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

That day. I was fourteen years old. I’d gone out feeling torn up inside as if someone had injected a million pieces of hot glass into my lower abdomen. I’d been seeing a girl. Alice, her name was. We used to kiss and fondle each other through our clothing for hours, and then she’d go home, leaving me feeling congested and annoyed. Masturbating was a poor substitute. Although I was a virgin, I knew I wanted to go all the way with Alice, who was a year older. She’d already done it with a previous boyfriend, but she said I was too young and she didn’t want to take the risk. If I made her pregnant, that would be both our lives ruined, and if anybody found out she was sleeping with a fourteen-year-old, she’d be arrested. Not to mention the social stigma. She’d be torn apart.

So we got flustered and sticky in her room one afternoon when her parents were at work and we should have been in school. It was winter; it was cold. We clung to each other as much to try to get warm as for any hope of progressing from fingers under jumpers and French kisses which left our mouths sore. Then she pushed me away; I think I’d put my hand down the back of her knickers.

“You can’t do that,” she said, as if it was a game of Scrabble and I’d submitted a proper noun. By that time I was resigned to another evening of blue balls so I allowed my temper to come through and I told her to fuck off and I left. She didn’t come after me, which I’d secretly been hoping for, and I walked all the way home expecting the truancy officer to jump me at any minute. Only I didn’t make it back. I would have done, had I taken the route I followed ninety-nine times out of a hundred; right at the Horse & Jockey, over the railway bridge by the scrap-iron yard, along Folly Lane and right into the street where I lived. But this time I went down Hawley’s Lane, past the gasworks and under the railway, turning left towards the road that ran parallel to Folly Lane, but on the south side of the school rather than the north; the better to avoid any staff.

I was dawdling, trying to time it so I’d get home at the time I usually arrived after school finished. The edge of the school fields came down to the corner of that road; later it would all be sold for the inevitable march of cheap housing. We were spoilt, back then, for green spaces.

I saw Beaky and Hardman, two lads from my year. The teachers probably didn’t even know their given names. They might as well have been christened Ne’er-do-well Beak and Trouble-maker Hardman, rather than Anthony and Charlie. They weren’t solid mates of mine, but we were on nodding terms and back then that was good enough to merit passing half an hour in someone’s company. Sometimes I let them see my homework book, in return for chocolate or cans of pop.

Charlie was carrying something.

“What have you got there?” I asked him.

“It’s our kid’s,” he said, as if I’d accused him of thieving it. It was an air rifle. A handsome one.

“Give us a go.”

“Knob off,” Charlie said. “We’re going down the woods, see if we can bag us a jay. Ant’s granddad wants a blue feather for his hat. Said he’d give him a tenner if he got him one.”

I fell into step with them though I hadn’t been invited along. I asked them if I’d been missed at school and neither of them said they’d heard anything. Beaky asked me where I’d been and I curried favour by giving them some juicy details of my time with Alice, much of it fabricated.

By the time we got to the clearing in the woods, the sky had become close and metallic; it was March and the weather would not improve for at least another month. Beaky set up some targets on the old collapsed tree trunk: a discarded Barratt’s Shandy can, a bottle filled with earth, a polystyrene cup. Charlie went first, pumping the action to load the gun with compressed air and loading the breech with a tiny metal pellet from a tin in his pocket. He missed every time.

“We’re only twenty feet away,” I said.

“Do you want a go, or not?”

Beaky went next. I could tell he was pissed off that I was there, and that they’d have to share the pellets. At least he hit something; the glass bottle. But because it was full of soil it didn’t shatter in the satisfying way we’d expected. It just made a kind of dull noise and split in two. He was happy enough, though. I accepted the rifle from him, along with his cocky rejoinder that he’d like to see me beat his so-called “high score.”

“Just imagine Alice’s fanny instead of the target and you’ll nail all of ’em,” Charlie said. And though I didn’t want her to be there, Alice slipped into my thoughts in her tight T-shirt and short-shorts, her hair tied back, her lips shiny with gloss. I felt heat for her in the centre of my belly and busied myself getting a decent stance and shutting out all the chatter from the boys.

I pumped the action and raised the sight to my eye. I blinked, and there was fire.

I daren’t breathe. The fox came out from behind the tree like something made from the space it occupied; it didn’t seem real. This wood was too dull and lustreless for it. I actually thought that, once it saw us and scampered away, its flicking tail would paint glorious colour into every dark grey or dark green niche it passed in front of.

“Shoot it,” Beaky said.

I didn’t hesitate.

I don’t know why I did it. I was blinded by its sinuous beauty, smiling at the everyday miracle of it — we’d often heard urban foxes, these known and yet utterly alien creatures, loosing their banshee screams in the winter streets, on the prowl for something tasty hanging from an overloaded dustbin — even as I pulled the trigger. The noise of the air gun, an ugly spit of violence, did not cause the fox to flinch and scamper away; I doubt it even heard the retort. It went down as though it had been instantaneously filleted of every bone in its body.

“Bastardo!” Charlie laughed. “Clint Eastwood or what? You coldblooded killer.”

We went to inspect the body. The pellet had taken its eye out. I felt queasy. I had a hard-on for the vestiges of Alice in my memory, and now this. It didn’t feel right.

“What are you going to do?” Charlie asked. “You should skin the fucker. Take its head off. Have it as a trophy.”

“It’s a fox,” I said. “It’s not a rhino.”

“Bury it, then,” Beaky said. He was reaching for the rifle.

“You bury it.”

“Not my mess.”

I placed a hand against the fox’s flank. It was warm and soft. I felt something moving through it. The last pulse of blood, maybe. Muscle memory. Something. I half expected the colour of it to come away on my skin when I lifted my hand clear.

Boredom was setting in. Beaky and Charlie ended up taking pot shots at the sky. They asked if I was coming and I said no. They wandered off. Charlie said something hilarious about fox AIDS and wearing a condom, and then it was just me and the fox and the closing of the day. I stayed for another hour, until it started to rain. I’d left my coat at Alice’s. I felt myself shiver and I could no longer look at the fox because with every tremor of cold it felt as though it was the fox, and not me, that was moving.

I wanted to bury it, but the ground was too hard. In the end I toed a stack of leaf mould over the body. I said I was sorry. And I left.

That night I came down with the shittiest cold I’d ever had. I remember Mum sitting with me for some of it, though I can’t remember what she said at the time. She was holding my hand. Sweat was lashing off me. With the coming of dawn, it seemed to just vanish, as if it was something that could only exist at night-time. Since then we always referred to it as my vampire flu. Mum said she was worried I might have contracted pneumonia and she was dithering over a call to the emergency services on a couple of occasions when my breath turned shallow, but Dad stayed her hand and told her to wait.