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

I took Kit’s silence for agreement and got myself outside before she could throw up any more barriers.

If you’re a parent, especially of young children, you’ll appreciate how rare it is to find yourself on your own. There’s always some task involved, whether it be the school run, playtimes, bath-times, or meals and all those bits in between, which usually involve nappies from hell and the kind of weird conversations you imagine could only ever happen elsewhere if you were behind the walls of a prison for the mentally deficient.

Being back outside in that crystallised air felt suddenly different because of the solitude, even though it had only been a matter of half an hour since our visit to the playground. It was strange. I understood, a little, what it must be like to be a wild animal mooching around in open countryside. I felt hunted, exposed. Guarded. I walked by the tyre swing, kicking off its cap of snow, and enjoyed the dissonance between the creak of the rope and the crunch of my boots in the white. I glanced over at the slide, and to the right, the pond. I stopped. The green patch was there: a weird, bucolic fox-ghost, but the fox itself was gone. I thought about that for some time. A good thing, obviously. You don’t want corpses lying around a child-friendly campsite. Obviously the farmer was up and about, perhaps alarmed into action by that morning’s incident at the coop. But it all seemed very … swift. And it bothered me slightly that the farmer, if he had retrieved the fox, hadn’t come to let us know. I couldn’t believe that he’d just want to sweep it under the carpet; he surely would have seen my footprints and we were the only people staying on his land. A hired hand, then. Someone who didn’t know that we knew the chickens had been attacked. Well, I’d soon find out.

The main living quarters of the farmhouse was a long building with a low roof. Part of it had been turned into an honesty shop; you went along and stocked up on whatever you needed — bread, bacon, pasta and the like — writing down what you’d taken in a large ledger, and at the end of the week it was totted up and added to your bill. Further along were some centrally-heated showers for those guests who didn’t want to trust themselves to the tepid showers running off the heat from the stoves in the tents. Across the way was a large barn filled with bales of hay wrapped in black polythene to feed livestock over the winter months. I drove Kit nuts whenever we saw them in the fields because I would always be compelled to say: “Big rabbits around here.”

The farmer lived at the end of the row; his car, a BMW, was parked next to ours. It hadn’t been anywhere for a while. Snow still covered the bonnet. I took the opportunity to rescue our torch from the glove compartment just as a pink oval slid across the inside of a kitchen window hung with pretty, blue curtains. There was the chunk of a heavy lock sliding back and the farmer appeared at the door, wiping his mouth with a black napkin. “All okay?” he asked. “Do you need more wood?”

“No thanks,” I said. “We’re okay for wood. I was going to tell you, in light of what happened this morning with the chickens … we found a fox up by the pond. It was dead. But it’s gone now. I just looked. I guess you must have found it.”

His face had changed from polite curiosity to alarm, his skin colouring all the while.

“I didn’t move anything,” he said, with a force to suggest he would otherwise have left it there to rot. It was beginning to snow again: big, serious flakes. If it carried on for much longer, getting home would become a problem.

“Then you have some pretty efficient scavengers knocking about,” I said.

“Show me,” he said, and held up his finger to indicate I should wait. A minute later he reappeared wearing a dark green windcheater and a woolen hat.

I took him back the way I’d come and pointed beyond the fence at the pond. Immediately, he climbed over and started striding through the thigh-high grass, snow shivering and tumbling in his wake. He cast glances back over his shoulder as we came around the lower edge of the pond. It was only as we were nearing the fence on the other side that I realised he was asking me silent questions: we’d bypassed the body’s location. Snow had erased the green patch. No amount of kicking through the ground layer would reveal the fox’s final resting place now.

“Do you have an assistant?” I asked. “A lad?”

“I do. But he’s not in today. It’s just me.”

“What could have taken it?”

The farmer shrugged and eyed the clouds. “Hawk?”

“Another fox?” I said.

“I bloody well hope not,” he said. “I spent an age on that coop today, reinforcing it. Two chickens in there now. Anyway, foxes aren’t social. They’re lone wolves, if you see what I mean.”

“I hope you’re right. I’ll keep an eye out, anyway.”

The farmer nodded. “You’re staying on then?”

“Of course. The weather’s a bit grim, and we’ve got an upset daughter, but this is our holiday. We’ll make the best of it.”

“Well, thank you. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention this in any online reviews you might write. Quite up to you, of course, but … well, people come from the towns and the cities to the countryside and it can … surprise them now and again. Nature. You can’t control it, can you?”

What a day. Little had happened, really, but what had was intense, memorable, life-changing perhaps. There was plenty to talk about but Kit and I did everything we could to steer the obvious discussions towards safer waters. We got Megan into her pyjamas and stroked her hair and reassured her. We promised her that no matter what the weather was like in the morning we’d go for a trip out somewhere special. Horse riding maybe.

Once Megan was in bed, I asked her what story she wanted me to read to her.

“The Hungry Ghosts,” she said.

“What?”

“The Hungry Goats.”

I flipped through the pile of books, unnerved and not fully understanding why. Here it was: The Hungry Goats . The cover showed a picture of a goat happily munching on clothes hanging from a washing line. I read her the story, delivering the lines with more gusto than usual, and tucked her in.

Kit accepted a small glass of red wine from me and settled into the rocking chair with Lucy for her evening feed. Kit seemed swollen and in pain, the milk dripping from her nipple even as Lucy’s mouth sought it. I watched my daughter suckle at that heavy breast, never failing to be fascinated by her appetite, and the way she stared, wide-eyed and curious, up at Kit’s face as she guzzled her meal. Despite myself, I was getting aroused. My wife had embodied the blossoming cliché in pregnancy. Her skin glowed. Her hair was so soft.

Nature. The hungry ghosts .

“I’m going to check the ties,” I said. Kit was smiling at me, one eyebrow arched. She knew me so well. I slipped from the tent, trying to hide my erection and served only to draw attention to myself.

You can’t control it, can you? I had tried. Many years before.

I went out into a cold that was fierce enough to draw tears from my eyes; it was being stirred by a restless wind. At least the snow had stopped. I went around the perimeter of the tent, checking knots and listening for sounds beneath the howl of the wind. I thought I could hear the chickens sounding rattled in their coop, perhaps because of the repairs the farmer had made, or a memory of the traumatic event that morning, if poultry even had memories. Well, here was one chicken who could remember. In detail so vivid it was like flicking through a catalogue of photographs.