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

That last time had been the most savage, though Karen hadn’t known it would be the last time, of course — but Nicholas, Nicholas might have had an inkling.

When they’d reached the clearing, he had tied Mary-Lou to the tree with string. Tightly, but not too tight — Karen had said she hadn’t loved Mary-Lou especially, and Nicholas didn’t want to be cruel. He had even wrapped his own handkerchief around her eyes as a blindfold.

Then he’d produced from his knapsack Father’s gun.

“You can’t use that!” Karen said. “Father will find out! Father will be angry!”

“Phooey to that,” said Nicholas. “I’ll be going to war soon, and I’ll have a gun all of my own. Had you heard that, Carrie? That I’m going to war?” She hadn’t heard. Nanny had kept it from her, and Nicholas had wanted it to be a surprise. He looked at the gun. “It’s a Webley Mark IV service revolver,” he said. “Crude and old-fashioned, just like Father. What I’ll be getting will be much better.”

He narrowed his eyes, and aimed the gun, fired. There was an explosion, louder than Karen could ever have dreamed — and she thought Nicholas was shocked too, not only by the noise, but by the recoil. Birds scattered. Nicholas laughed. The bullet had gone wild. “That was just a warm up,” he said.

It was on his fourth try that he hit Mary-Lou. Her leg was blown off.

“Do you want a go?”

“No,” said Karen.

“It’s just like at a fairground,” he said. “Come on.”

She took the gun from him, and it burned in her hand, it smelled like burning. He showed her how to hold it, and she liked the way his hand locked around hers as he corrected her aim. “It’s all right,” he said to his little sister gently, “we’ll do it together. There’s nothing to be scared of.” And really he was the one who pulled the trigger, but she’d been holding on too, so she was a bit responsible, and Nicholas gave a whoop of delight and Karen had never heard him so happy before, she wasn’t sure she’d ever heard him happy. And when they looked back at the tree, Mary-Lou had disappeared.

“I’m going across the seas,” he said. “I’m going to fight. And every man I kill, listen, I’m killing him for you. Do you understand me? I’ll kill them all because of you.”

He kissed her then on the lips. It felt warm and wet and the moustache tickled, and it was hard too, as if he were trying to leave an imprint there, as if when he pulled away he wanted to leave a part of him behind.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too.”

“Don’t forget me,” he said. Which seemed such an odd thing to say — how was she going to forget her own brother?

They’d normally bury the tribute then, but they couldn’t find any trace of Mary-Lou’s body. Nicholas put the gun back in the knapsack, he offered Karen his hand. She took it. They went home.

They had never found Nicholas’ body either; at the funeral, his coffin was empty, and Father told Karen it didn’t matter, that good form was the thing. Nicholas had been killed in the Dardanelles, and Karen looked for it upon the map, and it seemed such a long way to go to die. There were lots of funerals in the town that season, and Father made sure that Nicholas’ was the most lavish, no expense was spared.

The family was so small now, and they watched together as the coffin was lowered into the grave. Father looking proud, not sad. And Karen refusing to cry—“Don’t cry,” she said to the daughter she’d brought with her, “you mustn’t cry, or it won’t be clean”—and yet she dug her fingernails deep into her daughter’s body to try to force some tears from it.

Julian hadn’t gone to war. He’d been born just too late. And of course he said he was disappointed, felt cheated even, he loved his country and whatever his country might stand for, and he had wanted to demonstrate that love in the very noblest of ways. He said it with proper earnestness, and some days he almost meant it. His two older brothers had gone to fight, and both had returned home, and the younger had brought back some sort of medal with him. The brothers had changed. They had less time for Julian, and Julian felt that was no bad thing. He was no longer worth the effort of bullying. One day he’d asked his eldest brother what it had been like out there on the Front. And the brother turned to him in surprise, and Julian was surprised too, what had he been thinking of? — and he braced himself for the pinch or Chinese burn that was sure to follow. But instead the brother had just turned away; he’d sucked his cigarette down to the very stub, and sighed, and said it was just as well Julian hadn’t been called up, the trenches were a place for real men. The whole war really wouldn’t have been his bag at all.

When Julian Morris first met Karen Davison, neither was much impressed. Certainly, Julian was well used to girls finding him unimpressive: he was short, his face was too round and homely, his thighs quickly thinned into legs that looked too spindly to support him. There was an effeminacy about his features that his father had thought might have been cured by a spell fighting against Germans, but Julian didn’t know whether it would have helped; he tried to take after his brothers, tried to lower his voice and speak more gruffly, he drank beer, he took up smoking. But even there he’d got it all wrong somehow. The voice, however gruff, always rose in inflection no matter how much he tried to stop it. He sipped at his beer. He held his cigarette too languidly, apparently, and when he puffed out smoke it was always from the side of his mouth and never with a good, bold, manly blast.

But for Julian to be unimpressed by a girl was a new sensation for him. Girls flummoxed Julian. With their lips and their breasts and their flowing contours. With their bright colours, all that perfume. Even now, if some aged friend of his mother’s spoke to him, he’d be reduced to a stammering mess. But Karen Davison did something else to Julian entirely. He looked at her across the ballroom and realised that he rather despised her. It wasn’t that she was unattractive, at first glance her figure was pretty enough. But she was so much older than the other girls, in three years of attending dances no man had yet snatched her up — and there was already something middle-aged about that face, something jaded. She looked bored. That was it, she looked bored. And didn’t care to hide it.

Once in a while a man would approach her, take pity on her, ask her to dance. She would reject him, and off the suitor would scarper, with barely disguised relief.

Julian had promised his parents that he would at least invite one girl on to the dance floor. It would hardly be his fault if that one girl he chose said no. He could return home, he’d be asked how he had got on, and if he were clever he might even be able to phrase a reply that concealed the fact he’d been rejected. Julian was no good at lying outright, his voice would squeak, and he would turn bright red. But not telling the truth? He’d had to find a way of mastering it.

He approached the old maid. Now that she was close, he felt the usual panic rise within him, and he fought it down — look at her, he told himself, look at how hard she looks, like stone; she should be grateful you ask her to dance. He’d reached her. He opened his mouth to speak, realised his first word would be a stutter, put the word aside, found some new word to replace it, cleared his throat. Only then did the girl bother to look up at him. There was nothing welcoming in that expression, but nothing challenging either — she looked at him with utter indifference.