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

Jeremy Kirkwood gave a shriek. “Cover them up! Cover them!”

He seized the corrugated section of metal that Newton had pried off, and tried to push it back over those tremulous skins.

The fingernails tapped against that piece of tin as Kirkwood tried to shove it back into place. Instantly, the tapping became a furious clatter. In the glare of the headlights, Newton noticed filaments attached to one of those dead fingernails.

“Wait.” He pushed Kirkwood away.

“I’ll sue you! I’ll sue the entire police force! You’ll pay for this!”

After silencing the man with an angry glare, Newton turned his attention to the pearlescent fingernail. Between finger and thumb, he carefully removed the filament from the nail then held it in front of the headlamp. A single long, white hair. Straightaway, he remembered photographs in the master bedroom of Lord Alfred Kirkwood, the white-haired man who’d lived on the wealth generated by the slave trade. And he pictured the fine white hair still adhering to the hairbrush.

He fixed his eyes on the lord’s nephew, who stood there panting, with the tin sheet in his hands. He held up the hair for him to see. “I’m certain a DNA test will prove this belonged to your uncle.”

“How did it get stuck to one of those disgusting things?” He threw a frightened glance at the red material stretched tight over the woodwork. The distorted faces pulsated as the breeze played upon them. The lips tightened and slackened as if mouthing words. “And why did my uncle disappear?”

“Perhaps the magic doesn’t work anymore. Occult protection doesn’t last forever.”

The skins billowed as the winds blew harder. Fingernails rapped louder on the walls of the Tin House.

Jeremy Kirkwood appeared to freeze, his muscles locked tight. “My God … I’m the next of kin. I inherit everything. All the slave money. They’ll try and kill me, too!” His eyes blazed with terror. “You’re a policeman … you’ve got to protect me. It’s your job, you bastard!”

The man that Newton had judged to have been born with angry bones swung the six-foot by four-foot tin panel. It struck the side of the detective’s face. That heavy piece of metal cut him down as if it were an axe. Its sharp edge sliced open his jaw, blood sprayed — an aerosol of crimson in the car’s light.

He must have passed out for a moment, because when he opened his eyes, he realised he lay on the lawn, looking up at both Jeremy Kirkwood and the front of the house.

The human skins were melting. That’s what it looked like. Those skins that were almost the size of bed sheets slipped downward from the building’s timber skeleton. Jeremy stared at what was happening. He appeared fixed there. Hypnotised.

The skins continued to slide downward. Newton saw something dripping down through the narrow gap between the tin cladding and the frame at the bottom of the wall. The dripping effect resembled dark treacle being poured from a jar. Thick and continuous. These were yet more leathery remains sliding down from behind the intact panels. He realised he should try and stop his wound from bleeding, only he found he couldn’t move, either. He lay there on the grass propped up on one elbow. He watched the skins, and he realised they weren’t melting after all — they were sloughing from the woodwork. Detaching themselves from the house. Breaking free.

The car’s headlamps not only illuminated the dark red hides, but shone through them.

He could only compare those relics as something that resembled outstretched sheets on a washing line, except they moved into the wind. The mask-like faces at the top of the hides contained distorted holes where the eyes and mouths had once been. He caught sight of the whorl of navels in the centre of the hides. He saw the black discs that were the nipples.

When the detached skins reached the inheritor of the Kirkwood’s bloody fortune, they enclosed him. Sheets of human wrapping paper. They formed a parcel of Jeremy Kirkwood. His silhouette struggled inside for a while … but as time passed the struggles stopped … then even the silhouette was gone. Dissolved away. Dissipated. Broken down into slime and hair.

Newton managed to follow the paper-thin human remains that billowed and flapped across the dunes to the sea. He glimpsed peeled faces that formed part of those rippling sheets of skin. Although his senses still reeled after being struck by a section of the Tin House, he knew deep down that those skins that had once housed the bones of men, women, and children were truly free. Now they were heading for the ocean. Newton wondered if, given the right tides, favourable currents and enough time, the waters from which all life once emerged would finally carry its precious cargo back home.

The wind came for us as soon as we laid our heads on the pillows, as if it had been waiting for that moment. It spanked against the canvas, testing the guy ropes that were meant to keep the tent grounded. I kept thinking it would tear free at any moment and sail off into the sky. Kit was sleeping. Perhaps the weather didn’t affect her as much as it did me, or maybe she was able to shut it out; she was often talking to me about the powers of meditation. I concentrated on sleep but succeeded only in detecting another sound scampering around beneath the howl of the wind. It overcame the squeak of the tyre on the rope hanging from the oak branch, and the lowing of the cows in the next field, aggrieved at being out in such violent weather. It was something stealthier than that. Something that I almost dismissed as nothing, but for the way it kept coming back, like a heartbeat; trotting, slick. It might have been my wife’s breathing, and I might have believed that had I been tired enough.

I got out of bed and stumbled in the dark for the torch that I realised was still in the car down by the farmhouse. I checked on the children, Megan and Lucy, but they were softly snoring. You could always tell Lucy was deep because she would be murmuring, babbling, sometimes even laughing in her sleep. Her eyes were wide open. I was exactly the same when I was a baby. I bent over her and kissed her but she did not respond. There was a moment of panic when I thought that there would be something wrong, but she was breathing; she blinked when I brushed a fingertip against her eyelashes. It was as if she were doing what I had been doing, minutes before, listening intently to the scream of the weather, studying it almost, maybe identifying something that shifted beneath the patterns that were laid over the countryside. And I heard it again now. A beat against the flow; an anti-rhythm.

I went to the entrance that I had assiduously tied down not two hours previously, and started unpicking the knots. The tent smelled of old smoke from the stove that had been forced back down the flue by the wind. I paused as the last loop slipped free of the toggles. It was weird, feeling on the threshold between comfort and open miles of thrashing wild. Quickly, I ducked outside and loosely tethered the tent flaps. I could see nothing: cloud cover prevented any moonlight from picking out the shape of the farmhouse or the trees, though I could hear them hissing their shock over the ferocity in the sky. I felt afraid in that moment, at the glib way in which we had pitched ourselves against nature; thrown ourselves into the pit of the dark, separated from all it contained by one thin, trembling wall of canvas. It taught me, in a second, how dependent I was on light, and how the absence of it, rather than call to any base instincts in me, showed me how far removed I was from the wild. We’d come out here to connect, or reconnect, with nature. But that wasn’t quite it. We were finding the version of nature we expected: the field of sunflowers or rapeseed; scores of sullen, jawing cows; clean, clear lakes. Real nature, though, wasn’t about some plot of land set out of sight of the main road and an axe for you to chop your supplied share of logs to size. It was this anti-rhythm and the movement of things best suited to darkness.