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

The photo was of Tamsin’s graduation. The proudest day of his life, watching his daughter follow in his footsteps. He stared at their faces. Every few moments, he closed his eyes to try and recall them, but they stayed out of sight, reluctant shadows of a past cut off by these wooden walls. After a while, he kept his eyes shut and sobbed his throat raw.

Outside, he could hear Bill mumbling to himself. He sounded as scared as Malcolm felt.

The beast acted like it had all the time in the world, sitting on its haunches. There was no need to rush. Malcolm was going nowhere.

A drunken memory surfaced through the panic and, under his breath, Malcolm thanked Old Marley. Cut hand cradled in his lap, he pushed himself up from the floor, cramp bringing him tumbling down more than once. Crouching, he let his fingers drift across the floor like dangled puppets. Straw stuck to the cobbles in patches, layered and thick. It came away in strips, each laminate clouding the air with the stench of animal waste. Using small movements, Malcolm worked his way across the barn, pulling up decades of trampled bedding and dung, piling the fragments in stacks behind him. All the time, the creature watched, steam condensing against Malcolm’s skin.

Not many listened to Marley. Not many understood the creased shepherd, anyway, much less when he was on the outside of half a bottle of scotch, but Malcolm took the time and paid for the drinks. Marley cared for his animals more than anyone Malcolm had met. Get past the slurring and he could tell a good story, for the price of a single malt, of course.

Marley was the first to mention the bargest to Malcolm, first to describe the red ears and the culling stare. He didn’t know if Marley’s story of being pursued over the moors was true. He didn’t know if the whispered story of keeping one side of Moor Gill, the beast the other, was an embellishment. At the moment, he had little to lose and little left to try.

Outside, he could hear Bill stumble his way through the Lord’s Prayer. If it weren’t so serious, it would be funny. Dale gossip whispered the only time Bill saw the inside of church was to dip the collection plate.

Shifting along the ground, Malcolm carried on pulling fragments of dirt from the floor, slowly revealing the channel. Only shallow, the drain carried water along the barn to a stone slab trough at the other end. Now out of sight of the creature, Malcolm reached under the wall and pulled away fifty years of mud, the dirt pushing nails away from his fingers.

Only a trickle came at first, water the color of port. He wiped his face, leaving a stain across his forehead, scrabbled back and banged against the door. The creature looked up at the noise, spit dripping onto the floor.

“Don’t be struggling, Veterinary. If it were me, I’d be scooting across that barn. Get it over and done with,” Bill said, his voice close as if he were trying to peer through the gaps.

“Well, I’m not you, Bill,” Malcolm said, his teeth grinding as he tried to keep from shivering.

“Ay, you’re right at that, Veterinary. I’m outside; you’re stuck in there.”

“Might get out, yet.”

“Might be pigs fly. I’d rather bet on that than you making through the night,” Bill said.

Malcolm listened to him pause as he took another drag of his cigarette.

“Don’t drag it out. I know it’s not fair on you, but I don’t want you to suffer more than you have to, Veterinary. I’m not a cruel man.”

Malcolm ignored him.

He knew time was running low. His movements had been slow, trying to disturb the fetid air as little as possible. The creature might be less than twelve hours old, but the thing that clung inside was older than the hills themselves. The bargest blistered with cunning.

Cold mud coated Malcolm’s hands up to the knuckles, all feeling gone. He pressed on, scooping up handfuls of muck, throwing them over his shoulder, getting careless. Outside, Bill stopped stumbling his way through scripture and listened to the dirt slip down the walls.

The folk tales never came with specifics, or volume tables. Never said how much liquid needed to flow. Whether a river or a stutter. Malcolm kept digging the channel free.

The water was sticky, more sludge or soup, but it flowed, nonetheless. He watched it creep across the floor, rivulets spilling between the cobbles until the stone submerged below the neonatal stream.

An expression passed across the creature’s face, one Malcolm had never seen on an animal: confusion. Not the dislocated confusion of pain. Genuine wonderment at the lack of its own comprehension of the situation. Then anger.

Malcolm watched the creature’s skin dragged in through its mouth, now turned to a raw wound. Ribs and muscles glistened on the outside of its torso, like offal on a butcher’s slab. Malcolm’s brain protested, breaking down in the face of this. In that moment, he knew that if it couldn’t kill him to feast, the bargest would kill him with fear.

Somewhere deep inside, in the place that cocooned stories, he realized he must turn his back. If he didn’t, and soon, his heart would turn itself inside out of his chest in sympathy.

With effort, he pivoted each footstep. Outside, Bill started on the Psalms, sung in a discordant tenor to no tune a congregation would recognize.

Eyes closed, Malcolm faced the wall, whispering childhood stories to himself. The bargest’s breath scorched his jacket, wax running from charred cotton and dripping on the floor. Every nerve was telling him to turn. He stayed the other way, elective blind.

The whispers started. Fears and memories dragged from childhood. Voices of dead people Malcolm had buried deep squirmed their way out. His back was soaked with sweat, now. Then the promises of wealth and debauchery started. The offers of gold and power, if only he would turn. If only he would look just once. He didn’t even need to open his eyes, just peek. Just peek enough to step over the little, tiny stream bisecting the barn.

His throat was full of sand. He couldn’t speak, even though every inch of skin wanted to let the air burn his lungs and turn it against the walls, like Joshua against the walls of Jericho. He wanted to scream till his teeth powdered and tongue rotted at the root. He wanted to open his eyes and see the sun stream through the oak tree, outside his childhood bedroom, to sacrifice every minute of his adult life just to wake up from this stained and bitter nightmare in the cocoon of his childhood.

Malcolm stayed silent because he knew, deep down, even when the lies delivered in Hilary’s voice were at their most persuasive, that to survive the next few moments, he must not turn around.

Even when something brushed his cheek or took his hand. Even when he could no longer feel the cobbles beneath his feet or know if he were asleep or awake, he still did not turn round.

Malcolm never knew how long he stood facing that wall before his legs gave out, crumpling to the floor, head catching the straw and bringing a dreamless sleep.

Daytime had arrived when he came to, a dull, gray light visible through his sore eyes. He looked over the trickle of stream. The back wall of the shed had gone, broken planks littering the hill beyond, tufts of thick, black hair caught on the rusted nails. Still, he didn’t cross the water, instead smashing his shoulder again and again into the padlocked door until the wood gave, spreading a bruise across the top of his arm.

He half-expected to find Bill slumped on the grass outside, or mauled beyond recognition, but the field was empty apart from a pile of half-smoked cigarettes, a ripped-up copy of the King James Bible , and a flock of half-blind, featherless jackdaws cawing in the mist.