, the sound of a million gallons pouring down. Lindsome was immediately soaked. The tatters of her dress slapped at her legs as she ran, and so heavy was the downpour, Lindsome couldn’t see.